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Showing posts from February, 2015

kindness

No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves. ~Amelia Earhart

Bloom

Do you think the flower delights in my attention as I bend, love struck toward her beauty?  Does she feel the splendor of my love and turn toward it like sunshine?  I doubt it.  Flowers bloom because it is their nature to bloom.  Their beauty, seen or unseen, acknowledged or unacknowledged, is the natural expression of flower.  And yet, as human beings, we are blind to our sublimity, desperately seeking the light of other… bending toward the hope of their appreciation, love, attention, affirmation or whatever hot-sought object or ideal occupies the nexus of our desire.  Could it be that our beauty is as inseparable from what we are as the flower is to the bud?  Is it possible that in our seeking to be loved we have relinquished the simple knowing that it doesn't matter.  That what we already are has the power to stop someone in their tracks and cause them to bend, in wild wonder toward our own brilliance? Perhaps the act of seeking is a constant forgetting, blinding us to the sim

flocking

When I experience the flocking patterns of birds and fish, I am overcome by a reverent quiet and humility.   There is no leader, no overall control, no bickering or obvious negotiations; instead the flock's movements reflect trust and a collective response to the moment-by-moment navigation's of individual birds as they interact with: neighbors, wind patterns, predators and more. There is trust in the flock and the physics of flight.  Research illustrates that these "flocking waves" respond to movement initiations from birds that bank into the flock, rather than away from it. Turning away toward isolation makes the individual more vulnerable, this rule also helps prevent indecision and permits the flock to respond rapidly to threat.  An obvious overlap exists between flocking behavior and Vygotsky's social constructivist theory, often called social constructivism. For Vygotsky, culture provides the child with cognitive tools necessary for development and a