toads and archers...

Once again, I find that this blog is offered as reading in a philosophy course having to do with zen and archery, Philosophia. It appears to be an annual course and one that I wish had been offered when I was in college. I welcome readers from that course and also offer my blog sawzen as a place of potential interest.

The course states:

“Zen and Archery” teaches students to pay attention to their lives by training them to shoot a bow, to reflect, and to write. We will think about our practices both for the sake of the practices themselves and for the sake of how those practices shape us as practitioners. Our texts will help us discover how to function as mindful members of a community of practitioners.

The word archery comes from the Greek word for bow, but also from the shape of the sun's traverse of the earthly landscape and the arc of the arrow's flight.

Archimedes was a Greek mathematician and philosopher with a particular interest in geometry who came from ancient Media. Was Archimedes his real name, or was he simply an archetype for those who set the standard of scientific inquiry and discovery?

I live in the Ozarks, in the state of Arkansas, both of which are related to the arch of architecture, the arc of the bow and the arrow's feathered flight. I also live in a town named after Archimedes exclamation, Eureka, related to heuristic learning through a sense of discovery. Because our students are deeply engaged in the abundant natural life that is ever present on the Clear Spring School campus, the excitement that Archimedes felt when he ran naked through the streets is present in learning. I was in the school wood shop today when I heard the students unabashedly exclaiming to each other that toads were having sex. Eureka!

On the playground they had discovered two toads engaged in a reproductive exercise. I captured them in my iPhone photo as shown above. Their coloration made them blend in perfectly with the gravel that covers the school playground.

The cars were made for crash testing eggs as part of a physics experiment. The wheels and some of the parts were crafted in wood shop.

Make, fix and create...