Nature Views

   I am much more interested these days in the spaces between things: I will take photos out of focus or sometimes very quickly, without really looking to see what I am taking! Is there a logic to this? Well, it has to do with trusting in a judgment that doesn't arise from words alone. It's perhaps a subtle discernment-I know what I like, but I have yet to find the words to put it together.

  Nature photos are a good example. We often joke about how apps like Tik Tok or even Instagram have ways of enhancing one's appearance, but nature does not require this. Going outside, everything in nature seems to have its place, and it would be a bit absurd to try to "brush up" a nature photo so that something looks "younger" or "more symmetrical". And yet, this is the kind of thing that people will consider when taking photos of themselves or other people. With nature, there is a kind of accommodation that sets in: a notion that this scene that I am seeing is much too complex to be curated by a human, let alone decorated to look more "human" or more artificial.

 This reminds me of two dominant paradigms that I have read about in education. While one paradigm suggests that the student is a blank slate to be filled with the customs or rituals that are most conducive to building a cultured or educated mind, the other suggests that a student is already gifted and waiting to be discovered as a gift by teachers. Montessori and Steiner seem to belong to the latter category, while the former seems to accord more to a traditional view of education. With the first paradigm, there is a template to which humans are meant to conform. With the second paradigm, there is something that needs to be discovered and even honored in the other.

  Talk about nature is of course somewhat misleading, because there are different cultural views of nature. But overall, the idea of nature seems to accord with an orientation of surrender; trusting that what is in front of us is more complete than any designed or created thing, and even having faith that whatever is happening is part of an unfolding, interdependent process that does yield significance and meaning, without our actively needing to frame it as such. Very few people have analyzed what this "nature" is---and I am sure it's a cultural meaning--but I do try to get the underlying view of it.