In Graeco-Roman culture, a pedagaigos [the word from which we derive "pedagogue"] was a family slave made to serve as the educator-disciplinarian under which children of the household were raised unto adulthood. The role of the pedagogue was essentially this: to guide the young of the family onto the path of Right behavior in accordance with the worldview in which they were found.

The pedagogue – particularly within the Diaspora – was responsible to impress upon the child a variety of things, but namely his heritage as a member of God’s Chosen People. As such, the pedagogue was to reinforce the necessity to live faithfully in all God’s commandments [after all, God, in His grace, was so faithful to have given them], so that he might, as one created, live a life wholly pleasing to He who is Creator. As a Jew, the pedagogue’s thesis statement would be this: Love Yahweh with one’s entire heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love one’s neighbour as one would love oneself.

But what must be noted is that the pedagogue’s function is not atemporal. That is to say: the pedagogue must, at a certain point, relinquish the child to his own. The designation child itself implies a period of time through which a person passes, and the specific function of the pedagogue is inseparable from this temporality. For after a while, the child is no longer a child, and the pedagogue must trust that his investment in this stage will provide sturdy groundwork for the next, when freedom will append a responsibility which further and more deeply effects growth.

When the pedagogue’s time with the child is up, the surface appearance might be that his work is complete. But can progress be separated from tradition? Or, are Past and Future really two different things? And is one able delineate one section of life from another without some measure of loss from either [both]? The student is without volition to loose of himself the ethos of his teacher, and the values he has been taught provide both [at least] the context for and [at most] definition of all future behavior. One can not make a step forward without first lifting a foot from the one before.

There’s a lot of big questions I’ve never asked
There’s a lot of questions never asked.

When I first arrived on Ellsworth’s front soil only a year ago, I was not honestly aware which questions I was asking of myself, or, arrogantly, whether any at all were to be asked! In spite of my immaturity, [or, because of it] Ellsworth took me under its guiding, strong wing, and over the course of a year assumed the responsibility of ushering me towards maturity. And though I have yet to reach a place of growth with which I am content [I did say Growth - not Grown], I am indebted to Ellsworth as pedagaigos. As I continue on, I am able to speak with assurance on the measure of quality groundwork on which I’ve been given to build.

At a younger point in my life, I found it easy to type the words “places are things people fill.” Writing less from a belief that a place is a something made valuable only by the humans who occupy it, I was speaking from a less pure motive of Self-comfort. For it was at that time I was preparing to move somew[here] more Purgatorial [I thought] than Paradisical. It helped.

But a place is not bereft of value without persons to steward it, and I am awake to the truth that people are as-of-yet free of neither space nor time – if those are indeed two different things. As it is, people and place are woven so inextricably that it is simply impossible to identify one without the other. They are fibers of the same fabric, and with the same Hand and Needle that stitched them together in the Beginning, the corporeal, cosmic Cloth is now being re-stitched to its original Newness. And all things weaved into[gether] share a Hope of the benefits.

Why should we gain from His reward?
We can not give an answer.

I wonder about the extent to which Ellsworth will attach itself to the stories of this new family much like it did my roommates’ and mine. I wonder how Ellsworth will apply its discipline to their lives, moving them as a household into Mutuality and Commonness; the way of Right living.

I hope that it will, as it has with each of us [and Us as unit], afford them the true sense of Transcendence-in-Immanence – that the Future dwells among the Now – and from this Reality follows that the rips and snags are Already being repaired and sewn. There is only One who able see the entire Fabric, and therefore only One who can Hem to its edge.

And now I stand at the coast of the great sea which separates Ellsworth from Vickery, where the liquid molecules of my Past mingle with Future’s. But it is for the first time – from here – that I am able say Places are things people fill without denying the converse: People are things places fill.

Context has been woven so intensively throughout human existence that it would be a supreme mistake [or, misunderstanding of Reality for that matter] to ignore the essential purpose of the places in which our lives are being spread. Through them, we are taught and urged to see and to nowly-experience the Atemporal Place where we will [are] – as humans and as Humanity – [be] Mended and made Wholly One.

Consider the lilies of the valleys;
Neither do they toil or they spin.

Still, a quiet Hand is watching over them.