Shift to Life Closely Observed

I’m back in day care today after a weekend with family and friends and three days before that at school. I find myself returning to life closely observed, taking photos of small buildings full of animals, of children cuddled in Liana’s lap listening to stories, of two friends talking while clearing block shelves to make themselves bunk beds. Life in this small world is intimate if it is anything. We change diapers, we feed, we clothe, we talk and touch and sing.

In the larger world I’ve come to know at school, I help to organize events, Tie Dye Friday, Joan and Wally’s Disco Dance, the Moving On Ceremony, making a motion to school meeting for a change of use for the first stall of the barn to be used again by the Video Games Corp. In between we talk about books, college, JC business, inch worms and sunshine and what a beautiful day it’s been, things which require a bit more experience and a larger perspective than the conversations and experiences I have here with the littlest ones.

I wonder how shifting back from larger world to smaller one will feel this round. The pictures help a lot. Much of this world is tactile, physical, observed. In the world of a democratic school much more is tradition, written and preserved, documented, or experience of a wider nature.

Just now our toddler is crying and calling “Mommy.” None of us knows why and we ask, but probably it will remain a mystery. Even the littlest ones are self-contained on some level. Their inner experiences register and we can’t always know their thoughts. Now, as quickly as she began, she has stopped. Walking around to see what is happening has distracted her perhaps, and now she begins again, “Mommy, Mama.” My guess is the solution may be a cuddle..which Liana or I will offer..Back to the small world I call home a day and a half a week, soon more. Await news of the effects of the shift. Liana is offering puzzles, a favorite of the mama toddler, and others say, “I want some puzzles” and a new adventure has begun. “This will be interesting with so many people wanting to do the same puzzles, some who know how to and some who don’t.”

The day care is covered in pieces, tiny blocks and figures in the back room, books and instruments in the middle room, brick blocks and scarves in the front room, now pieces of many puzzles. Life here is not only intimate, it’s messy, another message to take in as I shift. I’m going to take more pictures in an attempt to see more closely what’s going on. I’ll share some here later in the afternoon if I can find quiet time to do that work in the midst of the other things that will be going on, settling kids for nap, washing dishes, making salad for the staff meeting tonight, helping Liana prepare the registration materials for families.

 

Sudbury Valley Blog Gets Off the Ground

Here is the first entry I’ve contributed to the Sudbury Valley School Blog, started a few months back and gaining momentum as the school takes on a greater presence in the world of social media, updating their web site, adding a blog, a facebook page, and a twitter feed. Feel free to subscribe to any or all of these new offerings. It’s fun for me to read and hear the voices of many folks describing their experience with the school and to try to find my own voice to contribute there.

http://blog.sudburyvalley.org/2013/05/outside-at-sudbury-valley/

https://www.facebook.com/SudburyValleySchool

 

Quote of the Day: “That’s my book. I’m not done with it.”

It’s nap time in the day care. All the littlest ones are sound asleep, except our chatty gal..a one who spends as much of nap time talking to herself as she possibly can. I am here resting on the couch, reading e-mails and preparing to write an observation, when I overhear her say, “That’s my book. I’m not done with it.” Clearly, the gal is learning how to share and how to keep track of her stuff. Practice, practice. 10,000 hours and all that. It takes a lot of work to learn to talk. This gal is putting in the time.

Now she’s singing the name of a one-year-old friend. A minute ago it sounded like a Christmas Carol. Now, “Yeah. This is my potty. My potty. My potty.” as she turns over the pink plastic doll potty in her hands. “Go away, go away, potty.”

Meanwhile her three year old friend, who is in underwear for the first time all year, and has not let out a single drop into the toilet all day, though she did manage to sit awhile with Alice’s persuasion just before lying down, is fast asleep on her mat, gal who rarely sleeps anymore likely to wake up soaked. We debated a diaper, but given that she normally stays awake, and the diaper seemed like an invitation not to use the toilet, we didn’t offer or suggest.

This is the caregiving we do all day, every day, forty eight weeks a year, eighteenth year of West Family Day Care. Lots of kids here have learned to talk and use the toilet, to nap and rest and fight and give in, to spill and make mistakes and clean them up and move along. Our task as caregivers is to keep the work interesting in our minds so that we can continue to take Mary Oliver’s words to heart:

“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

 

 

Quote of the Day: Some boys have breasts

As our fours sit outside the bathroom waiting for their turns to pee and wash their hands before lunch, one girl lifts her shirt a bit off her belly and says to her friends, “Some boys have breasts.”

She pauses and reflects. “That’s the Buddha.”

This is a girl who has loved to nurse her whole life, who is strong and agile in her body, whose friends talk about everything in the world together. Even still, overhearing this little bit of wisdom makes my day and I share it with my co-teacher who’s been helping kids in the bathroom while I prepare lunch in the tiny kitchen nearby.

Most of the morning we were outside, first in the yard visiting and soaking up the sun as the children played, then on the porch enjoying a picnic breakfast, then walking to and from and hanging out at the park with the children and our friends, fellow providers, and their group.

While we took care of the children, workers came to take care of the house, installing energy efficient treatments on the doors and along the space between foundation and house. We watched and the children wondered and we told them it was to make the house more comfortable. The worker even met us at the park so I could sign off on the project there, rather than bring kids home early.

Midway through park time, our fellow providers took small groups of kids in turn while they voted, a tradition in their group.

As we sat down to lunch, another four said to the room, “It’s so peaceful.” I had been setting the table for our meal and her friends were drifting in to join us for one of our favorites, maple yogurt, raspberries, english muffins, and cucumbers. “Except for —” said the four. “She’s being too noisy.”

When — arrived for lunch, she was indeed making lots of noise. One of her friends asked her to quiet down and she did not. I pointed out that her other friend had just said how peaceful it was, except for her noisy voice, and wondered if she could help us make it peaceful. She quieted down and we enjoyed our lunch.

Awhile later, the same four who talked about how peaceful it was suggested her friends play the silent game, seeing who could be quiet the longest. Each round ended in giggles. Then they organized the be still game. Soon they were all wiggling. Then it was the I Spy game for many rounds, then a game of trying to get the babysitter to make bubbles when she arrived to pick up, as she had once upon a time, which the kids never did forget.

All morning long, I think about the ease in our days and how grateful I am to spend them this way, and to be able to give the kids the freedom and space they need to be themselves, to be known, to know one another, to talk and laugh and play and bug each other and make friends. I wonder aloud as my co-teacher and I sit in the yard how it can feel so easy for us, and yet how it is so hard for so many children in the world these days to spend their days in peace. Perhaps the boy with breasts, the Buddha, can help.

 

Working Vacation after the Bombing

Today I took a walk to Davis Square. The streets in Teele Square were quiet. I wondered if it was because of the Boston Marathon bombing. The bank was somber. Davis Square was festive. People filled the park. Dave’s Fresh Pasta, where I chose delicious food and wine to celebrate the week off with my brother and a friend, spent a gift certificate from my day care families and a discount coupon my brother found while clearing off the fridge near midnight Monday night after the bombing, when I rose after napping to renewed energy, having napped after negotiating the city during the worst of it, dropping off my house guest from Spain at Logan and finding the news on the bar tv, waiting for the Silver Line bus with others who were checking cell phones for news, riding the bus and T and walking home e-mailing with friends who wondered if I was ok, in the midst of many doing the same, all of us somber.

The food in my bags on the walk home was heavy. Near home I ran into friends, a mother and two girls. We hugged, exchanged news. I commented on their beautiful outfits, wondered on their destination, raised the issue of the pall. Such a sunny day, vacation week from day care and school, all of us going on about our business while the world downtown is shattered. Here in Somerville my brother and I are energized, taking the first week we’ve had together on our own in years, probably in our lives, to unpack my adult life, to clear the basement and the yard and porches and house of layers of debris.

It’s uplifting work, dusty and dirty and endless in some ways, companionable to work in the basement and talk to each other, to be in the yard and on the porch, with the sun shining brightly, bringing the house and gardens back to life. So long as we’re working we are solidly here, fixed on the planet, taking care of it and ourselves and one another. For today, that is the task and I am happy in it, working vacation something I have not done with someone else for awhile, could make a habit of it if the opportunity presented. For now, my brother is out of work, and I am committed to getting my place in order for the next stage of life, whatever life may bring, and so this working vacation, even under the pall, is all right. While I’m thinking of those for whom this is a week of horror, at least I’m doing my part in the small world where I belong, this house and yard and everything in it. My self, my family, friends, the day care, and school are what I’ve got. Better to take care than to burrow in and suffer in solidarity with the loss.

 

Finding My Way in the Art Room

Today before I left school I scrubbed the art room sink. I tidied the supply closet, putting the scraps of spilled fabric back into their bins. I wiped down the tables, pushed the chairs into their spots, said good night to the quiet room.

Earlier in the day, the room held an ebb and flow of students, younger, older, novice, expert and in between. One girl and I worked the screen printer to produce a t-shirt we’d been planning awhile. She learned to run the press, to wash and clean up the equipment, to sort out the obligation with me we each felt to the Music Corps who had sponsored the making of the t-shirts as a fund raiser. Another girl showed me the day’s drawings of wolves, reminded me we needed another red marker, helped me sort the boxes of numbered markers to make sure each box had one of each color. Another guy watched me sorting a bin of wood I had brought to share with a teen who’s been working on wood burning, and decided to go out to the yard to collect sticks for legs on a small creature he was making with paper, which he attached, and played with a long while, leaving the art room to go outside, and returning again to draw. A young guy came to get me for help finding string. I showed him the yarn, the sewing scissors, and helped him put his supplies away. He made a strap for a bottle which looked sort of like a canteen, strapped it around his waist and headed back out into the world.

Another guy was in the art room yesterday with a group of older boys, found himself there alone today drawing. One of our most dedicated artists sat a long time working on drawing a wolf from the computer image. Some days she draws from life, some from books, some from her imagination, today from a computer screen. I watch and talk with her and she watches me, comes by to see me learning how to work the rasp against a branch of wood, wood working something to which I’ve been drawn a long time, can’t quite find my way in to fully explore. Others come and draw awhile,  and I watch and talk with them. Later in the day, when I’m closing school, I find scraps of fabric on the art room floor, and one piece stapled into what looks like a skirt, lying on the coat room floor. Someone was making things with fabric, as they often do.

Yesterday I sat in the art room with the kids and our more experienced artist staff member, sharing work and looking at art images she has collected, some which she was working on and some which interested the kids and us..David Hockney mostly, who is one of her favorites, along with Matisse, who is one of mine, and some older images, one of a deep purple flower that was done long ago. Then we talk about her teaching at night in a watercolor class she has taught some forty years, and her method of introducing drawing and painting to her students. She shares some handouts she’s made, one on David Hockney, one on learning to draw from the right side of the brain, and another on supplies her students need for the watercolor class. I have never been drawn to watercolor, but in talking to and observing her, and reading David Hockney’s experience with the medium, I begin to wonder what I’ve missed.

Last week when I was having a rough moment, I found myself working over a dry piece of clay in a bin where I’d placed it early in the year, talking with kids as I worked. The week before, I was drawn to the quiet room late in the day and found myself working with pastels and colored pencils, and talking with another staff member and a student about art at school, about photography and the impact of technology on the production of art.

When I was young, I was an artist. I was often the student in my classes who the kids and teachers felt could make good art. I had good teachers and it was something I loved to do through elementary and high school and into college. As a young child, I thought for awhile I’d like to grow up to write and illustrate children’s books. I loved Beatrix Potter and any book with illustrations of animals, especially if they were wearing clothes and living in homes made of recycled things. As I got older, there was less and less place for making art. Instead of drawing and painting and taking photographs, I decorated my home, dressed my children, learned to cook, prepared materials for children in camps and school and day care so they could make art. When I had my first public school classroom, I set up an easel, a construction area, brought supplies for sewing and weaving, drawing, painting, collage, and recycle construction into my classroom so kids could create. It was hard for me not to give this stuff priority over paper and pencil work, but I fought for the kids’ rights to materials and time and freedom to get their ideas into the world in many dimensions.

For the last twenty or so years, I’ve been supporting other people’s art, primarily the children in my life, whether in my classrooms, in the day care, my own children in my home, or our housemates in our place in the country. My biggest attempt to reenter the role of artist was when I got my first camera in many years, a small digital canon which became my constant companion for an intense period of photographing the world, in an attempt to see things anew as everything seemed to be falling apart. Now I’m here at SVS, wondering again what art I can make in the midst of the work the kids do. It’s another way to work with materials, to put my ideas into the world, to dialogue with kids and teens about their work, to provision, and possibly, to return to the artist in me, too..Not clear how or if it’s going to happen, but I’m curious and I’m drawn and while the path has heart, as Carlos Castenadas has advised, I’ll follow it awhile.

 

Birds in the Morning – More about Love and God and Light and Mystery

Seems like an awfully big title. Last two nights I’ve slept again, deeply, even napped at the end of long work days. In the morning I’ve woken to light and birds. I’ve been reading about Love, listening to words about god, wondering on it all, in all the forums where I live, home, day care, solitude, meeting, conversation, school, nature. It’s all around, we’re in it, is what I’m trying to understand. The now is it and within the now is the mystery we seek, connecting us to the everywhere and everyone and everything, is what I hope. Sounds bigger than it is. I have to slow down to let it in. Seems that was a process that both found me and that I’ve sought, and I’m still working at it. Waking to sunrise in the city or birdsong outside my bedroom, allowing the dreams time to shift to the daytime thoughts is one way to do it, my substitute for meditation. Quaker Meeting helps, where others sit with me in quiet, slowly begin to share what comes, marvel as the mysteries are one by one revealed and contemplated. Being with kids helps, too. Tuesday’s quote of the day, which I’ve been wondering how to write was this: Jesus’s birthday is on Christmas. The Easter Bunny’s birthday is on Easter. Halloween’s birthday is on Halloween:) Halloween is turning five!

Begin with the serious, shift to the light. State the known, follow the questions. Kids know.

I don’t really know what I’m saying here, except I’m thinking and feeling a whole lot again. I feel raw and broken open, consequence of many things, in part separating from the one I thought was holding me together and making my way again without a partner. It is an unmooring experience, unpartnering, venturing into the loss, searching for the safety net, trying again. Remaking home, remaking dreams, remaking self are life’s work made larger in moments of great loss and/or change. For me, these things take enormous energy, so much that I have learned to accept the loss of sleep, loss of appetite, loss of weight, loss of productivity and concentration and to wonder on them rather than to worry.

When I wrote to a good friend after the breakup of my marriage several years ago, she asked me how I was feeling and I said “unmoored.” To me, the experience of being unmoored was frightening, overwhelming, strange. Her reply made me reconsider. “That’s good,” is what she said, meaning, if I remember correctly, that being unmoored is the only way to find someplace new. It doesn’t make the experience of being unmoored any less intense to think of it as good, but it helps to accept the state as necessary in making great change, and to feel it as an opening to something new, rather than a release into an abyss. Unmoored implies, when I think of it right now, being adrift at sea, being bouyant, held up, as a ship floating in the water, not as a rock sinking to the bottom. In being unmoored, the experience of finding the water is key. Being held up comes in many forms, most all of them some type of love and connection, whether to the birds who come each morning to sing, or to the sun who comes each day to light the way, or to the friends or children or strangers who smile and look me in the eye, or to the inner life I discover when I slow down enough to listen.

Now it’s time to start the day. I have a sort of desperate need to write myself through these phases, but also the desperate fear that the writing is too personal, too unformed, too ambiguous to be let out. Perhaps it is. Forgive me if it’s so. I haven’t yet found another way to get the ideas out of my head and into clearer form. Enjoy the day. Live it where you are and see what you find. I’d be curious to know.

Here’s the book I’ve been reading on Love, in case you’re curious enough to read it, too.

The Art of Loving, by Eric Fromm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Loving

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Loving-Erich-Fromm/dp/0061129739

 

Dreaming of Abundance, Feeling Rested

For awhile now I’ve not been sleeping much. Dreams have been sparse. Last night I wrote here about wishing for a dream. This morning I woke at 6 from a dream of abundance. When I opened my eyes, even though I hadn’t slept much, I felt rested.

After dinner last night my son was talking with me in the kitchen. The night before I had been exhausted, after a hard day at work, a very long day before that. Last night was Friday night, a quiet one with me and my two at home kids, time alone, time cooking, time sharing food that was mostly good, a new chicken dish I invented with basil, olive oil, capers, fancy salt and ground pepper and lemon zest, baked, then broiled, roast cauliflower done just right and some boxed rice that could have been better, prepared with a glass of my favorite Reisling on the counter, bottle sitting in my fridge for weeks. As I talked with my boy, it occurred to me to remind myself out loud of the importance of starting each day fresh, of going to sleep knowing rest will help, dreams will come, and tomorrow will be a new day.

And then we had some time together with his sister watching Glee, our guilty pleasure, and time alone settling into sleep. Also over the kitchen table I tried to tell my boy about a book I got at Porter Square Books this week, where I had gone Monday evening to hear a young man read from his first novel and ended up perusing the shelves and finding more books, the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Art of Loving by Eric Fromm, and three slim red journals, in which I intended to write dreams and private thoughts, have so far written only one. In telling my boy about the book, I realized again how little I know and how curious I am to know more, how much conversation helps to put boundaries around and give shape to both. My boy, as a sixteen year old with a curious mind and a willingness to amble, talks to me about music in the car on our way to school, about politics and current events and things at school and thoughts and ideas he’s exploring and he listens and is curious about things I wonder about, too. I hadn’t thought of myself as a mother of teens, and I really hadn’t thought of myself as a mother of adults, but guess what, at 46 I am both, and it’s enlightening.

The Art of Loving is not perhaps what is seems. I carried the slim volume to the register in my arms along with the journals with some shame or embarrassment. Eric Fromm hits that right off, reminding me that because love is so essential to being human, when we feel lacking in love in some way we feel less than and ashamed. No one likes to be the middle aged woman at Porter Square Books on Monday evening sitting in the back row of a nearly empty reading listening to the author’s mother and her book club ask question after question of the author, nor to walk to the counter with a book on Love and three empty journals. What else is a woman to do with a locavore heart and a penchant for books and words and dreams and a midlife of unknowns?

In any case, no regrets. The book is a classic for good reason, less than one hundred twenty five pages, translated into many languages, read and reread for fifty years. I trust the words will work some wonders on my heart and mind, lead me in new directions, expand my world, deepen it if all goes well. In the spirit of loving, my son let me know that Mister Rogers answered every fan letter he received,  that his deepest belief was that each person mattered in a unique, significant way. Earlier in the week my son let me know that each of the sweaters Mister Rogers wore on his shows was hand made by his mother. Another factoid, which my son relayed as I was trying to sing a Mister Rogers song about being special, was that Mister Rogers studied music. Another I relayed to him was that I watched a lot of Mister Rogers, both because I liked his show and because he was the one tv guy my mom adored. Funny to find my son at sixteen drawn to him as well.

At bedtime, my gal was listening to Tracy Chapman, to an album I listened to again and again in my early years. Tracy’s portrait on my gal’s iphone in her bedside charger and speaker combination looked so young to me I said this to my daughter. What do you mean? was her response, prompting me to say she is so much older now, and for my girl to ask how old and for me to counter, about my age, as she was a young woman when I was in college, and for my girl to say that is not so old. Only a few hours ago, I was telling her about my newest ventures into the world of online dating, laughing at myself as I danced in the kitchen to our mutual song obsession of the day 1234 by Feist and she warned me not to do that in front of any new man or in front of her with him, and then I realized who I was with and what I was saying and acknowledged it was weird to be talking about that with her and she said, no big deal, as she had learned all about dating later in life from her grandma, my mom. Go figure. She did and I did and here we are, not living the life I had planned at her age at all, with her wiser than I’d ever been at twelve.

Kids really are terrific. I feel lucky to have mine. No wonder I get down when they’re away. I’m working on that, too. Dream abundance was the starting for this piece. The dream was about money, but also about care, and about the people and events which surprise us, and often provide for us in ways we couldn’t know.

With that I am off to pay the bills, prepare the contracts, apply for the financial aid, after installing my gift of the week, a copy of the Microsoft Office applications I’ve been missing since my computer went down, more abundance.

Enjoy the sunny day:) Before I go, though, I do want to say that I am thinking about my pulling back from making change in the larger world. It’s a thread I’ve been following for awhile, and I think it’s leading somewhere, not towards indifference, but toward an inner and outer shift that just might bring me peace and possibly have a greater impact on the worlds I hope to change than all the advocating I was doing before I wore out. Live the dream, perhaps is what I mean. Not so sure…another rambling piece I give you credit for having the patience to read. The brand new novelist warned us about this approach to writing and here I am regardless.

Just reread the Writer’s Almanac poem of the day, and realize it fits with the theme of abundance, so will share it here:

Fishing in the Keep of Silence

by Linda Gregg

There is a hush now while the hills rise up
and God is going to sleep. He trusts the ship
of Heaven to take over and proceed beautifully
as he lies dreaming in the lap of the world.
He knows the owls will guard the sweetness
of the soul in their massive keep of silence,
looking out with eyes open or closed over
the length of Tomales Bay that the egrets
conform to, whitely broad in flight, white
and slim in standing. God, who thinks about
poetry all the time, breathes happily as He
repeats to Himself: there are fish in the net,
lots of fish this time in the net of the heart.

“Fishing in the Keep of Silence” by Linda Gregg, from All of It Singing. © Graywolf Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

 

Friday Evening

I never write on Friday evening. It’s 7:15 and just starting to get dark. I ought to go downstairs and make the dinner. My children are patient. We get home late from school and it’s been a long day and I’ve been learning to take a break before cooking.

I’ve become a mother to teens. Somehow it happened. This weekend my boy will be off both days with friends. My gal is packing her things for a trip to Florida with her stepmom and cousin. Somehow it all feels very normal and at the same time surprising. They need me so little. Our life is in many ways so quiet. We can eat dinner at 8 or 9 and we can all cope. The kids are awfully independent, can spend hours in their rooms doing their own thing. I could read a book or mess around on the computer, even take a nap, and they would be fine. I can leave for hours to run errands, just let them know where I’ll be and when I’ll return. I hardly do that, though. Being a mother to teens for me is about being around, so that when they come and go, I’ll be here. I suppose another stage will follow, but for now, this is where I am, their backup crew, cook, conversation partner, dinner companion, chore sharer. It gets to be more and more like housemates, in a way, dividing up the chores, living our lives a bit more separately than I had imagined, each of us taking more and more responsibility for ourselves.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to parent kids who were not at Sudbury Valley and who had not grown up in our family day care, who lived with me all the time with their father. But mostly I don’t. This life feels normal, which is perhaps the surprising thing to me. I didn’t imagine life with teens, or life as a single mom, or choosing to raise my kids this way, yet all these things came to be, and they now feel normal. What the heck?

It turns out that kids without preschool, without formal school academics, without traditional school structure, are very easy companions, and very easy to parent, at least for me. When I think about the times we used to struggle with  homework, about the pressure of staying organized and on task at school and the effort I put in as a parent to help my kids in traditional school, I can remember, but mostly now this way makes sense and in our day to day I don’t think too much about the other ways we might have lived. After so much of my personal and professional life spent advocating for change in the larger worlds, now we’re just living another way, and putting very little energy into making change for anyone outside our small worlds.

Feels like there is more to say. Whatever it is is so far below the surface, I wasn’t sure I ought to write. Perhaps in the morning when I wake up I will have had a dream that will guide me to figure out what is on my mind. Now it’s time for Friday night dinner, midlife single mom with teens style, served between 8 and 9 to children I’ll have to call from their rooms to eat, who will talk and laugh with me, bring me into their worlds and share mine, then retreat again to where they live while I am left on my own. Funny thing parenting. There are many more stages than those for which I was prepared.

 

Sacred/Secular/Profane – Big Questions for Little and Big People

Last week my group of fours, who talk the day away, were in the kitchen during meal time. One said, “We can talk to each other after we’re dead.”

“No we can’t,” argued the other. Then I think there was talk about heaven.

Yesterday the same group of three were in the kitchen again, drawing. One said to the others, “How old is god?”

“Older than Jesus,” replied the second.

“Don’t use the F word!!!” commanded the third.

In my own adult life, I’ve been attending Quaker Meeting. This weekend I’ll go on retreat with members of the meeting to discuss our relation to spirit, to share our personal stories and to create one for the group to share with the world. I wonder how similar our questions will be to those of my fours.