Light and kindness

Light can come from you, today, in small ways. If you are gentle and patient when you help a child, that creates peace and comfort. If you smile at a stranger, give someone a seat, or hold a door, you have transformed a moment. The light you add to their day can warm your own soul, too.

Kindness lights up the world.

SandraDodd.com/inspiration
photo by Sandra Dodd, in Australia, in 2014
I wrote at the time "The water was SO GREEN—green like light, like light through green-tinted glass."

Happily and directly, see your children

This is the end of something about a collection of pessimistic statements by parents, about kids:

How many millions of times more than on my puny little collection have parents said those things to and about their kids as though saying it made it true?

But just hearing what we say can change us.

Hearing the negativity and the implied threat and the explicit insults can help us become softer, and more flexible and more thoughtful and original.

Speaking or writing without thinking is a little like driving a car with a blindfold. Others get hurt, we get hurt, the car gets wrecked.

Speaking or writing without thinking is like operating a relationship with a blindfold, with ear plugs, going "LA LA LA LA, I DON'T HAVE TO LISTEN TO MYSELF!!" all the whole time.

How can one see her own child directly without hushing, pulling out the earplugs, and looking at him?

—Sandra, of
SandraDodd.com/ifilet

If I let him, he would never...
If I let him, he would always...
If I let him, he would do nothing but...
photo by Sandra Dodd

Privacy and dignity

This regards the way I helped make peace between kids when they argued:

The reason I used the method of speaking to each child separately, and ME going back and forth, rather than summoning them to where I was is that I was trying to comfort them and help them be safe and to be better people—people they would be glad to be. They don't like it when they're all frustrated. If I could tweak sibling behavior and comfort the aggrieved child, and then go to the other one with comfort and ideas, each was better prepared, in private, without a witness knowing what he was "supposed to do" the next time. That was important to me, to give them some privacy and some dignity, and some time to think without other people looking at them or praising my suggestion, or criticizing them further.

SandraDodd.com/peace/fighting
There's more on the topic on Joyce's site: Siblings Fighting
photo by Sandra Dodd
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The distant future...

If you're looking up at the Sky of Imagined Tomorrow, you're going to stumble on something with your very next step. Look at where you are.

SandraDodd.com/moment
photo by Colleen Prieto
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Compassion and kindness

Robyn Coburn wrote:

I think that any time we get caught up in the idea that the child is "being disrespectful" (self-focused thinking) it can be harder to get back to thinking about what they are feeling, the need is they are expressing, and how to help them either fill the need, or cope with it being impossible right now, with compassion and kindness.

How do we as parents show that we respect our children, that we are parenting respectfully? One big way is by genuinely listening to them. One way is by being honest with them about our own feelings, and telling the truth about events, or unexaggerated truthful reasons about why things can or cannot occur.

—Robyn Coburn

SandraDodd.com/robyn/respect
photo by Sarah Scullin

Fun and interesting

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

My motivation for homeschooling was for learning to be fun and interesting whether first grade or twelfth grade.

As a learner I tend to absorb whatever runs by me whether it's from teachers droning or an engaging movie. That's why I did well in school. But it made no sense that school needed to be dull when outside of school was fascinating. I knew there had to be a better—funner—way to learn.

So that was my primary motivation for looking into homeschooling and ultimately choosing unschooling.

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/hsc/interviews/joyce
photo by Cátia Maciel

Nice is better

Change takes time. Don't send the bill. Don't "be nice" for two months and then say "I was nice and you weren't any nicer to me!" Be nice because being nice is better than not being nice. Do it for yourself and your children.

SandraDodd.com/betterpartner
photo by Ester Siroky
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Take joy in life

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

Unschooling requires you to take joy in life. It requires you to appreciate the wonders of the world. Every minute you spend being cynical and paranoid is a minute of your life with your children that you have wasted and can never get back again. During that minute, you could have had a relationship-building experience together, but you created negativity in your lives, instead.

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/negativity
photo by Gail Higgins

Life, thought and learning

Parents new to unschooling tend to worry that some activities are good preparation for life, but others are frivolous and should be forbidden or discouraged. Life and thought and learning, though, depend on connections being made. And the more points of information about anything at all being made inside an individual, the more points there will be to connect.

SandraDodd.com/connections/jokes
photo by Irene Adams

Finding more excitement

A mom once wrote:

I am ready for his Obsession with these [Yu-Gi-Oh] cards to be gone.

A dad named Lyle responded:

He's learning about the cards. He wants to learn to duel. He's found something that fascinates him, and has a deep passion for, and you don't want to help. I think you're the one with the obsession.

The mom:

We all went to the [aquarium] over Valentines Weekend! Learned a lot about Fish and Water, and wildlife.

Lyle:

Cool! Sounds great! And when you can show the same excitement about every other thing he does, you will be officially deschooled!

You're still looking for the learning, and I know that's a tough habit to get out of. But you can do it, with a lot of conscious effort on your part. Going to the aquarium is not better than dueling or playing a GameBoy. Different, but not better. I'll bet that the kids he knows talk more about dueling or video games than they do about fish and wildlife. He's in touch with what goes on around him, the people he knows and the things that they do. Including you. He enjoys Yu-Gi-Oh AND the aquarium. If you try real hard, you can do that too!

🙂
Lyle

That's the end of something longer, and interesting, at Deschooling and Games

The image is from an "Aquarium" page on a large Yu-Gi-Oh wiki page, which probably didn't exist when Lyle was writing to the mom quoted above. You can see the word "aquarium" translated into several languages, and more, there.

Many good moments

I don't make resolutions, and I think they're a bad idea. Deciding today what I want to hold important a year from now sets me up for failure.

Deciding that I want to make many good moments tomorrow, though, I can do with confidence and the expectation of success. I can't live a year at a time. I can't live a week, nor even a whole day at a time. I can only make a choice in this moment (or fail to remember to do so).

SandraDodd.com/moment
photo by Karen James (of beach art)

Learning let loose

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

Don't worry if you don't know the answers. Anyone can look up the answers. Few can ask the questions.

As a real-life example, by watching Xena and reading Little Town on the Prairie, my daughter was exposed to three references to Julius Caesar, Brutus, and Marc Antony. She doesn't "know" Roman history now, but she's got a hook or point of reference to build from tomorrow, next week, three years from now: "You remember Julius Caesar. The guy Xena hates."

Unfortunately we learned in school that learning is locked up in books and reading is the only way to get to it. It's not. It's free. We're surrounded by it. We just need to relearn how to recognize it in its wild state.

—Joyce Fetteroll

Five Steps to Unschooling
https://sandradodd.com/joyce/steps
photo by Roya Dedeaux

King of the Monsters

Sandra Dodd to Deb Lewis:

If I could describe all your writing in just a few words, it might be "Peace, humor and scary monsters." Dylan's life has involved a lot of Godzilla and that ilk. Scooby Doo and Godzilla.

Deb Lewis:

Yes, a lot of Godzilla, beginning when he was very little. And then any movie with a monster, or any book about monsters. And then all kinds of horror and science fiction. Godzilla was the gateway monster, though, and it started with a movie marathon on television. I couldn’t have guessed then, when he was three years old, that he would find a lifetime of happiness in horror! And I didn’t know then that his love of monster movies would lead to learning to read and write, finding authors, making connections to other cultures, (and more movies and authors) and connections to music, theater, poetry, folklore, art, history... It turned out to be this rich and wonderful experience he might have missed, and I might never have understood if I’d said no to TV, or to Godzilla, King of the Monsters.

Before Dylan was reading or writing really well, he’d meticulously copy the titles and dates of movies he wanted, and request them from interlibrary loan. All that writing, and all the time spent watching movies with subtitles helped him read and write better. I remember the feeling of joy and wonder, mixed with some sadness and loss when he didn’t need me to read movie subtitles to him anymore. I learned so much about learning.

There's Even MORE at
Montana to Italy via Godzilla
(an interview with Deb Lewis)
photo by Deb Lewis

Conversations and interactions

The middle of a longer article:

They grew up with exposure, context, experiences and knowledge of those things mathematics is designed to describe. Our oldest son, Kirby, worked in a games store from the time he was fourteen, and was running tournaments for Pokemon, Magic the Gathering and other such structured strategy games, in the store and at hotels in town for several years. The knowledge required to play those games and even more to organize, judge and score tournaments, is huge.

When Kirby was 18 he took his first math class, at the community college. Like a musician who can't read music, he was baffled at first, but once he understood the notation, he soared, and had the highest test score in the class.

To some people reading this, it might seem there was no "higher math," but what we have done is create a home in which algebraic thinking is a standard part of conversations. Our interactions are analytical and involve factors and projections. They see the concepts and they use them.

SandraDodd.com/math/unerzogen
(There's a link there to the published German version.)
photo by Belinda Dutch

How much?

Unschooling doesn't need to be expensive, but anyone choosing unschooling simply to save money is making a mistake. If parents don't want to spend any money on games, toys, museums, out-of-town trips, books, or whatever it is the kids might be interested in, then unschooling will not work at their house.

One doesn't need to be rich to unschool, but it takes dedication and focus, creativity and resourcefulness.

SandraDodd.com/unschoolingcost
photo by Jihong Tang

A changing environment

Many parents want to change the child, instead of changing the child's environment by (in large part) changing themselves.


SandraDodd.com/being
photo by Chrissy Florence
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Stages, and stars

The first stage is all the fear and uncertainty and angst.

Then comes deschooling and noticing how much of one's thoughts might be school-based and how easy it is for adults to belittle and discount children. That will take a year or so.


After school starts to recede it will be like the stars showing on a clear dark night in the country. They were always there, but you couldn’t see them for the glare of the sun or the city lights. So now you'll start to see that they're not all the same, and there are patterns, and a history, and there's science, mythology, art, and then the moon comes out! And then you hear coyotes and owls and water moving somewhere… what water?

It might be like that, or it might be exactly that. But until you stop doing what you were doing before, you will not see those stars.

After a few years of reveling in natural learning and the richness of the universe, if you or your children decide to take a class it will be an entirely different experience than you would have had when school loomed so large in your vision of the world.

That's all of page 37 (or 40) of The Big Book of Unschooling,
which leads to SandraDodd.com/stages
photo by Sandra Dodd
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---

This is repeated from a July 2012 post, to which someone responded "Beautiful. This is one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing on unschooling."

Longterm love

Young love was fun. Longterm love is different—different things are fun. Familiarity. Having a good woodpile. Memories. Projects. Grandchildren.
. . . . Sometimes we start to recite one of our repeat arguments, but we remember it's a re-run, and jump to the end, or trail off. They're about feeding cats (how to), or putting tools up (one of us is too short sometimes, and figures "on the bench" is close enough), how to do laundry (mostly we do our own now, and it pisses me off that his isn't totally ruined for his not following my instructions).

I guess the trick is to know it's about cats, tools, and laundry, and not about the soul of the other person.

—Sandra Dodd, 2018

Originally on facebook, now at the bottom of SandraDodd.com/spouses (slightly longer there)
photo by Rachael Rodgers

Figuring out what helps

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

Think about how you feel when you are "out of sorts." What will help you? What do you want from your family? I doubt it would help you for your husband to threaten, "If you behave badly again I'm going to take away your cell phone." You WANT to feel better, happier, nicer, right? What you need is support for doing what you, deep down, want for yourself.

Same with your kids. Lots of times that means to help them have the chance to be alone to recenter themselves.... Your kids don't KNOW yet what helps them—your role is to help them figure it out.

—Pam Sorooshian

Attentive parenting
photo by Julie Daniel

Rational perspective (cool!)

Deb Lewis wrote:

My mom was a kind person, but she was a negative person. Something was always wrong, something was always going to bring about the next big war, the end of the world, the destruction of human kind. As she saw it, we were all about to be thrown into chaos every day I can remember from my childhood. It wasn't good for me. I can tell you that it hurt my relationship with my mom, and made me resent, and mistrust her. Don't do that.

Even though you know there are worrying things in the world, even if you're sure you're right, every time you laser focus your attention on whatever those problems are, you're super heating your worry, and chances are you're losing rational perspective in all that steam.

—Deb Lewis

SandraDodd.com/indignation
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Doing and being

They don’t live to grow up. They’re living in the present. They don’t relate to questions about what they will do later or be when they’re grown. They’re doing and being now.

SandraDodd.com/sustainable
photo by Colleen Prieto

Let things flow

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

What's your favorite thing to do? Watch movies? Read a book? Garden? Go to Disneyland? Why don't you just do that all the time and nothing else? I mean — if it is your favorite, then doesn't it give you higher utility than anything else? Why do you ever stop doing it?

The answer is that as you do more and more of something, the marginal utility of doing even more of it, goes down. As its marginal utility goes down, other things start to look better and better.

When you restrict an activity, you keep the person at the point where the marginal utility is really high.

—Pam Sorooshian

Economics of Restricting TV Watching of Children
(and it's not just about tv)
photo by Sandra Dodd

Positive and sweet

Find beauty and hope wherever it can be found. Say and think sweet things about your children. If people can be positive and sweet, it doesn't matter so much where they do it. Being better is better.

Deposit the good stuff.
photo by Jesper Conrad
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Focus on the relationship

Create a situation where the children are calm and at peace and glad to be there.

More "calm and at peace" posts

The quote above is from the end of Learn Nothing Day - A Conversation with Sandra Dodd, from July 2024. The title words were spoken by Cathy Koetsier, my interviewer in the podcast linked here.
photo by Cátia Maciel

From the inside

Debbie Regan wrote:

From the outside, unschooling may look like no chores, no bedtimes, no education, no discipline, no structure, no limits, etc. But from the inside, it's about learning, relationships, living with real parameters, partnership, navigating turbulence, making connections, joy, curiosity, focus, enthusiasm, options, following trails, fun, growing understanding, opening doors...

—Debbie Regan

SandraDodd.com/priorities
photo by Ve Lacerda
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History around us

Question:

But suppose I have a block about, say, world history; if I let my child lead, and she never thinks to think about world history, and I never bring it up because it bores me to tears, might she not be missing out on something she might like?

My response:

Movies, historical novels, biographies, costumes, historical recipes, museums—it couldn't be that ALL those things would bore a parent to tears. Textbooks bore nearly EVERYONE to tears.

SandraDodd.com/barrageQ&A
photo by Hema Bharadwaj

Guidance and options

Robyn Coburn wrote:

Intentions matter. Guidance offered from the place of partnership and trust has a different feeling, avoids rebellion, and is just plain less focused on the trivial. Guidance means optional acceptance instead of mandatory compliance. Guidance means parents being safety nets, not trap doors or examiners. Guidance facilitates mindfulness. Directives shut it down, and may even foster resentment instead.

The idea of Unschooling is for parents to be the facilitators of options, the openers of doors, the creators of environments of freedom, and the guardians of choice, not the installers of roadblocks and barriers. Unschoolers are making the huge and wonderful choice to renounce our legal entitlements to be the authoritarian controllers of our children's lives, and instead choose to be their partners.

—Robyn Coburn

SandraDodd.com/choicerobyn
photo by Tara Joe Farrell

Improving the flow

One of the nicest thing I do for my husband is to withhold criticism. I could (and used to, when we were younger) say too much, comment too much. Letting things go by lets peace and love flow in.

P.S. It works with children, too.

SandraDodd.com/betterpartner
or the same article in German: Bessere Partner werden
(though the quote is from a discussion)
photo by Sandra Dodd (it's a link)
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An aha! moment

Sylvia Woodman wrote:

When I first started going to LLL (La Leche League) meetings there was one mom (not a leader) in the group who was very gung-ho about boycotting Nestle and other companies who were connected with evil formula companies.

And I remember so vividly the leader very gently saying something to the effect that she could never keep track of all the companies she was not supposed to support and she found it much simpler to just spend time every day supporting moms who wanted to breastfeed and that eventually that would have a greater and more positive effect on the world she lived in.

It was an aha! moment—don't focus on the negative or how awful the situation is—take small steps toward positive change. Denying my kids Nestle chocolate isn't going to bring the formula industry to its knees. But helping my neighbor who just had a new baby, bringing her a meal or unloading her dishwasher are small things that I can do that will make a huge difference for my neighbor.

—Sylvia Woodman

SandraDodd.com/factors
photo by Sandra Dodd

Significant shifts

Jen Keefe wrote, about "deserving" things:

One of the things I have found so wonderful about learning about unschooling is that whatever I learn in relation to my family life carries over to the rest of my life. I cannot remember the last time I felt like I "deserved" anything—that is a significant shift in the way I experience life and it has created a different childhood for my children.

—Jen Keefe

SandraDodd.com/deserve
photo by Holly Dodd

Step up

Who you are, no one else can be.

Who you are now is not who you were before. Who you are today is not who you will be tomorrow.

Breathe and smile and step toward your future.

SandraDodd.com/gratitude
Holly in Quebec; photographer unknown

Lots of little yeses

One big okay is a problem.
One giant "I'm changing everything" can make kids nervous, and could undermine their confidence in the mom's regard for them.

Depending how limited it was before, the mom shouldn't be surprised if there is a binge, or a frenzy. So go easy, and keep reading other things about unschooling, gradually, gently.

SandraDodd.com/betterchoice (Making the Better Choice)

Lots of little yeses are better than one big one (both for the mom and the kids).

Lots of little decisions are better than one unsustainable big one.

SandraDodd.com/problems/toofar
photo by Janine Davies

Generous partners

When you make a deal with someone—and I don't care if it's marriage, partnership, a little business, a lemonade stand, going on a car trip where you're both going to spend half and half on gasoline and food—the problem with 50/50 is that it never, ever works. Because one of you owned the car, one of you drove more, one of you had the sleeping bag, one of you had the charge card, and it's not going to be 50/50 and there's going to be something to argue about.

SandraDodd.com/50/50
photo by Olga Degtyareva

Enriched lives

Sonya Austin wrote:

When our children take the space they need in order to experience things, it doesn't make our lives as parents more difficult, it's something that makes our lives enriched and abundant.

—Sonya Austin

SandraDodd.com/inspiration
photo by Karen James

Kindness and a joyous attitude

Hema Bharadwaj, in an interview:

Sandra:
If you could give all unschoolers something by magic to help them succeed, what would it be?

Hema:
Kindness and a joyous attitude in the face of any adversity, small or large. This is what I wish for myself too.

"India, New Jersey,and the Civil War"
photo by Ravi Bharadwaj

Generating joy

When you learn to give, it starts to flow, and the others around you are soft and giving and a family can generate a lot of joy!

Focus, Hobbies, Obsessions, transcript of a chat
photos by Sandra Dodd,
of Keith Dodd's ice display

Philosophy and principles

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

The core idea of the unschooling philosophy is that humans are born learners. That's what John Holt observed over and over. Children will learn best when allowed to learn what, when and how they want.

That doesn't, of course, tell anyone what to do. The philosophy helps you make choices. The principles -- such as peace, trust, respect, support, helpfulness -- help you stay on course when situations make it difficult to.

—Joyce Fetteroll

The unschooling philosophy
photo by Christine Elizabeth Milne

Together; partners

If the only right choice is the mother's choice, then the mother will win when she gets her way, but the child will lose. The only way for the child to win would be for the mother to lose. That's what adversarial relations look like.

Be your child's partner, not his adversary.

Choose partnership many times each day.

SandraDodd.com/partners/child
photo by Amy Milstein

Yes, and more yes

Colleen Prieto wrote, in response to someone having written "We are adhering to a culture of self sufficiency":

All three of us (my husband, me, and my son) do things for each other throughout the day, asked and unasked, that we're all certainly capable of doing for ourselves. . . . .

Saying yes, and more yes, and more yes can indeed lead to wonderful things.

The part I left out is very sweet, and is here:
Serving Others as a Gift
photo by Shannon McClendon

Knots and knotwork

Knot tying can lead to all kinds of history and geography. Hunters, traps, climbing, ships (wrapped bottles, in addition to all kinds of sail rigging and tethering knots), and cowboy stuff, and...


see two great comments on this other one (and links)

The photo isn't of tied knots, but drawn and painted knots, by Keith Dodd. Keith knows lots of knots, with rope, but I don't have photos. What's there looks confusing. It's a three-legged tooled-leather-seated folding stool with a painted shield leaning on it.

Native habitats

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

It's important to observe radically unschooled kids rather than kids in general because kids in general are shaped by the relationship they have with their parents and their freedom to explore. Kids who are controlled behave very differently from kids who are supported in their explorations. They are as different as zoo animals kept in cages are different from animals who grow up in their native habitats.

—Joyce Fetteroll

Understanding Unschooling
photo by Rippy Dusseldorp
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Things are connected

Jen Keefe wrote:

I’ve found it fascinating (I don’t use that word lightly) how many different things are connecting for me, as an adult, through learning to unschool well. I didn’t understand how things connected from school. Wars, geography, fractions, the Russian language... it was all individual stuff. I moved dutifully from one stand alone period to the next trying to do the bare minimum work not because I was lazy or stupid but because none of it *made sense*.

Now, daily almost, I’ll watch or read or hear or be talking about something and I’ll think "oh my gosh! That’s connected!" Or, "That’s why that happened there."

—Jen Keefe

SandraDodd.com/jenkeefe
photo by Kristin Cleague

Children as people

Me, 2005:

If the parent can come to think before acting, so can the child.
   "Wait. That's Holly's. Do you want another one?"
That neither praises the child for acting rashly nor condemns him. It's the way you might deal with a person who isn't also a child. . . . .

This is important when people are going to be respectful of children. It's the soul of treating children as people. But it's not about teaching or discipline. It's about mindfulness, respect, honesty and compassion.

SandraDodd.com/tone
photo by Rippy Dusseldorp

Thought, emotion, awareness

from a discussion on eye contact:

When someone recommends turning full on toward the child, that means don't keep reading your newspaper or your computer screen. Pause the video. Put down the gardening tools. It doesn't mean stare at the child until he finishes his story. It means to be WITH him, with him in thought, and with him in emotion if needed, and with him in awareness.
. . . .
I think being side by side with someone is a good way to focus attention away from eyes yet still on them, so they can speak without the intimidation and confusion of your face right in front of them.

Leaning on a Truck is an article about communicating with children in that way.

SandraDodd.com/eyecontact
photo by Wesli Dykstra
in North America

but it's a lot like yesterday's photo which was taken
two hemispheres away

Don't stop too soon

Some people define unschooling as a relationship (or lack of one) with school. Others define it as a relationship (or potential damage to a relationship) with their children.

It seems our detractors say "If my kids aren't in school and I'm not using a curriculum, I'm unschooling."

It seems to me that stopping there will lead to frustration and failure and the continuous little additions of rules and lessons and requirements.

It's enough if one is looking toward school and wants to declare the kids are out AND they're not going to use a curriculum. So at that point in the sort (if we were writing a computer program), they've passed through two gates:
     School? if no, then homeschooling
     Curriculum? if no, then unschooling

But will that last years? It's the label of a moment. "Now what?"

It's not a computer program. For me it's about natural human learning, not about not-school and not-curriculum.

SandraDodd.com/lists/help
photo by Jo Isaac
in Australia

Healthy and useful

Learning and changing is fun. It's healthy. It's useful.

SandraDodd.com/authentic
photo by Gail Higgins

Even simpler

From some questions after a conference:

Q: When your child asks about something, for example "How do you write this letter?" do you focus on that until they are bored and let them bring it up again, or do you work on it over the course of days, weeks, months, until they are satisfied?

This was a written question, so I didn't get to ask whether by "letter" a piece of correspondence was meant, or a single figure. Same answer for both, though. I would just answer the question, sketching one example, and then see if the child wanted more information or not.

But if a single was meant, this morning (9/8/02) Holly asked me "What's the best way to make a 'q'?" I wrote four different ways, not knowing what she was asking. She was wanting the plainest printed "lower case" letter. So she picked the one that best matched the lettering she was doing, and she was happy. Total "lesson," fifteen seconds.

SandraDodd.com/questions
photo by Holly Dodd

Pretty great

My favourite response of Ethan's to many questions that are geared to have one right answer is "It depends." I used to think (because of my own schooling), "What does it depend on? The answer is ____. Period."

Now, because Ethan has proven to me so many times that is really *does* depend, my own mind hardly searches for that one "right" answer any longer. I love the expansion of the many possibilities! It's so much more fun to think about more than one answer, and so much less limiting to live in a world with more than one right way.

It took me a long time to see that. Ethan has never seen it any other way. How great is that!?

—Karen James
(original)

SandraDodd.com/betteranswers
photo by Marin Holmes

Expressing joy

Gratitude is good for the soul, for the spirit, for the mind, for the heart.

Negativity and discouragement spiral down a hole.

...When you hear or read something pure and joyful, maybe just bask in it, or add to it. Please try to think and make a choice, though, about whether to respond or to be quietly grateful that someone is courageous enough to express joy in a dangerously negative world.

Gratitude and choices
photo by Cathy Koetsier