Purify.

Ray Bradbury on life and love ...

We keep cleansing the stream just as any impurity running downhill in a river by the time it travels nine miles is purified.   So the life of a man traveling to the sea, which is our inevitable death someday, purifies itself.  It must, because if you do not purify, these tensions remain in and turn in on yourself and destroy you.  The man who cannot laugh freely is a sick man.  The man who cannot cry and release tears in that direction, there's a sick man.  The man who cannot be violent through exercise, through sports, through acting out his violence in paper or painting or acting on a stage, is a sick man.

Glow.

Kurt has not-all-that-surprising news ...

[A]ll living things – including humans – could literally glow with health, until we don't.

Inkling.

There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live. Surely these should never be confused in the mind of any man who has the slightest inkling of what culture is. For most of us it is essential that we should make a living.  In the complications of modern life and with our increased accumulation of knowledge, it doubtless helps greatly to compress some years of experience into far fewer years by studying for a particular trade or profession in an institution; but that fact should not blind us to another—namely, that in so doing we are learning a trade or a profession, but are not getting a liberal education as human beings.

James Truslow Adams, from The Epic of America

Life.

Caillebotte, Still Life with Oysters, 1881

Natural.

Ari Weinzweig explains his Natural Laws ...

This is exactly what the Natural Laws have given me. They offer me a frame through which I can resist the temptation to be totally taken in by “the incident.” Instead of getting pulled in as most leaders are to focus singly on a new product, a new hire, a big sale, or some crisis of the moment, they help me to take a mental step back to see things in a different, more holistic way. When in doubt, I pull out the list of the 24 Natural Laws and see what it tells me about what’s going on, and where I need to adjust or change what we’re doing.

Life.

Steve reminds us that public schools need to get a life.

Transcribe.

Getting the most out of the reading life ...

1. Read aloud: different forms of cognition and expression make for deeper meaning.
2. Develop a system of marginalia: transform the pages into personal maps of thought.
3. Transcribe inspirational passages: different forms of cognition and expression make for deeper meaning.

Thanks to Steve and Kurt.

Unsophistications.

The sheep-like tendency of human society soon makes inroads on a child's unsophistications, and then popular education completes the dastardly work with its systematic formulas, and away goes the individual, hurtling through space into that hateful oblivion of mediocrity. We are pruned into stumps, one resembling another, without character or grace.

N. C. Wyeth

Once upon a time there was a crooked tree and a straight tree ...

It's still happening. 

At school I notice the number of "crooked trees" are fewer each year.

The lumberjacks are getting better and better at cultivating straight trees.  They've successfully recruited young apprentices to aid in the process.

Schools are the worst place for crooked trees.  

The antidote is a housemade (God, I hate that word, but it's meaningful here) mixture of the following; each essential (none are available in a public school setting), all measured to-taste ...

• Fresh air sampling and studies, tree-climbing, water-wandering, and wind resistance (literal and figurative); exposure to raw weather 
• Books, read like a snacker snacks and like a savorer savors
• Commonplace books and an introduction to the love of a favored writing instrument
• Transportation: bikes, skateboards, boats, nothing motorized ... sturdy shoes
• Solitude

Art.

Let them remember that there is a meaning beyond absurdity. Let them be sure that every little deed counts, that every word has power, and that we can do, everyone, our share to redeem the world, in spite of all absurdities, and all the frustrations, and all the disappointment. And above all, remember that the meaning of life is to live life as if it were a work of art.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Unquestionably.

From last autumn, Nail Gaiman talks with Susanna Clarke to discuss her novel, Piranesi, which he calls "unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years" ...

Pursues.

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

Yvon Chouinard, from Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

CONNECT

Obvious.

Must.

You must write every single day of your life. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.  May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days and out of that love, remake a world.

Ray Bradbury

Appropriately.

To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.

Michel de Montaigne

Actualized.

To invoke an analogy, consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn’t it the same with life? Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn’t this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of their respective individual’s knowledge and belief?

Victor Frankl

Envied.

I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life; I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and lived them well.

Theodore Roosevelt

Gift.

Life is a gift, from the few to the many, from those who know and have to those who don't know and don't have.

Amedeo Modigliani

All.

Live all you can. It’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.

Henry James

Gratitude.

Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.

Sir Roger Scruton

CONNECT

Chatham-inspired.

A Chatham-inspired post from the past ... HERE.