[Silence and garbled sounds]

Hi Friends. This is Ashia Ray of the Raising Luminaries Podcast

Oh dear, oh that’s a bad start. This is the raising luminaries podcast, and this is episode one, and we’re gonna talk about… mm, let’s see… getting… started.

And why getting started is difficult, and how this has anything to do with what we actually do at Raising Luminaries, which is raising and igniting the next generation of kind and courageous children. So I’m not going to go into a lot of background because frankly, no one’s gonna stumble upon this, unless you’re pretty well first of what Raising Luminaries is. And I will go into a little bit about why we’re doing it here – doing this, whatever this is here, and why we’re doing it over a podcast.

So for anyone who has been with us for a really long time since 2014, back when we started out as Books for Littles. The goal was to kind of slip in to people’s consciousness is about. What should we actually be working on when we’re raising children. I mean, we have the day to day like – our kid wants to talk about trucks, all the time, and doesn’t want to talk about anything else. right? And I had a two-year old. But knowing about trucks. I have to hold space for that to be important to him, while also, you know, slipping in my own agenda.

And so Books for Littles is the best way I could think of to do that, we could find books about trucks, and then use those as kind of an anchor point to talk about the things that I really wanted to talk about like, don’t grow up to be an asshole, you know?

how do you bridge that gap. And how do you do it in a way that’s accessible and holds space and respects his specific type of learning styles, abilities, and interests. You know what? That two year old is now approaching 10. He is by no definition, ‘little,’ and he can read on his own. Books are no longer the anchor point, that they once were for us. So instead of turning into one of those parent bloggers who recommends board books, even though all of my children have graduated college, (which seems super unethical, by the way?) I think what we need to focus on is taking care of the people who have been with us for the long haul, who also have kids who are getting older. They need to be parented through a different lens, for – they are who they are now, and they’re no longer people that we can control all the media that they consume. They are more people who are going to go out and do their own thing, and we kind of have to be interactive potted plants, who they can come to for support.

So I will say quickly that part of getting started on this new experimental podcast has to come with being rough and imperfect. And it has to be a compromise between me and you, because we – I know a lot of people consider the pandemic over, but it is October of 2021, and as a parent with two children who are still not eligible for vaccination.

I can’t polish things perfectly. And there are so many things that we could be putting out.

in the world. If we were allowed to just put them out through the lens of ‘This isn’t perfect. This isn’t polished. But I’m gonna keep working on it.’

So you might notice that there’s a lot of windy sounds, UPS trucks, leaf blowers, I dunno, whatever that bird is that keeps calling at me. And that’s because, if I want a chance to sit down and have a monologue or a conversation, it’s going to have to come, while I’m doing something else.

Because I am a pandemic parent who has no childcare, althought I do co-parent, I have the priviledge of having a partner who’s home to kids right now. But this is going to have to come at a time where either I’m showering or I’m walking, or I’m doing something that I have to do alone. So walking seems like the best bet is I don’t think you’re gonna want to listen to the shower?

In this first pancake podcast. We kind of have to embrace the idea that I’m going to talk out of breath. And I’m going to be going up and down hills, and I’m going to be dealing with the sounds of, I don’t know, suburbia, as we go along, because there’s no room in my life and I’m pretty sure this is the case for you there’s no room in your life for perfection anymore.

We can still try. This isn’t an excuse not to try, or to do things that we’re a little bit nervous about. But we need to be okay with making these compromises and more importantly letting other people see us doing things and imperfectly and compromising.

So with that – this is our first podcast, it’ll probably get better. And you know what, if the sounds of the wind and the cars passing byturn out to be super inaccessible for people, then yeah, I’ll put that effort in. To, I dunno, lock my children out of the house?

I don’t know. How do you even… I don’t know how people do things. With childcare I assume? People who can afford childcare.

But this is our first podcast. This is an ode to getting started poorly and terribly, like a first pancake over done on the outside and full of bland filler that you wish you could skip on the inside. And this is the reason why we’re doing it.

So I hope that this wasn’t too terrible to listen to enough that you want to listen to the second one. I invite your feedback.

You can always comment on Patree-on? Patreon? posts as a way to submit question and answers. And one of the kind of glorious things about not having everything planned out perfect, is we can go in any direction. We could move our family movie night commentaries from the Luminary Brain Trust over here. We could go over the topics that we discussed over the last, you know, six years or so, through different mediums. So hopefully they’re more accessible to more people, or maybe you can get a deeper level of meaning out of it. We could collaborate on something.

We could, you know, invite guests on a podcast and have some kick ass conversations. But the cool thing is that if I don’t already have a plan for how to do it, then we can figure this out together. And wouldn’t it be neat?

I mean, yeah. Wouldn’t that be neat? Okay. So. I hope that I come up with a good sign off at some point but I don’t have one know. So this is what we’ll have to settle for.

I appreciate you. And I really am excited to do new fun shenanigans in cahoots with you. Okay bye.