L.J. Waks (ed.), Leaders in Philosophy of Education, 31–48. © 2014 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. MEGAN BOLER FROM EXISTENTIALISM TO VIRTUALITY I have a secret history of burying birds, an oddly hopeful childhood ritual. Some of the birds were my own but most were wild, found in the dark leaves or wet grass during times we lived in the hills or woods of Northern California, or by the side of buildings when we lived in San Francisco. At ten, I created an entire graveyard in the dank dark of the steep south-facing hill underneath our house on 23 rd Street in Noe Valley. Beneath the back porch was hard sandy clay where no sun ever reached. Here neighborhood cats fought out turf battles, leaving tufts of fur and cat spray, but I had no alternative – no back yard, no fields nearby. It was difficult for me to dig deeply, and the place was not graced by any natural beauty but was to the contrary hard to get to and difficult to perch in, and once I was there next to the graves it was simply damp and potently acrid, but I was committed. Each small, feathered creature deserved its own burial box, grave, prayers, and blessings. If a bird had been dead for awhile, I did feel a sense of revulsion at the cold body and frigid claws, whereas if it was still warm I was able to hum the final hymns with greater tenderness. I used shoeboxes for coffins, filled the box with a bed of grass, placed the bird’s feathered body into the box with yellow sourgrass flowers and orange nasturtiums as a gentle cover, and began to dig. I saw myself as their minister. I didn’t know any prayers, nor a single religious invocation, so I made up songs to sing to them. Their passing thus marked not by liturgy but blessed with my most sacred sense of loving thoughts and appreciation of the life they had lived flying in the sky. This rite grew from no church, since we went to only one church for one night in my entire growing up, but from a tender love of the meek and the vulnerable. Stray dogs and cats, birds and rodents all found a place in my life. Whether domestic, captive or befriended, I found animals and they found me. Sometimes I found them only once they were dead and became their keeper and minister for only this short time. One and all, they found places not only in my heart but in my digging of soil to bury each one the best I could, with small bare hands. I have always believed I was born a philosopher and it has been a primary identification in the world, even beyond more materialist ones including gender, race and class. One may not be born a woman, but perhaps one may be born existentialist? The characteristics of philosophical thought are of course learnt as much as they are inherent, but there is a strong indication that those of us drawn to this field of enquiry have strong predispositions to it, not unlike artists and writers show early proclivities for their own ways of seeing the world. For me, these