Our younger four children are very close in age and have vivid, well developed imaginations. They have played rich imaginary games with each other every day since they were old enough to imagine or play. They animate everything and can make a game of anything. Left to themselves, they would play with each other from the moment they all get up in the morning until nightfall. As parents, we are delighted with this as we understand that strong imaginations are required for imagining a new world and social and emotional development are positive results from playing closely together for so many years.

At the same time now that they are a bit older (9, 8, 7 and 5 years old), we find that it is time for each of them to start creating their own disciplined, internally focused lives as a balance to their imaginative, social lives. It is important that they be able to enter adulthood already instinctively carrying out a morning routine, for instance, that awakens their bodies, focuses their minds and engages their hearts for the day. Why merely idle away the early morning hours of their childhoods when they could use that time to gently build habits that will make their lives healthy and spiritually successful? Besides, having them engaged in quiet practices early in the morning keeps the house quieter as well! The atmosphere is more peaceful for everybody.

Their early morning routine starting from whenever they naturally arise is currently as follows:

Bathroom habits including a drink of water and possibly using a neti pot;

Getting dressed, if they haven’t already;

A simple hatha yoga routine that includes the sun salutation and a few other asanas;

Drinking a cup of plain real kefir;

Cleaning their assigned “zone”;

Reading, drawing or handcrafts, i.e. a quiet activity;

Family prayer and quiet time in the living room.

The entire routine doesn’t actually take very much time and it is followed by breakfast and milking the cows in varying order depending upon the weather and sensibilities of family members.

There are variations across children in carrying out this morning routine. For instance, at one end of the scale our 9 year old says the prayer and sits quietly in bed, gets dressed and comes downstairs to follow the rest of his routine. He can now carry out his yoga series on his own with occasional check-in’s with me. Also he isn’t doing a morning zone clean-up at the moment because he works by going out for the morning milking after family prayer time. At the other end, our 5 year old pours out the kefir for everyone but isn’t doing a yoga routine at all simply because I haven’t made it down to him yet in training. He loves doing yoga and is remarkably good at it. I will get to him next week…

We are having a lot of fun with the yoga part of the routine and seeing results from it in terms of self-discipline, flexibility and character development. For a few weeks before implementing individual routines, the children did yoga during the day along with an old YogaKids video. Our is for 3 - 10 year olds as opposed to the newer version that is only for younger children. All of our children have done yoga on and off with this video for a few years so it is pretty familiar to them.

Now they are using a book entitled Imagine That! A Child’s Guide to Yoga put out by the Integral Yoga people in Buckingham, Virginia. I bought this at the Integral Yoga health food store in Charlottesville but you can get it from Amazon. It starts off with the Sun Salutation (or Dance to the Sun, they call it) and then covers 11 other asanas suitable for children. There are soft illustrations that are nice without being cute and there is a little poem to go with each asana. The children really like this book and it is getting them started on a regular yoga routine.

Will (the 9 year old) grabs the book each morning and heads down to the basement where we have an area covered with padded, interlocking foam mats. He can work on his own and have some quiet in which to do it. Anna does her yoga in the living room on a yoga mat she received as a gift last year. The younger children are starting out there too so that I can work with them as I go about my morning duties.

Here are moments from this morning of Anna doing the Sun Salutation along with a couple of other asanas entitled The Boat (Nauasana) and The Seashell (Yoga Mudra):

We have been working with this new routine for a few weeks now and it is going very well. The children are seeing results already in their ability to do some of the asanas, or get closer to their knees in stretching poses and so forth. Digestion is improving as well as the willingness to go just a little bit past old boundaries in order to reach a new plateau in ability.

The combination of making the entire early morning routine of the children very regular, having it include a bit to drink as well as a bit to exercise, and having it be individual and inward directed is creating a very pleasing atmosphere of quiet purpose throughout the house each morning. By the time we all gather together in the living room to pray and sit, enough focusing and engaging and straightening up has taken place to make those moments spent in prayer very full. By coming prepared to our brief morning family gatherings, each person is reaping much more benefit from those five or ten minutes spent together thinking of Him.

What a great thing to learn as a child - well thought out morning routines including yoga, nutrition, cleaning the environment and praying to the Highest starts your day with peaceful purpose, brings harmony to the group, and increases productivity for the rest of the day. We have all gained so much already in just a few short weeks. I look forward to seeing what will naturally arise out of this new discipline.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

I just somewhat painfully learned two new lessons with regards to hanging out laundry during a winter in the mountains.

Today is sunny and windy so I prepared to hang out the laundry. Sunny and windy is laundry hanging weather even during the winter, right? Right. A load of laundry was washed and ready to go nice and early. Sometime during the morning routine, I asked one of the children to load the laundry into a basket downstairs and carry it out to the picnic table next to the laundry line. Being a lovely little child, they carried out the instruction without my even being aware of it.

Meanwhile I got caught up doing our taxes on-line. This took longer than it should have due to being surreptitiously slipped into expensive software somewhere along the way rather than the free version with which I started. I didn’t realize this until I had gotten to the end of the process (after answering endless questions that have nothing to do with our modest situation). I had to start over. Grrr… OK, it got done, the taxes got filed and it was time to go hang the laundry.

I bundled up and went out. I pulled the first item out of the laundry basket and it looked strange. Huh? What is wrong with this? Please don’t tell me something is wrong with the washer now too… It was stiff, there was patches of white stuff. At first I thought that it was soap. Then it dawned on me that the laundry all higgledy-piggledy in the laundry basket was partially frozen! That is not desirable, to say the least. It is much harder to shake the wrinkles out of frozen fabric, you know? In order to have smoothly frozen laundry like in The Saturday Evening Post cover below, it can’t be frozen first.

Lesson 1: When it is really cold out, hang the laundry up right away after taking it out to the line. Do not allow it to freeze in the laundry basket before hanging.

Lesson 2: When it is really cold and windy out, do not even try to hang out the little ticky tacky stuff. Being outside hanging laundry is not like being outside waiting for a bus, for instance. When you are hanging laundry, you can’t wear gloves, you are handling things that are wet and if your fingers get too numb, you cannot fulfill your objective anyway. So on the worst days, only hang out things like towels and jeans. Socks definitely should stay inside to dry! (I almost got frostbite hanging out those darn socks… Never again.)

What I didn’t realize when I went out was that with the wind chill, it is only 25 degrees out and the winds are gusting up to 25 to 30 m.p.h. My fingers went so numb I could no longer manage the clothespins and I was starting to drop things on the ground. And, oh my, how my fingers hurt.

Such common sense lessons these are. You would think that I could have thought of them ahead of time but some things you just really have to experience or grow up with or they simply don’t occur to you. So while a morning of doing the taxes and hanging frozen laundry was not exactly fun, it was productive and I learned a few things on both counts.

Good grief. Time to go watch a movie. No, really I have to go watch a movie. It is for homeschooling and has subtitles which I have to read out loud to my young pupils. Really I have to… ! Good thing. It will give my fingers time to recover before I have to go out and take the laundry down.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

If our children are going to be leaders in the new future that is awaiting humanity in general and Americans in particular, then it behooves them to develop a clear-eyed understanding of the state of humanity and of America today. One good place to get a bird’s eye view of prevailing power gropes and methodologies based in profits and self-serving “ignorance” is the politics of food. The national battle being waged over the sale of raw milk has recently seen the intersection of the governmental/regulatory/legal side of society and the private business/raw milk dairying/homeschooling side of society.

I won’t attempt to summarize the battle over raw milk. For detailed information reported by an intelligent journalist, The Complete Patient is a great source. Suffice it to say that raw milk is the one food, the only food, the government has labeled so dangerous that it must be regulated out of existence and by force if necessary. For a brief description of the issues at stake at Meadowsweet Farm in upstate New York, read David Gumpert’s post Meadowsweet Dairy’s Members Sweat Out a Judge’s Decision, and Prepare for the Long Haul.

With this background in mind, next read his post of today The White Coats are Coming! Teaching Kids About the Raw Milk Mess. After describing the latest developments in this particular court case and noting that the dairy family brought six of their homeschooled children to the court room, Mr. Gumpert ended with this:

Much as I’d like to see the children shielded from seeing the real behavior of their government, I really do think it’s preferable for them to learn the lessons earlier rather than later, like the adults among us.

For parents who feel responsible for guiding their children towards whatever form of inspired leadership they may be capable of as adults, this can be a tightrope to walk. You want to shelter your children long enough from a degraded society that they may grow naturally strong and deep and then, at just the right time presumably, you want to bring them alongside you as you deal with the intricacies of a profit-mad world. Gradually you work side by side until one day they are themselves leaders and problem solvers and torchbearers.

We, and many other parents, find that homeschooling our children provides them with both opportunities - growing naturally as well as learning to think originally and act effectively - in a manageable way. Kathryn Russell of Majesty Farm here in Virginia summed this up so beautifully in the comment she left with the above mentioned post. I will share at some length because she sums up so well:

The next generation does need to be made aware of what is true and right, and what real community and work consists of. Why do home schoolers seem to be ahead of government schoolers in maturity and ability to logically reason? The answers have been known for many decades, not because of WHAT and HOW they are taught, but that they are given the opportunity to produce in a meaningful way, and the time to make decisions, face real consequences, and reflect on the why of the situation. Homeschoolers have the chance to communicate in a non-peer structured environment in real life situations, since they are THERE with the family.Homeschooling is not the only way to reach kids, but a great and painless way to do it. Just as local, community based foods are the top of the line typically, so are those local community based kids.

What an interesting analogy. Here at The Lionsgate School, I am of course aware of us parents being the teachers and our children being the students. That awareness directs traffic most of the time. We do such and such so that they will learn such and such. However, I am equally aware that we are all of us students here together in this place we call home and school. The insights, energy and soul development of these children is often not a function of their chronological age at all. As a matter of fact, I have felt eclipsed by them more than once. Far more than once.

Really we are just eight people who have chosen to live together in a deeply satisfying and edifying intimacy as we each attempt the exact same thing, i.e. merger in Him and through Him give service to humanity. At the most essential level, then, we eight are the same and seek the same goal. It is this sharing of a spark and a goal that provides the harmony of our family life and our homeschooling. On other levels, we are different in ages, interests and destinies and it is those differences that provide the interest, the pizazz, of our family life and homeschooling.

Our children are mostly still young so we are still at the stay at home, milk the cows, drink the “local community based” fresh milk, read great books and learn how to get along day in and day out stage of life. As much as I love this stage of life, I also look forward to having our “local community based kids” come along side us parents shoulder to shoulder. Together we parents (two) and children (six) will creatively and prayerful work our way through the painful, soul-deadening intricacies of life in this age toward the goals we each cherish so deeply.

Then they will have children and the cycle will start anew with a fresh generation of clear-eyed, original thinkers who have the ability to look inside for their answers.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

(This is Part 1 of The Art of Listening to Nature series)

Much of life is about solving problems. We, all of us, have to solve problems every day. We chart career paths, make meal plans, budgets, maps, to-do lists, and create schedules and routines in order to cope with short term and long term problems as well as sudden changes. Even so, there are times when problems and obstacles seem to conspire against us in ways that thwarts our efforts towards stability and harmony. At times these seeming conspiracies feel like they threaten our very existence. So in the course of our lives, we all develop a method for dealing with these problems and obstacles with the immediate goal of regaining some order in our lives. In the short run, you can often mentally find a favorable solution that makes quick work of the problem but this approach invariably knocks you off your natural path. There is a more subtle method that not only solves your life problems, it also contributes in often unexpected ways to your inner development.

For most people solving life’s problems is a very analytical and mental exercise. Equipped with the ability to use reason, logic, and principles for reducing the problem, most people tend to transform their problem into a formula and then generate a reasonable and logical solution of like kind. In the Sahaj Marg method of Raja Yoga, on the other hand, the mind and logic are secondary in the problem solving process. Interestingly, raja yoga actually means yoga of the mind but in the sense of disciplining the mind, not at all in the sense of putting the mind first.

In the Sahaj Marg system of raja yoga, we meditate on the Divine until the inner Master naturally becomes the object of meditation. Through this process the heart gradually becomes the fit instrument through which we view the world. It is the heart that can interpret a situation, weigh responses to it and find the right way forward. Once the mind is disciplined and calmly pointed at the heart, we then have in it a fine instrument for carrying out the heart’s guidance. This system of a strengthened heart giving the signal and a disciplined mind following up on the signal is very efficient. I think of this as a sahaj or natural way to go about solving problems and find it very effective in living out the opportunities hidden in our life problems.

Perhaps a better way to explain it is this: Let’s say you are faced a multi-headed problem so you think of all the many aspects of the problems and methodically list them out. Continuing to use your mind to attack this problem, you organize the various items on the list into some kind of cohesive narrative that feels mentally satisfying. Finally you apply logic and scientific principles as you know them to the problem to solve it. That is the mental approach of solving the problem and the one most commonly used these days.

By contrast we bring all the information together in our hearts along with the idea of the Divinity that resides within all of us. Then we let the story or narrative of the “problem” unfold before us. This is what some might call “the art of listening to nature.” He notes that,

“We talk too much, and because we are always talking, we never listen; because we never listen, we don’t know what Nature is saying to us.” The Art of Listening to Nature

When we apply our minds to a problem, we are invariably controlling the problem in some way that we think best suits us. We interpret the data based upon our preferences and limited past experiences. When we instead use the heart as an instrument to decipher the truthful message that Nature is trying to give us, then only are we seeking the truth or really seeking guidance. We can only truly be guided when we are not demanding “to know” everything about our situation in advance. Here we allow our hearts to open to our dilemma and then ask in a service oriented manner, “What do I need to know and do next?” Then we simply allow the narrative to unfold before us, applying our minds where necessary. Whenever the path appears to curve away or divide, or another obstacle places itself in our way, we repeat this process.

While we are on the path of the “problem”, we keep alert with reading and listening to Nature. Eventually when it is time, Nature will reveal the full mystery to us. It is our experience here at Pockets of the Future that living with problems in this way is far more rewarding and satisfying then cleverly figuring out some necessarily limited portion of the experience, cynically judging that experience and then choosing to discount it out of frustration and exhaustion. With the mind we think and do but that is all. Using the heart allows us to become something.

It was this natural method for dealing with life’s challenges that even led us to our homesteading life, for instance. Since this heart-led, mind-enacted approach to life is a key component to the Pockets of the Future movement, Leslie and I will blog about our experiences with it in a series of posts.

We just had a pivotal experience the other day of running out of heating oil which was followed by encounters with a heron, a kestrel, some movie vultures and some kind of hawk that is a perfect example of just the kind of natural change we are excited about. That day led us to change our whole attitude towards how we are going to cook our food and heat our house in the future and that experience will be the subject of my next post.

All the best,

Paul

For years I have thought that a pretty jug of farm fresh milk sitting on a farm (0r farm wannabe) table was a romantic touch. I imagined that it hearkened back to more wholesome, graceful days of yore somehow. I occasionally wished that such a jug might grace my table of offerings for my family but I wasn’t sure it was quite practical for a family of our size. In any case, I never mentioned this little romantic notion of mine to anyone.

This morning for breakfast we had cornbread and milk. I never in my life heard of such a meal until about a year ago and then I started hearing of it with some frequency. I first learned of it from a friend whose farming grandparents had cornbread and milk for dinner every single night for decades (and lived to a ripe old age). Then I heard of it a few moretimes once we moved to Virginia. I gather this way of eating cornbread is not only an old fashioned, frugal thing but also a southern thing.

For the uninitiated, having a meal of cornbread and milk does not mean you slather butter on a piece of cornbread, put it on a plate and then pour yourself a glass of milk. No, it means that you break up pieces of cornbread into your bowl and then pour milk over it as if it were breakfast cereal. For our part, we add a drizzle of molasses and eat it for breakfast as opposed to dinner. It is both light, reasonably filling and yummy. I make a typical cornbread only I use freshly ground whole wheat and corn flours. Also nowadays I preheat a 10″ cast iron frying pan along with the oven and then bake the cornbread in that. Delicious and practically no clean up!

This morning as I was setting out breakfast and my husband was about to pour the (still warm from the cow) milk, I thought of the lovely Wedgwood pitcher I received in the mail yesterday afternoon. Apparently my paternal grandparents bought this pitcher on one of their trips to England and Ireland many, many years ago and gave it to my parents. My mother has now given it to me and it did, indeed, grace our breakfast table with every bit of the romance I had ever imagined.

Here is the cornbread with a bit of molasses all served up and with the milk just poured from this heavy, gleaming pitcher. Seeing a mama reading while her baby plays at her feet fits right in at the table of a Charlotte Mason/Ambleside Online homeschooling family.

Here is the other side of the pitcher. So sweet and a gentle reminder about the inner beauty of our children.

Homesteading can be a hard scrabble life at times. It is so nice to be able to bring a bit of almost otherworldly beauty to the table and create one more link between generations, cultures, beauty and food.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

Living a more simple life gives you the opportunity to figure out why you move through a day. What is a day for? What should you use an entire day for? How do we best receive the gifts any particular day may hold for us?

A “day” as a unit of meaning gets lost in these modern times of ongoing, complicated projects, communications measured in nano-seconds, bad news beaming in from all over a world that is currently at a different point of its day than we are, and lights on and shopping going 24 hours a day. What are our life goals? Does one day really have much value in relation to those goals?

Yes. A cycle of a day is a basic unit of meaning and functioning built into us by Nature. To ignore it or try to re-shape it into a unit of a different size (the project unit, say, in which time is mostly measured by the beginning and ending of an intense project or the slide on by until the weekend unit which is a life of weekends interrupted by boring bumps in between) robs us of health, well-being and opportunities.

Once we become aware of having the highest life goals and then gradually become willing to mold our lives in such a way that gives us hope of achieving the highest life goals, then “a day” becomes a unit of meaning and of practice of great significance. Creating new habits, for instance, is “a day at a time” venture by definition and is one of our most powerful tools as human beings for making something of ourselves. Given that we have generally managed to make ourselves into creatures rife with bad habits that take us away from anything real, learning the mechanics of transforming positive intentions into actual habits is a life changing necessity. Lots of people have lots to say on this subject. Here is a useful list of 18 Tricks to Make New Habits Stick. This author’s tricks include:

Commit to 30 Days

Make it Daily

Form a Trigger

Replace Lost Needs

Use ‘But’

Associate with Role Models

Know the Benefits

This is a good article to add to our understanding of how to form habits. There are short explanations for each of the 18 tricks and some of the tricks I have never heard of.

Moving from habits to rituals, the same author just wrote another related article on the same web site entitled The Power of Ritual: Conquer Procrastination, Time Wasters and Laziness. (Lifehack.org is a very popular and oft quoted blog with frequently updated posts covering myriad ways to increase productivity and organization in life.) He makes the following apt observation:

Life is wasted in the in-between times. The time between when your alarm first rings and when you finally decide to get out of bed. The time between when you sit at your desk and when productive work begins. The time between making a decision and doing something about it. Slowly your day is whittled away from all the unused in-between moments.

The solution to reclaim these lost middle moments is by creating rituals. Every culture on earth uses rituals to transfer information and encode behaviors that are deemed important. Personal rituals can help you build a better pattern for handling everything from how you wake up to how you work.

Unfortunately, when most people see rituals, they see pointless superstitions. Indeed, many rituals are based on a primitive understanding of the world. But by building personal rituals, you get to encode the behaviors you feel are important and cut out the wasted middle moments.

In other words, here rituals are a connected series of habits designed to bring more efficiency to our days without our having to think about it all the time. They are problem solvers one generation up from mere habits. Scott Young, the author, goes on to describe some of his successful rituals covering waking up, web usage, friendliness, working, exercise, sleeping and so on. He also gives some tips for forming successful rituals.

I am not crazy about the word ritual because it often implies a thoughtless carrying out of an action that would otherwise be meaningful if done in full consciousness. His strategies are good and usefully filling idle moments or moments that otherwise slip away from us is excellent. I am constantly searching for hidden pockets of time in my day. Occasionally I find one or two and develop a new habit for that newly discovered little pocket of time.

However, I think the next generation of problem solvers up from rituals is rhythm. A higher goal to reach calls for a deeper response from us. If our goal were to shift from the efficient use of time to uncovering a natural life, for instance, how might our days change? If we were to choose as a goal to consecrate every word and action to Him, would rituals per se suit us any longer? I don’t think so. I think that when we move on to simpler ways of life that spring from a heartfelt desire to focus on Him (or whatever word or idea you want to use to represent the highest and subtlest), each day becomes a significant pearl to be handled with care.

It is perhaps a rhythmic movement through our days that brings us the greatest sense of well-being. Rhythms come from nature whereas rituals are man-made. Each day, after all, is itself made of a rhythm of light and sound and atmosphere all playing together to provide living things with the beat for breathing Him in and breathing Him out. By discovering our inner rhythms in light of our highest goals, we can elevate our approach to our days from a search for efficiency to a search for simple sacredness. By working with nature to construct the details of our lives, we can move from a fragmented approach to one that is deeply holistic. By giving the deepest meaning possible to our use of time, we can find ways to move through our appointed days that accomplishes what needs to be accomplished but in full consciousness.

Each day can then be savored for the blessed opportunity that it is. Each day can then not only be full but also fragrant.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

We have just worked our way through another cold snap which ended with us running out of heating oil yesterday morning. Our oil tank has no gauge (can this be corrected?), the day was very windy and the oil delivery man could not bring us oil until the late afternoon. As by mid-day the inside of the house settled down into the high 40’s, we got under blankets and watched a movie Paul found at the library.

What a pool of peace The Cave of the Yellow Dog created for us during our difficult circumstances. Set in the seemingly endless mountains of western Mongolia, The Cave of the Yellow Dog brings us within a respectful yet intimate relationship with a nomadic family of parents, three young children, horses, yaks, goats, sheep, a corral, wagons, a motorbike and a yurt with all of its beautifully appointed furnishings.

The plot is minimal, as is often the case with real life. In this case, a young girl finds a dog out yonder and brings it home. The family wrestles a bit with whether or not to keep the dog. The issue is resolved on its own with a bit of time. That’s it. That is the entire plot line. However, this small story takes place within beautifully measured lives worth knowing just for their tranquility and naturalness.

I am fascinated with Mongolian nomadic life. I love traditional yurts and the streamlined life they contain. In both this movie and The Story of the Weeping Camel (by the same director), I closely study every aspect of life within these yurts I can manage to observe. Each piece of furniture, tool, carpet, cookware and basket is perfectly made to fulfill its function with efficient beauty. Even though they are “out in the middle of nowhere”, the woman and children are always dressed in shimmering silk clothes and have smooth, tightly bound hair. There are no toys, no clutter, nothing extraneous to take their minds and hands away from the essentials of their lives.

There was one detail in here that particularly caught our attention. Gathering dung was considered a child appropriate task and at one point, a basket of dung was sitting on the ground in front of the yurt.In the course of playing pretend, the little children played with it like we are used to seeing children play with wooden blocks. “See,” I turned and said to my husband. “This is just one more proof that naturally raised animals (i.e. grass-fed among other things) do not carry human pathogens!” My husband nodded wisely.

Even reading and listening to subtitles did not detract from the quiet tranquility and the feeling of rightness that filled this film. The family’s movements through their daily work were so sure, their words so gentle, their prayers so shared that we were all deeply inspired. Not only did the oldest girl have a very sure seat in the saddle, but all three children got along with each freely, playfully and with real regard for each other. The parents were very relaxed in their relationships with their children and were always attentive, present with them and sweetly loving. Husband and wife worked seamlessly through their days and showed a reserved affection for each other. I also particularly noted how adeptly the wife knew when and how to voice another point of view and when to be just be quiet. As a rule she was quiet when she disagreed with him, giving him the mental space to come to terms with issues on his own.

To spend time with a family that automatically prays its gratitude for all that is provided, lives deeply along with the seasons, speaks easily of reincarnation and lives harmoniously together through quietly respecting the individuality of each person is both an education and a blessing.

The Cave of the Yellow Dog is a reminder that there has been rightness in the world at certain times in certain places. That such a way of life has ever existed gives hope that, God willing, it will exist again. This movie features gorgeous cinematography, wonderful music, quietly mature adults, unspoiled adorable children, a glimpse into an ancient way of life, and the inspiration to live life more essentially.

While all the reviews on Amazon of this movie are glowing, I particularly recommend Brian Lane’s review which starts with How Peace Lives. To me it most captures the special quality of this enriching family movie.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

Yesterday was Sunday and I was pleased to enjoy a very special kind of quiet for a period of time during the afternoon. How lovely it was but I need to give a little background first in order to explain how it came about.

A few months ago, I made an astonishing mistake. The children were reading through their Pathway readers very nicely. They loved reading them and I enjoyed listening to them read them aloud. We came to know Peter and Rachel as friends and looked forward to seeing what happened in their sweet Amish lives next. The first grade level (which does not correspond to public school first grade level, by the way) is a set of three books. When our eight year old daughter finished the last first grade reader, I went to the bookshelf to get her the second grade reader. We have the entire set up to 8th grade which sits together on one shelf. The next time she and I sat together to read from this new book, we found it to be surprisingly difficult. The print was smaller, the sentence structure more difficult and the vocabulary more advanced. I was surprised. Anna could read it but haltingly and she was the most advanced of the three readers I was teaching. I concluded then that the jump from the first grade level to the second grade level was more than they were ready for so I set about finding them some other readers at their level so they could consolidate and strengthen their skills before continuing on with the Pathway readers.

Now finding readers that pass muster is not all that easy. Most of them are definitely twaddle in my mind and feature art work that can only be described as dumbed-down-stupid. But we did find enough readers to keep everyone busy - some nature readers, a few things from the library and especially readers from the enticing Bob & Nancy’s Bookshop which sells lovely, artistic Waldorf readers. Everyone was reading and doing fine.

Friday afternoon as I was re-shelving books, I chanced to rearrange some of the Pathway and other readers. Then I suddenly realized what I had done months ago. It turns out that there were three books for the second grade level too (just like for first grade) but I had inadvertently pulled the third of the three. In other words, by pulling the wrong book I took us from the end of the first grade level straight to the end of the second grade level. Good grief!

I called the children, told them of my mistake and showed them the two second grade readers now waiting for them. They literally shouted and jumped with glee. Anna grabbed the first of the two and basically disappeared. She occasionally showed up to tell me of the exploits of Peter and Rachel and the new neighbors who were moving in and so on and so on and then disappeared again. Faith waited impatiently for the book to be free so she could have a go at it. It turns out that she didn’t have long to wait because Anna burned through that 254 page reader in a day and a half! That was a decidedly un-Charlotte Mason-like pace but such excitement… It was wonderful.

So by Sunday afternoon, Anna was ploughing her way through the second of the three readers and Faith was about halfway through the first of the three readers. There was a moment of quiet in my schedule which I decided to spend in the living room working on a needlework project. I was on one sofa quietly stitching. Anna was on another reading and Faith was on the third one reading. It was so pleasant. And then I suddenly recognized the atmosphere that was in the room. It was that very special kind of quiet you feel in a library. That quiet that can only be created by focused minds completely absorbed in the delicious activity of intently reading.

That is the first time I have experienced that very special kind of quiet in my house. And it went on and on as these are readers with a long attention span. Ah… I smiled a smile of absolute contentment. That’s it. They are officially “readers” now and what is more, we will be able to share reading quietly together in the same room for years and years. Ahhh…

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

We have just discovered a blog that has already proved to be a wonderful resource for our family. For a little over a year, Hindu Blog has been featuring short, nicely written posts about a great range of topics germane to Hinduism or, more properly, Santana Dharma. Content covers everything from shifting ideas about the origin of Hinduism to biographical information about Indian saints; timely mentions of Indian festivals; games, books, comics, toys and films for children; books of interest for adults; a smattering of current events; brief philosophical discussions on vital subjects and more.

While Sahaj Marg is not in any way Hinduism, it could perhaps be somewhat considered a revolutionary turn in the millennial long thought process that comprises Santana Dharma. In any case, we abhyasis are occasionally enjoined to learn something of ancient Hindu thought as a way to broaden our general understanding of values and spiritual laws. As an adult, I eagerly read what I can of Indian literature. If nothing else, it gives me the perspective to appreciate Sahaj Marg all the more (one of my favorite activities, by the way) and be thankful for my great good fortune in having spent my entire adult life within its light.

Everyone here delights in learning some of the ancient stories and ways here. Both in terms of being abhyasis and in terms of homeschooling our children towards a generous world view, we take care to see that well chosen stories, histories, games and films related to ancient India are a regular feature in their curriculum. We have already discovered some new resources to investigate for the children from reading over the Hindu Blog which we look forward to pursuing.

The heritage from ancient India is a very rich one. Far richer and more salient than most westerners know. One of the great joys inherent in our freedom to homeschool our children is that as parents/teachers/guides we can provide them with a wide array of materials and opportunities to drink deeply of both the West and the East. It is yet one more way that we are privileged in guiding our children towards developing “western minds and eastern hearts.”

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie