ON LOVE & LEARNING: A set of 18 metaphysical miniatures…

IMAGE: Blue-eyed Mary (Collinsia parviflora) Diminutive spring ephemeral of the WALLOWAS, Land of Winding Waters, OREGON. FULL text you can use with your own improvised background is at http://www.picture-poems.com/pdfs/on-love-and-learning.pdf On Love, Learning and the World-wide Tragedy of Public Schools, a set of eighteen metaphysical miniatures (0) Talent? Everyone appreciates the wild flower's showy brilliance, but few care to follow the slow, steady ripening of the seed. (1) Schools? A place where the gift of wonder becomes the terror of exams.A child who can no longer tell the difference between a real question and a test, by what path do we lead it safely into the unknown? (2) Tests? Where the natural fear of outward attack gets mixed up and confused with the inward fear of failure. Watched carefully, we see that the fear thus generated folds into the body movements of a child at every level of subtlety, and, with time, causes any number of unnecessary permanent distortions. Later in life, in music, this leads to a forced, strident quality of sound which is never quite in tune, does not combine well with others and does not project well in space; in dance, the holding of tension caused by fear can lead to a debilitating rigidity and fragmentation of the primary head-neck-and-back relationship. If this goes on long enough, we will actually begin—completely unawares— to compose pieces which fit the distortions, and to a certain extent, even learn to enjoy playing and listening to them. Still later in life, pain and injury can bring this cycle to an abrupt stop.Why then do we not see this? Perhaps it is because, as F.M.Alexander used to say, "When people are wrong, the thing that is right is bound to be wrong to them."