Back to school

“I’m afraid I’m not a very good grown-up,” he told the Sun. “My wife has always felt I’m more comfortable with children than grown-ups. … I teach a fourth-grade class in a public school once a week — I teach them my version of art history — and I just love sitting in those little chairs.”

Dr. Robert Coles, Baltimore Sun interview

Limitations

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

             Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Vanity and Suffering of Life

 

 

 

 

Nature

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man
if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature
and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

            E. B. White, The Points of My Compass

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Long and short

Es tan corto el amor y tan largo el olvido.
Love is so short and forgetting is so long.

        Pablo Neruda, Tonight I Can Write (Puedo Escribir)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Summer

There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.

                 Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A different kind of place

[This] mirror reminds me of a story I once heard about a Persian dervish.

They say that a dervish arrived at a temple and asked the doorman, “What kind of place is this?”

The doorman answered: “This is a place where you must leave envy, lust, greed, anger, hostility, meanness, and the like behind to enter.“

To this, the dervish said, “If I were able to put all these negative traits behind, why would I need to enter this place? I need a place where I can carry in my impurities, and emerge without them.“
 

Alireza Taghdarreh, Light and Language in Thoreau and Rumi

 

 

 

Poem: August Morning

It’s ripe, the melon
by our sink. Yellow,
bee-bitten, soft, it perfumes
the house too sweetly.
At five I wake, the air
mournful in its quiet.
My wife’s eyes swim calmly
under their lids, her mouth and jaw
relaxed, different.
What is happening in the silence
of this house? Curtains
hang heavily from their rods.
Ficus leaves tremble
at my footsteps. Yet
the colors outside are perfect--
orange geranium, blue lobelia.
I wander from room to room
like a man in a museum:
wife, children, books, flowers,
melon. Such still air. Soon
the mid-morning breeze will float in
like tepid water, then hot.
How do I start this day,
I who am unsure
of how my life has happened
or how to proceed
amid this warm and steady sweetness?

                        Albert Garcia