Tuning Back In

I am sitting here at the keyboard in our silent little Orange Blossom Cottage, listening to the occasional far-off whooshing of a car off on the freeway and otherwise, nothing to be heard but the distant burble of the fish tank. 

I have been distant myself, more than I meant to be. Somehow, two years blipped past and I wrote not, shared not and burbled along in the my own little corner, trying to keep the wheels turning, doing dishes and laundry and dishes and laundry as life kept on. Situations kept on oozing into different shapes and the kids kept on growing into new versions of themselves and I kept stacking up post ideas and drafts and snippets of things that drifted across my mind. Things I meant to write about and needed to think about and ought to post about and would love to share and the the pile was so tall that I think it might have slid sideways and toppled down on top of my writer self. Writer-Me may have been here in this dark corner of the house waiting to post, buried sheepishly beneath all those intentions for quite some time now. It's nice to be back.

I am homeschooling 9th grade this year, head-on into high school with enthusiastically interested and yet unabashedly inexpert energy! Ru is reading wonderful classic literature: C.S. Lewis, Ivanhoe, Shakespeare, Defoe and Churchill and the things he is understanding and connecting together impress, delight and underwhelm me by turns. He is still after all, a normal 14 year old boy. Sometimes, he is brilliantly fresh and insightful and sometimes he just misses stuff. I am leaning in toward the promise of life being long, there being seasons for everything, subconscious knowledge still counting and my own role being just a beginning in the long line of teachers and guides he will have in life. My job is not to equip him with the whole body of knowledge, its just to keep his fire going, teach him some habits of discipline, and whet his appetite for the reams of things there are to know and learn. 

Everyone asks me if I am scared to be teaching high school and the truth is I'm not. Its closer to compatriot learning, he can understand and write about and read the things that I am interested in. I can imagine growing into adult friendship and an grown, peer to peer, life-share path. I am sure he will grow up and leave and differ and have areas of his life that he doesn't let me into but, I feel like he is increasingly a whole and separate person looking back at me bringing his own new things into the room and the conversation. Its encouraging and emboldening to me to know that I don't have to know all the things because he is going to be such a different person from me, living in such a different world than the one I grew up in. I also feel encouraged by the fact that his own freedom is allowing him to enrich his own high school experience and by turn our family and the rest of the students below him. 

“Our children should feel that they can peacefully say anything: questions, doubts, criticism, points of view. They should feel that we are genuine interested in what they do and think. We should not deprive them of privacy, but all our words and conduct should encourage an open relationship. One cannot overestimate the value of such relationships.”
― Sister Magdalen

So, that's a little peek into the velvety corners of my inner world in the dark of the night here in California. I hope that you are all well. I have missed you. I hope to pick up the loose threads here and weave onwards, mending the holes and filling in the gaps.