Miki Dedijer

Coaching for Relational Parents | Miki Dedijer

Home » gardener

gardener

How to plant your child in community

By

I’ve heard from many parents who dream of planting their children in community.

Like them, maybe you too have raised your head and looked around and seen nothing but fragments of a village, shards of a tribe, threads of an ancestral tapestry. You think at times of moving your family to where community seems more alive.

Hold on.

This seeing is not your vision of an elusive elsewhere. It may be your call to become a craftsman, a weaver, a mapmaker, an archaelogist, a neighbor, a villager of the place in which you now find yourself.

Follow the faint trail through the woods to the clearing where elders, parents, children, friends are gathered around the warmth of a shared longing for togetherness.

These are a few of the possible signposts and skills that will lead you there.

  • Find the existing hubs–Where do these erstwhile villagers gather? What tasks, activities, possibilitites draw them together? Where are they today? Some places to look include Waldorf schools, an outdoor program, a parent group for homeschoolers, a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm, dance class or your local yoga center.
  • Reach for the low hanging fruits–Who else around you is ready to weave? Someone who also sees what you see. Who else is ready to carry this longing towards a becoming? You’re looking for somene  who also feels the bewilderment beneath the anger, the grief beneath the bewilderment, the love beneath the grief.
  • Seek diversity–The village is guilded–keep an eye out for people with disparate gifts and bring them together in a social ecology that thrives through diversity. Call in the musicians and visionaries, the elders and anchors, the space holders and facilitators, the nature nerds, the musicians, the ancestral trackers and storytellers, the survivalists and permaculturists.
  • Root it in family–Community asks that we’re willing to extend our families and acknowledge kinship. Take time to consider your family values, the traditions you honor, and the culture you wish to extend and deepen. Make sure the community you seek to create aligns with your core values.
  • Call in the triad–We can’t do it alone. It starts with conversation, a coming together of a few embers. Sit by the fire with no more than two other weavers. This is your seed pod, a triad of local visionaries who hear the call of the ancestors. Soul activists who are willing to act for the sake of our children, and those yet to come.
  • Stay with it through conflict–Conflicts are the inevitable gifts of deepening relationships. Decide early on how you wish to resolve misunderstandings, hold differences, and grow from your disagreements.
  • Lay a foundation–There are conversations we rarely have, and questions we may not explore with our friends or neighbors. Yet they are foundational to the process of seeding community. What makes you come alive? What hurts and saddens you? What do you want for your children? What shared values can you agree on?
  • Celebrate the seasons–Nature is not an ideology. You can’t debate the winter solstice or the spring equinox. And so the seasonal shifts are wonderful invitations to gather in recurring celebration to honor the circularity of our lives.
  • Start small–Set a low threshold for your gatherings, and make it easy for other families to say yes to your invitations. Light the grill and gather around a pot-luck. Meet up at the beach for a playful afternoon of shared discoveries. Set up a net and have a volley-ball tournament.
  • Honor the long arch–You will likely not see the community of your dreams emerge in a year or two. But don’t let that blind you to what you have. A community of three is a good thing. Tend it’s growth through your enjoyment of it. Trust in time, and celebrate all the surprises that emerge and accumulate through your staying put, staying with.

There is so much more, of course. But these are all good places to begin, if you wish to plant your child in community right where you live.

Along the way it helps to remember, as Peter Block says, that every time we gather, we model the world we wish to create.

Validation is a fertilizer

By

Timely validation helps our child master herself.

When we notice that she can now safely handle a knife, we help her integrate this new skill. When we decide our child can now cross the street on his own, he gets to practice his increased capacity for autonomy.

Validation is a timely fertilization of emergent growth in our child. It supports her natural unfolding. She gets to know herself as a more capable person.

When applied too soon, it forces growth which our child isn’t yet ready for. Our child might respond with anxiety.

When applied too late or not at all, the ability may become stunted or hidden.

Validation asks that we see our child such as she is today, beyond our expectations. It asks that we are a loving and supportive witness to her growth.

Just by observing, and sharing what we see, we’re helping our child blossom.

Too much support for the sapling topples the tree

By

A newly planted sapling needs stakes to support it against strong winds.

If you leave the stakes in too long, though, the tree suffers. It grows taller, but its roots don’t spread. When the stakes are removed, the tree is thin and weak, and breaks or falls in the first storm.

Too many stakes prevent the tree’s natural growth.

Offer your child just the right amount of support, so she can grow strong roots of her own.

Read comments or comment here

Raise your child inside a walled garden

By

Mythology is rich with stories of a walled garden.

Inside there are treasured plants, a verdant richness, great beauty and solace.

Outside of the walls there is all that is untended, unlimited and beyond our influence.

As parents it helps to be mindful of the walls we build around our children.

They need us to create a buffer within which they can find the comfort, the rest and the familiarity to mature as nature has readied them to.

If we fail to build a wall around childhood, our little ones have no respite from information, entertainment, media and all that is carried through those channels.

Raise your child within a walled garden and help them know it well. They will carry this place within them when they are ready to head out on their own.

Read comments or comment here

 

Every family needs a gardener

By

Every family is an ecosystem to itself, a vegetable bed set in a larger landscape of great mosaic beauty.

This fertile soil in which our children grow is a complex, wondrous, wobbling weave of ancestry, biology, spirit, life stages, genders, roles, grief and losses, professions, passions, dreams, possibilities.

It is so vast even in its smallness, that its essence is nameless. You feel family more than you understand it. Love is its currency.

To be a joyful gardener within this rich web of life, we cannot stand apart as an unmoved observer chewing on a straw or command the day’s chores with the conviction of an all-knowing farm boss.

We must enter the action as a farm hand starting the day with two empty hands and a willingness to stay present to the cycles of life. On this depends our ability to feed ourselves even in the lean times of the hard winters.

As a gardener of this place, we must step into the cycle of life with a little bit of mind, some craftsmanship, and a lot of heart.

When we hoe, sow, dig, plant, weed, harvest, water, tend, or lay the land fallow, we sink into relationship and find our rightful place in the flow of family life.

There is more here that is unspoken and artful, than there is articulation and certitude. It’s our willingness to act and adapt, to listen and learn, that allows the land to thrive from its inclusion of us. The health of the crop testifies to the love of the gardener.

With time, the artful gardener becomes a responsive member of a dynamic, vital, ever-changing life cycle. From these relationships grows a knowing of our responsibility, such as it is, to sustain the creativity and regenerativity of the land that is become our home.

The practice of parenting is therefore a practice of humility. Our commitment to the land humbles us.  In tending the earth, we become more like the earth, humus, the root meaning of humility.

We are changed by the culture we cultivate.

Our sense of belonging to this land, this home, grows from our capacity to surrender, yield and submit our knowing to the demands of what we grow.

Parenting is sacrifice only in that we are made sacred by it.