Category Archives: At A Glance

Circles Games, Cycles of Life

Our children, and indeed children everywhere, break into spontaneous circle games. Their small bodies, psyches, and souls reflect great cosmic circles. In our childrens’ joyous, dizzying games we can see intimations of the whirling bodies, vapors and colors sent back to us from Hubble’s photographs. Soon we will pass through one of these nodal points, the Winter Solstice, and Light will be born again. Not only in Springtime, but now deep in the winter, new beginnings stir.

Perhaps your family has managed to escape the crush of commercialism, and you are preparing for a simple and cherished holiday time together. It is at these festival gatherings that we have the opportunity to “step outside of time” to review the year we have just completed, as well as envision the year to come. Take a moment at the holiday meal, to recollect together high points of your year, and also look together toward the growth the coming year will bring. As we engage in this recounting of our family’s story, and creatively imagining our future, we build up an oral history. This Living Book of Life will nourish our children, as well as model for them how we create, through images, the life we want to live.

Our year here at The Rose Garden has been full. Family Camp was magical last summer, and our circle of friends has widened. The garden has grown and the children have too. Some of them have stepped into new adventures in Grade School, and have returned to visit us, shining with new capacities and knowledge. New families have joined us, and new friendships bloom. New Land has graced us!

Looking toward the future, here is an idea I want to share with you. Let’s use this blog as one forum for your parenting questions. (Check the Family Consultation page for other ways to address your questions, too.) It seems the downturn in the economy has brought into vogue the parenting values we have always held dear. Now you read about “free-range parenting”, or “slow parenting”. The Rose Garden’s description has always been “A Slow Meander Through Early Childhood.” Email me your questions, observations, thoughts, concerns, and I will be happy to share ideas with you. Your questions, most certainly, are mirrored in many other parents, and we can look at these together. Together we can explore the particulars of your own child’s slow meander.

My holiday wish for you and your family is that you go along slowly, enjoy one another, and spend plenty of time playing together outdoors! Let me know your thoughts and questions! Sharifa

New Land

As some of you know, we have been in the process of acquiring two acres which adjoin The Rose Garden land. This is very exciting new land! It is amazing that such a small amount of earth can contain so many diverse micro-ecoystems! Just beyond our flower garden, we now have opened up a “circle walk”. Through the berry patch, past the giant poplar whose roots trail down to the creek, and up to the huge rock outcropping! This rock formation will lend itself well to games of valiant explorers. We then walk further into the deep forest to the moist and magical glade where the wood thrush nests. Now across the new footbridge, and into the poplar grove on the other side of the creeks’ “upper fork” .

This serene grove is a place to meander, rest, picnic, and play. It is here that we can see the small waterfall, and rock water slide. We also see the place where the two streams meet, for this new land contains all the vigorous energy of confluence! Beyond the quiet grove, we cross the creek’s “lower fork” and rush up the hillside to the open field! Having lived for so long under the umbrella of the trees, it is true pleasure to have what will soon be an open, sunny meadow. This is a work in progress. Slowly we will make benches, rustic chairs, tables and play structures from the wood and logs offered by the land.

It is a time for celebration and joy, as The Rose Garden becomes steward to the New Land!

Family Camp is Coming

It is summer in Virginia. The earth is made soft by a million autumns laying down carpets of gold, crumbled into black humus. Morning mist rises from the creek-bed. The wood thrush announces joy. The ruby-throated hummingbird peers in my kitchen window before she sips and veers away. Afternoon cicadas tune up for the evening performance. Human children join this forest community. They are just as tender and vulnerable, just as bursting with life force as their brothers and sisters, the furred, feathered and finned ones with whom they play, side-by-side. Each one of them needs our love and protection; we need their fresh hope.

Love, protection, freshness, hope. All of this is alive for the children, as they play barefoot in the garden, splash free in the creek. Days slip by in a primordial “here-ness, now-ness” Growth, exploration, new neural pathways, friendship, home-made meals, all are contained in the over-arching Presence of the living forest.

Soon, we will be joined by families coming from as far away as San Francisco and Florida, as well as those coming from a few miles down the road. For five days we will put our lives together, alongside the lives of the woodland creatures, and together we will all know something new!

In The Garden, Again!

Today the children, Rebecca and I returned to the garden playground! Last autumn, after the Harvest Festival, the children and their parents came to school for a Saturday picnic, to “put the garden to bed”. We raked out the leaves, took the scarecrow apart, and spread her straw into the beds for winter mulch, pulled out the old stalks, and laid everything to rest for the winter. Through the very long and cold winter, from time to time, a child would ask, “but when do we get to go back to the garden?” Today was the day, and everyone was thrilled! The five year olds were discussing the exact place they had left off playing their “garden games” and the little ones were trying to remember which path we take to get to the garden.

Our garden is a little bright spot in the deep Virginia woods. It is laid out in the curve of our stream, and we must walk across a small footbridge to get there. The children love to play “in the garden” because this includes splashing in the shallow water of the stream, looking for salamanders, water skaters, cray fish and all their relations. As well as the endless back and forth across the little bridge, to play on the swing set, in the sandbox , under the scented branches of the butterfly bush, nibbling herbs and flowers as they go.

It is such a gift to teach these young souls, here in the generous arms of Nature. The children develop intimate relations with the insect and animal world, from the army of worms they unearth (and re-earth!) to the song of the wood-thrush they hear and the footprints of the raccoon in the mud beside the creek.

The native people pray by intoning “All My Relations.” And the children talk of the great family of Nature: our best friends the Rain Fairies, their mother The Great Mother Rain Cloud, Brother Wind, Father Sun. These children have the foundation laid for a life lived experiencing humanity as part of a great seamless Whole. This is preparation for the only future we can sustain. This is our one hope, and they bring their up- springing joy to it!

Africa Alive

Let me tell you a story of two young mothers, a lot like yourselves.

Susanna and I met each other through our children, Shanti and Loren. We were looking for like-minded families with whom we could share the fun, the work, the frustrations, the baby sitters. Some little bit of magic sparked, and were suddenly close friends. We raised our babies together, and when it was time to send them to school, we worked with a group of dedicated parents to create the Charlottesville Waldorf School. Babies and brothers came to our families, and our children went to school, played baseball, swam at the pond together. My best memory is meeting at the pond, day after day, summer after summer: we splashed in the water, sat in the shade life guarding, we talked, and brought out the picnic lunches. We even made little nap spots in the shade for the kids afternoon snooze. Shanti and my son Noah went to Senior Prom together.

Life ensued, Susanna went back to school for an MBA, our lives became too full and we saw each other only for special occasions. A few moths ago, Susanna called. I knew her work had taken her into World Health, specifically to Africa, and heard through the grapevine she was at the Curry School at UVA completing a doctorate in Education. She surprised me by telling me one of her classmates had given her my name because I was a local educator interested in the brain development of babies and young children. Our interests had once again aligned! As Susanna described her project to me, I began to see threads of her work and mine weaving together to create something remarkable.

This where, if you choose, you enter the story. read more »

Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is always loved by the children, but especially so this year.  I have been telling the children “table stories”, stories they ask for while we are all at the big snack table.  A few days before Valentine’s Day, I told them the story of making heart-shaped waffles for my boys, now grown men, on Saturday mornings.  I showed them the heart shaped waffle iron, and they of course responded, “And will you make them for us?”  Up until the wee hours the night before, making mountains of waffles, I was was tired but happy on Valentine’s morning.  The children arrived, and with their parents help, they delivered the lovely hand-made Valentines to their friends’ bright bags.  The great excitement was eating the heart shaped waffles with fresh strawberry syrup!

The table story I told the children today is this:  Each Valentine’s Day, I wait eagerly for my gift from Mother Earth.  Usually, within a day or two, I hear the first call of the mourning dove, who returns to my woods from her long migration.  Today we will listen carefully, as we play in the woods.

Rose Garden “Day of Service”

In the spirit of change that is sweeping the nation and our globe, and looking toward a brighter future, The Rose Garden children joined neighbors helping neighbors all across the country, in a day of service.  But what exactly can three, four and five year olds do to be helpful?  And how can this tie into our normal school life?  Each day every child participates in house keeping, each with a particular chore.  They cheerfully wash tables and chairs, wash cups and spoons, and sweep the floor.

Nearby The Rose Garden, in the heart of our tiny town is the Batesville Store.  The store is Batesville’s “front porch” where locals go for coffee, conversation and good food.  Many of the children and parents go to the store on their way home from school.  The Post Office is next door.   This seemed like the perfect place for our day of service.

We packed sponges, brooms, mops, wisk brooms and dustpans, along with crayons and paper.  Away we went bright and early in the morning.  At the store, the children were confident, engaged, industrious, and told people who came through the door “We are helping out our neighbors!”  With great cheer, they sponged the many tables and chairs, dusted and swept the floors, emptied dustpans, and enchanted all.  At the Post Office, the Postmistress was thrilled, telling the children she was so busy with the mail she never had time to clean.

When everything was sparkling clean, we sat down and colored bright pictures which we made into a book for Cid and Liza, the store owners.  The children were hungry, now, and happy to have our snack of bread and honey butter at the big shiny tables in the store.

It was a day of work and fun.  The lesson that helping friends and neighbors is its own reward was sweet and tangible!

Create Your Family Culture

Join Sharifa Oppenheimer this summer!

Create Your Family Culture

    Or How to Live your Values amidst the Rising Tide of Commercialism

A Summer Camp for Families with Young Children
July 27th – 31, 2009 Monday – Friday

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Parents of young children will  begin to explore the regeneration of 21st century family life.  You will envision the “Star” of your family’s culture, studying deeply your own family’s rhythm, your family’s work together and play together. You will inquire into your child’s life, looking carefully at art, stories and the nature of play itself. The complex and often confusing questions of discipline will be discussed, beginning with your own sense of discipline. You will learn the fine balance of both protecting your children from the effects of this 21st century highly media-saturated culture, while also preparing them as young adults, to step into their world with courage, hope and commitment. read more »

Robin’s First Christmas – Stories For The Early Winter

 

As you remember, once, a very long time ago, an old man and a young woman took a long icy winter’s journey.  Because there was no room at the inn, they slept at night in a humble stable, with the animals’ sweet breath warming them, and golden hay for a bed.  A baby was born to them that night.  Although the old man made a small fire to warm the baby, still, the infant was cold.  At the baby’s cry, the old man put on his cloak.  He went out into the snowy night to gather more wood, that the fire might burn warmer, to comfort the baby’s tears.

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The Fig Tree – Stories For The Early Winter

 

Once upon a time, there was a little fig tree. She grew happily on a hill, close beside a stable. She loved her hillside, and all the busy goings-on at the stable close by. In the spring, she watched as the shepherd maiden brought the new lambs and their mothers out into the green meadow, to eat the soft spring grasses. In summertime, she saw the shepherd maiden bring the flock up higher on the hill, to catch the cool breezes. At autumn’s harvest, she breathed the fragrant perfume of fresh-mown hay, as bales were stacked into the stable for the coming cold. In winter, she thrilled to the silent snow, shimmering under the light of the moon.

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