PART ONE: WHY (and the WHY is maybe more important than ever.)
In the vast darkness of endless space, speckled with the glitter of galaxies and stars, one realizes how small and fragile humanity really is. The miracle of a single day, a single rotation of our sphere whipping us without our awareness from warm sunlight into infinite darkness and back again. The rhythm of the cosmic realm is crucial to our existence, yet most days …we are so bent over daily minutia we barely look up. Every evening the weather report tells us what the weather WAS–just in case we entirely missed the happenings of the heavens.
Yet one hour spent remembering our smallness, our fragility, can repair hours of frustration against fellow humanity streaming from doom and gloom media. Suddenly we are all comrades, stewards, fragile souls spinning together in a celestial orchestra conducted by Something so much more powerful than we can ever hope to grasp. When we shrink down in our own eyes and see the truth of our tiny place, pride goes low. Love grows up in its place.
The tending of the SOUL is so critical, and so very rare in modern education. It’s often amputated as a dangerous infection.
We all feel the weight of soulless learning. Facts and figures become noise. Knowledge replaces wisdom and humanity stumbles along in its own blind stupor.
Each summer we rent a tiny cabin in the northwoods, far from any city lights, where the wolves and bears roam. One year we sprawled out on the pier and in the paddleboat and stared up at the stars, watching the Perseid meteor shower. It was intoxicating.
(The next day the cottage owner told us about the bear who frequents the shoreline. I thanked the Lord for my ignorance –and His safety over us in our ignorance. My fear may have stolen that star-gazing evening had the facts about the bear been presented even one earth rotation earlier.)
I will never forget that evening on the pier. It wasn’t perfect ~ LIFE isn’t perfect. There were whines about boredom (I told my husband to stop) and complaints of fatigue and mosquitoes–but there we were. All five of us. Crickets, bullfrogs, and endless stars. We all felt our smallness. The hook was set in our hearts for our year of studying the heavens.
Take a little peek into our One-Room-Saltbox-Schoolhouse* ASTRONOMY unit!
What we studied:
- The summer sky – stargazing
- Galileo and other famous astronomers
- The planets and universe
*The One-Room-Saltbox-Schoolhouse approach = teaching multiple ages together, elementary through high school… how my grandmother was taught once upon a time gone by. xoxo
This will be the FIRST post in a SERIES. (As each post is published I will link them above.) Step one: find a space, gather your babies, and simply look up… the heavens declare the glory of the Lord. Join in.
Saltbox Colonial 