This weekend we attended our last NBOG event. NBOG or Nature Based Ongoing Group, is a small community of home-schoolers and their families who strive to teach their children awareness and respect for the interdependence and interconnection of all life. In addition to being a wonderful community for Ruby NBOG has provided us with an amazing group of likeminded parents. Saying goodbye was much harder than any of us expected.
NBOG meant something different to each of us. Ruby loved playing with her friends, and being in the redwood forest every week. She loved her teacher Jody who lead the youngest group with love, compassion, and patience. Victoria enjoyed comparing notes with fellow home-schoolers and feeling the support and strength of parents that share a common experience. I loved watching Ruby’s emotional, social, and musical vocabulary develop. Miles, loved digging in the dirt at Chimonkey Land and complaining about singing circle.
As we prepare to push off for distant shores, I suppose we should get used to saying goodbye to people and communities that have given us so much. I suppose we should even get good at it, but I’m not prepared to do that. As I digest what yesterday’s goodbyes mean, I think that the discomfort, loss and sadness of saying goodbye provide the necessary contrast that helps resolve the joy, beauty and sacredness of those experiences. So if you are one of the many people that we have to say goodbye to over the next few months, please don’t be surprised if we are awkward, weepy, inarticulate, or seemingly distant, we are just processing.
1 comment
Comment by Catalina Ventura via Facebook
Catalina Ventura via Facebook May 23, 2011 at 3:43 pm
beautiful, touching, sad, hopeful. I love you all!
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