"I encourage you to spend as much time with your family as your time allows, whether it's dancing, playing, walking, cooking, cleaning, being silly, or just hanging out. This can be a scary time for kids, and nothing will help ease their fears and encourage their cognitive and social development like spending time with you." ...This same teacher is also emailing us [parents] a daily photo of a bird to identify...and sharing out-of-the-box ideas for the students' unit this month on an appropriate topic: survival...but the words above are the words I will treasure as a parent for a long time. They will remind me to take a break from refreshing the updated coronavirus map, checking my school email, and cursing Amazon's multitude of out-of-stock items.
Instead, I'll look my 12-year-old daughter in the eyes and ask, "How you doing, Baby Goose?" I'll accept my son's challenge to a muddy soccer game in the backyard. I'll take him by the hand and walk up our mountain one more time, grateful that during a crisis when all we have is each other, "each other" is exactly what we all need.
~ Justin Minkel, an elementary school teacher in Arkansas, "What our Children Need Most Right Now": in Education Week., March 2020
If we will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, we see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.
People say that what we're all seeking in life is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think we're seeking the rapture, the joy, of being alive.
The tree of life, the axis mundi is the central point, the pole around which all revolves. The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you are doing in the temporal experience -- this is the mythological experience.
All final spiritual reference is to be the silence beyond sound. The word made flesh is the first sound. Beyond that sound is the transcendent unknown, the unknowable. It can be spoken of as the great silence, or as the void, or as the transcendent absolute.
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don't know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody, you don't know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
