Archive | October 2011

Have you met Pachamama?

I have a friend who was taking a mythology class in college this session. She sent me an email titled, “have you met Pachamama?” and included this great little picture:

I just love her! Love her serene little face and the yin-yang type of background.

“Pachamama is a goddess revered by the indigenous people of the Andes. Pachamama is usually translated as Mother Earth, but a more literal translation would be “Mother world” (in Aymara and Quechua mama = mother / pacha = world or land; and later widened in a modern meaning as the cosmos or the universe).[1] Pachamama and Inti are the most benevolent deities; they are worshiped in parts of the Andean mountain ranges, also known as Tawantinsuyu (the former Inca Empire) (stretching from present day Ecuador to Chile and northern Argentina being present day Peru the center of the empire with its capital city in Cuzco).”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachamama

Natural Learners

Oct5

As long as I have homeschooling on the brain lately, I want to quickly share some things I had saved in my drafts folder. This will most likely be my last homeschooling post for a while and I’ll return to my usual topics!

Quite some time ago (pre-children), I wrote the following in response to a 2001 Time magazine article about homeschooling that bemoaned both that homeschooled children were “not allowed to have a childhood” (forced to be miniature adults and grow up too soon) and that they somehow also “miss out on learning ‘real world’ skills” (in school) such as conflict resolution that will benefit them in adulthood. In the article, a strong statement was made that I’ve never forgotten that riding the school bus is a valuable and important part of growing up and imparts irreplaceable life lessons summarily denied to poor, deprived homeschoolers. (Luckily for my social and personal development as a complete human being, I did get to ride a school bus to our local Vacation Bible School each year for a number of years.)

Truly, is there anything inherently valuable about things like riding the school bus? I lived my childhood and it was rich and full in a way that is impossible to create when you spend 8-9 hours per day institutionalized. Why is sitting at a desk, artificially grouped with children all your own age, being spoonfed information, and restricted from developing your own personality and preferences (i.e. everyone must learn algebra), what childhood “should” be? Why do so many adults go through crises as adults that involve having to “find themselves” and develop their “true selves”? I would hypothesize that is because they never got to explore themselves and their identities in childhood, which is actually the ideal time for such growth and development. Government schooling is somehow seen as the better way for children to spend childhood instead of letting children develop, grow, and learn in the actual world in which they will live as adults.

I also had saved a quote about natural learners from the book, Providence, by Daniel Quinn. Quinn is the author best known for his philosophical novel Ishmael, which I read as a young teenager. I remember considering it to be a life changing and fascinating read, but it has been a LONG time since I read it—my primary memory of it is how he challenges the very human conception that we are the “end” result of evolution. That’s it, evolution has finished, we’re here now. Anyway, Providence was less illuminating/interesting. It was primarily an autobiography with an emphasis on how the author developed Ishmael (which went through more than 6 versions over a period of like 13 years) as well as an exploration of his religious development (which includes some time spent in a monastery and ends with animism).

While he was writing his book, he worked in educational publishing and I appreciated his remarks about education:

One of the great, persistent myths of education in our culture is that children become reluctant learners as they grow older. In fact, what they become reluctant about it going to school, where they’re bullied, regimented, bored silly, and very effectively prevented from learning…We know what works for children up to the age where we ship them off to school: Let them be around you, pay attention to them, talk to them, give them access to as much as you can, let them try things, and that’s it. They take care of the rest. You don’t have to strap small children down and teach them to speak, all you have to do is talk to them. You don’t have to give them crawling lessons or walking lessons or running lessons. You don’t have to spend an hour a day showing them how to bang two pots together; they’ll figure that out all by themselves–if you give them access to the pots. Nothing magical happens at the age of five to render this process obsolete or invalid.

Rebirth: What We Don’t Say

Oct2

A new self did emerge. This is what women do not tell each other. I want to say it here: You will die when you become a mother and it will hurt and it will be confusing and you will be someone you never imagined and then, you will be reborn. Truthfully, I have never wanted to be the woman I was before I had children. I loved that woman and I loved that life but I don’t want it again. My daughters have made me more daring, more human, more compassionate. Their births have brought me closer to the earth and they have helped me pare my life down to its essentials. Writing, quick prayers, good food, a few close friends, many deep breaths, love, plants, dancing, music, teaching-these are the ingredients of my/this new self. I waited for this new self in the dark, in the bittersweet water of letting go, in the heavy heartbeat of learning to be a mother, against the isolation, I grew and emerged laughing and crying and here I am, sisters and brothers. Rebirth: What We Don’t Say | The Sage Mama.

One of my favorite songs to listen to after my miscarriage experiences had a refrain of, “it is dark, dark, dark inside.” While previously not connecting to “darkness” as a place of growth or healing, during these experiences I learned that it is in the darkness that new things take root and grow.

As I’ve shared before, one of my favorite quotes about postpartum comes from Naomi Wolf, A mother is not born when a baby is born; a mother is forged, made. The quote I shared above from this “Rebirth” article touches that place in me—that motherhood results in a total life overhaul and a new, enriched identity. (This article also made me think of first postpartum journey which I wrote about here.)

In a previous post, I wrote the following about the idea that giving birth and mothering leaves permanent marks:

I’ve also come to realize that despite the many amazing and wonderful, profound and magical things about birth, the experience of giving birth is very likely to take some kind of toll on a woman—whether her body, mind, or emotions. There is usually some type of “price” to be paid for each and every birth and sometimes the price is very high. This is, I guess, what qualifies, birth as such an intense, initiatory rite for women. It is most definitely a transformative event and transformation does not usually come without some degree of challenge. Sometimes to be triumphed over or overcome, but something that also leaves permanent marks. Sometimes those marks are literal and sometimes they are emotional and sometimes they are truly beautiful, but we all earn some of them, somewhere along the line. And, I also think that by glossing over the marks, the figurative or literal scars birth can leave on us, and talking about only the “sunny side” we can deny or hide the full impact of our journeys.

During Pam England’s presentation about birth stories at the ICAN conference, she said that the place “where you were the most wounded—the place where the meat was chewed off your bones, becomes the seat of your most powerful medicine and the place where you can reach someone where no one else can.”

(I’m experimenting with PressThis for this short post)