Wild Roots: Creating an Educational Alternative
After the home birth of my daughter in 2015, I felt isolated and alone. We spent the first 8 weeks of my daughter’s life blissfully cocooned in our home as a new family getting to know our kiddo. Then, my partner’s parental leave ended and he abruptly returned to work. I was home alone with an 8-week old, and deeply felt our society’s lack of a communal village for new parents to lean on. As I realized how ill-equipped our system is for supporting new families, I started searching for a community of new parents who were equally yearning for a village.
In my search, I found a community of conscious parents with similarly-aged children who were also practicing connection parenting, and we started meeting twice a week in Golden Gate Park with our kids. Each day, we followed a rhythm: we started with a mindfulness practice, then held circle time with nature songs, enjoyed a picnic snack, checked in with each other, and set intentions for the week. We read parenting books together and had book discussions to deepen our conscious parenting practices.
Our community defied our culture’s capitalistic orientation; participating was free of charge and commitment was largely informal. Yet, we all showed up, over and over again, to be in community with one another. What we were creating met this visceral need for belonging, for a village, for connection with the earth, for interdependence. It was a community created by and for mothers and their children, and its matriarchal roots provided me a desperately needed alternative to our wider society’s conventions.
As our community evolved, we started to form language around what keeps us together: our commitment to self-growth, our practice of mindfulness and presence, our interdependence with one another and the earth, and our deep commitment to social and environmental justice, both in our community and in the larger world.
As our kids entered toddlerhood, the political backdrop dramatically shifted. When Trump was elected, we held an impromptu gathering in the San Francisco Botanical Gardens and talked and cried as our kids splashed in the lake. Together, we marched in the rain at the first Women’s March, with kids in strollers and carriers, on hips and shoulders. During the Muslim ban, we sat together at SFO airport, feeling fear and camaraderie, shock and resilience. We’ve gathered to protest child separation, Kavanaugh’s appointment to the supreme court, and the treatment of the earth at the climate rally. We’ve stood together through historic moments, with kids in tow, to model what standing up for the rights and dignities of all beings actually looks like.
When it came time to search for preschools, we chose to take the leap together and create an outdoor preschool alternative for our kids called Wild Roots. We’d already worked so hard to form a tight-knit village based on our shared values, and wanted to create an educational experience wholly aligned with those values for our children. Jane and I set to work creating our school and hired Mega, the perfect teacher for our community.
Six months into our playschool adventure, I’m in awe of the power of what we’ve created for our children and our families. It’s small. It’s peaceful. It’s profound. And it defies our society’s broken conventions for how to be with one another and with the earth.
If you want to keep up with the work we’re doing, follow me here on Medium or subscribe to my newsletter at radicalmatriarch.com.
