"The World Cannot Be Governed Without Juggling."

Skylar's first recorded attempt at juggling three pears

Something I have discovered in this study we've done on folk knowledge is that folk knowledge is the kind of knowledge that takes a lot of love to transmit.  There needs to be someone charitable and invested enough in another person to teach them, and the other person needs to be patient and humble as they are taught, or the knowledge we cannot fully convey with books is eventually lost.  The importance of folk knowledge is that it builds a community of teachers and students, and those roles are shifting all the time.

We started with towels, which didn't really work.

 Deborah Tannen, a lecturer and linguistics professor at Georgetown University, once said "Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone."  For this reason, we learned to juggle. 


My roommate Skylar was very patient as I learned the art of teaching juggling, something I'm not totally proficient at but love to do.  I tried to remember how I was taught, over the years, by my siblings, by a Carnival program that came to my          
elementary school for a week one year, by many practices with oranges and tennis balls and lots of running around the court and kitchen to catch the flying objects.  

                                My attempt at juggling  

Skylar was awesome - we started with towels to use instead of scarves, but they were pretty heavy and awkward, so we moved onto pears.  Here they are, afterwards, very, very bruised:

The pears were great!  Just rip off their stems and be ready to sacrifice them for a greater cause, and you're good!  I tried to slowly go, step-by-step, explaining how to keep the pears (or potatoes, in my cause) on one plane parallel to you, to throw one just as you need to catch the next, to keep them high up.  Laughingly, Skylar rocked it.  This is her final attempt: 

I think it takes a lot of humility to learn and to teach effectively, especially after the documentary we watched on Hugh Nibley.  What a brilliant man and what a humbling realization and acceptance of everything he still hadn't learned.  I'm trying to work on that.  

In addition to juggling, I can teach someone how to:

• play the violin
• play the piano
• survive in school (okay, sort of)
• make really soft chocolate chip cookies and really soft big ginger cookies
• drive
• make birthday posters on colored paper
• whistle in 
• set up a blog
• dance the Cotton Eye Joe, South High School-style
• tie a knot strong enough for indoor rock climbing
• make a tepee fire
• put in contact lenses 
• ride a bike
• roll sushi
• rearrange furniture (I used to do this a LOT at home) 
• pinch a pie crust

"Juggling is sometimes called the art of controlling patterns, controlling patterns in time and space." - Ronald Graham