Textured Teaching Quotes

Literature can teach us the qualitative texture of the world. And we need it to. We need to communicate the value of things, so that more of us might fight to save them.

Stories are masks of God. That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm. Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth. Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God. So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them.

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength. We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter their color; equal in importance no matter their texture.

Tonglen practice has four stages: Rest your mind for a second or two in a state of openness or stillness. This is called flashing absolute bodhichitta, or suddenly opening to the basic spaciousness and clarity of the awakened heart. Work with texture. Breathe in a feeling of hot, dark, and heavy—a sense of claustrophobia—and breathe out a feeling of cool, bright, and light—a sense of freshness. Breathe in through all the pores of your body and radiate out completely, through all the pores of your body. Do this until your visualization feels synchronized with your in and out-breaths. Now contemplate any painful situation that’s real to you. For example, you can breathe in the hot, dark, constricted feeling of sadness that you feel, and breathe out a light, cool sense of joy or space or whatever might provide relief. Widen the circle of compassion by connecting with all those who feel this kind of pain, and extending the wish to help everyone.

USE YOUR SENSES FULLY. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don’t interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don’t judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something — anything — and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the “isness” of all things. Move deeply into the Now. You are leaving behind the deadening world of mental abstraction, of time. You are getting out of the insane mind that is draining you of life energy, just as it is slowly poisoning and destroying the Earth. You are awakening out of the dream of time into the present.

Risotto is one of those dishes you just have to try a few times yourself, to teach yourself the moves and sounds and smells and textures. This is a guide map, but kind of a rough and tattered one.

It was as if she had grown, changed, overnight; her hair was different, her eyes; the shade and texture of her flesh, her limbs; and, most disconcerting and delightful of all, she was beginning to speak. She increasingly talked back to him when he murmured to her, and he understood that she was becoming what she was destined to become, when he first held her in the open air of the world: her own person, her own independent and particular self. He marveled at it all. And what would she grow up to be like? What was inside her, already formed, that would draw forth with time, and what was it that she most needed him to teach her? Would she be amenable to his help, his advice in worldly matters? And what advice did he have to give her?

I dreamed not long ago of that market with all its vivid textures. I walked through the stalls with a basket over my arms as always and went right to Edita for a bunch of fresh cilantro. We chatted and laughed and when I held out my coins she waved them off, patting my arm and sending me away. A gift, she said. Muchas gracias, señora, I replied. There was my favorite panadera, with clean cloths laid over the round loaves. I chose a few rolls, opened my purse, and this vendor too gestured away my money as if I were impolite to suggest paying. I looked around in bewilderment; this was my familiar market and yet everything had changed. It wasn't just for me—no shopper was paying. I floated through the market with a sense of euphoria. Gratitude was the only currency accepted here. It was all a gift. It was like picking strawberries in my field: the merchants were just the intermediaries passing on gifts from the earth. I looked in my basket: two zucchinis, an onion, tomatoes, bread, and a bunch of cilantro. It was still half empty, but it felt full. I had everything I needed. I glanced over at the cheese stall, thinking to get some, but knowing it would be given, not sold, I decided I could do without. It's funny: Had all the things in the market merely been a very low price, I probably would have scooped up as much as I could. But when everything became a gift, I felt self-restraint. I didn't want to take too much. And I began thinking of what small presents I might bring to the vendors tomorrow. The dream faded, of course, but the feelings of euphoria and then of self-restraint remain. I've thought of it often and recognize now that I was witness there to the conversion of a market economy to a gift economy, from private goods to common wealth. And in that transformation the relationships became as nourishing as the food I was getting. Across the market stalls and blankets, warmth and compassion were changing hands. There was a shared celebration of abundance for all we'd been given. And since every market basket contained a meal, there was justice.

Human history is the ancient story of the umbilical conflict between a lone individual versus a cabalistic society. A love-hate relationship defines our personal history with society, where the suppression of individuality for the sake of the collective good battles the notion that the purpose of society is to enable each person to flourish. A conspicuous feature of cultural development involves societies teaching children the sublimation of unacceptable impulses or idealizations, consciously to transform their inappropriate instinctual impulses into socially acceptable actions or behavior. The paradox rest in the concept that in order for any person to flourish they must preserve the spiritual texture of themselves, a process that requires the individual to resist societal restraint, push off against the community, and reject the walls of traditionalism that seek to pen us in. The climatic defining event in a person’s life represents the liberation of the self from crippling conformism, staunchly rebuffing capitulating to the whimsy of the super ego of society.

Just as the senses require sensible objects to stimulate them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and imagination do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the demands set up by current social occupations. The main texture of disposition is formed, independently of schooling, by such influences. What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some of their grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity more productive of meaning.

I charge you with a phrase from the gospel of John, Updike that is: Your only duty is to give the mundane its beautiful due. You step from this moment with scripture and stole ordained to the ordinary. Ours is an existence in something more than the husk it once was but not yet the bloom it shall be; in other words, you are charged to the in-between, middle-earth, us. Yes, our lives are sewn on occasion with a texture of joy unmistakable, the foretastes. But many days, if not most hours, reek of repetition, a mundane rising and falling punctuated with what the old hymn writer penned as “seasons of distress and grief.” The relief you are charged to bring to our souls in times like these is beauty – nothing more, nothing less. It is your only duty. Give up all other ambitions for the dross they are. Give the mundane its beautiful due. Bear witness to the truth we so often bury, that our lives are shot through with drama, interest, relevance, importance, and poetry. Live among us, story by story, with both precision and surprisingness. Help us to believe in God by startling us with the kicker – God believes in us. Know this, that yours is not so much a high calling as it is a careful attention; you are to be a person of prayer, not big britches. Once you begin a gesture it's often fatal not to go through with it, so please, for the love of God and us and you, go through with this. The world for you may be even harder from here on in, but most things worth doing are hard. So break and bless and preach and teach and laugh and sing and weep and rage and whisper at the altar of this astonishingly splendid fallen world. Give the mundane its beautiful due. Amen and amen.

I, like, added curry spices to the tomatoes and then firmed it with sodium alginate. Then there's the mousse I made with powdered, freeze-dried foie gras blended with turmeric. The white dollop in the middle is a puree of potatoes and six different types of cheese. Once your mouth has thoroughly cooled from those items, you should totally try the piecrust arches. Oh! I flash froze it first, so it should have a very light, fluffy texture. I kneaded coriander and a few other select spices into the pie dough. It'll cleanse your palate and give your tongue a break. This dish is all about "Thermal Sense," y'know. Molecular gastronomy teaches about the various contrasting temperature sensations foods and spices have. I took those theories and put them together into a single dish.

Sshhhhh from rain, pitpitpit from hemlock, bloink from maple, and lastly popp of falling alder water. Alder drops make a slow music. It takes time for fine rain to traverse the scabrous rough surface of an alder leaf. The drops aren't as big as maple drops, not enough to splash, but the popp ripples the surface and sends out concentric rings. I close my eyes and listen to the voices of the rain. The reflecting surface of the pool is textured with their signatures, each one different in pace and resonance. Every drip it seems is changed by its relationship with life, whether it encounters moss or maple or fir bark or my hair. And we think of it as simply rain, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it. I think that moss knows rain better than we do, and so do maples. Maybe there is no such thing as rain; there are only raindrops, each with its own story.

not despise the wisdom of childhood.” The words of the Book of Bédard flashed unbidden through his mind. “Childhood is a canvas, pure in its innocence, awaiting the brush of experience. In time, that canvas will become the portrait of a life and the growth of a living soul. But that portrait may be rich with color, filled with the texture of joy, or gray and ugly, shrouded in the bleakness of despair. It is your responsibility to guide that brush as God would have it guided. Nor will the guiding leave your life, your faith, unchanged, for a child’s eyes see what adults do not. A child’s gaze is unblinkered by preconception, and children have not learned to look willfully away from truth. Do not be deceived! That searching gaze, those fearless questions, are God’s gift to you. A child’s questions require answer; answer requires explanation; explanation requires thought; and thought requires understanding, and so even as they ask, they teach. Learn from them, treasure the opportunity God has given you, and remember always that whenever one teaches, two learn, and there is no greater joy than to learn together.” His

*Africans, Embrace One Another* -------------------------- My fellow African, when you look at another African, what do you see? Do you not see the reflection of yourself? Do you not see someone who was once a victim of the dark past? Someone who has now emerged as a survivor at last; just as your forefathers did before the shadows enslaved your kins! Do you not see the same colour of your skin? Do you not see the same texture of your hair? Yes, you see yourself, it's clear. Now, since you're looking at your reflection, don't you wish to cover yourself with affection? Beloved Africans, you were once the victims of confusion in the past. But you shouldn't remain in that disillusioned class. Today you're free and enriched with resources to maintain yourselves. Let the victim mentality go as a start. Like the three wise men, embrace your survivor status. Be wise and be resourceful. Africans, you have the permission to celebrate your roots, your heritage, and the teachings of your books. Go on and heal your bodies with your traditional herbs. And teach your children the secrets of your ancestors. Tell your children that your ancestors were self-sufficient. Efficient, your ancestors lived well — with little to nothing. Yet, they were the happiest. The merriest. Embrace the secrets of your traditions, just like the seas. You're safe and free.

These associations—Cavafy, my mother polishing the silver, a missionary aunt who fled the familiar turf of Tennessee for the otherness of Korea (presumably with the intent of teaching them something, hopefully with the result of being taught), my Mamaw’s fragrant old bureau with its smell of wax and polish—all of them would be brought to bear upon my painting of peppermints, but none of them would be visible; there’s no reason the viewer would know any of this. I could render only what can be seen—color and form, though the painter’s splendid artifice reveals to us texture, too, and rich associations of scent and flavor, all arriving through the gates of the eyes. And yet there is something more here, and that something is what nags at me to write this book, what tugs at my sleeve and my sleep. Why, if all that is personal has fallen away, should these pictures matter so? Why should they be alight with a feeling of intimacy? Interiority makes itself visible. In my imaginary still life, the “context and commentary” of my experience would be gone, but something would remain, something distilled and vibrant in the quality of attention itself. Is that what soul or spirit is, then, the outward-flying attention, the gaze that binds us to the world? Coorte’s asparagus, his gooseberries and shells, distill this quality down to its quietest, most startling essence: the eye suffuses what it sees with I. Not “I” in the sense of my story, the particulars of my life, the way my father tended his old asparagus beds each spring, the way my beloved loved the forms and colors of shells. But “I” as the quickest, subtlest thing we are: a moment of attention, an intimate engagement. Is that the lesson, then, that ultimately I becomes an eye? What is left of Adriaen Coorte but this? Isn’t that enough? […] That, I think, is the deepest secret of these paintings, finally, although it seems just barely in the realm of the sayable, this feeling that beneath the attachments and appurtenances, the furnishings of selfhood, what we are is attention, a quick physical presence in the world, a bright point of consciousness in a wide field from which we are not really separate. That, in a field of light, we are intensifications of that light.

DR. OZ SPEAKS OUT FOR TRANSCENDENTAL MEDITATION Toward the end of April, 2012, Dr. Mehmet Oz took center stage at The Dr. Oz Show and told his TV audience that he had been practicing Transcendental Meditation for three years, and had “decided to offer the technique to everyone on my team.” He shared with them that the day after the first 20 people (of his staff of 200) learned to meditate, things began to change. “The first thing I noticed was a change in the tone and the texture of the dialogue—away from dwelling on problems towards a much more thoughtful, insightful, clever way of solving problems. Instead of highlighting the issues that were separating us, my team was deriving bliss and joy from finding solutions.

The cessation of suffering is when we release our demand for the world to be as we want it to be and let it resume its own contours and textures.

We've done the grilled tomato and peach pizza at Le Papillon Sauvage. We've served the beet and peach soup. And the peach and cucumber salsa over the chicken. The tarts. The cobblers. The homemade ice cream. I don't know. I'm tapped out for ideas." Phillipa rolled a peach on a cutting board, massaging it. "Pork," she said. "Peaches and pork would taste amazing together. Or pan-seared foie gras? What do you think?" "If you can come up with something interesting, I'm all for it." "Me?" she asked. "But you're the chef. And I want to be inspired by you." "That makes two of us," I said. "You're doing amazing things." Phillipa halved a peach, cut into it, and then handed over a slice. "Eat this, savor it. Find your inspiration!" she said, and as I bit into it, I tried, able to focus only on the texture. As the juices from the slice ran across my tongue and down my throat, the sensation transported me to my childhood, to the teachings of my grand-mère in this kitchen, and her recipe for a peach crumble. The way she taught me to knead the flour, butter, and sugar into flaky crumbs, working her gentle hands with mine. I could almost feel her next to me, smell her cinnamon and nutmeg scent.

[...] But in my own field, I can tell you what happens to books when they are put to these uses. They are examined for "developmental values," or read because they teach the concept of "relative size," or because of "good human relations," or "interracial concepts," or "vocabulary content." But when one searches for values and pushes them as if they were plums in a pudding, one destroys the texture and proportion of the pudding itself, and the art of pudding-making and the eating thereof are destroyed.

Lizzie told me ’tis important to use all of the senses in cooking.” “She is correct—the art of baking bread or preparing a proper dish is to remember to use your senses. You must feel the texture to know the consistency and taste it to know if you have the right amount. The aroma will tell you when it is done. Experience will teach you.” He turned to the oven and opened the door. Mary drew back from the heat, but he nudged her to look inside. The soot had turned to a white-hot ash on the walls of the oven and he nodded toward the

Dear Black Man (Poem) ***** I love you because you make me feel things that I have never felt before. You erase my pain and you bring me so much gain. You embrace me and hide me in your well built African and manly body. You make me want to never look at other bodies. I love how you cut your hair. I love to feel your love in the air. The texture of your hair, so beautiful, so artistic. Your beautiful smile, so amazing; it reminds me of hiding places. You walk like you own the world; at least, I assure you that you own mine and the rest of my words. Black Man, you are beautiful. Your skin tone is so dark, it makes me want to bark. Please allow me to run my hands on the hills of that skin. You are handsome, my amazing king. The way you speak your language. The way you speak your Xhosa. Your Hausa. Your Zulu. Your Kituba. Your Tswana. Your Lingala. Your Venda. Your Gadomba. Your Tsonga. Your Shona. Your Bateke. Your Ga. Your Sotho. Your Igbo. Your eyes. Black Man, your eyes tell me a story never heard before. You teach me; from your wisdom, I learn. From your strength, I know 'I can'. Black Man, they enslaved you because they found you intimidating. But today, they look for you to be their mate in dating. You look at my stretchmarks with an eye of an artist. You appreciate my big behind with no judgement. You kiss my big lips with love. And in my big thighs, you hide. You love me when I have no hair. You love me when I have fake hair. Black Man, I thought of you and I wrote to you. All hail the Black king! From your Black Woman, (with African curves) .

We must take literally what vision teaches us: namely, that through it we come in contact with the sun and the stars, that we are everywhere all at once, and that even our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere—"I am in Petersburg in my bed, in Paris, my eyes see the sun"—or to intend real beings wherever they are, borrows from vision and employs means we owe to it. Vision alone makes us learn that beings that are different, "exterior," foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are "simultaneity"; this is a mystery psychologists handle the way a child handles explosives. Robert Delaunay says succinctly, "The railroad track is the image of succession which comes closest to the parallel: the parity of the rails." The rails converge and do not converge; they converge in order to remain equidistant down below. The world is in accordance with my perspective in order to be independent of me, is for me in order to be without me, and to be the world. The "visual quale" gives me, and alone gives me, the presence of what is not me, of what is simply and fully. It does so because, like texture, it is the concretion of a universal visibility, of a unique space which separates and reunites, which sustains every cohesion (and even that of past and future, since there would be no such cohesion if they were not essentially relevant to the same space). Every visual something, as individual as it is, functions also as a dimension, because it gives itself as the result of a dehiscence of Being. What this ultimately means is that the proper essence of the visible is to have a layer of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence...There is that which reaches the eye directly, the frontal properties of the visible; but there is also that which reaches it from below—the profound postural latency where the body raises itself to see—and that which reaches vision from above like the phenomena of flight, of swimming, of movement, where it participates no longer in the heaviness of origins but in free accomplishments. Through it, then, the painter touches the two extremities. In the immemorial depth of the visible, something moved, caught fire, and engulfed his body; everything he paints is in answer to this incitement, and his hand is "nothing but the instrument of a distant will." Vision encounters, as at a crossroads, all the aspects of Being... There is no break at all in this circuit; it is impossible to say that nature ends here and that man or expression starts here. It is, therefore, mute Being which itself comes to show forth its own meaning. Herein lies the reason why the dilemma between figurative and nonfigurative art is badly posed; it is true and uncontradictory that no grape was ever what it is in the most figurative painting and that no painting, no matter how abstract, can get away from Being, that even Caravaggio's grape is the grape itself. This precession of what is upon what one sees and makes seen, of what one sees and makes seen upon what is—this is vision itself.

The natural world is more recognizable and identifiable in its unaffected replies and usual predictability. This genuineness does have residual seepage observable in the surreal world of humanity as well, in instances where nature or a natural reality is observed in experience with an impassioned, ephemeral detection and the entirety of the world is shortly exposed as still living, composed of material, substance, texture and essence beyond the normalized human exposure of chosen limits of sensitivities, of closing endpoints of understanding, of illusory trickeries of senses, bewildering connotations of truth, and prospering beliefs in a newer, grander realism of self and the world without vital appreciation of a contextual reckoning of proportionality embedded within the curving, yielding designs of universal scales.” “Aspergic tendencies can establish a lifelong process of rebellious, reciprocated self-learning and self-teaching, whether the lessons taught are from oneself or insightful others during watchful experiences seeking new, keen-sighted inspirations to be marked by patterned, humorously strange and unexpectedly connected presences. It makes an individual believe in a perceived world which exists better in the enactions of others, while the real world of behaving, sensing and seeing a differently textured reality becomes an alleged fantasy.” “To an aspergic personality, allistic normalcy can be an enthrallment contrary to a naturally minded quest for equilibrium as a relationship with all reality. There can be guilt over one’s own social inadequacy. Inane separation can come from not wanting to impose such great exertion requirements on most others for the sake of a singular attending identity.” “As with multitudes of peoples under clever and hard-fought capitulation, nature quietly must adhere and defer to the idea of the perfect fusion of mind and body as fitting the successes of humanity accidentally shaped as the dualistic and sensitive personification of celestial, god-imaged spirituality within the universe.

WHAT WE’RE WORKING with in basic meditation practice—and more explicitly in tonglen practice—is the middle ground between acting out and repressing. We learn to see our thoughts of hatred, lust, poverty, loathing, whatever they might be. We learn to identify the thoughts as “thinking,” let them go, and begin to contact the texture of energy that lies beneath them. We gradually begin to realize how profound it is just to let those thoughts go, not rejecting them, not repressing them. We discover how to hold our seat and feel completely what’s underneath the story line of craving or aversion or jealousy or feeling wretched about ourselves,

Very often these luminous designs, rich in data, take the form of geometry. I speak from experience, having participated in more than seventy ayahuasca sessions since 2003, continuing to work with the brew for the valuable lessons it teaches me long after Supernatural was researched, written, and published. Here’s part of my account of the first time I drank ayahuasca in the Amazon: I raise the cup to my lips again. About two thirds of the measure that the shaman poured for me still remains, and now I drain it in one draught. The concentrated bittersweet foretaste, followed instantly by the aftertaste of rot and medicine, hits me like a punch in the stomach…. Feeling slightly apprehensive, I thank the shaman and wander back to my place on the floor…. Time passes but I don’t keep track of it. I’ve improvized a pillow from a rolled-up sleeping bag and I now find I’m swamped by a powerful feeling of weariness. My muscles involuntarily relax, I close my eyes, and without fanfare a parade of visions suddenly begins, visions that are at once geometrical and alive, visions of lights unlike any light I’ve ever seen—dark lights, a pulsing, swirling field of the deepest luminescent violets, of reds emerging out of night, of unearthly textures and colors, of solar systems revolving, of spiral galaxies on the move. Visions of nets and strange ladder-like structures. Visions in which I seem to see multiple square screens stacked side by side and on top of each other to form immense patterns of windows arranged in great banks. Though they manifest without sound in what seems to be a pristine and limitless vacuum, the images possess a most peculiar and particular quality. They feel like a drum-roll—as though their real function is to announce the arrival of something else.13 Other notes I made following my ayahuasca sessions in the Amazon refer to a “geometrical pulse,”14 to “a recurrence of the geometrical patterns,”15 to “a background of shifting geometrical patterns,”16 and to “complex interlaced patterns of geometry…. I zoom in for a closer view…. They’re rectangular, outlined in black, like windows. There’s a circle in the centre of each rectangle.”17

Together, we construct the sandwiches, using a blend of muenster, because it was what her mother favored, and provolone, because Delilah thinks it adds a deeper flavor--- and liberally buttering the bread because, Delilah informs me, it's all about the butter. "Now," she says, laying two sandwiches on the hot pan. "Here is where you learn that cooking involves all the senses. Taste, yes. But also sound. Listen. The butter is sizzling. No sound means it's not cooking the right way. The pan is either too low or too hot." We listen to the sizzle. "Sight," she says. "We need to see that beautiful butter hopping and bubbling around the edges of the pan." Dutifully, I watch. How can I not? She is in total command. "Smell." She wafts her hand over the pan, letting the warm scent of browning butter and bread wash over us. "This is more important when you're adding herbs and spices. Does the dish smell as it should? It's something you learn on the way. Flip the sandwiches." I take the spatula from her and do as asked. The bread is perfectly browned. "Feeling. You have to feel how the food is behaving. The texture of it. Now, with grilled cheese, you don't want to cook it too fast, or the cheese won't melt. Hear how the sound has dimmed?" I nod. "We need to add more butter; turn the heat down just a bit." She walks me through the entire process, teaching me to control the heat, baby the sandwiches to get them how I want. All the time our shoulders are brushing, our moves in coordination for a common goal. A sense of calm spreads over me. I'm not thinking about work or the outside world. I'm not angry or empty. I'm filled up. I'm here, with her. We get the sandwiches on plates, and she hands me a knife. "The best part. Cutting it open." Her brow wings up in warning. "Only cut on the diagonal. Down the middle is a sin against grilled cheese." "Please," I say, with feeling. "As if I'd sink so low." I make the first cut and am rewarded with a fine crunch of sound, followed by the ooze of gooey cheese. Perfection. "Taste. Take a bite," Delilah urges with childlike excitement. I take a bite. "Close your eyes," she says. "Tell me what you think when you taste it." You. Me. Delilah wearing braces, her thick hair pulled back in a tight ponytail that highlights the roundness of her face. Her gold eyes glaring at me from opposite her mother's kitchen table. Home. Safety.