Miki Dedijer

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Patience and the steady fire

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It’s no guarded parental secret that a child’s wild fire and love of life doesn’t easily submit to tasks and chores, to the daily demands of keeping house or staying the course.

The understandable temptation in the hubbub of modern life is to keep our child otherwise occupied, perhaps hooked up to another channel of entertainment, as we dive again into the dishes or the gathering dust.

What is lost, if we regularly do, is the child’s learning to endure moments that don’t readily feed the fire, that don’t deliver excitement or pacification or both.

What is gained, if we don’t succumb to temptation, is something less immediate than a distraction and therefore a bit harder to gage and harder to insist upon.

Through our willingness to bind our child to moments that hold no promise of gratification, now or later, she gains some familiarity with patience.

Patience, abiding by what is without recourse to immediate relief, endurance, submission to the hard and unsatisfying work at hand without a promise of either praise or recompense.

It’s hard work for a child, and adults, to practice patience. Few of us are willingly subjected to adversity. Few of us are likely to thank anyone who insists we endure the unjust suffering of sweeping the floor or cleaning our room, or worse.

Chances are, though, that a child familiar with patience will one day know something worth knowing about the work of tending a steady fire, even on the inevitable day when the storm draws near, a day when warmth and light is most needed.


Good table manners

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 As midwinter approaches on the northern hemisphere, it is time to once again gather with our loved ones around a table for a shared meal. It’s a time of great generosity, hospitality, a social ritual of both giving and receiving, feeding and being fed.

We welcome our guests, we might cook together, decorate the table, serve each other food, pour out drinks, swap stories and perhaps sing songs.

Sharing food with our loved ones of all ages, and even extending the hospitality to strangers, puts to rest the story of scarcity, at least for now.

Seated together around a table, we can make enough time for each other.  We can put aside our phones and meet each others gazes with a promise of attention, of listening to and seeing one another. We can bridge what sets us apart.

How we are at the table reaffirms the sanctity of food and the blessings of family and friendship, of connection and belonging. We can share gratitude for the many beautiful and unexpected ways this earth continues to sustains us. We can break bread, release our grievances, and restore peace.

Table fellowship is at the heart of spiritual etiquette, the practice of sustaining the space between friends, strengthening the subtle threads of relationships, nurturing companionship, and extending the family over time.

It offers us a place where we might return to fundamentals, the bare bones of being human, of shaping community through the bounty we’re willing and able to share.

Here we bear witness to one another, offering our presence to the possibility of remembering, rejoicing, or grieving as the wheel of the year turns once again, and light, life, may yet return.


A child’s ability to discern

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When our child was a bit older than two, I left him with a new teacher at kindergarden.

As soon as he was in her arms, he started to scream. So I waited a while with him until he was calm again, and turned to leave. Outside, I heard him through the door, crying incessantly, loudly, so I returned.

I saw the fear in his eyes, and decided to change my schedule and take him home again.

Children have a keen ability to discern safety and trust. They sense intent in a person, and notice the subtleties of incongruous body language.

They trust without question their instinct on who they wish to spend time with, and who they want to stay clear of.

As a parent it’s hard to know when to allow their discernment to guide our actions. Often we can’t, and it pains us to leave them. Othertimes they need our patient guidance to feel welcome in new contexts.

But whenever we can give credence to their perceptions, we strengthen their ability to follow their hearts.

We later found out that other children had similar reactions to the teacher, who eventually was asked to leave her position.

Hold on to your child

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There inevitably comes an age in our children’s lives when their attention and curiousity is directed more towards others than ourselves.

It’s easy then as a father or mother, flush with the business of making ends meet, to let go, understanding their outward gaze as an impending departure, rather than a cautious exploration.

Hold on to your child, is the advice of Gabor Maté and Gordon Neufeld to parents who notice their child’s shifting gaze and wonder what to do.

A child released too early from the family is exposed to the whims of a peer-led youth culture where each child pays for belonging with his or her vulnerability.

When parents let go too soon, the family fabric begins to fall apart and the the fire of youth is slaked by recurrent hurts, until the child becomes prematurely cool and conformist.

Hold on to your child, not by strengthening your hold but by remembering how much you still matter, and learning what your child asks of you now that she moves in widening circles around the family.

Our children deserve less than we got

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I know that my children deserve less than I got. Most likely your child does too.

This doesn’t go down easy, if like me you’re a member of the industrial growth society. Here, most of us by far want to pass on more to our children than our parents gave us.

Such is the script of progress, where more is the plotline of success. More comfort, more convenience, more mobility, more entertainment, more experiences, more activities, more money.

More, as you know, comes at a cost. We take more from those yet to come. We take it from earth and from once thriving communities.

The paradox of more in the times we know is that it inevitably impoverishes all our children, and their children in turn.

The innocent luxuries we have come to take for granted today–juicy tomatoes in December, a quick hop on an airplane, a 23 degree home year-round–are all mortgaged on our children and theirs to come.

As a generation desperately entitled to more, we inevitably deepen our debt spiritually, materially, relationally and morally to our grandchildren. Our legacy of consumerism, of taking more than we give, is an inherited poverty from our own ancestry, one that accrues to our children and theirs to come.

Our children deserve less of this poverty.

A legacy of less consumption but also of less cultural poverty is revolutionary parenting in the industrial growth society.

If you are willing to consider this, you likely belong to a minority of the concerned. If so, you will have to prepare for the day when your child asks you, “Mom, dad, why did you give me less than you got?”

This is a hard question to answer. I doubt there are many parents who have gone before us who ever had to. Yet our children deserve both this diminishing material legacy and our sincere concern for the cultural poverty that underlies it.

Whatever our response, it must somehow be sourced from love rather than self-hatred. It must also adress our obligation to leave enough for our children’s children as our way of affirming life itself, while becoming wise to the gnawing poverty that drives the hunger for more.

And if we get it right, our children, and theirs to come, will know how deep our love ran. They will know us as the ancestors who did their best to be human, accultured, generous and greatful.

Becoming a family servant

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In a few days, a dozen or so men are gathering at our farm around a man about to become a father.

So I’ve spent some time pondering what this moment asks of us, now that his life seems to be taking him away from a certain singularity awash in endless possibilities, towards an obligation to be tethered to the bundle of ties that is family.

Now there’s a word, family, pregnant with hidden meaning, fully birthed only by a willingness to wonder some about its ancestry.

Family, from the latin famulus, is originally an adjective meaning servile, or a noun signifying a servant or slave. We may receive this as a negative, this posture of submission, but I suspect that there’s more to it then what the knee’s jerk suggests. As the verb famulur, it indicates someone who ministers, tends to or waits upon someone or something.

And so there is an action concealed within the pale lifelessness of the noun, something being done that is of consequence to the one being acted upon.

The servant here is not a single person submitting to the will and command of others of higher standing. Nor does it ask of us that we resign ourselves to tending to the whole without recompense, agreeing to become gradually impoverished by our  ministrations, forever bound to an insatiable hunger.

When we first tread across the threshold of parenthood, we’re not entering the vaguely heroic realm of sacrifice, rising every day to lay our gifts down at the altar of the child. Not as I understand it. It’s more relational than that, less ridden with resignation.

It seems that as you become a parent, you take on a relational obligation and mutual agreement to serve whatever and whoever needs sustenance. Not sacrifice. Surrender.

For this man coming to our farm, his heart expectant, this may be his pregnant partner. It most certainly will be their newborn child. At times a grandmother or uncle and others of the fold. The family requires the attention of all members onto all members. It ceases to be without this collective willingness to serve.

And in entering this web of relations with the stance of a servant, we soon discover that it extends far beyond our child, our partner, ourselves. For what sustains us, is serving us, is family.

So I wonder if family is only born from our willingness to bow our backs and kneel together in servitude to all that calls on us for nurturance. As a man then, we marry into family by a pledging our allegiance to matrimony, the condition of the mother. This is the honor bestowed on the one entering wedlock, to become a servant, not master, in the household of life, human or otherwise.

Our children are not exempt from this daily practice of family-making.  They too are asked to learn this willingness generously to serve, so that they may one day come of age, knowing that beyond the immediate family, there’s a larger community fed by their willingness to give what they are able to part with, and some of what they relucantly know they must give up for life to continue.