Blue Skies

Blue Skies. This seemed at first to be a strange traditional greeting between Woodcraft Folk. It got me wondering why people use this term and what it means for the people of Woodcraft? Woodcraft Folk is an educational movement for children and young people which promotes equality, cooperation and friendship. There are groups all over the world and it has been going as long as, and is as well established as the scouting movement. The deeper I delve into the origins of Woodcraft, the more I realise how much more there is to learn about this energetic movement of young people.

I find myself saying ’blue skies’ in my head a lot. Is it, I wonder, a greeting, an aspiration or an affirmation? I want to believe that blue skies means ‘may your horizons be clear and your path ahead bathed in light’. I also annoyingly find myself humming the Electric Light Orchestra song a lot more than I used to!

There’s still much to find out in my Woodcraft Folk journey. I know that the gentle, peaceful philosophy on life; the belief in cooperation, equality and openness strike a cord in successive generations and wonder why on earth I have not heard more about them. After all, the scouts and brownies are international movements of young people. They have local groups, different sections, camp outs, activity days just as Woodcraft do and Woodcraft go the extra mile to ensure that young people are not just the focus of the groups, they own the groups.

The term Blue Skies was apparently first coined by President Theodore Roosevelt who was a Patron of Woodcraft. Roosevelt defined Woodcraft as “a man making scheme with a blue sky background".

Whatever it is, 'blue skies' as a greeting fills me with optimism and perhaps that is the secret of these two simple words. Many use the phrase ‘happy days’ to express some measure of their contentment in life, but blue skies seem to me so much more appropriate.

I shall greet friends with the phrase and see whether it has the same infectious optimism for them as it does for me. Blue skies, warm sun, happiness and peace. What more could we ask of humanity?

Mum's the Word

I have two children. Neither of them likes reading. Neither of them likes writing. I love reading. I love writing. I often wonder, in the spirit of youthful rebellion, whether there is an inverse correlation.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want children who bury their heads in a book all day – nothing wrong there of course – but it just isn’t going to happen with my two. Equally, I don’t want teachers to gasp in admiration at my children’s prose, although a few words of praise and the odd smiley face sticker or oversized tick on the page would go a long way. All I want is that none of it is a chore and I just don’t know how to achieve this. Some will already be making judgements – she’s an earth mother, a pushy parent, an enlightened would-be teacher, a politically correct uber-guardian? I am none of these. I’m just the busy kind of parent with ten minutes to spare here and there, who takes a deep breath and says ‘so, we’ve got some tests coming up, fancy trying some writing’? I have tried lots of ways, most of them involving moaning or losing my temper, but sometimes, an idea rises above the gloom and works. These are three ideas that have reaped some rewards and got my ten year old writing or at the very least, understanding the writing process.

Top Tip 1. Sweets. Yes…they work every time. Not any old sweets. Sweets that look like …well to use a word that is against the law to the under eighteens, ‘things. I use Rowntrees Randoms, but there are others packets of jelly or biscuit objects on the market to try. Anything with a variety of edible everyday ‘things’ in them. I ask my children to pick out four sweets. We line them up, shuffle them around, squish them into the table whilst we refrain from eating them and then see if we can build a basic story. Three objects to match a beginning, a middle and an end (and the fourth sweet to eat whilst we are contemplating). A reasonable story can be rustled up in just a few minutes and I have never once had any opposition to sitting down and experimenting many times over with this method! The beauty of this instant story crafting is that children realise just how easy it is to build a basic plot. Roald Dahl apparently used to do the same thing with objects on his mantelpiece. It’s the same thing, only my objects are just portable and edible!

Top Tip 2. When writing a story seems like an uphill struggle, or putting together even a basic a sentence interferes with the pressing tasks of playing in the fast and furious manner of a ten year old, then I have the perfect solution. Get rid of the paper. Let’s face it, it’s hard work putting your thoughts together even when you are an adult. There’s so much to think about – the story, the characters, the spelling, the structure, the pace, the flow – and the shorter the story, the harder it all is. But from my days teaching young adults who had been excluded from school, the last thing they were, was lost for words. They had opinions on everything. They had memories and experiences to share. All the poetry, all the emotion, all the pace and structure is right there within a child, but sometimes they just can’t translate that onto the page. If they are struggling, I recommend just taking the flat, empty, white void out of the equation. Use the oldest form of storytelling known to man – the spoken word. Every time you go on a journey, ask your children to try out their descriptions – the sky, the people in the next car, the sounds, the smells. Then you can build upon that; what happened to that car full of people who had beach towels and rubber rings peeking out of the back seat when they arrived at the beach? You can do it anywhere, there is no record of their attempts on paper to embarrass them and car journeys are boring anyway. It need only be a few sentences here and there, but if you can get into the habit of exploring language with your children it helps them to see how their thoughts and spoken language might translate onto the page.

Top Tip 3. I found the purchase of a ‘special book’ very helpful. I bought a leather bound book with the contorted head of a bearded man on the front. My son chose it. It was very mysterious he said, looked a bit like a wizard he said and if anything is going to inspire a ten year old, it’s a wizard! You have to be careful though. Make it too special and it becomes a barrier. ‘My writing isn’t good enough’, “I can’t write neatly enough’, ‘I might spoil the pages’ that sort of excuse. So if it becomes an ideas book, a place where anything can be jotted down – diary thoughts, funny expressions, jokes, then writing becomes living and fun. My son liked the idea of writing a diary (for a while anyway) and we spoke about good diary writing and bad. Feelings, good. Today I ate … bad. In years to come he won’t want to know what he had for breakfast on a given day (well he might I suppose, who am I to say?) but he is much more likely to be interested in what sort of boy he was and how he felt about the world, events and people around him.

So if there are mothers out there like me, who just want a bit of respite from that sinking feeling whenever you suggest a bit of work, then take heart and perhaps these few ideas might help you out a little. Good luck and believe me, there is inspiration in even the most mundane of lives – I should know!

Happiness

Here’s a little fable about happiness in dedication to an old friend.

Once upon a time there were two bears, called Big Chief and Curly. What wonderful bears they were - so full of life and adventure. It was right that two such wonderful bears should fall in love.

Their love kept them side by side, hand in hand for many years, sharing so many highs, travelling an exciting journey together. Then one day Curly had to stop travelling. She was heavy with a bear cub and needed to provide a safe home for it, a place for the future where she could teach it to become a strong, independent, decent young bear. Whilst she paused on her journey and shared her love between father and child, Big Chief continued his journey alone, travelling back here and there to admire his fine family. He began to relish travelling far more than he did standing still, since he met fresh faces every day, strange and thrilling people who swelled his head with compliments about what a truly wonderful bear he was.

Although Curly made a cosy home and filled it with love, eventually Big Chief began to see going home as a chore. Curly was different now, he mumbled. Life was boring, he complained, even though neither was true. It was only that in his mind, nothing could match his exciting world and all he craved was more excitement. As for Curly bear – well he forgot to show her how much he loved her. Then he forgot to love her and then he just wanted to forget. One day, when it all became too much, he slunk away, leaving Curly not only having to deal with her heartbreak, but also with everything that they had spent their lives building together. He waited for her to break. He held his breath in anticipation of her anger, but all that came was a gentle ‘why’? What could he say to explain his actions? How could he justify the unbearably huge decision that he had made. “I want to be happy” he said finally, trying to find the right words to sum up his emotions.

Curly held her despair at bay. She had to understand. She had to know what this meant. Where had such deep unhappiness come from and why on earth had he not let her know? She would not let go of her love for Big Chief until she got to the bottom of it. In an effort to feel the pulse of what other bears felt, she asked for their advice. Big Chief has simply lost his way, they advised. ‘He will come to his senses’, they said reassuringly. ‘He will be the biggest fool around if he lets you go’. They all seemed so certain that he would change his mind. ‘What is happiness anyway?’ they all said, ‘we certainly don’t know’. But that was not good enough for Curly. Not by a long way. She had been happy. Why had he not? They had been so strong - what could have made him so weak? Happiness was worth everything. Big Chief was right in that one respect and she wanted them both to be happy and she wanted them to find that feeling together. He had a right to happiness. After all, bears only had one life and it was important to lead it well. But did her happiness not count? How could he have forgotten about her happiness? How could the bear that had shared so much with her, more than most bears would ever experience, treat her so?

Meanwhile Big Chief went off and did lots of things to keep himself busy. He travelled, he laughed with some more friends, he travelled a bit more, he searched for people, places, events, jokes, silly things to make him laugh. Curly was hurt to see him smiling so much, but she could see that deep inside, he was still not happy, not by a long way.

In time Curly came to see that she was not the real cause of Big Chief’s unhappiness. It came from within him. He had shut himself off from feeling and experiencing love and happiness. He thought that there were more important things in life than these two simple and honest emotions. Sadly, his swollen head and swollen pride meant that having chosen a path in life without Curly, he could not turn back, he would not turn back. He felt that he was no longer capable of filling the void inside. He believed that people would judge him. He did not realise that side by side with Curly again and with the help of the very people who he thought would judge him, he could fill the void a thousand times over.

When he finally settled into life without Curly, he looked out of his window one day at the empty city outside and felt a feeling he had not felt before. Devastating loneliness. He felt emotionally spent. He ached for Curly and the cubs. Instead of telling them how he felt, he tried to carry on. He decided that he needed some colour in his life, so he planted a flower in his window box and watered it every day. It grew strong and bloomed and looked beautiful, filling him with joy as it flourished. However, his itchy travellers feet still itched and when he felt the pull of new people and new surroundings, he would go off for a while and leave the flower to fend for itself. Without his tenderness and his daily attention, the flower withered. Each time he returned he would water it guiltily and try to revive it. For a while it would struggle to recover. It would gather any strength it had left to show him its beauty. However, it grew a little weaker each time Big Chief went on a trip and then after a particularly long excursion, Big Chief returned and found his flower dead. The city looked cold and lifeless without its bright blooms to cheer him. He missed its floral scent. He missed the joy it brought to his cold life. As he stroked the flower’s dry stem, it crumbled in his hand. All the pieces blew away in the chill wind and Big Chief watched them swirl away from him. In that very second he realised that it was taking the last ashes of his happiness with it. The flower had taught him something so valuable, he wanted to shout it on the wind for everyone to hear. He had no love or happiness left in his life, because he had put none in. Only love begets love. With great sorrow he finally realised, now that it was too late, that you really and truly do reap what you sow.