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Hello friends.  What a full several weeks we have had!  Apologies for my extended absence: happy Christmas, holidays, solstice, and cheers to a New Year!  For me, more than New Year’s Eve, both Solstice and Twelfth Night are my markers for new beginnings and reflection.  I do love Christmas so much,  and the Pagan/Christian bookending of Christmas (along with our favourite Buddhist gathering and ceremony that usually happens in there, but which didn’t this year because of the seemingly unending snowstorms) is my idea of perfection in the form of wintery celebration.
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On the home front, we have gone through an interesting time of change and growth.  The lead-up to the winter holidays is full-out pottery making, and when that finally subsided, Lee and I spent some much-needed time hunkering down at the church and connecting, re-confirming our marriage and partnership, and thinking about ways to simplify our family, home, life.  Horus, Treva and Felix had a beautiful Christmas, but I’m being shown continuously, that kids, like everyone, need balance, rhythm, serenity—especially high-energy Horus, whose sometimes-edgy behaviour is a manifestation of deep sensitivity that I want to nurture in positive ways.
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In many ways too, our “school” (as un-schooly and personalized as it is) really starts in January rather than September.  We are incredibly fortunate to live and work by the seasons, and the fall is a high work time for us, with pottery-making and firings and then the busyness of the selling season—and our kids are very much a part of that, although sometimes I’m sure, they just feel beholden by it, or carried by the wave.  In any case, we don’t get a heck of a lot of formal sit-down school time (though always tons of reading and life-learning and art-making!) Over the holidays I did a lot of what has, perhaps strangely, become a pleasurable indulgence for me, that is, researching curriculums! (Any other homeschooling mothers out there who can relate?)

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I have already written quite a bit about my interest in, and appreciation for, Charlotte Mason’s philosophy, and I have come across several lovely sites with resources for that approach, which I find can very easily be incorporated into our family way of unschooling.  The Charlotte Mason approach tends to be oriented around religion, and I pick and choose on that front–my philosophy is a combination of secular, plural and spiritual.  The Ambleside Online Curriculum is great, and free.  Mater Amabilis is also free, is a great resource (Catholic) and has some good examples of daily schedules which would pretty much never work in their entirety at our home, but are nice to take a look at for ideas, anyway.  I’ve also found some inspiration from Moving Beyond the Page, although the beauty of literature-based learning is that parents can quite easily create their own “curriculum” from free library resources without paying a high cost for pre-arranged material.  I have also been reading a lot about the ENKI education philosophy.  I love that it is based in Buddhist philosophy, which also appeals to Lee, and I am somewhat tempted to invest in their teaching guides, although I am quite confident in my own abilities to teach and lead my kids, and I do have quite a bit of knowledge about the Waldorf philosophy from many years of reading and some involvement in a couple of Waldorf schools from each coast…I do have several critiques of the Waldorf approach which I might go into in a later post.  Does anyone here have any experience with ENKI?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on the program.
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I have also had some time to think about, and to plan, my pottery-making year.  Last year, Lee and I took on a more concentrated effort with our collaboration, the production line of functional pottery which we call “enso”. You can check it out here (and there is more to come from that line, soon).  Enso is now in several shops, in the maritimes and Toronto and of course, we are planning a spring wood-firing which Lee and I approach as individual artists.  We aren’t sure where that will be though, because we are still living at the church, while hoping that we will be able to move home to Queenstown sometime this year.  Because we can’t do any wood-firings until the weather warms significantly (and it’s been a cold one!), I have also been thinking about branching out into making some sculptural pieces in the electric kiln…we’ll see.  And excitingly, I will be curating/organizing an exhibition of the work of women potters of New Brunswick, to open in February at the Andrew & Laura McCain Gallery here in Florenceville.  The show is called “Transforming Earth, Shaping Fire: New Brunswick Women in Ceramics”, and I think it’s going to be fantastic!
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But mostly, my Christmas season was all about birth, and service.  I really haven’t been able to write at all, because I have had the immense privilege of serving three incredible women whose babies were all born at home, and these births have been at the forefront of my existence for the past several weeks: support, anticipation, waiting, consulting, holding spaces, welcoming.  I am so moved by the strength, beauty and courage of mothers and babies, of these mothers and babies, and by the persistent gorgeousness of life. It is such an honour to be a tiny part of the emergence.
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I have also been called to do some placenta encapsulation which is likewise an honour and privilege, and I’m opening myself up to doing more of this kind of work going forward.  I have added a couple of new pages to this site that go into a bit more detail the kind of birth work I have been doing, so check out my Birth Services page here, and my Placenta Encapsulation page here.
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My own belly is blooming, and we are all getting excited about our new baby, who is now very wiggly and real, and already so loved by all of us.
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Best wishes to all of you, and yours.
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Yo