On Life's Path

     Wow!  I feel like a nut that's been cracked open.  No one told me that blogging could be such a deeply personal kind of thing.  After a year of posting, suddenly I have some feelings attached to it.  While I understand that the unspoken rule here is honesty, I happen to like a little sugar with my truth.  So thank you, Michelle, for the very kind comment you posted yesterday.  I want to believe what you said.  In my liberal interpretation of teaching and learning, I've often thought that it doesn't take an official title to be a teacher (I consider myself to be one as I home school), and that it doesn't take a publishing house to make a person a writer.  
     For the first time in my life, I am doing exactly what I want to be doing.  Thank you, Thisisme, for helping me to realize this fact.   Your comment helped me to see that I am not like the Biblical Jonah, hiding in the belly of the whale, avoiding at all costs the calling to be a school teacher. I realize now that my childhood dream was

a.  the only response I could offer at family gatherings when aunts and uncles asked that question "what do you want to be when you grow up."  I was six years old and the only jobs I saw available to me in my rural town were teaching, mothering and farming.  Farming involved poop.  So did mothering.
b.  an idealized picture of me writing neatly on a chalkboard.
c.  I loved my teachers so much that I wanted to be lifelong friends with them.  When I grew up and moved away, they weren't there anymore.


     God has led me down so many paths and not one of them led me back to a brick and mortar classroom.  It's a great feeling to know that I can make a life for myself outside the security of the institutions that dominated my life for so many years.  Thinking about leaving behind a childhood dream to pursue something new and unexpected has helped me to stretch.  It is a faith journey.  It is my way of being a teacher to myself.

     I did not know how to operate a sewing machine when I started this activity.  I did not know how to make my computer do what I wanted it to do.  I knew pretty much nothing about photography (and am still working on that).  So if there is a lesson, it's that we all have something called neuroplasticity.  We each have the ability to rewire our brains to do things that we never thought we could.

      I am so thankful that this business wasn't on my to do list.  Because, if it was, the sheer number of things that I would have had to teach myself would be so overwhelming that I would have walked away.  Thankfully, I get to teach myself, in small, manageable chunks, and stay at home while reaching out to my community.  I have made some GREAT friends.  And, BONUS! I have customers who are not only satisfied but excited to be a part of something new.

It's true that I fall into the learner camp more than the teacher camp.  But this is okay with me.  One day, the memory of the things I learned will stand out more than the things that I taught.