Along with crafts, recipes, stories and songs, we will also share with you some content that we hope will anchor your days with encouragement and support on the adult front. Today Mama Christina writes about rhythm and routine. She offers a very rich, in-depth perspective of the importance of rhythm, but also some essential components to make your rhythm work well.
If you are needing some support on where to start in creating a healthy rhythm for your home, Lisa Boisvert Mackenzie has written a very practical article for LifeWays that you can read here. Also, Mothering Arts collaborates with LifeWays North America in a wonderful, very affordable online course on building Healthy Home Rhythms that is accessible all the time and moves at your own pace.
Dear Families,
Okay. I have my tea. This is a cozy topic so if you want to go and find the liquorice chai tea concoction and whip it up, take a moment…
As you begin or continue your teaching practice—for that is what you are doing—we realise the number of pieces to the teaching puzzle that makes up a LifeWays practice are many and varied. There is child development, philosophical and pedagogical components, social aspects, and so forth. They are all also integrated. So if we can share a few of the contributing underpinnings, this may help to build your practice in ways that you love and find meaningful. In this blog, we want to share some thoughts, beliefs and ideas about how Rhythm and Routine can be built into your teaching practice with your children.
In a culture and historical moment that priorities the New, the familiar is not necessarily views with equal enticement as is the “next best thing.” The built relationship with particular activities such as our relationship with traditions, with daily rituals and tasks, with language (prayers, verses, songs, stories, even conversation) can be lost in the sea of novelty. These relationships takes time and effort to create. Take for instance, language: words are first chosen deliberately (this verse, that blessing, this story), words are repeated and deepened over time, taken to heart and memorized, recited with reverence and with those we love. They are experienced with love for their textural cultural familiarity. The way the words resonate, the sense experience that lives over and over in our bodies and brains—create relationship that is nourishing. Like the relationship we build with different language experiences, a well-developed Rhythm and Routine take time, patience and perseverance. It is a worthy striving, for Rhythm and Routine are fundamental for calm, mindful and deliberate values-driven experience. They build safety, security, cultural competence, skill, inner resources, relationship, and love for own home traditions. They help alleviate stress, head off behaviour problems, and regulate mood. Rhythm and Routine are powerful tools as well as being cozy. What are they? How do we build them into the life school-at-home?
A routine is simply a regular, regulated way of doing things: structuring bath time, inventing dinner, tending the garden, transitioning in and out of play. We build routines by doing specific activities at regular times on these days with these tools, together and sometimes independently. This activity is typically preceded by that activity and this 3rd activity most often follows it. We schedule our activities with a breathing in/breathing out rhythm in order to both take in nourishment and expel energy. We give, and then we take in. We contribute, and then we rest. We sing or speak, and then we listen, and then we sing, and then we listen. This rhythm of taking in and expending matches our breath. It is a bit like a dance, moving in and out in choreographed and sometimes surprising steps. And missteps. Don’t worry when the rhythm goes awry; you will re-establish it, fine tune it, carve it into something that feels like your family rhythm. It takes a bit of intention and looking at the individual pieces of the day, giving them structure and beauty, sticking to them so they get established and changing them as needed.
For instance, let’s look at dinner. We have food prep with its minutia: gathering the herbs from the garden, chopping, washing veggies, stirring the soup, washing the cutting boards and sinks, turning the pot on low. Then there is setting the table: gathering the napkins, utensils, plates and glasses and placing them at the table, checking for neatness, gathering flowers on Mondays perhaps for the centre. Next we are putting away pre-dinner activities while the soup simmers, washing hands and combing hair. Once gathered, we are reviewing the day or sharing a verse or prayer, serving, eating and conversing. Lastly, we clean up together: each one going to their weekly after-dinner chore, with little ones being supported in their chore and, then, transitioning into the bedtime routine. The familiar rhythm of this routine daily event and the Mood with which it occurs, day after day, gives it a flavour that defines and deepens our family life and history. It builds our own relationship with food and gathering, with the garden and chores. It creates the biographies of our children around family life and themselves as participants, willing or no.
It is the mood with which we bring Rhythm and Routine that takes these elements from simply scheduled time to meaningful, nourishing family-owned ways of being in the world. A schedule becomes, with the intentional mood of the adults, the holding, secure rhythm of Our Family Life. So consider this as you both invent and live your routines and rhythms. The poet/writer Kathleen Norris, in her book Quotidian Mysteries* fleshes out the intent to make every household activity a meditation, from doing the laundry to sweeping the floor to tending the garden. It is that kind of intention that allows a routine to gain rooted meaning.
This is where your work in clarifying and living your values comes into play in actions as mundane (of the world) as setting the table, cleaning up the toys, dressing the doll, etc. Knowing the mood you want to permeate your family life allows you to invent both meaningful routines and to build a rhythm that makes them light and sweet. So begin with clarifying, and then bringing that mood to the routine you have decided is meaningful (and workable).
*Kathleen Norris’s Quotidian Mysteries was published by Paulist Press, 1998, Mahwaj, NJ