Welding Teacher Quotes

Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the welder, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.

Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place n the iron dark of the world

Everything is linked,' said an enraptured Baremboim on stage; 'everyone is linked, all our actions have ramifications, and music is a teacher of this interconnected reality.' There was, however, in the letter a mundane, prosaic footnote that nibbled at the very edges of possible understanding, since understanding must always be preceded by human curiosity. Perhaps it will vanish in the charged space between one suicide bomber and the next military bulldozer that buries human beings alive within the imagined security of their own homes; perhaps it will join other shards of recollected moments of curiosity and discovery, to weld into a vessel of receptivity and response.

No teacher of RE ever said to me: “Beyond the limited realm of the senses, the shallow pool of the known, is a great untamable ocean, and we don’t have a fucking clue what goes on in there.” What we receive through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch is all we know. We have tools that can enhance that information, we have theories for things that we suspect lie beyond that information, filtered through an apparatus limited once more to those senses. Those senses are limited; the light range we detect is within a narrow spectrum, between infrared light and ultraviolet light; other species see light that we can’t see. In the auditory realm, we hear but a fraction of the sound vibrations; we don’t hear high-pitched frequencies, like dog whistles, and we don’t hear low frequencies like whale song. The world is awash with colors unseen and abuzz with unheard frequencies. Undetected and disregarded. The wise have always known that these inaccessible realms, these dimensions that cannot be breached by our beautifully blunt senses, hold the very codes to our existence, the invisible, electromagnetic foundations upon which our gross reality clumsily rests. Expressible only through symbol and story, as it can never be known by the innocent mind. The stories are formulas, poems, tools for reflection through which we may access the realm behind the thinking mind, the consciousness beyond knowing and known, the awareness that is not connected to the haphazard data of biography. The awareness that is not prickled and tugged by capricious emotion. The awareness that is aware that it is aware. In meditation I access it; in yoga I feel it; on drugs it hit me like a hammer—at sixteen, staring into a bathroom mirror on LSD, contrary to instruction (“Don’t look in the mirror, Russ, it’ll fuck your head up.” Mental note: “Look in mirror.”). I saw that my face wasn’t my face at all but a face that I lived behind and was welded to by a billion nerves. I looked into my eyes and saw that there was something looking back at me that was not me, not what I’d taken to be me. The unrefined ocean beyond the shallow pool was cascading through the mirror back at me. Nature looking at nature.

For good reason, your parents and teachers are frantic over your mental health. Half of your friends are seeing shrinks or on psychiatric drugs or both. Your parents are concerned enough to hire a therapist to talk to you each week. “There are no wrong answers,” the woman in stretchy black pants and plastic glasses assures you over the soft tinkling of a prefab indoor water fountain. But, it turns out, there are lots of wrong answers—some of which trigger a diagnosis. No matter how good of a week you’ve had, or how well you followed the therapist’s advice, she never says: “You’re fixed! No need to return.” You’ve had a diagnosis for at least a year; it’s begun to feel as much a part of you as your own name. Your parents are obviously relieved to have a label for what’s wrong with you. Most of your friends have a diagnosis, too. It functions as an amulet; you begin to suspect it may be the most important thing about you. But also, it makes you feel like a glass with a starburst crack—damaged in a permanent way. You’ll never be a load-bearing object, strong enough to carry others. Your therapist suggests medication might help, and the pediatrician is happy to oblige. The drugs make you calmer and keep you from crashing, but sometimes you wish the training wheels weren’t welded on. Who knows what you might be able to do without them? You’ve been on SSRIs for so long, it’s hard to know. You’ve packed on pounds. You can’t help it; the drugs make you less inhibited around food. They’ve killed your sex drive. You’re not even sure if that matters. You spend a lot more time on the sofa. You no longer feel bad about that, but you’re also far less inclined to budge. Whenever you have to wait for anything—food to arrive, a show to start, your friend to speak—your skin starts to itch. You’ve been conditioned all your life to find waiting unbearable. You carry an accommodation machine in your pocket, which might as well be called a rumination device. It drives you deeper into the forest of your own mind to be haunted by shadows: the ex-boyfriend who didn’t want you, the party you missed, the numberless ways you don’t stack up.