 Photo by Bankim Desai on Unsplash Unraveling the neurodivergent complexities of my own mind is a never-ending emotional odyssey — each new insight arriving like a small, life-altering revelation. The discoveries hit differently when you spend 57 years inside a spicy brain with no language for why the world never quite fits. I never realized that feeling different wasn't a flaw — it was just how I was wired. Take the internal narrator, for instance — something I assumed everyone had until recently. Mine never shuts up. This past week, I noticed that when I let it wander mid-task, it stopped talking me through the steps, and suddenly, I've lost my place, forgotten what I've done, or can't recall what I meant to do next. That same voice is also my interpreter: music, a podcast, a conversation — none of it registers unless I silently echo the words back to myself, or they dissolve into noise, crowded out by the ten million other thoughts already in rotation. It isn't a memory problem, as people often assume. It's a finely tuned system that demands close attention — one that's constantly being seduced away by the same stream of creativity that powers it. Scrolling back through twelve years of blog posts, I can see the quirks hiding in plain sight — documented long before I had any framework for understanding them. I just thought I was weird. Still do, actually. At Deep Root Center, that's always been a point of pride: we own our eccentricity, and I wear the title of head weirdo without apology. This piece, written the day after my 50th birthday in 2014, finds me committed to being fully myself — though it would be another seven years before I understood I had been masking my neurology my whole life. Even so, something essential has remained intact. The colorful stripe never fully disappeared, except for a brief time during the pandemic. It just shifted — hot pink quietly moved to purple, blue, and now teal. I probably won’t adopt hoop earrings or flowing gowns. Both would be a sensory nightmare; however, the tattoo has been on my wishlist for a while—I even have the design ready and waiting for me to find an artist and make an appointment. Analysis of the Hot Pink Stripe 11/19/14 The following disclosure may delight, surprise, or even dismay a few family members, friends, and acquaintances. As of Friday, I am sporting a hot pink racing stripe running through my dishwater gray hair. When I told my mother, her first question was, "Is this all about turning 50?" My immediate response was an emphatic no. Let me be clear: this is not a midlife crisis. I have always hated my hair — even when it was a perfectly respectable dark brown. What I'm working with is an unfortunate hereditary combination: straight as a stick (my Gram's term for her own), clumpy at the temples (thanks, Dad), and aggressively early to gray (mid-twenties for me, early twenties for my Poppy, who has very little left at 91). As the eldest, I could have landed the naturally curly gene, but that skipped a generation — you're welcome, MacKenzie — along with the male pattern baldness. Sorry, Ian. So what's the connection? I have spent years preaching about being comfortable in your own skin, about choosing yourself over the crowd. And mostly I've practiced what I preach — even as a teenager, when the herd was chasing the latest fad, I was usually headed the other direction deliberately. The list is long and fairly impressive. So why hot pink? Here's the contradiction: alongside that instinct to take the road less traveled, I am also someone who would rather work quietly in the background than stand in any spotlight. Bold choices, invisible presence. It sounds like a mixed message. This is an analysis, as the title suggests — and I'm genuinely thinking it through as I write. My best theory: my internal, non-cerebral, truest self has been trying to get out. She's been yelling, pitching fits of considerable creativity, and I have worked hard to ignore her from the comfort of my warm, safe, non-threatening comfort zone. It appears she is done being ignored. So we're trying this for a while. But hot pink — really? What comes next: large hoop earrings, flowing gowns, a tattoo? Now that she's out and making herself known, no one can say where this ends. The next fifty years are sure to be interesting — or, at the very least, a lot of fun. DRC NewsWe have had another weird week that flew by in a blink. Several families were traveling, so we had a smaller crew than normal. We had to cancel our field trip to Nicandri and will have to reschedule it for September. The kids who were here spent a good portion of their time on independent projects and cool conversations. Tuesday, we did a seed propagation experiment for Kitchen Sink Science.  DRC Pop-Ups The Pop-ups Peeps had fun at Nicandri on Thursday, even though the Canton Crew could not join them.
0 Comments
 Tromping through the woods at the Cornell Copperative Extension Maple Tour For the past year, these posts have mapped the gap — or the absence of one — between our national crisis and my daily life with kids in a self-directed learning environment. That work continues, because nothing has stopped: not the incompetence, not the propaganda, not the lawlessness, not the grifters. Just when the absurdities seemed impossible to top, this past week found new depths. A president clutching a miniature bomber like a favorite toy, celebrating killing in a war he engineered, lying about the economy, about immigrants, about voter fraud — treating the whole catastrophe as a game his handlers cobbled together to keep him entertained and from wandering off. Meanwhile the people his agencies cage and deport, and the children powerful men have violated, are still waiting for anything resembling justice. For fourteen months, I've returned to the same insistence: this isn't about politics. It's about who gets to control the story — and through the story, the country itself. Authoritarianism isn't just the enemy of democracy. It's the enemy of curiosity, of autonomy, of the belief that human beings are capable of directing their own lives and their own learning. Which is to say, it's the enemy of everything this work is built on. As mentioned last week, I'm currently reviewing and revising over twelve years of essays, posting one here each week with an eye toward a book. The connections between this nightmare and our commitment to that mission will run through all of it. This piece, like last week's, is from our first month of operations, January 2014. Our Philosophy in Action 1/30/14 Did you know a Lamborghini can travel 65 miles in 15 minutes? (Yes, we did the math.) Do you know what drifting is? (Nothing to do with last week's snow.) What about 4K? A thermostat called Nest that can run nearly your entire house? A wheelie bar — what it is, what it does? Did you know drag racing cars have rear-wheel drive and sticky tires? Have you ever heard a ten-year-old say, "I'd like to make a movie from a first-person perspective"? These are a few things I've learned from the two kids I have the privilege of spending my days with. Are the facts themselves important? Not if you're not into cars or technology. But the facts were never the point. The point is the why and the how. Our conversations have covered a lot of ground, but the essential thing — the thing underneath all of it — has been the listening. I'm not just collecting interesting facts. I'm beginning to know these two young men. I'm learning why these subjects grip them, how they think, what lights them up, and what makes them genuinely happy and engaged. That's the job: know them well enough to ask the right questions, open the right doors, and then get out of the way and cheer. I lost count of the mental yes-es and imaginary arm pumps this week. There were a lot. DRC NewsWeekly Wrap-up It has been a strange week with two inclement weather related days off and a field trip on Thursday. Monday passed in a blur with no photos taken. Therefore, all of the photos this week are from our field trip to the Cooperative Extension Farm Maple Tour. Thank you to the folks at the farm for showing us the entire process from tapping to boiling and for letting us play with the baby kids and lambs. *The DRC Explore the NoCo Field Trip Project is supported by a Badenhausen Grant through the Northern New York Commercial Foundation.  Congratulations to Leslie Carlin, the winner of our raffle of $100 of NYS Lotto Scratch-off Tickets. Thank you to everyone who participated. We raised about $500, that goes directly toward supporting our student members.  TS drew the winning name. He insisted on wearing his hoodie backward to keep it completely fair.  From the Archives: photo taken January, 2014 It's surprising what you discover when you step back from the daily grind and look back at the past. This week I've been building a presentation for the SOAR class I'm facilitating on April 1st — and to avoid relying solely on recent photos, I started digging through the archives dating back to 2013. That is over 12 years of weekly essays! Many of those posts — even the ones written before we had many members — could have been written yesterday. My writing has improved over the years, but the core content holds up remarkably well. That realization was deeply gratifying. It means our philosophy and methodology have remained consistent from the very beginning, unchanged despite outside pressures: the misunderstanding of self-directed learning, funding challenges, and pushback that could have led us to abandon our core beliefs. None of it moved us. Reading through them, I realized I'm sitting on a treasure trove of ideas, stories, and insights — about self-directed learning, but also about how it quietly shows up in everyday life at the Center. Over the years, many people have suggested I write a book using these posts as a foundation. I think I might finally be ready to dive in. (I tried once before, during the pandemic, attempting to sort everything into categories — only to abandon it when the sheer volume became overwhelming. That was six years ago. There's considerably more material now!) Honestly, I've felt a bit unmoored this past year and need a big project to reignite my passion and creativity. This may be it. With that in mind, I plan to begin revisiting and revising older pieces. Some may be combined, others will need little more than a light polish, and several will likely be unrecognizable from the original. I will always reference the original post and its publication date. From the Deep Root Center Blog page, you can look at any of the archives from the past twelve years. They are listed on the side by month and year. The first is this piece, written in January 2014, the month that we opened. Trust January 18, 2014 This is a post I'd been trying to write for a long time. The bones of it existed for months, but it never felt quite ready. Looking back, maybe there was a reason for that. Around that time, I read a memoir by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, an author well into her eighties, known for her observations of animals and indigenous peoples in Africa — including her early work among the Ju/'hoansi (also known as the !Kung) of Namibia. She is a remarkable writer, and in one of the final chapters, she offers six rules for writing she always tries to follow. The sixth is about revision. Her suggestion: remove the sentence you are most proud of. Brutal — and effective. Ego has no place in good writing. I'll admit, some of my posts were written at the last minute with very little editing. This one deserved better. At its core, this piece is about trust. I have to believe that what I put into the world is the best I have to offer in that moment — and that the people reading it will receive the message for what it is. I have been passionate about trusting kids for a long time. Trust that they know what they need to become the best versions of themselves. Trust in their abilities, their insights, the goodness of their hearts. Trust that they will make mistakes, mess up, and make bad decisions — and that, as with all missteps, they will learn from the experience and carry that knowledge forward. Trust that they are not wasting time when it looks like they're "doing nothing." They are learning, growing beings absorbing information every moment of every day, because it is genuinely impossible to do nothing. As parents and teachers, we cannot judge what learning looks like — or, more importantly, what experiences are valuable for a particular person at a particular moment. We grow frustrated when kids can't seem to motivate themselves to do what we consider important. But we rarely stop to ask whether we've allowed them to be self-directed. Many children are told what to do constantly — at home, at school, and socially. They are bombarded with instructions: do this, don't do that, hurry up, sit still. Is it any wonder they haven't developed the skills for independent decision-making? Society makes the decisions for them. And it is our fear for their futures — not their incapacity — that drives us to micromanage their lives. I wear both hats: parent and mentor/facilitator. I have two teenagers, one of whom is homeschooled and the other is in college. There are moments I have to physically bite my tongue to keep unsolicited, judgmental comments from escaping. I am not always successful — some of those comments have pressure behind them. But I try most of the time to trust them to make the best choice available to them at that moment. When they ask for advice, I learn to pause before answering: Does he actually need me to solve this? Can she figure this out on her own? The goal has always been to raise happy, empowered young people who can make important decisions confidently. It's just that solving things for them is faster. Easier. And that temptation never fully goes away. So how do we find the balance between controlling our kids and supporting them to become emotionally mature human beings? I believe it comes down to mutual respect and trust. When you genuinely listen to your children — when you have real conversations that include your own dreams and imperfections, not just instructions for theirs — they respond. Kids want authenticity. They need to know we aren't perfect, because none of us are; we are all learning, growing beings. They need space to think out loud without fear of ridicule. And they need, most of all, the security of unconditional love, consistent support, and the occasional moment of pure, unadulterated silliness. Because when everything else fails, a sense of humor will carry you through. DRC NewsWeekly Wrap-up On Monday, the DRC crew discovered that the Grasse River is high from all the quick snow melt this past weekend, and the sledding hill is a sheet of ice. B has enjoyed cooking lately. They made pancakes for lunch. On Tuesday, we did a quick Kitchen Sink Science experiment looking at the properties of Hydrogen Peroxide. We sprayed some on our countertops and cutting boards to see how much it bubbled. Then put raw potatoes in one beaker of peroxide and cooked potatoes in another. The raw ones bubbled and fizzed, and the cooked ones did not. It is because of an enzyme called catalase that gets cooked out. We also tested carrots because most plants contain that enzyme. The raw ones bubbled, and the cooked did not. The DRC Crew took another walk to SUNY Canton. Digby wanted to be sure he was the center of attention at the end of the day. This Thursday ended up being a very relaxed day after we had to postpone our field trip to next Thursday. The crew had the chance to dig some ditches to divert the water from our garage and the annually flooded cellar. We thought we had avoided it from the melting snow, but the heavy rain last night created a river running through it again. The two sisters created and played a game on their own that involved using plenty of math and ELA skills in the Seedlings Room with Chris. And everyone else stayed occupied with projects and conversations. Some of the crew braved the chilly spring breeze for a walk to the Grasse River and the SUNY Canton trail. We had Friday off.   SOAR Class As mentioned at the beginning of this post, I will be facilitating a SOAR class on April 1, 2026, at the Canton Free Library. If you are a senior and have wondered what Deep Root Center is all about, or want to learn more about the self-directed learning philosophy, I hope to see you there.   Engaging all of our senses during the Kitchen Sink Science Experiment this week Lately, it feels like we're living inside a slow-motion catastrophe — one that is somehow, at the same time, careening toward the edge. Every day brings fresh news from a government gone rogue that has abandoned any pretense of legitimacy: propaganda churned out on an industrial scale, accountability nowhere in sight, and the guardrails stripped away so deliberately it can only be by design. I won't pretend this hasn't taken a toll. I fight daily to stay balanced, calm, and hopeful — and I'll be honest with you: this past week, I lost that battle more than once. Tuesday's full blood moon didn't help. The big feelings it stirred were real and widespread — frustration, anger, fear, anxiety — all of it feeding into how we moved through the day. There was sniping. There were sharp, critical words that didn't need to be said. A low-grade discontent settled over the Center like a weather system, and by the end of it, we were all depleted and desperate for relief. Happily, it was just one day. By Thursday and Friday, we had found our footing again — equilibrium restored, the storm passed. But I keep turning over the same question: how much of that Tuesday, full moon aside, was collateral damage from the world beyond our walls? Our kids are taking in more than we realize. One teen asked, with complete sincerity, whether it was true that this was the beginning of World War III. They absorb everything — the anxiety threading through adult voices, the headlines half-glimpsed and half-understood, the ambient dread saturating daily life — without the context or tools to process what they're sensing. Without understanding that the chaos has architects. That propaganda is real. That we are all, in ways large and small, being played. So what do we do with all of that? We keep showing up. We create spaces where kids feel safe enough to ask hard questions and honest enough to sit with uncertain answers. We model the thing we're struggling to practice ourselves — steadiness in the unsteady, hope that isn't naive, nor defeated. We name the dread without surrendering to it. The world beyond our walls may be chaotic by design, but what happens inside them is still ours to shape. That feels worth protecting. That feels worth fighting for — especially on the hard days when we fall down and fully surrender to the big feelings. DRC NewsWeekly Wrap-up It was a full week! Monday passed in a blur with no photos taken. As mentioned, on Tuesday, we were feeling some wild full moon energy at DRC. Phew! Lots of action and big(!) feelings. Thursday at DRC featured tons of chill vibes and engagement. Our Kitchen Sink Science Experiment involved testing which carb makes yeast grow the best and making predictions. Conclusion: dark corn syrup, brown sugar, sugar, and honey all made significant CO2 in that order. Flour, corn meal, and milk had negligible growth after 45 min, and the control with just yeast and water had none. One unintended variable was the fact that the dark corn syrup contains molasses. Everyone was happily doing their thing, while cool conversations swirled all day long. B began making sourdough bread to be finished on Friday. They also made yummy paella for lunch. The three siblings were in the art room, buzzing with creativity. The middle sibling proclaimed herself the superhero maker and created her siblings’ superheroes, including a detailed list of powers, along with the youngest's costume, while the oldest designed his own. Digby even got in a few cuddles at the end of the day. We had a well-deserved, very chill Friday, featuring beautiful homemade sourdough bread and drop sugar cookies, and plenty of independent projects and activities. B was very proud of their first effort in their sourdough adventure. It was delicious!  DRC Pop-ups The Pop-Ups Peeps met at the Massena Library and had a good time playing UNO and socializing. They will meet at Nicandri this coming Thursday.
DRC Fundraiser  |
Don't miss a post!
The DRC Weekly Blog can be found on Substack. Sign up to get the DRC Blog delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. 
Archives
April 2026
|
© 2025 Whole Learners, Inc. 501(c)3
Deep Root Center
48 Riverside Drive, Canton, NY 13617
315*323*1435/[email protected]
Deep Root Center
48 Riverside Drive, Canton, NY 13617
315*323*1435/[email protected]