L is for Learning

From the memoirs of Billie Harper, looking back on her learning journey.

Learning was never just about facts. Not for us.

By the time I was born, traditional education systems were long gone—along with outdated ideas about status and the rigid systems once used to measure human worth. My generation grew up under the Learning Circle model: small, intergenerational, grounded in place and purpose. We didn’t “go” to school—we belonged to it.

Learning was movement, listening, practice. We studied salt patterns and rainfall, we wrote poetry in the dirt. We read aloud from ancestral journals, tracing wisdom passed down like seed.

Learning from Ancestral Journals

Some of those journals speak of how learning once meant sitting still—rows of desks, rote recall, stress. Others mention how universities became sites of exclusion rather than expansion—how only some knowledge counted.

We changed that. Slowly, gently. During the Rebuild, Learning Circles emerged like spring shoots—first in community hubs, then on farms, then in railway stations and kitchens. Learning, like healing, became something we did together.

And we kept learning. Still do. At seventy-three, I am still apprenticed—to the land, to my grandchildren, to the questions that won’t sit still.

Learning, to me, is a state of being. A way of staying awake.

If there’s one thing I’ve carried all my life, it’s this: the moment we think we’ve “finished learning,” we stop listening. And the moment we stop listening, we forget who we are.

So I keep learning. And in that learning, I stay alive.