Closing the Cabin (for now)
It’s been 6 weeks now since we closed the Cabin due to covid19. We wanted to hold out and stay open whilst the schools stayed open, but in the end it made sense for us to take the call. School’s did close also at the end of the same week.
The very underpinnings of the Cabin were designed to be able to be agile and responsive to changing and volatile times — and by that I mean the business set up, and the culture/educational philosophy. We set out to create an environment that is authentic to and in alignment with the world that we live in, and that world is volatile and changeable in it’s nature — it always has been. The community’s own practice of self-direction and learner autonomy is intended to have protective and future-proofing qualities in regards to this — as well as giving people the best shot at being able to be true to themselves and to be in honest and consensual relationships.
Temporary closing has been relatively straight forward to us and low maintenance, for which I am grateful. Our community, from what I can gather, has reoriented themselves to be centred in their home environment, although friends and face to face contact is missed. As a setting open 2 days a week, our families have always been dancing between community and independence.
Home educators in my experience are resilient, having already gone through the process of opting out of school (which can sometimes feel like walking through fire, or at least, jumping into the unknown) and setting up their own family and community based systems for living and learning. The majority of home educators have experience in feeling isolated and lonely, and overcoming fear and uncertainty, at least from some part of their home education and/or parenting journey, and have had to become fluent in finding strategies to cope with conditions of isolation.
In terms of what kind of contact and provision we wanted to have open to the community during the lock down, what felt right was:
1) To keep in the connecting practice of our community meeting. We start and end our days at the Cabin with opening and closing circles. These circles are reassuring, stabilising and necessary spaces for us to ensure and maintain a healthy community, to model rights respecting culture and as spaces for co-creation and co-troubleshooting. They are a practice, and we wanted to maintain connection to this practice, so we are holding a circle for anyone that wants to attend on each day that ordinarily we would be open.
2) To hold space for our community to share, process, and feel seen. The meeting allows us to do this — there is the chance to check in and say how you are doing, and then we use the meeting time as we want to, usually for show and tell, to play games, and sometimes to set each other challenges. The types of games have included building a story together (this has given space for things on people’s minds to be spoken out loud in what feels like a creative and playful way), our version of Pictionary, and i-spy.
We’ve found that this is enough for us for now. I have found these meetings uplifting and really fun, it’s so nice to see people’s faces and the idiosyncrasies of each person that I love and miss. It’s a low stress and low maintenance provision for myself and Sarah to provide (we are chairing the circles for now), and that is important so that we can maintain our own health and well-being during this time.
Mostly in these meetings I just want to say how much I love the people who are there, how much I admire them, and miss them, and look forward to when we can play together again in person. And for those in the community who are busy doing other things, or for whom meeting in this way doesn’t promote well-being for whatever reason, I love and miss you too and can’t wait to catch up with you when we are back.
