Growing Together
The Cooperative School Blog
Listen and learn. “Maybe they forgot their bag,” a child observes in answer to finding yet another pile of dog poop on the lawn where we are playing. This willingness to see a global kindness in others is something often gets lost as we grow older. So now we just bring bags with us to help where we can.
The year winds down. Only a few weeks, a handful of days, left. I’m specifically not counting , but this year’s Tracks class is keeping count in a way that others haven’t. “Is this the last day I play the rhythm,” one asks. I force myself to think. Ada answers, though. She seems better equipped to think of the bittersweet in the beginning/endings, thankfully.
A celebration of discovery and adventure and where her story began.
“While sailing from England to France one night at age 4, Dr. Burbridge looked skyward and saw, as if for the first time, a luminous patchwork of stars and planets. ”
At just four-years old and her adventure unfolds, because she experienced wonder, she witnessed something bigger than her small self.
I have found this -- the source of inspiration and forward motion established in the early years -- to be a common theme in books I have been reading/listening to while our school has been closed.
We have this book perched on the shelf at our currently-empty school.
I just finished listening to the “grown-up” version, The Hidden Life of Trees by the author Peter Wohlleben. He found his inspiration for learning about and protecting forests as a child. From an article in the New York Times, German Forest Ranger Finds that Trees Have Social Networks, Too ;
Mr. Wohlleben traces his own love of the forest to his early childhood. Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s in Bonn, then the West German capital, he raised spiders and turtles, and liked playing outside more than any of his three siblings did. In high school, a generation of young, left-leaning teachers painted a dire picture of the world’s ecological future, and he decided it was his mission to help.
Before listening to Wohlleben’s book, I read Darwin Comes to Town; How the urban jungle drives evolution by Menno Schilthuizen.
Note: While the books written by Wohlleben and Schilthuizen may be presented for adults, the contents are certainly accessible by children.
Menno Schilthuizen, too, found his life's work as a young child and he returns to the places he would go as a child throughout the book to provide point and counterpoint to how wildlife adapts, responds, and cooperates with urban settings.
And finally, back to the stardust;
And . . .
We are stardust.
Joni Mitchell wrote this song, Woodstock because she MISSED playing at the festival. Traffic, crowds, she was booked elsewhere stopped her from going. She of endless talent, what would she have written if she had played Woodstock like she was supposed to?
Performing would have been about the what was, what had already been created. By not attending, she gave us this song.
