curiosity

Curiosity is the main energy...

A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently.

She was an experimental child but compassionate with it.

Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a child's relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we don't know as much as we think we know.

If soldiering did not interest him, the soldiers themselves were another matter. He loved to sit with the men and draw out their first-hand stories of past campaigns.

We need to know not only what is done but what is purposed and said by those who shape the destines of states and realms." Horace Greeley

Question like a child, reason like an adult, and write like a sage.

Neoteny is more than retaining a youthful appearance, although that is often part of it. Neoteny is the retention of all those wonderful qualities that we associate with youth: curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy. Unlike those defeated by time and age, our geezers have remained much like our geeks _ open, willing to take risks, hungry for knowledge and experience, courageous, eager to see what the new day brings. Time and lost steal the zest from the unlucky, and leave them looking longingly at the past. Neoteny is a metaphor for the quality _ and the gift _ that keeps the fortunate of whatever age focused on all marvelous undiscovered things to come.

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

Life seeks for willing soul. You can be the one.

Souls spread over the planet and leave no mountain unclimbed, no valley undiscovered, no sea unsailed, ventured even into outer space.Souls mingle and leave no relationship unattempted, no emotion unfelt, no pleasure and pain unexplored.Souls plunge into their minds and leave no tale untold, no image unpainted, no melody unheard.Souls transcend their fantasies and leave no idea unthought, no natural law undescribed, no wisdom undefined. Souls even pass over the thinkeable and witness ineffable realms of other worlds and their inhabitants. Curiosity, the drive to experience, the urge of urges, the world's innermost desire. We, souls, are its foremost scouts. We are the embodiment of the purpose of existence.

It is more important to find out the truth about oneself than to find out the truth about heaven and hell, or about many other things which are of less importance and are apart from oneself. However, every man's pursuit is according to his state of evolution, and so each soul is in pursuit of something__ut he does not know where it leads him.

You dare travel on sacred road, although you may not know the end.

I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can__ think about them. I live with trees. There are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and in addition, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down, shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach.

In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there.I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, __hen you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.

Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture and lapse into dreamless sleep. Because we are living people, and because we are on the receiving end of beauty, another element necessarily enters the question. The texture of space is a condition of time. Time is the warp and matter the weft of woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurtling shuttle_ What I want to do, then, is add time to the texture, paint the landscape on an unrolling scroll, and set the giant relief globe spinning on it stand.

Xerxes, I read, __alted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction_ the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain_you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven__ you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered_there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse_and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. __e had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life._ We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn__ it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don__ know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.

Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings_They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn__ that have been a sight to see?