Dear At and all Dear Learners,
A woman called Margaret Wheatley once wrote a paper citing a saint,
St.Thomas Aquinas. She was trying to grasp and represent the notion
perhaps more understood in those days, that learning, true 'authentic'
learning, takes place in joy. Not 'fun' a dubious adjective if ever there
was one in the hands of educators... but 'joy'. Such joyful learning comes
from an intense discovery of the quality of joy somehow embedded in the
natural world, with which many of us, I sense, have lost joyful contact.
This then becomes another kind/form/content of joy that in turn creates
even more joy, often inwardly turning until, somehow, it reaches a summit
of its own perfection in each and every person, explicating itself as a
'work' of joy which is surely a synonym for 'art' whether the
aesthetically fearful joy of the sublime or the fearless joy of the
beautiful. Dante wrote that, " In every action that is primarily intended
by the doer, whether he acts from natural necessity or free will, is the
disclosure of his own image. Hence it comes about that every doer, in so
far as he does, takes delight in doing; since everything that is desires
its own being, and since in action the being of the doer is somehow
intensified, delight necessarily follows....Thus, nothing acts unless by
acting it makes patent its latent self."
Action (praxis) and Speech (lexis) There is an even more ancient idea in
the 'western tradition' From Aristotle to Bohm there is a thread...that
the highest capacity for mankind is not 'logos' but 'nous'...not 'reason'
but 'contemplation'. It's chief characteristic...that it cannot be
rendered adequately in speech. Even dear Plato was a quantum mechanic of
the highest order;-) he once wrote me this, "Andrew, to be in solitude
means to be with oneself, and thinking is never altogether without a
partner or company;-)"
Acting into thinking and thinking into acting is rare...' These few who
still know what it means to act may be fewer than the artists, their
experience even rarer than the genuine experience and love for the world."
Hannah Arendt
Eme emauto <> Between me and myself <> a desert experience
In that desert <> alone <> no shadow
Love,
Andrew
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