mirror stories

We're having a heat wave (a tropical heat wave, cue the music....). I thought you all might enjoy a few random shots of the kids cooling off in the sprinkler out on our front lawn today, under the blazing near-100-degree sun, while I talk about a subject I have no actual illustrations for.

One of our tasks during the Enki Education Early Childhood Homeschool Conference (which I blogged about yesterday and the day before) was to write a Mirror Story for one of our kids to reflect a problem they are struggling with, using an image from nature. The idea being that it allows the child to see his/her struggles as being part of the natural process of living and being in this world, and lets the child know that he/she is being seen. The process of writing the story was far more complicated, and enlightening, than I had imagined it would be.

We started several weeks prior to the conference itself by doing a Child Study on the target child, which is a 3-week long observation of the child's physical, speech, and mind characteristics. We brought our observations with us to the conference, and each day we worked on writing our Mirror Story. I chose Zoo Boy as my subject and the challenge that I focused on was how devastated he is when things don't go his way.

The first two days, we merely presented our child's challenge to another conference participant and let them offer us an image from nature. Beth Sutton, the founder of Enki Education and our leader for the conference, encouraged us to use natural phenomenon rather than animals, as it's too easy to fall into the trap of giving an animal human characteristics or emotions, and the idea was to reflect back a natural situation to the child. The images that I was offered were a forest fire and a rock slide/avalanche. I thought both images were a bit too violent and scary for what I was trying to mirror, but I tried to keep an open mind.

On the third day, we shared our child study with another conference participant, and gleaned yet another image. This time i was offered an image of a river cutting away at it's banks, and that sat a little bit better with me than the previous two images. That night, we were told to do a Tonglen Meditation (one of the teacher health practices recommended by the Enki curriculum) on the challenge and see what images arose. We were encouraged to trust the process and follow any image that came up from that meditation, whether it was an image that we had been offered by another participant or something entirely new.

That night before bed I did my meditation. A very strong image arose for me -- a beaver building a beaver dam, and the dam being destroyed. I felt a bit conflicted. Beth had both told us not to use an animal, and to trust the process. So I slept on it.

In the morning, as I stepped into the shower, the water hit my face and it suddenly occurred to me that the image I got wasn't about the beaver, but rather the water that was being controlled by the beaver. That day we shared our image with another participant and roughed out our story, and that night's assignment was to write the story and tell it the following day. My story was about a little raindrop that fell on a mountain top, dripping into a stream and being rushed down the mountain, tossed to and fro, and winding up in a beaver pond, where it waited with all the other little raindrops until there were enough of them to break the dam and continue on their tumultuous journey down the mountain. The story was purposefully left open-ended -- this isn't about trying to solve our kids' problems, just to mirror their challenges and allow them to be "seen".

In the process of telling the little raindrop story the next day to another conference participant (and then to the group), I came to realize that Zoo Boy's challenge wasn't about his response to things not going his way, but rather to the deeper issue of feeling small and powerless.

Last night I told the story to Zoo Boy. He love it! He told me that it was a great story, and that he liked it even better than Charlotte's Web (which we finished at camp last week, and was a huge hit with both boys). He mentioned it several times today as well. I feel like it was a success, and I'm looking forward to writing other mirror stories for him as we continue working with the Enki curriculum.