Family-building skills – Light Morning

The Lofty Chronicles: 7

This continues an ongoing series of posts about a young girl growing up
and pursuing child-led learning at Light Morning. The series begins here
with an introduction. Links to the other posts in the series are here.

The Old Paths

Bedtime Stories (Friday, 7 February 1992) Last April (here) I listed the books that Joyce, Lauren, and I had been reading aloud as bedtime stories. Here’s what we’ve read together since then.

Gifts of Unknown Things, Watson
Star Wars, Lucas
The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas et al
The Return of the Jedi, ibid
A Wizard of Earthsea, LeGuinn
The Tombs of Atuan, ibid
The Farthest Shore, ibid
Treasure Island, Stevenson
The Adventures of Robin Hood
Afternoon of the Elves, Lisle
George Washington Carver, Holt
Carver’s George, Means
Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time, Roberts
A Swiftly Tilting Planet, L’Engle

The Lofty Chronicles: 6

On Loan From the Universe

A New Kind of Family (Thursday, 5 December 1991) A passing impression this evening of life in the emerging Light Morning form of family. After supper, Joyce went to a village meeting at the Institute for Sustainable Living and Marlene went to a weekly gathering at our neighbors Harry and Doris. The rest of us are sitting around our off-grid community shelter which is lit by kerosene lamps.

Adam’s in the kitchen reading the current issue of Harrowsmith. Ron’s by the wood-stove studying a book about dreams. I’m on the couch with an old issue of Whole Earth Review. Lauren is sitting on Tom’s lap in the rocking chair, listening to stories about his youth, for which she seems to have an insatiable appetite and which Tom loves to share. Everything’s warm and cozy and family.

The Lofty Chronicles: 5

The Irony of Pinocchio

You Can’t Just Say No (Monday, 2 September 1991) Our new grain grinder has just arrived. It’s an expensive machine whose large flywheel should make it much easier for us to convert wheat berries into whole wheat flour. Even seven-year-old Lauren can crank the handle with no trouble. She’s thrilled to finally be able to grind flour with the rest of us.

Unfortunately, the output is far below both our expectations and the claims of the manufacturer. After seeing how little flour it seems to produce, we use a timer and a measuring cup to run some trials between our older, harder to crank machine and the new one. The results clearly show that the new grinder will have to be returned.

Our daughter, however, has not been included in this decision-making process. Lauren’s eyes fill with tears when she learns that we’re going to ship back the beautiful new machine she’s been using to help make flour. All our reasons and statistics are meaningless to her. We who value making communal decisions by consensus have acted as though consensus is for adults only, thereby disenfranchising the littlest member of our community. We have, in effect, become a bunch of neighborhood bullies.

The Lofty Chronicles: 2

This continues an ongoing series of posts about a young girl growing up
and pursuing child-led learning at Light Morning. The series begins here.

Just For the Joy of It

*The Light Morning family. Harvest time 1990*.

What If I Were the Only Adult? (Saturday, 10 November 1990) Sometimes I get haunting glimpses of what it must be like to walk through the Light Morning lifestyle in Lauren’s shoes. It’s clearly a magical place to grow up, but Lauren is the only child here. What if I were the lone adult living with five or six children? What if it were their interests, needs,and priorities that mostly dictated what I could or couldn’t do, and when I could occasionally go to visit other adults?

It’s a humbling empathy that permits a parental oppressor, however well-intentioned, to perceive the world-view of the oppressed.

A New Kind of Family

[When Light Morning was an active community, those wanting to visit or intern here sometimes asked about our core values. In response, we posted three articles to an earlier version of this website: Living Close to the Earth, A New Kind of Family, and A Transformational Journey.]

In the spring of 1974, two couples arrived at an old Appalachian farm in southwest Virginia and started homesteading. Ron and Marlene and Joyce and I were passionate and vision-driven. We had just come out of a catalytic encounter with inner guidance. But we also came from significantly different backgrounds.

Joyce and I grew up in a small intentional village on the east coast. As young adults, we adopted the early hippie lifestyle of long hair, psychedelics, rock and roll, and Vietnam War protests. Ron and Marlene were raised on Wisconsin dairy farms. They came of age as straight-laced Midwesterners, never doing any drugs, ignoring the war, and becoming members of the John Birch Society.

How did two couples who would hardly have been acquaintances, let alone friends, end up spending their entire adult lives together? We later joked that it had been an arranged marriage, and we were still looking for who had arranged it. But whoever that mysterious matchmaker may have been, we were tightly bonded with a curiously durable glue.