Hear this

"I found early on      the less I talked           the more I was heard." —Karen James

SandraDodd.com/peace
photo by Colleen Prieto

Something worth listening to

Robyn Coburn shared this story in 2006. That was fourteen years ago. Jayn turned 21 this week.

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Recently I annoyed someone (stranger at a kid's birthday party) whose first question on hearing that we homeschool was "How do you get her to listen to you?" by instantly replying "I try to say something worth listening to."

I thought she meant listen in general. She got this look of utter irritation on her face and started on about what a discipline problem her 7yo son was and how much more difficult it would be to have to keep his attention on school subjects and make him work at home. What she was really asking was "How do you make your daughter do her work?"

The paradigms we live under are so broadly apart from the mainstream that even the language doesn't cross over—we use the same words and have different meanings.

Yet of all the children at the birthday party Jayn was the one who came up to me a couple of times just to give me a quick kiss and say what fun she was having.



You can read more by Robyn here: Robyn Coburn
and see some of the Barbie tableaux that Jayn was making in the days mentioned at Barbie in Romeo and Juliet

photo by Jayn Coburn, years ago

Antiquery

Some antiques are never in a store or a museum. What others show you as old and valuable might be wonderful, but be on the lookout for other elderly objects, minding their own business without being fancy.

History lives in all of that.

SandraDodd.com/history
photo by Sandra Dodd
(click for another angle, with mountains but no trough)

Angels

Music is so divine that people like to think of angels making it. The instrument pictured, with the cherub musicians, is named after the Greek goddess Calliope, one of the muses, a daughter of Zeus. Two religions are involved already, in that 19th century steam-powered music machine. Also, it having been made in the late 19th century, it was an engineering situation involving the latest technologies. I couldn't decide whether to link this to Connections or to Mechanical Music, so here are both links. The green and flowery French Calliope down on that page is a video I made, and I went around the back to show the punch card that plays the particular song. The one pictured above works that way, too. You can go exploring from home!

photo by Sandra Dodd

The motion of their own spheres

Looking out at our offspring, they are aligned in a certain way from our perspective, but they're not paused and gazing back. They are in the full motion of their own harmonic and intersecting spheres, spinning ever further away from us, and we marvel to see the celestial show.

SandraDodd.com/magicwindow
photo by Heather Booth, who wrote "My holiday window dream come true."

Frosty

Life produces some fragile, fleeting things.

Cass Kotrba photographed frost so beautifully that you can see the individual ice crystals that formed on the grass, in northern Colorado.

Some people live where this doesn't happen.

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You can click it for a larger image you can zoom in on better.
some other fleeting things
photo by Cass Kotrba
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I do believe...

Here's a fairy door. That is clearly what it is.

Are fairies real? We all know that word, and there's that door.

"What aspect of some particular subject involves objective truth? What is folklore or mythology? What literature or fantasy has come about based on that subject or item? Consider dragons, or India, or snakes, or rainbows. Checklist Abe Lincoln, the discovery of fire, or the depths of Lake Superior. Plot WWII, Japan, electric guitars, or Egypt."

Disposable Checklists for Unschoolers
photo by Rosie Todd
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