Off topic, right?

[Gary Warner <gar () askgar com>]

This is the off-topic list, right?

Here's my latest off-topic musings:

"on Nature"

My son had an assignment last night dealing with Ralph Waldo Emerson's 
"Nature".

He came and interrupted me watching a tv program with my wife and 
daughter and said, I'm sorry to bug you, but I need help.

This was a break-through moment as he's been being a stubborn 15 year 
old and refusing to ask for help, and then bringing home bad grades.

He wasn't getting it.  The Transparent Eye.  The City of God. Pretty 
much none of it.

He asked me to explain it to him, so I did.

We talked about Isaac Asimov's NIGHTFALL, and Buddhism and the Universal 
Soul, and the fact that without an ego we approach nature 
transparently.  We approach a tree or a stream or a deer as a fellow 
creation of God, because we have left our higher self that worries about 
what time it is and what we're having for supper and whether our son 
will get into medical school or whether the customer will like our 
presentation on Friday . . . we left all of that self at the border of 
the Woods when we entered Nature purposefully.

We talked about how when you ask a four year old to draw a picture you 
get a tree and a house and a boy with a dog and a big yellow sun up 
above, and how they focus on what things around them ARE instead of what 
they think about them.  We talked about the industrial revolution and 
how it made all of God's creation appear in our mind as a list of 
resources to be exploited, and when I was done he said

"I wish you could come say that to my class, just like that."

And then he threw away his almost completed homework, that isn't graded 
for content, but is just a check-mark that says "did it", because they 
are supposed to use their answers to the homework questions for their 
in-class conversation, and he wrote for thirty more minutes, so he would 
be equipped to explain this poem to his friends.

if the stars
appeared but once
in a thousand years

we'd be busy
watching Seinfeld reruns


Gary Warner
29SEP05


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