La Casa Chica: These kids, they are a-changin'...

You have found your way to the virtual front stoop of "La Casa Chica," a fitting name for the kind of home I am wanting to create. I hope it will contribute to the growing sense of connection and belonging here in my Central-Cocoanut neighborhood, in the Newtown community of Sarasota, Florida.

La Casa Chica is "the little house," modest in size relative to the other houses on the block and in the neighborhoood.

La Casa Chica is "the enchanted house," with its 1920's Spanish eclectic architecture, its emerging tradition of front-stoop and kitchen conversation, and its resident puppy, Gus.

La Casa Chica is "the home of the beloved child," brought to life through the everyday presence of neighborkids, whose natural inclinations to be social and exuberant generate the special, neighborly spirit of the place.

La Casa Chica is a reclaiming of the legitimate role and relationship of neighbor, which is often less recognized than that of family or professional, but can be powerful and transformative nonetheless.

If Jane Addams were to drop by, I hope that she might recognize La Casa Chica as Hull House reinvented, a century later...

If Jane Jacobs were to drop by, I hope that she might recognize La Casa Chica as an effort to get beyond "the mask of pretended order" that is affecting our community, and to nurture the "real order that is struggling to exist."

If Donald Winnicott were to drop by, I hope that he might recognize La Casa Chica as a place where neighbors choose to get together "to do the things which you can do better than you can be taught to do them."

And if Timothy Leary were to drop by, I hope that he might recognize La Casa Chica as an everyday, real-world, neighborhood-scale embracing of his notion that "the universe is an intelligence test."

But mostly, I hope that my neighbors will drop by.

I am ready to be a neighbor.

Monday, January 4, 2010

These kids, they are a-changin'...

What I Learned Over Winter Vacation - Part III

It has only been four months since we were spending daily time together on the block, but how quickly our neighborkids are changing! Our neighbor-babies are now walking and talking, and new ones have arrived and are on their way.

Our puppies are full-grown dogs.

The Woo Tang has been replaced by The Jerk as the dance-of-choice.

Kids are reading and writing words they could barely sound out in the summertime.

Shared memories are becoming more interconnected too. “Remember when…” is now followed by an even richer array of recollections than several months ago. We are developing a history together, and kids are proving themselves to be natural oral historians. It feels like a neighborkid culture is emerging…

As my former supervisor and mentor Dan Siegel talks about in his book The Developing Mind, "shareable stories...determine patterns of behavior...and may influence our internal lives in the forms of dreams, imagery, sensations and states of mind (p. 62)."

Glad we've got our neighborkids helping us create new stories together - and imagine what could happen if we all allowed their perspective to influence our states of mind...

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)