How are you changing?

Oct 27, 2022 | Family Ministry

Our congregational theme for the month of November is “Change”. How appropriate for us at this time in our church history! Not only are we in search for a new settled minister, we have really been forced to embrace change as we’ve spent the last few years navigating a waxing and waning pandemic. This has meant that we have had to be ready for plans to change at a moment’s notice and to pivot to plan B (or sometimes plan C etc.) It also means that we have had to spend a lot of time out of our comfort zone and learn to be more flexible with each other. How is change showing up in your family? Explore that question with these family friendly activities from Soulful Home!

Discussion Questions

  1. How have you changed in the past year? What can you do now that you couldn’t before? And what did you used to do that you now don’t? 
  2. What’s your favorite part of the season that you’re in right now? Are you looking forward to the next change of seasons?
  3. What part of growing up do you feel happy about? And what part makes you sad?
  4. What change have you always wanted to make to your own personality? What stops you from trying it?
  5. When was the moment that you went from feeling like a little kid, to feeling like a big kid?
  6. What’s something you notice that has changed around your neighborhood lately?
  7. If you could make one change to your neighborhood, what would it be?
  8. Can holding onto a grudge or deep anger change you? Can you think of one you might be ready to let go of?
  9. Who is the most likely in the family to wear a favorite shirt for as long as possible without changing clothes? And who goes through the most outfits in a day?
  10. How does being a caretaker of animals change you? (This might be a pet, or it might mean simply moving worms off the sidewalk, planting flowers for pollinating insects, etc.)
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Changing Dots into Art

Depending on where you live, early November may be the perfect outdoor weather, finally reliably cooled off from summer’s scorch, or you may have had a few good snows already and now make most of your fun indoors. So this month we have two options for turning dots into art.

One is turning a chalk-dot grid into beautiful, beckoning symmetry, inspired by the Indian folk art form, Rangoli.

And the other is a freeform connect-the-dots using the same grid idea, but with markers or paint sticks on big paper. 

“Change the view.”

While many of us know the value of “walking a mile in another’s shoes” to gain empathy for the other, and thus, more effectively embody love in action, we seldom mention how liberating this practice can be for us, too. So many of our biases are unconscious. Almost all of our first, knee-jerk responses are old scripts that we’ve inherited or thoughtlessly picked up along the way. How we see things at first glance usually tells more about us than about those we’re observing. 

 This month’s mantra aims to shed light on a different side of a situation.

Your child neglects to turn off the lights as they leave rooms in your home, and you snap at them. Internally, you: “Change the view.” What can I do to help them remember to turn off lights, so we save electricity? Or I wonder how much electricity is really wasted by their forgetfulness; maybe not that much. Or, they will be with me, in my care, for so short a time; turning off the lights behind them reminds me that this season of me being needed to guide and help them is fleeting. 

This mantra works best on one’s self. It’s most often going to be unhelpful if offered as advice, though there might be casual, calm conversations that are reflective in tone in which you might share this technique with a family member, as an option. 

Growing and Changing: Sandra Cisneros’ “Eleven”

Sandra Cisneros’ 1991 story, which describes a deeply memorable experience the author had as an elementary school student, became a mainstay in schools across North America throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. However, it has a very different feel when read at home, in the context of one’s family. Use this telling together as an opportunity to talk about the big changes that come with growing up.

Hear the author herself read the story here, and for a text version, here.

Stretching the Story:

  • What is something hard about growing up? What is something terrific about it?
  • If the main character in the story, Rachel, were your friend, and you saw these events happening, how would you feel? What might you say or do, in the moment or afterward?
  • Parents and guardians, tell about a time that you felt your younger self coming up to the surface, as Cisneros did when her teacher forced her to put the sweater on. What did that experience feel like to you at the time? How do you think about it now?

Garden Spot with Kate Jerome-Leave Your Leaves

Oct 27, 2022 | Scoop

The leaves are finally starting to fall, which means that wonderful activity, leaf pick-up, is here. Instead of looking at them as a nuisance, why not think of them as gold for the garden? I’m going to try to convince you to change leaf pick-up into “leaf recovery.”

It means a mind shift from wanting everything to look pristine to a less tidy appearance. Why is it that when we see leaves blanketing a bed instead of commercially shredded mulch, it looks messy to us? Both are organic matter, and the leaves are actually much more colorful than shredded bark.

The leaves that turn lovely hues and then drop are nature’s source for replenishing the soil beneath trees and shrubs. A plant takes up massive amounts of nutrients through its roots as it grows to use in food production for its healthy leaves. When the plant sheds its leaves, those nutrients are released back into the soil as the leaves decay. These nutrients are waiting to be used by the plant next season to produce leaves, stems and fruits.

So, taking away the leaves simply takes away nutrients. We can add nutrients by fertilizing, of course, but for the most part, synthetic fertilizers do nothing for the soil, and certainly make a dent in the wallet.

So, can you simply leave them where they fall? And exactly how do you use these leaves that are so plentiful?

For the leaves covering your grass, think of the prairie’s cycle. Prairies don’t usually have trees, so there are few leaves. The organic matter from a prairie cycle comes from the grass itself. So, it is a good idea to clean up the leaves on your grass in order to keep the grass healthy and free from disease.

Simply mow the grass and leaves together and blow it all in your landscape beds. This is not a hard job, but may take some creative driving or pushing to round them up into beds. If your mower is a mulcher, take out the mulching chute cover so you can blow and direct the leaves as you would into a bagger. If you don’t have that capacity, you can simply mow over them a couple of times and they will be ground finely enough to leave in place.

As for landscape beds, take a walk in the woods and you will see blankets of leaves covering the ground beneath trees. This cycle of leaf fall and decay maintains the soil health and this, in turn, allows the trees to grow and remain healthy. We can easily duplicate that cycle by simply not taking the leaves away.

Keep in mind that native bees nest in the ground, and bumblebees burrow into leaf litter to spend the winter. Leaf litter also protects countless types of butterfly pupa such as black swallowtails and fritillaries.

I have a lot of leaves, so after I fill my beds, I scoop all the extra into a pile at the back of my property and let them sit there over winter. Next spring I can dig into the bottom of the pile for some of the most beautiful shredded mulch to go directly on my vegetable garden instead of straw.

After a couple of years, my leaf pile will be reduced by half and will be composted beautifully for use all over the landscape. The British have been doing this for years – they are famous for their leaf “mould” which they use in the garden and even in containers. Best of all, it’s free!