Rules for Listening to People You Love But Don't Agree With

Rules for listening to people you love but don't agree with.

1. Choose to believe what they are telling you - that there is a truth at the root of what they are saying, even if it is not what they think they are saying.

2. Ask for clarification and more information instead of arguing. 'Can you tell me some specific examples of what you're talking about?' 'Can you tell me why a is more important to you than b?'

3. Move the conversation towards consensus by finding out what want or need is underneath their position. They want to feel safe - you also want them to feel safe. If you're both working on ideas of what would help them really be safe instead of attacking their first thoughts about what would make them feel safe, you'll get a lot more of what you want, too.

4. Say it's okay for the two of you to disagree. It really is. Disagreement is not the problem and can be done respectfully. Disrespect is what is not okay.

Breath

All I have to do
is let the love flow through me
like breath when I sing.

Doctor Who, Stonehenge, and Paganism

Needed: 

Green underlay

Stonehenge stones (gray felt)

Yellow felt Sun

Blue Felt Tardis

Science Symbol

Pagan Symbol

Spread out the green underlay in front of you

Hm, I wonder what this could be?

Start to set out the gray stones.

Someplace green … maybe it’s grass.

But what are these gray things?

[Kids may guess, or not.]

This is Stonehenge.  Stonehenge is a great circle of really big standing stones in a wide open field.  The stones line up so that at the Winter and Summer Solstices, you can see the sunset and the sunrise perfectly framed by the stones.

Put the sun at one end of the circle, then the other.

Stonehenge is in England.  England and other countries in Northern Europe is where a lot of my ancestors came from, a long time ago.

But Stonehenge was built much longer ago than that, probably starting about 5000 years ago.

I wonder what life was like then?

I wonder why people built this?

I wonder HOW people built this?

I wonder how we could find out the answers to the questions we have about this great mystery?

Bring out the Tardis.

One way we could find out is by time travelling.  There’s a very famous TV show called Doctor Who.  In it, The Doctor is a Time Lord.  [let kids tell you about The Doctor if they want to]  He can travel to wherever and whenever he wants.  And when he gets where he is going, he likes to find out answers to questions like, why did people build Stonehenge?  How did they do it?  Why was it important and what did they do there?

WOULDN’T THAT BE AWESOME?!?!

If we could do that?!?!?

But we can’t.  We don’t have a Tardis or any other kind of time machine.

Scientists try to answer these kinds of questions, too.

Bring out the science symbol

They dig up the ground and they radio-carbon date things and they examine the stones and they figure stuff out, like where the rocks in Stonehenge came from.  Some of them probably came from over 150 miles away.  Which means that people moved these HUGE stones on foot about as far as from here to Washington DC.  Which is AMAZING.

But they can’t really tell us why.  Science can’t tell us what the people who did these amazing things were thinking or feeling.  We can only guess.

So we guess.  And we guess that Stonehenge was used for religious ceremonies of some sort.  Pagan religious ceremonies.

Bring out the pagan symbol

A lot of religions have holy books or scriptures that tell the people who belong to that religion how the religion started, what to believe and how to worship.  Paganism doesn’t have that.

What Paganism has is a lot of stories and myths and rituals.  Some Pagans now go to Stonehenge and hold rituals and tell stories that are their best guesses about what the people who built it would have done there.  They take everything that the scientists know or guess, and they take fragments of stories that have been passed down through the generations, and they make something that means something to them out of it.

Are they right about what Stonehenge was for?  We don’t know.  They have no way to know, for sure, either.  But what matters to them is that the rituals they perform and the stories they tell make them feel more connected to each other and the natural world and the spirit world, more whole, happier. 

Please feel free to use this story anywhere you'd like with attribution to Dawn Star Sarahs-Borchelt 2016.

Fibonacci Scarf

I'm not sure this exactly belongs on this blog, but my son wanted me to post it somewhere and it fits better here than anywhere else ...

Last year (2014) for Christmas I sent my husband and the kids to the craft store and told them each to pick a skein of yarn for me to knit a scarf with.  I hadn't knit in a long time.  When my oldest was about 4 and my second was about 2, they discovered that knitting needles made great swords, and they tended to take the 'swords' out of whatever I was knitting and it just didn't really work well.  But now, I thought, the older one knew better and the youngest (then 2) was not as interested in sword play as her brothers had been.

And knit I did.  I made three scarves for the three youngest, and by then I was getting a bit bored with extremely simple designs that I could knit almost in my sleep.

So for my oldest, I made a Fibonacci scarf.

I cast on 21 stitches.

I expressed the sequence in three different ways:

Fibonacci #1

1: knit 1 row
1: knit 1 row
2: knit 2 rows
3: knit 3 rows
5: knit 5 rows
8: P2, K17, P2; K2, P17, K2; P2, K17, P2; P21; P2, K17, P2; P21; K21; K2, P17, K2.
13: K2, P17, K2; P2, K17, P2; K2, P17, K2; K21; K2, P17, K2; K21; P21; P2, K17, P2; P21; K21; P21; K21; K2, P17, K2.
21: P2, K17, P2; K2, P17, K2; P2, K17, P2; P21; P2, K17, P2; P21; K21; K2, P17, K2; K21; P21; K21; P21; P2, K17, P2; K21; P21; K21; P21; K21; P21;  K21; P2, K17, P2.

Fibonacci #2

0: K21

1: K1 p201: K1 p202: K2 p193: K3 p185: K5 p168: K8 p1313: K13 k821: K21


Fibonacci #3

K1 p1 k2 p3 k5 p8 k1
P12 k9
P12 k1 p1 k2 p3 k2
P3 k8 p10
K3 p18
K3 p1 k1 p2 k3 p5 k6
P2 k13 p6
K15 p1 k1 p2 k2
P1 k5 p8 k7
P6 k15
P6 k1 p1 k2 p3 k5 p3
K5 p13 k3
P18 k1 p1 k1
P1 k3 p5 k8 p4
K9 p12
K9 p1 k1 p2 k3 p5
K8 p13
K21

This shows all three sequences in order (or almost all three):

I was able to do almost 4 repeats of all three sequences with one ball of Sugar-n-Cream Hot Green yarn on size 6 needles.  Frustrating not to be able to finish the last 8 rows or so!

But he didn't care.  Here he is modeling (along with siblings modeling theirs) on New Year's Eve, when I finally finished it:

The Girl Who Broke Her Pot

This is a story from the Tsonga people, who have lived in the lands which we now call the countries of South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, for more than a thousand years.

That’s on the south east coast of the African continent.  It’s a tropical climate, with a dry season and a rainy season. 

Now once upon a time in the dry season, there was a village that was very far from the waterhole, where they went to get water for drinking, cooking, and washing.

One day, a girl was going from that village to draw water from the waterhole, when the rope holding her water pot broke, the pot fell to the ground, and broke into many pieces.

This was a terrible problem.  “Oh, no!  I must find a new pot,” she cried.  She looked up.  And there, hanging from a cloud, was a rope.  She took hold of it, and pulled on it, but it didn’t fall into her hand, it hung there as if attached to something strong.

Since she didn’t know what else to do, she climbed up the rope.  And in the sky, she found a ruined village.  An old woman was sitting there, and asked what she wanted.

The girl told her story, and the old woman told her to keep walking in this sky land, and if an ant crawled up into her ear she must leave it alone, as the ant would tell her what to do.

 

She wasn’t sure how this was supposed to get her a pot, but she didn’t have any better ideas, so she kept walking.  And pretty soon, an ant did crawl into her ear. The girl kept walking, and came to another village, where she heard the ant whisper to her to sit down at the entrance.

If she had come this far, she might as well do as she was directed and see what happened.  So she sat down at the gate.  Some Elders came out in shining clothes and asked what she was doing there. 

Well, she thought it would look silly to these shiny, important people if she told them she wanted a new pot, even though it WAS important to her.  Thinking quickly, the girl said she had come to look for a baby.  That SOUNDED serious and important.

When they heard this, the elders took her to a house, gave her a basket, and told her to collect some corn from the garden. The ant whispered that she should pull one cob at a time, and arrange it carefully in the basket. So she did. 

The elders were pleased with her work, and told her to cook the corn.  So she did, following the ant's instructions.  Again, the elders were happy.

The next morning they showed her two babies, one wrapped in red cloth and one in white cloth. She was going to choose the one in the red clothes, when the ant told her to choose the one wrapped in white instead. 

The elders gave her the baby, and as many cloths and beads as she could carry.  It wasn’t a new pot, but it was something better.  Her family welcomed her home with joy and greeted the new baby with delight. 

Bad fortune broke her rope and her pot, but because she looked around for a solution (seeing the rope), was polite (to the old woman), willing to follow directions (from the ant), and willing to do what was asked of her (by the elders),  good fortune brought her something better. 

I adapted this story from this source: http://www.gateway-africa.com/stories/The_Girl_Who_Broke_Her_Pot_Ronga.html and I'm happy to have it used for any non-profit purpose.