Cleaning the Desert Rose Kindergarten

Yesterday Chris and I took the class on our Friday walk to the arroyo, leaving Jill behind to prepare the room as best she could for the Open House today.

She was feeling quite overwhelmed by all there was to do, but she did exactly what L.T. recommends: when overwhelmed, stand quietly and perceive what corner is calling to you.

When we got back with the class after a couple of hours, Jill worried that we wouldn't see all her hard work. She shoveled out a bunch of stuff (a large trash bag half full) and wiped down surfaces with water only.

But Chris and I could both feel a real difference. The room seemed beautiful again. I am convinced that it is less the actual cleaning that matters and more the "penetrating the surroundings with consciousness."

Beauty, Clutter, Consciousness

Perhaps something new (for my project) has come out of my cleaning the bookcase on MLK day. It looks so different to me now - sparkling with new life. I touched each book, cleaned off the tops (and the sides, in some cases!) I read in some, and rearranged many, giving them new friends to talk to, exchange ideas with.
And I have a few new books, one by Gendler Notes on the need for Beauty and the other by O'Donahue Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, which have made me begin to think how to reshape my paper a bit. So far it has seemed pedestrian to me, and I want it to be beautiful! To give some sort of inspiration beyond what Linda Thomas has provided, not to outdo her, impossible, but to try to give another angle.
I pondering the role of penetrating clutter with consciousness (as in the bookcase) and how beauty can result, I have been thinking about how so many parents and other adults, when they first see a Waldorf kindergarten, think "how beautiful." But after one works there a while, I wonder how many of us see the room as beautiful? I know in our room, I see clutter and detrius and sheer messiness. And i also realize i can start in the corner where i work and begin to "penetrate it with consciousness."
I think one of the reasons Linda Thomas's workshops have been so inspiring is that she has cleaned off the lenses of our own inner eyes and we can see with new hope and appreciation what it is we do when we clean.

MLK Day

Today I have an extra day to which I had intended to dedicate to writing on my project. I spent the morning cleaning! It didn't feel right to write about cleaning when there was an area begging to be dusted.

I took all the books and extra stuff off of the bookcase next to my bed. Every home gets dusty, though it seems that in New Mexico we get dust in excess. I do actually dust the bookcase fairly regularly, but I don't take everything off and get into the cracks behind. Whew! The reward was two-fold (at least.) Not only does the bookcase look and feel better (I can't take a good picture of it because my little camera's lens is all scratched up), but I found books that I didn't remember were there.

I have been crying easily in the last couple of days (that is, more readily than usual.) Almost anything can set it off - Obama's train trip to DC, finding a book of dreams and reading in it, the deaths of the children in Gaza - that sort of thing.

I re-found an important book for my project The Spiritual Hierarchies and the Physical World by Rudolf Steiner. In it there is an emphasis on the responsibility for cultivating feelings of devotion, serenity, cheerfulness, and inner contentment. It is thereby we release elementals from their enchantment in lower realms and enable them to return to higher worlds.

When I consider my occasional weeping alongside these observations, I still feel OK. It seems to me that my tears are arising from tenderness rather than sullen discontent.

Speaking of tears. I found a quotation that I had written down from Confessions of a Pagan Nun which delighted me today (during the dusting).

I could put [my tears] in copper cups, but they are like the waters of the sea, vast and deep, but unable to quench any thirst. One can only drown in such waters or take from them fish to eat. The fish in my tears are so small that only a fairy could make a meal of them. p.35