The Craft: Gifts for the Birds

There are two essentials we use in in crafting our winter solstice celebration every year.  The book, The Winter Solstice: The Sacred Traditions of Christmas by John Matthews and Beautiful Darkness: Celebrating the Winter Solstice a gorgeous and haunting soundtrack that pairs musical accompaniment to many of the poems, blessings, and invocations found in Matthews' book.  

As part of one's holiday celebrations Matthews' suggests making a shrine in honor of the wild creatures that endure the long cold dark nights outside while we feast in the warmth and comfort inside our homes.  

Upon following his guidance we decided to not only to honor them with a shrine and his invocation:

Creatures of the wild world

We honor your strength

We honor your power

We honor your joy!

May you bring us:

The gift of your presence,

The blessing of your truth,

The light of your being,

Now and through the year to come

but to also offer them a gift in return.  We hung the treats on the trees that lined our sunrise walk to greet the returning sun on Solstice morning.

Biodegradable cord on pinecones.

Nut butter and wild bird seed.

Smeared. covered and ready to hang.

LKC: World Kindness Day 2018

Our Halloween celebrations are complete and yet under the light of the New Trading Moon a votive still flickers in my heart - the candle we light each year for those who died alone or forgotten.  At a time in our culture that feels hyper-focused on self-promotion, quiet moments contemplating a fate like Eleanore Rigby's are potent.  On Halloween night when we light the anonymous "You Are Not Forgotten Candle" the quiet feels even deeper than the rest of that solemn evening.  While our ancestor altar is a chance for us to experience the continuation of spirit through the act of remembering, a heavy question ever looms:

What happens if no one remembers you?

The Trading Moon for me has always been a month of transition.  Over a month's time we move from the death of the old year at Halloween into the hopes of the new year at Winter Solstice.  We spend our shortening days like busy little elves crafting the holiday gifts we will give to loved ones.  Traditionally it was a time not just for trading provisions but perhaps even more importantly for trading fear and isolation in for hope and a solid sense community.  The principal of reciprocity resounds as cold air and longer nights naturally circle us in together more closely.

Perhaps it was the haunting echo of "never forget" in the Veteran's Day memorials this weekend.  Maybe it was hearing from friends who escaped the California wildfires with only the clothes they were wearing.  This year I felt more than ever the need for a process to ferry me from a holiday of death and endings to one full of festive celebrations of light returning.  I noticed it in the seriousness I felt as I was readying our supplies for World Kindness Day.  In the past the energy around the table has been excited and happy as we prepare cards, stickers, cookies, kid-crafts, flowers... anything that we can think of to create maximum surprise and joy for unsuspecting recipients.  Last year we printed pictures of the people we love and wrote cards telling them what we adore about them.  The kid's were beaming with joy as we dropped a hefty load of finished letters into the mailbox.  We all agreed that it felt incredibly good to spend a day dedicated to telling other people why they are amazing.

Something happened after, however, that changed my attitude and energy surrounding World Kindness Day.   It was an experience that in part answered the question still haunting me from Halloween; "What happens if no one remembers you?" 

Something happened that made me understand that kindness is more than a choice, it is a responsibility.  I understand now that practicing kindness is my civic duty.  Practicing kindness is how we keep each other safe.  

Like trading provisions.  Like making a plan to survive the longest, darkest, coldest nights together.  

About a month after our mail drop last year I heard from one of our recipients.  Her letter had taken awhile to get to her since she had lost her apartment and was for the time being homeless.  According to her, like a miracle, our message found its way to her (via her sweet brother) and arrived at the perfect moment.  She said that she had never before felt such a depth of despair as in the days before our card's arrival.  She said she was afraid because for the first time in her life she felt truly without hope.  The picture we had printed was of her giggling with her signature smile - the one that everyone in her life doesn't even realize that they depend upon.  The message I had written was that her creativity and playfulness gave me hope in these hard times that love, light, joy and all the goodness in life will prevail.  She is a brilliant writer and in her thank you note to us she eloquently intimated that she felt like our card saved her life.  When we made her card we had no idea of her situation.  The last time we had seen her we were all laughing together at the beach in the sunshine and all was well. 

Last year's experience catalyzed a new commitment to kindness for me.  It was no longer just a beautiful value to share with my children.  It had shown itself to be a benevolent power worthy of assuming the position as pole star to my life's journey.  I began to treat it as a practice, strengthening my ability to extend it to others.  With the help of Kristin Neff's book, Self-Compassion I've even made progress on the ultimate challenge of extending kindness to myself. 

World Kindness Day still fills me with the joy of giving, especially as I watch the children enact that magic.  I too am joining in the card
making this year.  Understanding now that remembering someone can be the most important (even life saving!) act of kindness possible,  I am spending World Kindness Day writing letters for the Write for Rights campaign. 

We first learned of this human rights campaign through Jacques Goldstyn's beautiful, wordless, picture book Letters to a Prisoner.  My children's favorite part (spoiler alert) is that all the letters, like feathers assemble themselves into wings that lift the man back to his life and those that he loves.  For us it depicts the enduring truth that, "Hope is the thing with feathers..."

Last year taught us that remembering those who feel forgotten and giving them hope is a life changing act of kindness.  This year, as we started our work by reciting familiar affirmations of loving kindness I felt myself naturally expanding upon the phrases:

May all beings everywhere live in safety, be happy, be healthy, live with ease. 

...May no being know the answer to the question, "What happens if no one remembers you?" Rather, may all beings know the seriousness, as well as the lightness, of kindness and fulfill its charge like a duty.  May we all be remembered while living and forever after...

Wishing you a Happy and Hopeful World Kindness Day.  



Hope is the thing with feathers (254)
Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886

Illustration from: Letters to a Prisoner
by Jacques Goldstyn

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

The Craft: Altars of Extinction

L. Frank Menninguez (Raven's Manzanita) from
Mary Gomes' Altars of Extinction.

Fifteen years ago I stumbled upon Mary Gomes' project Altars of Extinction.
It inspired me deeply.  It was beautiful, creative, haunting, and important.  It was something I could really get my head around, but not yet my heart.  I didn't want to just care, I wanted to actually act.  Yet, I didn't.  Not then.  Not in meaningful ways.  Something just wasn't catalyzing in me yet and I was disappointed in that part of myself.  As ecological literacy educators are eager for us to all know, when it comes to heroic actions, like saving something, the most power comes to the individual who truly loves what they are saving.

Didn't I love nature and all its creatures great and small?

My answer in retrospect is no.  I respected it, well at least more than many people sharing my city with me.  I appreciated it, found it beautiful, and benefited from time spent communing in it, but no, I didn't love it.  I even grew up in nature.  I had the benefit of living on a small farm with big animals and running free in the woods without an adult in sight for hours.  Yet, I still didn't love nature in the way that would empower me to lift a two ton car off of its crushed leg.  (Or more accurately help reduce the estimated 1 billion cars crushing and chocking it worldwide.)  Ironically, I didn't fall in love with nature until I did the one action of my life that would wound it the most and became a mother.

My rite of passage into motherhood started with a stark initiation.  After a year of trying to conceive a child, I had tests, a surgery and a bleak prognosis - about a 1-5% chance that I would ever conceive a child naturally.  What followed was a literal beat the earth with your fist process of grief.  I had been a teenage girl in the eighties and all I had ever heard about pregnancy was "a woman's right to choose".  I had been living under the false assumption that it was all in my control.  Infertility schooled me and exiled me from my pack at the top of the food chain.  I wasn't in control, not like I thought I was, so rather than turning to the medical community I turned to nature.  Not for holistic treatments for infertility but for solace.  And, sadly, I found overwhelming company for my misery there.

Infertility was my personal initiation into extinction and Gary Snyder was my poetic shaman, "Death is one thing, an end to birth is something else."  I suddenly understood, no I FELT, all the animals grieving with me.  While well meaning friends were suggesting, "There are treatments..." I was enduring a rite of passage that was bonding me to a much bigger tribe; all the species suffering extinction at the hands of our unforgivable abuse of the communal environment.

I had a go-to mound of dirt that bore the brunt of my enacted rage.  It held its ground, until one day my anger finally gave way to sadness.  Then, the punches became tears and I was nearing the end of my initiation.  In fact, just a day before I was to learn that I had somehow miraculously beat those dire odds, and was indeed pregnant, two tiny mushrooms had burst through my mourning mound.  Which was just perfect.  Mushrooms, the lifeforms that push through and thrive from a big pile of crap.  I didn't need any more signs, I had gotten the message.  I had been given a second chance at life by being given the privilege of birth.  There was no doubt I was going to live differently.

So as I became a mother I finally became a true steward.  I was bound to the earth at the same time I was bound to my children through love.  I think of that paradoxical, mythic, moment in which I was granted a boon (the gift of birth) by a higher power that would be injured by the very gift it gave.  Not just one, but two more humans were granted.  Cute as their impossibly tiny toes may be one day they would create two more daunting footprints.  A heavy cost for nature whom in my opinion should in turn exact a payment.  So, in return for their lives I promised to raise my first and second born to be stewards committed to healing our mistakes and achieving sustainability.  I started reading up on ecological literacy and environmental education when E.P. was still swaddled.  I had a starting point, "Protect and nurture their innate biophilia."

It was a relief, learning that human babies are born preprogrammed to love nature.  I did underestimate, however, how difficult it would be to protect that natural instinct.  I listened to David Sobel's rule of "no tragedies before fourth grade" and tried to only provide positive opportunities to bond, wonder, and explore nature together.  I decided to save things like a family altar dedicated to our current mass extinction event for a few years down the road.

What one decade has proven in regards to how fast we are pushing our planet into dire peril has been staggering however.  Although Baanko is only in second grade the tragedies are too pervasive to push off.  She doesn't get to wait until fourth grade.  We don't get to wait another moment.  NOW is the moment we all need to activate our biophilia as the superpower necessary to save far more than just ourselves.

So, this year we made our first altar of extinction.  We placed it in the corner next to the Dead Letter Office.  I saw first hand why David Sobel made his fourth grade rule.   It was a simple altar but it hit the kids hard, particularly Baanko.  She moved the framed picture of Sudan, the last northern white male rhino that died earlier this year,  as if trying to get it placed perfectly.  The feeling we all shared was that there was no right place to put it.  It was all wrong.  She asked questions.  She tried to make sense of something so senseless.  I had to answer questions about guns, not the poachers but rather those humans armed to protect him in his last years from other humans.  She looked confused.  I felt sad.  In 2018 there is no protecting their biophilia.  There is only nourishing it and teaching them how to assert it.

Usually my entries under the title "The Craft" are full of whimsy, creativity, and tutorials.  Even if we are addressing a heavy topic usually our handiwork and what we learn leaves us in a more hopeful place than before we began.  Not this time however.  We completed our altar.  Every night we feel it in the corner, its one votive light, vigilantly flickering on Sudan's picture as if to remind how low our the planetary wick has become.

The kids spend their altar time focused on their family tree and their human ancestors.  I can't help but feel taken back much further and deeper to The Tree that Time Built  and the ancestors of the animals that I know currently face a truly terrifying expedited rate of extinction.  Just this morning WWF published a report about man-made factors creating a "mindblowing" crisis for wildlife:

"WWF UK Chief Executive Tanya Steele added in a statement, "We are the first generation to know we are destroying our planet and the last one that can do anything about it."

Reading our impact I feel grief of a global proportion and I am grateful for it.  It is part of the gift I was given with the conception of my children.  It is a result of the love that I finally authentically feel for all of nature.  Love born of compassion - suffering with.  It is a painful experience, like birth itself, but one I desperately wanted and must continue to repay by keeping my promise:  To help my children love nature enough to save it.

The Craft: A Dead Letter Office

This year we created a Dead Letter Office so that we can communicate with the dead.  I know, it sounds spooky, occult...taboo.  I can even imagine someone thinking, "Who in their right mind would teach a child to do that?"  When in fact, it was my children who taught me how to do it.  Like all great inventions it came from necessity.  Baanko's desire to talk to her ancestors was a natural result of her time spent at our family ancestor altar.  She had heard funny, inspiring, sometimes unbelievable stories.  She had touched vintage tea cups and stones from grave sites far away.  She had spent hours looking at crumbling black and white photographs.  So it was no surprise when she wanted to tell her grandpa,  a man whom she would never meet in person, a few things.  As I processed the request she almost instantaneously offered the solution: "Maybe I could write a letter to him?"  

And as it often does, her little idea expanded into an entire crafternoon.

In the basement we found the goose feathers that we gathered last May.  They were seasoned and dry.

Following the natural curve of the feather we sliced a tip and cleaned out the shaft.

You already know our policy on glitter making things feel even more magical.

We prepared paper that evoked feelings of days gone by.

And of course, magical ink.  We chose a coffee base and read up on recipes for dragon's blood and other magical inks.

We were ready to get to work on fulfilling a wish: for our ancestors to know how much we still care for them and appreciate the lives that they lived.

My addition to the altar was a vintage Royal typewriter that I've had since I was my daughter's age.  It is impossibly heavy which makes its transport, even from one room of the house to another, an event.  Placing it down is like a dinosaurs foot impacting the earth.  Heavy with the accumulation of all of the history that it has helped to document it is incredibly grounding for me.  It's an artifact.  It commands respect, I see that in my children's slow approach and exaggerated "whoa".  It is a natural choice for connecting with the past.

I realize that although no seance is necessary a medium certainly is and that medium should be well chosen since it has a profound affect on the very message that it conveys.  The scratch of the quill pen against thick rough paper.  Errant drops of coffee and dragon blood scented ink on fingers that are rhythmically dipping to deliver a precious few words at a time.  The smell of sulfur followed by melted sealing wax.  The slow extension of long metal arms imprinting one inky letter at a time at the expense of one strong, and tiring push of a finger after the next.  These are mediums of communication that allow for magic to happen.  They remind us that our words have force and that meaningful communication takes time and effort.  They command all of our senses to be present as they move at a different pace.  They slow us, like a special effect in a movie, to show us how important this very moment is.  These mediums truly are the message, as Marshall McCluhan suggested, and they are saying, "Be here now."

Which, come to think of it, is what a medium is commanding in a seance in traditional necromancy.  Except the command is made of the deceased to join the living to offer insights, messages, perhaps even to portend the future.  In our magical workings we are commanding only ourselves, our full selves, to be here now.  In fact, the longer we do magic at the Warthogs School the more I am convinced we are really one trick witches and wizards. We have one spell that we are ever casting, or more accurately ever under the influence of - the magic of the present moment.  Yes, our magic is simple but definitely not easy and I am confident it could take an entire lifetime to master this one power.  For us, we are not interested in the supernatural because we've found, again and again, that the best magic seems to be ever afoot in the natural world all around us.  If only, we are full present, in the moment, to experience it. 

Which Baanko and I did at the tail/tale end of our crafternoon.  Shortly after placing her letter on the altar we noticed three mule deers casually walking down our sidewalk.  We watched in wonder.  It was a wonder for us recent rural dwellers that even close to town we could count on deer visitations.  We wondered if they could sense things we could not including if any of our ancestors were close by, or if they might be our ancestors in another form.  We wondered about the mystery of life and death.  We read a letter written by my now deceased cousin about tracking, loving, and hunting deer.  We thanked them all, animal and ancestor, for keeping us awake while we are alive.

Wild Child Wednesday: And in turn, the river speaks to us again.

Our return to the river today was bittersweet.  It has been months since E.P. traded home school for his village school and we are used to the new routine.  Packing up the old blue backpack for a stolen Wild Child Wednesday adventure felt familiar and extra exciting.  We've had unfinished business to attend to and today was the day.  Nature waits for no one so school would have to.  E.P. broke out into a run as soon as we hit our well worn old homeschool trail.

Last year on one of our weekly visits to the Deschutes River we learned about the fate that the fish face every October when the water level is lowered at Wikiup Dam.   We missed the fish salvage that was set to occur the very next day.  Still eager to be of help we marked the calendar so that we would be ready this October.



This morning the earth was still frozen when we found a crew at what proved to be the largest and most populated entrapment of water.  They were just braving the frigid water and beginning to pull in the net. 



It took two and a half hours.
As a team we netted the fish.



We counted them; rainbow Trout, Sculpin, Whitefish, Kokanee. (And something none of us could recognize.)

And then, one volunteer at a time, we headed up the trail with a bucket of fish to reunite with the flowing river.  It's a hike that on a day with no pack I'm pleasantly winded.  With each five gallon bucket of water and fish I was stopping out of necessity every 5 minutes.  My arms were letting me know that they wouldn't cooperate indefinitely.  But the beauty and the abundance of the captured fish in transit were breath giving (rather than taking).  Staring in the bucket I'd catch enough of my breath and keep going.  In just over two hours time we saved over 1200 fish from our first net pull.



I remember last year being worried that it might be upsetting for E.P.  to process the fact that it is impossible to save all the fish.  At one point a man, the one counting and identifying what we were saving, had made brief mention of needing to pick up our pace, perhaps move to shocking and netting, since fish were suffocating in other pools of water down the river bed.  We were a smooth running machine at that point and after his mention I felt a steady uptick in our communal speed.  Like a knob being easily turned from level five to seven.  No one panicked.   I felt insulated from my easily triggered state of overwhelm.  I felt clear and focused and engaged.  I felt that incredible gift, that wonderful side effect, of being of use.  We were part of something bigger than ourselves and together we were making a difference.  Together we were keeping one another going.  Our pool of trapped fish was a well spring, albeit frigid, of hands on knowing that what we were doing mattered, immediately.  He didn't use the word grit but E.P. marveled at his experience of feeling he needed nothing but to keep going with the mission.  The boy who seemingly never stops eating had no hunger.  The boy who could be labeled inattentive wouldn't break focus until we had the last fish returned to the river.

While I was walking the empty buckets back down the trail to our team I took comfort in my station in our temporary bucket line.  A headline that I saw just before we headed out in the morning regarding our climate was still burning in my mind.  "The World is On Fire." Walking in silence was helping me process it.  With each step that I took I thought of bucket lines of humans, past and future, putting out fires, working against floods, working to save what can be saved together.  With each step, for that morning at least, I was one of many doing a small part.  I was overriding my own comfort craving body for all the helpless fish enduring our rescue mission.  I was acting.

As I placed my empty bucks down back at the netting I looked at every volunteer tending to the negative consequences that we create for other species.  They all had, for today, an answer to the question, "What did you do?"

hieroglyphic stairway 

--Drew Dellinger© 2017 

it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?
surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once
you
knew?
I’m riding home on the Colma train
I’ve got the voice of the milky way in my dreams
I have teams of scientists
feeding me data daily
and pleading I immediately
turn it into poetry
I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech
I am the desirous earth
equidistant to the underworld
and the flesh of the stars
I am everything already lost
the moment the universe turns transparent
and all the light shoots through the cosmos
I use words to instigate silence
I’m a hieroglyphic stairway
in a buried Mayan city
suddenly exposed by a hurricane
a satellite circling earth
finding dinosaur bones
in the Gobi desert
I am telescopes that see back in time
I am the precession of the equinoxes,
the magnetism of the spiraling sea
I’m riding home on the Colma train
with the voice of the milky way in my dreams
I am myths where violets blossom from blood
like dying and rising gods
I’m the boundary of time
soul encountering soul
and tongues of fire
it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I can’t sleep
because my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the earth was unraveling?
I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech

Mystery School Mondays: Altar-ing our perspective on death.

Each year, on the New Ancestor Moon, we dedicate a large space in our living room to death.  Rather than one hallowed eve, we spend the entire lunar month honoring this great mystery and those it has already taken from us.  Over the years, as time demands, our ancestor altar slowly grows.  This year we framed a picture of my sweet uncle who passed away just before Christmas last year and carefully nestled his image near that of his oldest brother and parents.  The process of making the altar is always bittersweet.  We feel the loss of no longer having those that we love alongside us in the world today.  Yet, we also are enlivened by seeing an image of them that so well conveys their essence.  Most often we've selected pictures of them at peak enjoyment of their lives and being their most inspired and authentic selves.  Their immortalized joy and zeal reminding us to live well while we can.  Bright fabrics of smiling skeletons and tissue paper flowers frame our memories with a festive, celebratory feeling.  In honoring death our altar inspires us to deeply appreciate the life that we still have.

As word has circulated through our extended family about not only our altar but the "dumb supper" we host yearly, curious items have begun arriving annually in the mail;  a fragile, yellowed newspaper clipping, a special necklace, a dusty cemetery rock, a handwritten grade school autobiography.  Each arrival initiates a quest, or at least a phone call, to a branch of the family tree.  Our need to "get the story straight" on our dearly departed always leads to a deeper connection with the family that we still have with us.  I am convinced that this savoring of our kinship would not be prioritized had we never stumbled into the seasonal part-time gig as our lineage's wisdom keepers. 

This year as I was sewing a paper binder that would preserve some precious handwritten letters,  I realized that this work is a craft, a service, and a responsibility.  I can't help but surmise, by the steady stream of items directed our way, that others know deep in our tribal bones that we're all a bit delinquent when it comes to keeping Death, and those it inevitably takes, in our lives.

It has been my experience that our common culture doesn't encourage this type of work.  The reality of death doesn't seem to have a place in a social landscape where themes of death and destruction dominate much of our entertainment while age defying advertising tell us to avoid the prospect of entropy at all costs.  Either we are obsessed or in denial of death and from the looks of things neither approach is working well for us.  A friend so poignantly summed it up for me after she experienced her father pass away in his hospital bed this summer.  "It was just all so scary to me.  I wasn't exposed to death before.  All I could feel was fear.  I wish I had been able to feel something else...we do it all wrong in this culture..."

Our ancestor altar is my attempt to do it differently in our family's own micro-culture.  So far, I can see an intimacy with death developing in our children that is rich with many feelings rather than dominated by the one and only feeling of fear.  It comes through the storytelling.  It comes from them witnessing first hand that when you die you are not forgotten.  They feel connection, experience legacy, and endure the force of mystery all with curiosity as their guide.  My job, as I am coming to understand it, is to be the keeper of the artifacts that initiate the questions that will lead them on their own journey of self-understanding.

This fall at The Warthog School we are going to post a few more explorations we have regarding the mystery of death.  As always we would love to hear any suggestions you may have about sharing the cycles of life and death in a naturally magical way with children.

As part of our "dumb supper" every year we read "The Tale of the Sands" found in Linda Booth Sweeneys book Connected Wisdom: Living Stories about Living Systems.  Interestingly, it is within her book of "living stories about living systems" that we have found the best story to share with our children regarding death.  Her commentary begins, "Everything in nature moves in cycles..."

Mystery School Monday: Bee with me.

We kicked off this homeschool week with the dawning of the New Wind Moon.  April's cold breeze is intermittently ferrying snow flakes between budding trees yet spring is undeniably in the air.  There's nary a peep of "I Hate Mondays!" at the Warthog School, in fact, it is Baanko's favorite day of the week thanks to what she has deemed "Mystery School Monday".  Emulating a friend she made on last week's nature walk she showed up to the table bright eyed and bushy tailed - ready to make magic.

I had sketchy notes about the wind moon in my folder, words like; inhalation, inspiration  (via poetry in particular), and intention.  I had the ecoliteracy principle "making the invisible, visible" underlined and a list of project ideas to explore just that kind of magic; kites, wind chimes, and bubbles.  I had a loose lesson plan to ride this moon cycle all the way to the doorstep of our next seasonal festival - May Day.  After winter's long nap we need activities to re-awaken and engage our all of senses in time to really enjoy our annual "5 Senses Feast" on May 1st. 


Nudged by routine, Baanko and I started the morning with intention not just for the day but for the whole new 28 day lunar cycle.  We added to our magic spell-ing books the latin root inspirare and explored the beauty and power of poetic language and rhyming words.  From Dr. Seuss to Emily Dickinson it is no news to a child that expressing oneself through either gorgeous and grandiose imagery or rollicking rhythm and rhyme is the secret to casting a spell.  They feel the natural enchantment of poetry and follow it like a darting dragon fly, their own creativity being drawn out of them along the way.


With Earth Day celebrations awaiting us at week's end as well as the fast approaching deadline for public comment period on the EPA's decision about bee-killing pesticides we found ourselves at the table with Emily Dickinson and her appreciation of bees. We read and re-read several times, “Bee, I’m expecting you!”

Bee! I'm expecting you!
Was saying yesterday
To somebody you know
That you were due -

The frogs got home last week -
Are settled, and at work -
Birds, mostly back -
The clover warm and thick -

You'll get my letter by
The seventeenth; Reply
Or better, be with me -
Yours, Fly.

Baanko’s reflections were about expectation and her thoughtful words stung a little as they initiated me into her perspective.  She focused on why the bee wasn't back yet.  A reality that I know too well could come to pass along with all of its implications to the food supply.  Sticking to David Sobel's suggestion "no catastrophies until grade 4" I've sheltered her from the realities of extinction - both the bees and our own.  Daily I see the wisdom of Sobel's protective bubble - her natural affinity for life really deserves more time to wonder and sing in concert with the meadow.  Through our nature explorations she revels in what are essential nutrients for a seven year old: feelings of kinship, seeing and being seen, and mattering to those with whom you share in community so much so that your cycles are anticipated and expected. 


Baanko's world is a beautiful place in which everything, all of it, is magic.  I don't think she would be a bit surprised if on one of our walks in the forest we stumbled onto Baba Yaga's house spinning and dancing about on its chicken legs.  I also think such an event would be on par, regarding its ability to provoke awe and wonder, with our recent experience of the cat tails near the pond all releasing their fluff in unison.  Were we caught in the midst of nature's miraculous process of wind pollination or was Mother Holle up in the sky shaking out her down pillows again?  It was legitimately up for debate.  For her natural magic and fairy tale magic are still one in the same.
   
I sighed as we walked (well, she skipped) to mail our impassioned pleas for the bees.  If only it were as easy as performing the type of magic portrayed in fairy tales to make a love spell for the masses, one large enough to save it all: the bees, the butterflies, the breeze, amen. 

I held back what I felt rise in my soul as I dropped the letters in the box.  My favorite words from Emily Dickinson are not the ones I'm willing to share with her.  Not yet.

"Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it."

Mother's Nature Journal: Jane's Message of Hope

In the world, in person, you have the opportunity to hear or see the lessons that aren't captured in a photograph or an article because they lie outside another's expectation of what will be important.  I have found that the most powerful learning moments of my life have been unbelievably subtle and quick. If I had not been "all-in" with my senses I would have missed some of the most important nuggets of wisdom to be gleaned.  Last October I had one of those treasured moments.  It glinted in the noon day sun near the end of the "Roots and Shoots Celebration of Service" event that we were attending in San Francisco.

It had been a truly peak experience.  Jane Goodall not only took the time to meet and listen to each and every one of us as we presented our service projects but she then spent forty five minutes delivering an inspiring talk.  It was a windfall of nourishment for my exhausted mother/mentor heart.

The quicksilver learning moment happened when Dr. Goodall came down from the stage after delivering her inspiring "Jane's Message of Hope."  Members of her organizations were in the wings, her son and grandson were in her audience along with a field full of children and their teachers.  She was leaving the stage alone and already lunch boxes were being zipped up, children's voices were unhushed and their bodies had been set free.  I sat firmly, eyes forward, processing everything that I had just heard.  Like many women, Jane Goodall has been a "shero" of mine since I was a little girl.  Her words, both to me personally and to the Roots and Shoots audience, were charged with agency.  Jane Goodall is spending her eighth decade of life, a life of enviable focus and purpose, in non-retirement empowering the next generations to embrace, with hope, the overwhelmingly and super-heroic task of saving the earth.  She didn't use those words.  Her podium moments (from what I've witnessed) don't reverberate with the charisma of a self-help speaker nor are they charged with the sharpness of an  expertise that has been jaded by exhaustion.  Her podium moments are a deep and grounded pool of personal, processed story that, in my experience, have a truly transformative effect on the listener.  As I sat staring at the now empty stage I was taking in the fact that I had just had my first real life experience of "being graced" by someone's presence.

And that is when I saw it.  Holding the handrail of the stage staircase as she exited alone she stopped half way down and paused.  A long pause.  A pause long enough for me to recognize the experience: She was taking in an awesome vista.  From how she stood, and more tellingly the soft and open expression on her face, we were kin to an epic sunset, a stunning desert in bloom, or an expanse of rainforest canopy.  We were worth taking in, savoring, and she recognized it.  And I was watching a master observer execute her craft:  the art of looking - and really seeing - what one is looking at.

Having a child that struggles with distractibility, as well as being raised a girl child in a culture that is more comfortable looking at women than really seeing them, I have special antennae for noticing people that actually SEE, observe, and wonder about what is right in front of them (a phone on selfie setting excluded).  Such seeing is a capability that I fear current cultural trends (in particular self-focused social media) are pushing towards endangered status.

Since October I've come back to her moment on the stairs countless times.  What was she seeing?  Our future, her audience, in rapt attention ready to be activated into agents of change?  Or, are we already a field of narcissists who have become too rooted in our own self-absorption to make a move.

She told us that day that what she sees on the horizon is hope.  It is grounded in her years of observing nature, in particular, its regenerative quality.  She marveled about how she has seen nature recover back to a point of flourishing if given the chance.

Since Jane Goodall's talk we've found Project Drawdown - a practical place to put that hope into action.  We've signed up for the Drawdown EcoChallenge that begins tomorrow and runs through Earth Day later this month.  For Team Warthog School we're celebrating Jane Goodall's eight-fourth birthday by taking a stand - one I first discovered in David Orr's essay "Hope in Hard Times":

     "I once put a poster on my office door that showed a large owl bearing down on its prey, talons outstretched, eyes full of malevolence.  At the bottom center, with its back to the viewer, a tiny mouse stood at rigid attention, right arm raised, with its middle digit fully extended: on the brink of eternity, no philosophy, no art, no words, no resignation, no apparent fear, no solutions, no squiriming, just defiance. People would stop, look at it, and always laugh - not out of hard-heartedness, I think, but because they saw something of themselves in that mouse.  We laugh at Peter Sellers similarly: Who cannot see themselves in the loony pretensions of Chief Inspector Clouseau, or Wily Fox, for that matter?  In our situation, this is gallows humor that admits the end is nigh but offers not solution, no finest final hour, just a certain style of exit.
     There is another kind of humor, however, that goes deeper and offers a more hopeful stategy in the face of dire possibilities.  Joseph Meeker describes this as "the comedy of survival".  Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl called it "a tragic optimism".  True comedy is not so much about jokes and laughter but rather about the recognition and acceptance of our limitations and foibles, right down to our reptilian brainstem.  It is, in Frankl's words, "Saying yes to life in spite of everything," including those limitations.  We are a spindly legged upstart species, a precocious and horribly immature primate family full of remarkable abilities and grandiose pretensions, with a bloody and destructive past."  

Today, standing on those spindly legs we are choosing the position of tragic optimism rather than gallows humor.  I am committed to teaching our children how to really see what they are looking at and to not shrink away from what they observe but rather to have the courage to say yes to life in spite of it all.  The sense of renewed hope that Jane Goodall shared with us last October was an invaluable gift.  I am hoping, that our commitment to act this April will serve as both a birthday and a thank you gift to her. 

Happy Birthday Dr. Goodall and thank you.

We would love for you to join us by either joining our team or by creating your own to inspire and challenge us through the month long eco-challenge.   

Spring Quarter: Mystery School Mondays

It took me about a month to process the unexpected shift in students at The Warthog School.  It was a whirlwind that lifted our son, on excited yet anxious wings, to his new school this past January.  Never have I seen someone so rise to the question we pose every blue moon, "What would you do just once in a blue moon?"  A boy who vowed never to step foot into a classroom again suddenly dreamed up a dream that left us breathless.  Like everything about him the transition was intense.  Yet he declared and delivered on his dream.  He is now a proud and happy member of our local village school.  Winter's quickening has passed and in its place I quite literally see spring in his step.  He is alight with inspiration, readiness, passion, and joyousness.

After he flew our nest I spent about two weeks working on "what comes next" for me.  My first action item was to begin my Raising The Red Tent blog.  It is a project that I have patiently waited for the opportunity to embrace.  Our son opened a door out into the world so I dashed out behind him.  It was a glorious and indulgent two weeks of engagement.  I wrote, I created intentions, I sent invitations, I met with other moms to talk about the vision... I felt aligned with authentic self and purpose in this new (yet familiar) direction.  It was a late January flurry of excitement so enchanting that I forgot to close the door behind me.  And, as winter's wind will do, she gusted an unexpected guest seeking shelter back through the threshold of The Warthog School.  Before I could blink, and taking me by complete surprise, my next student had arrived.  Our daughter was standing in front of me with her heels dug in.

"It's my turn." She said with eyes that expected compliance.

Although I felt the tug of everything else I was just beginning there was no way to deny or ignore it.  Yes. Absolutely.  It's her turn.

It's her turn in our family.  It's Her turn in our culture.

Growing up alongside a sibling with behavioral special needs I've tracked the signs of what I know she's at high risk for: second fiddle.  I've been on the look out for the tell tale signs of self-diagnosed less-importance.  Accommodation.  Stuffing of needs.  Over-compliance.  The "It's OK, it doesn't matter" approach to conflict resolution.  She's got a blush of them all already which made her defiant stand a breath of fresh air.  I'm relieved that she is ready to be first chair. 

And with that, The Warthog School was called back into session for spring quarter.  We are already off and running and you can follow all of our adventures in holistic, nature-based learning here.  If you do, you will hit a weekly intersection of our two blogs.  We're calling it Mystery School Mondays and it's where The Warthog School overlaps Raising The Red Tent.

Homeschool is giving us an unexpected chance to once weekly go deep for the day (rather than just an hour) into a subject that we all need to understand now more than ever - the mystery and wonders of the feminine.

There is a nesting nature* to this pairing that will long keep me inspired.  The Warthog School was originally born under The Red Tent. When my children were small and I was still working full-time at The Red Tent I began The Warthog School as a curriculum that would supplement my children's lives with the ecoliteracy and biophilia.  I couldn't find what they needed so I started creating it.  Like my children, The Warthog School was quite literally born under The Red Tent.

When E.P.'s learning needs demanded that The Warthog School become a full-time homeschool this nesting flipped.  My passion for all things red tent had to be downsized and put in storage in my heart while we allowed The Warthog School to unfurl into a full-fledged homeschool adventure.  I had to retire from what I knew, recovery, and jump into something new - prevention.  While homeschooling our son I jotted notes about my old passion, "How will I raise a red tent for my daughter?" And, as the years ticked on, "When?" 

Mystery School Mondays are answering those questions for me.  I am raising a red tent for my daughter, now, by putting it right on her campus.  Once weekly the Warthog School will be something that I believe our culture has sorely missed  - a women's mystery school.  A time to marvel together about "girl power" and all the positive ways we can direct our future as women.

*"Nesting Nature" became the first mystery to explore on our new Monday studies...