Relationships
Children are feeling beings. And it’s the happy and enthusiastic
feeling tones from the heart of the child that ignite the
synapses of intelligence and invite him to freely enter into the
exhilarating dance of creation.
Heart Wings
THE OUTDOOR ENVIRONMENT
The burgeoning inner life that impels each child’s development deserves interesting, dynamic, living environments. This means bringing down the walls between nature and the buildings as much as possible. If a complete indoor/outdoor environment is not practical, children need frequent and sustained opportunities to be outdoors, especially on beautiful days. Even if the outdoor area is only a half acre, it can become child-friendly with trees, shrubs, flowers and grasses, not manicured, but growing in natural profusion. Children love shaded nooks and crannies for small gatherings and imaginative play. If there’s limited space for fields, then they relish winding paths lined with native flower and berry-producing plants, and at least one tree and rocky hill for climbing. Native fruit trees, a vegetable and herb garden, and a small fountain and pond round out the natural environment, with about a third or fourth of the play area designed for games.
If the community designs and maintains the environment, Nature the Great Teacher will stimulate healthy bodies and optimal heart/brain function. While her beauty embraces children, multidimensional resonances commune with hearts and souls, a core consideration of conscious child-nurturing and therapies.
THE INDOOR ENVIRONMENT
Let all new building constructions at the center for living/learning have as many windows as possible, with a consciously planned view of surrounding nature, even if it means covering a viewed wall with vines and hanging plants.
When children are indoors let regularly refreshed activities for the hands, attractive centers, and projects for the innovative/creative imagination engage their focused attention. Let the indoors be as beautiful and carefully maintained as the outdoors with attention to color harmonies, and textures including natural wood tones and woven basket containers. And this beauty augmented natural sunlight streaming through a window backdrop of nature’s seasonal change of dress.
RELATIONSHIPS
Let the living/learning environment reflect the spirit of the first four aspects of the Harmonies Way Process:
1. Heart-Centered – An atmosphere of love and understanding forgoes judgement and forced homogeneity to encourage individual proclivities and inspire self-expression through heart-impelled creation and innovation. Heart to heart resonances govern interpersonal relationships through appreciation, compassion, and trust in inner forces. When children bask in this light, tense, subdued compliance yields to both serene and exuberant expressions of inner radiance.
2. Feminine/Masculine Balance – The return of the Mother to the world’s learning environments for children means the empowered feminine intuits individual needs and provides a warm, patient, accepting center for learning. The empowered feminine restores masculine balance, and together these offer a broad cross section of small motor and large motor tasks for model/mentoring. In this case autocratic posturing and coercive measures are replaced with friendly, irresistible challenges to expand individual capacities, research and explore new domains. This responsive/responsible partnership fosters and honors lots of child-designed projects including models, dioramas, plays, poetry, displays, experiments and inventions.
3. Synthesis of Science, Art and Ethics – In the modern center for learning, retrieving the advantages of the village, an optimal environment blends children’s propensity to design their own curriculum with adult offerings of their own creativity for the children’s enjoyment and development. This includes a wide range of offerings from storytelling, to arts and crafts, to constructions and practical repairs. The self-challenge for teacher/mentors is to synthesize science and mathematics curriculum with beauty and design, while communing heart to heart about inherent ethical, metaphorical lessons. For example a story can simultaneously inform about science, paint evocative pictures and provide heroic examples. Similarly, sacred geometry springs from mathematical constructs, stimulates colorful design-creation, and encodes living, ecological relationships.
4. The Four Harmonies – The challenge of the Four Harmonies is for adult minds, unnaturally grooved by many years of partitioned curriculum, to learn to see, experience and communicate in terms of living relationships. Essentially, it means open heart/brain systems become the harmonic microcosm of surrounding and cosmic nested systems ranging from the infinitely small particle to cosmic infinity. Communities consciously living the four harmonies loop elegantly back to heart-centered relationships with both outer landscapes and interior child terrains.
What greater achievement for the child than Deep Ecology, to feel his interconnectedness with all life and realize his right to ecstatic play, communion and co-creation in the unified fields of the heart.
