While cleaning out a dozen places where I have stored everything from old stamp collections and Boy Scout paraphernalia  to dozens of stuffed toys and and doll houses and their furniture, to my own novels run off on tractor feed paper, every kind of craft supply and even clay sculptures made by someone…well you get the point; I wondered again just why I was doing this when it made me so sad. I guess it’s the general way I view being in the world.

I’m a big picture gal. I have kept this stuff year in and year out…some of it for thirty-eight years simply because I have the room to store it, and the big picture was a kind of youthful status quo – they aren’t THAT far from the nest…but they are. The status is changing now with my age, so the “quo” must go, go, go!

As I add years to my sixty, I am realizing that no one is going to claim this stuff, and although it’s cute and has a memory attached to it, it makes the “bigger picture” all that more difficult to manage and to care for. The bigger picture is, quite frankly, a home that’s manageable in my later years that no longer looks like a store house. A home I can share with Terry that we will enjoy and not feel burdened by. How lovely it would be to open a dresser in one of my three guest rooms and not find it crammed full of non usable stuff. How nice to be able to vacuum a carpet and not have to move six boxes of 35 year old Halloween costumes!

As I was sorting and pitching and gathering for M Teresa’s, I realized that I have always been a big picture gal. I have always lived not by the moment, or the day, or the week, but for the greater good. At any point in time, you could ask me why I was doing what I was doing, and I would stretch out to star depth and probably say, “because it will eventually help my children to get to heaven.”

It’s no different with the Garden School…we, as a faculty, as a place, are helping the next generation get a good start that will make them good people and great parents! I want to give them something that they can take with them when they leave the Garden School that has become part of their personhood..their formation. Formation is a big big word for me.

That’s why our program at the Garden School must be more than one moment by moment activity after another. It must be about more than what is happening now or in five minutes. It can’t be flight by the seat of our pants or made it up as we go just to get by the moment. The whole program from the beginning has been a concept in early child care, and as it continues to develop, we need to remember our roots and remember what we must be about!.

First premise: safety.

Second premise: formation of body, intellect, and social awareness

Third premise: Activity!

The whole concept of the Garden School is to be a “little school for little people.” And that is no simple task. Approaching this concept from a big picture point of view means asking, “How much CAN we do; what are the possibilities in everything we do.

So when planning a calendar, an event, a play, a reading class, a menu, a summer program, an art program, the big question is, “How can this create a kind of positive outcome that will not only serve the child now but later, and serve the teacher with success?”

Does everyone come from a big picture point of view? Not by a long shot. Most people come from a much shorter perspective, and that’s not a bad thing altogether because too many big picture people would never agree and chaos would ensue. But at the same time, one person’s big picture perspective must be in a position to guide the shorter perspectives, because shorter perspectives will often dangle in space and time without continuity, without a reason to be and another kind of chaos is born and reborn.

Who has a big picture point of view? People who look at all the gathered moments for the greater good and continually ask questions about how it all fits together. How does this reading class fit into the general idea of what we are trying to do here…will it make them independent and stronger? Will reading propel them into their future with joy and understanding? How do the plays bring the social elements of the school into a focus that will build cohesiveness, trust, and group behavior while bringing out the star in all of us?  How does the afternoon class gather the activities of the whole day, the week and the month together and render a “picture,” through art, of what we are continuing to learn together? How does a summer program teach and build and establish the trust needed to teach the next school year while it is fun, and active?

It takes a lot of planning; it takes a lot of think time outside of school; it takes a lot of maneuvering and changing up and realizing that the status quo is not a safety zone, but a war  zone.