Once upon a time there was a class of kids. An art class.
One girl who didn't pay much attention in class was seriously focused on drawing.
For 20 minutes she kept her head down working on her paper.
Her teacher was curious. He walked over.
What are you drawing, he asked.
I am drawing the face of God, she said.
Surprised, the teacher said, But no one has ever seen the face of God.
They will in a moment, she said.
One of the tyrannies of formal education, said Orphan, is how it takes 12 tedious ominous years to beat creative curiosity out of a child. It's a tortuous Byzantine procedure of endless suffering.
I agree with you, Elf said in simple English. Take Turkey for example. It's all dumbed down grammar text-based learning dulling the mind. By the book. Keep your mouth shut, warn teachers conditioned by the machine using fear to control and maipulate.
Yeah, they know the grammar RULES for taking exams. That's it. Past simple, present continuous and NO SPEAK.
They love RULES.
They need vocabulary and the confidence to use it. Open head, heart and mouth. Risk.
I eat my sorrow with fresh yogurt, said a woman opening her creative notebook to a blank page. She wrote. She drew. She danced colors, dreams, rainbows, the Black Sea, caricatures of friends, flowers, gardens and butterflies.
I feel free, she laughed.
Use it or lose it, said a silver spoon dancing around brown tea leaves dissolving a white sugar cube.
Clink, clink, clink.
Do you want a verb to get going, asked a tea man.
On the side please with fresh tomatoes, kasher cheese and black olives at Hagia Sophia in Trebazon.
i love everything that flows.
humor and curiosity are the two most important components of intelligence.
create and live w/o fear, shame or humiliation.
thread follows needle.
i am an iceberg. what you don't see is fascinating.
memory is desire satisfied.
...“That biblical story about the seven good years and the seven bad years? That happened to me,” Ms. Soberats, 77, said in an interview at her home in Jackson Heights.
“I think their sickness helped me cope with my blindness. Because I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about them. How much they were suffering, how much they were going through.”
...“I feel your face, your hair, then I’ll ask you: ‘Are you light-colored? Or dark? Is your hair blonde or brown or black?’ ” she said. “So with asking and touching, then I’ll get an idea of what I have to work with.”
“It surprised me that the human mind can do whatever it wants if we work toward it,” Ms. Soberats said.
Read and see her vision on LENS.
Mindfulness gives you time.
Time gives you choices.
Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom.
You don't have to be swept away by your feelings.
You can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.
- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English
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