busy with life: Sea Heart School

My posts have been somewhat erratic over the last month or so: I've been seriously distracted with a new project. Until this past year I was a Waldorf teacher, first in the UK, then the US and then here in Costa Rica. This year, 2009, I left teaching for what I thought would be for good. Throughout the year people have asked me to start a little school and I've resisted, but it's been gnawing at me. Events have happened, the stars have aligned properly, things have just seemed to slip into place and so I find myself about to embark on a new school project.

The Sea Heart School will begin January 20th (the Costa Rican school year runs beginning of February to mid December). We will begin with a kindergarten and a homeschool support group for older children. We chose our name for the sea heart vine (Entada gigas), wishing to have our symbol be something which would connect the forest and the ocean. Sea heart vines grow up through the canopy, they are leguminous and form the longest seed pods in the world. When ripe the pods drop and shatter sending the seeds in all directions. The seeds are very beautiful: a deep brown polished looking woody heart, often they make their way down streams to the ocean where they become one of the most common and attractive drift seeds. Carried across oceans or around the world in currents they wash up on shores as far away as Ireland to be carried home as gifts from the sea. The sea heart connects forest and shore in a wonderful way - as a living and beautiful and heart shaped seed, ready to grow into a thriving, climbing, nitrogen fixing plant! As a world traveler it also symbolizes our children who come from  Central, South and North America and Europe. We hope our children will also grow and thrive and be at home in the forest, and the oceans, and are flexible and willing to travel to new destinations and make new discoveries on all levels of their being.

Our school house is very close to the farm, and almost as close to the ocean. It's a small traditional house with a yard that is ready to be painted, planted and loved. Right now it needs work - two walls, a rainwater collection system, repairs, paint, plumbing in the kitchen . . . but I love it, it's full of potential and crying out for the laughter of children. It has a grapefruit tree in the yard full of fruit - perfectly delicious pink fruits.