Avoiding the Straight and Narrow
image courtesy Sweet William Images
I think the narrow must scare the hell out of me, because whenever specialization is called for, I go broad. For example, the shortest path to adopting the Montessori “teacher speak,” would be to listen for concrete examples, write them down and practice by imitation. Something in me resists this. I think about how uncomfortable my own two parents would feel in a Montessori school and I know that its methods are nothing like those I’ve absorbed through them…but these are methods I need to begin to adopt in order to fit in. So what is my plan for getting there? It is circuitous, it is a process and I begin, as usual, by going broad.
Broad…now that is a term for another type of consideration; I haven’t felt much like one lately, well, until I got a massage from a friend and an apology from a long lost other, but I digress.
I almost gave up altogether about 5 times and that was only the first two weeks. Finally I wrote some goals for my outdoor education/movement program and started to have fun. Fun to me is not the running around sort that children love to do…fun for me=a struggle and by writing those goals, I realized I had one. There exists great distance between the goals I wrote for my program and what I am, on a day to day basis, able to accomplish. But I need my lofty goals in order to proceed.
Commonweal Garden
I realized that central to my ideals is the promotion of the development of life-long habits and attitudes to create a sustainable future. On Saturday, I drove out to the coast to the Commonweal Garden where Ellen facilitated the organization of an apple festival to celebrate the harvest of their heirloom apples.
location of Commonweal
The farm is being transformed into a permaculture model of human beings living in harmony with the earth. Lily is involved in a 9 month program through RDI called Regenerative Design and Nature Awareness. It is pretty amazing to me that I have situated myself into a household of people working toward furthering sustainable and regenerative practices. My first week at Montessori, I longed for the job I turned down at Emandal Farm in Willits California, but I believe I have figured out a way to make this job work for me and to help me accomplish some of my own goals. There is no real purpose in developing a mode of conversing, if, in the end, you have nothing more to say than “I’d like to invite you to keep the sand in the sandbox.” I’d much rather invite you to build a meaningful relationship with the earth.
