This Is Our Home
Hello there, Listening World! This week it’s time for another musical installment, and this one comes, not from a single writer, but from a classroom full of young collaborators at South Education Center in Minneapolis.
Chris and I have had the pleasure of partnering with District 287 for the last several years, co-writing poems and songs with students from their elementary, middle and high school programs. The creative energy I encounter in those classrooms is a perfect encapsulation of the neurodiversity movement: each student takes a different and utterly individual approach to whatever writing prompt I might offer, and the resulting songs are infinitely richer thanks to this wild and varied weave of meaning-makings.
That was certainly the case for today’s featured song “This is Our Home,” written by a group of a half-dozen elementary-age SEC rockstars earlier this school year (in that bygone era when physical classrooms existed!) When I kicked off our co-writing session that morning by asking “Where might certain animals feel at home?” and “Where do you feel at home?” I must admit I had a picture in my mind of where the song might go – but of course, my visionary co-writers steered us into terrain far more exciting than any I could have imagined myself:
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THIS IS OUR HOME
a lizard feels at home in the desert
playing in the sand
a pig feels at home on the farm
out in the farming land
a whale feels at home in its pod
down in the deep blue sea
polar bears feel at home at the poles
where it’s as cold as can be
this is our home, this is our home, this is our home
a zombie feels at home in the apocalypse
far from the light
a skeleton’s home is caves and graves
and mineshafts out of sight
a snowman feels at home in in the biome
where we like to tromp
and slime feels at home in the marsh
or the bog or the swamp
this is our home, this is our home, this is our home
and some of us feel at home with our pets
who we like to pet and clean
and some of us feel at home in front
of anything with a screen
and some of us feel at home on the ground
building Lego worlds
and some of us feel at home in the sky
where the weather swirls
this is our home, this is our home, this is our home
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Hope you’re all feeling similarly homey in your own homes, whatever shape they may take – warmest wishes during this strange time, and thanks for listening.
Happy hunkering,
Brian