In the past, I’ve been a freelancer, a diy entrepreneur. I’ve also been something of an individualist, apparently from a really early age. I was pretty happy about that for a long time, but now collaboration seems just so interesting! I don’t want to DIY anymore. I don’t want to hang out a shingle offering what I’m good-enough at to people who find me refreshing and affordable. Though I did enjoy integrating compassion into the way I do business.

But these days, collaboration seems to be the central lesson in my compassion curriculum. I thought I knew a little about it, but I was full of crap. I’ve been fighting this lesson for months, I think. But now, I’m just enthralled with the topic.

Getting a job

I remember saying to a supervisor-type once, “It’s not supposed to be this way. I don’t want to do this.” He said “You have no choice.” Not the right things to say to motivate me. :) I won’t tell you my reply, but I didn’t work there much — any, actually — longer.

I have adopted some practices I haven’t figured how to fit into “job” life. I don’t wear heels, and I always tell the truth. The heels, I could probably get around, but the always telling the truth could be a problem.

I don’t mean the kind of “truth” that’s made up of generated judgments about things being awesome / ugly / wrong / right / fat / stoopid… those ideas can be discussed, debated, and improved on as part of collaboration, but they’re just ideas. Truth is what I experience… joy, fear, affection, annoyance, sorrow, excitement… things like that. I generally don’t smile when I’m sad or nod when my gut is in knots. I say “Wow. My gut is in knots.” At least that’s the intention.

Follow the love.

I started on this path (as a student of compassion) because I have a really low tolerance for pain. I’m a crazy person, and there was a time I could only survive with antidepressants. I’m judgmental, scared and needy. But because I have such a low tolerance for those things, I’ve had to learn nonjudgment, grace, and interdependence.

Now I am beginning to get those things, and getting them saves my butt often enough, but I’m still the same person, prone to fall into fear, oblivious to the rope of love that I could grab if I could only see it.

If I stray from this path, try to put on a brave face, write a resume that cleverly highlights my strengths while hiding my weaknesses, I am guessing the result wouldn’t be pretty.

Collaboration.

Oh, but collaboration! I’m developing a real craving for it. That’s ok, though. If I sit with the craving and don’t pursue it with clinging-attention, it will come. And it will come clean, without need for heels, or a cleverly crafted resume, or smiling when I’m scared.

But our ways of reaching for freedom have diverged. Near as I can tell, he’s liking the Libertarian approach, whereas I look more like an anarchist of sorts. (The sort that doesn’t think anarchy will fix anything.)

All that is a preface, to tell you that Gene posted a quote on facebook that intrigued me.

“So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.” Ayn Rand

I read this and remembered how it felt to think that those were the only choices. It’s a feeling that has the comfort of familiarity. But I’m glad to be rid of it.

Another world is possible.

As a Jew, I heard something in Synagogue that blew me away. (I was lucky, in that I hadn’t grown up with it and become numbed to the message. An argument for not subjecting kids to religious education. But I digress.) Here is the message that electrified me:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

Because it’s about noticing what’s real and sacred, and sticking with it. It made so much sense to me.

And then I read about loving your neighbor as yourself. This idea isn’t original with Jesus. Plenty of Rabbis around the time he lived talked about this idea, and it’s found in the Hebrew Bible. (In Leviticus, of all places!)

But just when I thought got the whole message, here comes this part:

But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.

And somehow I knew, “Yes, that. Imma do that.”

But does love work?

I used to hear “Love will fix everything,” and I used to think it was naive. Then I thought maybe it was true. But what Jesus teaches me is that even if it isn’t true, I want to do it anyway. Even if it isn’t effective or the answer, I still want to choose love. And yet…

Love wins.

When I don’t see it as effective, it means I’m measuring by a yardstick that values other things over love, over beauty, over truth. I’m living out — embodying — values of money, security, stuff that’s subject to rust and decay and being taken away when I’m not looking.

That’s not really me. That’s not what I want to embody. I want the yardstick of peace. Or — no — I want to throw away the yardstick, and live in the world where Love wins. The world my teacher calls the Kingdom of Heaven.

Sorry, Ayn. Neither guns nor money open the door to that kingdom.

I sit down to write this post about unschooling, and a sense of burden settles over me. Ack! What’s that about?

Here’s what it’s about: I didn’t sit down to write some Introduction to Unschooling, or to take up the job of defending it. I just wanted to say something about my beautiful kids. And I guess I want there to be space for that.

Ok, pardon my introductory mind-clearing. I’m ready now.

Unschooling: a very quick definition

Unschooling is life without school. It’s connected with homeschooling, in that my kids are home during the day, when other kids are at school. It’s a “form” of homeschooling, but only because schooling is what’s expected. In our day-to-day lives, we aren’t schooling, or homeschooling, or even unschooling. We’re just living.

SuperKids

I remember when I was a new mom, reading stories about homeschool kids who were superstars. Went to Harvard at 15, won an olympic medal, four siblings who all became doctors… Those stories worried me a little. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a kid. And a parent.

But they aren’t the real measure of whether homeschooling “works”. The real measure is in the juicy stuff: beauty, love, joy, truth. And in creativity.

Creativity and Joy

So here’s what I sat down to write about my kids: Wow.

I am so amazed, so delighted. None of them are on an obvious track to the big leagues. But all of them are following their own real calling. All of them are creative in very specific, completely unique ways.

One is into systems. He’s a talented programmer, and loves math and science. He’s taken some college classes, and will take more, but his learning is very much his own. For example, he taught himself Calculus, rather than take it in school.

He also loves teaching, and has begun finding work as a tutor. He’s quite good at it, coming at it, as he does, with no sense of coercion or pressure, but instead with a deep love of exploring and understanding things.

He’s studying artificial intelligence, and is developing some serious mentor relationships that don’t depend on his having a college degree, or even being enrolled.

What’s most interesting to me is that he follows his own inner light. In other words, he’s a little obsessed. And out of that obsession comes brilliant, creative thinking. I love watching that!

The next kid is a visual artist. He has lulls occasionally, but mostly, he can’t can’t stop drawing. There’s that “obsessed” again.

His stuff is clever, interesting, and sometimes captures human experience in a way that brings tears to my eyes.

The younger one was humming tunes before he was six months old. I think he can play back every song he’s ever heard in his mind. His adoration for music is delicious, contagious. He loves to play with all kinds of instruments.

He’s really resistant to formal instruction. I’ve spent some time worrying that we “should” have pushed lessons on him from a young age. I imagine that he has the talent to be a celebrated performer. But I don’t think lessons would have helped. I think they’d have done more to dampen his passion.

As it is, he lives in a swirl of music, from when he wakes to when he sleeps. And like his brothers, he kneads and molds his experience into something that’s all his, not like anyone else’s.

Other unschoolers I’ve known have had their own passions. One is a dancer. Another has had a life-long love of horses, and wants to major in business so her horse business will thrive. Yet another has always loved cars. He became a talented mechanic, then decided to enroll in an elite BMW mechanics school.

Oh, and meanwhile, all of these kids are very close with their siblings. They would never consider doing something to hurt one another, hitting, name-calling, etc. They are best friends with their sibs, and with their parents.

Does that sound crazy?

Here I am, talking about unschooling, and maybe defending it. That’s not what I wanted to do.

What I wanted to do was to celebrate how grateful I am to live in the world with these kids, how beautiful they are, how excited I am to be a part of this beautiful, creative life. Maybe how grateful I am to be free from the whole schooling world.

I’m only just learning to live the way they do, in my mid 40s. Papa and I have spent the last few years really living this, and discovered that we also have the sort of calling our kids have. Turns out I’m a fiend for love & beauty. Thoroughly obsessed with it. I’ve discovered that I actually know things about how to increase compassion in the world. I know things about how to be less angry. I know about what love can do. And I’m learning more all the time about those things.

Papa is similarly obsessed with patterns. Well, not sure how to describe it, but the way to his heart is through a good fractal. He’s a functional programmer, a problem-solver, and a practical epistemologist. And if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry; He does. And I’ve seen it—even if I can’t do it, I can tell it’s beautiful.

Fireworks

So that’s what I wanted to say. w00t! Yipee! The world is beautiful, and I’m glad to be a part of it.

I’m grateful for freedom, grateful for creative juice, grateful for the love of my family, grateful for all the sparkly bits of life that appear when we get out of the way.

And, yeah, I don’t much like school.

There are all these people preaching hate in the name of freedom. I don’t know why they’re doing it — their idea of what’s important to freedom don’t seem to line up with mine — and I’d like to become curious, some time, about what they’re doing. But for now, I’m just really really sick of it.

Health Care Reform

The current health care legislation is lame and inadequate, but for purposes of this post, let’s assume we’re talking about real reform — the kind that means people don’t go blind or lose limbs or die because they can’t afford health care.

Here’s what I want to tell folks who claim to be speaking for freedom, for limited government, for constitutional government:

AFTER we’re free of a census that asks us to tell the government our “race”,
AFTER we don’t have standing armies all over the world,
AFTER we aren’t in a permanent state of war against a vague enemy,
AFTER we aren’t in a “drug war” that results in a higher percentage of Americans being in prison than citizens of any other major country and kills zillions of people each year,
AFTER corporations aren’t treated as people while being protected from the consequences of their actions,
AFTER we no longer have an IRS that’s above the law and ruins lives,
AFTER the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act is seen as a horrible, tragic mistake we once made, and could never make again…

AFTER all those things, and after we’ve solved the problem of human beings experiencing horrible suffering for lack of health care while we stand by and do nothing, let’s sit down over a nice cup of coffee and see if we can come up with an even better solution that honors that beautiful thing called liberty.

I was helping at a booth supporting Ron Paul for president. If you haven’t learned about Ron Paul, you should. Generally, I think politicians are all part of the problem, but Paul may be an exception. He’s a good guy, and could really help to wake people up.