i don’t know
if it’s funny
or sad
that people can read
Month: August 2025
everything changes
My hut has a dirt floor, basically,
(as I stopped running
the vacuum
at some point in recent time).
Role Development in Children
A couple of principles I see play out in my environments that connect my experience with my learning are verbal play and large motor play. We learn, in early childhood development circles, the importance of babble–emergent non-structured sound production, to a child’s language and musical development. Children need to have the space to try out…
🍬
An autistic person is a person that is like a unique confection,
When placed on the tongue, it elicits a strong response to some flavor that you might be averse to,
But as that initial response dissipates, underneath there is a curious combination of flavors that you hadn’t considered before, and you’re not so sure how you feel about,
And if you continue to feel about it, all the flavors dissolve into the honey of the center. The deepest delicatest honiest of honey.
back to school
What we should be asking of our administrators and educators as our children return to school:
note to parents:
there are lots of things to recognize in the busy world, and as we age, it’s natural that we’ll recognize more things. It’s just the way of things. Not everyone remembers this.
But if you grew up with grandparents, who nurtured you the way grandparents do, by making space for you to just be who you are, by being less busy, because they recognize themselves in you, you’ll recognize that if your children don’t grow up with grandparents, maybe it’s a good idea to nurture them a little more like grandparents do, by making space for them to be just who they are, and a little less like parents do, busy making sure that every detail’s taken care of, and managing their schedules, schedules that manage to reign in all their impulses, their beautiful human impulses to respond to their world in strange and beautiful ways.
Grandparents recognize strange and beautiful things and ways, simply because they’ve had time to recognize things and ways, and recognize themselves in things and ways, and make space for them. They’ve resolved something that allows them to see beauty in the strangest ways and strangeness in the most beautiful things.
They recognize themselves in you (remember, they were parents too).
💌
If you get a funny email, that was sent at 12:35am, from someone you recently had a conversation with, and nurtured with your smile, it’s likely they’re autistic, and for the few moments of your conversation, they believed that you were the best of friends, because you listened to their words, and words are how they feel, and you made that person feel special, for a moment, and in gratitude, they’re trying to nurture you, in the ways that autistic languagers do. They probably believe it’s what they’re supposed to do. Be gentle with them. Maybe humor them a little. They haven’t always been met with the kind of nurturing you made space for. If you are able to slow down enough, you might be able to hear, through the way the rhythms and rhymes flow out, how they are feeling, if you’re open to feeling how other people feel. If you aren’t able to slow down enough, it’s good to slow down. Enough. Thanks for listening.
enlightenment requires a certain cognitive load
Treat the difficult people among us gently.
Every day, they are processing our projections.
They are not trying to be difficult–they are just working with the operating system they were born with.
Making peace with the world involves a certain cognitive load, as the brain struggles to create new pathways to connect with and resolve reality.
continue reading enlightenment requires a certain cognitive load
How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
In learning about my sensory processing world (which should be uncontroversial, and just a normal part of getting old–I’m almost 60, and I feel like I’m just getting started), I’m learning that ‘spacial thinking’ is just not an accepted part of everyone’s operating system or language. In recognizing aphantasia (inner blindness to visual memory) as part of my sensory punchcard of blindnesses that open other windows, I’ve also recognized that I have a deep memory and skill information stored in my bodyandmind spatially. I can’t visualize my mother’s face, but I can imagine myself sitting in the skating rink in Klamath Falls OR in 1978 and point to all of the features there, relative to my position. I can imagine myself in my mother’s apartment and point to all of the rooms and some of the things (not all of the things: there are a lot of things in my mother’s apartment). I can’t see them, but I can point to them, spatially.
So anyway, this is just a quick note to say that some of us think spatially, and try to describe the world that we see spatially, and that in doing what is perfectly normal for me, some folks experience a cognitive load when conversing with or reading me. And some of these folks experience this cognitive load as “ryk being difficult.”
Pause for a moment, and imagine a whole lifetime of being told that you’re difficult, just because you’re trying to work with the operating system you’ve been given. And then consider giving a difficult person a big ol’ hug. I could use a big ol’ hug a lot of the time that I’m being asked to filter my experience through someone else’s operating system. It’s a whole process. Hugs all around.
Anyway, it’s notable and refreshing to be affirmed by examples of spatial thinking from history. Please give someone a hug, and enjoy the depth and breadth and height of this example of spatial thinking (or spatial feeling, actually, if thinking and feeling are different for you–they’re not for me).
continue reading How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)