Next week, next year, next century

People DO think of next week. They think of last week. But they're doing their thinking from inside their present selves.

Balance depends on the fulcrum. Be solid. Be grounded.
Be whole, and be here.

SandraDodd.com/peace/becoming
photo by Sandra Dodd

The surest path

Leah Rose wrote:

Learning to parent mindfully, keeping my focus in the present, making choices towards peace, towards help and support, is not, as it turns out, much of a gamble or a risk. It is the surest path to connection and trust.

—Leah Rose

SandraDodd.com/later/unschooling.html
photo by Julie D
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Living with the truth

Response to someone who wanted reassurance that unschooling would create success:

I can't guarantee anything for anyone else, nor for my own family. I know what does damage, and I know what might help.
. . . .
Every second of every day things happen or don't happen and there are consequences.

I would say if you don't want to gamble, don't unschool, but the truth is that everything else is a gamble too.


SandraDodd.com/guarantee
photo by Sandra Dodd, left over from playing a board game online—
click to enlarge it for candid desk details
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Amazing life

Just live life amazed. —Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/discovery
photo by Lisa Jonick
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Angels and devils

In my lifetime, every part of a hamburger and every part of pizza has been considered good, or terrible; will-kill-you or the best part of it. Even the grease has been reviled and then redeemed.



SandraDodd.com/error
photo by Sandra Dodd

Safe and happy—how?

Eva Witsel wrote:

I can spend my energy on limiting my child's world so that he will be safe and happy or I can spend my energy on helping my child learn the skills to navigate our world himself so that he will be safe and happy. I think the latter has a better chance of success in the long term.

—Eva Witsel

SandraDodd.com/energy
photo by Sandra Dodd
(color photo, in daytime,
though it's spookily dark)
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Huge and wonderful choice

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 Sandra Dodd, of a long-ago Kirby