A coral reef is not a collection of individuals who happen to share an address. That’s the mistake it’s easiest to make looking at one from the surface, or worse, from a photograph: coral here, a school of fish there, an anemone tucked into a crevice, each apparently going about its own business in the same general vicinity. But drop down into it and the boundaries dissolve almost immediately.

The coral itself is not one organism but thousands of tiny polyps, genetically identical, functioning as a single structure, each too small to survive alone and each contributing calcium to a skeleton that will outlast any of them individually. Clownfish raise their young inside anemones that would kill any other fish on contact, in an arrangement neither species could pull off solo. Parrotfish graze the algae that would otherwise smother the coral they depend on for shelter. Juveniles of a dozen species hide in the reef’s structural nooks until they’re large enough to survive in open water, protected not by their own parents specifically but by the architecture the whole community has built. Nothing on a reef is doing its growing in isolation, and very little of what keeps any one organism alive was built by that organism alone.

The juveniles bring genetic renewal and eventually replace what erosion and predation take; the established coral provides the physical structure nothing young could yet build alone. Separate them, and you don’t get two healthier populations. You get a nursery with no shelter and a fortress with no future.

A Montessori classroom, three years wide, is doing something structurally identical.

The instinct to sort children by age is a reasonable one if you’re organizing a curriculum. It is a much stranger one if you’re trying to build the thing schools actually claim to want, which is a community where children learn to read social situations, mentor without condescension, ask for help without shame, and see their own growth mapped out concretely in the older children around them rather than abstractly in a syllabus. A single-age classroom can teach all of that in theory. A mixed-age one produces it as an unavoidable byproduct of daily life, the way a reef produces cooperation not through instruction but through structural necessity: the six-year-old needs the four-year-old to practice patience on, and needs the six-year-old two seats over to watch and imitate. The three-year-old spends a whole year watching six-year-olds do long division at a distance, absorbing far more from proximity than from any deliberate lesson, the same way a reef fish learns to navigate a structure built mostly by creatures far older than itself, without a single one of them ever holding a class on the subject.

What’s easy to miss, watching from outside, a parent touring a classroom, a new hire meeting the room for the first time, is that the oldest children in a mixed-age group are not simply tolerating the presence of the youngest, the way an older sibling might grudgingly babysit. They are doing genuine developmental work of their own in the act of explaining, modeling, and steadying a younger child, in the same way parrotfish aren’t performing charity when they graze the coral’s algae, the grazing serves the grazer as much as the reef. A ten-year-old who patiently walks a six-year-old through a math material isn’t pausing her own education to help. Teaching it is, for her, a more demanding and more consolidating exercise than doing the problem herself would have been.

This is also why breaking a mixed-age group apart mid-cycle, or constantly shuffling children across age-alike groupings for administrative convenience, costs more than it looks like it costs. You aren’t rearranging seating. You’re dismantling structure that took years to grow and cannot be rebuilt on demand, the way coral itself grows too slowly to simply relocate and resume.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

"[awe is] a life force that merges people into a collective self, a tribe, an oceanic 'we'…"

Keltner, Dacher. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2023.

The first time I spoke with Dr. Philip Snow Gang, it was over the phone, and I hung up knowing something had realigned that I did not yet have language for. We had been introduced almost by accident, a friend suggested him as a keynote speaker for an online summit, and within minutes of talking I felt the particular pull of a person whose presence makes the air around them more ordered, not less. When I finally sat in his home, surrounded by warm red walls and handcrafted furniture and shelves of Bohm and Berry and Swimme, with his son-in-law Warren pouring coffee and plying me with single-source chocolate, I was not merely meeting a mentor. I was stepping into a field.

Months later, when Phil told me across a video call that he saw me, that he wanted to offer me a scholarship to study with him, I burst into tears. He seemed to know more about who I was becoming than I did. I had found, at fifty-five, my cosmic papa, and through him a cohort, a lineage, a learning community that would re-form me. This letter is about what that kind of community actually is, not metaphorically, but as a measurable field and how we might build more of them on purpose.

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The Field Between Us Is Real

We tend to picture a community as a collection of separate individuals who happen to share a room. The science suggests something stranger and more intimate. The human heart generates an electromagnetic field measurably stronger than the brain’s, a field that extends beyond the skin and that other people’s bodies detect and respond to. When we gather, these fields interact. Researchers at HeartMath have found that one person’s coherent heart rhythm can register in the brainwaves of someone nearby. We are, quite literally, broadcasting to one another, all the time, beneath the level of speech.

The sociologist Émile Durkheim had a name for what happens when this goes right in a group: collective effervescence, the charged, elevated energy that arises when people move and attend together, the feeling that a gathering has become more than the sum of those present. The awe researcher Dacher Keltner has since identified moving in unison as one of the measurable elicitors of awe itself. A choir, a procession, a classroom breathing through a hard problem together, these are not soft metaphors. They are coherence events, moments when separate nervous systems entrain into a shared rhythm and a collective order emerges that none of the members carried in alone.

This is the heart of the distinction I keep returning to. An entropic organization scatters its people, isolating them, setting them in competition, extracting their energy until each is depleted and alone. A syntropic one gathers them, creating the conditions in which a shared field can form, in which the whole becomes more coherent, more alive, more capable than its parts. The first runs down. The second wakes up.

The Classroom as a Coherent Field

My cohort with my graduate program, The Institute for Educational Studies (TIES) taught me what it feels like to be inside a syntropic community as a learner - to be seen, drawn forward, and changed by a field of shared attention. But I had spent decades building such fields myself without fully naming them, because the Montessori classroom, at its best, is precisely this: a prepared environment engineered to generate collective coherence.

Maria Montessori understood something most institutional design has forgotten. She did not arrange a room to deliver information to isolated children at desks. She prepared an environment, ordered, beautiful, alive with purpose, in which a community of children of mixed ages could find their own work and, in doing so, fall into a collective rhythm she called normalization: a state where each child contributes to the group and settles into deep, harmonious concentration and the whole room hums at a different frequency.

Any guide who has witnessed it knows the feeling, the moment the class stops being thirty separate strivings and becomes one coherent field. It is collective effervescence with the volume turned low and the depth turned up.

This is why Dr. Gang walked away from conventional teacher education decades ago, and why his life’s work has circled one driving question: what contexts and processes might liberate teachers and learners so they become catalysts for a new kind of human — one whose relationship with the living Earth is bound by right action and love? He saw what I came to see in the field: that we have too often trained guides as technicians delivering curriculum with fidelity, when the deeper task is to become a coherent presence that helps a whole community of learners cohere. The prepared adult is not the one who knows the most. It is the one whose own coherence makes the group’s coherence possible.

A cohort. A classroom. A friendship like the one with Phil that is also a lineage. These are the same phenomenon at different scales, living systems that counter the entropy of isolation through the syntropy of genuine relationship. And the astonishing thing is that they can be built. Not perfectly, not permanently, but deliberately.

Dr. Gang likes to say that his story is my story is Earth’s story is the Universe’s story, the sentence folding back on itself until the boundaries dissolve. I used to hear it as a lovely idea. Now I hear it as a description of how coherence actually propagates: one re-formed person re-forms a cohort, which re-forms a classroom, which re-forms the children who will carry a different way of being human into a world badly in need of it. The field does not stop at the skin, or at the door, or at the end of a single life.

We are not separate individuals who occasionally cooperate. We are nodes in a field that has been organizing itself toward greater communion for thirteen point eight billion years, and every genuine community we build, every cohort, every classroom, every circle that gathers rather than scatters, is the universe practicing, through us, its oldest and most patient art. Build one. However small. The whole pattern is waiting in it.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

"More than just a simple ameliorative, every element of the wonder cycle, from openness to awe, supports a more resilient psyche in even some of the most extreme and terrible situations."

-Monica Parker, The Power of Wonder

We bought the motorhome over the internet, sight unseen, from a seller in Utrecht in The Netherlands and we named it Cosmic Charlie. Everything we had not sold or given away fit into a storage unit five feet by five feet. We had quit our jobs without knowing whether we were leaving our careers. We had sold the house the same day we listed it. And then we drove out into a life with no fixed address, no plan more specific than west, then wherever, and no way to explain to anyone what we were doing, because we did not entirely know ourselves.

The people we loved could not keep pace, and so they narrated us instead. One told people we had retired young. One said we were homeless. One invented a reason for our leaving that belonged to their story, not ours. We had become unidentifiable , even to ourselves, some mornings, living inside a transition that had no name yet and would not be hurried into one. I did not have the word for it then. I do now. We were in the limen: the threshold, the long uncomfortable middle of a transformation already underway and not yet arrived.

I want to tell you about that space, because everything in our culture trains us to treat it as a problem to be solved as quickly as possible. And it is not a problem. It is a phase, the only phase in which anything genuinely new has ever arrived.

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The Edge Where Order Is Born

Chaos theory gave us a precise and counterintuitive truth: complex systems do their creating at the edge of chaos , not in the safety of stable order, and not in total randomness, but in the turbulent zone between. A system pushed far from equilibrium, past its old patterns, enters what the physicist Ilya Prigogine called a dissipative structure: it breaks down its existing order, and in the breaking down, reorganizes into something more complex than before. The disintegration is not the failure of the process. The disintegration is the process.

Order does not survive the chaos; order is born from it.

This is why a caterpillar in its chrysalis does not simply sprout wings. It dissolves, most of its body becomes an undifferentiated cellular soup before the new form assembles. If you opened the chrysalis at the wrong moment, hoping to help, you would find not a half-butterfly but a mess that looks like ruin. The mess is the method. Anthropologists named the middle stage of every rite of passage liminal, from the Latin for threshold, precisely because it is neither the old state nor the new one , a between-ness where identity goes fluid and the ordinary rules are suspended. Every culture that has ever guided humans through transformation has known to honor this middle rather than rush it.

We, mostly, have forgotten. We pathologize the soup. We call the dissolving a breakdown when it may be the most generative thing the system has ever done.

The Room Where Nothing Was Resolved

I had been in this kind of between once before, decades earlier, though I was too young to recognize it as anything but adventure. At twenty-one I boarded a one-way flight to Singapore with everything I needed on my back and no agenda beyond a stack of guidebooks and a daily budget of a few dollars. Arriving alone in a culture whose language I could not speak, where my food sensitivities had me ordering the same predictable meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I was stripped of every familiar coordinate. It was liberating and it was disorienting in equal measure, a good risk-edged fear that became, I later understood, a kind of mind-expanding drug.

What I remember most is the guilt. I would retreat to my often air-conditioned room and read, annotating the Tao Te Ching, of all things , instead of marching out to see every site the guidebooks insisted upon. It felt like failure, like wasting the trip, like I should be doing more. Only now do I understand that the quiet room was not the interruption of the journey. It was where the journey did its deepest work, where a nervous system battered by sensory overload could integrate, decompress, and quietly rewire itself toward transformation. The incubation looked, from the outside and even from inside, like doing nothing. It was doing everything.

In Cosmic Charlie, years later, I met the same lesson at a larger scale. An earlier version of me would have white-knuckled toward resolution, desperate to give the relatives a tidy answer, to convert the formless months into a respectable plan. Instead, my family had two mottos we had stumbled into like handrails in the dark: Open to the Possibility and Question Assumptions. They were not productivity tools. They were permissions , permission to not yet know, to let the misreadings stand, to live inside an unfinished story without forcing its ending.

Here is what those two between-times taught me, and what I most want to hand to you: being lost is not evidence that you have gone wrong. The disorientation of the middle , the not-yet-knowing, the dissolved old identity, the soup , is not a detour from the path. It is the part of the path where the new form is quietly deciding itself. You cannot think your way across it. You can only stay, and tend it, and trust that the breakdown is doing the work breakdown is for.

We never did give our relatives the tidy answer. The months in Cosmic Charlie resolved not into a plan but into a person, someone who had learned to belong to a process rather than cling to a structure. The flagship work of my life took shape on a literal beach, in the formless stretch when I appeared, to everyone watching, to be doing nothing at all. That is what the middle does, if you let it. It does not hand you the next form on a schedule. It dissolves the one who needed the schedule, and assembles someone who can live without it.

So if you are lost right now, dissolved, disoriented, misread, suspended in the long between of some change you may not have fully chosen, I will not tell you to hurry toward the far shore. I will tell you that the universe has been making new order out of exactly this kind of chaos for thirteen point eight billion years, and that you are not the exception to that pattern. You are the latest instance of it. Stay in the soup a while. Something is being born, and it is you.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

Watch someone learn to weave for the first time and the work looks almost insultingly small. Pass the shuttle through. Beat the weft down with the comb. Change the shed. Pass it back. Beat again. Each motion on its own is nothing; a child could dismiss it as busywork, and many adults watching from outside the tradition do exactly that, mistaking the smallness of the motion for the smallness of the task. But watch the same hands two years later, working a pattern with a dozen colors changing in sequence, selvages tight and even, tension held without a single conscious thought given to tension, and you are watching something that was never actually about the shuttle. It was about building, one unremarkable pass at a time, a body that could eventually hold an entire complex pattern the way you hold your own name: without having to think about it at all.

No experienced weaver counts threads while she works a pattern she knows well. She isn’t ignoring the counting, she did plenty of it, for a long time, when the motions were new and each pass required real attention. But the counting got absorbed into the hands themselves, the way a language gets absorbed into a mouth, until what’s left is not a series of remembered steps but a single fluent motion that happens to accomplish twelve things at once.

This is the part of practical life that gets consistently underestimated by anyone judging a Montessori classroom from the doorway: the sight of a four-year-old carefully spooning beans from one bowl to another looks, to an outside eye, like a strange substitute for what “real” learning should look like. It is not a substitute. It is the shuttle pass. It is the unremarkable, single motion a body has to bank a thousand times before it can do what the loom eventually does, combine a dozen small, separately-mastered motions into one fluent, uncounted whole.

This is worth being precise about, because it’s easy to undersell: the child who has genuinely absorbed practical life work is not merely capable of pouring water without spilling it. She is capable by five, by six, of executing something as long and as sequenced as cooking an entire simple meal. Cracking an egg cleanly. Reading, by feel and smell and the particular hiss of it, whether the pan has come up to the right heat. Remembering, unprompted, to set the table before the food is ready rather than after. None of these are single skills taught in a single lesson. Each is a shuttle pass, mastered separately, on its own unglamorous timeline, and what makes the whole meal possible is that all of them have already sunk below the level of conscious effort, freeing the child’s actual attention for the parts of the task that do require thought: is there enough butter left, does this smell right, what comes next. A child in the middle of that competence is not performing a cute imitation of adult life. She is running a genuinely complex, self-directed, multi-step sequence with a fluency most adults would envy in themselves after a stressful morning.

The adult’s job, watching this, is closer to the weaver’s teacher than to a curriculum designer: not to explain the pattern in advance, but to make sure every individual motion has been practiced long enough, and slowly enough, that it can eventually disappear into the hands. You cannot shortcut a weaver to fluency by describing the finished pattern to her in more detail. You cannot shortcut a child to a cooked breakfast by explaining, verbally, how eggs work.

The explaining was never where the skill was going to live.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going inside ourselves.”

-Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, p. 208

There is a particular quality to the moment before a phone rings that I have spent most of my life feeling in my body before I understood it as information. A tightening low in the stomach. A held breath. The screen lights up with the name of someone I love, and still my hand does not move toward it. For years I called this a personality quirk: I am a caller, not a called, and let it go at that. I did not yet know that my body was producing, in real time, a readable measurement. A reading I had simply never learned to take.

Coherence is not a mood. It is a measurable state of the heart, the breath, the nervous system and the body broadcasts it constantly, whether or not anyone is listening. This letter is about learning to listen. About the instruments, both the ones you can buy and the one you already are.

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The Most Honest Number in Your Body

If you want a single, well-studied window into your inner state, it is your heart rate variability… HRV. The name is counterintuitive at first. A healthy heart does not beat like a metronome; the interval between beats is meant to vary, expanding and contracting with each breath. That variability is the signature of a flexible, responsive nervous system, a body that can shift between effort and rest. When variability flattens, it is often a sign of stress, depletion, or a system stuck in defense.

The researchers at HeartMath have spent decades studying a specific, trainable state they call heart coherence, a smooth, ordered HRV pattern that arises when heart, breath, and emotion come into rhythm. Their work also documents what many of us sense intuitively: the heart generates an electromagnetic field far stronger than the brain’s, a field that extends beyond the skin and that other bodies can detect. Coherence, in other words, is not only something you feel. It is something you transmit.

The Body Was Keeping Score

I come to this subject as someone who spent decades not taking the reading. I was raised in a family culture where grit was the virtue and independence the requirement, where fear was something you swallowed and angst was dismissed with a handful of gravel and a boys will be boys. Bessel van der Kolk titled his landmark book The Body Keeps the Score, and he meant it literally: trauma is not only a memory in the mind, it is an imprint in the tissue. I have come to feel my own fascia, that connective web that wraps and separates muscle and bone, as a kind of quantum field of meaning, holding the energetic record of every dismissal I learned to absorb. The score was being kept whether or not I ever read it.

My younger sister Shana is the part of this I cannot write lightly. When her liver failed and took her life, the medical account named her obesity as the reason, a single number on a chart standing in for a whole life. But I am convinced the body was keeping a longer score than any clinic measured. Her liver had spent a lifetime processing the toxic culture we were all born into, the lifelong work of trying to earn a belonging that was withheld from her in childhood. She was a body measured the wrong way: read by the one instrument that was easy to read, while the deeper incoherence went unmeasured and unmet.

This is the quiet danger of measurement. A number can illuminate or it can replace. HRV, a coherence app, a lab value, these are gifts when they make the invisible legible, when they give you a foothold for change. They become a harm when they flatten a life into the one variable that fits on the screen. The art is to hold the objective and the subjective together: to let the instrument inform the body without letting it overrule the body’s own deeper knowing.

A Subjective Instrument: Your Disposition Toward Awe

Not everything worth measuring shows up on a heart monitor. Researchers Michelle Shiota, Dacher Keltner, and Oliver John developed a self-report scale for dispositional awe; not the lightning-strike awe of a single encounter, but your standing orientation toward wonder. Adapted gently below, it is a reading you take in your own words.

Add your scores. A higher total suggests a life already tilted toward wonder; a lower one is not a failing grade but an invitation. Unlike HRV, this number will not appear on any device and that is precisely its value. It measures the one thing the heart monitor cannot: where you have been pointing your attention. (Adapted from the awe subscale of the Dispositional Positive Emotion Scale; Shiota, Keltner & John, 2006.)

Two Readings, One Body

Here is the practice I keep returning to: pair the objective with the subjective and let them check each other. Let the HRV line tell you when your nervous system is depleted, and let your own felt sense tell you why. Let the awe self-rating reveal where your attention lives, and let a slow week of coherence breathing begin to move it. The instruments make the invisible legible; the body supplies the meaning. Neither is complete alone.

And when you take the reading, take it the way you would want to be measured, not as a verdict on your worth, but as a kindness, a way of finally listening to a body that has been broadcasting all along.

These days, when the phone rings and the old tightening rises, I notice it differently. Not as a flaw to override, but as a reading, a small honest signal from a nervous system shaped by everything it has carried. I put a hand on my heart. I slow the breath. I let the line smooth. Sometimes I even answer. The measurement was never the point; the listening was. The body keeps the score so that one day we might learn to read it, and, reading it, begin at last to mend.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

For eleven months of the year, the cholla is easy to walk past without a glance. It stands out on the grassland edges here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the piñon and juniper thin into open scrub. A grey-green, thorned, faintly menacing shape, more skeleton than plant, the kind of thing a jackrabbit ducks under and a person gives a wide berth. Nothing about it, most of the year, suggests it is capable of producing anything but more thorns. You could drive past a hillside of it a hundred times in winter and never once wonder what it’s for.

Then, for a handful of days in early summer, it opens.

Not gradually. Not one flower easing into bloom while its neighbor considers. The cane cholla across an entire hillside will hold its readiness for months and then release it within the same narrow window… a magenta so saturated it looks less like a flower than a wound, waxy-petaled, improbably large for a plant that spends the rest of its year looking like a weapon. And here is the part that matters most for what this allegory is actually about: each individual bloom opens for a single day. It unfurls in the morning, holds through the heat, and by the next day it is finished, closed, spent, done, while the plant beside it might be just opening its own. The window is not seasonal in some loose, forgiving sense. It is a day. Miss it, and that particular flower will not reopen to give you a second look.

Dr. Montessori noticed something that looked, to the adults around her, almost supernatural: a child who had shown no particular interest in letters for months would, within days of some invisible internal shift, become nearly unable to walk past a printed word without sounding it out: pulling cereal boxes off the shelf, tracing shop signs with a finger, asking what a word says four times on one walk to the car. And then, weeks or months later, just as suddenly, the intensity would recede, replaced by an equally fierce and equally temporary hunger for something else entirely, small precise movements, or order, or the exact sequence of a routine repeated with what looks like tyrannical insistence.

She called these windows the sensitive periods: temporary, intense, almost involuntary pulls toward one specific kind of activity, present only for a season, and gone, not diminished, gone once that season passes.

The uncomfortable part of this, for anyone trying to run a classroom on a syllabus, is that the bloom does not open on a curriculum’s schedule. It opens on the plant’s own accumulated readiness, invisible from the outside right up until the morning it isn’t.

And you can fail to notice it arrived. This is the real risk, more than mistiming a lesson; a child moves through a sensitive period whether or not an adult is paying attention, and if the environment offers nothing for that particular hunger to seize on, the intensity doesn’t hold the door and wait. It closes on its own schedule, same as the flower closes at dusk whether or not a bee found it that day. What was available in that narrow window either got absorbed with an ease that looks almost unfair, or it didn’t, and the next attempt (outside the window) will take real effort where this one would have taken none.

This is also, worth saying plainly, not a tragedy that ruins a child. A hillside that loses one bloom to a bad frost still flowers again next year, and most windows return in some form across childhood. But it is the argument, quietly, for a prepared environment kept ready in every direction at once, language, order, movement, refinement of the senses, rather than a curriculum marched through in sequence, because no one, however careful an observer, can call the exact morning a particular flower will open.

This is the ninth in the Montessori Allegories series, continuing from the Absorbent Mind and the wet clay. Read the rest of the series found in The Holding Field on my substack website.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

— attributed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I remember the first time I was told the scientific story of the coming of the universe. The whole of it, from the first flaring forth through the long labor of stars and the slow emergence of life, all the way down to the particular morning in which I sat and heard it. I was in my Montessori elementary training, young and less-formed, and I felt as though my head might come apart. The idea that I, this small, specific, ordinary person, was not separate from that story but made of it landed like a seed. I did not yet know what it would grow into.

It took my graduate work with The Institute for Educational Studies (TIES), years later, for that seed to fully crack open. I was no longer the young trainee encountering cosmic education for the first time; I was a working adult, supposedly formed, sitting again with the same story and this time it did not just land, it rearranged me. I understood, for the first time as fact rather than metaphor, that I am not a self who happens to exist inside an evolving universe.

I am an evolutionary spirit, one of the forms the unfolding takes when it becomes capable of noticing itself.

A current outcome of a process that began at the beginning of everything and had never once stopped. Something rearranged, fully this time. I have spent the years since leaning into that rearrangement rather than away from it, and these letters are, in a sense, the long aftermath of that one telling.

This is the fifth and final pathway in this series, and it gathers the other four into itself. Presence taught us to arrive in the moment. Vastness, to be dwarfed by scale. Openness, to stay in the question. Gratitude, to trace the improbable gift. The Universe Story does all of these at once, and adds the thing they were quietly building toward: a place to stand. Not a fact to know but a narrative to inhabit, a story so large and so true that it can reorganize, from the inside, your sense of who and what you are.

That distinction between knowing the story and living inside it, is the whole of this letter. Most of us were handed the universe as information: a sequence of facts about deep time and cosmic distances, filed somewhere between physics and trivia. Very few of us were handed it as identity, as the actual account of where we come from and what we are. The first leaves you a spectator of a vast indifferent machine. The second makes you a participant in an unfolding you belong to. Same facts. Entirely different universe to live in.

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Why a story does what a fact cannot

Human beings do not orient by facts. We orient by stories. Every culture that has ever existed has held a cosmology, an account of how the world came to be and where its people fit, because a creation story is not decoration; it is the load-bearing structure of a sense of belonging. It tells you what is sacred, what you owe, where you stand. Strip a people of their orienting story and you do not get neutral, rational clarity. You get drift, anxiety, the peculiar modern loneliness of a self with no cosmos to be part of.

Here is what Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme shared: for the first time in history, we possess a creation story that is empirically true and universally shared. The story science has assembled, the flaring forth, the forging of elements in dying stars, the emergence of life and mind on this particular planet belongs to no single tribe. It is the shared inheritance of everyone alive. And it is not less wondrous for being true; it is more. We are, quite literally, the stuff of collapsed stars become capable of contemplating the stars. Berry called this the New Story, and he argued that learning to tell it and to feel ourselves inside it, is the central spiritual task of our moment.

This is also, not incidentally, the heart of what Maria Montessori called Cosmic Education. She understood that a child given the universe as a story, their own existence woven into the long drama of becoming, receives something a curriculum of disconnected facts can never provide: a felt sense of belonging to a whole, and with it the natural emergence of responsibility, gratitude, and awe. What she designed for children is, I have come to believe, exactly what the adults are starving for too. We never outgrow the need to know the story we are living inside.

My story is your story is Earth’s story

My dear friend and mentor Dr. Philip Snow Gang, the Dean of TIES where I now teach, has a line he returns to like a refrain: My story is your story is Earth’s story is the universe’s story is Earth’s story is your story is my story. He says it as a kind of incantation, the clauses folding back on themselves, and the first dozen times I heard it I received it as a lovely idea. It took me longer to understand he meant it as a literal description of fact. There is no clean boundary where the universe stops and I begin. The carbon in my hands was forged in a star. The water in my blood is older than the sun. The story of the cosmos is not the backdrop against which my little story plays out. My little story is one of the ways the cosmos is currently telling itself.

When that lands, not as a thought but as an identity, in the body, it reorganizes the self the way that first telling reorganized mine. The anxious, defended, separate ego that spends its days auditing its own worth turns out to have been a case of mistaken identity.

You are not a thing the universe contains. You are something the universe is doing.

This is the recognition the mystics across every tradition kept pointing at, and which the New Story now lets us approach without requiring us to leave science at the door. To live inside the cosmic story is to wake each morning not as an isolated speck briefly visiting a foreign world, but as a local expression of a fourteen-billion-year process that is, through you, still underway. Still differentiating. Still reaching toward what does not yet exist. That is not a metaphor. It is, as nearly as we can tell, simply what is happening.

I will not pretend I hold this awareness constantly. No one does. The pull of the small separate self is strong, and most days I forget. But the story, once truly received, never fully leaves. It waits. And in the moments I remember, watching the light come up the piñons, sitting with a struggling educator, standing in an emptied room, it returns and reorganizes me again, and I am, briefly and accurately, gobsmacked by the sheer fact of participation.

The place to stand

We have walked five pathways now: presence, vastness, openness, gratitude, and the great story that holds them all. They are not five separate techniques. They are five doors into a single room, and the room is this: a life lived in conscious participation with the unfolding of the universe. Each door opens onto the same astonishing recognition from a different angle. Slow down enough and you find it in the morning light. Let yourself be dwarfed and you find it in deep time. Stay open and you find it in the question. Trace the gift and you find it in gratitude. And live inside the story, and you find that you were never outside it to begin with.

Berry told us the universe is ‘a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects’, that the cosmos is not a warehouse of things but a vast, ongoing conversation in which every part, including you, is a participant with a voice. To live inside the Universe Story is simply to accept the invitation to that conversation. To stop being a spectator of a world you were told was indifferent, and to take your place as one of the ways it is currently coming awake.

You are the universe, having journeyed fourteen billion years, arriving this morning at the capacity to be astonished by itself. That is not hope. It is cosmology. And it is, every single day, an invitation to participate.

Resources & Further Reading

• Berry, Thomas. The Dream of the Earth (1988) and The Great Work (1999). The New Story and the universe as a communion of subjects.

• Montessori, Maria. To Educate the Human Potential (1948). The foundational text of Cosmic Education — the child’s existence woven into the story of the whole.

• Sagan, Carl. Cosmos (1980). “The nitrogen in our DNA… made in the interiors of collapsing stars.”

• Swimme, Brian Thomas, and Mary Evelyn Tucker. Journey of the Universe (2011). A contemporary telling of the cosmic story as identity and orientation.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

There is a moment, just after the clay comes off the wheel, when it will take anything. Press a leaf into it and the veins remain, each one, down to the smallest fork, long after the leaf itself has been brushed away. Set it down on a woven mat and the weave is there too, a ghost pattern pressed into the surface, permanent, though the mat is long since folded and put back on its shelf. No one taught the clay to hold the leaf’s structure. No one instructed it in the geometry of the weave. It simply was soft enough, at exactly the right moment, to take an impression and firm enough, a little later, to keep it forever.

This is not a metaphor about effort. That’s the part that’s easy to miss, watching a potter work. We assume the impression is a kind of labor, that the clay is doing something, working hard to hold the shape it’s given. It isn’t. The clay does nothing at all. It is simply present, in a state of readiness that will not come again once it hardens, and the world writes itself into it without asking permission and without the clay’s consent, effort, or even awareness that anything is happening.

Not because the child is passive, anyone who has watched a two-year-old insist on an exact seating arrangement at dinner knows there is nothing passive in there. But because the mechanism of learning, in those years, bears almost no resemblance to what we call learning later on. The child does not study the cadence of her home language and gradually master it through repetition and correction, the way a twelve-year-old might grind through vocabulary. She simply absorbs it, the rhythm, the idioms, the exact pitch her mother’s voice takes on when she’s worried, the grammar of a language so complex that adults spend years failing to learn it deliberately, and none of it required a single lesson. It arrived the way the leaf’s veins arrived in the clay: through proximity, through presence, at a moment of readiness that will not come again.

Montessori called this the absorbent mind, and she meant it almost literally. Not a mind that learns quickly. A mind that takes in the whole environment, its order or disorder, its tone, its textures, its unspoken rules, and is shaped by it, indiscriminately, the way clay does not distinguish between a beautiful leaf and a broken twig. Whatever touches it while it is soft, it keeps.

Which is either the most hopeful fact in education or the most sobering one, depending on what the child is pressed against.

If you have ever tried to remove a bad habit from your own body, a way of gripping a pencil, a knee that turns in when you run, you already know something about how differently the adult mind works. We can understand the correction. We can watch a demonstration and nod. And still the old pattern returns, because the shaping already happened, years ago, in tissue that has long since fired hard.

This is why the prepared environment matters so disproportionately in the earliest years, and why it can look, to an outside observer, like an almost excessive concern with small things, the exact height of a shelf, the placement of a pitcher, whether the reading corner faces the light. It is not fussiness. It is potter’s math. Whatever is placed near the clay while it is still soft becomes part of the clay. There is no neutral surrounding. The child is absorbing something every waking hour of those years, whether or not anyone intends to be teaching, and the only real choice on offer is whether that absorption happens by design or by accident.

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The other thing worth sitting with is the impermanence built into the metaphor itself: clay is only absorbent for a window. Press a leaf into fired clay and nothing happens, it slides off, unmarked. The child’s mind will not stay this porous. Which means the invisible, patient work of the early environment is not deferred maintenance. It is the only appointment that will ever be offered.

This is not to say humans cannot continue to learn new things and rewire our brains with tremendous effort. Current neurobiology reveals our brains continue to be pliable, what is called neuro-plasticity, into old age, yet these windows of opportunity or sensitive periods for learning in the first years of life are unsurpassed in terms of plasticity.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is “thank you,” that will be enough.

— attributed to Meister Eckhart

There is a particular afternoon I return to often. The house was sold (the one the mold had eaten, the one we had rebuilt with our own raw hands) and we were standing in front of a five-by-five storage unit deciding what, of an entire life, was worth keeping. Almost nothing made the cut. The furniture went. The books went. The things I had once believed I could not live without went, carried off by strangers who paid us small amounts of money and seemed delighted. And here is the part I did not expect, the part that still surprises me when I touch it: I felt light. Not bereft. Grateful. Each thing that left lifted a corresponding weight I had not known I was carrying, and by the time the unit was full and the rest was gone, I was standing in the emptiest moment of my adult life feeling something very close to joy.

It took me years to understand what that lightness was. It was gratitude, but not the kind we are usually sold. Not the gratitude of counting one’s blessings, the tidy ledger of good fortune. It was something fiercer and stranger: the recognition that losing nearly everything had handed me a freedom I could not have bought, and that the chain of events delivering me to that empty afternoon, the broken pipe, the ruined floor, the cataclysm, had, against all sense, been a kind of gift.

Presence taught us to arrive. Vastness, to be dwarfed. Openness, to stay un-concluded. Gratitude, the fourth pathway, teaches us to trace, to follow the improbable thread of causes backward until the sheer unlikeliness of this exact moment lands in the body as awe. Gratitude, it turns out, is not the polite cousin of wonder. It is one of its most reliable doorways.

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The loop between thanks and wonder

Gratitude and awe are not the same emotion, but they feed each other in a tight, self-reinforcing loop, and learning to start the loop on purpose is one of the most practical skills in this entire series. Here is how it runs. Gratitude begins by directing attention to something received: a kindness, a meal, a morning. But if you do not stop at the thing itself and instead ask how did this come to be here?, you begin tracing the causes, and the causes multiply, and they multiply fast. The coffee in your hand required a farmer, a climate, a continent, ten thousand years of agriculture, a sun. Trace any ordinary gift far enough and it opens onto the whole improbable structure of existence and that opening, that sudden sense of vast and intricate dependency, is awe.

Gratitude is a primer. Awe is what it ignites.

And the loop runs the other way, too. Awe, the felt smallness of the self inside something immense, reliably increases gratitude because a self that has stopped grasping is a self newly able to notice what it has been given. The awe researchers have measured this in both directions: grateful people are more prone to awe, and awe-struck people become more grateful. It is one of the few feedback loops in human psychology that compounds toward flourishing rather than away from it. Most of our loops are vicious. This one is virtuous, and it is available on demand.

There is solid evidence, too, that the loop is good medicine. Gratitude practices are among the most robustly supported interventions in all of positive psychology: associated with better sleep, lower stress, steadier mood, and a measurable rise in baseline well-being. But I want to be careful here, because gratitude has been thinned, in its popular form, into a kind of forced cheerfulness, a denial of difficulty. That is not what I am describing. The gratitude that opens onto awe is not the refusal to see what is hard. It is the capacity to see, even inside what is hard, the improbable gift of being here to see it at all.

The gratitude that arrives uninvited

The most powerful gratitude of my life did not come on a good day. It came when I was ill, felled, far from home, at a monastery in the hills above the Kathmandu Valley, the body in full revolt and the mind too weak to do much but lie still and receive. And there, of all places, with nothing to be conventionally thankful for, gratitude arrived in waves. Not because the suffering was good. Because the suffering had stripped away everything else, and what remained, when the grasping fell silent, was the bare astonishing fact of being alive at all … breath entering, breath leaving, a body still doing the patient work of keeping me here. Gratitude came not as a thought I produced but as a tide that moved through me, again and again, unbidden.

I have learned to trust that experience as the truest version of this pathway. In his poem “A Brief for the Defense”, poet Jack Gilbert insisted that we must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness, to embrace delight, in the ruthless furnace of this world, that to make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the devil. He was not being naive. He had seen plenty of the furnace. He was arguing that gratitude inside difficulty is not a denial of the difficulty, it is an act of defiance against it, a refusal to let the hard thing have the final word. The waves at Kopan taught me he was right. Gratitude is not what we feel when life is easy. It is the faculty that lets us find the gift even when life is not.

This reframes the whole catastrophe that set my life on its present course. For years I told the story of the mold, the condemned house, the series of unfortunate events, as a thing that happened to my family and me. Gratitude, the tracing kind, let me eventually see it differently: that the same chain of losses that broke our old life open was the chain that freed us into the new one. I would not wish those months on anyone. And I would not trade where they delivered me. Both of those are true at once, and holding them together is exactly the work of this pathway.

Gratitude as the shape of an open hand

I think now that the lightness I felt in front of that empty storage unit was gratitude in its truest form, the open hand rather than the closed fist.

The fist grasps, hoards, defends; it is the posture of a self trying to hold the universe still. The open hand receives and releases in the same gesture; it is the posture of a self that has understood it is part of a flow far larger than itself, a self willing to be given to and to give away. Syntropy, the universe’s pull toward connection and communion, moves through open hands. It cannot move through closed ones.

So this week, trace something. Follow one ordinary gift backward until you feel the vast intricate web that had to hold for it to reach you. Let the thanks open into wonder, and let the wonder deepen the thanks, and let the loop turn a few times until you feel it: the improbable, undeserved, astonishing fact of being here, now, at all. That is not a mood. It is a clear-eyed perception of the truth. And it may be, in the end, the only prayer we need.

Thank you for being here, for reading, for being one more improbable thread in the web. Trace it back far enough and even that is a wonder.

Resources & Further Reading

• Dawkins, Richard. Unweaving the Rainbow (1998). “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones” — the improbability of being born at all.

• Emmons, Robert A. Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier (2007). The leading empirical research on gratitude and well-being.

• Gilbert, Jack. “A Brief for the Defense,” in Refusing Heaven (2005). On the stubbornness required to accept gladness in a world full of suffering.

• Keltner, Dacher. Awe (2023). On moral beauty, the vagus nerve, and the reciprocal loop between gratitude and awe.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

There is a moment in the making of a painting, every painter knows it, most painters dread it, when the canvas stops being a question and becomes an answer. Up until that moment, anything is possible. The surface is open, responsive, genuinely alive to whatever comes next. The painter is in conversation with the work, and the conversation is real because neither party knows where it is going. Marks are made and responded to. Color calls for color. A shape in one corner creates an obligation in another. The painting is thinking, in whatever way paintings think, and the painter is thinking with it, and the two of them together are arriving somewhere that neither could have reached alone.

And then the moment comes, sometimes suddenly, sometimes so gradually it isn’t noticed until it’s already past, when the painting tips from question into answer. When there is now something to protect rather than something to discover. When the next mark is no longer a move in a conversation but a risk to something already achieved. The painter steps back. She looks. She is no longer painting , she is managing. Deciding what the painting is allowed to become, based on what it has already become.

Painters call this being precious. It is the death of the work, or at least of the work’s aliveness. The painting that results is often technically accomplished. It may even be beautiful in a certain way, finished, resolved, the product of genuine skill. But it has the quality of a conversation that was ended before it was finished. Something in it stopped listening. And the viewer, without necessarily knowing why, feels the absence of that listening.

The child at the easel has never been precious in her life.

Watch a young child paint, really paint, with full access to color and brush and an adult who has managed to quiet the part of herself that wants to intervene, and you are watching something that most adult painters spend decades trying to recover. The child is entirely in the act. The canvas is not a product she is producing. It is a place she is inhabiting. She mixes colors not because she has a plan for the mixture but because mixing is intrinsically compelling , because something in her needs to know what happens when blue meets orange, needs to feel the brush loaded heavily and then drawn lightly, needs to understand through her hands and her eyes and whatever interior intelligence governs aesthetic response what this material is and what it will do.

She will paint over what she made yesterday without hesitation. She will cover the thing that made her mother say oh, that’s beautiful, can we keep it with an entirely new layer of something that pleases her more in this moment, right now, with this particular quality of attention she brings to this Tuesday morning that she will never bring to any other morning again. She is not being careless with the painting. She is being faithful to the process. The painting was never the point. The painting was the residue of the point.

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The difficulty is understandable. Residue is visible. Process is not.

When a parent comes to pick up their child at the end of the day, they can see a painting. They can hold it, photograph it, hang it on the refrigerator, show it to a grandmother who will exclaim over it. The painting is evidence, of time spent, of development occurring, of the school doing something worth the tuition. It is legible. It communicates.

What cannot be communicated in the painting, what lives only in the forty minutes that preceded it, in the quality of absorption the child brought to the mixing and the covering and the decision and the revision and the moment of stillness before the next mark, that is invisible. It left no trace except in the child herself, in whatever the child is becoming through the repeated experience of being fully inside her own process without interruption or evaluation or the subtle pressure of an adult who would like the painting to be something frameable.

And so we have, gradually and with good intentions, begun to orient our Montessori art experiences around the production of residue. Around the painting rather than the painting. Around the thing that can be seen and held and assessed and documented rather than the process that was always the actual curriculum.

Some have become precious on the children’s behalf. Some are protecting canvases they would have painted over without a second thought.

The abstract expressionists understood something about this that is worth sitting with. Willem de Kooning famously said that he had to keep destroying the painting to keep it alive, that the moment he stopped being willing to lose what was there, the work died. Cy Twombly made marks that looked to many viewers like a child’s scrawl and was entirely comfortable with that description, because what he was after was precisely the quality of a mark made without the self-consciousness that technical mastery tends to install. He wanted the hand to know things the mind hadn’t approved yet. He wanted to stay in the question.

These were painters who had developed extraordinary technical skill and then had to fight, every day, to prevent that skill from making them precious. They had to practice not-knowing in the presence of something they knew very well. They had to cultivate, deliberately and with great effort, the quality that a three-year-old at an easel has for free.

There is a profound irony here that the Montessori allegory sharpens into something almost uncomfortable: the child doesn’t need to be taught to be in the process. She is in the process. Completely, naturally, without effort or philosophy. What she needs is for the adult to refrain from teaching her out of it.

Because we do teach children out of it. Not maliciously. Not even consciously, most of the time. We teach them out of it by exclaiming over the paintings we find beautiful, which teaches them that some paintings are more successful than others. We teach them out of it by asking what they made , is that a dog? is that our house? , which teaches them that paintings should be representations of something, should be legible, should mean something a viewer can identify. We teach them out of it by laminating and displaying and sending home, which teaches them that the painting is the point, that the residue is what matters, that the forty minutes of being fully inside the question were preparation for the canvas rather than the canvas being a trace of the forty minutes.

And slowly, without our quite noticing, the child at the easel begins to paint for the painting. She makes decisions based on what the result will look like rather than what the process feels like. She stops covering yesterday’s work because yesterday’s work was praised and she has learned, in the wordless way that children learn things that are never said aloud, that praised things should be protected. She has become, at four years old, precious.

Something in her has stopped listening.

Montessori was precise about what the prepared environment was for in relation to creative work, and her precision is worth sitting with, because it runs against the instincts of almost every well-meaning adult who has ever stood next to a child with a paintbrush. The environment is not for the production of art. It is not for the development of artistic skill, in the sense of technical accomplishment that can be observed and assessed. It is for the development of the child, and specifically, in the context of expressive work, for the development of the child’s relationship with her own interior life. Her capacity to notice what she is drawn to and follow it. Her ability to sustain engagement with something open-ended, something that has no right answer, something that requires her to keep listening to herself in the absence of external guidance.

This is not a small thing. It is, in fact, one of the central things. A child who has learned to follow her own aesthetic impulse, to trust the interior signal that says more blue here, something different there, this is finished even though you might not see why, has learned something about self-knowledge and self-trust that will serve her in every domain of her life.

There is a practice among some painters called pentimento , from the Italian word for repentance, for regret. It refers to the traces of earlier marks that show through later layers of paint as the surface ages, the ghost of a composition the painter changed her mind about, the arm that was repositioned, the figure that was painted out and replaced. In old master paintings, pentimento is considered a sign of authenticity, of genuine process. It proves the painting was made by a person thinking, not by a person executing a predetermined plan. The changes are evidence of a conversation.

A child’s painting is all pentimento. It is nothing but the record of a thinking process, a conversation between the child and the material and the moment, with every reversal and revision intact. It doesn’t hide its changes. It couldn’t, even if it wanted to.

When we intervene too soon , when we exclaim over an early layer and teach the child to protect it, we are, in effect, varnishing the painting before it’s finished. Sealing in the first thought. Preventing the pentimento that would have proved the conversation was real.

The deepest preparation a Montessori guide can make in relation to creative work is interior: the discipline of finding the finished painting genuinely less interesting than the child who is making it. Of training her eye to look past the canvas to the quality of absorption on the child’s face, the slight frown of concentration, the almost involuntary physical response to a color that isn’t working, the stillness that descends when something suddenly is. Of learning, over many years of practice, to be more interested in the question than the answer.

This is harder than it sounds. The painting is right there. It is colorful and visible and it wants to be responded to. The process is invisible. It makes no demands. It will not be hurt if you ignore it.

But the child will know. Children always know when the adult in the room is looking at the canvas rather than at them. They feel the shift in attention , the way the gaze moves from their face to their work, from the making to the made. And they adjust, because children are exquisitely calibrated to the attention of the adults who matter to them. They begin to make things worth looking at, rather than things worth making.

And something, once again, quietly stops.

The painter who is no longer precious, who has fought her way back to the question after years of being seduced by answers, describes the return as something like relief. Like setting down a weight she didn’t know she was carrying. She is in the work again rather than managing it from outside. The canvas is a question again. Anything is possible.

This is what the child at the easel has, this morning, for free.

Our job is simply not to take it from her.

Not to ask what it is.

Not to save it before she’s finished.

Not to love the painting more than we love the painting.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe,basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

… it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement… I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

— John Keats, letter to his brothers, 1817

When we sold nearly everything we owned and drove off into a life with no fixed address, my husband, daughter, and I gave ourselves two mottos. We did not plan them so much as discover them, the way you discover the shape of a thing only after you have been living inside it for a while. The first was Open to the Possibility. The second was Question Assumptions. We painted them, in our way, onto the dashboard of our small motorhome, a creature we had named Cosmic Charlie, and they became less like slogans and more like a steering mechanism. When self-doubt rose, when a road washed out, when a plan dissolved in front of us, one of us would say the words and the other would feel the grip loosen.

I have thought a great deal, in the years since, about why those two phrases worked. And I have come to believe they are the whole of the third pathway, compressed into seven words. Openness is the disposition that says I do not yet know and treats that not-knowing not as a deficiency to be hurried past but as the precise condition under which something new can arrive.

Presence taught us to arrive. Vastness taught us to be dwarfed. Openness teaches us to stay un-concluded, to resist the very human itch to slam the door of a question shut with the first answer that fits. It is the hardest of the pathways to hold, because everything in us, and almost everything in our culture, rewards the fast closure. And yet without it, awe is impossible. You cannot be astonished by a world you have already decided you understand.

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Why the mind reaches for the door

The brain is, among other things, a prediction machine. It survives by closing uncertainty as fast as it can, by taking the flood of raw sensation and resolving it instantly into a known category: tree, friend, threat, done. This is a magnificent capacity and we would not last a day without it. But it has a cost, and the cost is exactly the texture of the world. The faster we categorize, the less we actually perceive. The label arrives and the looking stops.

Cynicism, I have come to think, is this reflex hardened into a worldview. It is closure pretending to be wisdom. The cynic has decided, in advance, how things will turn out (people are selfish, institutions fail, nothing really changes) and the great advantage of this stance is that it can never be surprised and therefore never disappointed. But the price is steep: a person who cannot be surprised cannot be moved, and a person who cannot be moved has sealed themselves off from awe entirely. The research bears this out. Comfort with mystery, the awe scientists find, correlates directly with awe-proneness. The people most able to say “I don’t understand this, and I don’t need to” are the people most available to wonder.

Here is where it touches the cosmology. The universe we have been describing in these letters is not a finished object; it is a process still underway, still differentiating, still reaching toward forms that do not yet exist. To meet such a universe with a closed mind is a category error, it is to bring a fixed answer to an open question. Openness is simply the disposition that matches reality’s actual shape. Not-knowing is not ignorance about a settled world. It is accuracy about an unfinished one.

The art of staying in the question

Two centuries ago the poet John Keats named the capacity I am circling. He called it negative capability: the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. I love that he called the reaching irritable, because that is exactly how premature closure feels from the inside: an itch, a discomfort, a craving to resolve.

Negative capability is the discipline of not scratching. Of letting the question stay open long enough for it to teach you something the answer never could.

Rebecca Solnit, in her field guide to getting lost, makes the case that the unknown is not a void to be feared but a country to be entered, that the most generative things in a life often arrive only when we have wandered past the edge of our maps. This was the literal condition of our years in Cosmic Charlie, and I can tell you it is true. The richest moments did not come from the itinerary. They came from the washed-out road, the wrong turn, the festival we stumbled into in a village whose name we never learned. Open to the Possibility was not a comfort we told ourselves. It was a method. It was how we kept the door propped open long enough for the unplanned grace to walk through it.

The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki put the same truth in a single, often-quoted line: in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. The expert has spent the door. This is the quiet danger of expertise, a danger I watch for constantly in my own field, where seasoned educators can become so certain of how a thing is done that they stop seeing the child actually in front of them. Maria Montessori’s whole method rests on an act of openness so radical it still unsettles people: the adult is asked to set down their assumptions and observe — to approach the child as a mystery to be discovered rather than a vessel to be filled. Question Assumptions, it turns out, is not just a traveler’s motto. It is a pedagogy. It may even be a cosmology.

Not-knowing as a syntropic act

I want to end where the cosmology insists we end. Syntropy: the universe’s pull toward greater complexity, connection, and consciousness and only operates in systems that remain open. A closed system runs down; it tends toward entropy, toward sameness and dissipation. It is the open system, the one still exchanging with what lies beyond it, that can climb toward new order. This is not a metaphor I am draping over the spiritual life. It is the literal physics of becoming. To stay open, to keep questioning the assumption, to keep saying I do not yet know, is to keep yourself in the one condition under which growth is even possible. Openness is how a person stays syntropic.

Cosmic Charlie is long sold now, but I still carry the two mottos. They sit on the dashboard of whatever I am driving: a conversation, a classroom, a year I cannot yet see the shape of. Open to the Possibility. Question Assumptions. Seven words against the irritable reaching after certainty. Seven words that keep the door propped open just wide enough for astonishment to find its way in.

Stay in the question a little longer this week. The answer will keep. The wonder will not.

Resources & Further Reading

• Keats, John. Letter to George and Tom Keats (December 1817). The origin of “negative capability” — dwelling in uncertainty without irritable reaching after fact.

• Montessori, Maria. The Absorbent Mind (1949). Observation as the discipline of setting down adult assumptions to meet the child as mystery.

• Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005). The unknown as a generative country to be entered rather than a void to be feared.

• Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970). “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with how much you’ve done. Swimmers know it. You have been in the water for an hour. You have moved constantly , arms pulling, legs kicking, lungs working hard. And yet when you look up, you are more or less where you started, or perhaps slightly further back than when you began. The current was running against you the entire time and you didn’t feel it as a current. You felt it as resistance, as difficulty, as your own inadequacy. You swam harder. The tide was indifferent.

The ocean has its own rhythm, older than anything alive in it. The tides are not negotiating. They are not responsive to urgency or schedule or the particular plans of the people who would like to cross a particular stretch of water at a particular time. They operate on a clock set by the moon, and the moon does not consult us.

Expert open-water swimmers understand something that novices don’t: you do not fight a tidal current. You learn its rhythm. You find the slack water , the brief window between the ebb and the flow when the current is neither running strongly in one direction nor the other , and you move then, in the direction you need to go, with the water rather than against it. You let the ocean’s own timing become your timing. Not because you are passive, but because you have learned something true about the nature of the thing you are working with.

Montessori observed something in the Children’s House that took her years to fully articulate because it ran against almost everything her culture assumed about children and learning and what productivity was supposed to look like. The children who did the deepest work, who made the real leaps, who consolidated genuine understanding, who emerged from a morning transformed in some quiet but measurable way, were not the children who had been busy the entire time.

They were the children who had been allowed to follow the full arc of their own engagement. Who had circled a material before committing to it. Who had worked intensely and then rested and then returned. Who had apparently done nothing for stretches of time that would have made an anxious observer deeply uncomfortable, and then suddenly, without announcement, gone deep.

She described this arc, the false fatigue, the rest, the return, the deep work, as the natural rhythm of the work cycle. Not a schedule she imposed. A rhythm she observed and then, with great care, protected. The prepared environment was organized around it. The three-hour morning was not an arbitrary duration, it was, or was intended to be, long enough that the full tide could run. Long enough that a child could circle, and settle, and go deep, and surface, and rest, and go deep again. Long enough that the slack water could be found and used.

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What we have done, in many of our programs, is cut the morning into segments too short for the tide to complete a cycle. We have installed interruptions, transitions, specialist pullouts, group times scheduled by the clock rather than by the children’s readiness, at the precise moments when the current was running. We have asked children to swim against the tide and then wondered why they seemed scattered, why the deep work was rare, why the transformation Montessori described felt elusive.

We were fighting the ocean.

Here is what false fatigue looks like, because it is important to recognize it and almost universally misread.

A child has been working at something challenging for twenty minutes. She pushes back from the table. She wanders. She picks up something from a shelf and puts it back. She lies on the floor for a moment, staring at the ceiling. She gets up and goes to the window. She seems, to every adult in the room, to have lost interest, to have given up, to be in need of redirection or a new invitation or perhaps a snack.

She is not. She is in the trough between waves. The work is still happening , it has simply moved inward, away from the visible surface, into whatever interior space consolidation requires. The brain, which has been working hard, is doing something that looks like nothing and is in fact essential. If she is left alone, genuinely alone, not watched with the particular quality of adult attention that telegraphs expectation and creates pressure, she will return to the work. Not always immediately. Sometimes after ten minutes of apparent wandering. Sometimes after a conversation with another child that seems entirely unrelated to anything. But she will return, and when she does, she will go deeper than she went before.

The swimmer has found the slack water.

If, at the moment of false fatigue, an adult intervenes , redirects, offers, suggests, checks in with a quality of helpfulness that is actually anxiety wearing a helpful face , the cycle is broken. Not catastrophically. Not irreparably. But the tide that was about to turn is disturbed, and the child must begin again from the surface, and the deep work that was forty minutes away is now further off, and may not be reached before the morning ends.

Jana Morgan Herman’s research into Montessori’s original schedule found something quietly important here: the original day was not three unbroken hours of independent work at materials. It included conversation, collective activity, time outside, the shared rhythms of a household. What it did not include was the kind of anxious, segmented, adult-managed time-filling that characterizes some programs today. The original day had a quality of breath, expansion and contraction, effort and rest, the individual and the collective moving in and out like the tide itself. The rhythm was not imposed. It was honored.

There is a swimmer I want to tell you about, though she is composite, made of many children I have watched or heard described by guides who were paying close attention.

She is five years old and she has been circling the long division bead frame for three days. Not working with it, circling. Watching other children use it. Touching it briefly and walking away. Carrying it to a table and then returning it to the shelf. Her guide has noted this and said nothing, has not offered a lesson, has not asked whether she’d like to try. Has simply continued to observe.

On the fourth morning the child takes the bead frame to a table and begins. She works for an hour and forty minutes without stopping, not the restless, surface-level engagement of a child who is busy, but the deep, interior, slightly unreachable quality of engagement that Montessori described as the hallmark of the work cycle at its fullest. When she finishes she sits for a moment in what can only be described as satisfaction. Then she puts the material away, gets her snack, and goes outside.

Three days of circling. Four days of apparently doing nothing. One hour and forty minutes of something that looked, from outside, like a child finally working, but was actually the culmination of a process that had been running the entire time, underground, in the trough, following the rhythm of a tide that the guide had been wise enough, patient enough, not to interrupt.

The guide did not teach this child long division in that hour and forty minutes. She taught her, in the three days before it, something harder: that her own rhythm was trustworthy. That the environment would wait. That she did not need to perform readiness before she had actually arrived at it.

This is what the work cycle, fully honored, actually teaches. Not the content of the materials. The relationship between a child and her own interior process. The knowledge, earned through repeated experience, that going deep is safe, that the environment is organized around her rhythm rather than around adult anxiety about whether enough is happening.

An expert open-water swimmer does not fight the tide. But neither does she simply drift. She reads the water. She understands the rhythm well enough to plan within it, to conserve energy in the running current, to move decisively in the slack water, to know which direction she is heading even when the ocean is temporarily taking her somewhere else.

This reading is a skill. It takes years to develop, and it cannot be learned from a training manual, because it is fundamentally about the cultivation of a particular quality of attention , patient, non-anxious, genuinely curious , that has to be practiced in the presence of actual children over actual time. It is the same quality Montessori asked of all prepared adults, in every allegory we might construct: the quality of someone who has learned to trust the process they are tending, even when , especially when , the process looks like nothing from the outside.

The tide is running. Let it run.

The slack water is coming. Be ready.

And when the child goes deep , when she finally, fully, irretrievably commits to the work that has been waiting for her , have the discipline to disappear. To become, in that moment, simply part of the environment. The right temperature of water. The right quality of light.

The current that carries rather than impedes.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

There is a moment in the Montessori elementary classroom that I have watched undo a child more times than I can count. It comes during the telling of the great story of life, the one we lay out as a long timeline, a strip of paper so absurdly long it has to be unrolled down a hallway or across a field, every epoch to scale. The child walks the timeline. And somewhere out past the dinosaurs, past the first flowers, past the long blank stretches where nothing complex existed at all, the child arrives at the very end and finds the entire span of human life compressed into a band so thin it is barely a fingernail’s width of red at the edge of the whole. I have seen six-year-olds go quiet in front of that fingernail. Something rearranges behind their eyes.

That rearrangement is what we are after this week. It has a name in the literature, the small self, and it is one of the most reliable gifts that vastness gives.

Presence, the first pathway, taught us to slow down enough to arrive. Vastness, the second, asks something almost opposite: it asks us to let ourselves be dwarfed. Not crushed, dwarfed, which is a different and stranger pleasure. To stand at the edge of something so much larger than the self that the self, for a moment, loosens its grip and rejoins the larger thing. This is the pathway of the timeline and the night sky, but it is also, as I want to argue, the pathway of the conversation that goes deeper than you expected. Vastness is not only out there. Some of the largest country there is lies behind the eyes of the person across the table.

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What being dwarfed does to a nervous system

In the research, vastness is one of the two defining features of awe, the experience of something so large in scale or concept that our existing mental models cannot quite contain it, which forces what seminal awe researcher Dacher Keltner calls accommodation: the mind has to update, to build new structure to hold what it just met. The other feature is exactly that need for accommodation. Vastness is the trigger; the scramble to make sense of it is the response. And in that scramble something therapeutic happens. Studies of awe consistently find a shrinking of the self-referential mind, that anxious inner accountant we met in the last letter goes quiet, alongside a measurable rise in generosity, patience, and the sense of having enough time. People primed with vastness literally report feeling that time has expanded.

This is worth pausing on, because our culture sells the opposite cure. When we feel small and overwhelmed, the marketplace urges us to feel big, to assert, to optimize, to brand the self into something solid and significant. But the science of awe suggests the relief runs the other way. The antidote to the anxious, inflated, exhausted self is not a bigger self. It is a smaller one, set briefly inside something immense and benevolent enough to belong to. The fingernail of red at the end of the timeline does not diminish the child. It enlarges the child’s sense of what they are part of.

And here is the cosmological turn that matters to these letters: deep time is not a backdrop against which life happens. It is the medium in which the universe composes itself, slowly, toward greater complexity and interiority, the very syntropic arc we have been tracing. To feel the vastness of thirteen point eight billion years is to feel the size of the patience the cosmos has been practicing.

Brian Thomas Swimme puts it as a kind of identity rather than information: you are not a thing that happened recently inside a very old universe. You are the very old universe, having arrived, after all that time, at the capacity to know itself. The timeline is not behind you. It is what you are made of.

The vastness you can’t see from a cliff

It is easy to locate vastness in the obvious places, the canyon rim, the field of stars, the deep-time scroll unrolling down the hall. The neuro-anthropologists think our species may have built the very capacity for awe at exactly such vistas, scanning the horizon from the mouth of a cave. But I have come to believe the most under-visited vastness of all is the interior life of another human being, and that learning to feel it is a discipline worth as much as any mountain.

George Eliot, in a passage I return to often, imagined that if we could truly feel the ordinary inner life of another person, all their hidden grief and striving, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, a roar on the other side of silence that we are, mercifully and tragically, mostly deaf to. That deafness is efficient. We could not function if we felt the full immensity of every stranger. But cultivated awe asks us to lift the deafness, deliberately, now and then, to remember that the person bagging your groceries or sitting across your dinner table contains a span as unmapped as any geological era. Decades of interior weather. Whole epochs of love and loss you will never see the timeline of.

I have felt this most acutely in the rooms where I work with adults, where educators who arrive as a roster of names slowly become legible to one another as the staggeringly deep beings they are. A conversation tips past its expected depth. Someone says the true thing under the polite thing. And suddenly the room has the same quality the hallway timeline has: a felt immensity, a small-self loosening, the recognition that you are in the presence of something far larger than you assumed. Any human face, attended to closely enough, becomes a sufficient lifetime’s study. This is vastness you reach not by traveling but by attending. It is the Grand Canyon of the ordinary, and it is sitting across from you more often than you notice.

The gift of the small self

Loren Eiseley, the naturalist who spent his life kneeling at the edge of deep time, came to suspect that we are not the centerpiece of the universe but something the universe is doing , a way the cosmos turns a corner and glimpses itself. That is the disposition vastness builds. Not a humiliation but a relocation: out of the cramped, defended, fingernail-sized self and into the immense unfolding that has been composing us all along. The small self is not the diminished self. It is the self that has finally found the right scale to feel its belonging.

So this week, let yourself be dwarfed. Walk the timeline, real or imagined, and find your thin red band at the end of it , and then feel, behind that band, the thirteen billion years of patience that made you possible. And when you sit across from another person, remember that you are sitting across from another such span, another timeline rolled up behind another pair of eyes. The vastness above is matched by the vastness within and the vastness across. Awe lives in all three, and the disposition we are building learns to find it in whichever one is nearest.

Love the questions, Rilke said, the locked rooms, the books in a foreign tongue. Vastness is the practice of loving them precisely because they are larger than we are.

Resources & Further Reading

Eiseley, Loren. The Immense Journey (1957). The naturalist’s meditations on deep time and the human place within the unfolding universe.

Eliot, George. Middlemarch (1871–72). Source of the “roar on the other side of silence” — the unbearable, ordinary vastness of another’s inner life.

Keltner, Dacher. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (2023). On vastness, accommodation, and the “small self.”

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet (1929; Letter Four, 1903). “Love the questions themselves.”

Sagan, Carl. Cosmos (1980). “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

Swimme, Brian Thomas, and Mary Evelyn Tucker. Journey of the Universe (2011). Deep time as identity rather than information; the cosmos arriving at self-awareness.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe,basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

There is a word bakers use that non-bakers sometimes find unsettling: fermentation. It sounds biological, which it is. It sounds like something is happening that you cannot entirely control, which is also true. Fermentation is the process by which wild yeasts, invisible, ancient, present in the flour and the air and on the baker’s own hands, begin to consume the sugars in the dough and produce, as a byproduct of that consumption, the carbon dioxide that makes bread rise and the acids that give sourdough its complexity and the alcohols that contribute to flavor in ways that no list of ingredients could predict in advance.

The baker does not make this happen. The baker makes it possible.

She mixes flour and water and salt in proportions she has learned through practice and failure and practice again. She folds the dough at intervals that develop its structure without tearing it. She controls the temperature of the room, not precisely, because precision is not quite the right word here, but attentively, because a dough that is too cold ferments too slowly and a dough that is too warm ferments too fast and in both cases something is lost that cannot be retrieved. She covers the bowl. She waits. She checks, not obsessively, not every ten minutes with a ruler, but with the kind of patient, practiced attention that has learned to read the signs: the slight dome of the surface, the bubbles visible through the sides of the glass bowl, the way the dough has become softer and more alive under her hands than it was an hour ago.

And then she waits some more.

The dough is doing something she cannot do for it. It is becoming itself.

What Montessori observed in the children of the first Casa dei Bambini , those traumatized, neglected, chaotic children who had been given so little, was a transformation she did not expect and could not initially explain. Given the right conditions, something shifted. The children who had been scattered became concentrated. The children who had been aggressive became peaceful. The children who had been disconnected began to care, genuinely and spontaneously, for each other and for the environment they shared. They became, as she described it, more themselves, more fully expressed, more coherent, more joyful, than they had been before.

I have written elsewhere, with as much honesty as I could manage, about the violence that has accumulated around the word normal in the century since Montessori used it: the ways it has been weaponized against neurodivergent children, against anyone whose way of being didn't conform to a narrow standard of acceptable personhood. I stand by that argument, and I don't want to deflect it now for the sake of a tidy metaphor. The word carries harm it did not originally intend, and intention does not neutralize harm.

What Montessori observed, the thing the word normalization was reaching for however imperfectly, that is real. Bakers know it. You cannot fake a fully fermented dough. You cannot manufacture, through clever technique or forced intervention, the quality that comes from genuine transformation. It either happened or it didn’t. And if it happened, you know.

Perhaps what we need is not to abandon the concept but to find language that more honestly describes it. Not normalization, not the making normal of a child who was somehow abnormal, but something closer to what the baker watches: the dough becoming itself. The latent potential expressing itself through the right conditions over the right time. Not conformity. Coherence. Not normality. Wholeness.

Here is what the baker knows that the anxious observer does not: checking does not help.

A baker who cannot resist checking her dough too often , lifting the cloth, poking the surface, holding it up to the light, disrupts the very process she is trying to witness. The gas escapes. The structure deflates slightly. The fermentation continues, because it is stubborn and alive, but it does so having been interrupted, and the interruption leaves a trace. The bread is still bread. It is not quite what it might have been.

We do this with children and we call it many things. We call it assessment. We call it progress monitoring. We call it staying engaged, staying present, maintaining the relationship. Some of this is genuine and necessary, a baker does need to check her dough, just not compulsively, just not from anxiety. But some of what we call attentiveness in Montessori environments is actually a difficulty tolerating the uncertainty of the process. A child who is in the middle of something important often looks, from the outside, like a child who is not doing very much. The dough at its most active looks inert. The surface is still. What is happening is invisible and interior and cannot be confirmed by looking.

The dough deflates slightly. The child surfaces from something that was just beginning to go deep. And both of them continue, because both of them are resilient and alive. But something was interrupted that cannot quite be retrieved.

There is another thing about bread that I keep returning to in this context, and it has to do with the wild yeasts.

Commercial bread, the kind produced at industrial scale, soft and identical and available everywhere, is leavened with a standardized yeast. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, cultivated and packaged and consistent. It produces a reliable, predictable, fast rise. Every loaf behaves the same way. The baker who uses it can plan precisely, can schedule her day around known timelines, can produce a product that meets specifications.

Sourdough is different. Sourdough is leavened with a culture of wild yeasts that is specific to its place, to the flour, the water, the air, the hands of the baker, the particular corner of the kitchen where the jar lives. No two sourdough cultures are identical. The bread made in San Francisco cannot be exactly replicated in London, because the wild yeasts are different, the air is different, the water carries different minerals. The bread is irreducibly local. Irreducibly specific. Irreducibly itself.

The transformation Montessori observed is sourdough transformation, not commercial yeast transformation. It does not produce identical children on a predictable schedule. It produces this child, in this environment, with this particular culture of wild yeasts that includes her family and her history and her neurology and her particular way of meeting the world, becoming, over time and in the right conditions, more fully and specifically herself. The coherence that emerges is not a standard. It is a signature.

This is why the language of normalization has always been, at some level, the wrong language. You do not normalize sourdough. You create the conditions for its particular fermentation and you pay close enough attention to know when it has happened. The result is not normal. It is extraordinary in its specificity. It is unrepeatable.

What the prepared environment offers is not a standard toward which children are guided. It is warmth. It is the right proportions of what is needed. It is the attentive, patient, non-anxious presence of a baker who has learned, and this learning takes years, takes failure, takes the humility of many collapsed loaves , to trust the process she is tending.

Trained directly by Dr. Montessori, educator Margot Waltuch said practical life is the soul of the Montessori classroom. I have been thinking about that claim in relation to bread, which is perhaps the most ancient of all practical life activities, humans have been fermenting grain and baking it for at least fourteen thousand years. There is something in the making of bread that is not about the bread. That is about the transformation of raw material into something nourishing through patient attention and the right conditions and a willingness to let the living process do what it knows how to do.

Which is, it turns out, also not about the bread.

The child who has kneaded dough, who has watched the bowl for signs of rising, who has learned through her hands what fermentation feels like, she has learned something about trust. About the relationship between conditions and outcomes. About the difference between forcing and allowing. About what it means to care for something that is alive and therefore somewhat beyond your control.

These are not small lessons. They are, in some ways, the whole lesson.

The dough already knows how to become bread. It has known since before the baker touched it. Her job, our job, is to understand that, and to provide what the knowing requires.

Warmth. Time. The discipline not to interfere.

And then, when the moment is right, to witness what the dough, what the child, what the wild and irreducible living thing has become.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe,basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

— Mary Oliver

The coffee was cold again.

I had carried it out to the portal at first light, the way I do most mornings now, and set it on the low wall while the desert decided what color it wanted to be. A jackrabbit was working the far edge of the yard, ears up like twin sails, going still in that way they do, not frozen by fear so much as fully arrived, the whole animal listening. I meant to drink the coffee. Instead I watched the light come up the trunks of the piñons and lay their long blue shadows across the dirt, and by the time I remembered the cup in my hand, the steam was gone and the morning had moved on without me. Or rather: I had moved into it.

This happens to me a lot lately, and I have stopped apologizing for it. Cold coffee, it turns out, is the reliable evidence of a life being paid attention to.

We have spent the first two phases of these letters building the conceptual architecture, syntropy as the universe’s pull toward greater complexity and communion, awe as the felt experience of that pull moving through a human nervous system. Phase Three turns from the architecture to the practice. If awe is a disposition and not merely an event, something we can cultivate rather than only stumble into, then the question becomes wonderfully practical: how? Over the next five letters I want to walk five pathways into dispositional awe. Presence. Vastness. Openness. Gratitude. And the Universe Story itself. We begin where every one of them begins, because none of the others is reachable without it. We begin with presence.

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Why slowness is not laziness

There is a particular shame I was raised inside (you may have been too) that treats stillness as a kind of theft. My forebears prized pragmatism as a survival virtue, and somewhere in my fascia I absorbed the belief that a morning is only well spent if something measurable came out of it. To stop and watch a jackrabbit is to produce nothing. The internal accountant flinches.

But the science of attention tells a different story, and it is worth letting it correct the accountant. Dacher Keltner’s research at Berkeley has shown that the experience of awe reliably slows our sense of time, expands our perception of available resources, and quiets the drumbeat of the self-referential mind, that anxious inner narrator forever auditing our worth. Awe walks, in controlled studies, increase prosocial behavior and decrease self-focus. Awe even appears to lower inflammatory markers in the body, the very cytokines implicated in chronic stress. In other words, the morning I “wasted” watching the light may have done more for my nervous system than the productive one that came after.

Here is the part that moves me as a cosmologist of the small: presence is not a retreat from the universe’s work. It is participation in it. The capacity to slow down enough to notice is the capacity to perceive pattern, and pattern is where the cosmos shows its hand. When I finally see the piñon’s shadow as a fractal, the branch repeating in the twig repeating in the needle, the same generative grammar scaling up and down, I am not escaping reality. I am reading it at the resolution it was always written in. Presence is the lens that brings the syntropic structure of things into focus. Hurry blurs it.

What the work of my hands taught me

I learned presence, oddly, through a chisel.

There was a season not long ago when I spent my days lifting old tile from a floor … decades of footfall to be pried up one square at a time. Whack, whack, whack: the blade slides under the next tile, the tension releases, the piece comes free. It is slow, percussive, unglamorous work, and there is no shortcut through it. You cannot hurry a floor. And what I noticed, somewhere in the second week, was that I had stopped trying to. I had let go of any attachment to finishing. I was simply there, in the rhythm, in the dust, my whole attention narrowed to the precise meeting of steel and grout, and a strange spaciousness opened up inside that narrowness. The work became a kind of meditation I had not asked for. The desert bird chorus tuned up outside. My self-critique, that old auditor, went quiet. I was, for whole hours, only present.

That is the secret the productivity culture cannot metabolize: presence is not what is left over when the work is done. Presence is available inside the work, the moment you release your grip on its completion. The floor taught me that the threshold, the liminal, unfinished, in-between place, is not a problem to be solved by speed. It is a place to be inhabited by attention. We will return to that threshold throughout these letters. For now it is enough to say that I found it not on a mountaintop but on my knees with a chisel, and that the door into it was simply slowing down.

Ross Gay, the poet, keeps what he calls a delight journal, a daily discipline of noticing one small pleasure and writing it down, on the theory that what we attend to grows. He found that the more he studied his delight, the more delight there was to study, as though attention were a kind of cultivation, a tending. This is syntropy in miniature, running through a single human life: the act of noticing increases the thing noticed. Presence is not passive reception. It is participation in the deepening of the world.

The resistance hidden in attention

The writer Jenny Odell argues that attention is, in our extractive economy, a quietly radical act, that to give your full notice to a rosebush, a heron, a neighbor, is to withdraw a scarce resource from the machinery built to harvest it. I think she is right, and I think it goes further than economics. To be present is to refuse the universe’s entropy at the only scale you can actually affect: this moment, this breath, this jackrabbit gone still in the long blue shadows. Every act of genuine attention is a small vote cast for coherence over dissipation, for communion over distraction.

So let the coffee go cold. Let the floor stay half-finished a little longer. Let the morning move into you. The four pathways still ahead, vastness, openness, gratitude, the great story of the cosmos itself all of them open from this one. There is no awe without first arriving, and there is no arriving without slowing down. Presence is the threshold. Everything else is the country on the other side of the door.

Pay attention. Be astonished. The telling, as Oliver knew, comes after and it is what these letters are for.

Resources & Further Reading

Oliver, Mary. “Sometimes,” in Red Bird (2008). Source of the epigraph: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

Gay, Ross. The Book of Delights (2019). The daily practice of attending to delight; attention as cultivation.

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous (1996). “We are all breathing each other’s breath” and the reciprocity of perception.

Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019). Attention as a quietly radical act of refusal.

Keltner, Dacher. Awe (2023). Awe walks, the small self, and the physiological effects of everyday wonder.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

There is a bay in Puerto Rico, Mosquito Bay, on the island of Vieques, where the water lights up at night. Not metaphorically. Not with reflected moonlight or the shimmer of phosphorescence you might glimpse in an ordinary ocean on a lucky evening. This bay glows. Paddle your hand through it in the darkness and your fingers leave trails of cold blue fire. Disturb the surface and it blooms, a living light, brief and absolute, rising from millions of microscopic organisms called dinoflagellates who produce their luminescence through a chemical process so ancient it predates almost everything else alive on earth.

The light is triggered by movement. By disturbance. By the right conditions meeting the organism’s own internal readiness at exactly the right moment. Take those same organisms out of that bay, alter the temperature, the salinity, the darkness, and the light diminishes. Changes the water and you change what’s possible. The organism is ready, has always been ready, but readiness requires the conditions that honor it.

Scientists who study bioluminescence will tell you something that sounds simple and isn’t: the light cannot be forced. You can create conditions that make it more or less likely. You cannot make it happen. The organism decides, if decide is even the right word for something so creaturely and involuntary, according to its own interior calendar. You bring the right water. You bring the darkness. You wait.

And then, if you are paying attention, you get to see something that most people on earth never see.

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In children, Montessori observed something analogous and more complex: windows for language, for order, for the refinement of movement, for small objects, for social relationships. During these windows, the child doesn’t merely enjoy the relevant experiences, she is consumed by them with an intensity that looks, to the uninformed adult eye, like obsession or fixation or occasionally inconvenient persistence. The toddler who must place every object back in its precise location, who dissolves if the routine is disrupted, who notices immediately and with great distress that the chair is in the wrong place , this child is not being difficult. She is bioluminescing. Her internal readiness for order has met whatever conditions have ripened it, and she is doing the only thing she can do, which is respond to it completely.

The light cannot be forced. But it can be missed. And it can be extinguished.

This is the part that should make us sit quietly for a moment.

De Vries noted something about the caterpillar’s sensitive period that Montessori found significant enough to carry into her own work: if the conditions that support the sensitive period are absent during the window, the capacity that the window was for doesn’t develop in the same way afterward. The caterpillar that can’t find leaves during its phototropic phase doesn’t simply wait and find them later. Something is lost. Not everything , organisms are more resilient than clean theories suggest , but something. The window was for something specific, and the something specific needed to happen then, and then is not infinitely elastic.

For children, Montessori was careful and compassionate about this. She didn’t frame it as doom, a missed sensitive period is not a closed door forever, and she knew that human development has a plasticity that caterpillars do not. But she was honest that learning something outside its sensitive period requires a different kind of effort, a more labored acquisition, a process that lacks the effortless absorption of the window when it was open. The child who learns to read during her sensitive period for language absorbs it the way the bay absorbs the darkness, naturally, completely, as if it were simply what was always going to happen. The child who learns to read years later, outside that window, still learns. But it costs more. It leaves a different trace.

What this means for those of us responsible for prepared environments is both clarifying and, if we are honest, a little frightening. The child’s sensitive periods are not on our schedule. They are not synchronized with our curriculum plans or our scope and sequence or the age groupings we’ve inherited from a system that was never designed around them. They arrive according to an interior calendar we cannot read directly, only infer, through careful observation, through the quality of attention a child brings to particular work, through the quality of that attention that looks less like interest and more like necessity.

The child at the sandpaper letters who traces them again and again and again, not because she’s been asked to but because something in her cannot stop, she is showing us something. The three-year-old who spends forty minutes arranging and rearranging a set of objects in precise order, who becomes distressed if interrupted, who returns to the work immediately when the interruption passes, she is showing us something. The question is whether we are prepared to see it.

Here is where the allegory sharpens into something uncomfortable.

The bioluminescent bay requires darkness. Genuine darkness. In recent decades, as development has crept closer to Mosquito Bay, light pollution has begun to threaten the very conditions that make the phenomenon possible. The dinoflagellates are still there. Their internal chemistry is unchanged. But the darkness they require, the environmental condition that allows the light to be visible, that perhaps allows it to be triggered at all , that darkness is being slowly, incrementally, well-intentionedly eroded. The boats that bring tourists to see the glow sometimes carry lights that diminish it. The development that brings people who love the bay changes the bay.

I think about this when I think about the ways we have filled the Montessori day. The specialists who pull children out of the prepared environment, for music, for PE, for enrichment, during the hours when a sensitive period might be doing its quiet, urgent work. The transitions we’ve built into programs that interrupt concentration at precisely the moment when concentration was becoming something deeper. The activities we’ve introduced in the afternoon because we were worried children needed variety, needed stimulation, needed a break, not understanding that what looked like sameness from the outside was, from the inside, the bioluminescent bay in full bloom. The light was happening. We turned on the lights.

Jana Morgan Herman’s research into Montessori’s original writings keeps returning me to this: the original Casa had a quality of unhurried continuity that we have, in many of our programs, inadvertently designed away. The long morning. The shared meal. The afternoon that belonged to the children in ways that weren’t scheduled into segments. That continuity wasn’t incidental. It was the darkness the bay requires. It was the salinity and temperature and depth that allowed the conditions inside the organism to express themselves fully.

When we interrupt, we are not being negligent. Usually we are being well-meaning. The boat that brings tourists to see the glow is not malicious. It simply hasn’t understood what it’s carrying, and what the carrying costs.

Montessori wrote that sensitive periods are lost forever once they pass, that nature, having offered this extraordinary gift of intensified receptivity, moves on when the window closes and does not return. That framing has sometimes been used to create anxiety, even urgency, in Montessori educators , a pressure to identify the windows and deliver the right content before they close, as if the guide’s job were to race the clock.

I don’t think that’s right. Or rather, I think the urgency is real but the response to it is wrong.

This means resisting interruption. It means protecting the long, unscheduled stretches of time in which a child can follow her own interior urgency to its natural conclusion. It means learning to read the quality of a child’s engagement not as something to be assessed but as something to be honored , to recognize the difference between a child who is busy and a child who is bioluminescing, and to respond to the latter with the most difficult thing the prepared adult is ever asked to do.

To get out of the way. To provide the darkness. To wait.

And then , if you are paying attention, if the conditions are right, if the darkness has been preserved , to witness something that most people never see.

A child, fully lit from within, doing exactly what she was born to do, at exactly the moment she was born to do it.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“Without the presence of the other, the self cannot exist.”

Martin Buber, I and Thou (Scribner, 1923/1958), p. 62

She came to me at pickup time, this particular mother, and I could feel her before she reached me. That sounds more mystical than I mean it. What I mean is that something in my nervous system registered her approach before I had consciously processed who was walking through the door. A slight bracing in my chest. A subtle shift in the quality of my attention. My body knew, before my mind had caught up, that this interaction was going to require something of me.

Her daughter was one of those children who illuminated a room, four years old with a laugh that arrived before she did and a ferocious curiosity about how everything worked. She was also, by the time her mother reached me that afternoon, in the middle of a phase that her mother was interpreting as a crisis: refusal to follow directions at home, what the mother called defiance, what I was observing as a developmentally impeccable drive toward autonomy expressing itself in a child whose home environment had very little room for it.

The mother was frightened. She was also, underneath the fear, furious: at her daughter, at herself, and I sensed, at me, for appearing to manage her child with an ease she couldn’t replicate at home. She stood in my doorway with her arms crossed and her jaw set and told me, with tremendous precision, everything that was wrong.

I noticed my own impulse to defend: the classroom, the approach, myself, her child. I noticed it and I let it pass. And then I did something I had been practicing for years without having the language for it yet. I got genuinely curious. Not strategically curious, not clinically curious, but the real kind: I actually wanted to understand what was happening in this woman’s experience of her daughter, what she was afraid of, what she needed me to know.

Something shifted in the room when I did that. I watched it happen. Her shoulders dropped approximately half an inch. Her breathing changed. The field between us, which had been organized around opposition, reorganized itself around something closer to shared concern. We were, suddenly, on the same side of the thing.

That was the day I began to understand what co-regulation actually means at the scale of adult relationship.

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The Field Between People

The science of what happens between people in close or sustained relationships is, to my mind, one of the most underappreciated bodies of research in contemporary psychology. We understand, at least in theory, that our thoughts and emotions affect others. What we understand less fully is that this influence operates at a level far more fundamental than thought or even emotion: it operates at the level of the nervous system itself, through a process called co-regulation.

Co-regulation is the way one nervous system directly influences the state of another, not through words or even through conscious behavior, but through the electromagnetic field the body generates and the subtle signals: breath rhythm, muscle tone, vocal prosody, facial micro-expression, that other nervous systems read with extraordinary precision. The HeartMath Institute’s research on the heart’s electromagnetic field, which extends several feet beyond the body’s surface, suggests that we are quite literally in each other’s fields whenever we are in proximity. We are not separate individuals who occasionally exchange information. We are nested fields, constantly influencing and being influenced by the people around us.

This is why the doorway check-in I developed over years of classroom teaching matters so much: the guide’s nervous system state sets the electromagnetic conditions of the room before a single lesson has been delivered. It is why some people leave us feeling more alive and others leave us feeling diminished, without anything obviously having happened. It is why sitting with a grieving friend in silence can be more healing than any words.

We are, in our bodies, already in communion with the people around us. The question is whether we show up to that communion consciously, and what we choose to do with the field we’re co-creating.

What the Classroom Taught Me About Relational Coherence

I spent more than two decades as a Montessori guide, and the most important thing I learned had almost nothing to do with the materials or the lessons. It had to do with what happened in the invisible space between me and the children, and between me and the adults, parents and co-teachers and administrators, who orbited the classroom.

Children are, in this sense, exquisitely honest. They have not yet developed the social machinery to hide their nervous system responses behind polite behavior. When a guide walks in carrying unresolved anxiety or suppressed frustration, the children feel it immediately and the room shifts: an uptick in conflict, a restlessness in the work cycle, a quality of ambient unease that no amount of redirection resolves because the source isn’t the children. It’s the field.

This was, when I first recognized it clearly, simultaneously humbling and galvanizing. Humbling because it meant that the times I’d attributed classroom difficulty to particular children, to phases of development or family stress or the particular alchemy of that year’s community, I had been missing the most important variable: myself. Galvanizing because it meant that the most powerful intervention available to me was not a new lesson plan or a different approach to conflict but my own coherence. When I arrived regulated, genuinely present, actually curious about who these specific children were becoming on this specific day, the room organized itself around that.

This is syntropy at the scale of a classroom: a coherent field generating coherent conditions, the guide’s inner state becoming, as Montessori always insisted, the true prepared environment.

What I didn’t fully understand then, and have been understanding more deeply since, is that this principle doesn’t stop at the classroom door. It operates in every sustained relationship: with partners, with friends, with colleagues, with the stranger at the farmers market counter, with ourselves.

The Mother in the Doorway: What Happened Next

The conversation with that particular mother stretched well past the usual pickup time. Her daughter’s assistant guide eventually walked the child to the car, and the mother and I found our way to chairs, and the conversation moved from complaint toward something more honest.

What emerged, slowly, was that the mother was terrified. Not of her daughter’s behavior, exactly, but of her own response to it: the fury that rose in her faster than she could manage it, the sense that she was failing at the most important thing she’d ever been asked to do. She had been interpreting her daughter’s autonomy drive as a referendum on her parenting. And she had been bringing that interpretation, and all the fear it carried, into every interaction with her child, who felt it, and escalated in response, which confirmed the mother’s fears, which intensified her fear-response, which escalated the child further.

This is a dysregulated relational field: a feedback loop in which two nervous systems organize each other toward increasing incoherence, each one’s distress amplifying the other’s.

What the mother needed, before any parenting strategy could be useful, was for her own nervous system to find its ground. And what I was able to offer, simply by getting genuinely curious and staying present rather than defensive, was a moment of co-regulation: my regulated field providing the conditions in which her nervous system could begin to settle.

She came back the following week with a small, careful observation: she’d tried waiting an extra breath before responding to her daughter’s refusals. Just one breath. The quality of the interaction had changed enough that she noticed.

One breath. This is how relational fields actually shift: not in dramatic transformation but in the accumulated practice of tiny moments of choosing presence over reactivity, curiosity over conclusion, genuine contact over protective management.

Awe in Intimate Connection

Dacher Keltner’s research on awe includes something I find quietly startling: the moral beauty of another person, witnessing someone demonstrate extraordinary virtue, courage, or creativity, is one of the most reliable and consistent elicitors of awe across cultures. Not grand vistas or vast skies. People. Specifically, people being fully themselves in ways that exceed our expectations of what human beings can be.

I think about that mother, returning the following week with her one-breath observation, and what I felt watching her report it. It was something close to awe: the recognition that she had taken something genuinely difficult and found, in the space of a week, a tiny foothold of agency. That is moral beauty in Keltner’s precise sense. It doesn’t require heroics. It requires the ordinary courage of trying again.

And I think about the children, year after year, whom I had the extraordinary privilege of witnessing in the act of becoming. The four-year-old who spent six weeks returning daily to the same impossible puzzle until the morning it wasn’t impossible anymore. The five-year-old who discovered, in a moment I can still see clearly decades later, that she could read, actually read, and looked up from the page with an expression that I can only describe as the face of someone encountering themselves for the first time.

This is what intimate relationship offers at its best: not comfort or stability or the management of mutual need, though it offers those things too, but the ongoing encounter with another subjectivity so genuinely other that it continually reorganizes us. The person who sees you more clearly than you see yourself. The child whose unguarded aliveness calls you back to your own. The parent who arrives frightened and leaves, one breath later, slightly more capable of meeting her daughter.

This is syntropy in its most intimate form: two nervous systems, two electromagnetic fields, pulling each other toward greater coherence, greater aliveness, greater expression of what each is most fully capable of being.

Building Syntropic Fields: What This Requires

What I’ve learned about building syntropic relational fields, from the research and from the years of classroom practice and from the ongoing experiment of my own relationships, comes down to a few things that feel important enough to name clearly.

Presence over management. The protective instinct in difficult relationships is to stay behind the glass: engaging enough to maintain the connection but not enough to be genuinely affected. What syntropy requires is the opposite. Genuine contact. Actual arrival in the field. The willingness to let the other person’s reality change yours, even when that’s uncomfortable, especially when that’s uncomfortable.

Curiosity over conclusion. The mother arrived in my doorway having already concluded who her daughter was and what was happening between them. What shifted the field was a single genuine question that hadn’t yet arrived at its own answer. Dispositional awe applied to relationship looks exactly like this: approaching the people we know best with the honest recognition that there is always more of them than we have yet seen.

Repair as ongoing practice, not single event. Relationships heal the way wounds heal: not in dramatic moments but through the slow, repeated return to contact. The accumulated practice of tiny moments of choosing genuine encounter over protective distance. One breath at a time, if necessary.

Your own coherence as the primary instrument. This is, perhaps, the most counterintuitive and the most important. The most powerful thing you can do for any relationship is tend your own nervous system. Not as self-absorption but as responsibility: because your field affects every field it touches, and the most generous thing you can offer the people you love is a regulated, present, genuinely curious version of yourself.

A Pause, and a Forward Look

We have traveled a long way together in this phase of the series. We began with the body itself, exploring its electromagnetic field and its capacity for quantum coherence, its fascia as a living communication network, its experience of allurement as a physical sensation. We moved through education and healing, through nutrition and movement, through the way Earth herself participates in our restoration. And we’ve arrived here, in the most intimate territory of all: the space between people, where syntropy either flourishes or withers depending on the quality of presence we bring.

What I hope you’re beginning to sense is not a collection of separate topics but a single, spiraling recognition: that the force organizing galaxies and healing wounds and drawing acorns toward oaks and pulling us to specific places and specific people is the same force, working at every scale, expressing itself through every system.

You are not a separate being navigating a neutral world. You are an expression of a universe that has been moving toward greater coherence, greater complexity, greater aliveness, for 13.8 billion years. Your body knows this. Your relationships enact it. The Earth around you demonstrates it in every season, every root system, every raven working a thermal above the Jemez range.

In the next phase of this series, we turn from the embodied experience of syntropy to its applied practice: how these principles live in parenting, in community, in the specific textures of daily life. How we build, not just understand, the conditions for syntropic flourishing. How we take everything explored here and begin to live it, not as philosophy, but as a way of being available right now, in this body, in these relationships, in this improbable and extraordinary life.

The work is not separate from you. It never was.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

On certain evenings in autumn, just before the light goes, something happens over the marshes that has no satisfying scientific name despite having been studied for decades. Tens of thousands of starlings gather in the sky and begin to move together, not in formation, not with a leader, not following a signal anyone has been able to identify. They pulse and wheel and fold back on themselves in shapes that seem to have intention, even emotion. A murmuration. The word is soft, almost liquid, which is appropriate because that’s what it looks like: a liquid made of birds.

Scientists have worked hard to explain it. The best current understanding is something called scale-free correlation, each bird responds to the movement of the seven birds nearest to it, and that local responsiveness propagates across the whole flock with no meaningful delay, no hierarchy, no instruction from above. The intelligence of the murmuration is entirely distributed. It lives in the relationships, not in any individual bird. No single starling knows the shape of what it’s part of.

And the young birds , the ones experiencing their first autumn, their first murmuration, do not attend a lesson on how to do this. There is no orientation. No one explains scale-free correlation to them. They enter the flock and they feel the pull of the seven birds nearest to them, and they respond, and in responding they become part of something that is teaching them, through its very movement, everything they need to know.

We tend to defend mixed ages with the language of benefit , which is understandable, because the benefits are real and well-documented. The younger child is exposed to work she isn’t yet ready for, and the exposure plants something. The older child consolidates understanding by teaching, because teaching requires a different and deeper engagement with material than learning it alone ever did. Both children gain. The math is tidy.

But this framing, while true, misses something essential. It describes the murmuration as a series of individual advantages, this bird gets this benefit, that bird gets that one. It doesn’t describe the thing itself. It doesn’t describe what it feels like to be inside it, or why the whole is so much stranger and more powerful than the sum of its parts.

What actually happens in a healthy mixed-age Montessori environment is something closer to cultural transmission. The three-year-old who watches a five-year-old carry the golden bead chain across the room with great ceremony is not receiving information about mathematics. She is absorbing something about what this place is, what it means to take work seriously, what it looks like to care about something, how a person moves when they are genuinely engaged. She is learning, through pure observation, the culture of concentration. Not the concept. The culture.

This cannot be taught directly. A guide can model it, and modeling matters. But there is something specific about watching a person who is only slightly ahead of you, close enough that you can almost imagine yourself into their position, far enough that they have something you don’t yet have. The developmental distance between a three and a five-year-old is large enough to be instructive and small enough to be imaginable. The younger child looks at the older and thinks, not consciously but in some prelinguistic way that is perhaps more powerful: I am going toward that. The path feels walkable because someone is walking it nearby.

This is different from what happens when a child watches an adult. An adult’s competence is too far away. The gap is not instructive; it is simply a gap. We don’t watch masters and feel ourselves moving toward mastery. We watch people who are one or two steps ahead of us and feel the pull of the possible.

And then there is what the older child receives, which is stranger and less often discussed.

When a five-year-old shows a three-year-old how to roll a mat, something happens that has nothing to do with mat-rolling. The five-year-old has to slow down. Has to find the edges of what she knows, has to discover whether she actually understands what she’s doing or only knows how to do it. These are not the same thing, and the difference between them becomes apparent immediately when someone who doesn’t know how is watching.

There is also something that happens to a child’s sense of herself when she becomes, genuinely and without adult engineering, useful to someone smaller. Not helpful in the way adults are helpful, swooping in with answers and assistance and the subtle suggestion that the child couldn’t have managed alone. Useful in the way that members of a community are useful to each other: because she is here, because she knows something, because the knowing is needed. That feeling is not a side effect of the mixed age group. It is one of its central gifts, and it is only possible because there is someone present who genuinely needs what the older child has to offer.

In a single-age classroom, no child is needed in this way. Everyone is at roughly the same place. The guide is needed, but that is a different relationship , the dependence runs in one direction and is too large to be formative in the same way. In the murmuration, every bird is simultaneously influencing and being influenced by the birds around it. The information flows in all directions at once. No bird is only a teacher or only a learner. The distinction doesn’t really exist.

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Here is what I think we risk losing when we defend mixed ages only in the language of individual benefit: we risk designing the environment around the extraction of those benefits rather than around the conditions that make the murmuration possible.

A murmuration requires density, enough birds close enough together that the local relationships can do their work. It requires that the birds actually be flying together, not sorted into groups by age or ability and then occasionally brought into proximity for supervised interaction. It requires time: murmurations don’t happen in ten-minute windows. They require the long, unstructured duration in which the relationships can deepen past the surface and the transmission can actually occur.

Which means: a mixed age group that is frequently sorted, that moves through its day in age-cohort groupings with occasional mixing, that doesn’t have the long hours of shared life in which culture is transmitted through proximity rather than instruction, that is not really a mixed age group. It has the label. It doesn’t have the murmuration.

The guide’s role here is precise and difficult: to protect the conditions without controlling the flock. To ensure the birds are flying together, and then to trust , genuinely trust, that the intelligence distributed across the relationships will do what no individual instruction could do. To resist the urge to intervene in the moment when a five-year-old’s explanation is imperfect, or when the three-year-old wanders away before the lesson is finished, because the wandering is not failure and the imperfect explanation has already done its work.

That is what the prepared environment is, at its best, for the mixed age group: not a classroom, not a curriculum delivery system, not a stage for demonstrating developmental appropriateness. A sky. Wide enough, open enough, continuous enough that ten thousand small moments of transmission can occur simultaneously , unremarkable from any individual vantage point, extraordinary in the aggregate.

No single child knows the shape of what she’s part of.

That’s exactly as it should be.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“Without the presence of the other, the self cannot exist.”

Martin Buber, I and Thou (Scribner, 1923/1958), p. 62

She came to me at pickup time, this particular mother, and I could feel her before she reached me. That sounds more mystical than I mean it. What I mean is that something in my nervous system registered her approach before I had consciously processed who was walking through the door. A slight bracing in my chest. A subtle shift in the quality of my attention. My body knew, before my mind had caught up, that this interaction was going to require something of me.

Her daughter was one of those children who illuminated a room, four years old with a laugh that arrived before she did and a ferocious curiosity about how everything worked. She was also, by the time her mother reached me that afternoon, in the middle of a phase that her mother was interpreting as a crisis: refusal to follow directions at home, what the mother called defiance, what I was observing as a developmentally impeccable drive toward autonomy expressing itself in a child whose home environment had very little room for it.

The mother was frightened. She was also, underneath the fear, furious: at her daughter, at herself, and I sensed, at me, for appearing to manage her child with an ease she couldn’t replicate at home. She stood in my doorway with her arms crossed and her jaw set and told me, with tremendous precision, everything that was wrong.

I noticed my own impulse to defend: the classroom, the approach, myself. I noticed it and I let it pass. And then I did something I had been practicing for years without having the language for it yet. I got genuinely curious. Not strategically curious, not clinically curious, but the real kind: I actually wanted to understand what was happening in this woman’s experience of her daughter, what she was afraid of, what she needed me to know.

Something shifted in the room when I did that. I watched it happen. Her shoulders dropped approximately half an inch. Her breathing changed. The field between us, which had been organized around opposition, reorganized itself around something closer to shared concern. We were, suddenly, on the same side of the thing.

That was the day I began to understand what co-regulation actually means at the scale of adult relationship.

The Field Between People

The science of what happens between people in close or sustained relationship is, to my mind, one of the most underappreciated bodies of research in contemporary psychology. We understand, at least in theory, that our thoughts and emotions affect others. What we understand less fully is that this influence operates at a level far more fundamental than thought or even emotion: it operates at the level of the nervous system itself, through a process called co-regulation.

Co-regulation is the way one nervous system directly influences the state of another, not through words or even through conscious behavior, but through the electromagnetic field the body generates, specialized brain-cells called mirror neurons, and subtle signals such breath rhythm, muscle tone, vocal prosody, facial micro-expression, that other nervous systems read with extraordinary precision. The HeartMath Institute’s research on the heart’s electromagnetic field, which extends several feet beyond the body’s surface, suggests that we are quite literally in each other’s fields whenever we are in proximity. We are not separate individuals who occasionally exchange information. We are nested fields, constantly influencing and being influenced by the people around us.

This is why the doorway check-in I developed over years of classroom teaching matters so much: the guide’s nervous system state sets the electromagnetic conditions of the room before a single lesson has been delivered. It is why some people leave us feeling more alive and others leave us feeling diminished, without anything obviously having happened. It is why sitting with a grieving friend in silence can be more healing than any words.

We are, in our bodies, already in communion with the people around us. The question is whether we show up to that communion consciously, and what we choose to do with the field we’re co-creating.

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What the Classroom Taught Me About Relational Coherence

I spent almost two decades as a Montessori guide, and the most important thing I learned had almost nothing to do with the materials or the lessons. It had to do with what happened in the invisible space between me and the children, and between me and the adults, parents and co-teachers and administrators, who orbited the classroom.

Children are, in this sense, exquisitely honest. They have not yet developed the social machinery to hide their nervous system responses behind polite behavior. When a guide walks in carrying unresolved anxiety or suppressed frustration, the children feel it immediately and the room shifts: an uptick in conflict, a restlessness in the work cycle, a quality of ambient unease that no amount of redirection resolves because the source isn’t the children. It’s the field.

This was, when I first recognized it clearly, simultaneously humbling and galvanizing. Humbling because it meant that the times I’d attributed classroom difficulty to particular children, to phases of development or family stress or the particular alchemy of that year’s community, I had been missing the most important variable: myself. Galvanizing because it meant that the most powerful intervention available to me was not a new lesson plan or a different approach to conflict but my own coherence. When I arrived regulated, genuinely present, actually curious about who these specific children were becoming on this specific day, the room organized itself around that.

This is syntropy at the scale of a classroom: a coherent field generating coherent conditions, the guide’s inner state becoming, as Montessori always insisted, the true prepared environment.

What I didn’t fully understand then, and have been understanding more deeply since, is that this principle doesn’t stop at the classroom door. It operates in every sustained relationship: with partners, with friends, with colleagues, with the stranger at the farmers market counter, with ourselves.

The Mother in the Doorway: What Happened Next

The conversation with that particular mother stretched well past the usual pickup time. Her daughter’s assistant guide eventually walked the child to the car, and the mother and I found our way to chairs, and the conversation moved from complaint toward something more honest.

What emerged, slowly, was that the mother was terrified. Not of her daughter’s behavior, exactly, but of her own response to it: the fury that rose in her faster than she could manage it, the sense that she was failing at the most important thing she’d ever been asked to do. She had been interpreting her daughter’s autonomy drive as a referendum on her parenting. And she had been bringing that interpretation, and all the fear it carried, into every interaction with her child, who felt it, and escalated in response, which confirmed the mother’s fears, which intensified her fear-response, which escalated the child further.

This is a dysregulated relational field: a feedback loop in which two nervous systems organize each other toward increasing incoherence, each one’s distress amplifying the other’s.

What the mother needed, before any parenting strategy could be useful, was for her own nervous system to find its ground. And what I was able to offer, simply by getting genuinely curious and staying present rather than defensive, was a moment of co-regulation: my regulated field providing the conditions in which her nervous system could begin to settle.

She came back the following week with a small, careful observation: she’d tried waiting an extra breath before responding to her daughter’s refusals. Just one breath. The quality of the interaction had changed enough that she noticed.

One breath. This is how relational fields actually shift: not in dramatic transformation but in the accumulated practice of tiny moments of choosing presence over reactivity, curiosity over conclusion, genuine contact over protective management.

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Awe in Intimate Connection

Keltner’s research on awe includes something I find quietly startling: the moral beauty of another person, witnessing someone demonstrate extraordinary virtue, courage, or creativity, is one of the most reliable and consistent elicitors of awe across cultures. Not grand vistas or vast skies. People. Specifically, people being fully themselves in ways that exceed our expectations of what human beings can be.

I think about that mother, returning the following week with her one-breath observation, and what I felt watching her report it. It was something close to awe: the recognition that she had taken something genuinely difficult and found, in the space of a week, a tiny foothold of agency. That is moral beauty in Keltner’s precise sense. It doesn’t require heroics. It requires the ordinary courage of trying again.

And I think about the children, year after year, whom I had the extraordinary privilege of witnessing in the act of becoming. The four-year-old who spends six weeks returning daily to the same impossible puzzle until the morning it isn’t impossible anymore. The five-year-old who discovers, in a moment I can still see clearly decades later, that she can read, actually read, and looks up from the page with an expression that I can only describe as the face of someone encountering themselves for the first time.

This is what intimate relationship offers at its best: not comfort or stability or the management of mutual need, though it offers those things too, but the ongoing encounter with another subjectivity so genuine that it continually reorganizes us. The person who sees you more clearly than you see yourself. The child whose unguarded aliveness calls you back to your own. The parent who arrives frightened and leaves, one breath later, slightly more capable of meeting her daughter.

This is syntropy in its most intimate form: two nervous systems, two electromagnetic fields, pulling each other toward greater coherence, greater aliveness, greater expression of what each is most fully capable of being.

Building Syntropic Fields: What This Requires

What I’ve learned about building syntropic relational fields, from the research and from the years of classroom practice and from the ongoing experiment of my own relationships, comes down to a few things that feel important enough to name clearly.

Presence over management. The protective instinct in difficult relationships is to stay behind the glass: engaging enough to maintain the connection but not enough to be genuinely affected. What syntropy requires is the opposite. Genuine contact. Actual arrival in the field. The willingness to let the other person’s reality change yours, even when that’s uncomfortable, especially when that’s uncomfortable.

Curiosity over conclusion. The mother arrived in my doorway having already concluded who her daughter was and what was happening between them. What shifted the field was a single genuine question that hadn’t yet arrived at its own answer. Dispositional awe applied to relationship looks exactly like this: approaching the people we know best with the honest recognition that there is always more of them than we have yet seen.

Repair as ongoing practice, not single event. Relationships heal the way wounds heal: not in dramatic moments but through the slow, repeated return to contact. The accumulated practice of tiny moments of choosing genuine encounter over protective distance. One breath at a time, if necessary.

Your own coherence as the primary instrument. This is, perhaps, the most counterintuitive and the most important. The most powerful thing you can do for any relationship is tend your own nervous system. Not as self-absorption but as responsibility: because your field affects every field it touches, and the most generous thing you can offer the people you love is a regulated, present, genuinely curious version of yourself.

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A Pause, and a Forward Look

We have traveled a long way together in this phase of the series. We began with the body itself, exploring its electromagnetic field and its capacity for quantum coherence, its fascia as a living communication network, its experience of allurement as a physical sensation. We moved through education and healing, through nutrition and movement, through the way Earth herself participates in our restoration. And we’ve arrived here, in the most intimate territory of all: the space between people, where syntropy either flourishes or withers depending on the quality of presence we bring.

What I hope you’re beginning to sense is not a collection of separate topics but a single, spiraling recognition: that the force organizing galaxies and healing wounds and drawing acorns toward oaks and pulling us to specific places and specific people is the same force, working at every scale, expressing itself through every system.

You are not a separate being navigating a neutral world. You are an expression of a universe that has been moving toward greater coherence, greater complexity, greater aliveness, for 13.8 billion years. Your body knows this. Your relationships enact it. The Earth around you demonstrates it in every season, every root system, every raven working a thermal above the Jemez range.

In the next phase of this series, we turn from the embodied experience of syntropy to its applied practice: how these principles live in parenting, in community, in the specific textures of daily life. How we build, not just understand, the conditions for syntropic flourishing. How we take everything explored here and begin to live it, not as philosophy, but as a way of being available right now, in this body, in these relationships, in this improbable and extraordinary life.

The work is not separate from you. It never was.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

Here is something most people don’t know about gardens: the most important work happens before anything is planted.

Before the seed goes in, someone has been on their knees in the soil for hours. Testing it, turning it, removing what doesn’t belong. Asking quiet questions. Is there enough drainage here, or will water pool and rot what we’re trying to grow? Does this corner receive morning light or afternoon light, and does that distinction matter for what we hope will happen here? What was growing in this bed before, and what did it take from the earth, and what does the earth need now before it can offer itself again?

This work is invisible once the garden is growing. Visitors come in July and exclaim over the dahlias. They don’t see October, November, December , the turning and the testing and the patient amendment of what wasn’t ready yet. They see the blooming and call it beautiful, and it is. But the beauty was decided long before the first green shoot appeared.

The prepared environment is like this. What a child experiences as freedom, the ease of moving through a room that seems to anticipate her, that offers exactly what she needs at precisely the right level of challenge, that is neither chaotic nor constraining, that ease is the result of a hundred invisible decisions made before she arrived. Where the light falls. What is at her eye level and what is stored out of reach. Which materials are present and which, just as importantly, are not. What the room smells like. Whether the floor invites bare feet or discourages them. Whether there is a place to be alone.

A garden that hasn’t been prepared doesn’t fail dramatically. It just produces less than it could. The seeds germinate but the roots hit compacted soil and stop short. The plants reach toward light that is partially blocked by something that could have been moved. Things grow, but sideways, or slowly, or not quite to their full expression. Everything is fine. Nothing is quite right.

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There is a particular discipline in garden-making that has no direct equivalent in most other creative work: the discipline of removal. The gardener who cannot bear to thin the seedlings gets a bed of stunted plants, each one competing for the same light and water and soil, none of them reaching what they might have been. The thinning feels violent. You are pulling out living things. But it is an act of clarity, of deciding what this garden is actually for, and making space for that thing to become fully itself.

The prepared environment requires this same discipline, and it may be the hardest part. Not the adding, most of us are quite good at adding. We add materials, add beauty, add interest, add variety. The shelves fill. The room accumulates. And slowly, without our quite noticing, the environment stops being a garden and becomes a storage facility with good intentions.

What would it mean to thin? To walk through the room not asking what could I add but what is competing for attention that shouldn’t be? What is present out of habit rather than purpose? What did we put here because we made it, or because we love it, or because we were trained that it should be here , rather than because this child, in this moment, in this particular soil, needs it?

The gardener who thins does it in service of the plant, not in service of her own ideas about what the garden should look like. That distinction is everything.

By July, the visitor sees dahlias. She doesn’t see the October decisions.

They are not. They are the result of someone who spent a long time on her knees in the soil, asking questions the plants could not yet answer.

That is what preparation means. Not arrangement. Not decoration. Not the accumulation of correct materials in their correct sequence on correctly-spaced shelves.

It means knowing the soil. Knowing the light. Knowing what to remove, and what to amend, and what to simply wait for , trusting that the conditions you have tended, invisibly and without applause, will become in time exactly what the growing thing needed.

The garden does the rest.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.