Wildflower Walk

"To see the fire that warms you or, better yet, to cut the wood that feeds the fire that warms you; to see the spring where the water bubbles up that slakes your thirst and to dip your pail into it; to see the beams that are the stay of your four walls and the timbers that uphold the roof that shelters you; to be in direct and personal contact with the sources of your material life; to find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to find a quest of wild berries more satisfying than a gift of tropical fruit; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wild flower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life." - John Burroughs (1837 - 1921)

Om Gnome & Fairy Garden Workshop

The Om Gnome and Fairy Garden Workshop has been busy during our spring break.  We were quite inspired by The Magic Onions amazing tutorials for making fairy furniture and toadstools... 

and got out into the garden this week to make a few additions.

We collect stones and had a bunch of nice round ones to work with.  We started with traditional red and white toadstools, then chose bright colors and, with just a little imagination, created some pretty psychedelic mushrooms.

Our fairy garden is beginning to look like a fairy wonderland...   

The new additions are so bright and cheerful...

Our kitty seems to be aware of magic in the garden...

Bright purple flowers are blooming on the Wild Lilac... 

And there is always time to just sit and enjoy breathing together...

Kindergarten Ecology

We are on spring vacation... so our lessons have been informal, our goals have been to relax and restore, and our days have been full of sunlight and friendship.  

Learning comes in infinite forms... and breaks from our regular schedule always remind me that, even without formal schooling, kids are always learning.  Sometimes, it's the lessons we don't plan for that have the most meaning.

In other words, Om School never really takes a break.  When your heart's compass is set strongly towards the ocean, everything you do, intended or not, flows down that river.  Something I desire deeply for my girl is for her to feel her connection with the earth, to know that she is connected to every other living thing, and to see that each drop of dew, every blade of grass, and all the creatures who walk upon it are sacred.  I think that the deepest peace a human heart can feel comes from loving and being loved in return.  Learning to feel to feel love from the natural world might just ensure that that deep peace.  It's there, always loving us, always providing for us... no matter what -- every day the sun shines down on us and the earth beams back.  We stand in the middle often too asleep to know that we are being held in that embrace.

When we awaken to this love, to our hidden connections with all things, we realize that it is up to us to care for the earth as we care for our children, our closest friends, and our families.  The earth truly is our mother and we should cherish her -- not just so we can use up her resources at some later date in time -- but because she is sacred.  

With Earth Day coming up on April 22nd (and turning forty this year) it's a perfect time to turn our attention to the environment.  I'm working to develop a thematic unit on ecology and will post resources here as I find them.  A great starter reading list can be found here: Children's Nature & Ecology Books and Elementary Education Resources: Kindergarten is a great site for developing your own lesson plans, games, and activities to get your kids involved and caring about the environment.  

Still, I think stories and picture books speak to a young child's heart more than scientific information... and I've been meaning to get this book for months now:  The Last Wild Witch by Starhawk.  You can support an independent book store by purchasing it at 100Fires.com: Extraordinary Books (and More!) for a Healthy Planet.  

This PDF, "The Last Wild Witch Teaching and Discussion Guide", is a fantastic guide -- full with discussion questions, language skill-builders, art projects, music circles, and science projects.   

The following video, a promo for the book, is a treasure by itself and a lesson in global responsibility.  Listen for the last lines, as the children realize, "Maybe we're supposed to do something... Maybe we're supposed to save the forest..."

Deep peace to all.

Easter Au Naturel

We started with all organic ingredients... a dozen hard-boiled eggs, a bushel of kale, two beets, skins from two yellow onions, grape juice, vinegar, plus crayons, and rubber-bands.







Hoping for a tie-dyed result, we wrapped some of the eggs with rubber-bands.  We used crayons to draw hearts and flowers and to write intentions on the shells -- we chose the four Brahma-Viharas, mudita (joy), metta (loving-kindness), karuna (compassion), and uppekha (equanimity).

In separate pots, we boiled the kale, beets, and onion skins in three cups of water with three tablespoons of vinegar for 30 minutes... then let the dyes cool.  We filled a mason jar with grape juice, added three tablespoons of vinegar and two eggs, and put it in the refrigerator for an hour. 

Last, we let each egg soak in dye for 20-30 minutes... and voila!  Easter eggs au naturel!
 
This was a fun way to honor the day and Mother Nature by using only gifts from the earth rather than harmful chemicals.  More info on Natural egg dying is available here.

Much spring joy to all.

Healing Garden, Sacred Space

I'm working to create a healing garden... a little sacred space... a quiet area for peace and introspection... a place for sitting and breathing and imagining.  We've planted both medicinal and culinary herbs and started a fairy garden full of butterfly attracting blooms.  Today I bundled bushels of lavender and hung it all around the patio.

I'm a big fan of sacred space and have tiny little alters all about my house.  Last year I cleared out the bay window in our bedroom and created a mini-shrine room for meditating each morning.  We use our fireplace hearth for a nature table where we bring symbols of the seasons indoors to celebrate our interconnection with the earth.  A picture of the Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, music and the arts, presides over my kitchen (next to some Jade which is for good fortune) and we bring her fresh rosemary or lavender each morning as an expression of gratitude.  

I have an alter-in-a-jar that I take with me to teach yoga to help us unite body, mind, and spirit and to sense the cosmos within.  It's just a silver candle plate with a white tea light but in each of the four directions I place a symbol for each of the elements.  For earth - a small stone, for water - a shell or a river rock, for air - a feather or an acorn top, for fire - well, the candle! ... and for spirit I keep a dried flower because to me it represents kindness and that comes from within.

I think it's important for kids to have sacred space too... quiet places for them to imagine and create... hallowed ground where they're able to recognize that they are of this earth and not separate from it... commercial-free zones where they can touch the elements and connect with themselves and the world around them.

We're a fast-paced world and it's up to us to create space that encourages us to slow down, to step back, to let the laundry wait and instead just... sit... and breathe.  It's not just adults that are effected by the stress of our busy lives.  Kids not only feel our stress but have stress of their own.  Taking time to nurture their spirit and their creativity creates happy kids.  It's a pretty simple equation.

What you put in your sacred space depends, obviously, on what is sacred to you and your kids.  We're working on a fairy garden.  To us, fairies capture the spirit of childhood.  My daughter loves playing like this, making up stories, and acting out their little voices.  So far we've converted a bird house into a fairy house by opening up the little round door into an arched doorway, we built a fairy swing with found wood and garden twine, we put together a fairy picnic table with stones and a glue gun, and made a little fairy bed with tree bark and reclaimed prayer flag. We've been making stick stars and decorated a new one for the fairy garden yesterday.  Our inspiration came from an AMAZING mama's blog, Ordinary Life Magic (here's the tutorial: http://ordinarylifemagic.com/blog/?s=twig+stars).

Stars have long been a symbol of magic and mysticism  and, for many reasons, they feel magical to me.  Venus, the planet named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, creates a five pointed star with her orbit around earth every eight years.  From ancient Greece and Babylonia to Egypt and beyond, the star has been used as a symbol of a Goddess for centuries.  Pythagoras used the star as a symbol for his school which pursued knowledge in mathematics, music, religion, and more.  During the times of the Hebrew Scriptures, the star was also an important symbol representing a secret name of God.

Lavender is a symbol of devotion and is said to have been the color of the Buddha's aura.  The name lavender comes from the Latin lavare, "to wash," since it was often used in bath and laundry waters.  It's been used for centuries as a medicinal herb and is said to relieve  stress, anxiety, exhaustion, irritability, headaches, migraines, insomnia, depression, colds, digestion, flatulence, upset stomach, liver and gallbladder problems, nervousness, and loss of appetite.  It's smell is calming and breathes a soothing scent into the air where I've tied it in bushels around the patio. 

Sacred space can be as small as the space between breaths or as big as the Temple of Artemis.  Regardless of size or location, what matters is that we create them... and the most important thing we can bring to our sacred space is ourselves.  I'm so grateful for this little healing garden that we're creating.  Hopefully, I'll have more luck with herbs than I had with veggies last year... but regardless if my organic healing herbs grow or medicinal recipes work, the space itself has already brought a little more Om into our home.

 fairy by Little Red Whimsy on Etsy

Symbols of Spring

Springtime has our focus on the feminine... on new life, crafting, creating, and rejuvenating. We've enjoyed making garlands with hand painted blown eggs and learning about eggs as a symbol of fertility...  We made a pretty little star with sticks and the lavender growing rampant in our yard and hung it over the seedlings in our kitchen for blessings from Mother Earth... 

We learned about the origins of spring holidays and honored the goddess Ostara with offerings of rice, flowers, stone eggs in a raffia nest, feathers, and stone towers representing the vernal equinox and return of balanced days and nights.... 

We planted seeds in egg crates and enjoyed combining two powerful images of new life.  Most of all, we've been honoring the earth's rebirth by simply spending family time together.

Our academic adventures are turned to the letter T with sixteen new words: take, that, the, their, them, they, this, three, tree, to, two, tell, than, these, thing, and tiger.  

We're spelling in song:
t-h-r-e-e, t-h-r-e-e, t-h-r-e-e, that's how we spell three! 


We're writing new sentences:
Three tall trees sway.
Two tigers tapdance.
Tell them they're late!


We're working on sister sums for math... matching doubles with equations of the same sum (4+4 with 5+3 and 6+2, etc.)


We've fallen in love with a wonderful book about loving-kindness, Tenzin's Deer: A Tibetan Tale by Barbara Soros,"a tale of compassion, healing, and the guiding power of dreams..." that "urges us to listen to our intuition and be courageous in the face of loss."

We're continuing our dharma unit on the three facets of right intention and have re-named last year's stuffed Easter Peeps.  Meet Mother Intention, Pinky Renunciation, Bluey Good Will, and Purpley Harmlessness.  We're working on a story that illustrates the intention of renunciation as resistance to the pull of desire, the intention of good will as resistance to feelings of anger and aversion, and the intention of harmlessness as not thinking or acting cruelly, violently, or aggressively, and to develop compassion.

Last but not least, we're working on a new yoga sequence and accompanying verse.  The first two lines came from our Oak Meadow Kindergarten syllabus.  I've expanded it and added asanas intended to help develop a strong, feminine sense of self.  The sequence is illustrated by my little yogini below.


I can be as small
as a small, small seed
I can be as tall
as a tall, tall tree
As strong as a mountain
As brave as can be
Because I'm a goddess
can't you see!

 

Our new sequence, from left to right: Seed Pose, Tree Pose (Vrksasana), Mountain Pose (Tadasana), Warrior I (Virabhadrasana I), Goddess Pose (Utkata Konasana), Prayer Pose (Pranamasana).

Spring is a time of balance and renewal but it also feels like a feminine season to me.  It's a time for planting, growing, and bringing forth new life from the earth and from within.  In a world that seems to have forgotten it's feminine history, this feels like the perfect season for remembering.

Sacred Refuge

After taking note of Shannon Hayes' book in the New York Times article, The Femivore's Dilemma, this morning I read a fabulous review of Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture.  I've been feeling empowered all day.  Surely, having my existence validated feels good, but that's only a tiny piece of it.  It's more that I've been reminded that I'm not alone in my endeavors to make my home a sacred refuge from economic materialism.  

Throughout the day my thoughts returned to the women I'm honored to know... supra-ordinary mamas who are redefining feminism by simplifying their lives and setting their heart's compass to ecological sustainability, social justice, and family well-being.  In some ways, it feels like the mamas of today have given birth to a new paradigm for femininity.  We've discovered that life outside the office doesn't mean a four walled torture chamber of bon bons and casseroles.  We know what road blind servitude and mindless consumerism takes us down and we're choosing a new path.

I don't think radical homemaking would be possible without the blood and sweat of our feminist sisters who paved the way... and I wouldn't want to stay home if our culture was as patriarchally backwards as it was 50 years ago.  Does this suggest a return of the Sacred Feminine?  Maybe our world is finally beginning to realize that internalizing our female half practically tipped the earth off of her axis. 

With my inner-goddess invoked, our school day felt like a downhill slalom.  I woke up before dawn and sat in meditation for an hour, then spent the sunrise in Surya Namaskara with the Gāyatrī Mantra.  Full of sunbeams and universe juice, it was time for tending to seedlings, plants, and compost, then a slow-paced, mindful breakfast, lesson planning, and organizing artwork into portfolios. 

The highlights of our day included:

a little Greek Mythology...
with the story of Persephone, Goddess of Spring and Queen of the Underworld, from The Lady of Ten Thousand Names: Goddess Stories from Many Cultures retold by Burleigh Muten.  

a silly tongue twister...

Swan swam over the sea

Swim swan! Swim!

Swan swam back again

Well swum swan!

... writing some sentences:

Six swans swim swiftly.

Seven sisters sleep soundly.

Silver stars shine in the sheltering sky.

... spelling our S words in song:

s-e-v-e-n, s-e-v-e-n, s-e-v-e-n, that's how we spell seven!

... an introduction to the second spoke of the dharma wheel, right intention - in Pali samma sankappa:

The Buddha explained right intention as threefold: the intention of renunciation, the intention of good will, and the intention of harmlessness.

... a little piano practice perfecting

a Samba!

Then it was time for a piano lesson, a ballet class, and the park with daddy.  Still, the best part of the day was our continued seeking of spring.  We're blessed to live in a warm little corner of the universe and everywhere we turned, Persephone's work abounded.  Too beautiful for words, I'll close here with some pictures.

cherry blossoms aflame

almost like a lotus unfurling

rosemary gone wild

seedlings sprouting...

 and shining in the sun

baby leaves being born on our favorite oak

welcome little leaves!

spring heralds popping up in the fairy garden

snow peas smiling

and the sweet taste of dew drops!


(support the author and buy Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture direct!)

S is for Spring

With one week to go, signs of spring abound and, by yet another sweet synchronicity, we began our letter S unit this week.  

We use Fry's 300 Instant Sight Words for our weekly words.  With a total of 30 S Words on the list, we decided to split it in half and give the letter S two weeks instead of one.  This week's words were: spring, said, see, she, so, stand, such, some, saw, say, school, seem, shall, should, soon, and sure.  Instead of a written spelling test this week, we elected for something more fun.  After singing all of the words all week, we had a family Spelling Bee on Saturday.  I'm proud to report that A. is becoming quite a fantastic little speller. 

Some of other S things we enjoyed this week were Spring's Sprung by Lynn Plourde, beautifully illustrated by Greg Couch, learning to play a Samba on piano, Book 10 in Scholastic's Planet Earth Phonics Reading Program - Snakes, and committing to memory eight math facts we called "sister sums" where we matched doubles (like 4+4 and 6+6) with other math facts (like 5+3 and 7+5).

Still, the highlights of our week were welcoming spring in our outdoor classroom.  We've been closely watching the trees in our area give birth to blossoms and baby leaves.  Our neighbor's Flowering Cherry is aflame with pink blossoms, our winter daphne is full and sweet smelling, the manzanita are covered in tiny white flowers, our snow peas are thriving, and our tomato and jalapeno seedlings are now three inches tall with water droplets always glistening on their primary leaves.

With the sun's return, and our studies turned to the letter S, it seemed like a perfect time for sun salutations... a moving prayer of gratitude to the life-giving energy of the sun.  Sun salutation, Surya Namaskar, links together twelve asanas in a dynamic flow.  Beginning the day with a set in each of the four cardinal directions wakes up our bodies, gets out the wiggles, and as Christopher Key Chapple, a professor of Indic and comparative theology at Loyola Marymout University says in this month's Yoga Journal, "calls us to stretch our minds and spirits to the corners of the universe, allowing us to feel the vast expanse of the cosmos within the movement of our bodies."

The ability to sense the cosmos within our body is something I hope my munchkin is cultivating through our at-home studies.  It comes when we slow down, when we put some space between our habitual responses and our actions, and when we take care to spend time with the natural world.  

Watching tiny blossoms sprout from barren winter branches reminds me that spring is a promise the earth keeps each year.  Sensing the birth of that promise within myself gives me a deep peace -- a trusting feeling in my heart.  There is a surrender, a certain acceptance, in this trusting... a calmness of spirit that informs each day with joy.


Tomorrow we'll begin eight more sister sums, fourteen new S words, sing a silly swan tongue twister, and continue seeking spring.  Tonight, I'm settling down with my family for a Sunday night in stillness.

A Quiet Garden

With my dad's passing two weeks ago, time slowed down.  Each day feels languid and somewhat surreal yet sweet and new all at the same time.  We've been spending a lot of time planting and enjoying some bright pre-spring weather while taking care to experience all of our feelings and honor the stillness within.

Part of our daily Circle Time consists of a little ritual we call Creative Infinity.  Our Creative Infinity is that place inside where the whole Universe lives.  We imagine our heart beating and then see inside to the molecules, atoms, and quarks of which we're comprised. 

"What's a quark made of, mama?"

"Energy.  Everything is energy."

Maybe inside the tiniest particles are secret gateways into infinity.  Maybe this is from where our ideas come.  Maybe this is heaven.

When we're still, we can send our awareness down into our heart, into our Creative Infinity, and unite our intellect with our love.  This is one of the guiding principles of our home education -- developing a wise heart.

My Creative Infinity has been very quiet lately.  I suspect this is because, when my dad passed, my heart broke open so he could come in.  I feel him there now and before we get back to the busyness of our regular lives, I wish to stay with the stillness a little longer. 

Meanwhile, we are enjoying pre-spring sunshine and getting a head start on our garden. We've planted the snapdragons from my dad's service and we're working on a healing garden with Ayurvedic and other medicinal and culinary herbs. We've started a fairy garden with butterfly attracting blooms, planted peas in pots (and in an old tupperwear container that was collecting dust in the garage), we planted a few marigolds with hopes that we won't have any more frost -- but put them in pots just in case; and we're planning a salsa garden with tomatoes and peppers in a big wine barrel.  I think we'll also do carrots and strawberries in a big wine barrel too.

Getting our hands in the soil reminds us of where we come from and to where we are going. Spending this quiet time together in the garden feels so right.  Our innermost self is stillness, is pure awareness.  When we rest in this stillness, we return home.  It is here, in this sanctuary of our own hearts, that the world is restored and begins to bloom again.