“Patience is a quality that is necessary in order to have any kind of healing take place. We are taught to rush about in our modern lives and to accomplish as much as possible in a day. Yet, when it comes to the body, we cannot hurry the healing process. The body repairs itself at its own rate. Babies are born in their own time. Cuts and broken bones mend when the body is strong enough to produce new cells, and there is no way a human being can force the body to mend faster…When a person has to be talking, hurrying, fidgeting, or actively engaged all the time, this reflects that person’s agitation with life. This constant agitation shows the astute observer that the person has not come to a place of healing. Physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual healing cannot take place without patience and stillness.” Jamie Sams – Earth Medicine, Ancestor’s Ways of Harmony for Many Moons
My world brews a rich concoction of patience and freedom, dancing right there on the edge of frustration. Frustration’s a good thing. It shows us where we’re wanting, needing or sometimes just impatient or it’s simply the by-product of restraint, of obstruction, of working through challenges in order to obtain a much-desired outcome. Or a basic need. It’s not lost on me that for two years now my daughter and I have both struggled with various frustrations. As my health screams somewhat relentless reminders that some illnesses don’t much care how much spunk and determination I have, the body must heal in her own time (within certain absolutely essential parameters), my daughter’s inability to pretend that public school has become anything but a crippling deterrent to learning and soulfulness has culminated into our mutual respect for patience and freedom. There comes a time when it’s time. So, as I’ve come to learn the essential requirements for my recovery and healing, we’ve also come to a place of realizing the School of Freedom has gotta open.
There’s no room for varying learning styles or respect for the body’s own unique rhythms on the conveyor belt system posing education for some. And in spite of that, some thrive and there are beautiful benefits within the flawed system with beautiful teachers and administrators making the most of it. But my daughter has not been able to thrive within that system and watching her wilt as I heal painstakingly gradually has been a heart-breaking reality. Back and forth we’ve swayed there on that cliff before grabbing each other by the hand and taking the leap. Home school is now our wonderful free fall into grace. We finally did it. And I wouldn’t be able to pull it off were she not so darn smart.
We hit critical mass a week ago. I sat down at the computer, did the research on how to open a homeschool and within 5 hours the deed was done. We could walk into her high school together and withdraw her legally and begin the new season. Before that, we had to find a name. I tossed some out there. “Nah…no…why that one?” Finally, she pipes up, “How about school of freedom?”
How about perfect? We took time in the light of that open door, days for her whole being to adjust and then we took the leap.
The cultivation of healing requires a level of freedom in order for any needful patience to even begin to work her steady ministrations of repair and restoration. If we’re living lifestyles that make patience obsolete, thus will our healing follow steadily into the void. Nada. Nothing. Nowhere. Automatons fidgeting with our duties and our hobbies, divorced from the soul of rest, of finding the body’s own time and allowing the space for life itself to consume us into wholeness, into rest, into respect for what must MEND. And my daughter is mending. Learning to love learning. One week and the changes are already very obvious. When the pressure is on to fit onto a conveyor belt reality, the idea of giving of yourself, of relaxing, of owning any kind of vision of your life is only a notion. That creates an enormous strain, pressure, unrest and it boils over into hurrying, fidgeting, attention deficit “disorder.” The organism frantically seeks balance and the frenetic feel of it is the tell-tale sign of a system all wrong. There must be room for being human. If you cannot take the time to be still and let your mind go blank and free, where are you? Why?
We all need a little school of freedom, room to let go and be still, restore our natural drive to learn, to run whatever marathon we desire not out of compulsion or duty or striving to prove but simply in honor of who we are. At. A. Pace. Respectful of the body. And the heart’s own mind…
J. Ruth Kelly 
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