Pockets of the Future Blog

Striving to live now as all will live in the future.

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    • Archive for August, 2008

    Aug
    18

    A Key Homeschooling, Homesteading, Self Sufficiency Supply You Can Buy in Bulk

    Posted by pockets

    There is just no proceeding with a thorough Charlotte Mason education without a working printer ever at the ready, right? You never know when you will need to print a revised schedule, some copywork or a newly discovered out of print book that will add the perfect touch to your geography studies. You could stock those phenomenally expensive ink cartridges in your office supply closet but there is a better way.

    For several years I ran into comments by people who re-filled their own ink cartridges for their printers. It was one of those things that sounded like a good idea but I would have to think about and research and figure out if it really were an effective strategy. And how hard is it to fill one of those cartridges anyway? Would this really work? There are always hurdles to trying something new, no matter how practical.

    Then I ran across Encore Ink. It is owned by a homeschooling family with seven children 9 and under. The mom’s family blog is even linked to their business site. The familiarity of another homeschooling family was enough for me to believe that refilling ink cartridges must be a good thing so I took the plunge. I am really glad that I did. I find that having bottles of ink on hand is as great for my peace of mind as is having bins full of grains and beans waiting for me in the basement. And just as with grains and beans, buying ink in bulk is a great money saver.

    Their site is easy to navigate. You find the make and model of your printer and choose the ink that is specially made for your printer. If you can’t figure all of that out, you can email them and they will figure it out for you. And it turns out that filling the cartridges is very easy. Mom’s do much more complicated things in a day than fill ink cartridges, I can tell you. And their customer service is wonderful. I ran into a problem with not having the directions I needed for doing colored ink refills and they emailed them to me immediately.

    Knowing that I will always have enough ink on hand to print out whatever project I am working on whether it be homeschooling related or drafts of books we are writing or homesteading research we need to study closely is really good. Taking just one more little step towards self sufficiency and frugality is just great.

    From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
    Leslie

    Homeschooling with a Vision, Invaluable Homesteading Tools, Preparedness
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    Aug
    17

    The Engaged Silence of Our Sunday Mornings

    Posted by pockets

    After many, many years of making do, our Sunday mornings finally have a quiet rhythm and the kind of engaged silence that can carry you through the week to the next Sunday morning. I feel a settling in my heart from this. We have made it through a long phase.

    Parents of young children today deal with a number of hassles. Diapers, bottles, sippy cups (loathsome things that are impossible to keep clean), strollers and car seats. Some parents of a thoughtful bent and strong backs can dispense with a number of these things from the outset. Bottles and sippy cups need never make an appearance in most homes. Strollers are only needed when going on long jaunts if slings and backpacks are available. Some particularly in-tune parents even mostly dispense with diapers. But no matter what, you have to have car seats and you generally find yourself using diapers a lot and strollers at least some. When you are the parents of “many” young children, years and years of using these things starts to take a toll. No longer needing them becomes a milestone. No longer needing diapers is a huge milestone and frees up so many resources in terms of time, money and space. For us, no longer needing car seats was also huge. (Well, our youngest still sits in a booster seat but he can handle that himself so it hardly counts in our minds.)

    These are common milestones celebrated by legions of parents. But what we have here is a different sort of milestone. What we have now are children who are old enough and skilled enough to keep themselves quiet while my husband and I meditate together on Sunday mornings.

    For years and years, my husband and I each took turns watching the children while the other one “took satsangh” or meditated every week. When we went places for Sunday morning group meditation, there generally weren’t any accommodations for children so Paul would drive them to a park or I would walk them around the neighborhood of the home where we were meeting. Sometimes there was a physical place for the children at the home or facility but there was insufficient adult supervision or our children were too young to be left or whatever. So even in those cases Paul and I took turns alternating between meditating or watching the children. This was tough. We both longed to participate in group meditation each week as individuals and we were aware that attending group meditation together had many benefits for us as a couple but there was nothing we could do about it.

    The whole question of TV and videos often came up. To my mind, TV and videos should really be added to the diapers, strollers, car seat list although most parents don’t see it that way. For many parents in general and for many abhyasis (practicants in our system of Sahaj Marg) in past years, plunking the children down in front of the TV or in front of a Disney movie while group meditation went on was considered good enough. Paul and I have never felt that way and have gone to the trouble of developing spiritually based education programs for young children just so that they too would benefit from the special opportunity of Sunday mornings.

    However, for the past several years we have lived too far away from any Sahaj Marg centers to be able to attend group meditation anywhere other than at home by ourselves. Therefore we have been forced to use the TV and videos during meditation time. Ironic, I know. We at least went out of our way to choose things for the children to watch that pertained somehow to spiritual (or at least religious) matters so that they could derive some possible benefit. OK. Well, at least Paul and I got to meditate.

    One of the many things I didn’t like about this stopgap solution was the noise of the TV. Even with the volume off, I find that turning a TV on changes the atmosphere in a place. Even if you can’t hear it, you can feel it. Our homes have been quite small so we could both hear it and feel it. Not exactly a meditative atmosphere but at least with the volume low and doors shut and perhaps a white noise maker on, it was quiet enough for us to meditate. That was very important for two spiritually hungry parents of many young children!

    But now… but now all that is swept away. Last summer three of the four younger children learned how to read. Since then, they have increased their reading skills and appetite for books enough that sitting down with a long chapter book is fun for them. Our oldest child is now regularly reading Sahaj Marg literature itself during meditation times and our 13 year old can successfully entertain himself in a number of ways as long as the younger children have their full attention elsewhere. So now we have what we need in place. Our oldest reads Sahaj Marg literature and is available in case of problems. Our 13 year old reads or works on the computer. Our 10 year old goes out and reads in the milking barn. Our 9 year old reads in the living room. Our 8 year old reads in her bedroom and lately has been reading aloud to our 6 year old. Today for a change our 10 year old and 6 year old played chess. Paul and I meditate in our bedroom and someday we will be meditating in the meditation building we are constructing right outside.

    Hallelujah! Everyone has space. Everyone’s mind is usefully engaged. There is no noise, no fussing, no unexpected disagreements. Not only is there no noise, the house fills with that special silence that can only flow out of hearts and minds fully engaged in an absorbing occupation. Not only do Paul and I now enjoy a tranquil atmosphere within which to take satsangh, but the children are getting a taste of the special atmosphere that is created by time that has been “set aside”. They are experiencing firsthand the different feel of a sacred atmosphere and learning through osmosis that a sacred atmosphere is always waiting there for them to create. It just takes intention, attention, planning, and (sometimes) patience.

    May our Sundays become ever deeper and, in so doing, may they spill over into our weekdays so that they become the pivot point of our family life.

    From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
    Leslie

    Ennobling Our Home, Raising Our Children as Torchbearers, Uplifting Sundays
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    Aug
    03

    Adrenal Fatigue and Blogging

    Posted by pockets

    When a system is functioning properly, you don’t attend to the inner workings because you don’t need to. Rather you busy yourself with gathering inputs, feeding the inputs into the system and then managing the outputs as they appear. Fussing around with the innards of the system is strictly up to engineers of various sorts depending upon the kind of system being used.

    As far as physical systems (aka bodies) go, mine used to be one that generated a tremendous amount of energy seemingly on its own. This suited me just fine because I have always liked to do things, and learn new things, and muck about with lots and lots of new ideas. I have loved to work ever since I was a little girl because you learn so much that way. In fact I had the rather odd childhood problem of not being allowed to engage in meaningful work as a child and young person and this was a great grief to me. In any case, my nearly inexhaustible store of high energy was something I simply accepted and appreciated over the years as necessary for achieving goals of all sorts.

    Alas and alack, I can no longer take my system or my energy for granted. I collapsed in May with severe Adrenal Fatigue. I don’t particularly attribute my case to the unnatural wear and tear of modern living as is said to be the case for many people, but rather to an abusive childhood. I was actually first diagnosed with adrenal fatigue when I was but 21 years old and life since then has not been exactly restful so any kind of recovery could not have been what you might call “spontaneous.” I didn’t know what to do about it then and was in so much physical pain that I don’t know how much the adrenal problem really got my attention. I wondered about it off and on many years later during my continuous pregnancies and breastfeeding of 15 or so years but no one I knew or worked with had a solid idea of how to safely support/treat the adrenals while pregnant and/or breastfeeding. More time passed.

    This past May I was having a conversation with my husband about a very traumatic event that took place in my early 20s. I was always vaguely aware that this event related somewhat to my parents but I had never thought about it much. My husband pointed out some very obvious truths that that situation revealed (he is a champion at this, by the way) and I experienced a profound emotional shock from this sudden awareness. A few days later, I collapsed. It took me a little while to figure out what was wrong with me and to piece together this time line but I am glad that I did because it is important information critical to moving forward.

    I don’t have the mental energy to write fully about what adrenal fatigue is as of yet so I will put a few links here for anyone interested. Adrenal Fatigue, Adrenal Burnout, Adrenal Fatigue 101, Adrenal Health in Women, What Causes Adrenal Fatigue.

    Having all of my energies drop to so low a point has shown me many things already. Two that are most pertinent to blogging are that just having good ideas requires healthy adrenals and then writing about those ideas requires healthy adrenals. That implementing the ideas would require an energy pack and strong adrenals was always apparent even to me but there is nothing like having a good idea and then feeling exhausted from just that single act to make you appreciate the subtle nature of energy and the power drain that is the brain. I am also experiencing that writing exhausts me. Gosh, reading and writing are two activities I have always done like breathing. Always and forever. However, a head injury back in the late 80s put some brakes on my reading and this adrenal collapse has put the brakes on my writing. Life surely does present limitations, doesn’t it? Since I am a person who has to read and needs to write and has a mind that is a good idea factory, for crying out loud, I have to learn to work within these limitations. This will be one of my many challenges in recovering from severe adrenal fatigue and adapting to forever weakened adrenals no matter how much I recover.

    All of which brings me to blogging. For the past year, I got up in the wee hours in order to type out the ideas, insights and experiences that pushed at me to be expressed here on the Pockets of the Future blog. Working on the computer makes me really tired but I persisted because I just had to. I felt compelled. On top of that, we have had problems with the blog since the spring. Wordpress problems and computer problems and then in June, our blog was hacked and we almost lost the whole thing. My husband worked mightily to get the thing fixed and it took a long time. He was victorious in the end but I lost some recent posts which just defeated me. Yes - now I will make copies in Open Office. I have lost posts twice now and it is not an experience I care to repeat.

    So this is why I have not posted in so long. Bloggers need strong adrenals… who knew? In the face of this revelation, I am still going to go ahead and add Adrenal Fatigue to our list of categories. According to Dr. Wilson:

    Adrenal Fatigue affects an estimated 80% of people living in industrialized countries at one time or another in their lives, yet it has been ignored and largely untreated by the medical community.

    Given that it is now a predominating factor in my life and that I am fairly certain that my husband and one of my daughters particularly is affected by it as well and that it affects so many people in so many places, I cherish the hope of writing about it here from time to time. May it be so.

    So, dear readers, please be patient with me. It took me weeks and weeks just to write this brief post and I am now exhausted from the effort. I can’t tell you how much that frustrates me. Even with my mind held under the water of exhaustion I have a half dozen posts on the tip of my tongue, so to speak. If I don’t write for a while, know that we are still here and that I am working my way towards another post and that the farm is still progressing which you can see on video and the children are wonderful. If, on the other hand, by some miracle I start to post too much, send me an email in which you very politely (we adrenal fatigue sufferers are a very emotional, sensitive lot) suggest that I not do that.

    OK, that is it for now.

    From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
    Leslie

    Adrenal Fatigue, Health Related, Inner Development
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