On discovering why I’m raising my children in the wild
Spin
Inside the Creation Stories of Dancing Mother
On discovering why I'm raising my children in the wild
by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
I have always wanted to be with my children.
Before my children were growing miraculously into their human stories, and before they were babies born of my body, and before I had language for myself as an afrofuturist bush mother, and before Wildseed even had its name, I dreamed of nurturing a frequency of deep connection and presence with my children, and learning in a way that centered freedom, joy and curiosity.
A decade ago, when my oldest children were 2 ½ years old and 9 months old, I consciously began designing what would one day be called Wildseed. I activated the term “family learning lab” to practice speaking authentically about our way of being, a way that I didn’t see reflected back to me from other families I had witnessed over the years who educated their children on their own.
Ever fascinated by experimentation, I wanted it to be clear that our lab was where we explored, developed and learned from our processes. A lab is where we get to try things out; nothing is wrong or wasted. Everything matters, and everything teaches everyone something, from the very young all the way up to the very old.
Learning in a lab encourages us to be curious about multiple ways to understand whatever it is. A lab softens our expectations of “outcomes” because we can consider all sides of an experience. We can acknowledge the way this moment grew us and inspired us to keep learning, even if it’s not what we thought it would be.
My language and practices continued to grow after family learning lab: self-directed learning, soft-time, soft mornings, being with my children during sunlight hours. These ideas became central to nurturing greater inquiry and consciousness around the form and function of education, and to disrupt assumptions—particularly assumptions of limitations—of what it meant that my children were at home with me. What did I know? Some were more vocal with their doubts than others. I was just their mother, right?
I needed the language to express the multiplicities of life at Wildseed: the mundane and the intricate labors, the chaos and the clarity that sometimes walked hand in hand, the excitement of innovation and the long, stubborn reach of old traditions. As I mapped our family’s learning journeys and built archival systems, Wildseed’s core values emerged more tangibly. We lived our questions. We tried lots of different approaches, sometimes with fabulous feedback, and sometimes not so. We slowed down, way down, to honor the hurts and hiccups, the challenges and the tangles. We listened and learned. We cried and felt defeated at times. We discovered everyone will learn to read in their own way–if you let them. We went out whenever we could, making the world around us our extended laboratory. And we stayed home many times, too, when we wished we had somewhere to go, or the resources to get there. We chased the sun often, and delighted in wide open spaces where everyone could spread out and breathe.
Experimentation, curiosity, and kindness source everything about Wildseed. Each question or idea can be a doorway, a sparkling light, an opening into something fantastic that will take us beyond what we don’t yet know we’re longing to know. When I felt into the heart of all we were doing, the word “homeschool” –particularly the school part–landed too rigidly for what I was really dreaming into.
Learning, as I imagined it, was fluid, dynamic, spacious, organic. There had to be room for shifting and evolving off the script. In fact, I discovered from unpacking my experiences as a girlchild, the mandate of a script/curriculum/rubric was antithetical to real learning. I felt deeply in my spirit that if my children were going to have a chance to know themselves, to live and create from their unadulterated and undiluted brilliance, then I would have to preserve their access to their freedom, to their bodies, and to their joy.
I could feel all this, and then I had to learn how to listen and live into all I was feeling. It was from listening to my spirit all those years ago that got my children here, earthside, after all. So why would I stop listening now that they’re supposedly “school age?” It made sense to me to keep following the pure pathways of creation that brought my children into the world in the first place: movement, stories, mothering, fertility.
I imagined that raising my children outside of conventional systems of education and schooling, and instead exploring learning from a deep commitment to trusting intuition, joy, laughter, play, honest questions, interest-led research, and embodied discovery was akin to raising my children in the wild. This wildness is essential, I realized, to my artistry too. Being wild, staying wild—that seemed to be the most spacious, breathable present and future for all of us.
So this is how I landed on Wildseed as the clearest energetic and physical container for our family learning lab. Wildseed is an affirmation, and a celebration, of the brilliance of our wild and wondrous ways. It felt like the most capable name to hold the vastness of this dream. This would be the signal that we send out as we move through the world, attracting like minds and hearts as we discover where this vision leads. Whenever we call out the name, Wildseed, we are amplifying the dream with our intentions, prayers, and actions. We are learning more about nature and the mysteries of our planet, our galaxy, our universe, and seeing that living in the wilderness of creation consciousness will teach us a bit of everything.
Become a member of Curious Seeds
Curious Seeds is a story building space for parents raising learners in the wild, lush, freedom of life as it is. This is a soft-time circle for parents deepening into their family’s stories of learning and systems of creation. Curious Seeds is for those who are realizing that their stories can help them document their learning practices, and also seed new possibilities for themselves and their communities.
Read Mother Mother’s Wildseed Stories
