Let Us Grow With Kindness
Bloom exploring how trees are living and breathing too just like human beings.
The more I deepen my process as the facilitator of our family learning lab, the more I keep coming back to how I want to feel inside these labors. Most recently, the word that stays with me is kindness. I want to feel kindness as I am learning how to create and hold this dynamic, creative, discovery-based, learning space for my family.
This is also what I want for my children, to feel kindness from me, their family, and the many folks who will be a part of their world as they dive deeper into the magic of learning. I want their journey to be anchored by positive, gentle, encouraging adults, who support them in taking larger leaps when asking questions and seeking answers, when braving the unknowns that pop up when conducting an experiment, when stumbling through the inevitably difficult parts of their own transformational discoveries.
I am making more of an effort to acknowledge this intention of kindness as a core element of our whole family learning lab process. The truth is, I have not been treated kindly by some of the people in my family and my community when it comes to choosing to nurture my children’s education outside of the dominant “send your child to school” culture. Every time I have encountered a negative comment or incident, it’s been very hurtful, and it takes me a while to recover my sense of confidence and hope in my vision for our family learning lab. Mostly, I do this emotional restoration work alone, in the privacy of my own thoughts, or between the lines of my journal, or within my liberated, dancing body while the munchkins run circles around me in their own playful delight. Sometimes I have vented, and even cried, to other mamas in my village who have dealt with similar criticisms or mean things said to them about their homeschooling process.
When I think of how a tree grows, how any plant grows, I think of it flourishing in an environment where it is treated well, where it has all it needs to expand and take up more space, where it is immersed in the forward momentum of its becoming. A tree would have a hard time developing into its full potential if when it was a sapling it was constantly kicked at or stepped on, its roots yanked from the ground before its foundation was solid, if in its delicate infancy it was denied adequate water and sunlight, restricted from fresh air to breathe. The tree, wired for growth, would indeed keep trying to become more of what it dreams to be, but after a while, the constant lack of support from the external environment would overpower even its will to live. It would gradually give up, its passion to live fading more and and more each day.
I don’t think we’re much different as humans. We need kindness, support, generosity, and protection when we’re in our most vulnerable stages. When we’re at the beginning of something—whether as the embryo in our mother’s womb, or as a little person holding the pencil to the page for the first time, or as a mother navigating the dense jungle of cultivating an authentic learning process for her children that dreams outside the lines of the society’s rules for what education is— when everything is newly forming and still determining its path toward sustainability, we need a lot of positive encouragement, space to grow and become, and an overall gentle, loving presence from everyone intimately involved.
So many times I’ve pondered what my experience as a mother and as a learner would be if the people closest to me were simply kinder to me. I know I am doing my best everyday, and I know I’d be doing even better if I had more loving interactions with people in my family and community. It’s ironic that through their meanness about my choice to create a new reality outside of the school system, those naysayers actually reinforce my belief in my dream for our family learning lab. Through their words it becomes clear that their education, and mine too because I grew up in that system too, was tragically incomplete. If in their adulthood they have become so closed-minded, so fearful of new ideas, so hostile towards something that disrupts their notion of the truth—then what useful thing have they really learned to be able to thrive in this vast and changing world?
Creativity, innovation, openness to fresh ways of understanding, conscious, deep listening skills, the ability to consider alternative perspectives even if they’re so different from your own, and an ever-growing passion for what we are learning are what propels humanity forward. To grow, we have to have room to come undone from what we are, and reemerge as something new, and likely something better.
In our family learning lab I am daily searching for more and more opportunities to model these expansive qualities as the norm for a vibrant, heart-centered education. I want my children to seed their learning practices in the lush soil of a warm, welcoming, and loving environment. I want them to understand on a soul-deep level that their growth as human beings, while ultimately initiated from within themselves, is supposed to be unconditionally supported from the people around them, people who at the very least should have the capacity to be loving, kind, and gentle with them—and their mother—through the learning process.