Last weekend was Cables of Resistance, a conference I've been organizing together with 20-something other people since last September. The goal was to bring all the Berlin and German movements fighting against Big Tech in the same venue for cross-pollination, strategic coordination, and simply to discover more about each other.

For me, it was a chance to do something again in Berlin, the city where I live, after two years focusing on Tech Workers Coalition Global, which is primarily an online affair. The element of grounding and relationship-building, which underlined the conference, was for me a personal and emotional need before a political one.

I was skeptical at first: not being a Leftist, the organizing groups and the target crowd felt and still feel distant in culture, language, and identity. For a long time, I felt like a guest, suppressing this sentiment, as I often do, to pursue the organization of the conference, a necessity I agreed with.

Now that it is over, I want to look back and offer some insights that speak to the historical moment we are going through.

Let's start with some math.

Originally, we were targeting 300 participants. We booked what at the time felt like an oversized venue. We sold out all the tickets in less than a week, basically doing a single post on social media. This was months before the conference.

Wait, that's just not how it works: it was the first event for us, and possibly the first of this kind in decades in Germany. It wasn't targeting the general public, but people who were already politically active. Why was it so easy?

We had to sell more tickets. We sold more tickets. More participants coming required more volunteers, and in the end, more than 200 people took shifts to help us.

Comes the day of the event, and the venue is packed. Bodies are squeezed into every hall. People lining the walls of the seminar rooms. More people show up asking to volunteer to join the event. We struggle to count who's coming in through the door. In the end, probably more than 1000 people joined us across the three days.

How many were left out? Most of my friends couldn't get a ticket, which we stopped selling because, at some point, we were afraid of endangering people. All of this with pretty much no effort to try to sell the tickets. I like to speculate that we could have sold 3000 tickets if we had made different choices.

It may sound self-congratulatory, and it is. As I said, I'm not a Leftist: I like to win, and this result is a win worth of celebration, even if just instrumental to more impactful wins. But I'm sharing these numbers because they suggest a lot more is moving than we can see. The interest in the event surprised every single person involved, including me. I believed I had a sense of the technopolitical scene: I discovered I don't.

The numbers don't add up: we counted ourselves, and we are many more than we thought. We inherited from the tech industry the sentiment of always leaving on the bleeding edge, the fetishism for the new. Like Amazon still calling itself a “startup”. The numbers don't match the narrative, hence the narrative has to change. None of this is young and new: the movement is becoming adult.

Let me talk about the Saturday workshop. Since the program felt a bit too academic for my taste, I tried to bring something else to the table. Yeah, we know big tech is bad. Now what? Knowing things doesn't change things. Let's spice things up, I thought.

Some weeks before the conference, by chance, I met Nala at a party after a long time. We danced. We talked about Rodrigo Nunes. We talked about the conference. “What's your strategy to scale up this effort after the conference is over? What's the expected outcome? Where will you funnel the people involved? What do you want to get out of it?”

I didn't know.

As I said before, the conference for me was fulfilling primarily an emotional need rather than a strategic one, and I grew comfortable with the limited clarity on long-term clarity that motivated what in the end was a first event from a heterogeneous group of organizations with very different theories of change, perspectives, and motivations to join. I was so concerned with the short-term execution that I forgot to keep the focus on the next move.

Fuck. I'm getting sloppier.

In the end, I managed to squeeze in a Strategic Mapping workshop of the anti-big-tech organizations in Germany. Nala would facilitate. The slot is not great: 7:30 PM – 9:00 PM, in parallel with the dinner and a couple of other sessions, and a live performance. It's the end of a long day of conferencing, and it's a Saturday evening in Berlin. Only the more motivated will come, but it's ok. “I guess max 20 people will show up, plan for that, Nala.”

Five minutes before the time of the workshop, there are already 30 people in the room. “Simone, close the doors and let me think how to adapt the workshop.” Nala shuts down for a couple of minutes, eyes closed. “I got it”, she says.

People keep coming in. Lesson learned: if you place a sign saying “Full” on the door at an event full of Leftists, it won't achieve any effect. More people join. In the end, there will be around 60 participants in the room. Run around, grab post-its from every room in the venue, run back.

Nala replanned the workshop on the fly and gave me a master lecture on the ineffable art of the “It is what it is.” As a 3° Dan political facilitator, I was impressed by what a 6° Dan could do. I still have a long way to go. The workshop involved different exercises that culminated in the production of a collaborative map, documenting all the relevant organizations in Germany fighting against Big Tech.

The most interesting bit is that most people didn't know most of the actors and organizations that other participants were bringing up. Neither did I, despite having done similar mapping exercises before. You can see the results in the photo. Hopefully, soon the exhaustion from the conference will fade, I will regain control of my limbs, and be able to transcribe and systematize the results.

A second important insight, which was the input for the reflection I'm writing, is that when the participants were asked which actors are building the narrative we need, very few, and underwhelming, actors came up. Solarpunk and Lunarpunk were mentioned. Then Cory Doctorow. Big up for Cory, who always promotes Tech Workers Coalition, but I don't think his shoulders are broad enough to carry this burden. Where is the equivalent of Fridays For Future or Extinction Rebellion in the fight for democratic technology? There's nothing like that. Nobody is filling that ecosystemic function.

The dust still has yet to settle after the event. We have to deal with the consequences of German political repression. We haven't had a meeting yet, but we are already thinking about what comes next. It's clear this is not going to end here.

The intensification of the psycho-digital loops makes the whole society more nervous: Cables of Resistance is but an itch that got scratched.

The shakes provoked by the acceleration of Imperial collapse leave bigger and bigger cracks in the concrete, where the tendrils of a new technology probe around, looking for attachment, nourishment, and Sunlight.

We did what we did not because it was easy, but because we thought it was easy. We are going to do it again.

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

I Am Able

He unto him A sad day Mortals’ rest Up and motors for Michigan to get moving The low, waving echo Steering of warmth The mercy shop to Québec Buying new within her Storied fold Undebted direct And under the match shop History’s most appointment Ontarian Friend Would buy to make way This emergency in Labrador And the Samsung queue Making war Folding the Apple within All for day and the umbra Fifty clouds speaking And Marigold geese Meandering forward To this path of open destruction We filed for men In this option, The mercy of the land And pay order To be in esteem Buy and love it This Ottawa day In thinking pen- Mercy of the tears Open to distance By the pier of the Sea- The red one And mercy by stateside Worrying the elderly- But there were no wolves Only Michigan And Westray came And as we were For more.

今日も電車には新入社員が溢れていて、乗れるだけ人が詰め込まれている。 なぜか今日は早足のグルーヴで歩いていて、乗り換えのタイミングで次の電車に乗ろうとしたら、自分の足が速すぎて、いつも乗っている一本前の電車が目の前に到着した。

なぜそんなに早足だったのかはわからない。 視力を良くしようと思って、電車の窓から見える家の色を見ては、その色を頭の中で言葉にしていたからかもしれない。 そして、その屋根に色は、意外とすぐに出てこない、絶妙な色が多かった。

一本早い電車に乗れたと思ったが、それは鈍行で、出社時間に間に合わないことに気づく。 見たことのない駅で降りて急行に乗り換えたが、結局いつもより遅い電車になった。 車内では綿菓子みたいな匂いがして、少し気分が悪くなった。

帰りの電車も混んでいた。 やたら体の存在感が強くて硬い外国人が隣にいて、急ブレーキでよろけたときにその人の肘に当たった。 手すりにぶつかったのかと思うくらい痛かったが、その人は当たったことにも気づかず、まったく動かなかった。

夕飯は生姜焼きだった。 平日にこんなにちゃんとした食事ができるのは、ただただありがたい。本当に嬉しい。

風呂に入る。 昔から、ときどき自分が誰かに話しかけているイメージが勝手に浮かんでくる。
漫画が好きだった頃は、読んでいるだけで自分が描いているような気になっていたと、その中の自分は豪語していた。 そのあとも、自分が楽しそうに話しているのに、音だけがあって、具体的な言葉はなかった。

新品で買ったパンツが傷んでいくのが嫌で、メルカリでスラックスを買った。 中古で安くて生地の良いブラウンのスラックスは手に入るが、ブラックはなかなか見つからない。 特にタイトなものは。

明日はそれを履いていく。 この子もきっと、好きになれる形をしている。

Aplausos y homenajes, medallas y laureles. Si el mundo fuera justo, ¿cuántas manos tendríamos?

I apologize because this is gonna sound so incredibly cringe and I swear it’s not in a fucking Redditor way, but I do think I have a fairly high IQ which just corresponds to pattern matching, and I wonder if that is my issue in a way. I talked with my therapist today about why I felt so horribly bad after spending time with friends, and there are other reasons there but the biggest thing was just the severity of how bad I felt afterwards, and specifically the fact that I had suicidal ideation. And I believe the reason for those thoughts was because I felt like I was slipping into depression even though I was doing everything I thought I needed to do. And as a result, I start to feel this desperate panic, and the way I described it to my therapist was like a hostage taker telling you that they needed $100,000. You somehow managed to scrape together enough money to pay off the ransom and when you finally do that, the hostage taker refuses to release the hostage. It is the desperation from already being faced with something so incredibly difficult and managing to do it all to find out that it is not enough, and you are still in square one but with less resources and less direction. And when the threat is a depressive episode, it is enough for me to start to indulge in the thoughts of killing myself. But a lot of that is because I remember how incredibly horrifying and hellish a depressive episode is. And when I start to feel those first warning signs, I am like a crab in the pot as it starts to boil. I am desperate to avoid what is almost guaranteed hell. Except for the fact that in the past that have been the case, but in the present it’s not nearly that bad. Still it is horrible and I wish I didn’t have to go through it sometimes, but it is nowhere near an episode like I am afraid of. One of the fallacies that my brain tries to trick me with is the fact that because I am doing all of these other things, that is a big reason why the episodes are not nearly as bad as they used to be. Nowadays more often than not it’s just one or two days depressed rather than weeks or even months. I also now have the tools to break myself out of full of those cycles, and I also do have those social networks fostered well enough to help me out. And so I think a lot of the fear and desperation comes from the pattern matching. Using the crab analogy, I start to feel the water heating up and I’m desperate to do anything to avoid the incoming pain of being boiled alive, but in reality the water is just going to get warm to hot for a bit, and then go back down. And even if I logically know that and even though it through data, depression is a pretty efficient thing in the sense that it also convinces you that this feeling will not go away and it is going to stay.

Another thing from therapy today was that I should remind myself how I exist, and so statistically since I don’t think I am so unique person, there will be other people out there like me, and I will be able to meet a girl that I feel matches me. And additionally I will be able to meet her at a time where things work out and at the location where I am. And for what it’s worth I do see very concrete tangible genius in myself especially in this small stuff being able to recognize certain red flags that prior would’ve romanticized. Additionally the fact that I am willing to step away from infatuation to rather wait a little bit longer for a partner that I feel more confident about. I think these are all things that past me has not always exhibited and I’m very proud of myself for that and I want to recognize that progress. I am proud of the person I see myself becoming every day.

Une mémoire vivante est encore là, sur le domaine Médard Bourgault. À travers ces enregistrements, la parole d’André Médard donne accès, sans filtre, à une histoire qui n’a jamais été écrite ainsi.

6 heures de témoignages d’André Médard Bourgault — 18 fichiers audio classés, résumés et minutés, enregistrés sur le domaine familial

André Médard a 85 ans. Il porte dans sa mémoire une connaissance intime et rare de Médard, de sa famille, de ses techniques, de son époque et de son territoire. Ces enregistrements ont été captés au fil de plusieurs rencontres, sur le domaine familial.

Ces enregistrements constituent une archive sonore directe, captée sur le lieu même où cette mémoire s’est construite.

Je suis le petit-fils de Médard Bourgault. J’ai passé une partie de ma jeunesse sur ce domaine, à m’y promener, à observer et parfois à y dormir. De ma naissance jusqu’à la période de la COVID, j’y ai célébré les principales fêtes chrétiennes, notamment Noël et Pâques.

En parallèle, j’ai travaillé sur des productions d’animation jeunesse (HBO, Radio-Canada), ce qui m’a permis de développer une capacité à structurer des récits et à mettre en valeur du contenu narratif.

Cette double proximité — personnelle et professionnelle — donne à ce travail une dimension d’échange vivant, ancré dans une expérience réelle du lieu et dans une capacité concrète à en transmettre la mémoire.

Les fichiers sont en cours de classement. Les résumés ci-dessous donnent un aperçu des sujets abordés dans chaque enregistrement. Les audio ne sont pas encore tous disponibles pour écoute publique.

Ces enregistrements ont été captés au Zoom H2 lors de rencontres informelles avec André Médard Bourgault, sur le domaine familial à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli. Les conversations n'étaient pas scriptées — André Médard parlait librement, guidé par les objets autour de lui, les pièces de la maison, le terrain. Il s’agit de captations brutes, sans mise en scène. Les fichiers sont classés par lieu et par date d'enregistrement. Les résumés sont établis à l'écoute, minutage par minutage. Les approximations de dates sont signalées — André Médard lui-même reconnaissait que Médard n'était pas toujours fiable sur les années.

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Exemples de contenu

Les sections suivantes sont des exemples tirés des enregistrements. Elles illustrent comment les audio peuvent être utilisés pour construire des récits courts à partir d’éléments précis du domaine Médard Bourgault.

L’ensemble du corpus couvre un large éventail de sujets : les sculptures présentes sur le domaine, les différentes périodes de la vie de Médard et d’André Médard, la vie dans le village, les métiers, ainsi que la manière dont se vivait le quotidien au sein d’une grande famille. On y retrouve autant le bon que le moins bon — sans mise en scène.

Ces extraits montrent le potentiel du matériau audio à faire émerger des histoires complètes, à partir de fragments captés sur place.

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Les routes de terre

En 1932, les routes sont encore en terre. Un couple de Rivière-du-Loup arrive jusqu'à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli et veut acheter une sculpture. C'est la première vente de Médard Bourgault. Il en tire 2 piastres. Le Québec est en pleine crise économique. André Médard se souvient de ce que valait 2 piastres à cette époque-là.

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Le village

Saint-Jean-Port-Joli dans les années 30 et 40 — les bœufs et les chevaux pour labourer, le forgeron Fortin, l'Auberge du Faubourg, les touristes américains qui arrivent l'été, Jean-Marie Gauvreau et d'autres personnages importants de l'époque. André Médard en parle comme si c'était hier.

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Avant la Révolution tranquille

Dans le Québec d'avant 1960, le clergé avait son mot à dire sur tout — y compris sur la longueur du pagne des crucifix. Les fils de Médard vivaient des commandes religieuses. Médard, lui, sculptait des nus sur la grève en cachette. André Médard raconte cette tension — entre la liberté d'un père et le gagne-pain de ses fils.

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Les écoles ménagères

Dans les années 30, les filles de Médard fréquentaient l'école ménagère. C'était une institution — on y apprenait à tenir une maison, à coudre, à cuisiner. André Médard raconte comment ça se passait, ce que ses sœurs y vivaient, ce que ça dit du Québec de cette époque.

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Le Montcalm

Avant de sculpter, Médard était marin. Il naviguait sur le Montcalm — un brise-glace sur le Saint-Laurent — et a traversé l'Atlantique avec un équipage anglais. Ce voyage en Europe, cette vie sur le fleuve, cette façon de voir le monde — tout ça se retrouve dans son œuvre. André Médard raconte les années marines de son père.

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la longueur du pagne sur les crucifix

Le clergé qui commande des sculptures religieuses aux fils pendant que le père cache ses nus sous un drap. Puis le clergé qui négocie la longueur du pagne sur les crucifix. Et finalement Médard qui arrête de cacher — il assume.

C'est toute une époque dans cette tension-là. Le Québec d'avant la Révolution tranquille raconté à travers un drap et un pagne trop court.

André Médard porte ça avec humour et affection. C'est ce qui rend ces enregistrements vivants.

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La banque audio est plus large que les extraits présentés ici et permet, à partir d’un même matériau, de structurer plusieurs récits complets.

Travail en cours d’archivage, de structuration et de mise en forme.

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Fichier : 27 octobre 2021

https://archive.org/details/Andre-Medard-Bourgault-Temoignage-27-octobre-2021

Durée : 25 minutes

• Début — Sculptures sur le mur — à identifier
• 3:44 — L'horloge grand-mère — histoire détaillée
• 5:00 — L'armoire fabriquée par Médard pour sa mère — histoire, contexte 1938
• 9:00 — Médard dessinait directement sur le bois — absence de croquis
• ~10-11:00 — Motifs et symboles — inspirations de la nature. Le chêne : force et beauté
• 12:00 — La fougère — symbole de l'humilité, développement détaillé
• 13:00 — Pièces ajoutées avec le temps — la lampe aux chiens, fabriquée par Claude
• 15:00 — Procédés de l'époque — utilisation de la teinture, rôle et application des détails
• 16:00 — Outil pour les poils — technique montrée par Jean-Julien à Jacques, un des fils de Médard
• 17:00 — Les 3 murales — appartiennent à Janette, Carmelle et Murielle — datées vers 1938, à prendre avec réserve. Janette : sculptures avec petits visages très religieux, coupe-papier. Janette et Gertrude (cousine) faisaient du coloriage ensemble
• 20:00 — Les Américains et la sculpture de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli — engouement dans les années 40
• 21:00 — Les différents touristes à l'époque — les Canadiens français
• 22:00 — Touristes qui louaient une résidence à l'Auberge du Faubourg — Jean-Marie Gauvreau et d'autres personnages importants de l'époque
• 24:00 — ⚠️ Opinion forte d'André Médard — M. Bouverette achetait uniquement des sculptures faites à la machine. Ce qui a tué la sculpture à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli selon André Médard : la machine et le travail en série

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Fichier : 27 octobre_2

• Début — Histoire de la maison — achetée 200 dollars. Les anciens propriétaires — détails en profondeur. Anecdote : faisaient sécher du foin dans la maison
• 1:40 — La mère de Médard lui conseille de remettre la maison sur pied
• 2:00 — La lucarne — début de la construction
• 3:00 — Le mariage de Médard — la maison construite pour sa famille
• 4:00 — On découvre que la maison date de 1840
• 5:00 — Médard sculpte des oiseaux à l'extérieur — ce qui attire Marius Barbeau en 1930
• 7:50 — Rencontre détaillée avec Marius Barbeau — il croit que Médard a suivi une formation en art. Sa femme lui explique qu'il fait ça pour le plaisir. Barbeau découvre un autodidacte complet
• 9:00 — La femme de Médard annonce la visite de Marius — Médard est sceptique, ne comprend pas pourquoi Barbeau veut le rencontrer
• 9:30 — Médard est déçu de ne pas voir Marius à l'église — il était finalement curieux
• 10:00 — La rencontre entre Médard et Marius Barbeau — racontée en détails
• 11:25 — Marius achète 60 dollars de sculptures de Médard
• 12:00 — La suite avec Marius — le ministre de la Culture de l'époque impliqué
• 13:00 — Comment Médard s'est fait connaître rapidement grâce à Marius Barbeau
• 13:27 — Marius part étudier en Angleterre — plus de nouvelles. Personne n'achète. Médard retourne à la menuiserie avec son père
• 14:40 — ⭐ L'épouse de Médard lui conseille de vendre ses sculptures aux touristes
• 15:30 — ⭐ 1932 — époque des routes de terre — un couple venant de Rivière-du-Loup veut acheter la première sculpture de Médard
• 17:00 — ⭐ Première pièce vendue 2 piastres. Une autre sculpture vendue 10 dollars — 3 jours de travail. Contexte : crise économique majeure au Québec
• 18:00 — Albert Tessier — art religieux — a fait des reportages sur Médard
• 19:00 — Grâce à Albert Tessier, les affaires de Médard commencent à bien marcher
• 19:30 — Les écoles ménagères — années 1930
• 20:00 — Les filles de Médard qui ont fréquenté l'école ménagère — comment ça se passait dans ces écoles
• 21:30 — 1938 — l'armoire (lien avec fichier 27 octobre 2021) — Médard continue de décorer sa maison et fait de la peinture
• 22:16 — La peinture du bateau faite par Médard — dans la maison — contexte de création. Les matériaux étaient plus difficiles à trouver à l'époque
• 23:00 — ⭐ Médard fabriquait ses propres outils — comment il les faisait — outils encore conservés aujourd'hui
• 24:00 — Le forgeron Fortin du village — fabriquait des outils pour Médard
• 25:00 — Médard se procurait des outils en Allemagne
• 26:00 — ⭐ 1918 — ses premiers outils — comment Médard a commencé à fabriquer ses propres outils
• 27:00 — Médard reçoit un atelier de Malgoire (son père)
• 27:40 — ⭐ Les curieux étaient payés en sucre à la crème — les débuts du travail dans l'atelier
• 29:00 — Souvenirs personnels d'André sur la création de l'atelier
• 29:00 — ⭐⭐ 1942 — Médard sculpte les murales du salon — l'histoire des Canadiens français, l'histoire des Bourgault. Les animaux sculptés et leur signification
• 31:00 — Les sculptures de Joseph — n'ont pas été vendues, sont restées dans la maison
• 31:50 — ⭐ La petite chapelle — sculptures placées là — période religieuse de Médard vers 1946
• 33:00 — ⭐⭐ Médard transforme son domaine en musée

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Fichier : 27 octobre_3

Son de l'horloge grand-mère — enregistrement sonore authentique de l'horloge dont André Médard parle en détail dans le fichier 27 octobre 2021.

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Fichier : escalier

Ambiance sonore — André Médard qui marche sur le terrain du domaine. Sons de pas.

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Fichier : exterieur_1

Durée : ~7 minutes

• Début — Le terrain, la mer, le bord du fleuve — la famille — les mésanges et les oiseaux sur le domaine
• 1:30 — Dans les années 30 — Médard décore son rocher
• 2:00 — 1940 — la petite chapelle bénie par Albert Tessier — Médard aidé de ses fils
• 3:00 — Les coutumes familiales autour de la chapelle
• 4:00 — Les premières sculptures en jardin
• 4:30 — Comment Médard a construit la chapelle — détails de construction
• 5:00 — L'hôtel de la chapelle fait par son fils — avec les coquilles
• 6:00 — Les enfants qui jouaient sur le terrain et la falaise — la prudence de Martine
• 7:00 — Les mains sculptées sur le bord de la porte — faisaient peur à la famille et surtout à Martine

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Fichier : salle a manger

• Début — Les débuts de Médard — quand il était marin
• 1:00 — Le bateau sur lequel Médard travaillait — représenté en miniature dans la maison
• 2:00 — Le désir de Médard de voyager
• 2:30 — La navigation sur le Montcalm — la beauté de la navigation hivernale
• 4:00 — La suite de la carrière marine de Médard
• 4:50 — Médard part en Europe avec un équipage anglais
• 5:00 — Médard devient menuisier avec son père
• 5:20 — ⭐ Les débuts de la sculpture — ses sujets préférés — ce qu'il voit il le reproduit
• 6:00 — ⭐⭐ La sculpture des trois bœufs — le défrichage — inspiration et ce que Médard a voulu représenter — pièce de 1939 — une des plus belles selon André — dans la cuisine, sur la table pour le moment
• 8:00 — La vie dans le village à l'époque de Médard — détails du village
• 9:00 — L'utilisation des bœufs et des chevaux à l'époque
• 9:40 — Comment ça se passait pour labourer dans le village à l'époque
• 10:50 — Les sujets des sculptures de l'époque
• 12:00 — ⭐ L'art religieux — Médard s'inspire des œuvres de maîtres mais cherche son propre style — la Cène
• 13:50 — L'histoire de la Cène racontée par André — détails de l'œuvre
• 14:00 — Comment ça se passait dans la maison — 14 enfants
• 15:00 — ⭐ Les frères commencent la sculpture en s'inspirant de Médard — la transmission familiale
• 16:00 — ⭐ Comment les frères Bourgault développent chacun leur propre style
• 17:00 — ⭐ Comment son frère Jean-Julien se différencie des autres
• 17:30 — Jean-Julien représentait le conseil municipal

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Voici le document formaté pour write.as :

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Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : rencontre2

https://archive.org/details/rencontre2_202603

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Période profane — le nu et la liberté créatrice

• Début — 1957 — Médard se tanne de l'art religieux — période profane avant la Révolution tranquille. 1946 — Médard commence à sculpter le corps humain dans le bois flotté
• 1:22 — Le bois de grève utilisé — comment la forme des racines guide la sculpture
• 2:00 — Les visiteurs voient d'un mauvais œil que Médard commence à faire du nu
• 2:30 — ⭐ Le petit bonhomme — populaire à l'époque, tout le monde fait la même chose — sauf Médard
• 3:00 — La famille encourage Médard — ses frères vont suivre et en faire ensuite
• 3:45 — Les thèmes abordés dans les nus — les expérimentations de Médard avec le bois
• 4:20 — ⭐ Médard est passionné — commence à vendre à des gens plus cultivés
• 5:00 — ⭐⭐ Médard libre de créer — ses fils font les commandes religieuses
• 5:30 — ⭐⭐ Médard s'inquiète que le clergé coupe les contrats aux Bourgault à cause de ses nus — c'est le gagne-pain de ses fils
• 6:00 — L'ouverture du clergé
• 6:30 — ⭐ L'atelier — les visiteurs — une pièce pour les touristes — Médard cache ses nus aux visiteurs avec un drap
• 7:00 — Le clergé découvre les nus de Médard
• 8:40 — ⭐⭐ Médard arrête de cacher ses œuvres — il travaillait sur la grève hors des regards — maintenant il assume

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L'artiste et son processus

• 9:50 — ⭐⭐ Médard grand rêveur — il caresse ses œuvres et prend son temps
• 10:30 — Médard travaille avec le compas
• 11:00 — ⭐⭐ Médard ne veut pas provoquer — la pièce la plus provocante — souvenirs d'André Médard sur le travail profane de son père
• 13:45 — ⭐ Médard a peur des ragots du village — rumeurs qu'il utilise ses filles comme modèles
• 15:00 — ⭐⭐ Les pièces les plus abouties de Médard — comment la famille réagit aux nus avec le temps
• 16:00 — L'évolution du tourisme et des visiteurs de l'atelier avec le temps — les grands changements
• 17:00 — ⭐⭐ Les nus sont normaux pour sa famille — rares sont les gens qui encouragent Médard à cette époque

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L'apogée et la transmission

• 18:00 — ⭐⭐ La dernière pièce de Médard — ses influences
• 19:00 — ⭐⭐ Anecdote — un visiteur jure de ne jamais vendre une pièce de Médard — Médard voulait garder cette pièce — l'œuvre est revenue à André Médard
• 21:00 — ⭐⭐ La rançon de la gloire — histoire de cette sculpture
• 23:00 — Comment Médard travaillait le bois dans ses dernières années — selon André Médard
• 24:00 — ⭐⭐ L'apogée et la fierté d'André Médard par rapport à son père
• 25:00 — Le travail de famille sur le domaine et l'atelier
• 26:00 — ⭐ Baloune et Ti-Cuir — personnages du village rencontrés par Médard et immortalisés en sculptures
• 28:00 — ⭐ Le clergé conseille à Médard de rallonger le pagne sur les crucifix du Christ

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Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : rencontre2b

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La vie de famille

• Début — La vie de famille dans la maison avec 16 enfants — routine familiale — les réveillons
• 1:42 — ⭐ Une crèche faite avec ses fils — d'inspiration canadienne française — pour l'église de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli
• 3:00 — Le réveillon en famille
• 4:00 — La routine des repas en famille le reste de l'année — les prières — anecdotes et réactions différentes
• 4:40 — Les enfants font des blagues sur la religion
• 5:00 — ⭐ Fin du chapelet avec l'arrivée du dernier — Jean-Eude

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La maison et son organisation

• 6:00 — Les pièces de la maison — comment on s'organise — quelle pièce pour qui — combien par chambre — la vie avec les souris dans la maison
• 7:30 — ⭐⭐ Les soupers et les repas — les veillées — le violoneux Deschênes et l'accordéon le soir — on danse dans le salon — Médard n'est pas très danseur
• 8:40 — ⭐ Les dîners et repas — qu'est-ce qu'on mange à 16 dans la famille — la routine et les patates

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Les enfants et les jeux

• 9:00 — ⭐⭐ André Médard a 10 ans — Médard encourage ses fils à faire un petit village miniature — Claude découpe les animaux — Claude fait un camion et des jouets en bois
• 10:00 — La suite — comment les enfants de Médard s'amusent sur le domaine
• 12:00 — ⭐ André Médard fabrique une goélette pour jouer — se rend compte en se promenant dans le village que ce n'est pas fait comme ça en vrai
• 13:00 — Les filles s'amusent avec des poupées
• 14:00 — ⭐ Les jeux d'hiver des enfants — Claude aide les enfants dans la conception de leurs jouets
• 15:00 — Les enfants à la grève — hiver et été
• 16:00 — Les jouets dangereux de l'époque

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La transmission

• 17:00 — La famille et les voisins
• 18:00 — ⭐ André Médard et son frère se mettent à la sculpture

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Voici le document formaté pour write.as :

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Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : exterieur2

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La chapelle — construction et entretien

• Début — Comment la chapelle a été construite avec André Médard et Médard — comment elle a été entretenue et changée avec le temps
• 2:40 — ⭐ Les enfants voient leur père méditer sur le rocher — les visites de visiteurs près de la chapelle — les religieuses qui visitent
• 3:40 — André Médard répare le toit de la chapelle
• 5:00 — ⭐ Les enfants jouent au mariage à la chapelle — entre voisins
• 6:00 — Médard délaisse sa chapelle — s'occupe du domaine sur le fleuve

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Le domaine — bâtiments et construction

• 8:00 — Les techniques de construction pour les toits et les bâtiments sur le domaine — comment il s'organisait — les matériaux utilisés
• 9:00 — Les outils utilisés
• 10:00 — Le style des bâtiments — où Médard a trouvé son inspiration architecturale

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Les sculptures extérieures

• 11:00 — ⭐⭐ Les sculptures près de la chapelle — sculptures refusées par le clergé car le drapé était trop proche de la cuisse — elles se sont ramassées là
• 13:00 — ⭐⭐ Notre-Dame de la falaise — son histoire — comment Médard préparait les sculptures pour l'extérieur
• 14:00 — Les sculptures qui ont survécu à l'hiver

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Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : sallon4

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L'école et les débuts

• Début — Après la mort — la reprise de l'école par son cousin Pierre
• 1:50 — La difficulté de son père à trouver des modèles
• 2:50 — Les premiers modèles trouvés par Nicole Bourgault — cousine d'André Médard Bourgault

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Le nu — modèles et rumeurs

• 4:00 — Comment le village réagissait aux nus — les rumeurs
• 5:00 — Quel bois Médard utilisait
• 6:00 — ⭐⭐ Martine a servi de modèle pour Le Vent du Large — la seule fille de Médard qui aurait servi de modèle — Martine très proche de Médard. Jean-Eude aussi, mais Médard trouvait qu'il bougeait trop

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L'observation comme méthode

• 7:00 — Pendant son époque paysanne — il reproduit ce qu'il a vu sans modèle
• 8:00 — ⭐ À l'époque les femmes travaillaient énormément mais on en parlait moins — Médard le disait lui-même
• 8:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ À l'époque pas de salon funéraire — c'était le croque-mort — Médard travaillait là-bas parfois — il regardait et étudiait les cadavres pour comprendre le corps humain, faute de références en anatomie

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La transmission

• 11:00 — André Médard parle de son apprentissage

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Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : sallon2

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Les débuts — la mer et le retour

• Début — 1917 — Médard tombe malade en mer — débarque à New York
• 1:30 — 1918 — Médard aide son père — son père lui demande de faire une armoire. Son père avait des livres d'Arthur Fournier, un ami de la famille — Médard s'inspire de ses sculptures
• 3:00 — Comment Médard fabrique ses propres outils

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Le village et la jeunesse

• 6:00 — Médard fait des pipes sculptées pour les gens du village
• 7:30 — Souvenirs de jeunesse d'André Médard avec son frère Raymond

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Arthur Fournier — l'encouragement décisif

• 9:00 — Les gens n'encouragent pas Médard — mais Arthur Fournier, lui, l'encourage
• 10:00 — ⭐ Arthur Fournier encourage Médard à faire sa première œuvre religieuse

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L'apprentissage et les premières œuvres

• 11:00 — L'apprentissage du dessin de Médard — et ses frères
• 12:00 — Médard a gardé ses premières œuvres
• 15:00 — Les métiers représentés par Médard et ses frères — anecdotes et souvenirs
• 16:00 — Début de la demande en tilleul dans le village — sert à autre chose que chauffer les cabanes à sucre

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Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : sallemanger3

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L'Émilia — le bateau de Médard

• Début — 1917 — histoire de marin — l'Émilia en détails — apprentissage de marin de Médard — le bateau représenté en miniature dans la maison
• 1:30 — Médard apprend vite les manœuvres et devient rapidement un bon marin
• 2:30 — Les journées de travail sur l'Émilia
• 3:00 — ⭐ Lucien fabrique la miniature de l'Émilia — l'oncle Antonio l'aide dans les explications pour que ce soit fidèle à l'original
• 4:00 — La navigation avec ce type de bateau
• 5:00 — ⭐ Médard — un petit gars en pleine mer
• 6:00 — Anecdote de navigation de l'Émilia

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Médard et la mer

• 10:00 — Les passe-temps de Médard en mer
• 11:00 — ⭐ L'intérêt de Médard pour l'art — la réaction de ses parents — Médard observe la nature
• 12:30 — Médard sur le Montcalm (lien avec fichier salle a manger)

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La miniature — construction et mémoire

• 13:00 — Le travail de Lucien — fils d'Antonio
• 14:00 — ⭐ La construction de l'Émilia — histoire de la miniature
• 15:00 — Les fonctionnalités du bateau
• 20:00 — La cale du bateau
• 22:00 — Le déchargement de l'Émilia

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Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : rencontred

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L'atelier — construction et vie

• Début — La construction de l'atelier — André (frère de Médard) reste dans l'atelier en haut — il lâche l'atelier
• 1:00 — L'histoire d'André (frère de Médard) — fait des figurines
• 2:50 — Les senteux et le début de l'atelier
• 4:00 — Le début de l'école de sculpture — commande d'une sculpture énorme de plus de 7 pieds
• 5:00 — ⭐ La fermeture de l'école — les élèves de Médard se lancent dans la sculpture dans le village
• 7:00 — Interrompu par l'horloge grand-mère

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La famille dans l'atelier

• 8:00 — ⭐ Raymond — frère d'André Médard — entre dans l'atelier. Carmelle, Janette, Fernand, Claude, Marielle et Thérèse — la famille de Médard travaille avec lui après la fermeture de l'école
• 10:00 — ⭐⭐ Fabrication d'une statue de 20 pieds dans l'atelier — souvenirs d'André Médard
• 12:00 — ⭐⭐ Sortir la statue de 20 pieds en groupe avec des cordes
• 14:00 — La livraison de la sculpture
• 16:00 — ⭐ Le début d'André Médard dans l'atelier de son père

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La destruction et la douleur

• 17:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ La disparition de l'atelier — André Médard se confie sur la destruction de l'atelier par une pelle mécanique
• 24:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ André Médard est triste que l'atelier ait été détruit pour en faire un stationnement

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Le village et les artisans

• 20:00 — Les sculpteurs de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli — le côté commercial
• 21:00 — ⭐ L'intérêt de Médard pour la mythologie
• 23:00 — Le travail de Médard à la boutique sur le bord du fleuve
• 25:00 — La fraternité des artisans de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli — les chicanes de village — les manigances
• 26:00 — ⭐⭐ Médard est blessé par le comportement des gens de son village
• 27:00 — Anecdote sur Eugène Leclerc
• 29:00 — Quelques souvenirs de l'atelier — Paul-Yvan

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Confidentiel et comment André Médard Bourgault aimerait que le patrimoine soit conservé.

• 31:00 — 🔒 Contenu confidentiel
• 32:30 — ⭐⭐⭐ André Médard exprime son désir de faire du domaine un site d'interprétation de Médard Bourgault — ne veut pas voir de transformation
• 34:00 — 🔒 Contenu confidentiel

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Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : rencontre2c

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La vie de famille et le salon

• Début — Après la messe — la famille dans le salon — la famille écoute de la musique classique
• 1:00 — Les visites de Pierre Bourgault (cousin qui avait repris l'école)
• 2:00 — La coutume de discuter entre garçons dans le salon avec Pierre
• 3:00 — ⭐ André Médard parle de ses premiers disques — obtenus avec les boîtes de céréales à 14 ans
• 3:00 — La visite de Victor Dallaire
• 4:00 — Les sujets de conversation dans le salon à travers les années

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L'entrée dans l'atelier

• 5:00 — ⭐ André Médard arrête l'école pour travailler avec son père
• 6:00 — Les visites de l'oncle Antonio — la cuisine de sa mère
• 6:30 — ⭐⭐ André Médard découvre la sculpture sur bois
• 7:30 — ⭐ Les enfants jouent au sculpteur — l'un fait le sculpteur, l'autre pose comme sculpture — mais il ne faut pas bouger
• 8:20 — La visite des enfants dans l'atelier
• 9:00 — Jeannette — cousine d'André Médard — peinture les pièces
• 10:00 — ⭐ Thérèse fait des plats à bonbons et des bols à salade — elle se marie — Marielle reprend son travail — puis André Médard reprend après avoir peint l'atelier

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Les premières ventes et l'apprentissage

• 11:00 — ⭐ Le premier plat vendu par André Médard — 5 dollars
• 11:30 — ⭐ André Médard fait des plats à la gouge — se forme la main
• 12:00 — ⭐⭐ Souvenirs d'André Médard à l'école — se tanne et ne retourne pas en septembre — Médard lui prépare des modèles — il commence les plaquettes — son frère Jacques est plus avancé que lui
• 14:00 — ⭐⭐ Le premier vrai contrat pour André Médard Bourgault
• 14:30 — ⭐⭐⭐ Son premier chemin de croix — fait avec son père qui l'aide à faire les pieds et les mains
• 15:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ Médard conseille à son fils de signer son nom au complet — “signe ton nom au complet” — pour se différencier d'André Bourgault (frère de Médard) — origine de la signature André Médard Bourgault

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La transmission et la confiance

• 17:00 — Comment lui et ses frères ont appris à sculpter le corps humain
• 18:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ Médard voit une pièce d'André Médard et la trouve belle
• 18:00 — ⭐⭐ André Médard se lance vraiment — partage du travail avec ses frères — qui fait quoi — chacun a ses bois et sa spécialité
• 19:00 — ⭐⭐ André Médard parle des pièces qu'il préfère de son père
• 21:00 — ⭐⭐ Divers souvenirs de l'atelier et du travail de son père — comment André Médard a gagné confiance en lui

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La carrière et la fin

• 20:00 — Les diverses commandes d'André Médard pour l'art religieux
• 21:00 — ⭐ Les contrats d'André Médard à travers le monde
• 22:00 — ⭐⭐ La période profane d'André Médard Bourgault
• 23:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ Comment André Médard voit la fin de sa carrière
• 24:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ André Médard parle de la sculpture Baloune — dernière pièce inachevée de son père avant que Médard entre à l'hôpital
• 25:00 — Les clochards à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli

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Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : labranche

Enregistrement fait à l'extérieur

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Les oiseaux et la nature

• Début — André Médard parle des mésanges et des oiseaux sur le terrain
• 0:51 — Les oiseaux et leur comportement — les différents oiseaux selon les saisons et les années
• 1:30 — Les corneilles sur le domaine
• 2:00 — ⭐ Les oiseaux ne vont plus sur le domaine depuis qu'il n'est plus habité par Ghislaine.

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Le domaine

• 3:20 — Les divers arbres plantés sur le domaine — certains sont devenus très gros
• 4:00 — La porte de la chapelle sans peinture
• 5:00 — ⭐ La branche comme indicateur de température — quel bois utiliser et comment ça fonctionne

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Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : laboutique

Enregistrement fait dans la petite boutique sur le bord du fleuve — domaine Médard Bourgault

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La boutique — lieu de paix de Médard

• Début — On entre dans la boutique — histoire de la boutique — c'est là que Médard faisait ses sculptures — son lieu de paix — les touristes ne descendaient pas ici
• 1:00 — Médard a rajouté des rallonges à la boutique avec le temps — pour se réchauffer
• 2:00 — ⭐ Histoire détaillée du chalet des garçons et du Nord — l'utilisation des chalets
• 3:00 — Plusieurs dessins faits sur le bord de la mer à la boutique
• 4:00 — L'origine du nom la boutique
• 4:30 — ⭐ Le domaine sur le bord du fleuve — seuls les intimes y avaient accès
• 5:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ Le désir d'André Médard de laisser la boutique telle que son père l'a laissée

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Les outils et les objets

• 6:00 — ⭐ Les outils de la boutique — fabriqués par un forgeron du coin — Laurendeau
• 7:00 — Les outils et les techniques de son père
• 8:00 — ⭐⭐ André Médard parle des divers objets restés sur place dans la boutique de Médard
• 9:30 — D'où viennent les sculptures en plâtre
• 10:00 — Les bois et les différents défis des sculptures faites dans la boutique
• 18:00 — L'utilisation de la meule de pierre

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La vie dans la boutique

• 11:00 — La routine de travail dans la boutique
• 12:00 — ⭐ Différents souvenirs d'André Médard sur cette boutique
• 13:00 — Le foyer
• 14:00 — La visite de Médard l'hiver dans le chalet du Nord
• 14:30 — Le ramassage du bois avec ses frères

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Les sculptures

• 15:00 — ⭐ Le Saint-Joseph de Fernand — sculpture
• 16:00 — ⭐⭐ L'origine de toutes les sculptures dans la boutique — Médard ramasse les sculptures de ses fils pour les mettre dans sa boutique

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Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : laboutique2

Enregistrement fait dans la petite boutique sur le bord du fleuve — domaine Médard Bourgault

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La sculpture et les objets

• Début — Le début de la sculpture dans une racine
• 1:00 — Les travaux inachevés de son père — les plaquettes de Carmelle
• 3:00 — Les statuettes de Fernand — souvenirs d'André Médard de son père sur le domaine

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L'art religieux après la Révolution tranquille

• 4:00 — Après la Révolution tranquille — l'art religieux reste populaire et en demande — surtout avec les touristes américains

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Ghislaine et les objets

• 6:00 — Souvenirs de Ghislaine — souvenirs des objets

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Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : premiereouevre

Fichier de ~15 minutes — tous les symboles présents sont discutés

Médard qui humanise le sacré

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Les premières œuvres et l'art religieux

• Début — Les premières œuvres — les symboles religieux utilisés par Médard
• 1:03 — La Cène — dans la cuisine — les religieux qui expliquent à Médard ce qu'ils veulent
• 2:00 — Comment Médard s'est approprié l'art religieux
• 3:00 — ⭐⭐ Comparaison et inspiration de l'œuvre de Léonard de Vinci — Médard a voulu faire sa propre version
• 4:00 — ⭐ Médard rend les scènes religieuses plus naturelles
• 5:00 — ⭐ Les symboles qui ont captivé l'intérêt de Médard

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Le gagne-pain et l'évolution

• 7:00 — ⭐ L'art religieux comme gagne-pain — évolution de son œuvre religieuse — comment il travaillait
• 8:00 — ⭐ La différence entre les sculpteurs Bourgault — les préférences d'André Médard
• 10:00 — L'arrivée des plâtres dans la vie de Médard
• 11:00 — Médard et la concurrence

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Ce qui est unique à Médard

• 12:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ Ce qui est unique à Médard selon André Médard
• 12:00 — Anecdote sur le village
• 13:00 — Comment le village a évolué selon André Médard — ce qu'il a vu

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Document en cours de mise à jour — Raphaël Maltais Bourgault, 2026

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Pour comprendre le Domaine Médard Bourgault

Ces pages permettent de découvrir le domaine, son histoire, et les enjeux actuels à travers des archives, des analyses et des témoignages directs.

Archives et mémoire du lieu → Domaine Médard Bourgault — archives sonores et témoignages d’André Médard Bourgault Enregistrements réalisés sur le domaine, retraçant la vie, les gestes et la mémoire du lieu.

Analyses et situation actuelle → Domaine Médard Bourgault — analyses et enjeux actuels Réflexions et mises à jour sur les enjeux en cours.

Savoir et transmission → André Médard Bourgault — classe de maître complète en sculpture sur bois → Médard Bourgault — éducation artistique, principes, beauté et transmission Comprendre la pratique, la transmission et la vision artistique de Médard Bourgault.

Récit et contexte historique → Médard Bourgault — récit en mer inspiré de son journal (1913–1918) Un récit basé sur ses écrits, qui éclaire une période peu connue de sa vie.

Enjeu actuel du domaine → Domaine Médard Bourgault — le jardin doit-il devenir un accès public au fleuve ? Une question concrète sur l’avenir et l’usage du lieu.

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Before the city had fully woken, when the towers near downtown still looked half asleep and the traffic had not yet become a hard, unbroken river of need, Jesus stood alone at Buffalo Bayou Park and prayed. He stood where the air still carried a little mercy before the heat took over. The water moved below Him with that steady sound that never begs for attention and never stops. He bowed His head and spoke softly to the Father while Houston stretched and groaned in a hundred directions at once. A woman sat in a small apartment kitchen off Bellaire Boulevard staring at a rent notice she could not answer. A young man who had not slept watched the pale sky from a curb downtown and hated himself before the day had even begun. An old man in Magnolia Park pressed a hand to the center of his chest and waited for the pressure to pass because he did not want his daughter to know it had come back. Jesus prayed for the people who had already spent too much of themselves before sunrise. He prayed for the ones who still got up, still worked, still smiled at strangers, and still felt something in them wearing thin. When He lifted His head, the city was not lighter, but He carried into it a peace that was stronger than everything trying to crush the people inside it.

He walked east with no rush in Him. Men in work boots crossed parking lots with foam cups in their hands. A woman in scrubs sat on a bench rubbing her eyes as if she could erase a whole night by pressing hard enough. A delivery truck hissed at a curb. A bus sighed and bent toward the street. Houston was already beginning to move in that way big cities move, like it had no choice and had forgotten how to rest. Jesus never seemed crowded by it. He never matched the city’s panic. He moved through it as if every person mattered more than the schedule they were trapped inside. He noticed what most people had trained themselves not to see. He noticed the man arguing with no one because he had not spoken to another human being since yesterday afternoon. He noticed the woman checking her phone, then her bank app, then her phone again, like maybe the numbers would change if she looked enough times. He noticed the little moments where people were beginning to lose heart, because loss almost never starts with collapse. It starts when a person learns how to keep going without expecting anything good.

Marisol Ramos had learned that kind of going. She was forty-two and looked older in the first light of morning than she did at noon because the truth always showed up first on her face before she remembered to hide it. She had just finished a night shift in environmental services at the Texas Medical Center. All night she had stripped beds, mopped floors, emptied bins, wiped down rooms after fear had already passed through them, and moved quietly around pain that belonged to other families while her own life kept knotting tighter. Her knees hurt. Her lower back hurt. The skin under her eyes looked bruised. Her landlord had texted her at 4:11 a.m. to say he needed five hundred dollars by noon or he would start the formal notice. He had texted again at 5:02 to say he was done hearing stories. Her son Gabriel had not come home. He was nineteen now and angry in the quiet way that wore her out more than yelling ever had. He had stopped answering her calls two weeks earlier unless he needed something. Her father had missed two appointments and lied about both. Marisol sat on the Red Line with her work shoes planted hard on the floor and stared at her reflection in the dark train window as if she were looking at a woman she only knew from a distance.

She had once believed that if she worked hard enough life would stop feeling like a room filling with water. She did not believe that anymore. She had believed it when her husband was alive and still laughing in the kitchen and still fixing little things around the apartment with the calm hands of a man who was good at staying steady. Then a stroke had taken him three years earlier and left the world exactly where it was while her own ground disappeared. Since then she had become the kind of person who remembered every due date and forgot what it felt like to breathe all the way down. She took extra shifts because numbers did not care about grief. She lied to her father and told him she was fine because old men with soft hearts should not have to carry their daughters too. She lied to her son by pretending her disappointment was only anger. She lied to herself by calling it strength when it was really numbness in a church dress. When the train slowed near the Medical Center, Marisol closed her eyes for one second and thought, not even as a prayer, just as a tired sentence inside herself, I cannot keep being the only one who does not fall apart.

Jesus stepped onto the train and sat across from her. There was nothing dramatic in the moment. The doors opened. A few people got off. A few people got on. Someone near the back coughed. A phone rang and stopped. Yet the space around Him felt different in a way Marisol would not have known how to explain even if she had wanted to. He sat with the ease of someone who had never once needed to prove He belonged anywhere. His clothes did not call attention to themselves. His face was calm. His eyes held that kind of stillness people sometimes have for one second before they start talking again, except in Him it stayed. Marisol looked up because she felt looked at without being pressed. Jesus did not stare at her pain like it was a spectacle. He saw her with the tenderness of someone who understood tired people from the inside. She looked away first. She had no energy for kind strangers. Kind strangers sometimes made things worse because they brushed against the place where she was trying not to feel. The train moved again. Jesus waited, then said, “You have been carrying what other people dropped for a long time.”

Marisol gave a short laugh that had no joy in it. “That sounds nice,” she said. “I’m too tired for nice this morning.”

“It is not nice,” He said. “It is true.”

She stared at Him then, not because she liked what He said, but because something in His voice had no performance in it. Most people who talked gently wanted something in return. They wanted to be thanked, or admired, or trusted too soon. This man spoke like truth did not need decoration.

“You don’t know me,” she said.

“I know you have not rested in more than one way.”

The answer hit harder than it should have. Marisol looked down at her hands. The skin around her knuckles was dry from chemicals and gloves and washing and more gloves. Her wedding ring had been gone for years, but there was still a faint pale band where it used to sit. “Everybody’s tired,” she said, because she did not know what else to do.

Jesus leaned back as the train passed into downtown. “Not everybody is tired from trying to hold a whole house together with one soul.”

Her throat tightened. She hated that. She hated when one sentence reached the place she kept boarded up. “You some kind of counselor?” she asked.

He shook His head once. “No.”

The train pulled into Main Street Square. People stood. Bags shifted. Shoes scraped. Marisol stayed seated for a second too long because her body wanted to keep moving only if it had to. Then she stood and reached for the old canvas bag at her feet. A folded paper slipped out and fell near Jesus’s shoe. He picked it up and handed it to her. She saw the red words on the front before she could tuck it away. Final notice. Past due. Immediate action required. Shame rose in her so fast it made her hot.

Jesus did not look at the paper long enough to embarrass her. He just held it out. “You do not have to become hard to survive this.”

Marisol grabbed the notice and shoved it back into her bag. “You say that like survival is optional.”

“It is not,” He said. “But the way pain changes a person is not the only way they can change.”

She stepped onto the platform and hated that part of her wanted to stay near Him. Wanting anything had become dangerous. Wanting help was worse. She moved toward the stairs, then felt His presence beside her, not crowding, not pushing, simply there. Downtown had fully come alive now. The light had sharpened. People crossed with purpose and impatience. A man on a bike cut through the corner of the street. A woman at the curb spoke into a headset with the clipped voice of someone already late for a problem she did not create. Marisol stopped near the edge of the square and rubbed her forehead. Jesus stood nearby and let the morning breathe for a moment.

“You should go home,” He said.

She gave Him a look that almost turned angry. “And do what there? Count my problems in a different room?”

“Your feet are taking you somewhere else first.”

Marisol let out a hard breath. “I’m trying to find money.”

“You are trying not to drown before noon.”

That was so close to the truth that it stripped all the posture out of her. She looked past Him toward the street. “Same difference.”

“Not to your heart.”

She almost walked away then. Maybe she should have. That would have been the practical thing. But something in her had grown tired of practical things that kept failing. So she stayed still while the city moved around them and felt, for the first time in months, the ache of not being able to control the next hour.

A few blocks away, Gabriel sat on the low edge of a planter and stared at a pawn ticket until the print blurred. He had his father’s hands and his mother’s temper and right now he hated both. He had sold the tool belt first, then the drill set, then the socket case his father had kept under the sink for years because there had been rent once and groceries once and a battery once and a girl once and a week where he thought he could put everything back before anybody knew. Then a small problem became a string of small problems, and now the man at the pawn shop had the last good things his father had touched with his own hands. Gabriel told himself he had done what he needed to do. He had even said it out loud one night while looking in the bathroom mirror. It sounded false then and it sounded false now. He had not gone home because he could not stand the thought of his mother opening the hall closet and seeing the empty shelf. He had not answered her because shame makes silence feel safer than love. His stomach was empty. His jaw hurt because he had been clenching it in his sleep. He looked like a young man who could handle himself, which was unfortunate, because people only rush to help the ones who look like they are already falling.

Jesus sat down on the other end of the planter as if He had been expected there. Gabriel noticed Him and looked away. Downtown was full of men who sat near you for the wrong reasons, and Gabriel had learned to keep his guard up. He rubbed his eyes and tried not to look like someone who had nowhere to go. Jesus looked out toward the street and said, “You keep replaying the moment before you made the choice.”

Gabriel turned then. “What?”

“The part where you could still turn back.”

Gabriel stared at Him, then scoffed because that was easier than feeling exposed. “You talking to me?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t know what choice I made.”

Jesus looked at him with a steadiness that made Gabriel feel both seen and cornered. “No,” He said gently. “But you do.”

Gabriel swore under his breath and shoved the pawn ticket deeper into his pocket. “Everybody’s got problems, man.”

“That is true.”

“So whatever speech you got, save it.”

Jesus nodded once as if He were not offended by resistance. “You are not angry because somebody talked to you,” He said. “You are angry because you still know the difference between what you did and who you want to be.”

Gabriel stood up too fast. He hated that his eyes burned. He hated that a stranger’s calm voice could make him feel twelve years old. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Jesus looked up at him. “You have not become unreachable.”

Gabriel almost laughed. It came out like a broken breath instead. Then he turned and walked hard toward the corner because he could not bear one more second of being near someone who spoke as if there was still something worth saving in him.

On the east side of the city, Ernesto Ramos stood at Magnolia Park Transit Center holding a manila envelope against his chest. He was seventy-one and still dressed each morning like a man who respected the day whether the day respected him back or not. His shirt was clean. His boots were old but polished. He had once painted houses all over Houston and could still tell you which trim held and which cracked after the first hard season. Now his hands shook when he buttoned his sleeves. His daughter had told him twice that week not to miss the cardiology appointment. He had told her he would go. He had meant to go. Yet when he woke before dawn and felt that thick pressure in his chest again, he became certain of two things at once. One was that he needed the doctor. The other was that he could not bear more bad news. Old age had not made him less proud. Grief had sharpened it. Since his wife died, he had become a man who preferred inconvenience to dependence. The envelope in his hand held unpaid tax letters and a notice about the roof that he had not shown Marisol. He kept telling himself he would get ahead of it next month. Men tell themselves many things when they are trying not to become a burden to their children.

Jesus sat beside him on the bench. Ernesto noticed the stranger right away because old men who ride transit alone learn to read people quickly. There was no threat in Him. There was no salesmanship either. Just presence. Ernesto shifted the envelope to his lap and tried to settle the breathing in his chest without making it obvious.

“You are deciding whether to turn around,” Jesus said.

Ernesto gave a dry look. “Houston’s full of smart people today.”

“It is full of afraid people today.”

Ernesto almost smiled despite himself. “That too.”

He kept his eyes on the buses. “My daughter thinks I need doctors for everything.”

“She loves you.”

Ernesto’s jaw tightened. “That is not the same thing.”

“No,” Jesus said. “But sometimes proud men use that sentence to protect themselves from receiving love.”

Ernesto turned toward Him more fully. “You know a lot about proud men?”

Jesus met his gaze without a trace of mockery. “Yes.”

The old man looked away first. His fingers pressed the edge of the envelope until the paper bent. “I buried my wife,” he said after a while. “Since then everybody talks to me like I might break. I am tired of that.”

Jesus nodded. “But you are already hurting.”

Ernesto let out a slow breath through his nose. “Hurting is not the same as helpless.”

“No,” Jesus said. “But pretending you need nothing has left you alone with too much.”

The bus pulled in. The doors opened. Ernesto did not move. His chest ached again, not sharp this time, but heavy. Jesus stood and waited. After a moment Ernesto stood too, as if some small war inside him had ended without victory and without defeat, just with truth. He boarded because he had run out of strength to keep lying about what was happening in his body.

Back downtown, Marisol left a check-cashing place with less hope than when she walked in. She had thought maybe she could move numbers around long enough to survive the week. Instead the woman behind the glass had shaken her head before Marisol finished explaining. Policies. Limits. Expired account. Try again next week. Next week felt like a joke told by people with savings. She crossed the sidewalk and sat on a low wall near Main Street Square. Heat was rising off the street now. The city looked clean from a distance and cruel up close. Men in dress shirts passed without seeing her. A woman with expensive sunglasses laughed into her phone. A METRO train glided through downtown with that smooth sound that made everything seem orderly, even when people inside it were coming apart quietly. Marisol took out her phone and checked for Gabriel’s name though she knew it would not be there. Then she checked her bank balance though she knew what it would say. Then she put the phone away because despair repeated itself enough without help.

Jesus stood in front of her holding a paper cup of water from somewhere she had not seen Him go. He offered it and she accepted it because refusing would have required strength she no longer had. The water was cold. The coldness alone almost made her cry.

“Why are you still here?” she asked.

“Because you are.”

That answer did something to her. It did not solve rent. It did not bring her son home. It did not shrink the day. Yet it touched the place in her that had gone too long without gentleness. Marisol looked down into the cup. “I can’t do this much longer.”

“You have already been doing too much for too long.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“No,” He said. “But it names the truth. Sometimes that is where healing begins.”

Marisol gave a bitter half laugh. “Healing. I need money. I need my son to stop disappearing. I need my father to stop acting like he’s thirty-five. I need one thing in my life to stop slipping.”

Jesus sat beside her. “When a person lives under pressure for a long time, they stop asking for what their soul actually needs. They begin asking only for relief.”

She looked over at Him. “Are you saying relief is bad?”

“I am saying relief without truth does not last.”

She held the cup with both hands. “I do not have time for deep thoughts today.”

“You do not need deep thoughts,” He said. “You need to stop running for one hour so your heart can speak before fear speaks again.”

Marisol should have said no. Instead she heard herself ask, “And where do people do that in Houston?”

Jesus looked toward the tracks. “Come with Me.”

She almost laughed again. Come with Me sounded like the kind of thing irresponsible people said right before they wrecked your day. Yet Jesus did not feel irresponsible. He felt anchored. That was what was so strange. He did not look like a man escaping real life. He looked like the only person in it who was not ruled by panic. Marisol stood because part of her had become more afraid of staying the same than of following a stranger for one hour. They boarded the train heading south. She sat beside the window. Jesus sat across from her again. The city passed in flashes and blocks and tracks and glass. For a few minutes neither of them spoke. Marisol looked at her own face reflected faintly in the window and wondered when exactly she had become a woman who only talked to God in emergencies and only trusted Him when the answer looked practical.

“What happened to your son?” Jesus asked at last.

Marisol kept her eyes on the glass. “Life happened.”

“That is not what happened.”

She swallowed. “His father died. I kept working. He got angry. I got harder. He stopped telling me things. I started assuming the worst. He found people who listened when I was too tired to. You want the short version or the true version?”

“The true one.”

Marisol closed her eyes. “The true one is I have been trying so hard not to lose everything that I started losing him while he was still in the room.”

Jesus did not rush to soften it. “Yes,” He said quietly. “And he has been punishing himself for pain he does not know how to name.”

Her eyes opened. “You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

The train moved past the Medical Center. Hermann Park waited ahead with its paths and trees and pockets of quiet that sat strangely near so much traffic and strain. Marisol watched sunlight flash along metal rail and felt something she had not felt in a while. It was not peace yet. It was not hope either. It was something smaller and almost harder to receive. It was the sense that her life had not gone unseen.

At the Medical Center, Ernesto kept his appointment because Jesus stayed with him all the way to the building and never once treated him like a child. They walked through the edge of that vast place where illness and skill and fear and waiting all lived close together. Ernesto hated the smell of hospitals because it reminded him of loss. He hated the forms. He hated the bright lights. He hated the way nurses smiled with eyes that had seen too much. Yet beside Jesus he did not feel reduced. He felt accompanied. That mattered more than he expected. When the receptionist asked for his insurance card, his hands shook. Jesus placed a hand on his shoulder for one brief moment and the old man steadied. It was not a show. No one else in the room even noticed. Ernesto sat in a waiting chair and told himself he would leave if they were late. Then he thought of Marisol working nights and bringing him soup and pretending not to watch him breathe when he fell asleep in the recliner. He stayed because pride had begun, at last, to feel more expensive than honesty.

Gabriel rode the train south without deciding to. He boarded because movement felt better than standing still with himself. He kept touching the pawn ticket through the fabric of his jeans like it was burning there. He thought about his father’s hands. He thought about the smell of the closet where the tools had always been kept. He thought about the first time his mother had let him hand her a wrench while his father fixed a kitchen pipe. They had laughed that day because he kept grabbing the wrong size and pretending he meant to. Back then home had felt ordinary in the best way. There was always noise. There was always food being stretched. There was always some reason to complain and some reason to stay at the table anyway. He did not know when ordinary became something he could lose. He got off near Hermann Park because he needed air and because the train had begun to feel too much like a mirror. The park held that strange Houston contrast of shade and traffic, quiet and movement, beauty and strain. Gabriel walked without direction until his legs started to ache. Then he sat near Bayou Parkland and stared at the water and wished there were a version of himself he could still go back and become.

Marisol followed Jesus along a path where the morning had opened but had not yet turned brutal. Families passed. A runner moved by with hard breath and fixed focus. Somewhere farther off a child laughed, then cried, then laughed again. Normal life kept happening all around her, which felt almost offensive, because she had once imagined that if enough weight gathered in one person’s chest the whole world should slow down and make room for it. Instead the world kept moving and tired women learned how to move with it until they forgot what was happening inside them.

Jesus walked at her pace. He did not fill the air with advice. After a while Marisol said, “When my husband died, people brought food and said kind things and quoted Scripture. Then they went home. Bills stayed. Laundry stayed. My son still needed rides and shoes and lunch money. My father still needed me. Everybody kept saying God was near, but near did not look like anything I could use.”

Jesus stopped and turned toward her. There was no offense in His face. Only grief and understanding joined together in a way that made her chest hurt. “You wanted God to stand in the kitchen and remain after everyone else left.”

“Yes,” she said before she could stop herself.

“I do remain.”

The words landed in her with such quiet force that for a moment she could not breathe right. She looked at Him with real fear then, because there are moments when a soul senses it is standing closer to holiness than it knows how to bear. The city sound seemed to thin around them. Not disappear. Just lose its right to rule the moment. Marisol took one step back. “Who are You?”

Jesus held her gaze with steady compassion. “The One who has heard every prayer you stopped praying out loud.”

She should have argued. She should have protected herself with logic or suspicion or anger. Instead tears came so suddenly she had to press a hand to her mouth. Not soft tears. Not pretty tears. The kind that rise from a place that has been locked too long and do not ask permission before they break through. She turned away because public crying felt unbearable. Jesus did not rush her. He let her stand there with her shaking shoulders and her ruined composure and her whole hard year opening at once.

When she finally wiped at her face and turned back, she saw Gabriel before she saw anything else. He stood several yards away on the path with his body half turned as if he had not yet decided whether to run or stay. His face changed the moment he saw her. Shock came first. Then alarm. Then that closed-off look he wore when he thought the only safe way through a moment was to act like nothing mattered. Marisol’s heart lurched so hard it almost made her dizzy. She had looked for his name on her phone all morning. Now there he was in front of her in daylight, unshaven, hollow-eyed, and thinner than she had admitted to herself he was becoming.

“Gabriel,” she said.

He looked from her to Jesus and back. “What is this?”

Marisol took a step toward him. “Where have you been?”

He gave a laugh that was all edge. “You see me after two weeks and that’s the first thing?”

Her tears dried into anger so fast it frightened her. “Two weeks?” she said. “You think this started two weeks ago? I have been burying myself trying to keep this family alive and you vanish and ignore me and now you want to get smart?”

Gabriel’s jaw tightened. “There it is.”

“There what is?”

“That voice. Like you only know how to talk to me when you’re one second from exploding.”

Marisol stared at him. Every hurt hour she had lived rushed up at once. “I am your mother.”

“And I’m your son,” he shot back. “Not one more bill.”

The sentence cut because it was close enough to truth to wound. Marisol opened her mouth, then closed it. Gabriel looked away. His hand went into his pocket and came out again too quickly. Something small and pale slipped free and fell onto the path between them. The pawn ticket.

Marisol looked down first. Then Gabriel did. Then the whole world inside her seemed to stop.

“Gabriel,” she said, and now his name came out like fear.

He bent for the ticket but she was faster. She picked it up and looked at the printed lines and the item description. Tool belt. Drill set. Socket case. Her husband’s things. The last working pieces he had left in that house with the weight of his hands still on them. Marisol’s face emptied. Gabriel stood frozen because there are confessions you plan for and confessions that happen because the truth finally slips through your grip. Jesus stood between nothing and everything, saying nothing yet, letting the moment reach full honesty before a single word tried to manage it.

Marisol lifted her eyes to her son, and the pain in them was deeper than anger. “You sold his tools.”

Gabriel looked like he might deny it, then like he might run, then like he might break. His mouth opened but no sound came. All the heat of the day seemed to gather around the three of them while the city kept moving just beyond the trees, unaware that one family had arrived at the edge of something it could no longer hide.

Gabriel looked like he might deny it, then like he might run, then like he might break. His mouth opened but no sound came. All the heat of the day seemed to gather around the three of them while the city kept moving just beyond the trees, unaware that one family had arrived at the edge of something it could no longer hide.

“I was going to get them back,” he said at last, and even he heard how weak it sounded.

Marisol’s face tightened in a way that made her look both furious and wounded at the same time. “With what money?” she asked. “With what plan? You don’t even come home. You don’t answer me. You disappear, and now I find out you sold the last things your father left with his own hands on them, and you want me to hear that like it’s a delay?”

Gabriel swallowed hard. “I said I was going to get them back.”

“No,” she said. “You said words because the truth just fell out in front of you.”

His eyes flashed. “You think I don’t know that?”

“I think you have been acting like none of this touches anybody but you.”

He looked at Jesus then, almost accusingly, as if somehow this stranger had arranged the collision. “You told her,” he said.

Jesus shook His head. “No.”

Gabriel’s voice sharpened. “Then why am I even here?”

Jesus held his gaze with that same quiet steadiness that did not bend under anger. “Because truth has stopped letting you hide.”

The sentence landed between them and stayed there. Marisol looked at her son and saw something she had not let herself see clearly before. He was thinner. His shirt smelled faintly of old sweat and outside air and nights spent where no mother would want to imagine. There was a grayness under his eyes that came from more than lost sleep. For a brief second her anger dropped low enough for fear to come through it. Gabriel saw that change and looked away because fear in a mother’s face is sometimes harder to bear than anger.

Jesus bent and picked up the pawn ticket from Marisol’s hand. He did not study it like evidence. He simply folded it once and held it loosely between His fingers. “Come sit,” He said.

Neither of them wanted to. That was obvious. Marisol’s whole body was braced for a fight. Gabriel looked like a man who would rather walk into traffic than sit down and say one honest thing. Yet something in Jesus made disobedience feel childish and exhausting. He was not controlling them. He was not threatening them. He was simply the calmest person in the moment, and people in pain often follow calm before they understand why.

They sat on a bench a little farther off the path where trees gave some shade and the park held a small pocket of quiet. Cars moved beyond the edges of the green. Somewhere nearer the zoo entrance a child whined to a parent. A helicopter thudded in the far distance over the Medical Center. Life went on, but this little corner of the day had narrowed to three people and one truth that could no longer be shoved back into the dark.

Jesus looked at Gabriel first. “Say the whole thing.”

Gabriel rubbed both hands over his face. “There isn’t some big whole thing.”

“There is,” Jesus said. “You have been telling yourself fragments because the whole thing hurts too much.”

Gabriel stared at the ground. “I used the tools first,” he said. “I didn’t take them to sell them. Not at first.”

Marisol said nothing. Her hands were clenched in her lap so tightly that the knuckles had gone pale.

Gabriel kept his eyes down. “I thought I could do side jobs. Fix things. Small stuff. I signed up for one of those apps. A guy in Midtown needed help with a fence gate. Somebody else needed shelves put up. I thought maybe I could make enough to cover a couple things and keep you off my back.”

“My back,” Marisol said with a pain in her voice that made the words feel heavier than anger.

Gabriel winced. “That’s not what I meant.”

“It is what you said.”

Jesus did not let the moment turn into another loop of accusation. “Keep going,” He said.

Gabriel pulled in a breath that shook on the way in. “I messed up a job. A window cracked when I was moving a ladder. The guy wanted it paid for. I didn’t have it. Then my friend Mateo said he knew someone who would front me some cash if I paid it back fast. I took it. Then I couldn’t pay that back either. Then everything got stupid after that.” He looked up finally, and now his shame was plain. “I sold the tools because I thought I could fix the whole thing before Mom noticed. Then when I sold them, I couldn’t stand going back to the apartment. Every time I thought about the closet I felt sick.”

Marisol sat very still. “So you stayed gone.”

Gabriel nodded once. “Yeah.”

“That was your answer.”

“It was the only one I had.”

“No,” she said, and now her voice was lower, more hurt than sharp. “It was the one that protected you from seeing my face.”

He took that and had no defense ready because it was true.

Jesus looked at Marisol. “Now you.”

She turned toward Him with disbelief. “Now me? He sold his father’s tools.”

“Yes,” Jesus said. “And you have been speaking to him from a wound you have called responsibility.”

Her mouth fell open a little. “I am responsible.”

“You are,” He said. “But responsibility is not the same as love when grief begins speaking through it.”

Marisol’s eyes filled again, but this time there was anger mixed into the water. “So now this is my fault.”

“No,” Jesus said. “It is your pain.”

That silenced her. Not because she agreed. Because something in her had gone still under the accuracy of it.

Jesus did not rush the next words. “You have been surviving with your jaw set and your heart locked. Your son has felt your fear as pressure and your love as worry. He has heard your exhaustion before he heard your tenderness. He is wrong for hiding. You are wrong for turning every conversation into the weight of the house.”

Marisol looked away toward the path, blinking hard. “Somebody had to care about the weight of the house.”

“Yes,” Jesus said. “But the house is not the only thing that was falling.”

Gabriel’s face twisted as if he hated hearing Jesus defend him and confront him at the same time. “She never asked if I was okay,” he said quietly. “Not really. She asked where I was. What I was doing. What job I applied for. If I called back. If I paid this. If I forgot that. She looked at me like every mistake meant I was slipping away. After a while I just got tired of standing there like one more problem waiting to happen.”

Marisol turned toward him with real shock, and the shock hurt because it came with recognition. “I asked because I was scared.”

“I know,” Gabriel said. “That was the problem. I could hear it every time you talked to me.”

The truth of that sat in her chest like something heavy and cold. She thought about late nights in the apartment kitchen after her shift, when Gabriel would come in and she would begin with bills or deadlines or rules because beginning with gentleness felt like it would open a door to tears she could not afford. She thought about how many times she had spoken from panic and called it strength. She had told herself she was holding the family together. Maybe she had been. Maybe she had also been squeezing too hard on the people she was trying to keep close.

A warm gust moved through the trees and died. Jesus looked from one to the other like a man seeing not just the damage but the years behind it. “You both loved a man you lost,” He said. “And instead of grieving together, you each took a different road into loneliness.”

Gabriel’s face broke then. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just enough for the boy still living under the man he was trying to become to show through. “I used the tools because it felt like Dad was still near,” he said. “I know how stupid that sounds.”

“It does not sound stupid,” Jesus said.

Gabriel’s voice got rough. “When I held them, I could remember him showing me how to keep a drill straight. How he’d say don’t force it, feel the line first. He’d laugh when I tried to rush it. I used to think if I could work with my hands the way he did, then I wouldn’t feel so useless all the time.” He pressed his palms into his eyes and kept going because now he had crossed into the place where stopping hurts more than speaking. “Then when I sold them, it felt like I sold the last thing that proved I belonged to him.”

Marisol made a sound then. Not a word. Just that sound mothers make when they hear their child finally bleed from somewhere deeper than attitude. Her anger did not disappear. The tools still mattered. The betrayal still hurt. Yet now the hurt had shape. It was not just disrespect. It was grief tangled with shame and panic and a boy trying to become a man without knowing how.

She looked at him and said, “Why didn’t you tell me any of that?”

Gabriel lowered his hands. “Because every time I tried to tell you anything real, you already looked tired enough to collapse.”

That sentence cut her more cleanly than the pawn ticket had.

For a long moment nobody spoke. The city kept making noise in the distance. Sunlight shifted on the path. A jogger passed without glancing their way. The world stayed ordinary while something unordinary was happening in the middle of it. People were telling the truth and not dying from it.

Jesus leaned forward and rested His forearms on His knees. “You have all been trying to protect one another by hiding from one another,” He said. “That is why this house has become so lonely.”

Marisol stared at the ground. “What am I supposed to do with that now?”

“Start again,” He said.

She gave a tired, almost offended breath. “That sounds simple.”

“It is simple,” Jesus said. “It is not easy.”

Gabriel looked at Him and there was more openness in his face now than suspicion. “Start again how?”

“By refusing the next lie.” Jesus let the words settle and then continued. “Not the big lies only. The smaller ones. I’m fine. I can handle it. It’s not that bad. I’ll fix it myself. I don’t need help. I’m not hurt. Those lies build the rooms where people disappear from each other.”

Marisol covered her face with one hand. She was not crying hard now. The tears were quieter, more tired. “My father has a cardiology appointment today,” she said after a while. “He told me he went. I don’t know if he really did.”

“He went,” Jesus said.

She looked at Him.

“He almost turned around,” Jesus added. “But he went.”

Gabriel stared too, as if another layer of mystery in this man had just opened, but neither of them asked yet. Some part of them had already stopped measuring Jesus by ordinary categories.

Marisol let out a breath that trembled. “There are letters too,” she said. “For my father. I found one by accident last week. Tax stuff. I put it back because I didn’t want another problem. I knew if I brought it up, he’d get proud and shut down. So I just left it there.”

Jesus nodded. “There is more hidden in your family than money.”

That felt almost too obvious to say out loud and yet none of them had been living like they believed it. They had been living as if secrets were sometimes more merciful than truth. Maybe for a day they are. Maybe for a month. Then the secret begins eating its way through the walls.

Gabriel leaned back and stared up through the branches. “So what now? We all sit here and confess until we feel better?”

“No,” Jesus said. “You walk into the rest of the day differently than you walked into it.”

The words might have sounded abstract from anyone else. From Him they felt like direction.

He stood, and after a moment they stood with Him. “Come,” He said.

They walked out of Hermann Park and back toward the rail line. Marisol did not ask where they were going because she had given up trying to control the day an hour ago. Gabriel walked beside them with the awkward posture of someone not yet forgiven and not yet condemned either. The train took them east. Downtown thinned behind them and the city changed texture the way Houston does when one neighborhood gives way to another. Murals flashed by. Small businesses sat up against the street. Utility lines cut the sky into sections. The train’s hum and sway gave them all something to look at besides each other.

No one spoke much. Once Marisol looked across at Gabriel and he looked back, and neither of them had the right words yet, but the silence between them was no longer made only of avoidance. It held pain, yes, but also the possibility of repair, and that possibility made everything feel more fragile than before.

They got off at Magnolia Park Transit Center. Heat rose from the pavement in visible waves now. Ernesto sat on a bench with the same manila envelope on his lap and a plastic bracelet still around his wrist from the clinic. When he saw Marisol, his face registered surprise first, then guilt, then something like relief. When he saw Gabriel beside her, surprise returned in full.

“What is this?” Ernesto asked, looking from one to the other and finally to Jesus.

“It is your family,” Jesus said.

Ernesto gave a dry little breath through his nose. “That much I can see.”

Marisol sat beside her father. “Did they tell you to go back for more tests?”

He looked at the envelope in his lap. “Yes.”

“Did you tell me that when I called?”

“No.”

She nodded once and lowered her head for a second because there it was again. Another person she loved choosing silence instead of burdening her. Another lie shaped like protection. “Why?”

Ernesto shrugged, but age and weariness made the gesture look smaller than pride wanted it to. “Because I am tired of being the old man people watch.”

Gabriel stayed standing nearby, hands in his pockets, not yet sure what his place was in this circle. Jesus remained where all of them could see Him.

Marisol looked at her father’s wristband and then at his face. “Papá, I am already watching because I love you.”

Ernesto turned toward her slowly. “And I am already hiding because I love you,” he said. “That is the trouble.”

The words did not excuse anything, but they did name the family resemblance. Gabriel looked down at the pavement. Marisol glanced at him and saw that he heard it too.

Ernesto tapped the envelope on his knee. “There is more,” he said. “I have roof estimates. Tax letters. I was going to fix it before saying anything.”

Gabriel let out a hollow laugh that held no humor. “Seems like that runs in the family.”

Ernesto shot him a look. “Where have you been?”

Gabriel met his grandfather’s eyes only for a second. “Being stupid.”

“No,” Jesus said, not harshly. “Be truthful.”

Gabriel’s shoulders sagged. “Being ashamed.”

That answer softened Ernesto more than apology would have. He knew that road. Too many men do.

They left the station together and walked the few blocks to Ernesto’s small house, the one with flaking trim and a porch that had held family conversations for years before grief made everybody spend less time outdoors. A neighbor watered plants next door and nodded. Someone farther down the street had music playing low from an open garage. A dog barked once and then gave up. It was just another Houston afternoon in a neighborhood that had seen generations of people carry things in silence.

Inside, the house held the smell of old wood, coffee, and time. Family photos were still on the walls. Marisol as a girl missing her front teeth. Gabriel much younger with a baseball glove too large for him. Ernesto and his wife at some long-ago church event, dressed better than the moment required because older people from their generation often treated ordinary days with respect. The air conditioner rattled like it was arguing with summer and losing.

Jesus sat at the kitchen table as if He had always belonged there. The others sat too. Ernesto set the envelope down in the middle. Marisol pulled the pawn ticket from her pocket and laid it beside the envelope. Gabriel stared at both papers like they were two versions of the same wound. For a moment nobody moved.

Then Jesus said, “Open them.”

One by one they did. Roof estimates. Tax notices. Follow-up instructions from the clinic. Past due amounts. Numbers circled in red. A reclaim total on the pawn ticket. Nothing dramatic. Just the dull paperwork of human strain. Yet when all of it lay spread out together on the table, something changed. Burdens hidden in separate rooms had become a shared reality under one light.

Marisol looked at the papers and whispered, “This is too much.”

“It was too much before,” Jesus said. “It was only hidden.”

She put both hands flat on the table and bowed her head. “I don’t know how to carry all this.”

“You were never meant to carry all of it alone.”

Gabriel looked at the reclaim total on the ticket. “They’ll hold the tools through tomorrow morning,” he said. “After that they go out.”

Marisol closed her eyes. “And rent by noon.”

Ernesto looked ashamed that he had no easy answer to offer. “I have some money,” he said after a long pause. “Not enough for all of it. I have been saving it for emergencies.”

Marisol looked up sharply. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because then it would become your emergency instead of mine.”

Jesus watched them with the patience of someone who had seen families mistake isolation for dignity a thousand times before. “Love is not made safer by concealment,” He said. “It is made lonelier.”

Silence followed. Not empty silence. The kind that happens when truth has entered a room and everyone is adjusting to the new arrangement of things.

Then Gabriel spoke, and this time his voice had less defense in it. “Use whatever money you have for the roof and the doctor. I’ll figure out the tools.”

Marisol turned toward him. “With what?”

He swallowed. “I don’t know yet. But I made that mess.”

“And I left you alone inside it,” she said before she could second-guess the confession. The words came out raw and unpolished. “I did. I kept telling myself I was fighting for this family while I was losing how to be with it.”

Gabriel looked at her then in a way he had not all day. There was still hurt in him. There was still damage. Yet the wall between them had cracked enough for tenderness to find a way through. “I should’ve come home,” he said.

“Yes,” Marisol said.

“I didn’t know how to face you.”

She looked at the ticket, then back at him. “I didn’t know how to be someone you could face.”

That was not the end of their pain. It was just the first clean truth between them in a long time. Sometimes that is where love begins to sound like itself again.

Jesus stood and looked toward the door. “Come with Me.”

They did not question Him now. There was too much in the room already and not enough certainty in any of them to pretend they knew the next step better than He did.

They drove in Ernesto’s old pickup because it was what they had, and the pickup smelled like sun-warmed vinyl and years of work. Gabriel drove. Ernesto sat in the passenger seat because the clinic had told him not to exert himself. Marisol sat in the back with the envelope and ticket gathered in her lap. Jesus sat beside her, and even in the cramped cab with the air conditioner blowing weakly and traffic pushing against all sides, His presence made the space feel less crowded. They moved west and then north through the tangle of Houston streets, through lights and lanes and long strips of businesses where everybody seemed to be buying or fixing or enduring something.

The pawn shop was on Harrisburg Boulevard. It had bars on the windows and faded signs and the tired look of a place that knew too much about bad weeks and desperate decisions. Gabriel parked and shut off the truck. For a second no one moved.

“I can go in alone,” he said.

“No,” Jesus said.

Gabriel nodded. He knew better than to argue now.

Inside, the air was cool and stale. Watches and guitars and electronics sat behind glass. Tools lined one section of the wall with little paper tags tied to them like judgments. The man behind the counter was broad-shouldered and middle-aged, with the guarded eyes of someone who listened to stories all day and trusted almost none of them. He recognized Gabriel immediately.

“You back,” he said. “Ticket says tomorrow morning.”

Gabriel held it out anyway. “I know.”

The man took the slip and glanced at it. “Then tomorrow morning is still tomorrow morning.”

Marisol stood just behind Gabriel, feeling the weight of the reclaim amount in her chest. They did not have it. Not yet. The old panic tried to rise in her again, the one that made her want to grab control of everything and start bargaining before anyone else could fail. But Jesus was beside her, and she stayed still.

Gabriel cleared his throat. “Can you hold them one more day?”

The man gave the kind of laugh people use when they have heard too many last requests. “Everybody wants one more day.”

“I know.”

“You should’ve known that before.”

Gabriel took the blow because he deserved it. “Yeah.”

The man looked at him longer. Then his eyes shifted to Ernesto, who had come in slowly behind them, and recognition flickered. “You’re Ramos’s grandson,” he said. “Your granddad painted my mother’s porch years back over on Lawndale.”

Ernesto nodded once. “I remember the house.”

The man leaned his elbows on the counter and looked at Gabriel again, and now he seemed less like a clerk and more like a man deciding whether to keep acting like one. “Your father fixed a cabinet door in my first apartment,” he said. “Wouldn’t take extra money either.”

Gabriel stared. “I didn’t know that.”

“Lot of things kids don’t know.” The man looked past him toward Jesus for just a second and something unreadable moved through his face, like the room had shifted in a way he could not explain. Then he looked back at the ticket. “I can hold them till close tomorrow. No longer.”

Gabriel nodded fast. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Bring the money.”

It was not a miracle that made all the numbers disappear. It was one more door not fully shut. Sometimes grace enters that way, without spectacle, just enough to keep hope breathing for another day.

Back outside, the heat pressed against them. Houston traffic rolled by on Harrisburg as if no sacred thing had happened, but something had. Not enough to erase consequences. Enough to make repentance possible.

Gabriel leaned against the truck and stared down the street. “I can get work,” he said. “Real work. Today. Tonight if I have to. I’ll call Mateo’s cousin. He always needs people on cleanup crews.”

Marisol looked at him. “You don’t have to make a whole speech out of one hour.”

“I’m not.” He looked over at her and there was more man than boy in his face now, not because he had stopped hurting, but because he had finally stopped dodging. “I’m saying I’m done hiding behind feeling bad about what I did.”

Jesus nodded. “Good.”

They found a small taqueria nearby and sat because nobody had eaten enough and truth lands harder on empty bodies. The place smelled of grilled meat, lime, and warm tortillas. A television in the corner played with the volume low. Two men in work shirts ate at the far end in tired silence. Ordinary places often hold the holiest conversations because they do not know they are supposed to.

Marisol watched Gabriel eat like someone who had gone too long without regular meals. She watched her father rub at his chest once and then stop when he noticed she saw. She watched Jesus break a tortilla and listen more than He spoke. Under the fluorescent lights and the hum of the room, something settled in her that she had not felt in years. Not relief. The bills were still real. The rent was still real. Her father’s health was still real. The tools were not back yet. Yet the loneliness inside all of it had shifted. She was not the only one holding the day up. More than that, she was not being asked to pretend she could.

She looked at Jesus and said, “I kept asking God to fix things, but I think what I wanted was for Him to keep me from feeling all of this.”

Jesus met her eyes. “And now?”

She looked down at the table. “Now I think I want Him near enough that I do not have to go numb to survive it.”

Jesus’ face softened. “That is a truer prayer.”

Ernesto sat back and studied Him. The old man had lived long enough to know when a room held more than appearances. “Who are You?” he asked quietly.

Jesus looked at him with gentle directness. “The One who does not turn away from what you hide.”

No one at the table answered after that. They did not need to. Something in each of them already knew they were sitting with holiness wearing the calm face of a man in an ordinary chair.

By late afternoon they were back at Marisol’s apartment. The landlord had not come yet. The rent was still short. Ernesto’s small emergency cash sat on the table beside the clinic papers, and for the first time Marisol let herself accept it without arguing. Gabriel made calls from the kitchen and got one shift lined up for that evening with a cleanup crew in East Downtown. It was not glorious work. It was work. He took it without complaint. Ernesto promised he would tell the whole truth after every doctor visit from now on, and Marisol believed him because humiliation had finally done what love had been trying to do for months. It had made honesty cheaper than pride.

At one point Gabriel opened the hall closet. The empty space where the tools had been seemed louder than before. He stood there for a while, then said without turning around, “I’m sorry.”

Marisol had been standing at the sink with both hands on the counter. She looked at the back of her son’s neck and saw how much of his father lived there in the shape of him. “I know,” she said.

He turned around then. “No. I mean it. I’m not saying it because today got weird and intense and spiritual and all that. I mean I am sorry. I knew what those were. I knew.”

Marisol walked toward him slowly. “I know you knew.”

He nodded and looked down. “I hated myself the second I did it.”

She came close enough to touch his arm. “I do not want you to hate yourself into becoming somebody else.”

He looked up at her with wet eyes. “Then who am I supposed to be?”

She glanced toward the doorway where Jesus stood, not intruding, simply present, and then back to her son. “Somebody honest enough to be loved while he is still being changed.”

Gabriel broke then. Not loudly. Just enough to lean forward and let his mother hold him for the first time in longer than either of them wanted to count. Marisol held the back of his head the way she used to when he was small and feverish. He was too old for that and not too old at all. Some grief only leaves when it is finally held.

Evening came slow and gold against the apartment blinds. The city outside kept going. Sirens rose and fell. People headed home. Others headed to jobs that began after the sun dropped. Gabriel left for his shift in borrowed work boots and with a promise to come home after, and this time when he said it, Marisol believed him. Ernesto went back to Magnolia Park with his papers no longer hidden. He hugged his daughter at the door longer than usual. Jesus remained until the apartment had grown quiet and the worst of the day had passed through.

Marisol sat at the kitchen table with the rent notice, the clinic instructions, the envelope, and the pawn ticket all in front of her. The numbers had not vanished. They were still numbers. Yet now they no longer looked like private indictments. They looked like realities that could be faced in the open. She rested her hands around a mug gone lukewarm and looked at Jesus.

“I thought strength meant not falling apart,” she said.

Jesus sat across from her. “No.”

She waited.

“It means telling the truth before your soul hardens around the lie.”

She let that in. “And what if I do not know how to live any other way?”

“You learn,” He said. “Not all at once. But you learn.”

A long silence followed, kind and full enough to rest in. Then Marisol said the truest thing she had said all day. “Stay.”

Jesus’ eyes held hers with the tenderness of someone answering a prayer older than the words themselves. “I do.”

When He rose to leave, the apartment did not feel abandoned. That was the strange mercy of Him. He could step away and still leave nearness behind. Marisol walked Him to the door. The hallway outside smelled faintly of old carpet and someone’s dinner cooking two units down. Ordinary life again. Yet nothing in her felt as ordinary as it had that morning. She had started the day trying not to drown before noon. Now night was coming and the water was still there, but she had stopped pretending she was meant to stand in it alone.

Jesus walked back out into Houston as the sky softened toward dusk. The city looked different in evening light. Downtown glass caught fire for a few minutes before dimming. Freeways streamed red and white. Buffalo Bayou held the last of the day in broken reflections. In apartments and houses and hospital rooms and parked cars, people were still carrying more than they could say. A grandfather unfolded clinic papers with less pride and more courage than he had that morning. A young man worked under floodlights with sore hands and a mind no longer running from home. A mother sat at her kitchen table with unpaid bills and an open heart, which was its own kind of miracle.

Jesus returned to Buffalo Bayou Park after dark began to settle. The air had cooled just enough to feel like mercy again. The city still hummed around Him, restless and immense and full of need. He stood near the water where He had stood before sunrise. He bowed His head and prayed in quiet. He prayed for the families who loved each other badly because they were wounded. He prayed for the fathers hiding weakness, for the mothers mistaking fear for strength, for the sons burying shame under distance, for the daughters carrying more than anyone saw. He prayed for Houston in its beauty and exhaustion, in its striving and ache, in its glitter and loneliness. He prayed for the people who had not yet spoken the truth and the ones who feared what would happen when they did. He prayed not like a distant observer offering sympathy, but like a Savior who had walked the streets, sat at the tables, heard the pain, and carried it close.

The water moved under the night without hurry. Lights trembled across it. The city did not suddenly become easy. Rent was still due. Bodies still failed. Grief still left holes at tables. Yet prayer rose there in the dark stronger than despair, and Jesus remained in that quiet a long while, near the Father, near the city, near the people who did not know how near He truly was.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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Nearly seven in ten middle and high school students now say they believe artificial intelligence is eroding their critical thinking skills. They reported this in a December 2025 survey conducted by the RAND Corporation's American Youth Panel. They also reported, in the very same survey, that they are using AI for homework more than ever before, with usage climbing from 48 per cent to 62 per cent in barely seven months. The students, in other words, can see the problem clearly. They simply cannot stop participating in it.

This is an extraordinarily revealing paradox, and it deserves more scrutiny than the predictable hand-wringing it has generated. Because the most uncomfortable question here is not whether ChatGPT is making teenagers worse at thinking. It is whether the education system that ushered AI into classrooms with such breathless enthusiasm ever genuinely valued the kind of independent, rigorous, critical thought it now claims to be losing.

The answer, if you follow the evidence, is not encouraging.

The Paradox in the Numbers

The RAND data is striking in its internal contradictions. Among the 1,214 young people surveyed (aged 12 to 29, all enrolled in school during the 2025-26 academic year), 67 per cent endorsed the statement that “the more students use AI for their schoolwork, the more it will harm their critical thinking skills.” That figure had risen more than ten percentage points in just ten months. The concern was especially pronounced among female students, 75 per cent of whom agreed, compared with 59 per cent of male students.

Yet during the same period, the percentage of middle schoolers using AI for homework leapt from 30 per cent to 46 per cent, and among high schoolers it jumped from 49 per cent to 60 per cent. Most of these students (60 per cent) also expressed concern about using AI for school-related purposes. So they are worried and they are doing it anyway. This is not cognitive dissonance in any simple sense. It is something more structurally interesting: students have correctly diagnosed a systemic problem, but they exist within a system that gives them no rational incentive to behave differently.

Consider the logic from a student's perspective. Assignments are graded. Grades determine university admissions. University admissions determine (or are perceived to determine) life outcomes. If your peers are using AI and getting better grades, opting out is not a principled stand. It is a competitive disadvantage. The students are not confused. They are trapped.

Think of it another way. You are sixteen. You have five GCSEs to revise for, a personal statement to write, and a part-time job. Your classmates are producing polished coursework in half the time it takes you to write a first draft because they are running their ideas through ChatGPT. Your teachers, overwhelmed and under-resourced, cannot reliably tell the difference. The system rewards the output, not the process. In this environment, choosing not to use AI is not intellectual integrity. It is self-sabotage.

Meanwhile, faculty at the university level are sounding alarms with even greater urgency. A national survey conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities and Elon University's Imagining the Digital Future Centre in November 2025 found that 95 per cent of the 1,057 faculty respondents feared that generative AI would increase student overreliance on the technology. Ninety per cent said it would diminish students' critical thinking skills. Eighty-three per cent said AI would decrease student attention spans. And 78 per cent said cheating on their campuses had increased since these tools became widely available, with 57 per cent saying it had increased significantly.

The teachers see the same thing the students see. The difference is that teachers are surprised. The students are not.

A System That Never Quite Got Round to Critical Thinking

Here is where the conversation gets genuinely uncomfortable. Long before ChatGPT existed, education reformers, cognitive scientists, and classroom teachers themselves were raising the alarm about a system that was systematically undermining higher-order thinking. The culprit was not artificial intelligence. It was standardised testing.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) represented, in the United States at least, the triumph of measurable outcomes over meaningful learning. Under its regime, schools were judged by their students' performance on standardised assessments. The consequences of poor scores were severe: funding cuts, staff dismissals, school closures. The entirely predictable result was what educators came to call “teaching to the test,” a practice in which classroom instruction was narrowed to the specific content and formats that would appear on state exams.

The effects were devastating and well-documented. Subjects not covered by standardised tests, including art, music, physical education, and social studies, were minimised or eliminated outright. Some principals eliminated recess to devote more time to test preparation. Science was replaced with additional maths drills. Social studies gave way to language arts worksheets. The phrase that captured this era most succinctly was “sit, get, spit, forget,” a cycle in which students received information passively, regurgitated it on an exam, and promptly forgot it, having never engaged with it at any depth.

The situation in the United Kingdom has followed a parallel trajectory. Successive reforms since the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1988, the expansion of league tables in the 1990s, and the intensification of Ofsted inspections have created an accountability culture that rewards measurable outcomes above all else. Teachers in England report spending enormous amounts of time on assessment preparation, data tracking, and administrative compliance, time that might otherwise be devoted to the kind of open-ended, inquiry-driven teaching that develops critical thinking. The Department for Education published expanded guidance on AI in education in June 2025, stressing that AI tools should support rather than replace subject knowledge and that students still need a strong foundation in reading, writing, and critical thinking to use these tools effectively. But guidance is one thing; structural reform is quite another.

Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and philosopher, would have recognised all of this instantly. In his seminal 1968 work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” Freire described what he called the “banking model” of education, in which teachers deposit knowledge into the passive receptacles of students' minds, and students are expected to receive, memorise, and repeat. Freire argued that this approach was fundamentally hostile to critical consciousness; the more students worked at storing deposits, the less they developed the critical thinking that would allow them to intervene in the world as transformers of that world. His alternative, critical pedagogy, was rooted in dialogue, in treating students as co-creators of knowledge rather than empty vessels to be filled.

NCLB was, in Freire's terms, the banking model with federal enforcement mechanisms. The UK's accountability framework achieved much the same outcome through different institutional channels. And while NCLB was eventually replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, which offered states greater flexibility in assessment design, the deeper cultural damage had been done. An entire generation of teachers on both sides of the Atlantic had been trained in a system that rewarded compliance over curiosity, memorisation over analysis, and standardised answers over independent thought.

So when commentators now lament that AI is destroying students' capacity for critical thinking, the honest follow-up question is: which critical thinking? When, precisely, was this golden age of independent thought in schools? Because the evidence suggests it was already in serious trouble long before a single student typed a homework question into ChatGPT.

Cognitive Offloading and the Science of Thinking Less

The cognitive science, meanwhile, tells a more nuanced story than either technophiles or technophobes would prefer. Research published in 2025 by Michael Gerlich of SBS Swiss Business School, in the journal Societies, investigated the relationship between AI tool usage and critical thinking through the lens of cognitive offloading, the well-established phenomenon in which humans delegate cognitive tasks to external resources to reduce mental demand.

Gerlich's study surveyed and interviewed 666 participants across diverse age groups and educational backgrounds, finding a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool use and critical thinking abilities. The numbers were stark: cognitive offloading was strongly correlated with AI tool usage (r = +0.72) and inversely related to critical thinking (r = -0.75). Younger participants, those aged 17 to 25, showed higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older age groups. However, and this is crucial, advanced educational attainment correlated positively with critical thinking skills, suggesting that education, when it works properly, can mitigate some of the cognitive costs of AI reliance. The implication is clear: the problem is not that education cannot protect against cognitive offloading, but that most education systems are not currently designed to do so.

A separate study from Microsoft Research, presented at CHI 2025 (the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), surveyed 319 knowledge workers about their experiences with generative AI. The findings revealed a telling dynamic: higher confidence in AI was associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence was associated with more critical thinking. The research also identified a fundamental shift in the nature of cognitive work, from information gathering to information verification, from problem-solving to AI response integration, and from doing tasks to supervising them.

This matters enormously for students, who are still in the process of building the very cognitive capacities that adults are now choosing to offload. A knowledge worker who has spent twenty years learning to construct arguments, evaluate evidence, and synthesise information can afford to delegate some of those tasks to AI without losing the underlying skill. A teenager who has never fully developed those skills in the first place is in a fundamentally different position. For them, cognitive offloading is not a convenience. It is a developmental short-circuit.

This is not merely a problem of laziness or moral failure. It is a predictable consequence of how human cognition interacts with powerful tools. We have always offloaded cognitive tasks onto external supports, from written language to calculators to search engines. The question with AI is whether the offloading is so comprehensive, and so seamless, that it crosses the line from scaffolding (which is temporary and empowering) to substitution (which is permanent and diminishing).

The critical distinction, as cognitive scientists have noted, is whether AI operates as a scaffold or a substitute. Scaffolding is characterised by temporariness, adaptability, and the goal of strengthening internal capacities. Substitution simply does the thinking for you. And the educational system, in its rush to adopt AI tools, has devoted remarkably little attention to ensuring the former rather than the latter.

The Teacher's Impossible Position

Any honest account of this situation must reckon with the position of teachers themselves, who are caught between contradictory demands with diminishing resources to meet any of them. Nearly half of teachers in the United States and the United Kingdom report chronic burnout. Teacher shortages are endemic. Class sizes in many state schools have grown. Administrative demands consume ever-larger portions of the working week.

Into this environment of exhaustion and scarcity comes AI, marketed to schools and teachers as a solution to the very problems the system has created. District leaders implementing AI tools report that teachers can reclaim an average of 5.9 hours per week by automating lesson planning, grading, and communication tasks. For a profession in crisis, this is not a trivial proposition. If a teacher can use AI to handle routine administrative work and spend more time on meaningful instruction, that sounds like progress.

But the reality is more complicated. Only about one in five teachers work at a school that has an AI policy. Teacher training on the pedagogical use of AI remains inconsistent and often superficial. The gap between the promise of AI as a teaching aid and the lived reality of its implementation is vast. Teachers are being asked to integrate a transformative technology into their practice while simultaneously meeting accountability targets, managing behaviour, differentiating instruction for diverse learners, and coping with the emotional demands of working with young people in an era of escalating mental health challenges.

The result is that AI adoption in schools is happening not through careful pedagogical planning, but through exhaustion. Teachers are adopting AI not because they have been trained to use it well, but because they are too stretched to do without it. And students are adopting AI not because they have been taught to use it critically, but because nobody has given them a compelling reason not to.

The Whiplash of Institutional Adoption

The speed at which schools reversed their positions on AI is itself a revealing story. In January 2023, New York City's Department of Education became one of the first major school systems to ban ChatGPT from its networks and devices. The ban was announced with the gravity of a public health measure, citing concerns about academic integrity and the tool's potential to provide students with answers that lacked critical thinking. Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia and Austin Independent School District in Texas followed suit, citing child safety and academic integrity.

Within four months, New York City reversed its ban. The reversal came after convening tech industry representatives and educators to evaluate the technology's potential benefits. By 2024, more than three-quarters of educators reported that their districts had not banned ChatGPT or similar tools. The pattern, ban first, then embrace, played out across districts nationwide. Seattle Public Schools, which had initially banned ChatGPT and six additional AI writing assistance websites, similarly softened its stance.

This institutional whiplash is instructive. The initial bans suggested that schools understood, at least intuitively, that AI posed a genuine threat to the learning process. The rapid reversals suggested that this understanding was no match for the combined pressures of industry lobbying, parental expectations, competitive anxiety, and the sheer momentum of a technology that students were already using at home.

The AI in education market tells its own story of institutional capture. Valued at approximately 7 billion dollars in 2025, the sector is projected to grow to nearly 137 billion dollars by 2035, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of over 34 per cent. Major technology companies, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Pearson, have invested heavily in educational AI products. In July 2025 alone, Microsoft announced plans to invest over 4 billion dollars in AI education initiatives. These investments are not philanthropic gestures. They are strategic plays for long-term market dominance in an industry that touches every child in the developed world.

These are not neutral actors offering disinterested tools. They are companies with revenue models that depend on deep integration into educational infrastructure. When schools adopt their platforms, they are not just choosing a product; they are choosing a pedagogical philosophy, one that often prioritises efficiency, personalisation through algorithmic recommendation, and scalable delivery over the messy, slow, deeply human process of learning to think for oneself.

The Khanmigo Question

Not all educational AI is created equal, and the differences matter. Khan Academy's Khanmigo, launched in limited beta in 2023 and reaching approximately 1.5 million users across 130 countries by the end of 2025, represents a philosophically distinct approach to AI in education. Unlike ChatGPT, Khanmigo is designed not to give answers directly. Instead, it employs a Socratic method, offering hints and guiding questions intended to help students find answers themselves.

According to Khan Academy's own data, 68 per cent of students preferred Khanmigo's approach over ChatGPT for homework help, citing reduced anxiety about cheating. There is, students reported, a real psychological difference between “the AI gave me the answer” and “I figured it out with help.” This is a meaningful distinction. The student who works through a problem with Socratic guidance is still engaging in the cognitive labour that builds understanding. The student who pastes an essay prompt into ChatGPT and submits the output is not.

This distinction matters because it reveals that the problem is not AI per se, but how AI is designed and deployed. A tool built to scaffold learning is fundamentally different from a tool optimised to generate complete, polished outputs on demand. Yet in practice, most students are not using carefully designed educational AI. They are using general-purpose large language models, tools built for productivity, not pedagogy. And the education system has done remarkably little to shape how students interact with these tools.

The gap between what is possible and what is actually happening is enormous. Khanmigo demonstrates that AI can be designed to support critical thinking rather than replace it. But Khanmigo also requires institutional investment, teacher training, and a deliberate pedagogical framework, precisely the things that the current system, oriented toward rapid adoption and measurable outcomes, is least equipped to provide.

We Have Been Here Before, Sort Of

The temptation to draw neat historical parallels is strong, and partly justified. In 1986, the Christian Science Monitor reported on fierce debates over calculator use in schools, with one Oregon teacher of the year warning that “once you have a crutch, you rely on it more and more.” The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics had urged the integration of calculators at all grade levels, and maths teachers in Washington, D.C. picketed their meetings in protest.

The pro-calculator camp cited studies showing that students with calculators performed at least as well on tests as those without them (except, curiously, in the fourth grade). The anti-calculator camp warned of atrophied mental arithmetic skills and dangerous dependency. Eventually, calculators became ubiquitous, and the debate faded into the background noise of educational history.

The AI parallel writes itself, but it is also misleading in important ways. A calculator is a tool for performing a specific, well-defined operation. It computes. AI, by contrast, is a tool for generating language, analysing arguments, synthesising information, and producing written outputs that closely mimic (and sometimes surpass) the kinds of work that students are assessed on. The calculator could not write your essay. ChatGPT can. The calculator did not threaten the process by which students learned to construct arguments, weigh evidence, or develop original perspectives. AI does. The scope of the offloading is categorically different, and so the historical precedent offers less comfort than its proponents suggest.

The more honest historical parallel might be the introduction of television in the 1950s and 1960s, when educators initially hailed the new medium as a revolutionary learning tool before gradually recognising that passive consumption of information was not the same as active engagement with ideas. The lesson from that era was not that television was inherently bad, but that it was easy to confuse exposure to information with genuine understanding. AI presents the same confusion in a more insidious form: the output looks like understanding. It reads like comprehension. But the student who submits it may not have comprehended anything at all.

The International View

The global picture offers both cautionary tales and faint glimmers of hope. The OECD's PISA 2022 assessment, which for the first time evaluated creative thinking skills across 64 countries and economies, revealed enormous international variation in how well education systems prepare students for higher-order cognition. Singapore, South Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Estonia, and Finland topped the creative thinking rankings, with Singapore's students scoring a mean of 41 points, well above the OECD average of 33. In Singapore, South Korea, and Canada, over 70 per cent of students performed at or above Level 4.

What distinguishes these high-performing systems is not the presence or absence of technology, but the pedagogical philosophy that underpins its use. Finland, consistently celebrated for its educational outcomes, emphasises teacher autonomy, minimal standardised testing, and a holistic approach in which children are encouraged to explore their interests rather than conform to rigid assessment frameworks. Finnish teachers enjoy the freedom to craft lessons tailored to their students' needs, a dynamic that fosters precisely the kind of critical and creative thinking that AI threatens to undermine elsewhere. Crucially, Finland has also launched national AI literacy programmes, including free online coursework, ensuring that citizens understand the technology rather than simply consuming it.

Singapore, meanwhile, has announced a national initiative to build AI literacy among students and teachers, with training to be offered at all levels by 2026. But Singapore's approach is embedded within its broader “Smart Nation” strategy, which explicitly aims to help teachers customise education for individual students rather than replace teacher judgement with algorithmic recommendation. The emphasis is on AI literacy, understanding what these tools are, what they can and cannot do, and how to use them critically, rather than mere AI adoption.

The contrast with the prevailing approach in the United States and United Kingdom is instructive. Where Finland and Singapore have invested in teacher preparation, pedagogical frameworks, and critical AI literacy, many anglophone systems have prioritised speed of adoption, market-driven solutions, and measurable outcomes, precisely the conditions under which AI is most likely to substitute for, rather than scaffold, genuine thinking. The PISA data suggests this is not a coincidence. Systems that invest in the conditions for critical thinking produce students who think critically. Systems that invest in accountability metrics produce students who are good at meeting metrics.

The Systemic Trap

What emerges from all of this is not a simple story about technology corrupting youth. It is a story about institutional incentives, structural pressures, and a decades-long failure to prioritise the very capacities that AI now threatens.

Consider the chain of causation. Standardised testing regimes devalued critical thinking in favour of measurable performance. This created an educational culture oriented toward right answers rather than good questions. Into this culture arrived AI tools optimised to produce right answers at unprecedented speed. Students, trained since primary school to value correct outputs over thoughtful processes, adopted these tools with the perfectly rational logic of the system they inhabit. And institutions, pressed by market forces, parental expectations, and competitive dynamics, facilitated this adoption with minimal safeguards.

The students who told RAND researchers that AI is harming their critical thinking are not confused. They are articulating something that adults in the system have been reluctant to say: that the educational infrastructure was never really set up to produce independent thinkers. It was set up to produce compliant test-takers. AI simply automated the compliance.

This framing shifts the burden of responsibility from individual students (who are often blamed for laziness or moral weakness) to the system that shaped their incentives. A 15-year-old who uses ChatGPT to complete an essay is not failing the education system. The education system is failing that 15-year-old, not because it allowed access to AI, but because it created conditions in which using AI to generate a polished essay and submitting it for a grade is the most rational thing a student can do.

What Would a Genuine Alternative Look Like

If the diagnosis is systemic, the treatment must be too. Banning AI, as the brief experiment of early 2023 demonstrated, is neither practical nor effective. Students will use these tools regardless of school policies, just as they use mobile phones in classrooms despite decades of prohibition attempts. The question is not whether students will interact with AI, but what kind of interaction the education system enables.

A genuinely transformative response would begin by acknowledging what the PISA data and international comparisons make clear: that systems emphasising teacher autonomy, reduced standardised testing, and inquiry-based learning produce students who are better equipped for creative and critical thought. This is not a new insight. It is a well-established finding that anglophone education systems have spent decades ignoring in favour of accountability frameworks and market-based reforms.

It would continue by investing in the kind of deliberate AI pedagogy that tools like Khanmigo gesture toward, in which AI is designed to support the development of thinking skills rather than bypass them. This requires not just better software, but better teacher training, smaller class sizes, and assessment reforms that reward the process of thinking rather than the product of having thought. It requires, in short, treating teachers as professionals with the autonomy and resources to teach well, rather than as data-entry operatives tasked with hitting numerical targets.

It would also require a fundamental rethinking of what education is for. If the purpose of schooling is to produce graduates who can pass standardised assessments and demonstrate competence on measurable metrics, then AI is not a threat; it is an upgrade. It does what the system was always asking students to do, only faster and more efficiently. If, however, the purpose of education is to cultivate human beings capable of independent judgement, ethical reasoning, creative problem-solving, and the ability to navigate complexity without algorithmic assistance, then the arrival of AI is not the crisis. It is the revelation that the crisis was already here.

The DfE's guidance in the United Kingdom acknowledges as much, at least implicitly. Its insistence that AI must operate under human oversight, that professional judgement and critical thinking remain essential, and that AI is a tool to inform decisions rather than make them, articulates a philosophy that is sound. Whether the institutional structures, the funding, the teacher training, and the assessment frameworks exist to make that philosophy real is an entirely different question.

The Revelation Nobody Wanted

The most provocative implication of the RAND data is not that AI is making students less capable. It is that the students themselves are more honest about the situation than the institutions that serve them. When 67 per cent of young people say AI is harming their critical thinking, they are not just reporting a technology problem. They are reporting a system problem. They are saying, in effect: we know this is making us worse at thinking, and we know the system gives us no reason to care.

That honesty deserves a response that is equally honest. Not more bans. Not more surveillance software. Not more hand-wringing opinion pieces from adults who themselves rely on AI for their professional work. What the moment demands is a structural reckoning with the values that education systems actually embody, as opposed to the values they claim in their mission statements.

The 95 per cent of faculty who fear student overreliance on AI are right to be concerned. But the overreliance they fear is not a new phenomenon introduced by ChatGPT. It is the logical extension of an educational philosophy that has been cultivating dependency on external authority, whether in the form of textbooks, standardised curricula, or high-stakes assessments, for generations. AI did not break the system. It revealed, with uncomfortable clarity, what the system was always building toward: a model of education in which the appearance of learning matters more than learning itself, and in which the correct output is valued infinitely more than the process of arriving at it.

The students, it turns out, were paying closer attention than anyone gave them credit for. They can see the trap. They can describe it with remarkable precision when asked. They just need the adults in the room to stop pretending it is not there.

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References

1. RAND Corporation. “More Students Use AI for Homework, and More Believe It Harms Critical Thinking: Selected Findings from the American Youth Panel.” RAND Research Report RRA4742-1, March 2026. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4742-1.html

2. RAND Corporation. “Student Use of AI for Homework Rises as Concerns Grow About Critical Thinking Skills.” RAND Press Release, March 2026. https://www.rand.org/news/press/2026/03/student-use-of-ai-for-homework-rises-as-concerns-grow.html

3. Watson, C. Edward, and Rainie, Lee. “The AI Challenge: How College Faculty Assess the Present and Future of Higher Education in the Age of AI.” American Association of Colleges and Universities and Elon University, January 2026. https://www.aacu.org/newsroom/national-survey-95-of-college-faculty-fear-student-overreliance-on-ai-and-diminished-critical-thinking-among-learners-who-use-generative-ai-tools

4. Gerlich, Michael. “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking.” Societies, 15(1), 6, 2025. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6

5. Lee, et al. “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers.” Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3706598.3713778

6. Freire, Paulo. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Continuum Publishing, 1968.

7. National Education Association. “Standardized Testing is Still Failing Students.” NEA Today. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/standardized-testing-still-failing-students

8. CNN. “New York City public schools ban access to AI tool that could help students cheat.” CNN Business, January 2023. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/05/tech/chatgpt-nyc-school-ban/index.html

9. NBC News. “New York City public schools remove ChatGPT ban.” NBC News, May 2023. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/chatgpt-ban-dropped-new-york-city-public-schools-rcna85089

10. Education Week. “Students Are Worried That AI Will Hurt Their Critical Thinking Skills.” Education Week, March 2026. https://www.edweek.org/technology/students-are-worried-that-ai-will-hurt-their-critical-thinking-skills/2026/03

11. OECD. “PISA 2022 Results (Volume III): Creative Minds, Creative Schools.” OECD Publishing, June 2024. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-iii_765ee8c2-en.html

12. Khan Academy. “Meet Khanmigo: Khan Academy's AI-powered teaching assistant and tutor.” 2025. https://www.khanmigo.ai/

13. Precedence Research. “AI in Education Market Size to Surge USD 136.79 Bn by 2035.” Precedence Research, 2025. https://www.precedenceresearch.com/ai-in-education-market

14. Christian Science Monitor. “The great calculator debate: Educators disagree over their place in the classroom.” CSMonitor.com, 9 May 1986. https://www.csmonitor.com/1986/0509/dcalc-f.html

15. Centre on Reinventing Public Education. “Shockwaves and Innovations: How Nations Worldwide Are Approaching AI in Education.” CRPE, 2025. https://crpe.org/shockwaves-and-innovations-how-nations-worldwide-are-dealing-with-ai-in-education/

16. Emerald Publishing. “AI policies in school education: a comparative study on China, Singapore, Finland, and the US.” Journal of Science and Technology Policy Management, 2025. https://www.emerald.com/jstpm/article/doi/10.1108/JSTPM-06-2024-0218/1302351/

17. Brookings Institution. “The Impact of No Child Left Behind on Students, Teachers, and Schools.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2010. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/2010b_bpea_dee.pdf

18. Education Week. “Does Your District Ban ChatGPT? Here's What Educators Told Us.” Education Week, February 2024. https://www.edweek.org/technology/does-your-district-ban-chatgpt-heres-what-educators-told-us/2024/02

19. Department for Education. “Generative AI in Education Settings.” UK Government, June 2025. https://thirdspacelearning.com/blog/ai-in-schools/

20. K-12 Dive. “Lighten teacher workloads and reduce burnout with AI designed for education.” K-12 Dive, 2025. https://www.k12dive.com/spons/lighten-teacher-workloads-and-reduce-burnout-with-ai-designed-for-education/758435/

21. Education Futures. “How did we get from 'schools kill creativity' to 'AI kills critical thinking in schools?'” Education Futures, 2025. https://educationfutures.com/post/how-did-we-get-from-schools-kill-creativity-to-ai-kills-creativity-in-schools/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

In Summary: * A stange coincidence: as soon as the wife went to bed for her post-lunch nap. the home Internet went down. I checked with our ISP and they were aware of an Internet outage in our neighborhood and were working to have service restored. Three hours later, at almost the exact moment when the wife woke up, our home connection to the Internet was restored. Huh!

Anyway she's gone to play Bingo now, and I've found a baseball game to keep me company. Phillies are leading the Cubs 2 to 0 in the top of the 3rd inning.By the time the game ends I'll have worked through the night prayers and should be ready for bed.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 232.81 lbs. * bp= 154/90 (68)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:15 – 1 banana, coffee cake * 11:00 – 1 peanut butter sandwich, crackers and gravy * 12:15 – meat loaf and crackers, pineapple cake

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 06:00 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 07:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 10:00 – listening to Jack in 60 Minutes * 10:30 – start my weekly laundry * 11:00 – listening to The Markley, van Camp and Robbins Show * 12:15 to 14:15 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:30 – research sudden lack of home Internet * 15:15 – listening to OTA local radio while folding laundry * 17:33 – and... the Internet comes back up. * 17:45 – now that I've got access to the Internet again, I've found a baseball game to follow: Chicago Cubs vs Philadelphia Phillies.

Chess: * 17:30 – moved in all pending CC games

10 April 2026

Plastic bed: the first work in a while that is weightless, that doesn't really seem to triangulate to any obvious reference points (that I'm aware of). Maybe a bit of those Ken Price acrylic and ink on paper works that I saw in New York last fall. But otherwise its tether is loose. Reminds me of how it felt making a small gouache painting called Quarantine sunrise six years ago; it suddenly asked a lot of questions that seem like they'll lead to more questions, a crop field becoming larger and more fertile and perhaps more impenetrable. I'll have more to say about it, but for today I'm just going to enjoy the feeling.

8 April 2026

Tonight on the way home from the gym I was one of two people on the 345 bus toward South Kensington. The other was a guy in tan cargo pants holding a long stick made of what looked like driftwood. He was sitting in the bottom section of the bus monologuing out loud when I got on, but I couldn't hear what he was saying because I had my noise cancelling headphones in. I went and sat in the top section and kept them in, but I could still faintly hear him going and going as we made our way through Battersea into Kensington. When my stop arrived (South Kensington Station), I removed my headphones as I was stepping off the bus and heard the man say: “You've got water in the earth? I'm jumping in.”