Random acts of public happiness

I found this video via my friend Joan, who was the voice of kindness and reason on my dorm floor my sophomore year of college.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUazLI9k

This video gets better as it goes. I just love it.

I'm reminded of a wonderful woman I met years ago when I lived in England. (Steve? Are you reading this? She was a friend of yours. I don't recall her name.) She had started a volunteer group which, in twos or threes, boarded trains on London's Underground. They would begin to sing a singable, knowable tune, and invite anyone who wished to join in. They wanted to make a dent in the anonymity of urban life. They wanted to connect. Sometimes they would sing their song and then quietly exit at the next station. But sometimes, she reported, they'd get a whole car singing. I always meant to join them, but I never made it.

There is this video, too, which is good fun, but it doesn't quite have that element of boundless joy, does it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwMj3PJDxuo

there is poetry in Cleveland

Here is my proof.

April 2nd, Willoughby Municipal Park, Cleveland, on Lake Erie.

(I photoshopped out a picnic table and two trash cans. Forgive me.)

why they are masters

Every day I make an effort to go toward what I don’t understand. This wandering leads to the accidental learning that continually shapes my life.
— Yo-Yo Ma

Ancora imparo.
[I am still learning.]
-- Michaelangelo, age 87

snow + bloom

Perhaps I'm taking the silver lining thing a bit too far, but I find reassurance that sometimes, even Earth herself muddles things up. Today, long after she released the blooms in my neighborhood--oops, she flurried some snow.
















(Can you see it swirling in this photo?)

It's strange. Surreal. Beautiful. And it allows me to take it a little easier on myself when I go to the store expressly for eggs and bread, and I come home with eggs (and tofu and chocolate and strawberries) but no bread. I'm in good company in my absent-mindedness.

Gertrude sums it up

"I do want to get rich, but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich."

Gertrude Stein, from Everybody's Autobiography

language in translation

I've been thinking a lot about the German language, flipping through traveler's phrase books and the hefty, sober Oxford-Duden Dictionary (concise version of). I love German. It's a realist's language. Not that I'm a realist, but I admire those who are.

English in translation

I told them English
is my mother tongue,
but every day, every word
I translate
from the unformed,
the fleeting, the impassioned,
the true.
Even that
I translate
from the primoridal dark
and the dappled green shadows
of my forebears' memories.

Comparing early childhood education concepts

For a long time, I've been mentally working on a comparison study of the many schools of thought on early childhood education.

And I just came across this blog and this series of posts. Wonderful. I wish I had had this information at my fingertips when my own children were preschool-aged.

Click around--such informative posts, and doesn't she have an eye for the beautiful detail?