Be This Flower

Follow the stem of this zinnia.

In my son’s crowded garden, it was pulled on by purple bean vine and weighed down by a plant heavy with ripening tomatoes.

It twisted, reached toward the sun, and grew stronger so that it could bloom.

Be this flower.

What Has Schooling Wrought?

The headline was changed to reflect that the CDC Director was specifically referring to high school students and the need to reopen schools.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/micaelaburrow/2020/07/28/redfield-says-more-abovebase-suicides-than-covid-deaths-n2573278?fbclid=IwAR1mMzEnl51HxAgk8s6d8XIuJIPyB5EDBsqN-LE4a9XUBOGOA0qlacftd74

The article is terribly written, obviously with one premise in mind, then sloppily editted to include the critical fact about students.

So what questions should we ask? Is the education system creating strong, healthy individuals who can overcome hardship? Or is it creating dependent addicts who can’t survive without it?

The hardest and most important job I see as a parent is to foster my children’s independence. I want to coexist with these humans who love me, yet nonetheless want to flee from my authority. School can’t do that. School says, “You must stay until 3:00.” “You must stay until June.” “You must stay until you are 18, 22…”

This is heartbreaking information. I pray for those who are ready to be awakened from a system designed to create compliant factory workers and soldiers.

A Budding Anarchist

Many libertarians identify as anarchist. Some of my favorite libertarian thinkers are anarcho-capitalists.

Anarchism is the idea that people can coexist without a central force to compel them. Lawlessness and voluntarism are tenants of anarchism. The contemporary bastardizing of the term is partially corrected by the recent documentary: The Monopoly on Violence.
https://youtu.be/XWAEKQjN-yM

Some libertarians are anarchists because anarchism might be fairly considered a mode, or form, of libertarianism.

Homeschooling brought me to voluntarism, the non-aggression principle (NAP), libertarianism, and anarchism. Howdy🤠

Not The Moment?

I have a couple significant disagreements (“questions” may be a better term) with this article, but there is a strong argument that this year has not been a good one for homeschooling.

As an irrational optimist I look at the folks who were close to choosing home education before government forced the Lockdown. The families who were most likely to join the ranks of educational freedom and the learning lifestyle are the ones who may have benefited from the unexpected push. Those families were already questioning the wisdom of allowing the State to control most of their children’s waking hours.

Most families in the school system are all in. They must be. However automatic the decision to place their children in the education system was, it remains a critical one that must be defended. Bringing all the assumptions of the school structure into one’s home is jarring. Couple those assumptions with unemployment, a perceived public health crisis, and nonstop negativity from the media, and the opportunities for any type of success are slim.

As for us, an “unstructured” (ugh, that is one problem I have in the piece) home-educating family, we are in a marginally advantageous position. Our learning lifestyle is built on flexibility, but relies on community. Museums, libraries, parks, gardens, art studios, concert and lecture halls, and private educational providers are not only the places we go to for learning, but, more importantly, the places full of the people we learn from. Security guards, docents, educational leaders, volunteers, other homeschoolers, and those who are living the lives my children might envision for themselves populate our learning lifestyle.

My sons regularly interact with people doing their jobs and sharing their experiences. The Lockdown cut off our most valuable learning resource: humans. The relationships we’ve established over six or seven years of home education continue to be the shining stars on our learning journey. I don’t know what it will do to my children’s brains to not be able to see the smiles of their museum and library friends when they walk in, to miss that surprised look when they shake someone’s presumption about the abilities of homeschoolers, or to struggle to understand an accent through a face mask. As I struggle to maintain relationships under rapidly-changing societal rules, I wonder how much damage is being done to our children.

This all came out a bit more dire than I had intended. We have had significant victories in our personal lives and the few relationships that we’ve been able to put work into. We’ve improved our physical health through diet and activity. I’ve deepened my spiritual practice and discovered the friends who will be steady in tough times.

We have made the best of our situation, but it remains that our freedoms have been limited and our world has gotten smaller. I continue to wrestle with those facts.

God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason

Friday Fishin’

The Zerbey Boys, six years ago.

Delaware Nature Society has been hosting our adventures for a long time.

I started with a wagon, wheeling the boys around the marsh pond at DuPont Environmental Education Center (DEEC). I learned about their dip-netting program and almost as soon as my younger could walk, he was knee deep in muck.

Today Isaac wraps up a week of camp at DEEC.

We’re blessed to have places that go deep into our memory. Places where the seeds of unschooling were planted.

God bless you and thank you for reading, I appreciate you,

Jason

Entirely Enchanted

This moment was the highlight of a wonderous day at Winterthur. After a week of grumbly adulthood, I needed to let the little boy inside me run about some.

And there he was. Toad sitting outside his house. I was back in a rocking chair, reading Adventures of Frog and Toad to my baby sons. Then further back, to my mother reading The Wind in the Willows to me. That was the first glimpse of my motherland, England. The hovels and houses and riverside adventures of those stories filled me with a love for that country.

Winterthur brings me back there, a wild, natural, cared for land full of color and life.

This was the first time we had seen Enchanted Woods in months. The Lockdown kept us from so many important places. The disappointment of seeing the Faerie Cottage blocked off was dissipated by the wonderful attention that went into decorating it to once again fill our imaginations.

The magic of the place carried with us as we explored further. We were startled and amazed when we interrupted a snake that had brought its riparian lunch onto the rocks. A catbird demanded that I appreciate it for a moment. We spotted a green frog that was much more camoflaged than the photo reveals. We found turtles sunbathing and snappers lurking in muddy water like sea monsters.

And we smiled.

Three or four hours were lost to the quiet and constant parade of deer, chipmunks, fish, song birds, geese, and groundhogs.

I had asked God for a reset. I didn’t know how to come down from the flight-or-fight fever of the previous week, so I got humble and just asked.

He provided.

God bless and thank you for reading, I appreciate you,

Jason

Oh, She’s “Just Curious”

“I’m just curious what percentage of dead children works for you.”

Just curious? That’s lovely, I’m a big fan of curiosity. Curiosity is the best start towards truth.

Life is tragic and people die and none of it is fair. I choose to act in the world, as broken and dangerous as it is, and want to use accurate data to assess the risk I’m willing to accept for myself and my sons.

I believe we would have healthier children without State-run education. The State wants complicit, sedentary children on mind-numbing psychotropics and fattening Government meals. That’s what’s killing our children’s bodies, minds, and souls.

I’m curious how doped up and obese our society wants children.

FB link: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10220363937822865&id=1062625417&comment_id=10220366826815088&notif_t=feed_comment_reply&notif_id=1594326163206960&ref=m_notif

The Usefulness of Triggers

Widowhood won’t leave you alone for long. It creeps up in the weirdest ways.

My boys and I say down this week to watch the Tron movies. I thought I had seen the sequel, but as the opening scenes began, I realized that it was an unfinished plan I shared with Mary.

We had watched the original film together in 2017. Were going to watch the new one. We didn’t get that chance.

It didn’t hurt. I didn’t see any great opportunity for healing or a need to share this rather small observation with my sons.

But I see this as a place to share those little things. One day my sons may need this story. Maybe they’ll need to know how much of their mother’s legacy they are a seamless part of. They complete, and at once continue, the life that seems to have been cut short.

God bless, thank you, I appreciate you,

Jason

Each individual has to find that time to speak or listen in his or her heart. The latest bully tactic on social media is to push people to post on a certain topic, claiming they are bad if they do not. That’s intimidating if you want to do more than cut and paste the approved message. If you use the “wrong” word or aren’t “strong” enough against whatever or for whatever, you could have a shit pile come down on you.

A lot of people are under the stress of the lockdowns, just trying to keep themselves and their families together, to keep their businesses open, to navigate the labyrinth of restrictions on our daily lives.

Compelling speech or action does not empower the individual.

God bless, thank you, I appreciate you,

Jason

On Individuality, Love, and Race

I grew up in the Jehovah’s Witnesses until I was eight, it was a significantly black congregation in an almost exclusively white town. After worship, we would often go to a black family’s house for a giant meal and fellowship. This was my normal. We segregated ourselves as Witnesses. We called each other Brother and Sister. My best friend was the only black kid in the class, we were the only Witnesses I knew of in elementary school.

We were rising poor, living in the farmland outside town, my dad was doing well as a guitar teacher and performer when my grandfather died and saddled us with debt and a house we had to move in to. That area was more wealthy and had better schools. He continued to work his butt off and provide a safe and loving home for us, with my mom home, loving on us full time. My friend, Brandon, lived in, to my country eyes, an impossibly crowded apartment building with his grandmother. We never talked about his parents. We were outsiders in school, we knew that: Witnesses whose caretakers dressed them as close to Middle Class standards as they could manage. He had a video game system and I had the luxury of open spaces around me, I figured we each had our little pieces of the good life.

Then we left the congregation. For years I had been pelting my dad with theological questions. He’s a smart rebel, he answered and encouraged my questions. Nothing was off limits, each question deserved thoughtful consideration, no matter how deeply it may undercut doctrine. And undercut they did. Once the dust settled, he would credit my questions for speeding our exit from that insular tribe.

I think I knew the next gut punch was coming, “Brandon won’t be your friend anymore. He won’t be allowed to talk to you. It’s not his fault. His grandmother and the Brothers and Sisters will insist on it. Don’t be angry with him. This will hurt him too. This is part of the reason we’re leaving, this is wrong.” It wasn’t really a surprise, I knew the rules. I don’t think I cried then, but right now, in the midst of this tribal bullshit, it breaks my heart anew. I’m crying over that loss for the first time. Worse than that, I feel a wellspring of hate that I have buried over years of trying to do right and live in love. You can’t bury a spring. The water will saturate the ground, seep into your life.

Hate can only last for as long as you don’t look at it. I hated the Witnesses for taking away someone I loved. I hated organized religion in general for the divides it built between people. Since becoming a father, I’ve had more love in my life each day. It has held back these old hates at times, but eventually they must be faced. Since becoming a widower, I’ve seen the transformational power of love and focused my life on understanding my anger, forgiving myself for it, and moving forward in love.

I no longer hate the Witnesses or organized religion. I have discovered God’s love in all Creation, including the horrors and tragedies. Jesus said to love your enemies, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. moved my heart when he specified to love the oppressor.

My bias remains against tribal institutions. I value the individual above any group. That is not to say that groups do not have value, but experience has taught me that evil has an easier time rising in groups than good.

I talked to my son about “mob mentality” and how I’ve witnessed it and participated in it. I explained, in fewer words than here, how I protect myself from it. The nervous system is not controlled in whole by one’s brain, each nerve ending can react through reflexes and muscle memory. In this way, our entire body is our brain. At different times we focus thinking power in one or more places. Much of the body functions independent of concious thought. This is not simply a matter of voluntary and involuntary systems as we were taught in health class. We can take control over every function of the body to varying degrees. We can also cede control to automatic responses or an external “brain.” This is what happens in a mob. It can seem as harmless as dress, everyone in black t-shirts at a metal concert. It can manifest in a chant, “U! S! A!” or “I can’t breathe!” These are steps toward surrendering control of one’s mind to a group. Once we all look and sound alike, we can move alike. Fists in the air, stomping to a beat, or marching…we’ve relinquished yet more of our mind, our soul, our individuality. The tipping point is a mystery to me, where does this become dangerous? I choose to activate my individuality at as many stages as possible. I am highly social, I love being around people, so I am often in situations that encourage hive mind over individual thought.

It may seem contradictory, but I learned this as a child raised with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. We were not to worship anything but God and the Pledge of Allegiance was against that principle. I was taught to respectfully stand while the class recited the words of the Pledge, but to not participate further. The Witnesses were promoters of group think; however, they taught me how to exist within a group, yet stay separate from the group.

It was decades before I read the same message from Jesus. In Jesus I found a way to love that individualistic part of myself and express it as love toward others.

Yesterday I put on an absurd outfit, almost without thinking (I wish I had taken a picture). There are so many demands to “Say this,” “Don’t say that,” “Go to this rally,” “Don’t go to this rally,” “Wear this,” “Don’t wear that.” I put on blue soccer shorts for a small group training later in the day, a torn and orange Hawaiian shirt because it was beautiful out and we were visiting a world class garden, and a red What Would Joan Jett Do? t-shirt because, well, I need headbanging in my life. An eclectic outfit for an eclectic life. No fear that I would end up with my mind lost to a crowd, a first defense of sorts.

Mob mentality, hive mind, and group think are the easy ways we slide into tribalism. It’s how we move from the higher level thinking of the muscle in our heads to the rote mimickery of our bodies.

I keep trying to push into the specific tribalism of race, but I don’t know how to get there. My own bias against all tribalism is significant in my rejection of the idea of race. My upbringing in a tribe that was based on doctrine was infused with the concept that a human’s soul was everything and his skin color nothing. I experienced otherism before racism. Racism struck me as a crude and ignorant subset of otherism. It still doesn’t make sense to me. Race is a social construction. If we accept it as more than that, we are at the whim of popular norms. I need a better framework than that.

Love God = Love yourself = Love your family = Love your neighbor = Love your enemies

That is a tall fucking order. I fail. Oh boy do I fail. I prioritize that list. I don’t know if that’s wrong, but it’s what I’m capable of. I see God’s love as pure and infinite. I see myself as having access to that infinite love. If I can focus on that, then I can love my children and family to the best of my ability. If I have this circle of loving humans around me, with God in my heart, then I can pour that energy into my neighbors and those who would be my enemies.

This sermon from Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr., delivered in 1957 says a lot of what I’m trying to find in my soul:
Love Your Enemies
Transcript

Before hate comes fear. Fear of rejection drives us to dress alike and sound alike. That fear, and fear of discord, grips me hard as I try to communicate in love. I have been insulted by those I love, for things that I do not see as wrong. Dr. King reminds me that people will dislike me for all types of reasons. That’s not my lack of love, but theirs.

Please receive this in love. I welcome disagreement, I am on this planet to learn and grow. In these hot times, I hope we can cool the discourse and discover what troubles us deep down.

God bless, thank you, I appreciate you,
Jason