doing something different with language
Americans smile a lot. It feels good! 🙂 Occasionally someone gives a fake smile, one of those that is offered up because it is socially expected, but most of the smiles are accompanied with eye contact that acknowledges, somehow, what a pleasure it is to recognize mutual presence. No more carefully-controlled neutral (or somewhat suspicious) … Read more...
It is cool for summer. In fact, the chill at night feels more like autumn. Otherwise the lush, bright greens (of trees, grass, cultivated crops and wild bush), sky and mountain blues, and varying tones of white in the clouds are as they ever were. I got out on the bike trail yesterday, smelling … Read more...
Language is a force.
Language names, and by naming, it calls into being. This is how social reality is constructed and maintained. I think it is an effect of quantum mechanics, but smarter minds than mine are needed to make the connections in a compelling scientific manner.
Last fall I wrote a post on some dynamics … Read more...
A year ago, I marked a confluence of transitions. How many times, I continue to wonder, can one bounce back from failure? I also consider, if failure (however conceived) has lead me here . . .
So what if the museum … Read more...
I don’t want your departure to hurt so much, but it does.
Silly, I know. I’m watching the wind blow lush spring foliage like currents in the sea, swirling in multiply-rippled design – now unfurling a wide swath then cutting back against itself, sweeping into new unpredictable configurations and keeping me guessing, waiting, eager for the next sussuration. I envision … Read more...
The park is magical. As are all the public, cultivated spaces here: I’m given the sense of a holodeck – programmed to appear wild but the evidence of human design remains.
Doesn’t that remind you of the lamppost on the other side of the wardrobe in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe? (I have refrained from watching … Read more...
Most of the Middle Eastern Spirituality and Peace Festival is over, there were only two events that lingered past my arrival Sunday [15 March] – I chose to add them to my tourist itinerary as prep for the Dialogue Under Occupation conference that I dash to next.
I spent … Read more...
Anne said this last Friday: she was teasing me that none of my friends collected the in-class paperwork for me. My Dutch continues to limp along…
Walking to the tram later that afternoon, I noticed someone had lain flowers at the foot of a statue that I had not paid attention to before. A bouquet on this regular day … Read more...
Fill in the blank:
It always sounds a bit pompous to respond factually, “doing research for my dissertation,” or, alternatively, “trying to contribute to a more peaceable world.” One needs regular doses of humor … Read more...
It occurs to me that I have an occasionally-troubled relationship with time. The patience of the Dutch impresses me: the decades and generations, for instance, of carefully reclaiming land from the sea. The paintings of Johannes Vermeer and the woodcuts and lithographs by M.C. Escher, bespeak a lifetime of deeply-responsive and engaged living. Vermeer, we … Read more...