Song of the Seeing Being, Moving in Slow Motion

Farewells from Whole Child/Whole Parent

Polly Berrien Berends

As the truly parently parent is the childlike parent,

As the truly nourishing parent is the nursing parent,

As the truly teaching parent is the learning parent,

As the truly freeing parent is the obedient parent,

As the truly unifying parent is the unified parent,

As the truly beautifying parent is the truthful parent,

As the truly creative parent is the beholding parent,

As the truly communicating parent is the listening parent,

So is the truly loving parent after all no parent at all, but only the loved child of God.

Song of the Seeing Being

The more we see that seeing is the issue in life, the more we look at everything for what it has to teach us.

The more we look at everything for what it has to teach us, the more we see that we are being taught.

The more we see that we are being taught, the more we know that we are loved.

The more we know are loved, the more lovingly we are seeing.

The more lovingly we are seeing, the more loving we are being.

The more loving we are being, the more we see that seeing is the issue in life.

[start over]

Dear Families,

      My hope is that these updates from parent & child classes are helpful to you.  As we look ahead toward the summer and the new school year, I want to make information available to you without these posts becoming an annoyance.  For current Rosebud children who are moving on to the Butterfly nursery, please let me know if you want me to keep you on the parent & child list as well next year.  For everyone else, I will assume that you wish to continue to receive information unless you tell me otherwise.  You can email me or call the school 341-5686 or tell me in person.  You can also visit the Dewdrop and Rosebud google groups page, click on Edit my Membership on the right side of the page, and click on Unsubscribe.

      As I have written before, Polly Berrien Berends' Whole Child/Whole Parent continues to provide me inspiration and insight.  I recommend her book.  Our school library will procure new, updated copies this summer.  One of my favorite aspects of Berends' style is that she places revisions and additional reflections in updated copies of this book--"This is what I thought 20 years ago, but here, now, are my additional reflections."  Her style of writing reflects her recommendation for parenting--rather than seeking an easy answer, we accept the challenges as an ever-continuing opportunity for development and growth.  At the end of her book, Berends reprises "The Song of the Seeing Being" and reframes the concept of farewell and good bye as "bon voyage"--or, for her, "good seeing."  

Here is a talk on orality, literacy, and excitement by Professor Barry Sanders--author of A is for Ox and founder of the Pasadena Waldorf School.  Although Sanders' style and topic may seem different from Berends', and although his piece provides a response to times of crisis in the broader culture, his complex search for simplicity and renewal in the human breath harmonizes with Berends' approach.  Like James Joyce (and many others), both Sanders and Berends help show us that the "longest way round is the shortest way home," that often to find the simple solution, we have to take the complex path.

        I will be presenting songs, music, rhymes, gesture games, and puppet shows at the Langley library on Tuesdays in July at 11am.  Some of the material will be familiar to your child.

Bon Voyage and Good Seeing,

William Dolde

Two more weeks of classes left

Dear Families,

       Thank you for coming to the festival yesterday, and thank you for bringing friends along.  Along with the school, I hope to host four festivals for young children a year (with children being invited to other festivals such as the Lantern Walk):

1)  An Autumn Festival, in which children take a walk and meet Mother Earth and other imaginative characters who give them gifts to prepare for winter.

2)  An Advent Spiral in the morning for young children.

3)  A Spring Festival, with Mother Wind, Sister Rain, Father Sun, and Brother Wind.

4)  A May/Summer Festival, much as what we experienced yesterday.

Although yesterday felt conclusive, we do still have two more weeks of parent & child classes.  I look forward to seeing you and your family in the weeks ahead.

With warmth and light,

William Dolde

Further Preview of Thursday's Festival

Dear Families,

       The forecast is for sunnier and warmer weather on Thursday.  Our festival is outside, and I am setting the Butterfly Room up for a summer puppet show (to which I'll invite everyone at 9:30am).  To preserve a sense of wonder and magic, the Butterfly Room will remain closed until the time for the puppet show; if you come as an 8:30am earlybird, be prepared that the weather may be cool. 

Whenever you arrive, feel free to start dyeing silks right away.  Because Brazilwood sawdust was unavailable, I am offering 3 dyes:

Osage Orange sawdust -- which generally produces yellow

Madder Root -- which produces orangey red or reddish orange

Annato -- another reddish dye in case the Madder is acting particularly orange

A challenge and blessing of plant dyes is that they produce slightly different results on different occasions.

Because I want the process to be more tangible, I choose not to use dye sacks or strainers; the sawdust or bits of roots are floating in the pots, and you may have to pick them off once you take your silk out.  Although someone seeking a "perfect" silk may find minor flaws with this method (idyes and rit dyes and other synthetics do a much better job of producing absolute uniformity if that is what you seek), parents and children in past years have found the process and results very satisfying.

Although the dye pots themselves are hot, I will have tubs for rinsing.  Once the silk has entered the cool water, children tend to love to help with rinsing.

Brief process description

1)  Put your silk in the first color for 5 seconds to 5 minutes (observe how others are coming out).

2)  As best you can, allow the liquid to drip back into the pot as you take out your silk.

3)  Rinse in cold water.

4)  Hang to dry (and keep track of your silks' location).

5)  If you want to dye in more than one color (stripes, tie dye, yellow sun in the middle with a red exterior, and soforth), please start with the osage orange yellow and rinse between colors.  This will keep the colors as true as possible for others.

If you preordered extra silks, I will have them set aside for you.  Because I have not submitted an invoice yet for reimbursement, it is easiest for you to pay me directly with cash or a check to William Dolde, and I will deduct this from what I ask back from the school (rather than flooding our business office with a bunch of checks).

It is probable that we will have extra silks even if you did not preorder.  After I get a sense of how many visitors we have, I will release extra silks.

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde

Pirates, Metaphor, Festival

Dear Families,

      We have class as usual this coming week (May 14 & 15).  From 8:30 to 10:30am on May 21, all families, friends, and alums are invited to our May and Summer Festival for young children and parents.  Thank you to parents who have let me know they intend to buy extra silks on that day.  You still have a chance to let me know--I will place the order this Monday.

There is no class on Friday, May 22.  School is closed.

We had a discussion about pirates, fairy tales, and metaphor yesterday.  Here are some thoughts about images I wrote for my nursery families that you may also find useful. 

In my most recent nursery blog post, I wrote at length about fairy tales, violence, and gender roles.  If this subject is of interest to you, you may wish to visit my nursery blog to read the latest entry (or anything that interests you).

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde

Helpful Article on Toddler Conflict

Dear Families,

      At Mayfaire I had a helpful and appreciative conversation with a parent about conflict and the permission to sometimes allow conflicts to evolve with children taking the lead toward the solution (while remaining close enough to provide security and physical safety if it comes to that).  When I took my RIE training in Los Angeles, one of my instructors, Bev Kovach, shared her article on assisting toddlers in conflict situations with us.  It is written for caregivers working with groups of children with one or two or three adults, not necessarily for parents or for teachers of parent & child classes.  As such, I have the following thoughts (some of which I shared with this parent on Sunday, or she shared with me).

1)  You will likely find Kovach's ideas consistent with ideas from Vanessa's presentation at WIWS last spring.

2)  When children are of different ages (toddlers and infants together; older and younger toddlers), we may have to intervene, defend, redirect more.  When children are hungry or tired, we need to intervene or redirect more.

3)  RIE's wisdom comes from Loczy in Hungary, which is shown to have fostered excellent child development (not just in light of being an orphanage).  In Loczy, the caregivers are incredibly consistent (same group of carers with children their whole first 3 years; same caregivers stay with Loczy for decades and decades), and their ability to refrain from intervening too soon leads to a more harmonious social network among the toddlers over time.  As parents, we may be in a variety of places all the time, and we don't know how other parents will react to a conflict at a playground or birthday party.  If we feel things might not work out for the best, sometimes our best option may be to come up with a creative redirection (excuse, pretend coughing fit) and decide that there will be other chances for our own to child to learn from conflict later.

4)  As Kim Payne quotes from one of my friends in Baltimore, "Don't just do something.  Stand there!"  Sometimes our calm presence is enough to help.  Sometimes our objective reporting ("both children are pulling on the rope") is enough to help children feel recognized so that they can find their own direction.  It is very helpful at these times if we can project confidence, calmness, grace, stability rather than fear and worry.

5)  The following imaginative picture (which I've written about before) works for me.  Use it if it works for you.  As you may know, Rudolf Steiner provided us with elaborate pictures of the spiritual.  Brian Gray, a teacher at Rudolf Steiner college (and rock musician in the house band), had a gift for translating Steiner to make his insights accessible.  Brian summed up a complex discussion with the following:  "So in essence, when we take care of pets or farm animals, we are practicing to become angels."  As angels tend to each of us, the quiet and removed and strong archangels tend to interactions amongst us.  It helps me, during tense times of conflict, to practice being an archangel--confident, strong, removed.

6)  This image may not work for you.  I've heard others use the term shadowing for being close to children to ensure safety and broadcasting or narrating for the factual, nonjudgmental reporting of what is happening.  Andrea Gambardella, Waldorf teacher of teachers, recommended that as teachers and parents we find our own metaphor to help during turbulent times.  When teaching the nursery class, Andrea meditated upon being a heavy stone in a river.  Water and currents might rush and dash and bubble and gurgle about, but the stone remains strong, steady, and consistent.  Whatever metaphor you use. I recommend finding one.  Our children learn a great deal not just from our words, but from our thoughts (or thoughts expressed by body language, gesture, and intentions).

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde

Preview of Spring/Summer Festival, Thursday, May 21

Dear Current Families, Relatives, Alums, and Friends,

You are invited to our parent & child Mayfaire and summer festival for young children and parents on Thursday, May 21, from 8:30 to 10:30am (you are also invited to the school's larger Mayfaire on Sunday, May 3, from 11 to 3pm). Feel free to come later if 8:30am is too soon. Here is a provisional schedule. It is an outdoor festival--rain, snow, or shine.

8:30 to 9:30am Arrival, conversation, outdoor play, silk dyeing
9:15am First set of Maypole dances
9:30am Puppet show
9:40am Outdoor snack (picnic)
10am Reprise of Maypole dances
10:10am Dancing to the fiddle
Continued outdoor play and conversation until 10:30am.

To celebrate the gifts of plants and sun and bring us toward a summer mood (when the sun's fire is manifest), we will be dyeing silks in brazilwood (which produces red/orange) and osage orange (which produces yellow) plant dyes. The school will provide every visiting family with 1 30x30 silk (a good size for making a cape with for a young child). If you wish to dye more than one silk, we will also be selling additional 30 x 30 silks at cost ($3 per silk), payable by cash or check to WIWS (cash would make the administrative work easier).

You might choose, for example, to dye 3 silks--one red, one yellow, one with a yellow sun in the middle of a red background. You might want to dye extra silks for older siblings, as gifts, and the like.

It will help us procure and mordant the right amount of silks if you email me (wdolde@gmail.com) to let me know if you plan to buy silks in addition to the one the school is providing you. Please let me know as soon as possible. If you are not sure, do know that we will try to have some extras on the day of the festival.

I will do the work of preparing the silks (mordanting with alum and cream of tartar) and warming the dye vats. If you feel inspired to try this at home, or if you wish more information, I recommend Joan Almon's First Steps in Natural Dyeing.

Here are a few pages to give you a sense of the book. I am experimenting with ways of sharing pdfs on line, so here is the same selection given to you in 2 different ways. Please let me know if option A or B works for you.

A. This is a version uploaded to scribd.com.

B. This version uses google's document viewer.

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde

Last Child in the Woods, walks at end of class

Dear Families,

     In preparing to view Where Do the Children Play (there is another showing at school this Wednesday night with a discussion), I was inspired to read Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods (available in the Kathrine Dickerson Memorial Library once I return my copy).  I recommend the book highly.  Even as we live in a place where nature seems relatively easy to access, Louv's book helps us as islanders (and friends near the island in beautiful places) frame questions about stewardship, safety, freedom, and exploration.  Louv encourages us to allow children to find secret spaces, to get dirty, to build and feel, to participate in nature and not just develop an abstract sense of nature.  Our school is blessed with its berry bushes, large amount of fallen logs in the woods, and absence of irritants such as poison ivy or poison oak (and the nettle, if one were to call this healthful herb an irritant, tends not to grow on any of the paths on which the nursery children and I walk).

       Louv's book and a thought to helping the transition to the Butterfly nursery class for your children next year or in a future year encourages me to offer the following:  after each Dewdrop and Rosebud class for the rest of the session, I will walk with interested families to the teepee near our school (the site where Mother Earth met us during the Spring Festival).  We'll probably leave at 11:10am or so (once everyone who wants to go has had a chance to get dressed for the outside).  Stay as long or as little as you want.  This is optional and not officially part of class, so if your child is exhausted and you need to leave (or if your child wants to stay on the swings at the Berry Patch playground), feel free to do so.   

       There are many potential benefits to this activity.  Here are a few:

1)  The clearing near the teepee is close to school (children can walk themselves at their own pace) so this will not be a forced march for the children (longer walks for parents have their place, too, but I have learned that young children can be quite satisfied with a shorter walk with more chances to explore, touch, smell, dig, and explore).

2)  The clearing has lots of uneven terrain to explore.  What we offer in playgrounds and curriculum such as gymnastics attempt to replicate the motor development activities humans have found in nature.

3)  We begin our nursery day outside and walk every day to the teepee at about 9:05am or so (once all children have arrived).  It will help the nursery next fall if a number of children know the way to the teepee.  Without judging the way other teachers might do things, I find--through my reading, observations, meditations, and books like Louv's--that young children benefit much more from a nature walk if they can go at their own pace and are not forced to hold hands or hold onto a rope (if we were an urban school with traffic or other perils I would of course adapt and do things differently).  In my nursery, I go towards the front, making sure children go the right direction while my assistant walks in the back with children who choose a slower pace (sometimes a much slower pace, but our method prevents this from causing tension or a power struggle).

       In the video, Where do the Children Play, a professor, after talking about the manner in which mass media can inhibit child development, suggests that he could train children to be environmentalists using the mass media because it is such a powerful teacher.  Louv (also appearing frequently in the video) would disagree; Louv worries, in fact, about some environmental organizations that do so much teaching of the mind but won't allow children to pick flowers, catch frogs, or build tree houses.  Louv writes about John Muir chasing gulls with his homemade gun as a boy (Muir was apparently a bad shot); Louv worries that if we try too hard to train children to always leave nature in peace as young children (not that we should encourage children to violate hunting laws), they will grow up with the sense of nature as an abstraction and feel, as adults, no connection or need to preserve wild and natural spaces.

  The professor in the media also suggests that children who do have a lot of media exposure have a richer vocabulary and know more about the world.  Louv, again, laments that children know about the Amazon rainforest but nothing about flora and fauna near their home.  I want to quote here Louv quoting D.H. Lawrence:

. . . Twenty-first century Western culture accepts the view that because of omnipresent technology we are awash in data.  But in this information age, vital information is missing.  Nature is about smelling, hearing, tasting, seeing below the "transparent mucous-paper in which the world like a bon-bon is wrapped so carefully that we can never get at it," as D.H. Lawrence put it, in a relatively obscure but extraordinary description of his own awakening to nature's sensory gift.  Lawrence described his awakening in Taos, New Mexico, as an antidote to the "know-it-all state of mind," that poor substitute for wisdom and wonder:

Superficially, the world has become small and known.  Poor little globe of earth, the tourists trot round you as easily as they trot round the Bois or Central Park.  There is no mystery left, we've been there, we've seen it, we know all about it.  We've done the globe and the globe is done.

This is quite true, superficially.  On the superficies, horizontally, we've been everywhere and done everything, we know all about it.  Yet the more we know, superficially, the less we penetrate, vertically.  It's all very well skimming across the surface of the ocean and saying you know all about the sea . . . .

As a matter of fact, our great-grandfathers, who never went anywhere, in actuality had more experience of the world than we have, who have seen everything.  When they listened to a lecture with lantern-slides, they really held their breath before the unknown, as they sat in the village school-room.  We, bowling along in a rickshaw in Ceylon, say to ourselves:  "It's very much what you'd expect."  We really know it all.

We are mistaken.  The know-it-all state of mind is just the result of being outside the mucous-paper wrapping of civilization.  Underneath is everything we don't know and are afraid of knowing.

Last Child in the Woods (57-58), Richard Louv

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde