Off Grid Kids
Returns
After 10 years, the kids and I are complete. Last Sunday we had a beautiful and heartfelt graduation. Afterward, we spent four days at Farmer Ron’s, our final camping trip together. It was simple, meaningful.
On the way home my daughter and I, in several different phrases, kept saying the same thing to each other: “Wow, um…I think we did it.”
We did. In the last month and a half we tackled the important tasks, conversations, and events to close up 10 wonderful years of teaching, learning, and playing outside. I could not be more grateful for this moment, for the energy and love so many incredible people shared with us along the way. To feel complete, not just with graduation, but with a decade of life effort - I touch the earth humbly and wish this for all people.
Two days ago I returned home, emptied the truck, and saw the corn sprouting in the garden. Slowly, my eyes are turning to the future. The creativity and activity that consumed me for so many years is…closed. And in a very good way. Now what?
Patience.
I have had diverse and rich conversations with folks who know I’m freed up for new ventures, giving me hints of what I might lend my energy towards next. I like inquiry and slow discernment (if I can shut myself up enough). I believe it will be 6 months to 2 years before I have fully landed in the next moment. In the meantime, I’m doing some housekeeping, and one of my first tasks is to republish Off Grid Kids as a serial here on Substack.
If you’re not familiar with Off Grid Kids, it was the initial spark of all the work that I’m now completing - this joyful mix of wilderness with kids, fatherhood, and good writing (to me at least). OGK led me to Fatherly, collaborations with Silke, How to Tell Stories to Children, forest kindergarten, and the formation of the Juniper School. It was a simple effort, published on my website and Facebook, read by a handful of family and friends. But I loved it, fully and completely, and it feels right to return to that material now.
To be clear - I will be publishing Off Grid Kids as a separate publication on Substack, not within this newsletter, which I call Juniper Heartwood. Please visit and subscribe today if you’re interested (sample below). I will share snippets and links here, but my intention, in time, is to create 3 separate publications, each of which captures and articulates a different body of work:
Off Grid Kids
How to Tell Stories to Children
Juniper Heartwood
Off Grid Kids and How to Tell Stories to Children (newsletter and podcast) will be presented serially, in the order they were first published, with the goal of making that work permanently available to a wider audience on Substack. It will be more easy to find and navigate than my current websites. Juniper Heartwood will continue and slowly evolve as I begin tackling subjects, events, and projects I couldn’t get to in my teaching years. In the coming months, I plan to address the following subjects, always with a lens on parenting and childhood. Not just how to talk with kids but how to engage with them (and ourselves) on these important and often difficult topics that many of us learned to ignore or remain silent about, especially when it comes to parent/child relationships.
grief/death
sex
single and divorced parenting
depression
play
intoxicants
I’d like to create meaningful conversation, resources, and workshops addressing not just these subjects but how to talk about them openly, humbly. It’s my opinion that the silence many of us learned in childhood didn’t serve well. Many parents want to do something different, but it’s easy to recycle the silence for fear of awkwardness or not doing it right.
Times are changing. Kids are adapting. We urgently need people who are grounded and available to listen and talk with teens and youth, with parents and peers, with elders and communities. People who know how to share insight and kindness, but also (and this is very important) - how to listen, disagree skillfully, and seek communion. The subjects I’ve listed above cannot be tackled without some element of listening, or receiving. They are far too hot.
Our culture has become almost obsessed with taking strong positions, being seen as an expert, or in the know, and then ridiculing or condemning people we don’t agree with, who don’t understand, or simply haven’t had the opportunity to learn. We do this in so many realms - teasing kids about math, clothing, or what they have in their lunch, vilifying neighbors and friends over politics or their choice of car. Judgement gets passed forward. And forward. Often with glee.
This is a terrible lesson to be sharing with our children. I am only one person, surely not the right person, and no expert of anything much at all. But after 10 years of working with kids and parents, I have too many healthy relationships to continue needlessly doubting myself: I know how to wiggle my way into children’s hearts, into those of parents and community members, and then listen to them. I’d like to see more of this in the world.
Off Grid Kids Returns
Bull Snake
October 1, 2016
We met a snake on Thursday. It was me, Agnes, Claire and Peter. I’m thirty-six years old. Agnes is four-and-a-half, Claire is three-and-a-half, and Peter is two. I don’t know how old the snake is, but it was big. “I would guess one-hundred,” Claire said with her typical giant mouth smile. “One hundred what?” I asked. Laughter. “Silly Joe Joe.”
It was a bull snake, sometimes called a gopher snake or rat snake. It’s harmless, but beautiful. Black and gold patterns all along its sinuous back. One giant articulation of muscle. We had just returned from an outing with Silke and her forest kindergarten - Agnes, Claire and me. Peter caught a glimpse of us as we walked past the kitchen, excited as usual to see us. The girls and I headed round the outside, while Peter shouted to his mother that we were home.
As we turned another corner, headed toward the mud pit, we crossed a small landing of brick pavers next to the sun room. Agnes and Claire walked right past the snake, lost in each other’s imaginations. I might have walked past too, but my peripheral vision brought my attention to something out of place. “Holy shit!” I might have said. But I probably didn’t. Instead, I yelled for the girls, “Agnes! Claire! Come here! Agnes, Agnes! Claire! Right now. Come here, come here! Look at this snake!” I was determined to win their attention.
“Look, look,” I said, when they had both returned. The snake, pinned against the corner of the wall, was about three and a half feet long, as thick as a banana. Immediately, the girls went into a squat position and got close. I hovered behind. Black and gold ran along the snake’s back, surrounded by the red brick floor and the earthy brown stucco of the wall. Its tongue flicked, and I guessed it was a little frightened. I was surprised not to see it dart away, but it may have felt trapped. There was no immediate thicket of grass or shrubs to shrink into. It was perfectly exposed, and that’s largely why we found it so fascinating. In the near distance I saw our two male turkeys taking notice of the commotion. Every business is their business. That snake is coiling with fear, I thought. Its black, forked tongue flicked out every half second, but its body sat largely unmoved.
“Can we touch it?” Agnes asked.
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