If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can move mountains. This was a message my youngest daughter received at her primary school graduation on Friday night. We send children to school to find meaning. Everything else is secondary. We humans want to believe in our own species. On nights like that the joys of parents and their fears come out of hiding. Words in certains songs do that to parents: “We are the feeling in your song; We are the rhythm that color your song; We are the pain that makes the melody strong.”
Stephen Covey said that there are only two lasting bequests we can give our children; one is roots, the other is wings. However, a faith is often what holds people's lives together. It is an attempt to resolve the tensions of everyday life by promising an idealized future in which one will be rescued from all the problems of ordinary life.
To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk being called sentimental.
To reach out to another is to risk involvement..
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self
To place your ideas, your dreams before the crowd is to risk being called naive.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
To hope is to risk despair, and to try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken because the greastest hazard in life is to risk
nothing.
The person who risks nothing does nothing, has nothing, and becomes nothing.
He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn and feel and change and grow and love and live.
Chained by his certitudes, he is a slave, he's forfeited his freedom.
Only the person who risks is truly free.
- Leo Buscalia
Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Donna’s Year 6 Self Examining Book & Powerpoint of Memories
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
I mentioned the other day that Dvorak’s String Sextet was written in “A major, that most divinely innocent of keys." Now a reader writes to ask:
Is there something intrinsic to the key of A major that makes it more innocent than any other? Is it innocent only when strings are playing in it?
Keys are often said to possess characteristics associated with various extra-musical emotional states. While there has never been a consensus on these associations, the material basis for these attributions was at one time quite real: because of inequalities in actual temperament, each mode acquired a unique intonation and thus its own distinctive “tone,” and the sense that each mode had its own musical characteristics was strong enough to persist even in circumstances in which equal temperament was abstractly assumed. Though highly specific with respect to different repertories and listeners, these expressive qualties fall into two basic categories, which conform to the basic difference—often asserted as an opposition—between major and minor: major is heard to be brighter and more cheerful than minor, which in comparison is darker and sadder.
• D minor: it's not just a key, it's a living! ; [Oh sister, oh brother]
• · Picture a mundane aspect of everyday life that most readers will recognize: you're in touch with a coworker on the other side of the planet via email or IM, and at the same time you get an SMS telling you to bring home a carton of milk Sociology of Mobility
• · · The earth is always changing as man develops and has to deal with new combinations of elements; and the writer who is to be anything more than an echo of his predecessors must always find expression for something which has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of Phenomena which has never yet been mastered….
• · · · So did you really read all those Christmas stories, or just set them out like decorations? Here's a quiz from the Guardian for you holiday/lit know-it-alls. Literary Scrooge: God bless us, every one