Snail Memebrarian

31/07/2023

14/07/2023

Tumblr user headspace-hotel:

"Plant blindness" was coined as a term relating to the tendency to fail to notice plants in your environment, to view them as unimportant backdrop.

The tendency that concerns me the most is not this per se, but rather the inability to notice plants that comes from the inability to identify them, causing your brain to see the world in terms of "grass" surfaces, "weeds," "flowers" and "bushes" and "trees"

I can identify most wild plants I encounter on sight now—it's hard to even imagine how I lived differently.

The change is shocking. Learning to see plants was not just a matter of adding knowledge to my head, but creating totally new neural pathways. I believe my brain's capability for noticing and processing detail is profoundly increased. I can look much more closely at surfaces and objects and notice and be immediately drawn to small details.

The way I take photos is very different. When I look at outdoor photos from before I learned the plants, they are very broad and zoomed-out pictures of only the most obvious and unmissable features. It really appears like I was stumbling through the world almost blind, able to see big, obvious objects and nothing else.

And when I started learning to identify plants, oh, it was so painful, they all looked the same, and I couldn't even see the small details that set them apart! And there were no good resources or guides! I was fighting for my life!

And it's normal, that's the wild thing, most people go through life not being able to name the common plants that are all around them. This thought is scary and alien to me now, but a couple years ago I was entirely aware of my ignorance and felt no need to fix it. I didn't even know what the trees in my backyard were and I had lived here for 10 years and I wasn't troubled by it.

13/07/2023

13/07/2023

The QUESTIONS

As non coercive collaborative parents, we are always trying to dig deeper into our mindset, into our thinking, into our choices.

We are always trying to uncover deeper layers of our coercive patterns so that we can shift them.

Rather than imagine we aren't being coercive, we accept that we probably are and are always on the lookout. This of course is very challenging, to try and be conscious all the time.

I have developed a number of tools to make it easier, and one of them is something I call the questions. I ask these questions of myself all the time when I'm interacting with my kid and it helps me be clear in my mindset.

The Questions:

1) Am I oppressing or empowering?
2) Am I imposing my values or supporting their self-knowledge?
3) Am I violating their consent or respecting their autonomy?
4) Am I controlling or collaborating?
5) Does this decision make me feel less safe or more safe to them?

When we let these questions guide our thinking and our decisions, we soon find many things we need to change. As challenging as that can be, it is also something to celebrate.

I invite you to start asking these questions in your interactions with your kids.

Please sign up for my FREE COURSE "Guiding Without Controlling".
https://buff.ly/3O5WXFM

Ps. This lovely graphic was made by my friend and conscious parent, Sarah Rose

13/07/2023

https://twitter.com/strongtowns/status/1679165773837680640?s=46&t=TumE_K3eLLMkQ3UkOVQViQ

13/07/2023

Follow Us On Instagram :

13/07/2023

🥹 this is so beautiful 💕

13/07/2023

It’s time for the four hour workday.