This Little Light of Mine: Listening to Our Inner Voices
Notes and resources and journal excerpts and photos offered with love by Elise Huneke-Stone to the EAA (virtual) Summer Conference attendees, July 22, 2022. Also known as why I didn’t make this first post earlier, and also known as how I spent my summer vacation.
Hello my people.
If you’ve been rocked by grief and/or rolled by joy lately, come to this workshop with a journal and apply the human tendencies to your own self and listen to your inner voice for a while.
“This little light of mine,
I’m going to let it shine.
This little light of mine,
I’m going to let it shine.
This little light of mine,
I’m going to let it shine.
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.”
It is VITAL to listen to that inner voice.
The inner voice communicates our truth, our awareness, our purposes, our soul
“To thine own self be true,” Shakespeare wrote, and this was on the graduation certificate of my first upper elementary classes.
So “This Little Light of Mine” is my song right now, and it’s also Nana and Milo’s song (we sing it every time we meet). What is your song for right now? Do your kin have a song for right now? Does your class need a song?
Here are some songs, new and old, that are part of my awareness lately. Because sometimes my inner voice comes to me in the form of an ear worm! I find myself walking around singing something to myself, and when I pay attention to the lyrics…usually I laugh first, then heed the message that came to me from the music.
YOUR INNER VOICE might sing to you. And you, who bring many songs into your elementary communities, might be sowing the seeds of the children’s inner voices in the songs that you teach. What songs are they singing while they work, or what songs are they requesting every time you gather? Listen to those messages.
On my first couple of 6-12 training courses, I had a persistent earworm during my morning drive to work: A song called “Shell Game” by Bright Eyes (Conor Oberst) from the album “The People’s Key.”
“Here it comes, that heavy love
Someone’s got to share in the load
Here it comes, that heavy love
I’m never going to move it alone.”
The beginning of the lyrics describe all his previous albums (see what my unconscious did here?) and then look to how he shows up in his work in the world. About the best description of what I was doing as a trainer, courtesy of my inner voice, sung in the People’s Key and earworming itself into my awareness…
So a few more thoughts about inner voice as an earworm…
These are some songs I’ve been sharing in community lately, all of which have already proven their potential as inner voice earworms for me:
“We will not, we will not, we will not be controlled.
I am sovereign in my body, I am sovereign in my soul.”
This can also be made plural: We are sovereign in our bodies, we are sovereign in our souls.
When I heard about Roe v Wade, the Bengsons showed up for me like they did in 2020 with the Keep Going On song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orh4kuTuE7g
And it became part of the protests: https://www.instagram.com/p/CfNHNd3Ffgh/
(Yes, that’s adrienne maree brown on the left! I love when my heroes and muses collaborate!)
And this is one of the songs I offered to the Oakland MTR (Montessori Teacher Residency):
Seems perfect for Montessori kids and their teachers.
The Great Turning (We Shall Be Known): This is a song I first encountered in 2021 through my work with School of the Great Turning, https://schoolforthegreatturning.com and lived with as an inner voice earworm for months. Later, in June 2022, the song was brought to the Oakland MTR by one of the residents (talk about feeling a cosmic connection!) It IS time for us to thrive!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in2QxIzNbcc includes both the songmakers MaMuse and Oakland’s Thrive Choir.
Here is the another link: https://songsforthegreatturning.net/going-forth/we-shall-be-known-by-the-company-we-keep/ And this one has the song broken into two tracks for easier learning. Check out the rest of the songs too if you need some new tunes to inspire you and connect your spirit to your work! Music is definitely a mode of expression favored by the inner voice. And really listening to music, to the sounds that make music, is a sensorial awareness practice.
We all need to make time and space to listen to our inner voices.
- In Aline D. Wolf’s book Nurturing the Spirit, there is a section about teacher preparation (p.34):
“The best preparation for teaching, Maria Montessori emphasized many times, is a study of one’s self. This may the most profound advice that she gave us about teacher training. Most Montessorians have heard it, but how many have actually taken a serious in-depth study of their own values, beliefs, strengths, weaknesses, habits and omissions? How many have tried to determine how their personal characteristics either inhibit or enhance their relationships with children?
- How many of us have TIME to do that? Certainly not in the training! We have to make time with ourselves and with the children for some kind of awareness practice, some kind of listening to our inner voices.
- My objective: To help you feel more resourced for making this big listening work part of what you offer to 6-12 year olds, how you will co-evolve along with them.
- Role of the adult: to co-evolve with the children.
- Not just self-construction at 6-12 but also conscious community construction.
- We have the freedom and responsibility to look at this big listening work and consider our prepared environments and our human tendencies and the characteristics of 6-12 year olds and how to invite THEM to listen to their inner voices.
- What are we doing, all of us, when we listen to our inner voices? We are growing awareness!
- I have been on my own journey of growing awareness, and I have learned that I can find my way, with nature and dreaming and reflection and intuitive arts and oracles and my spirituality and the hedgerow and the well, back to the magic and deep sense of connection and belonging I felt in childhood. And I want that for all of us. I want children to grow up with it and I want adults to find it again.
- All that comes before adulthood is CHILDHOOD. This is it. This little window of exploration of the universe is what every human being brings forward into adulthood. Whatever belonging, whatever inner voice that is created there in childhood and adolescence is what will reign over our lives…
From Elise’s journal:
Aching about Uvalde
The world is wounded, usually,
by people who are 18 years old and older, legal,
who do not feel like they belong
who have certain freedoms
to vote
to buy a gun and use it
to hate themselves
enough to want to destroy their schools
people who do not feel belonging
do not feel responsible
do not feel compassion, empathy, connection
to guide that freedom.
In Montessori, the freedom is freedom within limits.
The limits are love.
Limits on freedom in the elementary: The collective good of the whole community.
Awareness Practices
- One way to listen to your inner voice: Engage regularly in some kind of AWARENESS PRACTICE.
- What you pay attention to matters. What you feed with your awareness is what grows.
- It the greatest privilege and it’s the freedom I cherish the most .
- When there’s freedom to pay attention, responsibility arises naturally as the ability to respond
- Yoga, journaling, breathwork, drumming, reflection, art, dance, chanting, meditation, mindful eating, classroom observation, therapy, book groups, handwork, prayer, craft: So many of our engagements in life can be enhanced when we consider them as awareness practices.
- MAP (Montessori Awareness Practice) is in development at AMI Global. I was involved in the pilot and then worked with some of the originators of this reflective practice.
- We can sow the seeds of awareness and cultivate reverence for growing awareness the way that we sow the the seeds of culture and the sciences, and honor language development, athletic or artistic skill, academic achievement, etc. We need growing awareness in children, adolescents, and adults—in everybody—in order to live more freely and responsibly in the interdependency and Gaian systems of our planet.
Awareness practices ground us in the here and now. This is where we are, where we live and breathe, where we grow and gather our food. We share the here and now with all of the other kin, human and more-than-human, of this planet.
Trey Adcock, “Cherokee Perspectives on Education” panel at the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector’s conference, April 2022: To give a respectful voice to the Native American story, consider place and the present
Start where you are right now. Start with the land acknowledgment (place) and how the Indigenous inhabitants are living right now (the present). The time to make reparations for historic and current injustices and inequities is right now.
I was part of an Embracing Equity cohort with the Oakland Montessori Teachers Residency (OMTR) and we wrote land acknowledgments (they did Oakland, I’m doing Portland with my circle here). Land acknowledgements are an awareness practice. Elementary children and adolescents can very much be involved in a school’s creation of a land acknowledgement and commitment to recognizing and collaborating with the local Indigenous people. I’ve had encouragement, guidance, and learning opportunities in this work from the following:
- Embracing Equity: https://embracingequity.org
- Educateurs sans Frontieres: https://montessori-esf.org
- Center for Humans and Nature: https://humansandnature.org
The Oakland Montessori Teachers Residency collaborated with many individuals and Montessori organizations, and we are grateful for the support and input from the following:
Public Montessori in Action (Elizabeth Slade): https://montessori-action.org
National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector: https://www.public-montessori.org
Montessori Northwest: https://montessori-nw.org
Lewis and Clark Montessori Public Charter: https://lewisandclarkcharter.org
What the Water Gave Me
Part of my own awareness journey involved, from the fall of 2020 to the present, making time for my inner voice in a flotation tank. You can learn more about floatation here: https://floathq.com
(My first float was a gift from my first course, and the float center here still honored the gift certificate almost ten years after its issue, when I finally had time to use it! I really appreciate when other people recognize that we all have to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery[1] on our own growing awareness schedules. Our inner voices are not always able to pay attention to when a gift certificate is going to expire…)
My experiences in the flotation tank remind me of the painting by Frida Kahlo called “What the Water Gave Me.”
https://www.fridakahlo.org/what-the-water-gave-me.jsp#prettyPhoto
When I made time and space for my inner voice, I had a lot to tell myself. “This Little Light of Mine” emerged from my floats, and many other insights, memories, questions, feelings, physical sensations, cosmic connections…often connected to water (no surprise there, I was floating…) I kept imagining wells, and ended up doing some research about sacred wells in the Irish old country where some of my ancestors lived. I also had impressions of cenotes almost every time I floated. I’ve never visited a cenote in real life but my imagination created several. And once, the cenote I imagined helped me think about time in a new way.
How is a cenote like time? Here I am floating in the water. We are all floating in our own cenotes. The surface of the water is the present, right now. The depths of the water are the past. The next part of the water cycle, moving into the air above, is the future. We float on NOW.
All of our work with children happens in the NOW. It is time NOW. It is time for us to thrive.
On the next page, I’ve shared a post-float journal reflection on the connections between cenotes and time. I have been reflecting and writing a lot about the elementals (water, fire, earth, air) as physical manifestations of our living planet, as symbols or archetypes, and as components of astrology, tarot, and other intuitive arts and crafts.
Our inner voices speak fire, water, earth and air. Our ancestors knew these elementals. Indigenous worldviews hold them sacred. Cosmic Education recognizes the elementals as cosmic agents in the work of shaping the universe. How are these elementals speaking to the children in your community? How is the children’s growing awareness of the elementals becoming material for their self-construction?
What is your inner voice telling you about yourself these days? About your community? About your classroom? About the kids?
My inner voice tells me we need growing awareness, nature, love, time outside, healing, rest, sleep, play, music, rhythm, language, story, inclusion, acceptance, food sovereignty, truth, justice, belonging…and my inner voice tells me that the abundance I seek will only ever be available now, in the present moment, at the surface of the cenote where we float in our understanding.
Some components of the inner voice that I’ve contemplated and explored more deeply since 2020
Listening to our bodies
- To the senses
- All input, all data from the world comes through the senses
- Imagination is based on sensorial experience
- Art, music, dance: all sensorial
- The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee TaylorI listened to the audiobook and although I was familiar with some of the ideas from 90s feminism and being an LGBTQIA+ ally, this book still blew my mind; I’m going to buy it and do ALL of the journal prompts. She brilliantly and so clearly recognizes and expresses the political implications of body shaming and body sovereignty. She helped me realize that the basis of inclusion is acceptance of each other’s bodies. https://www.sonyareneetaylor.com/the-body-is-not-an-apology
- Radical Permission
- I first encountered adrienne maree brown in Yes! magazine in 2020 and I thought, “this is what I want my inner voice to sound like!” Her meme game on Instagram is unparalleled. She writes fiction, poetry, and non-fiction; Radical Permission is her collaboration with Sonya Renee Taylor.
- I will be using the Journal of Radical Permission as part of my awareness practice next year. Anybody want to join me? Email me at elise.huneke.stone@gmail.com
- In 2023 she will have a musical production in Ashland, Oregon https://www.osfashland.org/en/news-multimedia/news-announcements/2023-season-announcement.aspx that will “invite audiences to explore how we can be in right relationship to change.” I’m going. Anybody want to come with me, make it a group?
- The Nap Ministry
- We will rest. This scholar of Black U.S. history has documented the ways that women of color were oppressed through a denial of their freedom to choose their work and rest—a freedom still compromised for many people of color and for most children I know today.
Listening to our hands
- “The prehensile organ of the mind,” Montessori tells us.
- Handwork!
- Toko-pa Turner, in Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, p. 161
- “While those of us who are the children of refugees or settlers may no longer have this symbiotic relationship with the land upon which we live, our history is still embedded in the things we make with our hands, which is why I consider handmaking to be a great competency of belonging.”
- “The materials we chose, the teachers who imparted the craft to us, the necessity or beauty which called the creation forth, the style of music contained within its curves and lines—all of these elements live quietly in an object made by a person’s hands. And wearing, using, or living with handmade things allows the essence of a place or a lineage to be kept alive through us.”
- Consider the children’s handwork in your classroom in light of these quotes. Consider the materials in your classroom too. How can this understanding of handwork as a competency of belonging help the children be freer in their development and self-construction? How can their handwork help them be more collaborative and cooperative and sustainable in their construction of community?
- Toko-pa Turner: https://toko-pa.com
- Renata Hillman on handwork: https://youtu.be/bfoByYLSBY8
Listening to Nature
From Elise’s journal:
Some children will know many rivers
but some none
Hard for me to imagine, a child
without the sense of time passing like a current
and carving away the rock that was there for a long forever.
Sad to think there might be children
who don’t feel their kinship to trees, who haven’t heard what birds say
in the morning, who never babbled like a brook because the brooks are all dammed
to silence in their mother tongue.
When our understanding of ourselves is shaped and symbolled by the natural world,
we are one with something so entire, so divine, so beautiful and vast and extreme and complex that we cannot help but love ourselves, accept ourselves, know that we hold mystery and give light to the darkness.
When we know the world, when our children are at home with the land and waters,
and fluent in sky,
When nature gives us what matters
and we spin our imaginations out in delicate tracings of pattern and innovation
like a web, we can see ourselves and each other
in the light we make.
Some of us are
like the moon,
Silvering the night sky,
a reflection of the sun’s golden regenerative warmth, so far from us,
The sun somehow so remote and so reliable and so generous with its power.
And some of us are like the rain
drumming on shelter
Each droplet so small, but together
Feeding rivers, fulfilling oceans, watering seeds.
In childhood I had two friends who were trees: Bartholomew and the pine.
In childhood I communed daily with a hundred year old stone wall.
In childhood I grew a pumpkin vine that I still remember, and begonias.
In childhood I rode my bike and played in the ocean and in the woods and in backyards.
In childhood I had several imaginary worlds co-created with other children in my family and neighborhood, enduring narratives that we returned to again and again, populated by ourselves and sometimes given voice through our toys. We spent hours and hours playing outside.
We can argue about whether or not kids need screens, or Legos, or PE, or a soccer team.
But it’s pretty hard to argue against our children’s birthright to the natural world. It’s theirs. Nobody’s saying that what’s ruining kids today, what’s threatening humanity’s future, is that kids today spend too much time playing in nature, learning about it and loving it and belonging to it.
I spend as much time as I can outside these days, observing and gardening and playing with stuff that came from my garden or exploring with Milo. I hope to be writing more about these experiences in the decade to come!
While looking for something else on the internet, I discovered this, a wonderful resource of writing about children connecting to nature, available for download to share for free.[2]
What I was looking for on the internet was a link for Wisdom of Nature Press, which published a book you might be interested in. It’s a picture book that could be a key for all kinds of interesting conversations. My friend Delila wrote and illustrated the story of Fred, a monarch butterfly. The text is excerpts from her journal about her observations and reflections on Fred’s transformative process of development and how we humans in the pandemic times were undergoing similar changes. It would be a wonderful way to talk about observations, care of the environment, care of our more-than-human kin. It would be a good way to have a deeper conversation with yourself and your students about journals in the elementary classroom, and it would be a good read-aloud for the beginning of the year. Available widely but I posted the Amazon link here because it has both hardcover and paperback.
Listening to your oracles; practicing intuitive arts; acknowledging the unseen.
- Prayer, the sacred, the divine, the gods and goddesses, enchantment…
- Ghosts, and other presences from history.
- Astrology and dreamwork give us the chance to play with the elementals and with symbols and with wisdom traditions that are ancient but absolutely personalized through our interaction with them right now. This is listening to your inner voice. Astrology works for some of us because we tell ourselves what we need to hear and we listen.
- Tarot or other practices like this.
- I’ve had really healing, positive, kind experiences with the Gentle Tarot that have expanded my awareness so much. My love and appreciation for our belonging to this planet, for kinship, for myself, and for tarot have all grown!
Listening to the ancestors
- “As you pick apart the narratives of your upbringing, you may decide to bury the false ones in the ground. Stories are power; you can always choose which ones you want to live by. Those left standing become counsel to repeat for future generations.” Chani Nicholas, astrologer
Listening to each other
- The collective, the community, the “we”, the kin, our Gaian selves
- Connections and interdependencies
- We are not just a family tree but the entire fractal network of mycelium, soil, sunshine: We are the whole forest.
- With awareness of our human belonging, and awareness of our belonging to the more than human world
- In the classroom: Keep the learning journals and add in a few other ways of community timekeeping: A class journal, a class calendar, a communal nature journal, a going out journal, a color journal (this is great as an individual journal too—I’m loving mine).
Etc.
From Elise’s journal, imagining if one of the introductions to the noun was a poem.
Noun Story
Here is a little bit of me.
Here is a little bit of my story.
This is a jasper,
a red polished stone. And this is a jasper too,
Oregon picture jasper,
evoking beaches, sand and sea and sky,
when your eye tumbling over the stone
reminds your mind of places past.
I named my firstborn Jasper.
Nouns matter.
The golden beads are nouns.
A story is a noun.
What we make with our hands: nouns.
Every name is a noun.
And a song can make nouns into sounds,
And give them voice.
#rewilding_montessori
#montessori_belonging
#montessori_kinship
#growing_awareness
Some hashtags I’ve been using. Follow me on Instagram @hedgerowmontessori
“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.” Marcus Garvey said it, Bob Marley put it into one of my most beloved earworms. “Won’t you help me sing these songs of freedom?” https://youtu.be/yv5xonFSC4c and https://youtu.be/55s3T7VRQSc ; if you don’t already know about Playing for Change, you’re welcome!) https://www.playingforchange.com
[2] Community Playthings donated shelves and other furnishings to Montessori Northwest’s elementary course. I haven’t read this whole thing yet but I like it so far!
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