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 […]
ecology
Place is your child’s close relative
A friend of mine grew up in the inner city, a world of asphalt, concrete, steel and the growl of combustion engines. Outside his apartment a solitary lime tree sprung from the pavement. Every day he’d climb that tree. He says he perched there for what seemed like most of his childhood, watching the world […]
Attachment beyond mom and dad
Attachment theory places a child’s sense of belonging at the breast of the mother, or in the lap of the father. But we’re all born with a need for attachment to a home that is far vaster than the nuclear family. Imagine instead an attachment theory that knows the pain of being uprooted and adrift, […]
Your child’s gift holds the family together
What sets every family member apart is what holds the family together. This is an old ancestral understanding. The strength of our relationships grows from our willingness to honor, celebrate and cultivate our differences. Every child has a unique gift, talent, passion that complements the gifts of others. These are the variegated threads of a […]
Broken chrysalis
The world is being broken open, and you may break with it, like a chrysalis. This is one way we heal–breaking down whatever separates us from the whole. So rupture the cocoon of factory-mind, emerge resplendently winged. Take flight, by submitting to all that lies beyond this sugared shell spun like a spell around your […]
Stories for the love of earth
We need children who love the earth unconditionally. Let the stories you tell your small one seed the ecology of her imagination. Go far beyond the arid fields sown with concepts, statistics, theories, information and labels about the natural world. Harness your heart to fairy-tales and myths, fables and anecdotes and journey with your child […]
Too much support for the sapling topples the tree
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 […]
Change the rhythm to get the fruit
It’s time to make cider on our farm. I climb the apple trees, and shake the branches to tumble the fruit for harvest. But they don’t fall from an even rhythm. It’s the changes in rhythm that breaks the stem and drops the apple. Sometimes we get into routines and ruts in our families when […]
Autumn and every family in transition
The equinox just past, and every family is in transition, whether in cities or countryside, apartments or houses. It’s on the winds, in the rains, under our feet and in the canopies. And it’s in our children too. They’re called indoors, to fires and candles and stories and games and comforting blankets. Like seeds, they’re […]
Every family needs a gardener
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 […]