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."

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

Peaceful and engaging

Deb Files wrote, on facebook, and gave me permission to share:

The children are grown now and we all thank you for the inspiration and support that gave us confidence to follow a peaceful and engaging childhood for them. I used to say that I wouldn't know if we'd done things really well until they were grown. Now I know.

—Deb Files
(Martialia Deb Maling Files, on fb)

I love "peaceful and engaging," and appreciate the feedback.

Peace links
and
Strewing (for engagement links)
photo by Rosie Moon

Artifacts

I have seen toys, in museums, just like things I played with as a child in the 1950s and 60s, and that my children played with in the 1980s and 90s.

History is happening all around and through us.


Seeing things from the past can trigger stories that might never have been told without the presence of those artifacts. I missed the days of radio dramas and serials. By the time I was listening to radio, it was all music. The stories had moved to the TV. All of my older relatives had radio stories—of war news, comedy routines, inspiring speeches and of mystery stories presented in several voices, and with sound effects.

We still want stories, news, humor and inspiration, but the sources change, and will change some more.

Antiques elsewhere here
photo by Sandra Dodd

---

I wrote this four days ago (what's above). Three days ago, I started listening to So, Anyway...: A Memoir by John Cleese (read by the author, who is best known as a member of Monty Python). He has talked about radio shows four times in eight chapters, telling stories of his childhood memories, and of radio producers who seemed to think, when television was new, that TV would not supplant radio programs.

Knowing this post was ready to go made those stories seem like magical coincidence to me. Jung called those coincidences "synchronicity."

Encouragement back and forth

An unidentified reader wrote:

I wanted to say that this blog, out of all the blogs in the blogosphere, encourages me the most. It lets me know that my actually natural inclinations as a parent (to love, to focus on relationship, to care for the inside more than the outside) are what I should be listening to. It is so easy in this world to get mired down in how we *should* do something. I admit to falling for this time and time again. I just wanted you to know this blog to be a true inspiration for how to be not only a "good" unschooling parent, but just a good person. Thank you.

That was late 2013, but I came across it again in 2024. It's one of those I saved here: Feedback—Just Add Light and Stir

SandraDodd.com/feedback
photo and quote by Sandra Dodd; image by Holly Dodd

Interested in learning

"I'm more interested in learning what they think of the world than in telling them about the world."

—Linnea King

SandraDodd.com/inspiration
photo by Sandra Dodd

The open flow of real-world sharing

from 2004, Sandra Dodd:

The best thing unschoolers can do is to unschool well. The best thing those who are interested in helping others come along the same path can do is explain what helped it work well.

Reading other families' personal stories, hearing about paths that didn't work well and others that did is what helped me when I was new to this, and that's what I've been involved in helping happen ever since—real unschoolers sharing their real experiences.

Some people don't want to share in public and that's fine. Some people share things in public that turn out not to be true, and that's not cool. But over the years, many hundreds of unschoolers who first found one another through AOL's message boards, or at conferences, or through e-mail correspondence have met other unschoolers in person, and each person must ultimately gauge for herself who to emulate or trust or to go to for inspiration or whatever. There is no central board certifying unschoolers or conference organizers or listowners. It's the open flow of real-world sharing.

In 2024 I'm still offering a hand.
SandraDodd.com/help
photo by Linda Wyatt

Shuffle it up

What unschoolers do to help other unschoolers is to share how they came to unschooling, and the effect it has had on their children and their home lives.

It helps for new unschoolers to read some, then try some, maybe meet some people if they can, read more, try more, maybe listen to something or watch something, try more, and shuffle it up that way. . . . .
Those new to unschooling need most or all of the same things others needed when they were new: local information, access to laws and policies, reassurance, suggestions for deschooling, answers to questions (although the answers are ever more easily available as people collect up the best answers of the past). They need inspiration and ideas.

If you're new: read, change a little; read more, change more; repeat.


From page 19 or 20 of The Big Book of Unschooling, which links to the help page: SandraDodd.com/help

photo by Dan Vilter

What or where, and when?

Nancy Wooton wrote:

My husband wasn't too sure about unschooling at first, and was also adamant the kids be in bed and stay there at a certain time. I'd just come home from a one-day conference—probably the first time I heard Sandra speak—with an armload of interesting toys and books and a head full of inspiration. One of the books was about finding Titanic, and included a paper model, which I decided Mommy should put together (I really like that kind of thing 🙂).

I was working on it after the kids had gone to bed, but then-7-y.o. Alex got up. He looked at the book and we talked about it as I worked; we discovered what a fathom was, and that Titanic came to rest on the continental shelf, not the very bottom of the ocean, and I'm sure some more interesting things, but those stick in my mind.

About a half hour later, Alex went back to bed and I kept gluing. Dh came in and said, "So that's unschooling." He'd overheard the conversation. I said, "Yeah, that's unschooling." Never had an argument after that. 🙂

—Nancy Wooton

Stories of Late-night Learning
photo by Sarah Dickinson, of a seawater-flooded playground in Port Stewart, Northern Ireland. It's the closest photo I have to the right waters, and the Titanic was built in Belfast.

Keep an open mind

Even if you don't decide to unschool, keep an open mind about where and what your children could be learning, and where they might find the inspiration to become something like world-changing scientists.

---

That is paragraph 5 of 5, of "Gilligan's Island and Star Trek,"
page 152 (or 140) of The Big Book of Unschooling, noting, in part,
Dr. Robert Sapolsky's crediting of Gilligan's Island, and Dr. Mae Jemison's of Star Trek
for their abiding interest in scientific research.

This photo of Holly Dodd and a braiding pattern on a pony was taken to illustrate a quote from Professor Christine Alvarado about... well just go and read it, please.

A good person

Someone wrote:

"I wanted to say that this blog, out of all the blogs in the blogosphere, encourages me the most. It lets me know that my actually natural inclinations as a parent (to love, to focus on relationship, to care for the inside more than the outside) are what I should be listening to. It is so easy in this world to get mired down in how we *should* do something. I admit to falling for this time and time again. I just wanted you to know this blog to be a true inspiration for how to be not only a 'good' unschooling parent, but just a good person. Thank you."

That comment was left by "unknown," when the blog was three years old, in 2013.

Just Add Light and Stir is ten years old now.

Thank you for reading.


The comment was at Gradually Climb, October 22, 2013.
photo by Sandra Dodd

Light up the world

I try not to use similar photos too near to one another, but look at these, by four different moms, who saw the sun, made an image, and shared it with Just Add Light readers. For this beauty and generosity, I'm grateful.

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.

photo by Lisa J Haugen photo by Gail Higgins photo by Karen James photo by Ester Siroky

SandraDodd.com/inspiration

Really out there

Ronnie Maier, years ago:

The collected minds on unschooling.com were my primary inspiration. Actually, my first reaction was, "These people are really out there!" But as I read a lot (LOT) of information about homeschooling, those unschooling voices kept calling me. The seeds were planted, and I began to see in our lives—even while our kids were in school—what the people "out there" were talking about. By the time we officially pulled our kids out of school, I was 80% an unschooler. One math lesson after that, it was closer to 90%.

—Ronnie Maier

SandraDodd.com/day/meme
(The message board named was once marvelous, but is long gone.)
photo by Chrissy Florence

Seven Years of Adding Light

Just Add Light and Stir was started in 2010 as a daily inspiration. Somehow it didn't occur to me that it might last seven years. So here begins Year #8.

I hope some of the posts have helped you be patient, and to smile.

Thanks for reading!

Last request for donations until 2020: SandraDodd.com/2017
beautiful stripey photo by Jill Parmer

Sorry I missed posting yesterday; I was up late
playing Chronology at the Free to Be Unschooling conference.

Divergence

It's cool when something can be more than one thing. When you think of how to categorize an object, an idea, or an action, if you can give it more than one designation, it will have more "relatives"—more connections in the world.

Art? Apple? Fruit. Food. Gift. Inspiration, memory, photo-op!

Most things are many things.

SandraDodd.com/connections
photo by Brandie Hadfield

Who inspired you?

At a couple of conferences, I've asked participants to share. The question was:
Who inspired you? Who helped you move toward better parenting and unschooling?

They might not even be unschoolers. They might have said one thing, one time.

Please think about this. If someone said or did something that changed the course of your life in this direction, and if you want to acknowledge that (with or without their name), please leave a comment or write to me and I'll add a new section of acknowledgements on the page linked below.

SandraDodd.com/inspiration
photo by Dylan Lewis

What they think

"I'm more interested in learning what they think of the world than in telling them about the world."

—Linnea King

SandraDodd.com/inspiration
photo by Sandra Dodd

God speaks through light

I got a daily calendar in India, each page having a different picture of Ganesha and a quote. One is:

God talks to His devotees through intuitive feeling, through friends, through light and through a voice heard within.

I really like that intuition and "a voice heard within" are separate. Having grown up Baptist, "friends" were often considered to be the devil for sure. But best of all is "light." Inspiration and clarity, no doubt, but things look different in different lights.

SandraDodd.com/spirituality
photo by Sandra Dodd, of figurines brought home from India last year