About

“We did not find the world desolate when we entered it;
our ancestors planted for us before we were born:
so do we plant for those who will come after us.” ~Talmud

The name of this site is also the name of our school, The Yetsirah School of Life. We are a homeschooling family of eight sharing our adventures, creativity, legends, and resources. The contributors of this site are The Yetsirah School of Lifers, a.k.a. SoLjourners (see below for definition) with occasional invited guest posts.

Yetsirah: a Hebrew word pronounced yet-SEER-ah. As a family of Hebrew language students we chose the word yetsirah as it means formation and to create with intent. We’re doing a lot of creating over here, in the world and in ourselves, our intent is love.

School of Life: we adopted this title and phrase from a book I read at the beginning of my homeschool career in which there was a school entitled School of Life. In this school half of the day was dedicated to sitting down with books and the other half was all about putting their hands to the learning. I loved this idea and never wanted to release it from my continual vision so to keep it as a continual aim.

SoLjourners: we made up this word for ourselves as a mnemonic device and for fun. SoL=School of Life attached and made one with a favorite word, sojourner. A sojourner is a person dwelling transiently, an always moving, growing, changing seeker. There are many things in life to abide long in, but as people we want to always be becoming. We want to be pilgrims, seekers, sojourners no matter how long we are, or are not, in a specific geographic place in the world.

As it happens, this chosen word was more prophetic than we could at first realize. As a family we’ve physically moved A LOT over the years. Yet moving alone does not make any of us pilgrims. Travel can be just travel, but being a seeker in our travels is a way of looking out on the world no matter where we are, or for how long. This is what we are aiming for. We hope to impart to our children, that even long after they have graduated from our homeschool, they have the ability to always be SoLjourners. It will be for blessing of themselves and others if they will still, always and everywhere, be students of Love and grow ever onward. Life is a gift with so many ways to learn from and enjoy it.

What you can expect here:

  • Online journals updated by our homeschooled students sharing recent studies, art, finished pieces, and works-in-progress on a broad range of subjects that we hope will encourage and inspire others to pursue being a student of life through many means.
  • A blog sharing resources and ideas we have personally found beneficial, where we can pass on the blessing, as well as potentially hope to create an avenue of revenue that is supportive to our school.

With much thanks for your interest and presence,

Raynna

P.S. I want it to be known and remembered that we owe our beginnings of this site to one of our young scholars (J. R. S. Myers) who began his own school newspaper about a year ago and recently decided to go digital with it. So, big thanks to J.R.S. and his dad, Jay, who paved the way for all of this!