Thanks, Rhonda Baird, a friend, permaculturist, and wonderful home-schooling mother of two, for this pic and prose by Pinkola-Estes. They pair beautifully with a video of Mr. Rogers below . . .
Dear Brave Souls: One of these children will grow up to be brilliant. The rest already are.
Actually, all the children are brilliant just by being the great hearts they are. The greater part of ‘education’ is to keep the fire alive in all children, to not define slowness as stupidity, but rather as carefulness and care in learning… to not define subject preferences as a child being one-sided, but as the talent of focus that will be guided to greater and good uses.
At least half the failure of children in any education system can be laid directly at the feet of those who douse the child’s early creativity, explorations, veerings, obcessions, eccentricities.
That they survive us who know so much about much, and sometimes remember so little about the wingspread of a child.
Let us Bless all creatures great and small… and Spread the word.
With love,
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
A.K.: And do watch this remarkable, and very typical “speech” by Mr. Rogers, on receiving a lifetime achievement award. Has there ever been a more kind, generous, compassionate, heart-based soul alive in a human body? I am so lucky to have had this “best neighbor any of us ever had” to help soothe my children while their mother was enacting the paroxysms of late ’60s feminism . . .
