Frog Eggs

What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.


— Stanley Kunitz, "Touch Me", in The Wild Braid, p. 95


April 2009

Yesterday while riding our bikes we came across a pond with frogs in it. Amidst the reeds were large clutches of frog eggs. We headed home, collected buckets and net, and headed back to the pond to collect some eggs.

For several years I've been wanting to hatch frog eggs or nurture tadpoles for a few weeks and then release into the wild. As a suburban child in the 1970s mid-Atlantic we would search religiously in the clear pools of water that formed in the orange clay after a rainstorm. We were looking for the tiny black tadpoles of toads to keep for a few weeks until they sprouted legs. So much of the wild was regarded as dangerous; the massive river a few miles away was polluted. Having the opportunity to really observe something pure, young, wild, and alive was a cherished experience.

After returning to the pond by car we collected the eggs and ample pondwater to fill the aquarium purchased a few weeks ago at Goodwill. When we got home, we placed the aquarium in a temperature-appropriate spot, poured in the pondwater, and very carefully transferred the eggs. We're raising our kids to respect all living things—no bug-killing, no keeping crabs in a thimbleful of water in the sun at the beach— a fact which prompted the lecture today about not poking the frog eggs with a stick. They are alive.

Last night we had dinner with another homeschooling family. We proudly shared our excitement at finally scoring some frog eggs. Well, it was quickly pointed out that what we did is now illegal in Maine, a point that would have been well-driven-home were I on the internet this year. Apparently, someone else like me posted a basic question to one of the homeschooling email lists about handling frog eggs, unleashing an email firestorm.

No more bragging about the frog eggs.

If truth is truth, then sit in it.

Jesus said one word, and a dead man sat up,
but creation usually unfolds,
like calm breakers.

— Rumi, Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks, p. 258





March 2009

Wednesday the boys are scheduled to visit a local private school from 8:30 to 12:30. I think sending them there would be a huge mistake.

There is a part of me that really wants to passively sabotage this…as in, not prepare the kids for their visit, not get them to bed on time, not wake them up on time, feed them the wrong kind of breakfast, etc. Then I realized — don’t bend over backward trying to make it perfect, don’t bribe, and don’t passively sabotage.

I could ruin this entirely by bribing or getting punitive about it. Tell them what’s going on, set them up for success and see what comes.

The inclination tonight is instead of fearful silence, to sit down in what I feel is right, like sitting deep in the saddle. Nonviolent protest. Allowing this weight to speak the viewpoint, and that is to be more deeply involved in the other school we're already involved in and to allow the kids to remain there a couple more years.

We can do more structured academic work to help the writing along, to accelerate the math. But to seize them out of this world we've been cultivating and put them in that totally different world: a mistake. At least at present.

Here are a few of the things I want to protect: C’s happiness (hard-won!), B’s endless reverie about airplanes, B’s obsession with drawing — these things speak deeply and resonantly: Do not touch.

We need community. We need to deepen community, to broaden our opportunities as a family to interact with other families.

I need to sit down deeper in what I can feel -- not just know, but feel — to be the truth.

I will prepare my children but not force them. I will let the right answers come, allow my own desires to surface and allow them to filter away and let the answers that are most appropriate for all concerned to come to light.

When I got the image of sitting deeper into the truth, as if on horseback, and I yielded to it, the fear left.

If truth is truth, then sit in it.

No e-mail? I'll just yell out the front door.

Spring, and everything outside is growing,
even the tall cypress tree.
We must not leave this place.
Around the lip of the cup we share, these words,
My life is not mine.

— Rumi, Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks, p. 41


March 9, 2009

Well, being off the internet is making communications with our Monday homeschooling coop a living hell.

Fortunately, no one has voted me off the island yet, but it is causing difficulties in staying in touch with everyone. While we are together we are coordinating activities, setting up snack, cleaning up snack, assisting with conflict, pasting up the newspaper, etc.

It is difficult to finish a conversation. So we would finish conversations by email. But then I went and got off the internet. This is making communications difficult.

OK, well I guess M. has never been a big e-mailer. We would always have to call her last year. In particular, A. seems stressed — whether this is caused in part or in full by more challenging coop communications, I don’t know. I like to think everything’s about me, anyway.

I’m officially a flaky homeschooler.

The good news: we finally laid out the first issue of The Blue Eagle newspaper together today at coop. C. was super-grumpy and needed to play alone, but the rest of the older kids and I did that.

Obstacles

"Grasping is the source of all our problems."

— Sogyal Rinpoche, Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, p. 33




Early March 2009

Being off the internet is a huge pain when it comes to homeschooling.

On the internet are practically limitless resources, answers to questions, to use with homeschooling. We use it like an encyclopedia, with me weeding through all the resources to find the answers.

Right now, I'm becoming very adept at saying, "I don't know." When I remember and can find my notebook of questions, I write the question down in hopes I will remember to bring it to the library later.

Sometimes I forget to bring it. Sometimes the pressing question is no longer so pressing by then, and so it never gets answered. Other times, we head to library and dive headlong into whatever is pressing at that moment, old questions forgotten and new ones arising.

This is when I begin to wonder if, in the balance of things, the internet can make us smarter and more educated. Or if there is value in not answering every single question.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Day

"There's hidden sweetness in the stomach's emptiness."
— Rumi

January 19, 2009 · Monday
MLK Jr. Day

This day has special significance this year given what’s happening tomorrow. For the first time I get a little wistful that I’m not in Washington. Then I remember — the crowds.

Wake up somewhat grieving email. I imagine people all over Facebook plastering themselves with excitement.

I get over this quickly when our homeschool family coop happens, at our house again, with happy kiddos playing all over the piles of snow the plow left behind.

And then we get to work on the newspaper I’m helping them put together, The Blue Eagle. The kids all made badges last week out of watercolor paper and ribbon, and everyone showed up with theirs this week, and their notebooks.

Some had hand-written news stories about grackles stealing fruit or giant icicles; one had compelling photos of fishing and cub scouts on which he declined to comment. They all decorated a letter to go in the name of the paper on the first page.

Glitches · digital coma

[kids' room, the "before" picture]

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." — Gandhi

Still January 12

Homeschooling coop: we are finally moving forward with an idea the kids had last year — which was to start a kids' newspaper.

Small, to start. Today we came up with a name (The Blue Eagle Newspaper), a first issue pub date (mid-February) and some general assignments / roles, and we made press badges (we had some of Jeff’s professional ones for them to look at).

Not having e-mail makes the assimilation process very interesting. We could have them e-mail stories and photos to Jeff; I could come up with the template and have kids and parents type in their own stories right onto my computer, they could bring them hard-copy and I could type them in….this is one of those tasks that would be in many ways be made easier by email. Or would it?

Sometimes I feel I’ve done a lot of turning my back on communities and people I’m leaving behind, usually by moving. Or is this non-attachment, a healthy letting go, a natural moving on? Moments in the last two weeks I’ve wondered if I’m doing it again—and if I am, why does it feel so freaking good? Like shedding 20 layers of dead skin all at once? So rejuvenating.

There is a deep desire in me at moments to hop online and find out what’s going on with the weather, with the war in Gaza. Definitely I experience and hold more anxiety than I ever realized, which was alleviated (momentarily) a lot of times by sitting down at the computer. The Dead Zone. The Digital Coma. I wonder what the effect is on my children all this time. How it has been to be partially ignored during those online spots.

It’s hard to say what the long-term ramifications of this experiment will be. In all likelihood it will mean much to me, something to those close by, and little or nothing to the world at large. But we can only change ourselves!

And in this case it is changing just about everything! I’m trying to think of what this hasn’t changed for me thus far…….

Snowflakes on the virtual Appalachian Trail

But don't be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others. Unfold
your own myth....
— Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks

This morning: the snow coming down very lightly, big flakes. But it was very cold. They were magnificent, tiny, hexagonal flakes.

We had Monday homeschool coop for the first time in ages. Angie pulled a piece of black velvet out of her pocket and I went into the kitchen to retrieve the two magnifying glasses. We caught some flakes and we looked. Observed. Kids huddled around. What’s falling out of the sky right now? Don’t breathe too close to them or they will melt away to droplets of water!
*
We have in so many instances traded the immediacy of opening a letter, of a poem, of this, whatever this may be, for a false immediacy. Messages are retrieved, little black words on a screen, that for the most part poorly approximate the realness of a person.

But the immediacy, when observed from the outside, is: person interacting with machine. And whatever this is can only be experienced by me, and cannot, most of the time, be a shared experience. Like me and my friends and their children observing the snowflakes this morning as they alighted on a bit of black velvet. Even that person on the other end of the text message is not sharing a real experience with me, except of messaging on our phones!

Nothing I have ever experienced socially via the internet could approximate the experience of sitting in a room full of actual people — the way they look, move, smell, sound, laugh. The way it feels to be touched by one of them. It’s a known fact that many, many of us are living in a state of touch deprivation and computers are partially, if not entirely, to blame.

Even in a platonic, casual conversation, there might be a hug exchanged, or a hand laid upon an arm. These simple gestures can draw an otherwise isolated person back into the collective experience, can provide that much-needed human contact that is lacking. Computers are not warm and loving. They are cold and toxic. People are warm and loving (and, well, I suppose some people are toxic!).

There is not enough of this in this wired world — of people sitting in a room together, enjoying the moment, not having to save it or store it (except perhaps a photograph, a memory, a poem, a journal entry) but mostly to breathe it in and breathe it out. To live it and to let it go.

As I hike away from the internet on my virtual Appalachian Trail there is so little I miss and much that leads me to feel that another year like this might be good.

Getting Real

"I think I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a blood-sucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither." — H.D. Thoreau, "Visitors"

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

The experiment continues. I find that I’m still wanting to over-crowd my time. The internet use was only a symptom.

Today I felt like one of Timothy Leary’s people: Drop Out, Tune In. I feel like I’ve dropped below the din and there’s a whole reality going on down here.

I feel like I’m becoming more real to myself again and haven’t felt this way in a long time. Been playing my fiddle more, talking to people more, appreciating more the people in front of me, and who are important to me: family, old friends, neighbors.
*
Today I was talking with Janey on the phone, about various things, including wool — and had to sign off to get the boys. She offered to bring her spinning wheel over when we were back.

She did, and let the boys try it, and I got the carding brushes put together, and started to learn to card. Susan, my neighbor across the street who's a fiber enthusiast / spinner / knitter, must have seen us from her upstairs window because she showed up with dishes from a meal I brought her last month when she had surgery, and a batch of delicious Mexican anise cookies. She came in and upon seeing our project asked if I had an extra set of carders. She and Janey hit it off.

I felt a bit overwhelmed, tired as I was from a long first day back taking the boys to Sierra's (their teacher 2x week), ready for some down time. But how could I say no to such needed and wonderful impromptu community. It’s only day 6 and already my dream is coming true. What will the other 359 days of this year bring?
*
Tonight met with Angie, Janet, and Mandy about the fate of our homeschool coop. We are going to do some outdoor activities and I had the kids’ newspaper idea come back up again. We are going to get an issue out with little articles, an ad or two, and lots of artwork.

The fiddle is at my beck and call all of a sudden. I’ve been playing again. Thinking again more clearly. The thought-habit of narrating my actions as if I were posting a Facebook status update has faded into the background and something else is emerging. What is that---uninterrupted, unedited thought?