It’s been a few weeks since I posted anything. There’s a few reasons for that, the first being that I have spent a bit of my usual writing time looking for paid employment. I quit working after my maternity leave cos we are planning to home educate little monster and for me that starts from the beginning – the idea of putting her in childcare for a few years and then taking up the reins from there seems a bit daft. Of course it could have been either one of us taking up that role but, classically, my male partner gets paid more than I was, so financially it made more sense to do it this way (it was a touch and go actually – we were pretty even for a while but he ended up with more hours than me, both our roles were reasonably gender balanced), and I am genuinely fascinated by child development and education theory and have more professional experience with children, whereas his experience in in working with adult minds. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I’m fed up of being terminally skint (I want to do more activities, buy books and coffee and go to more places) and I’m not gonna make money with my writing any time soon. I know there’s loads of advice around how to monetise blogs and what have you but I’m not in any way ready to do that. My blog as it stands is very much like a personal notebook for thoughts around spirituality, gender and home education. At some point I want to have something that’s actually worth publishing as a book, something that will be really helpful to people or that may influence education policy or something. I’d love to get more feedback from people but I reckon that will come as my thought trains start to take more coherent directions.
The second reason I haven’t written for a couple of weeks is that the computers at the library wouldn’t connect to the internet last week so I had no way to use WordPress or to type notes to send myself later so I read instead.
The third reason is that my reading has been sending me round in circles and down rabbit holes. Most of the rabbit holes seem to connect somehow in the great warren of metaphysics. The world seems to be telling me that I need to sort out my beliefs around the nature of being and the nature of knowledge before I can make any real headway with writing ideas around children’s learning. This is slightly in conflict with where I am in my druid studies (i.e. not on the druid grade which, I believe, is more philosophy based) which is currently centred around embodiment and perceptions of lived experience, it is also slightly in conflict with where we are on our parent-monster journey which is also very much around embodiment and lived connection. The thing is, if I can’t conceptualise and write about where we are then I will lose my long term goal of writing about druidic parenting/ educating from tiny and that is one of the areas of literature that is really sparse when it comes to pagan parenting and home education and it really bugs me that those very earliest years are so neglected when it comes to education theory because it sort of implies that there is no importance to children’s learning before normal school age when the job is then taken on by professionals and that is so clearly untrue; children never learn more or faster than they do in those first few years and unless you’re a fan of attachment parenting (which I’m basically not, but that’s for another post) most of the help guides out there are just about behaviour training your kids ready for professional institutionalisation (and breathe).
So to stop myself from going down rabbit holes, I’m going to make a pledge, right here where people can see it. (Thanks for the inspiration Nimue) . I want to #showthelove by inspiring people/ policy makers to forge an educational/ spiritual path for our children that will lead the next generation to connect with and care for our earth and deconstruct the capitalist materialism that has got us into the environmental mess that we are currently in. Right now, I am going to start with reading a book about Steiner (not by Steiner cos that leads straight down a Goethe rabbit hole and I’m not ready for that yet), finish the David Abram book “The Spell of the Sensuous” and write myself a proper mission plan to give myself some sense of direction.