Stories from the Yafa trenches

A lie travels 1/2 way around the world before the truth crosses the starting line. Mark Twain, I think (saw this on Studio 60 episode last week on NBC).
Think of life like a party at the hot night club in town. If you are up to no good, the bouncer at the door just waves you right in. If you profess to be acting for the greatest good however, then the test is a lot higher. I think this is why so many poor people vote Republican, because it's reflecting this truth. People just sense the greater phoniness of the Democrats, taking the same large corporate contributions but talking about doing "good". People who support the Democrats perhaps have had just enough education to have that intuitive sense brainwashed out of them. I'm just talking generalities here to illustrate a concept, of course there are exceptional individuals.

So accepting this truth is accepting that if you are committing yourself to working for the highest good, then you know what you are up against. You lower your expectations of things being easy: The pioneers of woman's voting rights never lived to see their work to fruition.

And for me, raising a child is certainly a task that I want to do in the highest good, just like Ghandi working to free India from oppression.

The law of attraction

We attract to ourselves exactly what we are putting out into the universe. Other ways to state this. Inner and outer - our outer world will reflect our inner life. Perhaps this is synonymous with Karma. Karma says that the degree of our suffering and happiness will be influenced by the quality of intention of our choices in the past. Act with a kind heart and happiness will follow, like a cart follows a horse.

Power of Discernment

Today, we were cleaning the house in preparation for an out of town
guest. Yafa kept switching off the vacuum, and laughing.

How do we react to that? Well, first instead of reacting, I recall something I learned which is "don't react, instead cultivate an ever widening repertoire of responses". I like that. I'm the parent, it's my job to teach that to Yafa, and no better way than by example.

Of course, sometimes she does "get" me and I do react ("hey stop that"). But I have to say, it's pretty rare, once a month maybe? And that's my job, it's the warrior's path, especially a Dad's path (although we don't have to be caught up with temporary gender assignment). It's actually a very yang (Chinese male energy) response. Remember yang is the energy that is expansive, yin is contracting energy.

Responding creatively to Yafa's action is so powerful, such wonderful soul enriching medicine! I think it says: I know that you know you aren't supposed to do that and there is a part of you that made a choice to go down that dark path, and I even honor that part of you that is doing that. Because every human being just biologically seems to have to engage in a personal exploration of that territory. This is the Buddhist concept of samsara: the unenlightened mind. And we are all stuck in samsara. I know I certainly explored some dark paths (also known as making a trip to the underworld). And if life is really a journey to find healing and wholeness, then you will need to visit these dark places. However, I know you are not ready for that yet, Yafa doesn't have the tools to go there. Like a little child who wants to chop up a carrot with a sharp knife. They are just too young to do it safely, but as we take the knife away, we do it in an artful way that honors that part of them that wants to learn, that wants to grow. That same spark that can someday get them through the darkest nights.

So when Yafa shuts off the vacuum, it goes like this in my head:
Hey, I'm trying to get this done, don't you know we have guests coming? Then that thought passes quickly and I think, Why are you doing this? I think because it's a way to engage
with me, and it's fun. My first response might be to play along for a while and hopefully she will move on to some other fun thing and I can get back to cleaning. Because it's not like she's crossing a busy street without holding my hand, or something serious. She already knows what she's playing with, and if we defuse it together, then all is good.

So I try that. But after 5 times, I see she is calling my bluff, she's willing to do it many more times that I am, so that doesn't work for me. Now what? OK, well maybe I can go for trying to explain it rationally: "if you keep doing this, we won't be able to clean up for our guest", but I know she doesn't care. So don't bother with that approach. And also you have to respect her carpe diem - she intuitively knows that having fun now is more important than some unknown future engagement. And there is a truth there which I don't want to invalidate.

Maybe can setup a "warning": If you do this again you will have to go to your room. But I don't want to do that, because I know her intention was just to have fun, and I'd rather save those kinds of warnings for big things like hitting people or something big that I hopefully will never have to use it.

Using a warning here just doesn't ring true. It's not a case of a "natural consequence", like saying I don't want you to play with burning candles because if you play with fire, you are eventually going to get burned. It's really a fake warning, I'm just making up something so that she will bend to my will. And after I drag her to her room and with mock sternness impress on her the importance of my "right" to vacuum being higher than her "right" to play, I'm stuck with having taught her a sneaky little lie just so I could get on with vacuuming.

But I do want her to move on and let me vacuum. I have needs here so I have to find a way to honor everyone's needs, some negotiation. So I decide in this case it's really my job to find something positive for her to do. Not TV or something where in the future she might associate shutting off my vacuum as a ploy to get to watch television. Because almost everything on TV is just a form of mind candy - empty calories. And the shows which are not just mind candy (e.g. trains and locomotives on RFD TV) don't have enough "hook" to work for her in this case anyway. So, I need to use my own creativity in the moment to find some activity that will engage her. This is good because it then illustrates to her the power of creativity and mind yet it hopefully doesn't setup a dependency where she then has to come
to me for ideas all the time. Perhaps even better is getting her to join me in brainstorming something she can do where she is a participant in thinking up something fun. Sometimes we do a word game where I make a song and she fills in the blanks. That really shifts the energy away from her being kind of "needy", i.e. "Daddy play with me", to her being creative in language which then empowers her to crossover to start thinking of some kind of play with just small doses of my attention so that I can still get the vacuuming done. So in a sense we co-engineered a compromise. One example of this last week was me folding up paper into the shape of a greeting card and having her make one for each of her friends. So she checks in with me every 4 minutes: "Hey Daddy, look at this one". And I can take 1 minute to work and have another 4 minutes to vacuum.

Honoring our children's sovereignty

The previous story kind of illustrates this as well, but here are some more.

Today we were at a play date and it was time to leave. With 5 minutes to go, I told yafa we needed to leave soon and initiated a cleanup game with her because although yafa doesn't like to cleanup, I feel one of the most vital things I need to pass on to her as a parent is the concept of etiquette, which means being sensitive to other people's feelings and tuning into the natural give and take of a relationship (i.e. not leaving a mess for our hostess). Also, I had hoped it would shift her into a mode that would lead to acceptance that we were leaving and help to get out the door more easily. Kids don't always shift gears so well. I don't really do it well myself.

After 5 minutes of that, which we did as a game "find me all the red things and put them in this basket", we were in the basement and I needed her to go upstairs to leave. She was going boneless and wouldn't climb up. I could have picked her up, but that's another tactic
that I don't want to abuse, because it's not respectful of her sovereignty to be physically imposing my will on her if there is a better way. Well, I came up with something: "lets make a rhyme for each step", and it worked! We made it easily up the steps.

Then in the front room, she asked to take a toy with her. yafa has a habit of wanting to take a small toy from wherever she visits, like a party favor. My first impulsive response to this is to cringe because I know that making a request for a gift upon parting seems extremely ungracious to us in the Anglo-American culture. However, intuitively, I think that there may
be some archetypal basis for making this kind of request as a way of honoring the friendship. There's a native American concept of potlatch where people in the community would compete on a friendly basis to demonstrate their generosity. And along with that in Native American culture is the idea of Indian Giver in which you would accept a gift from someone but your
ownership of things wasn't absolute so if that person came over and took it back, it was in the spirit of passing the light on. So I feel the need to honor her impulse to do this.

So, I asked her to sit on the couch and close her eyes, hold out her hand, and I pulled out a small toy of her own that we had brought along but I had kept out of play in my bag. She seemed quite satisfied with that and we said our good byes and thank yours and made it out
the door!

I think I honored her sovereignty here.

Alcatraz on Thanksgiving

I'm thinking of taking Yafa to this. Perhaps someone wants to join us?

http://www.gokid.org/html2/thanksgiving02.shtml - has some details. concerned it could sell out though, maybe tix can be bought on advance somewheres.

Also

http://www.awakenedwoman.com/leslie_alcatraz.htm

and

http://www.journalism.sfsu.edu/www/pubs/gater/fall95/nov30/06.html

first post

I took the title for this blog, likeamountain, from something I read in college in 1988. The quote was an admonition to "think like a mountain", from Deep Ecology by Bill Devall and George Sessions. The book had a profound effect on my life (as many books have).

More recently, while studying Buddhism, I came upon some advice on the posture for meditation: "Your back should be like an arrow, or your spine like gold coins piled up. You should sit inspiringly , like a mountain."

So, I'm starting this to put something out into the universe about preschool, parenting, and whatever else.

My daugher's name is Yafa.