Guardians of Goodness

I want to say with full honesty, I have been freaking out this last week. It wasn’t what I expected my coronavirus freak out to be (If one were to expect such a thing). It really had little to do with the virus. It was an existential crisis about life-itself. The life that my husband and I have chosen for ourselves in this moment. Most specifically, the leap of faith our family made to move to Trout Lake, WA.

It is our first full year here. Last year we arrived April 15th or so. In a round-about way from Seattle via Costa Rica. I was told we arrived on the most beautiful week of a most intense spring transition. We then got a mild summer and winter. Now we are feeling some of the reality of being in a zone 5 climate trying to farm and garden like the zone 7 transplants that we have been. It’s intense to have snow on April 1 and 2 and 3! The wind is oppressive! Our housing is in flux while we want to put down roots. Our cash flow has been a trickle for the last year, while our goals have become behemoth.  And it is intense. Add to this isolation, 3 sick kids, 2 sick adults, housing insecurity, and a litany of new variables from COVID-19. I’m like, “GOD?! What do we do?! 

Two zoom interactions kept me afloat, A somatic experiencing session with Shannon Northrup at Integrative Hood River, and a meeting of my old homeschool group facilitated by Susanna Reynolds with SSI-Seattle. Shannon encouraged me to try singing lullabies. While Susanna Reynolds reflected that, “As mothers, we are guardians of goodness.” These notions went straight to my heart.

Pause.

Welcome to the still point. 

Take a breath. 

Sing a lullaby

Guardians of goodness…

Seems simple.

I can work with goodness. I can guard this goodness. For myself, it means allowing. It means self care. It means treating myself as though I am good enough to be fully embodied. 

Knowing that by entering into a full relationship with my fear, my greif, my unknowing, I can release that which does not serve life, or goodness. This is cathartic. It is real. It is true. My children model it. When I really have a hard moment, a tool I have is my tears. Our emotions are messengers. If they are sacred whisperings from our subconscious. If we are to guard goodness, and life itself is good, we must, then make a seat for the reality of our experience.  

The guarding of goodness is not, from this perspective, a rigid blocking out of that which my mind deems bad. It is not a false binary in which there is a force of evil that I must guard against. Rather, it is an allowing of life itself with a belief in life’s innate goodness. It is a softening into the possibility of offering these emotions in service of life itself.  

What it ended up meaning was that I needed to fall all-the-way-apart. I had a good strong on-the-earth cry session. This is something I can do when there is a safe space (and another adult to hold the children). It is something I allow in myself because it keeps the emotions of grief, fear,  doubt and anger from running my show. Just as our children need emotional release through laughter and crying, adults too have the same needs. 

These feelings are here, these big emotions. I don’t want these feelings. What do I do with them? How do I make them go away? It is goodness we must guard, goodness we must walk toward, goodness we must carry and share. How do I make it good?!

I talk to my higher power. I talk to the emotions. If life is good, and life is bringing me this overpowering wave, I must ask, what are you here to teach me? What do I need to know from this feeling, this situation, this discomfort to help me grow into an even more wonderful future?

I come to preschool with a degree in Philosophy, a foundation in the pragmatism of John Dewey and an adoration for the mysticism of Rudolf Steiner. You see the best ideas for how to educate human beings come from people being curious about human beings. It is about becoming, rather than being immersed in a subject. For when you focus on the gifts and talents and information coming to you from the students, you know how to reach them. If you focus only on the subject matter, and a predetermined prescription on how to apply the subject, the results can be hit-or-miss. 

In this same way, when you come to a moment in time in which all that you know is paused, or interrupted, or over, the predetermined prescription can really be hit or miss.  Attuning to my role in all this as a Guardian of goodness puts me in right relationship with myself, my children, my work, my grief, my fear, my anxiety, my hope. 

Steiner speaks to this: 

A Verse for Our Time

We must eradicate from the soul

All fear and terror of what comes towards man out of the future.

We must acquire serenity

In all feelings and sensations about the future.

We must look forward with absolute equanimity

To everything that may come.

And we must think only that whatever comes

Is given to us by a world-directive full of wisdom.

It is part of what we must learn in this age,

namely, to live out of pure trust,

Without any security in existence.

Trust in the ever present help 

Of the spiritual world.

Truly, nothing else will do

If our courage is not to fail us.

And let us seek the awakening from within ourselves

Every morning and every evening.

                  -Rudolf Steiner

For our children, for the future generations, we trust. We form a concept of goodness that makes space for all we are to experience from the future. This informs motherhood for me. Mothers and fathers as guardians of goodness is a reality I aspire to. Focused attention, love, nourishing food, safety in big emotions--goodness. The fear is there, the unknown is there--in a way, it has always been. However as we look to the moment and forward from here, it is goodness that I am called to cultivate and a faith in the possibility that this hard moment is teaching me something good. In this way, I am cultivating my inner life as a parent and a teacher.