Criss Cross Applesauce

Before I started this foundation, I ran a home nursery school called Brooklyn Country Day. It was the most incredible experience in precisely none of the ways I first imagined it would be.

I’m an epistemology nerd by trade; in graduate school, I studied how to help children ask good questions in order to form their understanding of the world. Naturally, then, my favorite part about the work was to honor and grow the questions that children asked me. There were so many! I rarely answered them. I like to think it drove them a little crazy, and I hope maybe if they remember someday, they’ll understand why.

The school was many things, and it was also purposefully not many other things. One of the key features of my program was that I never promised anything in particular would be taught or mastered. I only promised exploration, uncertainty, and wonder. For this reason, many parent applicants found my program enchanting but ultimately not what they were seeking. I was OK with that.

Flexibility 101: staying open to the process. We yanked an allium out of the garden to see how it would work as a paintbrush.

One of the clearest memories I carry from the five-year journey was setting up a cutesy pumpkin guts project around Halloween. Wheeling the heavy pumpkins home and bringing them inside. Sawing open the tops. Laying everything out - an “invitation to play”. I set out tiny hammers made especially for children and golf tees so that we could tap the tees into the pumpkins, tools for guts squishing… fresh white paper underneath. The morning of the activity, one of the children came and sat down with some urgency next to one of our teachers. Didn’t even notice the pumpkins or even the hammers. He really, really wanted to talk about figuring out how to get his invention (an electric tomato plant) to grow. He wanted to share his ideas, and he wanted to share them right at that moment. Calculator in hand, urgency in his little eyebrows. The energy in his quest spread throughout the group. As I remember it, we never really got to the pumpkins that week - at least not in the way I was envisioning.

Then there was the time that I felt so proud of myself for setting up an indoor car wash on a particularly cold day. The children looked blankly at me as I explained that we could send the cars wheeling down into the bucket to get scrubbed! They were less than enthused. Thinking on my feet and studying their expressions, I realized that there wasn’t anything particularly dirty about the cars. We needed to re-think the entire premise. We needed a dirty raceway.

Little hands dove right in. One of our most popular activities of all time. Magic.

The premise is the most important part; it deserves equal time and effort. Children know this.

I learned more about flexibility and abandon and true creation than I did about anything else as a teacher of young children, and it’s serving me well in these formative diaper bank moments. As a believer in good questions, I see open frontier in this diaper project- I take increasing comfort and excitement in my recognition that it won’t go at all the way I am imagining it will. I see how framing the problems without enough context and zeroing in on one-way solutions can befall a project. To me, creativity isn’t something you can find on Pinterest, nor is it a skill. It’s an awareness- an honest and brave willingness to face the unbelievable (often uncomfortable) reality of what’s actually available.

Calvin, Fall 2014. I was just as much a student of his wonder as he was mine.

Children are amazing because they haven’t accepted or internalized the constraints of what the world tells them must be so. To hear their questions and their thoughts is to really live a miracle. The best way to lead a project is to do so like a child might- ego and expectations on the sidelines, openness the primary tool. Wisdom is understanding that.

Another Brooklyn Country Day - June 29, 2015 - “International Mud Day”.

The Brooklyn Diaper Project is in a pretty cool phase - pieces have begun to jam themselves to a halting refusal for forward motion in some ways, which has pried open the doors for new paths forward. It’s a bit like “process art”: as you mold something, it takes shape in different ways depending on where you apply pressure- you have to just hold the dough and not think too much about what you need it to be.

You have to trust the process. You throw some fairy dust and some frustration at it. Throw in the towel and then pick it up again, and continue to show up. You just have to believe sometimes. 

Watercolor, sand, shaving cream. Unintentional, accidental, and not the end result. Celebrating it along the way.

This project has experienced first hand, in the past few months, our severed Postal Service and the crushing disaster of Amazon. Out of our “stuckness” in how we thought this would all go, we’re creating something- sitting quietly with the brush, not asking ourselves ‘what it is’ but simply watching what’s unfolding with endless questioning and imagination.

Remembering to always search beyond the toolbox of possibility, enticing and complete as it may seem.