Dear Reader,

In July and August in The Studio for Playful Inquiry, we read Anchored and Inciting Joy together as we focused on the practice of finding glimmers - which is Deb Dana’s word for paying attention to the world and our experiences with the intention to perceive what brings us joy, delight, happiness, or comfort. In many ways, our explorations this month are grounded in a similar practice - only this time, we’re focusing on the ways that making a commitment to being aware of glimmers can set us up to find openness and flexibility as we encounter the inevitable challenges inherent in any community. This is true even when some of the members of that community - some of its citizens - are very young.

In Pam Oken-Wright’s new book, Embracing Challenges in Early Childhood Education, which we are reading together in The Studio this month, she writes that young children "have not yet learned that being right can become something to protect at all costs, and it is up to us to make sure they don't. Curiosity is a casualty of the need to be right. In so many ways, we teach children to value correctness over curiosity, over trial and error, over innovation." We are considering this idea, and others that run through her important work - as fractals and properties of emergence that connect small and all. To seek a glimmer is to seek a kind of fractal that is a way to “resource the pathways that nourish our well-being.”

What if instead of focusing on what winning feels like, we help children learn what safe feels like? What trust feels like? What love feels like?

I think that's where resistance lives. It's much harder to break someone who knows safety, trust, and love in their bones - who knows on the most primal level that they are deserving of those things. But it's also hard (impossible?) to learn those things when we are not challenged. When do we ever have a better chance of learning safety, trust, and love than when we're in need of protection, encouragement, a hand to hold, a listening ear?

What small change might you make today to begin creating the pathway toward nourishment and your own well being?

In playful solidarity,

Last Chance! Registration for this year's Leading Playful Inquiry program closes this week. If you've been thinking about joining us - now is the time! ​ More Information

WATCHING, LISTENING, READING

Good things:

Suleika Jaouad has created a free journaling club guide to go along with her new book The Book of Alchemy and it's a good thing.

If you are looking for some structure to keep "glimmering" Deb Dana's Glimmers Journal is also a good thing.

Our friend - Studio member Cathy Belgrave - has a growing collection of great podcast episodes you can find through her new website. We're excited to record with her later this month and look forward to sharing that episode with you.

I really appreciated this post to support ways of reading more which is something I'm always trying to do. Preview: most of her suggestions involve making it FUN. I plan to try that!

Such an important new article from Peter Moss: Ten propositions for a democratic politics of early childhood education​

"When we learn to have cognitive conflict without letting it overwhelm us emotionally or send us running back to those who think as we do, we can stay in the space where disagreements happen, and we can sit with uncertainty without a hit to our identity."

— Pam Oken-Wright​

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