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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.

The place where we all want to be met.

An autistic person is a person that is like a unique confection: challenging at first, but worth the effort.

More than worth the effort.

back to school

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What we should be asking of our administrators and educators as our children return to school:

  • Being that the human species is a highly cooperative species, and being that the skill of cooperation takes practice to acquire, what models of cooperation will my child experience in this environment, and what opportunities to cooperate will be offered to meet the need of my child to learn cooperation?
  • Being that skill in any environment depends on impulses finely tuned to respond to the needs of that environment, and being that tuning our impulses takes careful practice and loving attention, what kinds of loving attention will be applied to tuning the impulses of my child to respond to needs within the environment they’re entering?
  • Being that children are instinctively inspired to apply their impulses in a learning environment, and being that restraint of impulses requires a certain cognitive and physical load, which the body and mind take on as a posture, what measures have been taken to ensure that attention is given to applying restraint in selective ways, and to giving attention to returning my child to their natural impulsive state once restraints are removed?
  • Being that the human species has a varied and rich distribution of sensory, cognitive, and behavioral expression, even within families, and these expressions are complementary, what is being done in these learning environments to acknowledge, allow, and encourage people with different sensory, cognitive, and behavioral expressions styles and allow them to engage with the world in the ways that make sense to them?
  • Being that the adult world is highly specialized and highly cooperative, what opportunities will my child to inhabit different roles, to see which is the best fit for their particular gifts, and so better meet the challenges the adult world will soon offer them?

the care economy

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give

The care economy is an emerging model for supporting people, things, and processes we’d like to see more of in the world. It is about recognizing the things in our experience that bring us joy, that give us a [wow] or a [yes], and responding to these moments in a supportive way. It’s actually just, well, practicing care, and that’s not new at all. But the language of commerce is transactional, rather than responsive.

Read more

note to parents:

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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 your child is growing up without grandparents, give someone permission to be their grandparents. Maybe the person you’ll recognize and give permission to is you. Permission granted.

đź’Ś

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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

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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.
It’s actually what keeps us young.

But in trying to avoid the feeling of the brain creating new pathways, we often offload this cognitive load onto the person we struggle to understand.
And the person we are struggling to understand often wants nothing more than to connect with us, and is trying their best, and will process the result of being told they’re difficult until it’s fully processed. This can take multiple lifetimes.

In offloading this processing, realize that we are moving ourselves away from the enlightenment we seek.
Enlightenment requires a certain cognitive load.

But if we need a break, advocate for ourselves and take a break. But don’t possibly break the self we’re struggling to understand by offloading our cognitive load to another part of ourself to process by telling ourself we’re difficult.

Don’t offload our cognitive load.
Give it a big ol’ hug.

may all beings recognize our true nature
every day is neurodiversity awareness day

How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)

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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).

How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.  
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height  
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight  
For the ends of being and ideal grace.  
I love thee to the level of every day's  
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.  
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.  
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.  
I love thee with the passion put to use  
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.  
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose  
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,  
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,  
I shall but love thee better after death.

may all beings recognize their true nature
every day is neurodiversity awareness day

sonnet #3

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it’s not in belief that faith succeeds, but in being
moved by beings one sees are being moved
by faithful arcs: the sun and moon are proved
faithful in their arcs. are we agreeing?

who is moving in these faithful arcs?
whose business is in preparing to meet the moon?
who is leaving breakfast far too soon,
to move some dollars to some oligarchs?

being moved by faith, one moves more slowly;
responds more quickly to the moment’s need–
without a thought of whether the need is holy,
or whether one is doing a holy deed.

faith’s beyond belief: and being wholly
present frees the faithful to succeed.

🌖🌕🌔

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on viewing the full moon, i see three moons.

should i attune myself so that I see a single moon, and continue seeing one moon?

or is my gift to see three moons, and continue seeing a multiplicity of moons?

or is my gift the gift of inner blindness, that doesn’t see a thing, but instead describes it?

calm yourself, child. the busy world is too busy to calm you.

let whatever moon, or multiplicity of moons that might appear, appear, and let them calm you. let the rhythm of the moon appear, and in appearing, calm you.

appearances are just appearances: one two three, coming and going.

calm yourself in the rhythms of coming and going.

favor the coming and going of the moon-or-moons over the rhythms of the busy world.

whether one or three, the moon is calm, and calling for you.

calm yourself, child. the world’s too busy to do it for you.

calm yourself, child, in whatever rhythms you entrain to.

what we’re working with

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We’re living in a world where we’re all witnessing the same symphony, with all of its nuances and variations and development of themes and variations of timbre and tone and iterations of rhythm and rhyming ends of lines,

and some of us are only hearing the pitch and timbre and tone and rhythm range of the violins,

and some of us are tuned into different specific frequency ranges, and timbral ranges, and rhythm changes, and tonal shifts and spectral bumps and thumps and squeaks and squawks and beeps and thunks,

and some of us are hearing the full spectrum of sound, and the spaces between the sounds (the spaces between are not just beautiful–they contain the beauty) and timbres and pitches and rhythms and iterations of rhythms,

and when we gather, after the symphony, and describe our experiences, some of us are being told that the nuances we heard don’t exist, and that we’re weird for hearing them.

Imagine, if you can imagine, (or at least make friends with someone who imagines, if you can’t imagine), being told that hearing basses and oboes and piccolos and triangles and tympani and glockenspiels and bassoons and trumpets and trombones is weird (to be fair, glockenspiels is a weird word, if English is your only language and you can’t hear the music in it).

That’s what people “on the spectrum” are up against. We’re weird for hearing the whole symphony, or a specific part of the symphonic fabric, and not just the violins, and trying to describe our wonderful spectral experiences to our peers, when we gather, after witnessing the symphony.

And sometimes we just give up. Or selectively give up. Because trying and trying is trying on our ability to describe, so we may appear to have a disability. I’ll tell you: it’s not a disability to witness the symphony. It’s a disability to get our experience across to those who are acculturated to violins.

Something weird’s going on, indeed–I’ll give you that.

Imagine, if you can imagine (or make friends with someone who imagines if you can’t imagine) a world where our experience of the symphony is better together, when we combine our described experiences, rather than excluding ones that are different from our own by calling them weird or saying they don’t exist at all.

Or maybe one wants to live in a world of violins…

As a person who plays both bass and piccolo, I shudder to think of it. It sounds like a violin world, indeed.