OF GARDENS AND GARDENERS

Planting and Communion

In the third week of March, according to our yearly ritual, the teachers at The Living Ethics School brought wheelbarrows of soil, bags of worm castings and bean and squash seeds to the children’s play yard. The teachers readied stacks of planting pots, trowels and seed packages, and lined up trays to house the pots close by. The children gathered around eager to plant the first seeds for the spring garden.

As the adults explained about the earthworm casting nutrients for the baby plants, the children helped stir it into the soil. Then each filled a pot with the prepared soil to welcome the seed.

Our rule of gardener’s thumb is that the sensitive gardener establishes a relationship of tender appreciation and reverence for the nature and the gifts of each seed he plants.

Aware that energy exchanges connect all living beings, the adults modeled tenderly holding and speaking to each seed. Knowing the power of gratitude, the planters thanked each seed for the fruit it would produce before placing it in the little hole in the pot. Knowing the value of a sense of wonder to enrich life, the adult planters expressed their amazement that from each tiny seed would come nourishing food and many more seeds.

Cultivating the Soil

Gardeners know the foundational importance of feeding the soil. While the seeds sprout in the greenhouse, the gardener ascertains that the garden soil is rich in macronutrients and micronutrients –compost, potash, minerals, etc. to feed the micro-organisms that will help feed the tender seedlings. Biodynamic and organic gardeners appreciate the differences between living soil and lab-concocted soils filled with vermiculite and requiring chemical fertilizers. A handful of living soil in one hand and lifeless soil in the other tells all.

Similarly, gardeners of human seedlings know the foundational importance of optimal nutrition for children. Fresh produce grown in nutrient-rich living soil feeds them best, while processed food products laden with coloring, nitrates, 4-5 syllable chemicals and/or sugar feed them least. A year in the life of each child through flu, cold, and allergy seasons reveals much.

 Planting Seedlings

By mid April the adult and child planters marveled at the earthworms in the garden while digging planting holes. Again tender care, expressions of appreciation and a sense of wonder blessed the planting of each seedling.

Experienced gardeners note that the baby plants respond exuberantly to leaving the hothouse pots to be placed in the garden. Quickly, the seedlings rooted in the garden out-distance same-age counterparts remaining in the greenhouse.

Because of temperature sensitivities different members of the Plant Kingdom sprout earlier or later in spring. Radishes, peas and potatoes require earlier planting than beans, squash, tomatoes and corn.

Experienced gardeners of child gardens know the same is true for the human seedlings. For example, distinct individual proclivities determine readiness for academics. One child may learn to read at 4, and another at 8. By the time they are 12, given that each loves to read, their intelligence cultivated in a biodynamic, child-responsive environment, they are likely to both be reading at the same level with ease.

Rainclouds of Potential

Gardeners observe that garden plants respond differently to water from rainstorms than hose water. While water from hoses promotes measurable growth, dynamically charged rainwater induces profuse growth.

Similarly, rainclouds of ideas charged with attractive potentials water child gardens with novelty, meaning and creativity for a profusion of growth.

The future date approaches when schooling hot houses are only historical accounts of a failed experiment; and the proliferation of two-dimensional tests is only a relic of early 21^st century ignorance.

When the world’s children are thriving in organic child gardens; when generations take root in curricular soil that feeds the soul, watered by rainclouds of adult creativity, insight, and responsiveness—then will rainbow hues of bright-eyed enthusiasm, joy, and passionate, self-driven learning bless human seedlings. At last, the gardeners of human potentials will cultivate and celebrate bountiful harvests of multi-dimensional genius.

OF MOLECULES AND MEN

Q: Why do you favor replacing an emphasis on boundaries with more inclusive terminology for conflict-resolution. Clear boundaries are important to most people.

Recent revelations in science challenge the scientific dogma that many of us have heard all our lives. For example one truism has been that survival of the fittest is the main driver of a strong evolving species. In the survival of the fittest scenario, a singular species expands its borders at the expense of another. According to this view when humans behave this way we are following a biological imperative established in nature for billions of years.

This dominant view permeates our lives, even to the point of emphasizing personal boundaries when faced with conflict.

Likewise we have been told that the DNA we are born with remains unchanged for life. This view that change must be imposed from an external source, such as a system, parent or teacher, has profoundly affected our relationships with one another - especially children.

Yet modern research has shown that DNA intelligently reorganizes in response to challenges facing the organism.  And this reorganization consistently favors inclusiveness and wholeness for lasting and far-reaching solutions.

In Earth Dance: Living Systems in Evolution Elisabet Sahtouris brings to light a new and more complete view of living relationships. Yes, competition and survival of the fittest has played an important role in the evolvement of life, including the earliest bacteria. But in time, these life forms competing for resources have invariably created a life-threatening environment for themselves.

The first protein molecules multiplied in the early chemical soup that was the young earth. Eventually, they joined in partnerships to facilitate enzymatic activity.  Grouping together in the form of a cell generated a mutual support system for the molecules and the cell that housed them.

At one point the competition for nitrogen of the monera (one-celled organisms) that formed the organic soup in Gaia’s waters caused a crisis. Faced with possible extinction, Life instead reorganized the DNA to accommodate a new solution from a new resource - solar energy. 

A couple of billion years later still another crises arose. The gas excreted by Gaia’s bacteria filled the atmosphere. Life was again in danger of extinction from the poisonous gas, oxygen, and the accompanying stronger sunlight!

But again the DNA of these organisms responded with inventive solutions. Some learned to produce enzymes to render oxygen nonpoisonous to themselves. Others learned to make ultraviolet sunscreens. Still others learned to live together in colonies housed by an protective skin of dead cells.

So, what does this have to do with human relationships and in particular adult/child relationships?

A competitive worldview, emphasizing exclusive rights and boundaries between human beings, has triggered an epidemic of self-interest at the expense of the whole. We see this all the way from huge corporations that use up both Earth resources and human beings by desecrating and enslaving life; to human relationships ruled by self-interest and competition.

Can it be that this crisis facing the latest dominant species on Planet Earth, offers yet another momentous challenge?

Based on historical precedent on our planet, to the extent that we learn to re-pattern our relationships with one another and children to facilitate unity and wholeness we can affect positive changes down to the level of our DNA.

Indeed, avant-garde science ascertains that we work, play and relate in a unified field. We will know the forerunners of this latest expansion into unity and wholeness by its by-products – inclusive language and mutually supportive behaviors. To the extent we learn the language of encouragement and inspiration, and engagement through example and invitation, we help secure an Atmosphere of Love and Understanding in a momentous planetary grouping – the Human Family.

A SENSE OF WONDER

 Q. To provide lasting value for the child, which deserves first and foremost emphasis: rules, skills & formulas; or self-expression that flows from the very soul of the child?

In the book Quantum Creativity, the philosopher/physicist Amit Goswami relates the following story:

Two boys in France were given the task of taking a short trip and then coming back and reporting on it. When they came back, the first boy was asked, “So, what did you see?” The boy shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing much.” … But the second boy, in answer to the same question, said with luminous eyes, “I have seen so much.” Then he proceeded to describe it all in glowing detail. … The second boy grew up to be renowned novelist, Victor Hugo.

By way of contrast, I recently listened to a concerned mother speaking to her child’s tutor about long e word spellings. The concern over, and discussion of, this small detail of spelling continued for 20 minutes. Meanwhile her child escaped to play on nearby swings.

Does it seem heretical to care far more that children want to say something, i.e., that they desire to write their own stories on paper, regardless of misspellings? Written articulation is a return, at a higher level, to the toddler stage of learning to speak. The little one self-refines his speech and self-develops an amazing complexity of speech patterns because he is immersed in oral communication. Also, importantly, it is because he wants to want to communicate with those around him. Similarly, the child gradually learns to see and self-correct misspellings organically through immersion in compelling literature, and a triggered desire for self-expression. After writing, children are amenable to a degree of editing by an appreciative mentor, because the spelling is in the context of their creativity, and they like for their spelling to be correct.

Like windows closed to the soul, the emphasis on correct spelling first and foremost deflects the breezes of self-expression. The greater danger is for closed doors and windows to continue to deflect the urge to written articulation of one’s discoveries, ponderings and stories throughout life.

Fearfully, modern society confines its offspring to a speeding train of minutia for 12+ years of schooling. Compelling panoramas pass by unnoticed, in the belief that this is the track to the destination—successful adulthood. But is it?

In the 1950’s Donald Mckinnon conducted a study of the traits of 40 of the most distinguished architects in the United States. The two control groups included (1) a group of architects chosen randomly from a directory, and (2) architects who had worked with the 40 most creative architects above.

In a series of multidimensional tests, the 40 architects, who were the most sought after for their brilliant designs, scored significantly higher in two traits: sensitivity to feelings and a strong sense of aesthetics.*

How did schooling come to mean forcing the child’s brain to fixate on rule-driven bits of data, rather than awakening a sense of wonder at the world we live in? Far from being drones to perform programmed tasks, human beings are multidimensional beings, with the potential become eager explorers and purposeful creators. The task of the teachers of such beings is to stimulate a sense of adventure, anticipation and eagerness to learn more about the world. A child must FEEL something if his learning is to be meaningful and lasting.

Modern psychology now recognizes that feelings and sensory associations anchor meaningful and lasting learning. The place for academics is within the context of bringing the world to the child, i.e. triggered by the textures, colors, scents, sounds, tastes and aliveness of inviting surroundings. In this case, the honing of academic skill is a secondary impulse. The primary source is an awakened quest for increasing knowledge and self-expression as the child, regardless of age, relates to living kingdoms. Equally inspiring are evocative renderings of his ancestral heritage of great quests, discoveries, inventions, and masterpieces.

As the child reaches adulthood, knowledge of academic minutia may be vital for a successful vocation. However, overarching accustomed ordinariness, the skill of passionate self-expression vitalizes a fulfilling, beyond ordinary, avocation.

*D.W. Mckinnon, “The Personality Correlates of Creativity: A Study of American Architects,” in Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Applied Psychology, Volume 2, edited by G.S. Nielsen, 11-39 (Copenhagen: Munskgaard, 1962).