Wonder World 1

Posted on August 17, 2007 by randomyriad

 

“How do you to hold a hundred tons of water in thin air with no visible means of support: you build a cloud.”

Bob Ross, painter



“Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions.”

Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

 

The Ancient Invisible

There are bacteria buried deep in the sediment at the bottom of the ocean that produce methane. Nobody knows how long they live. It could be thousands of years or even much longer. They are frozen in methane and are spewed forth out of mud volcanoes only to fall back under the ocean and restart the process again. They could be as old as mountains and older than the oldest trees.

Learning by Cannibalism

If you teach one of a certain type of flatworm to navigate a maze, by the use of mild shocks, and then feed that one to another flatworm of the same species, the flatworm that ate the one that learned the maze will then know how to navigate the maze.

Posted in Art in Nature, mindworks, Other peoples words, Questions and riddles, Teaching and Learning, Wild Life, wonder world | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Tilting My World

Posted on August 15, 2007 by randomyriad

The real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeking new
landscapes, but in having new eyes
Marcel Proust

Sometimes, in order for things to make sense, you have to tilt your head for a different view. Then there are other times when you have to tilt your world.

This blog is one way in which I am tilting my world. I have challenged myself to see through new eyes each day and write a little about what I see in my part of the world as well as ideas I find as read and listen and study.

I have spent the majority of the last 25 years as a father, husband, Head Start Teacher, but I don’t feel that any of those roles define me. They challenge and inspire me and give me experience, but there is so much more to my experience as a human being living at this time, in this place. There are books, stories, poems, movies as well as feelings and thoughts, dreams and fantasies, ideas that come from somewhere inside me, reactions to things I have experienced. I hope all of this can somehow come out on these pages in a creative way that has its own life.

I see myself as an artist in the same way that I see anyone who creates and attempts to communicate ideas and experiences through any medium. All art is an attempt to communicate something real and true from out of our experience of being human. We are alone without it. The best part of intimate relationships are those that are honest and communicated with passion, and so art. I think we let other people tell our stories, sing our songs, paint our pictures, and dance our dances because we believe they are the artists. But, everyone has a story, a song, a dance. What is it like inside this life among all the multitude of lives in the whole of time and space. I am here now at a starting point, in the middle, at an end to tell you what it is like to be me.

Posted in developing relationships, mindworks, My Art, my life, Other peoples words, philosophy, Telling Stories, thinking in words, wonder world | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Self-Experiment #1

Posted on August 14, 2007 by randomyriad

“If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be too cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

Annie Dillard

The cliff I am jumping off today is a job interview. I have a job to return to next Monday. I don’t have to do this. I am going to do this to have an experience of not even wanting the job they are offering. Frankly, I don’t know how I even made it through the screening process. I am always unemployed during the summer as I work for Head Start. Everyone asks me how my vacation is going. You mean my unemployment I reply. So anyway I have to apply for jobs and generally look for work. I applied for this job a month ago and last week they called and said if I would like to interview for the position I could schedule an appointment. This was after I got my notice to return to work. But, I thought what the hell. I should go and see what it is like to really not care whether I get a job or not. I am not nervous. I am not prepared. I will wear what I feel like not what I think would impress them. I thought about getting a haircut, but decided to not change a thing. I will walk out the door just as I am any other day of my unemployment. I am not looking for a reaction. I am doing this to observe my reaction to the situation. Actually it is more of a self-experiment than a cliff, but I have got my do-it-yourself wing kit just in case.

Posted in All part of the process, Flying and Falling, make your own world, my life, Other peoples words, Self-Experiments, thinking in words, working world | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment