Ellen Haas's Page

Evening rain patters on the hexagonal roof of the Ananda Center and drips down the panes of the clerestory windows where baby swallows were begging for breakfast at 6 this morning during yoga. Below, warm and happy on the soft carpet are 42 of us, gathered from many countries around Joseph Cornell’s 30th anniversary of the publication of Sharing Nature with Children. Joseph has been playing games with us all day under the inland California sun in meadows full of flowers, and we are playfu… Continue

This Sunday I will fly down to sunny Nevada City in inland California to spend a week along with 45 international leaders of Joseph Cornell's Sharing Nature approach, at the Ananda retreat center. I'll be blogging daily to share the magic.
Joseph Cornell is the author of two powerful little books, Sharing the Joy of Nature, and Sharing Nature with Children. These books shaped my approach to playing with my own child twenty years ago. When Evan and I were first working on Coyote's Guide, we atten… Continue

Let's talk about "what we're really teaching" when we are "Coyote Mentoring."

Jon, Evan and I are in the midst of a debate, as we edit Coyote's Guide for a second edition. They want to "purge" the word "teach" from the book, and I want to keep it. They say we're talking about a whole different approach to education than traditional teaching, with its connotation of standing in front of a classroom and pouring information into obedient ears. I say, "But of course. And let's call this whole diffe… Continue

3.14 Pi Day
Fear and Play

I’ve got some twisted attitudes. I think kids should run and fall, talk to strangers, get lost, be scared, suffer consequences and so grow stronger, more vital. Too bad if they get injured and traumatized; they’ll heal -- and bear scars that tell good stories. My senior yearbook quote was “Live fast, die young, and have a good looking corpse.” At least I’d rather stand in the sun and risk cancer than live covered in sunscreen in the shade, depressed from low Vitamin D.… Continue

Optimism -- by Jane Hirshfield, in Given Sugar, Given Salt

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pllow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape,
but the sinuous tenacity of a tree:
finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another.
A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs --
all this resinous, unretractable earth.