For a long time now I've been working up my courage to write a book about unschooling based on my Handmade Life theory: A Handmade Life Is Love Manifest. And while the idea that us homeschoolers are raising our children, each one individually and by hand is a common theme in the homeschool community, looking deeply into what it means to own our parenting and lifestyle choices at the level of inner landscape is not a book I've read yet. I think its one I would like to write, based on the profound shift in perspective that 5 years of radical unschooling has afforded me. But I am scared to cross over from "blogger" to "writer." And maybe I won't. But I am thinking about it. In some ways, looking over the 12 or so posts I have already written on this theme, I think the book may kind of just be sitting there. What is it waiting for? Maybe its just waiting for my confidence, in myself and my ideas, to rise. Do I have anything important to offer? Does my experience count? Could these ideas help another family get farther down the road?

Last night I did a google search on this theme. I found an intriguing book called, "A Handmade Life" -by William Coperthwaite I'd very much like to read. Apparently he made a yurt for his family to live and homeschool in. Hard to get more handmade than that. In fact, it puts me in mind of my younger sister and the life she and her husband live. These are people who have knocked together stones to make REAL arrowheads, who have hunted with them and used them to scrape hides. (Ya know how you scrape the hide right before you smear brains all over it?) And there is Poppins who has started thinking about what a handmade life means to her. Clearly, its a theme these days. And I'm glad. Our society needs to return focus to our hands: from the war that comes from our non-voting hands and the pollution generated by choices our hands enact everyday, to the solutions that are available as potential in our hands. Also the children and their hands, what we teach them, how we teach them, yes, its a powerful theme.