Summary

Community is a complex and moving phenomena. I have only “scratched the surface” in my study of Black Mountain College. Likewise, I am still a beginning learner/participant in my understanding of the philosophical and theoretical ideas and practice emerging at the European Graduate School. My perspective on both schools is both informed and limited by my own cultural background as a Southern Appalachian woman, trained primarily in the discipline and discourse of American psychology. Yet as I study both schools, I am inspired. Each school, in itself, is an act of artistic making, a work of art. William Doty (2000) says that cultures and communities that survive and flourish are those that can tell their stories and honor them. We have begun to tell our story and to honor it.

Twenty years ago in the midst of the woods where I walk every day, there was an open field, full of grasses and wildflowers. Then small pine seedlings began to sprout in the open area, where sunlight was available. Now there is a pine forest. Tall pines arch over the trail, their branches forming an arc like a cathedral over the soft carpet of needles which line the path there. Mary Emma Harris (1987) says that Black Mountain was not an institution but a process. At the European Graduate School, we too are a process, and we are in process, changing, still seeding the open spaces with new growth, still opening to what has yet to emerge. Mervin Lane (1990) said that it is the spirit of the enterprise at Black Mountain that has had a “long-range resonating effect” on the arts, on education, and on American culture. I wonder what long-range resonating effect may be wrought by what we make here.