This Week! Steven Universe (the Movie), Pokemon Showdowns, Moon Photos, and more...

Today the school is really empty because a lot of people are at the Climate Strike (which is really exciting). My brain is not fully online this afternoon, though I’m not 100% sure why. I was saying to Xander earlier I’m still adjusting to a 5-day-a-week talking to humans schedule after a very introverted summer (true, v relevant). I’m sure there’s other stuff, but that’s at the top of the list.

Stuff that’s happening now: James is writing a blog post that’s just fun facts about Ash. Ash is volunteering the facts he thinks will freak James out the most. Interesting data: Ash owns 15 porcelain clown dolls and his favorite is named Cheeky. Cheeky smells very musty, apparently.

Stuff that happened today: The first edition of The Agile Learner was published by Hugo and Iphy. It is very funny and good and includes a profile of Ryan’s cat and Interesting Data (instead of Fun Facts) and also an exposé about Luca’s lunch. Big stuff.I went to close park with Xander, Savannah, Sterl and Sebastian and we played shark tag. I tripped over my own feet while trying to be sneaky and Xander laughed at me.

Speaking of Xander, he beat me many times at Pokemon showdown this afternoon and I am feeling very salty about it. I used to be a very sore loser and I’ve gotten a lot more graceful about it over time, but still, it doesn’t feel good to have all your best Pokemon get one-shotted, especially when you’re about to use Crunch, the best ever move.

Lots of singing today, because I’ve had all the songs from the Steven Universe Movie (a v v excellent movie) stuck in my head all week. We’ve been singing the hits all day -

• Other Friends

• Happily Ever After

• No Matter What

• Independent Together

• Drift Away

Okay as I’m making this list I want to add all the songs from the movie so… I recommend watching it. I really love Steven Universe and I really love musicals and to watch my two loves combined into this one glorious package is magical.

An interaction from the beginning of blogging time:

James: Every odd number has an “e” in it

Me: Cool. Doesn’t every number have an “e” in it?

James: Uhh no.

Me: Really?

James: Two.

Me: >.<

Some things from earlier this week: I went to the Met and looked at photos of the moon with Olive, Mason, and Hugo, which was delightful. We walked through Central Park to get there and it was an absolutely beautiful September day, just really joyful all around. Shark tag has returned as Close Park tag of choice. Chemistry started up again this week, as did Anatomy and Physiology (Meet the Gastrointestinal System!). Several Pokemon walks were taken. And lots happened in DnD on Tuesday (I still have to write the recap) including the party's first fight! Also, many other things happened not noted here or elsewhere (if a kid learns something and no one records it, how will they ever learn math???? a joke, a joke...)

It’s been a Friday! Stay tuned for DnD updates, etc.

<3 Mel

How I Became ALC-NYC's Librarian

First of all, you should know that I love books, always have. Some of my first memories are being in a crib, full of books; I quickly grew to be the kind of kid who had to be told to stop reading and come eat dinner. My mother, a reading teacher, is a book lover herself, and so my growing-up was filled with trips to the public library and the bookstore and her classroom, where I could borrow whatever I wanted from the library she tended. Unsurprisingly, I’ve become the kind of adult who walks down the street reading; in fact, since I finished my schooling 6 years ago and rediscovered reading for pleasure, I’ve read nearly 500 books. I love genre fiction - fantasy and sci-fi novels are my bread and butter (metaphorically, of course, because I don’t eat bread) - but I’ve also been reading graphic novels, memoirs, nonfiction and basically whatever else I can get my hands on for most of my life.

I love reading but I also love the books themselves - the beautiful shapes and colors and art and poeticism of children’s books, the illustrative charts and maps and images in reference guides, the smooth feel of a new paperback, the musty smell of a well-worn hardcover. I love how they make a place feel like home. I love to run my eyes over the titles of books I’ll maybe read, maybe not; I love the promise of ideas.

When I got to ALC-NYC, there were already tons of books here. But they were unruly and overwhelmingly adult; the kind of library you get when well-meaning folks donate the books they no longer want to haul around their life. We had 5 copies of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but not a full set of Harry Potter. There were pockets of places where someone had clearly been poking at it - a few picture books displayed prominently on the back room windowsill, or a stash of Tamora Pierce novels at hand where a teen might find them in the library. I later learned a lot of those books were Abby’s personal books, brought in with specific kids in mind. There were lots of other kids books, but they were all about the space, willy-nilly; there was a library, but who knew what was on the shelves.

About a month into my first year ALFing, we had a staff work day; no kids in the space, just me, Ryan, and Abby, coming in to do what felt necessary for us. I gravitated towards the Library. Do you think it’s okay, I asked, if I move some of these books? I was a new baby facilitator, still deep in my ask-permission conditioning. I knew what I wanted, but I hadn’t yet given myself permission to act on my desires without first receiving outside approval.

Of course you can move the books, Abby and Ryan told me. Do what you want.

It wasn’t that straightforward, of course - I asked many times and received many variations on that answer. I asked about putting books out of sight so I could make others more visible, and about getting rid of old, outdated texts with harmful contents, and trusting my intuition about which books to feature. I don’t remember exactly what I asked my co-facilitators, three years ago now, but I do remember the feeling: is this real? Am I allowed? Am I taking up too much space? I’m grateful for their clarity and support: this is your real job. You are allowed to shape your role with your desires. The space you occupy is valuable to us, and to this community.

Offhandedly, a few months later, Abby told me that she’d listed me as the librarian on one of our mandated government forms; just like that, I realized I already was. It was my first medium-is-the-message experience in self-directed education and it was a powerful one.

I’ve rearranged the Library many times since then; I’ve come to understand the way it has aliveness and needs to be tended, like a garden. I’ve learned a lot about making a welcoming space, when to offer books and when to strew them in discoverable places, how to listen for what texts we need this season. Being Librarian means I get to be guide and guard and gardener; serving as librarian is part of facilitating in my joy. I became ALC-NYCs librarian by noticing my desire and giving myself permission to act on it, just as any good self-directed learner does.

First Week Wheeeeeee!!

Well, turns out three years of practice does make a difference. Earlier this week everyone in spawn was all talking at once, and the 8-year-old facilitator was completely distracted with his lego, and no one had written anything on the board, and I could hear kids from the other spawns already out in the hall, finished with their meetings when we hadn't even started, and I wasn't worried about it. Past Mel would have felt pressured to do something, but I didn't. I resisted the urge to take control, to make the meeting more "efficient," and I was able to tolerate the discomfort (less than it once was, after the practice of many chaotic spawns) because I really do trust the kids now. A big part of it is noticing where my schoolishness wants to eat that trust and actively choosing to reject the impulses of ordering, controlling, and making things smooth; another is recognizing the assumption that order, control, or smoothness are the primary goals of the meeting, rather than authentic presence, reflection, and relationship-building. Time is weird, but sometime in the last three cycles I've begun giving myself permission to relax in noticing the ways that it is circular. Things are how they are right now, so notice them. Be present in that noticing. Spawn is chaotic and that slows things down but we are here: a teen is trying to help the 8-year-old decide how to set the gameshifting board, a kid who has been practicing is sounding really good playing piano, everyone's body posture is relaxed and sleepy this morning. This is only the second day of school. There's plenty of time.

After a summer of littles, I'm particularly grateful to be back in a self-directed space with pre-teens and teens; I was reflecting on this after I spent a lot of yesterday talking to Timo and Iphy. We started with which language-learning apps we like (estamos practicando español!) and then, organically, moved through conversations about gender, patriarchy, the origins of hegemony, conspiracy theories, what money is, individual actors vs organizations, climate change, theories and schemas for manifesting cultural shifts, brains and bodies and networks and emergent strategy and so much more; a pretty comprehensive list of some of my favorite subjects to swirl my brain around. There are lots of kinds of self-directed spaces, and lots of kinds of play, but this particular kind - where we float on a conversational tide of our interests - is one that I love, and am grateful for the intellectual challenge of.

More first week highlights: ramping up a really big D&D game thanks to Xander's enthusiasm and organization, lots of humans playing the piano, reconnecting over our fandoms, listening to culture keepers discuss culture hacking, a smooth(er) cleanup time than the end of last year, sharing books, listening to Sebastian's evil laugh echoing down the hall, the return of Geoguessr, Wikitrails, and Coup, the invention of a new currency, age-mixed Roblox, naming the new projector, and listening to Timo and Iphy explain active voice to Hugo (happening right now!). Exciting things to come: field trips, park trips, the return of volunteer-led offerings like Acro and cook noob, art projects, anatomy and physiology, and a Pokemon showdown tournament (that I might stand a chance in - we'll see!). First things first: the D&D crew got $150 from finance club today to go to the Strand and Forbidden Planet on Monday to get supplies! Yay for a new year!

The End of Year 3

The whole time I’ve been ALFing, there’s been something about the end of year 3. An aura, or a promise: threes are magical. When I was uncertain, blindsided by a question for the first time, moving through a situation I had never encountered, traversing the part of the map labeled here be dragons, I felt that promise - things would loosen. I would find ease, after year three. I would be able to keep the tops spinning. I held hands with that promise, I believed in my future-ALF self.  Now I am that future-ALF; today is the last Writing Time of the school year. Tomorrow is the last climbing trip. Friday is the last Check-In and Change-Up. Next week is the final week - the time for picnics and park trips and the Rockaways. The roses on my block are blooming. I am tender. This cycle is closing. This post is an aggregate of what I’ve learned this yearcycle - an incomplete and earnest attempt to get better at sharing my learning. I’ve learned a lot about myself in the first three years of ALFing, a lot about the ways that I learned to relate to and disassociate from my body to survive schooling. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I started this year by spending my birthday writing a long, hard post about what I want, the question at the cornerstone of SDE. It was scary to post - prior to publishing it, I was not out on the internet as a trans person, and I didn’t know I was ready to occupy a public space so vulnerably. Sitting here, on the other side of the year, I’m grateful for my day-of-birth courage (I’m 27, which is three nines…). In three years, the most profound lesson I’ve learned is that the things my body wants are valid, even if those things are hard. A lot of the rest is just variations on this theme. (See the two featured posts below for my years 1 and 2 ramblings on it.)

Since then, I’ve been on 25 field trips, made an obscene amount of slime, practiced 3 instruments, learned to crochet hyperbolic corals, played an exuberance of tag, learned a ton about anatomy and physiology, played many writing games, fed my body lots of fruits and veggies, read the entire Percy Jackson and Heroes of Olympus series (among many other awesome books), puzzled through the delightful game Baba Is You, shared my love of Steven Universe with the school, and spent more time outside playing at the park than ever before in my life. My facilitation comes more easily now that I’ve discovered the embodiment of it. It’s not always smooth and I don’t have all the answers - but I’m much more comfortable with unknown unknowns than my three-years-ago self ever believed I was capable of.

Abby just handed me a letter from my September self (one of our favorite traditions here at ALC-NYC), and in it I said “I intend to share my writing in the world - my works and my art - because I am inspired by these humans and the work I’m privileged to do with them - their chaos and humor and joy.” The thing I’m proudest of this year is achieving that goal: I’ve published 22 blog posts this year! They’re all listed below - the long and the short alike. Thinking about my next-three-years self, I’m looking forward to the ones I haven’t written yet, and I hope that they’ll help other facilitators who are finding their way through this strange journey, practicing and deschooling and collaborating and playing. Happy end of year three, and I’ll see you in the future.

• 9.22 Where Have You Been? 

• 10.02 What Are You Up To? 

• 10.03 Quiet Morning Writing Time 

• 10.14 This Week: Rose, Bud, Thorn 

• 10.19 Another Cycle, Another Practice Reflection 

• 10.26 On Rest 

• 11.16 Practicing Cycles and What We’ve Been Up To 

• 11.30 Your Bones Are Wet 

• 12.21 Last Blog at the End of the Universe 

• 1.18 What Is Writing Time? 

• 1.18 Share Your Learning 

• 1.18 What Are You Up To Now? 

• 2.01 On Kindness and the Soft Animal of My Body 

• 2.15 Describe Your Relationship to Work 

• 2.12 On Facilitating In Your Joy

• 3.22 Mercury Retrograde: A Review 

• 3.27 An Unabridged Free Write

• 4.05 Gratitude for Gratitudes 

• 4.12 Pre-Break Focused Blog Brilliance 

• 5.17 Post-SotA Reentry Feels

• 5.31 Tag! Tag! Tag!

Post-SotA Reentry Feels

A couple months ago I posted about School of the Alternative - a self-directed art camp for grownups that I applied to go play at. This week, I went and came back again. I'm still processing, and there's a post that I'm dreaming up about slime and soma and distributed networks and non-hierarchical education for all (or maybe a book I'm writing, or a notpoem, or a big ole' installation...) but I'm not ready to write it today. Today I'm writing about reentry. It's been hard, and I see three reasons for it.

One is that I'm simply tired - I ran my body to the ground because I wanted to get the most [waking hours] out of the 6 days that I was playing with the brilliant humans who came together at SotA. Your human body is made of meatstuff and it needs sleep and water and good food and regular schedules to feel good. Fine. I live with these choices.

The second is that I feel a real loss of the intimacy of the community of SotA - the shared vocabulary that mushroomed up among us after days of Clump and slime and sharing and falling and late nights and early mornings and workshares and meals and being present with one another and our bodies. I miss my friends and the liminal space we created staying up until 2 in the morning making stickers, or walking through the woods in the pouring rain to go scream into the void. I'm unbelievably grateful to have had the opportunity to be there, to make obscene amounts of slime, to commune with other weirdos, to yell about my soma, to hold and be held by the brilliant, creative, generative artists who are collaborating there and carrying on the legacy of Black Mountain College. The depth of my grief is a testament to how powerful the spacemaking at SotA is. I'm grateful for this grief.

The third reason that re-entry has been hard is that, for as much as ALC-land is aligned in principal with SotA, there is a massive difference between being an adult communitying with other adults, and being an adult who is responsible for the safety of children. This is the bit I'm working out here, today.

Part of my intention behind going to SotA was to experience being facilitated, to be a participant in a space that I was not actively coherence holding. A coherence holder, as I'm using it, is the person who makes the thing happen - who makes sure everyone's dietary restrictions are accounted for and there is enough to eat, or that the right doors are unlocked, or the tape and scissors are where we need them, or the schedule is hung up, or the translation work is done, or everyone on the email chain is clear which piece of the puzzle they're holding. In the abstract, as an adult coherence holder for this ALC space, it's my responsibility to make sure that ALC-NYC is as physically, mentally, and emotionally safe as possible, so that the childpeople of this community are free to play, explore, learn, create, choose, heal, and thrive. It's a job I don't take lightly.I've noticed, upon reentry, that we aren't our usual May selves this year. Usually by this point, the school culture is so strong that safe-space-making is held between the ALFs and the kids easily, lightly. When I think about May, I remember the feelings of twice-a-week field trips and playing with visitors and going to the park every day and finishing all the last-minute magic that comes up. I'm acutely aware, this week, just how much energy I'm expending reminding people not to bring their chase game into the quiet room, or that pushing someone is breaking our "respect yourself and others" agreement, or that you should only have to say "stop rule" once. I'm expending energy on volume management and clean-up logistics. I'm repeating myself. At other points in the year, this is par for the course - in May, it's frustrating.

The primary difference between this space and any other where I might be working with kids is the amount of agency they have - the degree to which they are empowered to collaborate in our culture. I'm curious how we found ourselves, this May, expecting the adults to hold cleanup, and conflict resolution, and community care. I do this work because I believe in science fiction - I believe that children are brilliant people who have the ability to generate visionary worlds. Looking at the last four (ahh!) weeks of school, I'm wondering how we can aid and abet our best selves, the ones who actively care for one another, rather than do the minimum of harm. I'm thinking about how care is pleasure, and dreaming of ways to share these thoughts that are careful not to use my power-over to impose these beliefs on children.

Not all of these last two days has been frustrating, and I don't want to overemphasize the parts that have been hard. Some of these frustrations will always be a part of this work - I've never been to a self-directed space for kids that isn't constantly talking about how to make cleanup go more smoothly. The nature of this work [with children] is that children are constantly changing - they ramble through chaos which crashes back through them as they change and that's growing. The place of difficulty is also the wellspring of magic.

In the last two days I've collaborated with children in playing at least 6 varieties of tag in two parks in the rain and the beautiful spring sunshine, singing the Steven Universe theme song really, really loudly, watching ants crawl on our hands, making art messes, hugging a tree, hanging upside down, learning how blood clots, punning around, and discussing the healing power of visionary fiction. I'm dreaming of ways to spend the last weeks of school putting my attention on collaborations like these (what you put your attention on grows!).I'm deeply grateful to my #SuperALFTeam for making space for me to leave and come back again. I'm grateful to School of the Alternative, for making space for me to come play with their magic. I'm grateful to all the past-three-years Mels who did the work of holding contradiction so I could write this post. I'm grateful for slime, and flocking, and Emergent Strategy, and the lessons of distributed networks that are clamoring all around me. And I'm grateful we're not done yet.Thanks for witnessing.<3

Pre-Break Focused Blog Brilliance

I was working on this blog post but then we were retelling jokes and redrawing old drawings and talking about your flesh seashells aka your ears and old timey music and queerbaiting and the Titanic and who belongs at Pride and how testosterone humans grow later in life and your address and your identity and get on my level and cat sounds and being a person who shares the world with others and 11 hours of sleep tiredness and the perfect sleep method and taking out the dog and pay-per-google and and and... it's the day before break and (surprise surprise) focused blogging is not-so-focused today.

I am writing a very nice coherent blog post about tracking my trackers and I will post it here soon but I am putting down the struggle now; my three-years-in facilitator self has learned a lot about going with the flow instead of fighting the momentum. I'm grateful for the ways that the cycle of the year makes space for work and play, makes eddys of silly time and productive labors, of movement and rest. Happy break!

Gratitude for Gratitudes

Today, I'm feeling really grateful for Gratitudes - my favorite part of our daily routine here. It's an optional meeting, every afternoon, but I try to never miss one. It's been an anxious few weeks for me, but I can always rely on Grats (as I affectionately call it) to be a safe, quiet space (or a silly one, on those magical days when we decide to run an upside down meeting). We use the custom Gameshift board pictured above (featuring secret menu - you have to be here) and take 10 or so minutes to draw a ritual space together. All 4 ALFs usually attend. The kids are more varied - Timo, Iphy, and Hugo are pretty consistent participants and Tamia, Mason, Ash, Aniya and Olive come more occasionally. Even when no kids come, the ALFs hold the space (a rare but not unheard of occurrence). We've increased enrollment recently, so there are a lot of bodies in the space, and spring fever has us real energized (though not necessarily eager to go to the park as the early-spring chill continues) and I am a human that is sensitive to noise and others' energy - when I arrive at Gratitudes after a particularly raucous day, I can literally feel my nervous system relax a bit. That's because praciticing paying attention to what your grateful for is really good for you - it's science. Today I'm grateful for water, and the space that is this blog, and a Quick and Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns, and for my fellow ALFs, and that the magnolia tree on my block is starting to bloom....

Mercury Retrograde: a Review

It’s been a weird few weeks, y’all, and I’m blaming Mercury retrograde. You've probably heard of this astrological phenomenon, since it's sucked up into pop culture in recent years. That may be because it happens fairly often - three times a year, for a few weeks at a time - but I think it's because it's really, truly annoying. Mercury is the planet that rules communication, travel, technology, and commerce, and when it goes retrograde (appears to move backwards in the sky) it makes those things go wonky - tech malfunctions, communication goes awry and travel gets snarled.

The wifi has been in and out of functioning for no apparent reason all morning, here at ALC-NYC, and I’ve been in and out of a not-fight with a friend for three weeks now. On Monday, I got to the train station to find that my metrocard expired, and all three of the machines at my station were only accepting cash. Luckily, I had enough cash for a single ride, but not for the monthly unlimited card that I rely on. When I swiped the card at the turnstile, though, it told me to swipe card again at this turnstile… and then it told me that I had an insufficient fare. I went and argued with the stationmaster about it, and they opened the gate to let me in. Then I went to school, did a whole day, and forgot about it - until I got on the bus in the afternoon. I swiped 2 different (empty) metrocards, shrugged at the driver and got on the bus. When I got to 86th street to transfer to my train, I thought to myself finally, I’ll be able to get my unlimited and I won’t have to deal with this any more. But, of course, none of the machines at 86th street were working either - every one of the (seven!!!!) machines at the station were only selling single rides. Knowing it's Mercury retrograde helped me find a sense of amusement about it as I bought a single ride, explained what was happening to a tourist, and swiped into the station just in time to miss my train.

Mercury retrograde is annoying, but it’s not just an annoyance. It forces us to slow day, and slowing down things we take for granted makes us notice them - like how I discovered that I could, in fact, hold boundaries with my anxious brain on my Mercury retrograde journey to Australia last year.

I’ve been spending a lot of time, this retrograde, with my old notebooks and past selves - 25 books worth of them. I got sick the first week, and was forced to slow down all the way to a halt. I spent 4 straight days in my apartment, sitting with my changing selves. It is still loud in my head, but not a cacophonous as it once was, I’m noticing.

As I record my present selves - in free writes, in staff check in notes, in journals and reflections on tarot cards, in blog posts - and the data available to me about my patterns piles up, becomes several-cycles-worth of observations, I can see my self getting better at slowing down. I can trace the path of learning to hold my paradoxes: all of my thoughts are valid, even if they are not all as urgent as my brain would have me believe.It’s a shift that I didn’t notice until this retrograde-review-cycle, but it’s been a seismic one. It didn't start now, but now is when I can finally feel it: not all of my strongest thoughts and feelings are urgent and need to be acted on. It’s really hard for me to just sit with them - to not go racing down the mental track of contingency plans and what-ifs and hypothetical conversations - but it is possible. When I read my traveling-to-Australia-through-Mercury-retrograde thoughts I can see the buds that are now flowering - I can't wait to discover the buds under this flower when I check back with this post in a year, or five, or ten...

View this post on Instagram

I’m so excited to go play at @schoolofthealternative this May!! I’ve been thinking about this drawing since I made it for their application, and while Pisces season mercury retrograde has me swirling in past-present-future unknown-undefined-unknowable time, I don’t feel as helpless as I once did - I feel rooted, and grateful, and optimistic, and unfurling. Non-hierarchical education for all, indeed! 🕐🕑🕒🕓🕔🕕🕖🕗🕘🕙🕚🕛🕜🕝🕞🕟🕠🕡🕢🕣🕤🕥🕦🕧

A post shared by Mel Compo (@the_melicorn) on Mar 13, 2019 at 8:01am PDT

On Facilitating in Your Joy

Looking back through this blog, I see myself working through a lot of hard feelings around facilitation; while that’s a big part of this work, it’s definitely not all of it. I want this blog to be an accurate reflection of my life in ALC-land, struggles and joys alike, and so today I intend to course-correct a bit.

I can feel it in my body when I’m facilitating in my joy; I feel the bubbling right below my solar plexus.

I’m facilitating in my joy when we’re barefoot in the gym first thing Monday morning and the sun is streaming in through the windows and we’re playing a game of tag where everyone is it and we’re shrieking and chasing and rock-paper-scissoring and throwing the same hand sign over and over.

I’m facilitating in my joy upside down on the floor in Gratitudes, laughing helplessly with a teenager, laughing so hard we can’t even look at each other, because someone surprised us my elaborating on an inside joke and our faces are so red and every time one of us makes a little sigh and tries to stop we make eye contact and set off laughing again.

I’m facilitating in my joy in the library, curled up on the denim couch, reading a kid a book, or in the red room on a rainy day watching one of my favorite movies (Star Wars, or Harry Potter, or Howl’s Moving Castle) and I get to see a strange, fantastical world that I love as if for the first time, again.

I’m facilitating in my joy when I share a surprising fact (oooh how I love surprising facts) and a kid’s face lights up and they say really??? I’m facilitating in my joy when these roles are reversed.I’m facilitating in my joy at the park, any park, and the sun is shining.

I’m facilitating in my joy when riffing on existential questions, or the nature of time, or surprised on the subway by an unexpectedly deep “this or that” from a kid I didn’t know was contemplating the metaphysical.

I’m facilitating in my joy when there’s paint between my toes.

I’m facilitating in my joy sitting deliberately out of sight, doing something with my hands to make myself invisible (crochet, or sketching) and listening to kids play with each other; co-create worlds with their Lego or tend the hamster in age-mixed clusters or...I’m facilitating in my joy making up a dance outside the deli, or down the hallway, or after the big collective feast of Dancegiving with the music all the way up.

Playing in language facilitates my joy.

I’m facilitating in my joy on the subway, at the museum, on the rock climbing wall, in a bookstore or public library or exploring the zine collection, on the ferry, at the beach, under the Brooklyn Bridge, overlooking the East River, moving from island to island of this strange wondrous city and getting to taste and touch and see it all for the first time: the dumplings in Chinatown, the silver dome of the park at Union Square, the belly of the Great Blue Whale at my favorite childhood museum.

Of course not all of the facilitating I do comes from that place of joy; I’m still working through the shit from a childhood that wasn’t self-directed, where joy was not the goal. And that’s important work, no doubt. But joy is the work, too, joy is the medicine, joy is co-creating movement towards the world I want to live in. Thanks for witnessing <3

Share Your Learning

I have a confession: when I talk about the fourth Agile root, I often forget about sharing. “Growth happens in cycles of intention, action, reflection and sharing.” I’ve always had the hardest time with sharing, which I know is part of my deschooling. This year, I’m committed to examining that - and doing it publicly, as a meta-process.I was thinking about it yesterday at ice skating, when I was watching Saylor and Savannah teach strangers to skate. Saylor has been skating for a few years now, but one of the first things she said when she got on the ice yesterday was “I forgot how to do this.” And Savannah skated for the first time ever just last month. She went from not being able to make it around the rink without falling down a dozen times, to holding hands with a stranger and encouraging them to lean on her, to keep going, to try what she’s doing. And as I watched them I was thinking, “well that’s definitely sharing.”I’m sharing this today because I’m realizing there’s lots of different levels of sharing - and the more high-stakes it feels, the more I struggle with the gifts of my schooling: procrastination and perfectionism. I just paused my writing to have a chat with Timo about the difficulty of teaching someone a skill (like writing or, in his case, programming) that requires the person to generate work from their own ideas before you can practice the skill. We talked about “blank page syndrome” and I’m realizing that, while I’ve got a bunch of tricks for tricking my brain out of blank page paralysis, (check out this post on Writing Time for some of them) I don’t often use them with work that I’m planning to share. My reflection practices are robust in writing, but my sharing is sparse. Usually, when conceiving writing I’m going to share here or elsewhere, I get stuck in the planning phase because I’m carrying that blank page around in my head and beating myself up over it before I’ve even begun.I’m sharing this today because I’m trying to lower the stakes in 2019: to bring my reflection and sharing closer together, to publish shorter blog posts, to remember that sharing doesn’t have to be formal and that no one is judging me. Each of us get hung up on different stages of growth and this is it for me; I am excited to grow even as I am apprehensive of being vulnerable. There is no such thing as perfect work. There is only us, growing together.