Inside Outdoor Voices

Just as honesty plants seeds of integrity so too vulnerability plants seeds of honesty. My primary vocation in this my gay grandfatherly retiring age is to parent mindbody challenged adolescents of diverse colors as ecotherapeutically as possible to optimize their and our wealth of health, growing nutritional elements and moments into humanely co-operative organisms with good days more than bad. More or less like watering the flowers and ignoring the weeds, or, better yet, repurposing the weeds, redirecting their potential energy in a more nutritiously nurturing way. My kids not only are vulnerable, they know they are vulnerable, and this tends to make them exceedingly honest with themselves with me with each other about what is funny and what is tragedy. They are easy to parent in this way. Yet this same vulnerability is their greatest risk in a too often competitive, and mindless of other's special needs, world. We communicate connected to the feeling level, even while learning the ABCs, the 1 through 100 percents of good and bad numbers and proportions and balance and symmetry, the drawing of self-portraits, homes, Earth and Her Sun. Often these inside feeling voices do not feel well enough to care about the ABC's, or even the needs of those we need to love and to love us, to be as lovely with as possible. Inside feeling voices become loud and angry and hurt outside voices. I noticed this the other day when old family friends dropped by. Not quite as old as I and therefore much less retired from life's exterior competitions. When we had time to visit several times per week, we often began together checking in about how our inside voices were feeling today, happy or sad, depressed or triumphant, and usually some more richly nuanced place between. Then we would turn to our big outdoor voices. What we were working and playing on and with in our back and front and side-yards, the gardens and woodlands of our productive nutritional lives, how the pets and pests and domestic egg-layers were feeling, and why and why not. These two voices generally resonated with each other. What we were working on with Outdoor Voices said something about nutrition and health we were working on as individuals as a family with our Inside Voices, and vice versa. Only then, if there was nothing else to do, no further outdoor recreations and discernment projects, would we return to more yet less intimate and vulnerable Indoor Voices. Work and play projects in perpetual interior process. The noticing of more ornamental acquisitions like ceiling and wall and floor coverings, safer boundaries about what we could see together through all those more interior feelings and thoughts about relationships, past and future and present interactions, transactions of value and disvalue, warmth and cooler apathy. I remembered this yesterday when old friends, no longer neighbors, revisited and we began with new floor and ceiling coverings and ended with farewell. They arrive so late it is already past time to be back home to get ready for another Indoor Voices monotonous monoculturing day. Which, this morning, results in feeling blessed to be here in this time and place to listen and speak at our leisure with my vulnerable no-boundary kids, outrageously honest about their nutritional needs and wants, speaking with full volume integrity in both Inside Outdoor Voices, health meets and greets and eventually defeats pathology, through honest integrity of repurposing redirection, feeding the flowers and noticing how funny the weedy Outdoor Voices sound indoors feeling our way through the ABCs and the 1 through 100% flowering days and mean weedy nights. I'm surprised and disappointed my former neighbors didn't notice all the new fruit trees and berry bushes poppies and lilies strawberries and tomatoes onions and garlic asparagus and rhubarb, and 17 new solar panels on the roof! My kids could care less and probably never more what our old friends did and did not notice, other than their own Voices vulnerably maturing into integrity, I hope. Still, I'm glad they noticed, because the liked, the new floor and ceiling covers.