"Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast.  

Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places." 

~ Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden 

Once upon a time people were more connected to nature, to the rhythms and cycles of our planet Earth. We honored her healing energies and respected our dependence to survive and also thrive. Things have changed and many of us feel a longing for something that we may no longer feel-a deep spiritual connection to the natural world. In this newsletter our focus will be on gardening with children and all of the magic and wonder it brings. Happy Spring!

Love & Light,

Amy Gerassimoff, Editor

It's a quiet moment on a Monday morning - my son and husband have left for the day and our Playgarden friends have yet to arrive.  I'm standing at my kitchen sink looking out into our front yard - our garden - while sipping a warm cup of tea. Spring has sprung here in California, and it is a glorious time of the year - the hills are green, the tulips that we planted as a "winter gift" to Mother Earth are poking out, the onions and garlic planted in the fall stand a foot high. I am filled with joy and gratitude as I witness this new life before me.  

Jaimee is a recent graduate of the LifeWays training in Portland, OR. All LifeWays students are required to complete a gardening project as part of the course requirements. This is her very moving report:

For everything there is a season,

a time for every activity under heaven.

A time to be born and a time to die.

A time to plant and a time to harvest.

~ Ecclesiastes 3: 1-2

This is not the gardening project I had planned. I wasn't even the one who planted it. My mother did. Two weeks before I began my LifeWays training, reluctantly leaving my 3-year-old daughter in her care. Two weeks before Easter Sunday. Two weeks before my mother's last day in her body.

Brooklyn-based Waldorf family is seeking an experienced, dynamic, creative, organized/tidy, holistically inclined, ideally Waldorf or LifeWays-literate caregiver for our imaginative, energetic children. Majority of time would be spent with our 2.5 year old son, and then after school with our 6 year old daughter as well. For more information, email

News from LifeWays Graduates   

New LifeWays Board Members 

We want to express heartfelt thanks to Rosario Villasana, who has served on the LifeWays board since 2006 and recently stepped down.  Rosario is also the Director when we have offered LifeWays workshops and training sessions in Spanish.

With Rosario's absence, we have added two new board members, Ashley Masters and Rhoda Kambandu, who are serving along with Cynthia Aldinger, Mary O'Connell (new Board President), Kerry Ingram (VP), Rahima Baldwin Dancy (Treasurer), Sara Baldwin (Secretary), Marianne Alsop, and Lisa Boisvert-Mackenzie.

Ashley Masters, left, completed the LifeWays Training in 2010 in Boulder and was the force behind bringing the training to her area in Asheville, NC last year as Student Services Director.