Lag B'Omer: Let's Go Fly a Kite!

Lag B'Omer

by N.

Today is the minor Jewish holiday of Lag B' Omer. The word "Lag" is not really a word, but an acronymn for the letters "lamed" and "gimmel," the number 33 in Hebrew. To understand Lag B'Omer, first you need to know what the Omer is and what counting the Omer is.

The Torah says:

You shall count for yourselves seven weeks, from when the sickle is first put to the standing crop shall you begin counting seven weeks. Then you will observe the Festival of Shavu'ot for the L-RD, your G-d -Deuteronomy 16:9-10.



Beginning at Pesach time, a measure of barley was brought to the Temple for sacrifice--the sheaf or measure is called an Omer. Every day for 50 days, that measure of barley was waved in the temple. Fifty days is the time between the holiday of Pesach and the holiday of Shavuot. This was the time of the ancient barley harvest in the land of Israel. Now we do not have the Temple in Jerusalem, and most of us do not live in Eretz Israel, and most of us are not farmers, so instead of harvesting the barley measure and bringing it to the temple, we count each day from the second night of Pesach until the day before Shavuot. We call this counting the Omer.

In the days of Rabbi Akiba, there was a plague in the land of Israel, but the plague stopped on the 33 day of counting the Omer. So that day is a happy day in the middle of the barley harvest. We celebrate by going out of doors that day, having picnics, and enjoying a day in the middle of spring. The End.



Back to you, Mom!



Elisheva:



The period of the counting of the Omer is a period of semi-mourning in the Jewish calendar. We do not have weddings, parties or dances, or cut our hair during this time. Some say it is because of a plague that occured in Rabbi Akiba's time. Others say that it is because harvest time is a time of uncertainty and work until the crop is safely in. But on the 33 day of the counting of the Omer, the restrictions are lifed and a minor holiday is celebrated by Jews the world over. This is Lag B'Omer. It occurs about a month after the festival of Passover, and a little over 2 weeks before the festival of Shavuot--the Feast of Weeks. It is customary to enjoy the springtime on this holiday by going outside to have picnics and bonfires. Also, it is the anniversary of the death of Rabbi Simeon Bar Yochai, a mystic of old, so in Israel many Hasidic Jews make a pilgrimage to his grave in the Galilee. Also, little boys get their first hair-cut on this day at the age of three.

The agricultural underpinning of Lag B'Omer, as a celebration of the ongoing barley harvest, is akin to May Day in the Old European calendar. It is a time to rejoice in the sweetness of new life and fecundity in the springtime of the year.

Today we had an outdoors day--on a blustery day in early May--as celebration of Lag B'Omer.

My daughter, MLC, and our daughter-of-the-heart, L. ran the 5K race in the Run for the Zoo in Albuquerque. Here, in the black hat and pink sweatshirt, is MLC crossing the finish line.

She said she has had better time in training, but was happy with her time considering the wind and the crowd.

Here is L. coming up to the finish line a few minutes later.

She was also happy with her time.

MLC's boyfriend took these pictures from the media stand for one of the radio stations. The guy knows everybody!

This afternoon, Bruce, N. and I went to the Edgewood Wind Festival at Wildlife West--a wonderful nature park in Edgewood.

It was a wonderful day to fly kites, brisk with a stiff northeast wind.

N. bought "Jaws" at the kite stand. In honor of Lag B'Omer, a day in which the Keshet (rainbow) is also celebrated, he also got a "rainbow" tail to put on the kite.

Here is "Jaws" turning into the wind.

I honestly don't know who had a better time flying the kite, N. or Bruce!

Bruce says that when he was little, he was the Charlie Brown of Oakland. His only attempt at getting a kite into the air ended up feeding a "kite eating palm tree."

But together, my guys got the kite into the air.
There was a lot encouraging talk and laughter while they did it.

N: "Feel the Force, Jaws, feel the force!"

Bruce: "Be the wind, Jaws! Be the wind!"

All of us: "Da-dum, Da-dum, da-dum..."
(the shark riff from the movie Jaws).

Today the weather was a little strange. Did you notice that MLC was wearing a sweatshirt while running in Albuquerque in May? Do you notice that the guys have winter coats on while flying kites? We actually had snow flurries this morning at our house! But the strange weather did bring good kite-flying wind. So we celebrated a little in the middle of counting the Omer.

It was wonderful to get out and feel the wind and enjoy the new grass smell. And to know that I am done with the semester. Lag B'Omer is one of those wonderful little holidays that take very little planning and have no elaborate preparation. It's just a day of fun in the middle of spring.

Tidying Up Using Sharp Instruments of Destruction

Despite predictions of a dry spring this year, we have been seeing lots of clouds and rain.

Between Monday and yesterday, we got nearly an inch of rain! This is very different than this time last year and we are grateful!

Here are some clouds spilling over the Sandia Mountains yesterday morning. Beautiful! And wet...







...which means that between the weather and final exams, papers, and presentations, I have not gotten out to the garden.

But today was a perfect day, finally. All finals, papers and presentations are complete. Last night, the moon was "a ghostly galleon" among the diminishing clouds. And this morning dawned fair and dewy. Dew. Or "tal" in Hebrew.
I have not seen dew in New Mexico in years! There was none up here last spring, and before that we lived in the high desert.




"Today," I told N. at breakfast, "I am working to tidy up the garden areas."

"And plant?" he asked eagerly.

"Don't be hasty. There is a lot of work to do before we can plant. And anyway, the danger of frost has not passed until around Mother's Day. I'll be tidying up," I explained.

"Does that involve sharp instruments of destruction?"

"Yep," I replied.

"I'm there!" N. exclaimed.

Here he is, using the long-handled clippers to cut back a purple sage bush. They look really nice against adobe, but oh, Lord, they are weeds! They spread all over the place and have to be cut severely back and thinned in the spring. I probably should've done this in March--but with cleaning for Pesach, gardening has to wait.


I am always amazed at the industry shown by young men if they are given "sharp instruments of destruction!"

Here is the purple sage bush after N. went at it.
While I did the dooryard garden area, he not only got the bush trimmed, but also raked the rocks clear of most of the twigs. And he also started on the Aspen suckers.

I don't why the former owners planted Aspen--they are largest living plant on earth. When you see a stand of Aspen, you are really seeing one organism. The damn things clone like mad, forming stands a hundred yards wide sometimes. Bruce is eventually going to take the Aspen out, but until he does, we do sucker control.

But back to the point. In two hours, we got four hours worth of work done--all because N. wanted to work with "Sharp instruments of destruction."

Can a woman really every understand the male of the species?

Carnival of Homeschooling: Yes-No-Yes!

The Carnival of Homeschooling--May Day Edition is up at Dewey's Treehouse. Mama Squirrel actually got it up last night, There are some really good articles--so stop and smell the roses! Enjoy!

The Lovely Month of May!

Today is May Day!

A day to take a break from heavy thinking and rejoice in the middle of spring.

Here is where the sun rose today at our house--it is rising north of east, about half-way to its farthest point north of rising. The days are still getting longer!

May Day is a cross-quarter day--coming roughly half-way between the Vernal Equinox and the Summer Solstice. In the Old Calendar, this is Beltane--the beginning of summer, when the goddess is manifest in the form of the maiden, the promise of life. In Christian Europe, this month is dedicated to the Virgin, again, as the promise of life.

The closest Jewish holiday is Lag b'Omer, the 33rd day of the the counting of the omer--a measure of barley--which is coming up this Sunday. It is also a moment of rejoicing in the middle of the ancient barley harvest. Stay tuned for more!

Here is a picture of the sunrise on the Vernal Equinox. By comparing this with the picture above, you can see that the sun is now rising well to the left of where it rose on the first day of astronomical spring for the northern hemisphere.

The passing of the seasons of our lives happens so quickly and our lives are so fleeting that seems important to stop this day and enjoy this moment!


When I was a child growing up in Illinois, all of these small holidays were marked in school.

Throughout the elementary years, we would make May baskets on May Day--weaving them out of many bright colors of construction paper strips, and staple on handles. On the way home from school, we would pick flowers that bloomed so abundantly--violets, lilac, sweet clover, and dandelions--and put them in the May baskets. We would then hang these baskets on neighbors door-handles, ring the bell and run away. When they opened their doors, our neighbors always acted as if they didn't know who could possibly have given them this beautiful gift, exclaiming loudly over the beauty of the spring baskets, so they could be heard over our giggles, as we hid around the corner of the porch.

I think something precious has been lost--some connection to the turning of the seasons and to community--now that May Day is no longer celebrated by children in schools. At least, it does not happen here anymore.

So today, to celebrate May Day, we took pictures of the flowers blooming in our meadow. Here, in the high desert mountains of New Mexico, the real wildflower season comes in August. But when we get rain in the spring, we do get some flowers peeping shyly through the grasses in mid-spring.

So here are some dandelions. Above are some flowers from the pea-family that are purple. Here I do not see violets or white clover. In a few weeks the evening primroses will be out. We will see lots of sunflowers and penstamon, and yellow clover later in the summer. If we go to the top of the Sandias we will even see the beautiful columbine, up against the limestone rock face, in the shade, where it likes to hide.

Happy May Day!

What We Do Matters Part 1

Last week, as some you know, I was the lawyer for a Mock Trial for Special Education Law 510. It was a difficult case. The parents of a child with AS had taken him out of school because there was disagreement between the school people and the parents about his special education needs. Because the boy was academically gifted, the school people thought he should be in the general education classroom with no special education component. The parents differed because they were concerned about how being in the general education classroom environment would affect the child's ability to learn. Large classrooms are noisy, confusing places and the sensory over-stimulation can affect an Aspie's ability to focus. The parents also had concerns that the child was marginalized and being bullied. So they took him out of school, but for reasons involving the child's socialization, they brought him to the municipal park to play and sometimes he was in the park while the school children were also playing in the park. Nearly two years later, the principal of the school and some teachers tried to ban the child from the park, saying that his behavior was a problem. They insisted that they should have the right to have the school psychologist re-evaluate the child before he could play in the park.

When we first got the case, my group spent a good deal of time mucking around with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), because we were focused on the park issue. And we were a little angry because, we are not lawyers, and after all, in class we had studied the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and we did not see how the case we were given fit. Here is a homeschooled child being deprived of the right to play on a public playground. I even contacted Judy Aron over at Consent of the Governed because she is a researcher working with National Home Education Legal Defense. However, because I was swamped with my other course, I was unable to take Judy's gracious offer to help.

At one of our rather hilarious group meetings--we coped with the stress with humor--a change of perspective took place. We began to wonder about why the parents were bringing such a case two years after taking their child out of school. And we realized that the real violation took place when the parents' concerns were ignored at the child's IEP meeting two years ago. Not only that, the school people compounded the problem by asserting their power against the family two years later. The parents were most likely bringing the case in order to get the school off their backs and to stop what they perceived to be harassment by a powerful institution. With this change in our perspective, we were able to find our case in IDEA--because Congress found that one problem (among many) with special education was that parents are not included in the IEP process effectively. (And this is very true as any parent who has dealt with the special education process can tell you). And Congress wrote into the law ways to correct that. I don't know if we won or not yet. In the original case, the school won on procedural grounds--in our public institutions you can behave very badly, but if you cross all your "T's" and dot all of your "i's" you can get away with it.

In my closing statement I said, in part:

"...But in our concept of law, (justice) is not in some pure realm. Justice is not justice if it does not reach into the sometimes messy conflicts of ordinary lives. A great scholar and legalist once said: “Justice delayed and justice denied will bring the sword.”
I think what he meant was that what we do here now matters. How we respond to the need of one person for justice matters. How an individual is treated in our public institutions matters. If a child is bullied, if his parents are harassed, if a student does not receive needed services, all of this affects all of us. We have learned this only too well this past week as the details of the Virginia Tech shooting have been revealed."

This shows that government schools, and the people who operate them, don't know winning for losing. When a lawyer came to talk to our class about the IDEA and due process hearings, I saw this clearly. He kept talking about the how the schools can "win." What he did not appear to get is that if a parent is frustrated to the point of bringing a due process hearing, there is a problem that the school has not dealt with in some way. When a school comes off as asserting its considerable power over individual citizens--taxpayers all--then the school loses the public relations battle even if they win the case. This is so, because schools are not generally perceived as friendly places by the people who were and are compelled to go to them, and school people are not held in great respect in our communities. The root of that issue is twofold: the compulsory nature of school attendance in a free society and the virtual monopoly school people have over education process in this country. School people are not required to listen to the people they require to attend, and to pay for their services. Further, the institutional power school people have, which is derived from compulsion, has created in many of them an unbearable officiousness and know-it-all attitude. On top of it all, public schools have not shown great success in teaching their clients to read and write and figure, let alone educating them to think critically for themselves about the issues of our day. This is painfully obvious to anyone who has taught at the university level in the United States. And the name-calling and sound-byte-repeating-nature of what passes for public discourse is another indicator of the failure of schools to educate. For all these reasons, even if the school people have the letter of the law on their side, in any tangle with the public, they lose good-will.

I believe that one problem common to much of our institutional life in the United States is that at our core we have forgotten how to treat one another as unique, irreplacible human beings. When, as in the case above, the needs of the child are eclipsed by the need of an institution to deny responsibility for mistakes it has made, for unthinking power asserted over children as if they were interchangable parts, we all lose. As I said further in my closing argument:

"...(my clients) ask that the ... Public Schools recognize that this is not about power. It is not about money. It is about the future of one child. And if justice means anything at all—if it is to have a reality beyond abstraction, then what we decide here in the midst of a real and messy conflict matters."

Ultimately, it all comes down to this: What we do to one another matters. What we say to one another matters. How we treat one another matters. It matters in communities where we are acting as individuals, and it matters even more in institutional settings where the institutional power of what we represent can become oppressive to our brothers and sisters.

If we are honest with ourselves, we all know we make mistakes in our dealings with others. And when we do, we are obligated to make things right. To admit that we are, all of us, fallible human beings.

I think that when we insist that events like the VT shootings are about gun-control, or about surveillance, or about the evil in one individual, we are missing a critical point. And by this I do NOT mean that we do not need need to have a conversation about gun-control, or about surveillance, or about the fact that people can do evil. What I mean is that all behavior has causes--whether the behavior itself is rational or not. And if we are really honest with ourselves, we can see where a fragile mind and heart can be broken when cornered and bullied in an institution that does not care to stop it. An institution in which those with power turn a blind eye to the responsibility that power entails. And in many cases, that institution is the local public school.

Were the Virginia Tech teachers and students who were murdered in cold blood killed randomly? Yes. They were innocents who reaped the whirlwind sown by others; those who, when given power, chose to turn a blind-eye to the consequences of that power. It is wrong to start pointing fingers at the administration at VT, and blame the victims who were killed because they did not to fight back. The shooter made certain choices and is responsible for them--that is true. But it is also true that those choices were influenced by a broken mind and heart. And that mind and heart were damaged, in part, by terrible emotional pain inflicted by other children who were allowed to bully someone in a public institution that compelled his attendance. Bullied by children who were not taught what it means to be civil, to be compassionate, to be able to put themselves in the place of another person.

And in our case, we began to understand that we were seeing the same thing. A situation in which a public school refused to solve a problem with parents and a little boy by talking to them, treating their concerns as important, stopping the bullying.

In The Uncertainty Principle, a masterful episode of his PBS series, The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski takes us to Auschwitz. There he discusses the importance of the the spiritual component in our dealing with each other as human beings. He says that ultimately, we must remember when making judgements that we are fallible, that we cannot know everything with certainty. In making choices about how we deal with one another, Bronowski says, we must "touch people." And he plunges his hand into the pond--into the ashes of those who were murdered because an institution, the Nazi party, was certain of their unworthiness to live. That scene has stayed forever etched in my mind. And I wonder, can a compulsory institution--one that is given absolute power over the lives of students, one that regularly passes judgement on the worthiness of students by standardized test, one that refuses to be questioned or reformed--can such an instition ever really "touch people?"

Perhaps the spiritual shallowness of the institution is no accident of law or custom. Perhaps the lack of spiritual depth comes from the very nature of the beast. After all, we know that many of the people who make up the system, start out with the best intentions in the world. And yet, when stripped of their own spiritual nature, forced by the nature of the institution into a mold that insists that no one is responsible and that all values are relative, when acting not as individuals, but at the behest of the system, they behave without regard to the sacredness of the individual.

This is something to think more about.

Oops! I Made A Mistake

It happens now and then.

Frankie, over at Kitchen Table Learners reminded me that her son Thomas does not have AS. He is, however, twice-exceptional. That means that he is intellectually gifted and has learning difficulties.

It is late, but I did not want to let another day go by without correcting my mistake.

Frankie, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking! But this does not get you out of being nominating for the Thinking Blogger Award! See, you've made me think twice as hard today! :)

Frankie has a great post up about some ducks that are visiting her yard. Do go on over and check it out! The ducks' names are Fred and Ethel. Hmmm. They do look a bit like Fred and Ethel Mertz. Remember I love Lucy?

The Thinking Blogger Award

I have been tagged!

I have received the Thinking Blogger Award. My blog was listed on the blog Falling Like Rain as one of 5 blogs that causes readers to think.

This is a meme that has rules!

1. Link to 5 blogs that make you think.
2. Link to the original post about the Thinking Blog Award so that people can go find the exact origin of the meme. (I have linked above).
3. Optional: Display the Thinking Blog Award with a link to the post you wrote. (I am working on this).

It is always a pleasure to find out that what I write makes someone think. At Falling Like Rain, my blog was praised as follows: "This mom has a unique perspective and a writing style that always makes me think about whether or not I am living what I believe."
This is touching praise, indeed. In order to live with integrity, every person must consider this question every day of life. Writing my blog requires to constantly ask myself this question, too.

So now I will list 5 blogs that make me think. Those of you who are listed, please go to the original site (link above) and then, if you choose, follow the rules above. I am imagining a whole wonderful tree of bloggers that make us think!

Disclaimer: I am an equal-opportunity thinker. I enjoy blogs whose authors have very different perspectives that come from many different experiences. From considering the words of others who are different than me, I learn the most.

"Ben Zoma said:
'Who is wise? The person who learns from all human beings. As it is said: From all my teachers I have gotten understanding.' " Pirke Avot 4.1

Five Blogs That Make Me Think

1. Homeschooling Aspergers : Megan in Queensland Australia regularly posts very educational information about life in Australia. Her perspectives on children's safety, raising a son with AS, life "down under," and on homeschooling keep me thinking all the time.

2. Barefoot Meandering : Kathy Jo is homeschooling her kids in my old stomping grounds in Illinois. Her posts keep me laughing, crying and thinking. I am always eager to find out what new developments have happened in the Land of Lincoln. She makes me think about all the details that go into constantly improving the homeschool experience.

3. Kitchen Table Learners : Frankie is a homeschooling mother of one, a child with AS. She shares her perspective on many different aspects of homeschooling and raising a child with an ASD. Her blog brings up a myriad of different ideas and things to think about.

4. Homeschooling the Doctorate? : This was the first homeschooling blog I looked at. The name intrigued me because I am also working on my doctorate. Sarah and Stephen are both working on doctorates in theology and they homeschool one son and are expecting another child. Their posts are informative, funny, touching and wonderful! A good mix of all aspects of their lives can be found here! They make me think about the fact that although their beliefs are not mine, their commitment to living them is.

5. Woman of the Tiger Moon : Beth is homeschooling her children and working on her degree at the same time. She is raising very unique children. She blogs about her experiences and those of her children with a great deal of insight. Her blog makes me continually expand my maps of reality and consider the importance and value of each person I encounter.

It was hard to limit the blogs to five! I was helped by the fact that a number of blogs I read have already been nominated. In fact, someone nominated the Edie Neurolearning Blog just yesterday! There are several others that displayed the award already. In the interest of sharing the wealth, I have nominated other blogs.