It is April.  The gardens are in bloom, the grass is growing and needs frequent mowing, and students are working to finish projects before Expo, our community sharing day.  We have other things growing and changing as well. 

We have located a billy goat buck to "rent" for 45 days, who will be arriving on campus soon if all goes well.  Come October we may have baby goats on campus.  Whatever happens, these next weeks will be an adventure!

Three of our own coop eggs hatched this week and we have 3 new friends, "Cutie,"  "Fred," and "Kumquat."  "Fred," was stuck to the shell and it was due to the heroic efforts of Kate that it lived.  We cannot wait to see how the genetic traits manifest in our new mini flock.

Last but not least, we have a date to finish our cob oven.  We are excited to welcome Trey Farmer back to IOS to apply our final plaster.   Next week we will drive to Bastrop and dig buckets of red clay for our cob.  This week our dimension of Human Greatness is "Identity."  All of these things help make IOS what it is.  Once we were a dream.  I hope you are dreaming big, too.

Every Wednesday morning at the Inside Outside School, we have Peace Circle.  We gather in the theater space together, light a candle, meditate to center ourselves and then one of us shares a story that connects to some aspect of Human Greatness.  When we were working with "Identity" we heard the story of the Soul Bird, the bird that lives in each of us, the bird that has the keys to open the little drawers inside of us that hold our feelings and bits of our self that we may open often or rarely.  Sometimes we tell the soul bird which drawer to open and what we want to think and feel and sometimes it decides all by itself which drawer to open.  The children did some amazing watercolors to represent the soul bird inside each of them.  In our lives, the soul bird dips into some dark sticky places where the drawers are stuck and when they open there are sticky feelings in them.  It is nice to know that we can handle feeling those things and that there are plenty of drawers to open that help us feel better.  As we work with big ideas like Identity, Integrity, and Intuition, we learn more about who we are and how we can be true to who we are.  This week we will be working with the dimension of "Imagination."  Do you think trees have feelings?  I wonder.