05/26/2026
📸 Spring snapshot: FORAGING!
In a place with no curriculum, grades, or “educational benchmarks,” some folks wonder how we learn. The notion of emergence comes up here often as one of many responses to that question, as does our connection to the land.
We notice when the violets blanket the ground, we greet them, and someone here inevitably says, “It’s time to make violet lemonade again!” They make a plan, find a recipe, calculate how many lemons and how much sugar we need, experiment with the ratios of syrup to water to make the best-tasting version. When the chickweed is coming up, and we’re excited to find the juciest plants, to transform them into a pesto (or something else!). When the first morel mushrooms pop from the soil, we squeal, and we plan. This year we harvested, cleaned, and sautéed them in butter and salt, and mixed them into a fluffy quiche seasoned with garlic from the gardens. Smoked gouda and a couple other cheeses rounded out this year’s experiment to rave reviews.
The ways the land teaches us are explicit and implicit both - like a reliable friend, showing up with wisdom and gifts around the same time each year, we greet her with a resonant knowing and warm gratitude, tending to the soil and the trees and beyond. Some of what we learn we could perhaps name, but most of it is transmitted less noticeably, into our senses and cells. It’s in the recognition of the smell of the violet syrup as it steeps, and the fuchsia it turns with the addition of a splash of lemon juice. It’s in the way we know which chickweed to harvest by the curl and color of the delicate leaves. It’s in the awareness of exactly where and when to scout for morels, based on the curves of the spaces we traverse each day, each year.
What are we all learning? Who’s to say. We really can’t know exactly, ever. But we can feel that what happens in these experiences matters. It eludes being captured in words or metrics or grades or “learning goals” and yet it’s also everything, at once.
✨ Relationship, relationship, relationship. ✨
