A blog for thinking mothers about the things mothers think about...food, health, and educating our children...and philosophy, art, and other things what matter.
A blog by Kristin Prugh about how dwelling poetically just might be the answer to all of the world's problems.
A blog by Kristin Prugh about how dwelling poetically might be the answer to all of the world's problems.
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ABOUT THE BLOG
I’ve met a lot of thinking mothers along the way, mothers who question and search after true ways to raise their children and to flourish as a family.
I believe that thinking mothers are cultivating the ground of a new culture, a natural culture, a way of dwelling poetically on the earth.
They’re the medicine women. They’re the healers. They’re the thinkers living their thoughts in the forms of daily life they envision for their families.
On this blog, I’m going to share my thoughts on a number of topics that have affected my life as a mother: from food, health, education, money, and technology, to philosophy, poetry, and film to traveling as a family and raising teenagers.
There’s nothing prescriptive here. I’m not going to tell you how to live, how to eat, or how to raise your children. I’m only going to share my thoughts along the way, the thinking that has shaped my life as a mother.
In all of my searching, throughout all of my struggles as a wife, mother, poet, and philosopher, I have benefited from the ideas, research, and encouragement of thinking mothers who have helped me to believe in the creative power of love and intellect working together to make a home for us, in the world and in the life of the mind. This blog is dedicated, with gratitude, to them.
ABOUT THE BLOG
“Poets are dreamers of the true.” —Aristotle
I’m a Catholic convert, poet, mother and thinker with dreadlocks, a Master’s degree in philosophy, an artist-thinker-husband and four artistic children who have all traveled with me in my search after poetic dwelling. We have lived in one farmhouse, two city apartments, two suburban houses, two sailboats, two minivans, two units of graduate student housing and in more tents and hotel rooms than I could count searching after an answer to this question: What sort of life shall we live so as to feel poetry?
This search has taken us from Florida to Alaska and to many places between, and through all of these various life experiments, successes and failures, one thing has remained constant: people ask us questions. They want to hear a story about, or expect an account of, how or why we live the way we do and the reason we don’t live in the usual ways, if you know what I mean, Pooh…
Everywhere we go we receive questioning looks, get stopped by people in stores, in parks, in churches and in the streets who ask about our family and want to know why we’re piling out of our row dinghy on a busy public dock or why we’re piling out of our clown-car-minivan which is also clearly our house in a campground or rest area or why we’re living in a tent in a state forest or why or how we homeschool our children in such small spaces always on the move or why we can’t just settle down like everyone else, get a career, buy a house, and send our children to school.
The house is the foundation of the American dream. But I have a different dream, a dream of a society in which the ethics of care overcomes the economy of self interest that has come to define the American way; a dream in which families live and work together, sharing their spaces and their resources and their time; a dream in which the elderly are rescued from their nursing homes and children from their daycares and schools so that they can dwell together, the young learning from the wisdom of the old; a dream in which workers are rescued from their factories and offices and cubicles so that they can support with dignity and grace their family members and friends, being together with and not always separated from the loved ones in their care; a dream in which the consumer frenzy begins to abate and the empty indifferent things that generate and perpetuate this frenzy begin to fall away in favor of handmade things animated by the human spirit in living harmony with nature; a dream in which the land is restored to itself and human beings again move freely on this earth; a dream in which Kindness, The Pure, heals divisions between family members, between religions, between political factions, between nations, and—as the foundation of all of this healing—between human beings and creation.
It’s a dream that really could become reality, because it is a dream that flows out of the heart of the heart of reality, the heart which beats in every vein of creation and of the creatures who dwell here, giving life.
