Our children are, in the words of Kahlil Gibran, the gift of Life's longing for Itself. They run toward Life, arms open, and Life loves Itself through their small bodies. Pressing themselves into the sand, sifting dirt, watching an inchworm measure a branch, reaching toward the black cat, who evades, then looks at them through inscrutable green eyes...it is their biological imperative to reach toward Life, and we, their caregivers, must structure the way in which Life reaches back, the way they are touched in return. -- Sharifa Oppenheimer

As we see a shift of old forms that were once the foundations of our daily lives, parents--who must prepare the next generation to meet the changing world--have more questions today than ever before. Although our cultural values and family structures may change, it is the atmosphere in the home that continues to form the foundation of a child's life. In Heaven on Earth, parent and educator Sharifa Oppenheimer reveals how parents can make the home environment warm, lively, loving, and consistent with their highest ideals.

Heaven on Earth balances a theoretical understanding of child development with practical ideas, resources, and tips that can transform family life. Readers will learn how to create the regular life rhythms needed to establish a foundation for learning; how to design indoor play environments that allow children the broadest development of skills; and how to create outdoor play spaces that encourage vigorous movement and a wide sensory palette. Through art, storytelling, and the festival celebrations, this book is an invaluable guide to building a family culture based on the guiding principle of love--a culture that supports children and encourages the free development of each unique soul.

Sharifa Oppenheimer offers a gift from the heart. Heaven on Earth is a practical, inspiring resource that brings the author's informed, intuitive understanding of young children into the heart of the home.

Astonishing! I have never beheld anything like this collection of songs to the wild earth, to its unbounded elegance and heart-wrenching vulnerability, to its singular ability to penetrate our carefully shielded minds and deliver us directly into the arms of a love that lives in every cell of our bodies... I thirst for the elixir Sharifa offers. I want everyone I know to drink deeply and be transfigured by the sacred wonderment shining from every nexus of these beautifully written poems. -Mirabai Starr, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce & Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics

A Litany of Wild Graces is a call to experience a sensuous encounter with the living Universe. Poems, essays and litanies are imbued with hymns to botany, biology, geography, cosmology and all life, inviting us to engage deeply, to create pathways of loving and honoring our sacred earth. -Felicia Kainat Norton, An Emerald Earth

We stand at a pivotal moment as the environmental crisis deepens. Scientists, environmental organizations, island nations, and the children of our world are calling for a vast encompassing paradigm shift. We search everywhere, seeking what can be done to turn the tide. Yet into this chorus, a new melody is arising, asking not only what must we do, but who must we become to meet this urgent need.

In A Litany of Wild Graces: Meditations on Sacred Ecology, Sharifa Oppenheimer points us toward an open secret. Through poetry, essay, litany, and dreams, she invites us to step out of a 21st century virtual reality and into the emerald earth. Here we rediscover our ancient neural core: kinship with all beings. In these pages we meet close relatives: woman-in-the-mountain, northern blue ice, our sun the father of all incandescence. We inhale the very breath exhaled by arctic phytoplankton.

It is through kinship through Love alone that we will be brought back to our senses, back home to the sensually alive inter-being that composes the living body of Gaia. It is, singularly, here at home in the one heart of earth that we will shuck off our husk of greed and domination. Here we can regain our humanity. We can rejoin the great conversation among beings. Step outside, open these pages and remember.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A WALDORF KINDERGARTEN: Baking, washing, sweeping, mending, singing, painting! Imagine the scent of bread baking, the warm sudsy water for washing the dishes, the muscle power of sweeping, the fine eye-hand coordination of mending and sewing. Imagine the visual education in the dancing watercolors. And if you have had the great pleasure of sitting in the midst of children's creative, imaginative play, you will know the happy sound at the heart of this beehive of activity.

All this beauty given to the children is nutritional. Their senses are stimulated, and through free movement and imitation of the adult the experience is digested. It then becomes their own, nourishing their growth toward freedom.

In all the activities we do with our children we are making decisions that establish our family's culture. Culture is nothing more or less than the way we live our lives. Although this 'culture making' is going on all the time, the quality of the culture pivots entirely on the awareness we bring to it. We are fashioning our family's culture with each decision, so let us bring as much consciousness to this process as we can (from the introduction).

In this gem of a book, parents are offered an exploratory approach to the principles introduced in Heaven on Earth: A Handbook for Parents of Young Children. Using excerpts as leading thoughts, as well as The Star of Family Culture as a guiding image, parents are given a warmhearted lens through which to view their family life.

Beginning with love as the foundation of the family, parents will have the opportunity to discover healthy family rhythms interactively, including family work and family play. They will be engaged in creating nourishing play spaces for their children, both indoors and out, and will learn to tell handmade stories, as well as to make art joyfully with their children.

Establishing this loving, disciplined approach to family lays a sturdy foundation. In this way, many twenty-first-century discipline problems are deterred. With love as a guide, parents are given insight for dealing with developmentally appropriate behavior issues.

In this book readers will find not only a heart-filled rendering of the gentle ways young children have been traditionally raised and educated, but also cutting edge research that supports these practices. With love as the foundation, and through the neural tapestry created by joyful movement, music, art, stories, and play, we feed and bathe the brain of the young child. These deep connections with life are woven together during childhood to become the wholeness we call I.

Each chapter offers ideas for bringing this new science and these time-honored ways into the home and classroom. Parents, educators, and everyone who has ever loved and cared for a child will find research, humor, wisdom, and a new paradigm that marries ageless wisdom with the new science of the human brain and heart.