A Spacious Place

You may notice that I've changed the name of my blog. It shouldn't affect the feeds, I hope, since the address is still the same.

The reference to "a spacious place" is from Psalm 30 -- or 31, depending on which version you use. It is one of my favorite Psalms:

In thee, O Lord, have I hoped, let me never be confounded: deliver me in thy justice. 3 Bow down thy ear to me: make haste to deliver me. Be thou unto me a God, a protector, and a house of refuge, to save me. 4 For thou art my strength and my refuge; and for thy name's sake thou wilt lead me, and nourish me. 5 Thou wilt bring me out of this snare, which they have hidden for me: for thou art my protector. 6 Into thy hands I commend my spirit: thou hast redeemed me, O Lord, the God of truth. 7 Thou hast hated them that regard vanities, to no purpose. But I have hoped in the Lord: 8 I will be glad and rejoice in thy mercy. For thou best regarded my humility, thou hast saved my soul out of distresses. 9 And thou hast not shut me up in the hands of the enemy: thou hast set my feet in a spacious place.

Charlotte Mason uses the phrase -- her version is "a large room"-- to describe the broad liberal education she thought all children were worthy of receiving:

Our aim in Education is to give a Full Life. -- We begin to see what we want. Children make large demands upon us. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. 'Thou hast set my feet in a large room' should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking -- the strain would be too great -- but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest... The question is not, -- how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education -- but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him? (HT: The Common Room)

This expresses well what I aspire to in educating my children; whether I reach it in practice or not, it is the light I focus on in this homeschooling endeavour.

Plus, we literally live in a spacious place -- a log home big enough for 2 parents and 7 children, at least, in the California Sierras, where everything is on a large scale.

Finally, it was getting so confusing dealing with two blogs of the same name! My other blog is called Every Waking Hour, too.... I started this one to deal with my ponderings on unschooling, way back in August 2005 and then started the homeschool journal version last spring
because I liked the community over there, and the wordpress format, and I wanted to have a more journal-like focus to record what my children (and I) were learning and doing. Meanwhile this one has moved towards more of a general real learning focus: my ongoing blend of classical and Charlotte Mason and unschooling which takes different forms at different seasons of our lives. I wanted the title change to reflect that.

SO.....'nuff said, I think! (The picture is one my second son took last time we were at Yosemite, which is not far from where we live -- I love the way the colors of Bridalveil Falls turned out, and it reminds me of the light and hope I want to teach my children to look for, as Cardinal Arinze said).