Beauty and usefulness

The world isn't sorted into serious and funny, or beautiful and dull. Things are often quite mixed up, and changing with the moment, and the light, and the seasons. New things get old.

Some radio stations (which aren't as vital as they once were) play songs that are sixty years old, or more. A hundred years ago, 1920 provided the first public radio broadcasts of a news program (in Detroit, Michigan). A college radio station aired music, a sporting event and concerts (Schenectedy, New York). An opera was broadcast for the twenty radios that could receive it (August 2020, Buenos Aries, Argentina).

Our receipt of sound is more varied now, and we can bring in humor, debate, tragedy, and re-reuns of those things from earlier times. Text and images have been added. We have more choices than we have time to choose them, these days.

Look for beauty and usefulness. Choose joy and uplift, from the river of output that pours around us.

SandraDodd.com/emotion
photo by Sandra Dodd, in Liverpool one time

Stories of radio in 1920, which I looked up not knowing I really was writing this 100 years after initial public broadcasts, came from Wikipedia's History of Radio page. Good coincidence, for 2020. We are living in the flow of history.__

Time and attention

Schuyler Waynforth said, in a presentation in Australia:

When I stumbled across unschooling I grabbed hold.. . . The more I read and the more I experienced and the more I tried, the more that I could see a framework. It was my engagement that made a difference. It was my time and my attention and my focus that kept things moving better and more smoothly than it could ever have done without me.

—Schuyler Waynforth

SandraDodd.com/nest
art and photo by Holly Blossom

Absent witnesses

In a discussion about mothers of young children imagining their actions are being witnessed, I wrote:

I did that early on with my favorite La Leche League leaders. I invited them early, into my super-ego, to talk to me when they weren't there. 🙂 Trying to keep their voices in my head made me remember that I wouldn't want to do things that would keep them from feeling good about my progress and their assistance.

I think it's the purpose of saints (imagery in the house or worn on the body) or amulets or other religious or superstitious objects. I mean I think it's natural and ancient, among people, to have absent witnesses. The feeling that ancestors can see what we're doing is common in some cultures (and, honestly, ours—it came up at my house on Tuesday at a memorial for a dead friend, even though most there were atheists; it can be soothing, and inspiring).

SandraDodd.com/witness
photo by Jihong Tang

An unschooling nest

There is some physicality to the "nest," but much of it is constructed and held together by love, attitudes and relationships. Shared memories and plans, family jokes, songs and stories shared and discussed, all those strengthen the nest.

Building a Nest
photo by Roya Dedeaux

Two for one

I like photos with reflections. Sometimes they're clear and sometimes they're interestingly changed. Always, though, you see the two things.

Connections and contrasts are the way brains sort. What is the same, and what is different?

Covers of songs; different paintings of the same object or building or person; woodworking projects made from the same pattern by different carpenters with different types of wood... Examining pairs is like playing a game of "spot the difference." Each difference might have a natural explanation, or was a conscious decision on the part of an artist.

What a rich life you and your children might have in those moments that seeing, playing and learning are the same valuable substance.

Two things, two words
photo by Dan Vilter

Finding yourself with your children

Being where you are, in a mindful way, with the potential and the tools to be still and know it, is the portal to a better life. Call it what you want to, finding yourself with your children will put you in a good place.



Finding
yourself
with
✵

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SandraDodd.com/being/healing
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Happy mom

A mom was worried about intellectualizing too much, and not being fully present with her young child. I wrote:

Nobody's still and at kid-speed all the time. But if you can figure out how to do it sometimes, then you can choose to do it, or choose to go faster, but to bring him along in a happy way.

Instead of saying "Come on, let's go!" maybe you could have picked him up and twirled him around and said something sweet and by the time he knows it he's fifty yards from there, but happy to be with his happy mom.

From the "possibilities and joy" section of Parenting Peacefully
photo by Sandra Dodd