64 x 9 (Recommended Reading)

I'm reading Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch and finding it—to use an old-fashioned word not meant to be dismissive or patronizing—charming. Mead has read and re-read Eliot throughout her life, and her book is part memoir, part literary criticism, part biography, part travelogue, and part personal reflection. All of it is thought-provoking, well-written, and surprisingly fun to read. Check it out.

64 x 8 (Thinking II)

The deepest and most powerful thinking of which we are capable takes place without our explicit knowledge in areas of the brain not subject to our conscious direction or control, and that therefore we must make an effort to regularly engage in what might be called non-thinking, the emptying of the mind, in order that new, more spontaneous thoughts may arise unbidden from within.

64 x 7 (Thinking I)

Asked what aspects of thinking are most central or valuable, I'd say the ability to keep an open mind, especially about things you may already believe to be true or false; the inclination to ask good questions and really listen to the answers; the flexibility to shift your point of view when you're stuck; and the humility to realize that truth is never singular.

Process Reflection: Trying to mold these thoughts into a single sentence of exactly 64 words was both more labor intensive and more revelatory than I had thought it would be. I've been toying with the idea of doing some writing about thinking again. As a result of the years I spent in dialogue with the Critical Thinking group at Punahou, with my CT classes, and with the Institute for Critical Thinking, it's a subject I've had more direct experience with than most. But it's been a while since I've re-visited the subject. If I were to give myself the exact same assignment again I suspect I would not come up with exactly the same answer. In fact, I'm inclined, as an exercise in lateral thinking and the shifting of my own point of view, to set myself the exact same assignment again under the condition that I have to come up with a completely different answer that will also be, if not "true," at least plausible. So that will be, with luck and the blessing, be the next post.

64 x 6 (We Do Now)

Across the blank paper

The pen tip carves

A trail, here certain,

Here hesitant. The line

has its own life:

the hand its father,

the eye its mother,

impulse its deep yearning,

movement its only voice

or gesture. Having begun,

there's no turning back.

Water carves the canyon;

swallows sweep the skies.

None of us knew

At the start where

The story would end.

64 x 5 (Augustiana)

Today began cool and gray. Around ten o'clock

The sun began to burn through the clouds,

And now, at noon, the day hands suspended.

I'm waiting to see which way it goes:

Back to heat and summer glare, or forward

Toward autumn—its barred clouds and gathering swallows,

Its knife-edge tracing borders, its drops of blood:

emblems of what's been lost, and what remains.

64 x 4 (Drilling Down)

That buzzing noise. Is it in fact coming from those poles? Or is it coming from the ground, maybe the rumble of a far-off train? Or from further back, something hidden in the clouds? Maybe from inside the shafts of the silver mines up in the hills? Somewhere behind that sound is the silence, larger and more lasting. Close your eyes. Listen. Listen harder.