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Thought of the Week Archives
July 2001
July 2
As we work to increase our awareness, we must go through a process
of development, a process which is delicate and needs careful nurturing.
While we are looking into ourselves, expanding our willingness to examine
both our strengths and weaknesses, and beginning to take steps to change,
we may not be sure of our ground. Yet we may be tempted to test our growing
knowledge of ourselves by talking about what we are going through, or
attempting to advise others. When we talk about a process of inner growth
before we have fully integrated it, we risk losing what we have gained.
We tend to dissipate the strength of our awareness, substituting talk
for the growth itself.
- Tarthang Tulku
Skillful Means, p. 105
July 9
...the best mechanism for reducing helplessness resides within us.
We truly evolve and grow only when we take control of our circumstances
and fears. While most people tend to regress to a state of feeling inadequacy
when they get anxious and scared, the truly resourceful person uses this
as yet another opportunity to take charge of circumstances or events.
- Alan Briskin
Do What You Love, the Money will Follow (p. 140)
July 16
Creative tension is necessary for writing. The drive in the mind is
to articulate. The mind doesn't much care whether you articulate by writing
or talking. When you intend to write about something in your journal,
don't talk it out first. Talking dissipates the creative tension and expends
the impetus. Over and over again, journal writers notice that if they
talk out a topic, when they finish the conversation and open their journals,
the drive to write is gone.
- ChristinaBaldwin
Life's Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest, 25.2
July 23
Work is the best part of Zen practice and training. No matter what
the work is, it should be done with effort and total attention to what's
in front of our nose. ...There is the actual task we are doing and then
there are all the considerations we have about it. Work is just taking
care of what needs to be done right now.
- Charolette Joko Beck
Everyday Zen (p. 8)
July 30
...language is not merely a tool; it is not a set of counters to be
moved about nor a set of conventions to be manipulated in order to express
one or another idea. We don't have ideas that we put into words; we don't
think of what we want to say and then write. In composing, we make meanings.
We find the forms of thought by means of language, and we find the forms
of language by taking thought. If we English teachers are to understand
composing as the kind of process it is, we will need a philosophy of language
that can account for this dialectic of forming. A hopeful sign that this
is beginning to happen is that English teachers are beginning to study
Vygotsky, a developmental psychologist who knew that language and thought
do not bear one another a sequential relationship, but that they are simultaneous
and correlative.
- Ann E. Berthoff
The Making of Meaning (p. 69)
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