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06/14/2022

The Wild, Messy Work of Love and Care

Shoshin wasuru bekarazu / Never forget the beginner’s spirit.
Japanese proverb

"Experiences of love and touch animate children’s everyday life…We can explain love and describe how best to provide it, but love unfolds beyond the delineations between theoretical perspectives and concepts. Love grows wild — it becomes in relations, on its own irreducible terms. Like a dandelion, despite our best intentions to shape and mold the landscape, it grows up ‘between the cracks,’" writes Teresa K. Aslanian in the International Journal of Early Years Education.

In Illuminating Care, Carol Garboden Murray embraces, with a joyful seriousness, the complex world of early care and education as so much more than tasks or timelines:

"When we slip into the illusion that it is our job to fix the other, we lose our perspective on care and education. As practitioners of human development, we remind ourselves that we are not technicians. Unlike technicians, who can prescribe and predict outcomes as part of a task to repair and fix machines, we understand that human growth is organic, individual, messy and surprising. With care and education, we have to walk in the dark at times, we have to be open to confusion as well as delightful discovery."


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