For the Children... A reminder

When you think of your commitment to Montessori education you must ultimately reconcile your 'why' for working with children, so using the poetry of the venerable Gary Snyder, let's ground and remind ourselves of the universal reason why you are in the role you are in and why it is imperative for you to keep striving to be at your best, given the times we find ourselves in.

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,

of statistics

lie before us.

the steep climb

of everything, going up,

up, as we all

go down.

In the next century

or the one beyond that,

they say,

are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace

if we make it.

To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to

you and your children:

stay together

learn the flowers

go light

--Gary Snyder

“If we make it.”? Maria Montessori was worried about whether we would all make it, having lived through both world wars, and as I’m writing this, yet another war disguised as a special military operation rages on in Ukraine.? The chance for world peace became Montessori’s enduring ‘why' for continually discovering the secrets of childhood as she intuitively understood that a better world begins with children whose education is optimized from birth for care of self, care of others, and care of the environment. And yet the perfect irony is that this optimization only occurs when willing adults--adults open to consistently examining how they have not yet done their own healing around the skills to care for self, others, and their environments--are able to eliminate that which is still in the way of doing so.?

One of my mentors, Marta Donahoe, put it best when she consistently echoed Paul Wellstone’s oft repeated quote to sheet metal workers in the late 1990’s: “We all do better when we all do better.”? And so it is.

The coaching that I do with leaders is designed to help you continue to optimize your self and inner development for the sake of the children and to elucidate what’s possible when we succeed. Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to explore more deeply how to do the inner work necessary for what Charles Eisenstein called, "the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible."