The Trashing of the Yard

A tropical storm came through last weekend. We many inches of water in a very short period of time, and in our yard, that means floods. Sometimes the water comes into our house, thanks to the slope of our landscape. 

And this time I had my baby plants to worry about. Some I had just planted had to be ripped from the ground as they were drowning in too-soft dirt and water. Their roots just weren't secure enough to manage. The more established plants were mostly fine, but we lost a lot of strong, beautiful stems with plenty of buds about to open and quite a few were nearly flat to the ground. 

We mourned a little around here. My kids LOVE running outside every morning to see what is blooming. When a new flower has appeared in their area, the kids very much take ownership it. When a really cool flower has appeared, shouts are heard and everyone comes running to see. 

The destruction of parts of these plants taught me something. My desire to hold onto the fruits of my labors is pretty futile. I can't control the world. If a hurricane comes through here, which of course it could, I will likely lose everything and have to start all over again. 

Now, this does not mean I should give up. I love gardening and would willingly, but mournfully, start over again if such a thing happened. Plus, I believe in being a good neighbor and trying to keep my front yard lovely. 

But the backyard is perhaps a different story. At least in part. 

When I was growing up, I had a field right next to my house to play in. It was a small field, though at the time it seemed huge. There was a broken down workshop full of jagged glass and rusted nails. I played in it constantly. My imagination ran wild. It was a piece of land I could manipulate however I chose without consequences, and the imaginary worlds I created for myself lasted for months and months if not years.

A space like that does not exist in our house, and as messy as my house is, my tolerance for forts rarely lasts beyond a day. I'm always making my kids clean up, tear-down, and put away. 

Our kids need a space they can manipulate however they like to feed their imaginations. They need to have spaces to create that don't have to be taken down right away. I wonder how much of this need goes ignored by the adults of this world. We all have our manicured lawns. Our nice swingsets. Our trampolines with giant safety nets. Sometimes there are flowers and gardens. There are patios and decks and barbecues. 

But is there a spot in these yards where kids can drag out cardboard boxes, firewood, plastic tubs, ancient pillows, tires, rusted pots, old bricks, and the list goes on?

I'm thinking about this because Sam and I have grand plans right now for our backyard. We want to do the work ourselves over time, and I'm positive when we're through, we are going to have a hard time letting the kids continue with creations such as this: 

and this:

But when I step back and analyze the situation... this person:

And this person:

are far more important than the fancy stone patio I have in my head. I'm hopeful we can find the way to combine the two, a space where imagination can happen and a space where we can have our barbecues and family nights under the stars (with no mosquitoes!!!!). We shall see, we shall see. But I refuse to have appearances trump the real, imaginative needs of my kids. 

Here are some books that celebrate this kind of destructive, yet so important, imagination.

The classic of all classic backyard destruction stories:

Weslandia by Paul Fleischman

A reminder of what true play should look like:

Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran

A reminder to grown-ups about how foolish keeping up with the Jones's is:

The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Pinkwater

A mirror for the world:

The Araboolies of Liberty Street by Sam Swope

The following books are great for any kid who loves to build anything. 

Star Jumper: Journal of a Cardboard Genius by Frank Asch

Gravity Buster: Journal 2 of a Cardboard Genius by Frank Asch

Time Twister: Journal 3 of a Cardboard Genius by Frank Asch

Happy Summer. Happy Building. Have fun trashing your yard!

Beautiful—at least to me

I wish you all could sit where I'm sitting right now. You probably wouldn't be very impressed with the view—I'm not really all that impressed by the view. But I love the view. I love it because we ripped up half of our weedie, non-existent mess of a front yard, planted nearly a hundred tiny, tiny baby perennials, threw down thirteen truckloads of mulch to save the baby perennials from the onslaught of weeds sure to arrive, and now we have this:

(Okay, this picture is terrible. It's an iphone picture and it is raining, and you can hardly see the flowers on the plants that are in bloom, but oh well...)

Look at all those beautiful, baby plants! They were once sooooooo small. It has taken so much work to get them to where they are. Constant attention, watering, weeding, a wee-bit of fertilizing.

And the best part is, we've done it all together. The kids love to go outside with each other or with me or on their own to inspect each plant to see what's happened to it overnight. Every day something new blooms, and we are always terribly surprised, because our planting was so randomly done. We basically ordered a bunch of plants and stuck them the ground. We had no idea what to suspect, and that is suspense at its best.

I find I am constantly using garden analogies now. We keep talking about how hard, consistent, daily care produces a more and more beautiful plant. We talk about how weeding out the things we don't like about ourselves and our lives allows the true, beautiful us to shine through. We talk about how we can't do anything on our own. We can water our plants and give them the best soil we can find and we can fertilize, but we cannot do anything about the sun. The sun is a gift from God as are the bees and other bugs that fertilize our plants. We are never alone.

I was reading an article the other day about getting rid of stress in our lives. The article talked about the virtue of working outside. Unless you wear your headphones while gardening, there is little to distract you. You have yourself and your thoughts and the beating of your own heart. I love weeding with my kids. They chat and chat about this and that and we just hang out and we take each other seriously. This isn't true for us when we clean the house together. Okay, sometimes, but rarely. When we clean the house there is a lot of complaining and nagging and contention and rushing about and being in different rooms (and that's just me!). There is not a lot of bonding. Gardening, for us, is different.

Anyway, I can't recommend gardening enough. Bring light to your kids. Bring light to yourself. Try planting a garden! You will find everyone stepping outside to check on the results of their hard work, and there will be new surprises every day!

On a side note, our family has discovered two games we LOVE, and I had to share.


The Scrambled States of America Game

Rat-a-tat Cat

Inexpensive. Tons of fun. We love them—and they are semi-educational too.

And one more tangent. I am trying not to focus on the common core too much on this blog. The more I read about it, the more I am certain it is a bad thing for education and a bad thing for this country. Many parents in New York have even boycotted the end of grade tests this year, because of the manic attitude toward testing that has enveloped the country. That is something to think about. (read about that here: http://online.wsj.com/article/APb5789c1bb6184ee49df2544f5bd7cb9a.html )

And here is a wonderful article that sheds even more light onto the many problems with the common core and why every parent should do their best to at least educate themselves about what is invading our schools and the lives of our children:

http://www.schoolbook.org/2013/05/17/bill-gates-should-not-micro-manage-our-schools/

Music—Something for Everyone

I wish more kids did music. Meaning, I wish more kids played musical instruments. 

I know some reasons many don't:

1) music lessons are EXPENSIVE

2) many parents don't consider themselves musical, and they don't feel skilled enough to help their children

3) you have to make your kids practice daily, and most kids, the majority of kids, don't want to practice

4) their kids don't want to do it

5) their kids' friends aren't doing it

6) many people don't like classical music any more, and most instrumental practice involves classical music, especially in the beginning

And there are probably more reasons, but there is a big one that is very, very sad to me that I haven't mentioned yet. That reason is number seven, but it should probably be number one:

7) The schools no longer teach music. Musical education has become something for a small subset of students—the rich or the very, very determined. There are few opportunities for most kids to even give music a try.

I can't describe how much I love music for my kids. It brings so much light and joy into their lives. They know how bad they were in the beginning and they know how good they are now and they know how hard they had to work to get there. It isn't about talent. It really isn't. I don't believe my kids are any more talented than any other kids out there. They've worked incredibly hard to get where they are now, and that is the only reason they can play the way they do. Music has become a social thing for my kids as well—they love the kids they play with, and we love them too. These are some great kids, just good, good people.

We are fortunate enough to live in a smallish metropolitan area that is large enough to have a solid emphasis on the arts in the general community. We have found some great organizations that offer fabulous musical opportunities for children. They are making up the difference where our public schools have failed, and many of them offer scholarships for families who cannot afford lessons. 

The kids get to do chamber music regularly, fiddling jam sessions, recitals, symphonic performances,  competitions, and music camps. Lucy was randomly selected this year to join the NC Symphony on a Play with the Pros night. She's nervous as all get out, but she's pretty excited too. She'll actually get to sit on stage with professional cellists and play the same lovely music. 

Mary and Lucy had an orchestra concert on Tuesday. It was wonderful. They played Shostakovich and Beethoven and Wagner among others. I wish you all could have heard them. Even more, I wish I saw more diversity up on that stage, a greater diversity of kids from every situation. Even MORE, I wish that symphony hall had been filled to the brim with eager faces, excited to support these kids and just listen to some great music. 

I wish I could give that same joy and happiness to more people.

If you have any interest in starting music with your kids, I have two points of advice you can totally ignore:

1) Remember that it is incredibly painful the first year. It starts out exciting (sometimes), but soon everyone realizes how hard this is going to be, how long it is going to take to make decent sounds, and just how much nagging daily practice will take. But if you can hang on through the first year, the second year is better. The third year is better than that. The fourth year is a breath of fresh air. I think there is a hump to get over for every kid and every family, and it is different for everyone, but my two oldest are over that hump, and IT IS AWESOME! I don't have to force them to practice. They are totally self-sufficient now. But it took a long time. And I am not overly musical. I am comfortable with music, but I only play the piano, and I say that word "play" very lightly.

2) There is a particular culture for each individual instrument. Violinists seem to be much more perfectionistic than violas, for example. If you have more of a laid-back kid, the viola is the way to go. (I know there are exceptions to this, but I've talked to several professional musicians about this, and it really is true! Oboists, I've been told, tend to be leaders, a sneaky way of saying they are a little bossy, I think.) Different instruments seem to work best with specific temperaments. The double bass, for example, is a laid-back, mess-around, kind of instrument, because there aren't a whole ton of double bass concertos to learn. But nearly every kind of music needs a bass line, and some of those bass lines require an amazing ability to improvise, which takes a certain amount of confidence. The bass players in the girls' orchestra were head-banging their way through Beethoven this past week, literally. It was hilarious. If you contrast the hulking high-school bass players against the tiny, prim and proper violinists, they couldn't be more different. (Shaemus started double bass at age five, and we LOVE it.)

There is a musical instrument for nearly everyone, I think, much like books! As a parent, look into every instrument available, try to think about what your kids would like the most. Involve them in the decision, of course, but don't be shy about explaining the differences between them and guiding the situation. Talk to different teachers about the temperaments they think work best for their particular instrument. Calvin plays the cello, but I think he will eventually switch to clarinet or saxophone—an instrument with more of a culture of improvising, because he is my kid who likes to mess around on his instrument, make up songs, test out different sounds, and it's not something his teacher is very well equipped to teach him, because he doesn't do it himself. But cello matches little perfectionist Lucy to a T. 

Here are some pictures of the concert:

We love music!

Happiness is... A little knife throwing?

Happiness is...

Boy, I don't know. We had such a strange mix of stress and happiness this weekend. An enormous dump truck dropped off twelve cubic yards of mulch on our driveway on Wednesday. I told the kids if we got it spread around our little baby plants, we could go to Busch Gardens on Saturday. Everyone worked hard Wednesday and Thursday, some much harder than others, but everyone worked. I hoped that Sam would be able to stop work a little early on Friday and help with the shoveling and the wheelbarrow pushing, because I wasn't sure we'd be able to get it done without him.

But then our toilet literally started erupting and we called a plumber who not only discovered our main line was completely clogged, but the pipes connecting our disposal to whatever strange and mysterious underground sewage tube that takes our leftover food away had completely broken off. Buckets and buckets full of rotting food had been gathering under our house for who knows how long. Buckets of rotting food and flies and mosquitoes.

The plumbing was all fixed without incident, but poor Sam—poor, poor Sam—had to spend hours underneath the house cleaning up what essentially amounts to barf in our crawlspace.

So I had to shovel thousands of shovelfuls of mulch all day while he did the grossest thing imaginable. We had four tickets to the John Williams symphony that night, which Sam really wanted to go to ( Indiana Jones and Star Wars music is his kind of symphony), and I didn't know how we would make it.

Then, miraculously, right as it was time to go, Sam came up and said he'd done all he could do without completely ripping up the plastic underneath our house (that will have to be done soon...), and he showered and took three of the kids to the symphony and they had a great time. Shaemus was so happy to meet the following characters:

And we managed to spread all that mulch. So on Saturday, Busch Gardens was the place! We had a wonderful time. The weather couldn't have been more perfect, and no one seemed to know that but us, so it was not very crowded (for Busch Gardens). That sure seemed like happiness.

Then yesterday, I observed something. My kids were happy at Busch Gardens. They were happy at the symphony. They weren't so happy mulching, but they were happy when it was done. But probably one of their favorite things of the weekend was the knife throwing they did with their dad on the front lawn.

One of the fifty dangerous things you should do with your kids is throwing a knife into the ground to see if it sticks. Sam decided to give this a go last night. Holy Cow, was this a hit (with everyone but Mary who could give or take knife throwing). Give kids a box, they are happy. Give them a few table knives and tell them to chuck them at some grass, and memories are made.

Throwing knives with their dad on the front lawn made them happy, maybe even happier than Busch Gardens.

I also know that I was not happy yesterday. There are various reasons for this. The messy state of our house was not the reason for my unhappiness, but it was manifestation of it, which makes no sense, but that's how it felt.

Books were everywhere (my fault, yes). Papers were everywhere. Shoes were everywhere. Dirt from gardening all weekend was everywhere. Mary made a delicious dinner and devastated the kitchen. This prompted in me enormous feelings of guilt: she worked so hard to make the dinner, but should she clean it up? Because I sure didn't want to. And a lot of the mess was preventable.

I had to take a break. I had to go upstairs and lie down and calm myself down because everything was tensing up and I was about to lose it. Worse than I had already lost it.

Once I was done taking a break, we had an extended family meeting. It began with upset me talking and talking and talking. It ended with two words we'd chosen together that we all felt would bring our family a great deal more happiness: Responsibility and Respect.

As I rambled, my anger fizzled away, and I realized that I didn't want my children to have a bazillion rules they had to follow to avoid punishment. I didn't want them to clean up after themselves because they knew they would get in trouble or because they felt guilty. I want them to clean up after themselves because they have respect, respect for the rest of their family and respect for themselves. I want them to be polite, responsible human beings who recognize that the two seconds it takes to put a book back on a shelf are nothing compared to the rewards—a calm, happy home, a calm, happy mother, less chaos, more love, more sacrifice.

Big Plans by Bob Shea is, in my opinion, one of the funniest picture books ever.

We ended our family meeting by all shouting (not in unison, because like that would work), "I got big plans, big plans, I say!" and now, whenever, someone turns out a light (another part of our discussion) or picks up after themselves, they may happily shout, "I'm in!" said the Myna bird."

Because "Being in" on a big plan does bring happiness, I think. A sweet, deep happiness that we all felt at the end of our family meeting. I know Shaemus felt it as he turned off a light in a bathroom a few minutes later and shouted, "I'm in!" said the myna bird."

Happiness can be many things. It can be Busch Gardens and accomplishing a giant task or going to the symphony or being done shoveling barf, but I think it is often the simplest things of all.

(Like knife throwing. Or shouting nonsensical things from a picture book. He he.)

Amazingly Cool Chicken Gardens

I had an interesting experience on Saturday. I drove the carpool for Mary and Lucy's chamber music rehearsal, and a girl I didn't know very well rode along with us.

This is a very sweet girl. Funny and spunky. Full of energy. I was driving the van, Mary was next to me, and this girl was in one of the middle seats. I immediately began to chat away, asking her about school, violin, Tae-kwan-do (or however you spell that), and all the things she was involved in. 

Her answers grew less and less enthusiastic as time went on, and at one point she said, "Wha—what?" like she'd been startled. 

I turned my head then to see if something was wrong, because my conversational skills are usually so good :).

Nothing was wrong with her, she was just playing with her iPad. 

Oh, this irked me. It's no secret I dislike screen time in general for kids, but I'd never been ignored before because of it. I thought about this the rest of the way there, and I thought about it as I waited during their rehearsal (while I was supposed to be writing), and I thought about it as I drove them home (and was again ignored thanks to the iPad). 

This event could be analyzed from every angle, plenty of pros and cons: 

just relax—be more strict 
let loose—don't give up 
it's too late—take control 
that's the way our society is going—kids today need discipline! 

I don't think there is a right or wrong answer here, and it really is not my place to judge this girl or her family. And there are plenty of times when one of my kids is so engrossed in a book, they completely ignore me. I've heard plenty of, "Wha—what?" Is it any ruder for them to ignore me while reading than for this girl to ignore me while tableting? I just prefer reading. I almost think it's cute when they are so engrossed. Others might find tableting cute. So, in some ways, I'm really being hypocritical. 

Tablet or no tablet, our world today with ALL of its distractions, puts us and our children in danger of being disconnected from each other and disconnected from life. If you combine these distractions with this intense need in our society to compete with one another and to succeed by other peoples' measures of success, of course our children are going to be distracted! This distraction will be their escape from these pressures they cannot control and that probably frighten them or at least threaten their sense of security. 

This is all bringing me to our backyard. 

Really, it is. 

Because our backyard is a mess. A total disaster. Grass does not really exist in North Carolina, and neither do sprinkling systems. Our yard is a den of weeds. And probably snakes. The kids have their own little fort worlds in the backyard (something I love), which involves them taking out pillows (now  chewed up, probably by raccoons), cardboard boxes, bowls, anything they need to build their grocery stores, their jails, their libraries, and their houses. It's great, but it's ugly. 

But really something must be done. Our backyard is beyond out of control. 

The way I see it, we have two choices. We can make our own grown-up plan of how we want our backyard to look and then set about doing it. We would try to involve the kids in the work, of course, but every bit of the work would have to be directed by us and controlled by us, because our intention would be to have the yard look a certain way. 

There is nothing wrong with this, of course! We're the adults. It's our home. We have a responsibility to our neighbors. There is no reason not to make our backyard nice and appealing based on our ideas and our designs. 

But I have another opportunity with this yard. I can sense it. It's on the tips of my fingers and on the tip of my brain. I'm not sure what it is or how it will translate into reality, but this mess of a backyard is my chance to give my children autonomy support, which is defined as this: 

explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child’s point of view.

(This autonomy support idea is something I got from this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/health/15mind.html?_r=2&)

I could give each child a task in the backyard and give them complete autonomy to accomplish the task however they desire. 

One of the things we want in the backyard is chickens. The kids want chickens too—they are stoked about this idea. Sam went and got a bunch of free wooden pallets, and I've told him I want the kids to build the chicken coop themselves. He can help, in the sense that he can be a robot, doing exactly what they tell him to do, but he is in no way supposed to take over the project or even give suggestions. I really want them to have autonomy. 

Then I read this book (click here for a one minute video about the book):
http://www.timberpress.com/books/free_range_chicken_gardens/bloom/9781604692372

And it made me want one of those really cool, amazingly beautiful chicken gardens. It really, really did. And there is no way my kids would be able to accomplish anything close to that. (I'm not sure I could accomplish anything close to that.)

So do I take it over? Do I make my backyard my own amazingly cool chicken garden (based on someone else's amazingly cool chicken garden)? 

Or do I remember why I chose to have kids in the first place! Not so I could have an amazingly cool chicken garden, but so I could help these little people discover their own unique talents and interests and gifts. So I could help them become good people that aren't afraid to try and FAIL. Fail! If I force my kids to help me with my amazingly cool chicken garden, I will not give them the opportunity to fail. I know I won't. I won't want them to fail  because I won't want my amazingly cool chicken garden to fail, and I will stop them before failure can happen. 

I've answered my own question, I guess. I can have my own amazingly cool chicken garden when they grow up. In the meantime, I will have my own amazingly cool, kid-generated chicken mess that we will constantly be working on and reevaluating. 

It will be something they never forget, because they had their own ideas about where to put that stone or that plant or that nail, and I didn't tell them their idea was wrong or not-so-good. Then, when that compost bin they build falls apart, they will hopefully shrug and say, "Nothing devastating has happened here. Let's try again." Hopefully this will happen because they won't feel Mom's stress about her garden not being amazingly cool like she wants it to be. 

Will this connect them to their world? Will they still need iPads—or even books!—for escape. 

Hopefully, they won't be escaping anything, because they will be living right in the intensity of the moment, in the thick of real, tangible life. Then, as we're driving in the car, they won't be distracted. They'll be looking around, imagining what they could do with that yard or that space. Envisioning what they want to do when they get back home with ours.

I hope. I hope. I hope.

(I will post pictures of our backyard as it stands tomorrow—I have no working camera here today. You will see the mess before it becomes and even greater mess!)

The Power of Writing

Writing may be one of the least favorite parts of an elementary school kids' day. I'd wager most of you have a child that hates to write, even if they love to read.

I have one of those. Mary hates writing. Her mother is a writer. Our home is overflowing with books. She is rarely without a book. Literacy is a integral part of our family, so why does Mary hate writing?

I have no idea. A big part of it is the physicality of actually writing on the page (Mary has terrible handwriting), but that can't be the only reason why. I've tried to figure out why Calvin loves to write. He writes pages and pages of creative writing for fun, on his own time, and he never complains about any of the writing I have him do for home school, and I have him do a lot, way more than he would get in traditional school. 

Lucy loves to write too. Unlike Calvin, it isn't so much the story she loves, but the language. She likes to write poetry (unlike me!) and she likes to put beautiful phrases together. 

So far, Shaemus seems to enjoy writing as well, though his writing is more structurally based. He likes following a formula, and he has started using formulas (goofy alphabet books, retellings of fairytales) to write stories for fun. (But his grade went down in writing this past quarter because his handwriting has gotten worse. His teacher told me he is a brilliant little first grade writer, the most literate in the class, but she couldn't give him the highest grade because of his handwriting—and now I'm watching his self-esteem sink a bit. Not too happy about this subjective grading system... 4, 3, 2, 1)

So why Mary? Why does she hate any and all forms of writing? And how do I change this?

If you have time, read this great article on how a college English teacher got his non-writer students totally excited about stories. And writing. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/books/review/straight-through-the-heart.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

If I believe every child can love reading—and I do—then I also believe every child can love writing. Really. I believe that. Writing is not a subject, it is a tool to get across a point to an audience. Like reading, the more you write, the more confident you are in your ability to write well. The greater your confidence, the more you enjoy yourself as you write. And the more you write.

But how do we achieve this? If I believe this, why isn't it happening in my own home for Mary?

It's not happening in my own home because Mary has yet to experience for herself two major truths: one, stories are incredibly important things, not just fun, important. Exciting. Meaningful. Life changing. World changing. Two, Mary has yet to believe that she has the ability to harness that power.

Notice I am not talking about interest here. I know some people might say, lay off! She just isn't interested in writing. It isn't her thing. But writing isn't like History or Science or Underwater Basketweaving. It isn't a subject. It truly is a tool. You can dislike writing fiction, because you don't enjoy fiction, but you may love nonfiction and you may love writing nonfiction. To say you hate to write, just plain write, means you hate to express yourself. To have ideas. To communicate.

I think if every kid believed in the power of writing to make a difference and if they believed they had the innate potential to write well, they would want that power. They would be motivated to seek it and develop it.

I've got to teach Mary about this power and I've got to get her to believe she can use it, and then I've got to give her the autonomy we all crave to use this power HOWEVER SHE WANTS TO. 

I cannot express how exciting it is for me to create a story. I love having these people in my head, I love giving them life, giving them actions and relationships and personalities and problems. These people are in my control, they are my play things. If you are writing nonfiction, you still have this power. You are choosing words that will teach and excite emotions in others. You are choosing what facts to share and when. You are striving to get across a point and convince others that you are right (or maybe just get them to think). You are bringing to life ideas and images that were invisible before.

Kids do not get autonomy in the writing they do in school (and with the common core, they will get even less autonomy than they've had in the past). For my master's degree in creative writing, I had creative work due regularly that was in every way my own. My stories were mine. No one told me what to write, only how to make it better. Even the critical writing I did for my degree—and I did a lot of it—was my own. I chose what I wanted to write about, what I wanted to study. All the writing I did during my master's degree was autonomous, and I loved (nearly) every minute of it.

I need to say to Mary, "How did that book make you feel? What did you love about it? What did you hate? What does it make you think about? Do you think this book is important? What words did the author use that made you feel that way? How did the author do it?" Then, once this discussion has established that stories are awesome (!!!) and writers are powerful, I need to say, "You know, I'll bet you could write a story that would do the same things, a story that is powerful. If you wanted to give it a try, we could publish it. We could put it on a blog and add segments of the story as you write them, or we could take your book over to Kinko's and have it bound, like a real book." 

I need to give her first, a spark of passion, second, autonomy, and third, an audience. In that order.

Your child is not Mary (obviously). What kind of a child do you have? Why don't they like writing? What can you do to help them discover the power in writing? What can you do to love writing more yourself?

Monday's Light—Our inner or outer Genius

If you have time, watch this:

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

It's a Ted Talk about creative genius by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love (which I've never read). I was a bit skeptical about watching this, but I loved it. I really loved it. (It's 19 minutes)

Her topic is genius and creativity, and how the Romans and the Greeks had a much healthier attitude toward genius and creativity than we do today. 

Today, we consider genius to be inside someone, a part of them, who they are OR who they are not. Our works, the things we produce, are reflective of that inner genius and totally dependent on the person doing the creating. The creator.

The Greeks and the Romans believed differently. They believed your genius was basically a little fairy person, a gift, sitting on your shoulder, taking your work and making it into something much better than you could make it on your own. It was a collaboration, and this collaboration gave the creator some distance, some space between themselves and their final product. If the thing they created wasn't so fabulous, perhaps their Genius just didn't show up for work that day. If the thing they created was fabulous, they couldn't take all the credit either. Their Genius, this person on their shoulder, was a big part of what made it so great. 

I LOVE this idea of an outer genius, independent of me. I love the idea of distance between myself and my work. When I'm having a tough writing day, it isn't entirely my fault. I'm there. I showed up. I'm doing the writing. My genius just hasn't shown up. I've done my job, and that's all I can do. 

I'm going to teach my kids this philosophy. 

We are so afraid to fail in our society. We want results and we want them fast. In education, we want the Silver Bullet that fixes all of our problems, and it better be something we can explain, quantify, and replicate. In writing, we want to be Stephanie Meyers (well maybe not be her...), but we want to write a book in a few short months, send it off into the world, have agents and editors beating down our door. We want to have success, and if we don't, why bother? If we don't get published, why bother? If we don't get rich, why bother? 

If it is hard, if things don't work out the way we envision, why bother?

It's okay to fail. What's important is that we show up for work. We put in the time. We don't give up. That is our success. On our deathbeds, we will not regret that our works were not amazing by the world's standards of amazing, but we will regret not creating at all. 

It's so incredibly important that every single day we create. And that every day, we give our children opportunities to create as well. 

Watch this very, very short clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhLlnq5yY7k

Notice at the end, he says when we rely on the Spirit, we have endless capacity to create. The Spirit, the outer Genius, whatever you want to call it—I believe in this concept. That we do nothing on our own, or when we do, we are missing an opportunity to collaborate with something better than us.

When I go back home to my mom's to visit, I notice how many people have beautiful yards. I love beautiful yards. My mom's yard is truly beautiful. She is a master gardener, and her yard is a unique masterpiece. 

But most of these yards, while beautiful, look exactly the same. If people were really trying to create, not just trying to "Keep up with the Jones's" wouldn't there be more variety? Wouldn't this world look very, very different if we were all trying to make the world a better place using our own unique talents and our own unique sensibilities, rather than trying to impress those around us? I think our outer genius's would produce a much greater variety of gardens, for example, than relying on our inner genius's (and competing with other people's inner geniuses) allow us to.

I'm a bit obsessed with The Tinkering School. I wish there was one here my children could go to. At this school (also a summer camp), kids are given supplies and told to build. Use saws, knives, hammers, fire, dangerous things!, and go build. These are some pictures I pulled from their blog. They show examples of creations made entirely by eight and nine year olds. This is without any adult help.

 And here's a link to their website if you want to check it out:

tinkeringschool.com

My kids are going to be building a chicken coop this weekend. We are going to get supplies (old wood pallets if we can find them), and we are going to tell them to go create what they think would be a good home for chickens. I'll take pictures and tell you how it goes!

Light

So I'd like to change what I post about on Mondays for my own sanity. I'm trying to stop being so upset   about education in America. About what is (standardized testing, grrrr...) and is not (learning to love reading, grrrr...) happening in our schools.

Because in reality, there is nothing I can do about this, other than do my best to vote for people who care about these issues, but even that seems impossible.

The only thing I really have control over is my own home and what happens there. I'm going to have to walk around with half-shut eyes (still trying to stay informed, of course), and be as positive as I can about this crazy, wonderful world we live in. (Even when I read fascinating articles like this and I want to move to Finland:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/ )

On Mondays, I'd like to focus on light, as in light versus dark. I know this is a touchy, feely thing. Vague. Unsubstantiated. Maybe even weird, but I believe in the concept of light and darkness in our lives, and I believe we have a great amount of control over how much of each we let in.

I was at my childrens' school the other day and witnessed countless remarks like, "Get back in line." "That is not a straight line." "Stop messing around in line." "Where does the line go?" "You will go to the office if you do not get in line this instant.""Are you listening to me?" "Are you paying any attention at all?"

I know teachers (and teachers assistants and cafeteria workers) are tired. I know they have to keep kids under control. I know this, and I have no doubt I would be saying the exact same things (though sometimes I imagine I would not). But there is an awful lot of berating that happens at school, and while it is not exactly dark, it is definitely not light.

And then there are the darker things: school safety drills because of senseless shootings, the need to protect our children from abuse—just the way adults and even parents speak to children sometimes.

Our kids need as much light as we can give them. At least mine do. And, not to be cheesy, but the more light I manage to infuse into my kids lives, I swear, the more they shine.

I'm striving for this light every day, so on Mondays I'd like to post my experiments and findings. Today, I'd  like to share something that brought a little light into our family over the weekend.

I call it: Mom Lets Me Decorate My Room By Myself—Totally.

When I was about eight years old, I moved down to our newly finished basement. I remember spending a lot of time agonizing over wallpaper, picking blue clouds or some such thing and not being able to wait until the room was finished. Then I came home from school one day and found pink carpet and pink flowery wallpaper. My (wonderful!) mother had chosen for me. 

I did not like pink. I was not happy. I lived with that room through high school. The room is still pink, and I still don't like it... BUT my mom did let me decorate my room (posters, etc...) however I wished. Cary Grant lined my walls. So did Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Everything I hung up in my room represented what I thought was cool, the kind of person I wanted to be. What I would have chosen at eight for the wallpaper and carpet might have been quiet hideous, but it would have been mine. I would have owned it, and I think that might have been good for me.

To me, this is a form of light. When we let our kids own their spaces, really own them. Sometimes we make even the tiniest suggestions that essentially tell our kids we don't trust them to make good choices. That our ideas, in the end, are better than theirs. When we don't suggest, cajole, influence, we tell our kids that we have faith in their choices, and we gain great insights into what is important to our kids. 

Lucy wanted to get her room painted for her birthday. I told her we would buy the paint and I would help her paint, but I wanted her to be the primary painter. I also told her I wanted her to pick out the colors. I would not even offer a suggestion. (This was hard, especially because of the work it would entail—and there is always that, "What if we have to sell our house later?" question.)

Lucy is a tidy little person. Her room has always been well-organized, but as we moved stuff around on Saturday, I discovered that she is a bit of a pack-rat, far more than I realized. She owns a lot, a lot!, of seashells, for example. She has tidy piles of papers everywhere. She collects pencils. A lot of pencils. And she has some pretty strange things taped to her walls. 

But as we painted her room a pukish-greenish color and a bright pink (her choices!), I learned a lot about her. She is sentimental. She loves the Savior and having pictures of him around the room. She loves the fish, the bird, and the guinea pig in her room, and she takes immaculate care of them. She has labeled her bookshelf and sorted her books alphabetically. She likes stickers. She likes baby pictures of her and Mary. She likes funky pillows that match nothing. She is happy and she is content being herself right now, so much more than I was at her age. Oh, I loved realizing that. That made the aching hand and aching back I was left with when we were through painting her room colors I would not have chosen well worth it. 

On Sunday, Lucy shone a bit. She was filled up with a little more with light than usual. And I loved it.

Of course, all the other kids want to transform their own spaces now, and I'm trying to brace myself for lots of painting and lots of mess and lots of little piles I don't understand as well as pictures that don't seem all that special being taped up to walls. 

But it is their light, their space, and I'm going to do my best to step aside and let them shine!