REBOOT!

I have wandered lost in the blogging world, looking both for voice and a blog name that would reflect who and where I am right now.

Last week, reading Jen Hatmaker's Interrupted, she wrote of her experience being the progression of Mind --> Hearts --> Hands and I had this aha moment, because of course I have always been about Bright Minds ... Loving Hearts ... Capable Hands and the way these things integrate to create wholeness within us. It isn't quite the same as her concept of ideas beginning in our minds, progressing to our hearts, and then being manifested by our hands; I think there is synergy between the three, that there must be balance, and that we can affect our minds by what we do with our hands just as surely as we can change what we do with our hands by what we think.

And so, I thought that maybe I had wandered too far away, looking for something that has always been here (oh goodness, yes I have, but what I found within myself is a post for another day).

I'll admit, I like fresh starts. Part of me deeply wants to start over with a new blog, with new words and ideas, with new focus. Yet this is my blog, this is where I have shared my struggles and my heart. I decided to change the domain (which I know is risky, but I can always move the new posts back if it doesn't work out), but I have to decided to go forward from here, leaving the past visible.

(I could have decided to blog at Red Dirt Life, which was always my personal blog, but I wanted the connection with Bright Minds ... Loving Hearts ... Capable Hands.)

I suppose that I will still write about homeschooling; after all, it is still what we do, passionately during some parts of the year and half-heartedly during others. I still feel the tension between planned lesson work and unschooling. I still hit mid-April and wish we were done for the year.  (The 132 learning days that schools offered back in the 1800s? That would work for us.)

But we are also just living, and learning from that while we cram in Geometry, Spanish, and everything else that must be learned, so I will probably write more about life than curricula.

I decided that I want it all in one place, so I merged Red Dirt Life with the old Bright Minds ... Loving Hearts ... Capable Hands (which was at www.holisticlearning.blogspot.com).  Here is the progression through the years from having children in grade 1 to having high schoolers, the ever changing ideas that make up who I am, and the messiness of my heart and my home.