Weeks 10 & 11 2024-2025 in Review
Dear TCC Families,
Please enjoy this recap of our last full week together and the two days we met last week. Our predictable routine - which leaves plenty of room for pivoting and agility when we inadvertently burn cookies, for example - and full docket of offerings and options has been feeling good and steady and meaningful.
Our recent days together have been jam-packed with baking and chopping and culinary adventure of all sorts. Fluffy Japanese milk bread, a long-awaited four-element chocolate ice cream cake, DIY dog treat/"pup cups," peanut butter cookies, and a multi-gallon batch of kimchi put up to ferment all passed through the TCC kitchen. When we cook together, so much is happening within and between us. What we get to eat together when it's all over is a very small representation of what all of the process represents and the stories of connection it holds.
We kicked each week off with a trip somewhere for ingredients, navigating LIFE together. “How does this store treat its workers, because I hear it's not very good?” (this was a question initiated by a young person on the way to Wal-mart). More questions followed: Is shopping here ethical? How might we make more thoughtful purchases with worker wellbeing in mind? Is shopping anywhere ethical? How do we choose which brand of butter to get? The cream comes in a container that's either way too big or too small - what to do? Which organic sugar is cheaper - and are workers on organic farms treated better? How do we weigh, scan, and ring up groceries? Which garlic should we get and why is this one purple? Literally how do we MOVE in the store, taking into account where we need to go as well as other shoppers, without running into things and people? These experiences were *rich!*
In addition to trips to the store and a great deal of cooking we enjoyed Current Events/Histories of Resistance, TCC Awesome Math, History (of Living Things), an offering with Mr. Randy on Sound and Synthesizers (he asked the group during Set the Week if this was an experience he could bring and the group reached quick consensus on a “yes!”), and all of the in-between experiences in the "shadow schedule" that unfold: games, drawing, experimentation with video, dancing, singing, climbing trees. Learning happens everywhere, all the time. Our brains and bodies are always learning.
A cornerstone of the start of each of our weeks is our culture-keeping check in. We've been exploring screen use together - specifically what feelings around personal screen use folks have, and what needs they have surrounding the role personal screen use has in our community. This conversation includes facilitator screen use; it’s a community-wide exploration. Our processing on the topic has been thoughtful, reflective, and wide-ranging, as we consider a variety of feelings and needs. As a group, we noted that screens often serve us as a tool (for connection, for information, for note-taking, for regulation, and more) and sometimes they are an obstacle to all of the above and more. Together we drafted some questions we can ask ourselves (and one another, if we are regulated and authentic, coming from a place of genuine curiosity and care rather than asking with an agenda…this can be hard to do!):
"How might my screen use be an obstacle, or an opportunity for connection?”
“How is this taking care of the group (or not)?”
“How is this taking care of me right now (or not)?"
We drafted these questions the week before last and then were able to revisit them this past Monday. Several young people volunteered the ways they're reflecting on their own and others' screen use, and changing their behavior as part of that internal process. We noted how powerful and potent these conversations are, and the deep impact that holding them in community has. We reflected together that if we simply had a set of arbitrary rules that banned screens altogether, we'd lose all of these moments of reflection and learning about ourselves and one another. Might rules make things appear more neat and tidy, so we could get on to the "real" learning, like science experiments and book clubs and math? Maybe. But we're grateful for these opportunities to unpack complex ideas and negotiate and then renegotiate ways of being that take care of one another. This is a form of something called "relational accountability" - rather than being beholden to a set of rules and consequences, distanced from people and process, we're accountable to our relationships. To all our relations. This type of relational work doesn't often happen in many conventional spaces - where we see one another for a short time only, or a few times a week, or in the school or workplace where we're occupied with more "important" tasks and unable to take the time for this slow, messy, necessary, and humanizing work. We're eager to walk these next steps of this reflective process together and see what unfolds.
We are grateful.
Folks in the Current Events/Histories of Resistance offering met again, this time shifting focus from what and how we might resist to what we want to build and fight for. Initially, we set out to imagine together and create through images, by way of collage. What colors and elements and visions fill our minds if we consider a future with no constraints? What would we build? When we set words to those worlds in the second part of the world-building conversation, we dreamed that a future we imagine would contain: interspecies symbiosis - vs. humans considering themselves to be at the "front" of all living things; trust; compassion (to the group this meant understanding, kindness, and “trust that you will be cared for”); community (being together and caring for one another even in hard times and in conflict); imagination; kindness; preservation/sustainability/nature care; connection; relationship; food (there is enough, it's yummy, and it's free); medicine; everything is free; and clear, starry skies.
What future do you imagine, what worlds do you dream and wish to build?
The start of December marks the end of Indigenous People's Month. We have many ways we can honor Indigenous people and both their history and their lifeways as well as their resistance movements in the present. Supporting current Land Back efforts, like the Osage Nation's rematriation of the Sugarloaf Mound sacred site, is one example. We can further educate ourselves about Indigenous ways of being and honor and embrace them, and not only in November. We can grow our awareness of the role colonization has played and continues to play in Indigenous history, resistance, and existence. We can honor Indigeneity by examining the impact of colonization has played in our own lives and lineages and the ways it continues to shape our paradigms, thoughts, and our actions. We can actively shift away from colonial mindsets. As we try to imagine new worlds, may we also consider the ways colonial tools and structures (including conventional schooling, even our language) have hindered our ability to dream and imagine beyond the colonial - and to decolonize.
What does it mean to decolonize ourselves, and what can it look like in our every day interactions, within ourselves, and with the young people in our lives?
Being tucked here in this valley, surrounded by forest, gardens, and glades, we can look to our more-than-human kin to guide us in this work. Things move at the pace of trust and relationship and reciprocity here. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Indigenous ethnobotanist and writer, points out in her new book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, that plants love us unconditionally. They share their gifts in their own time. The rhythms of the forest cannot be forced; serviceberries - any berry, any living thing - cannot be coerced to grow. Similarly, the children in our lives have their own timetables, their own pace and rhythms of growth, their own ways of being. We can look to the trees and life around us - and to our children - and recenter relationship. We can trust, letting these elements and these creatures remind us that we do not own and cannot control any of this, despite how much we may wish we did and could. We are simply a connected part of it all. And we can simply be accountable to these relationships. To all our relations.
With gratitude and care,
Emily, Sarah, and Zoey
