connections

it came to me when i was scribbling madness onto my morning pages. {which is the Reader's Digest version of how it came about...it was actually a week-long battle with Great Cosmic Forces and my penchant for being a bit slow at times.}

the even shorter version is i've realized this unschooling journey is exactly the same as our journey to art. well, it's mostly my journey to art -- children are born artists -- so says Picasso. and i happen to believe him.

i have learned that in opening ourselves to the creative source....we open ourselves to a place of infinite possibility.

kind of like unschooling

i was tidying up today and i came across a pile of Savannah's GIANT drawings. she creates complex scenes of fantastical creatures on the giant vellum Bristol that i buy for my big paintings.  and then she drops them in a heap in the hallway to be recycled.

occasionally there's one she loves and decides to tape it to her wall. or she'll gift one to one of us. but otherwise, she's done. in the moment, they are her Masterpieces; while she's working on them, they are precious. once they're finished  though, and she's shared the story behind them, she can set them aside and move onto the next thing.

assemblage of found objects {raiding the recycling bin} ~ Savannah

she is completely disengaged from the product*. it's all about the process.

kind of like unschooling 


so yeah, i'm done looking in other places for our extraordinary. it's clearly right here under my nose.

and so the drumming finds a rhythm.....and our haze of paint and poetry isn't such a mad idea after all.


*my next post will illustrate that this isn't always the case...;)

shift work

frost on the window pane
~life up close~

things are moving around here. subtle, but profound shifts that leave you with that "Ooooh, now i get it" feeling.

good stuff. but it means change.

i'm not sure of the future (if any) of this space. i'm struggling with the purpose of it...ie. what was my original intention and where is it now? i am afraid that it has become a place to justify how we choose to live, rather than simply a chronicle of our days. it's just how it's become to feel whenever i think of posting.

i also want to be mindful of my children; of their journey, of how their future-selves will look back on this.

i feel less moved to document our lives with photos, strictly for the purpose of blogging here. i see how that works so beautifully for some families...and i love to visit with them...but it doesn't seem to capture who we are.

how do i capture the wild wind and the rain, and the fast-beating hearts of my faery children? because these are the things that are the pulse of my family....the feral days of paint and poetry...tomatoes for breakfast, the fire of our disagreements and the vast, vast love of our forgiving.

 i look at the photographs and i know there is so much more to them...especially my beloved Sebastian- who seems to get very little air-time...only because of the elusiveness of his Bright and Shining soul. it is he who has taught me the most - even more than my magical girl - yet the one who i seem unable to share. at least, not yet.

so i'm still around. i'm peeping in your windows and leaving wild honey on your doorsteps.....

....but mostly we're going to follow the wild drum-beat of our souls....into the woods for a while.

blessings and Light to you and yours.....

where we are

it's been a week of questions....mine, theirs, ours.

i wonder sometimes, about these chronicles of our goings-on -- how much is too much, where are the lines that we cross or don't....and to say nothing of the agony of doubt. there are days when i look around, slightly bleary-eyed, shaking myself loose from our sandalwood-scented haze of paint and books and dog hair and wonder what the hell i'm doing.

in my heart of hearts i know...i believe...that we are walking the right path. but how that looks from day to day, or where the road is taking us...well, that's where my faith is tested.

i asked Savannah the other day, if she felt like she was missing something...if she wanted more.


"Why? Did someone complain that we weren't learning something?"  


from the mouths of babes.  you can tell that we offer full-disclosure around here. she knows well of the trials of family and the doubting and questioning and disapprovals.  we want her to know, so that we can explain how we see it differently. and she gets it. she's a perceptive kid.

but no, this time i didn't ask in response to an external judgment. this time it came from me.

at last...there is snow

i recognize my biases. i recognize i've leaned heavily toward art and literature in my strewing of their path. i've offered the science -- we have a deep fascination with the world around us...but, again -- my bias is that of Biology -- it's where my partial degree is, and then my vet tech training -- and the art/stories far outweigh in influence. so i worry that they're getting a lopsided view of the world. not that it's a bad view.

Sarah wrote a couple of lovely posts about how she has moved through curriculum-based education to unschooling to something somewhere in between. it gave me much to think about....although i've been thinking about it rather a lot lately.

i'm not a rabid unschooler. i believe strongly in the principles therein...but i also recognize that each family -- each child -- is different. so to paint us all with the same brush, is as inherently foolish as the way the conventional educational system operates.

a modest snow-person....coaxed out of not-packing snow

i suppose what i'm struggling with mostly, is trying to discover what unschooling looks like to us. and even then - how it looks for Savannah is vastly different to how it looks for Sebastian.

so where are we?

Savannah has decided she wants to learn how to tell time....so we dusted off a workbook and are meeting at The Table every morning to explore that. she's also decided she wants to learn Spanish. i'm still working on that one....

we have Arthurian legend on the brain -- and enjoyed a boisterous session of sword-fighting on the Wii at Nanna's on Friday. we've also just started watching this documentary on Netflix - and are marveling at the vast beauty of this country we live in. for me, it's an affirmation (at just the right time) of the extraordinary that exists right under our noses. there's a new hidden object game from Big Fish that the pair of them have been glued to for almost two days.

and of course....there's the art and the pursuit thereof.  big paintings and small paintings, illustrated story 'books', air-drying clay sculpture....it's never-ending.

but is it enough?

i really don't know. it's a blind faith, this road.

mostly we're just bumbling along.