2008: be beautiful (serenity), resplendent (with compassion), joyful (I am living youth) and truth (the source of all things)

and the air is wonderfully fresh after three days of non-stop rain, and it is good to be alive!

I must say I’m not very resplendent with compassion at the moment. A, having spent the entire weekend moaning and wailing and gnashing her teeth about how terrible her life was what with D back in Nagoya – not a second thought for his health, incidentally – and none of her friends paying her enough attention, promptly fell over walking through a blizzard and “pretty much fractured a part of her spine”.
I’m not sure how one can “pretty much” fracture anything, still less a spine, but as she’s already been discharged from hospital I’m assuming that no part of her spine is actually broken.
Tomorrow, in the spirit of this goal, I will work on compassion. Promise. But just for today, I’m not going to try too hard to fend off the feelings of righteous vindication and, dare I say it, good old fashioned schadenfreude.

A happy day at the elementary school. After our lesosn, the teacher and kids showed me thier corridor of winter projects. There ar eonly seven kids in the entire school, so over the winter holidays they pick a theme and do all the research on it themselves, then create a huge display about it. I wa samazed and strangely touched by the range of subjects they chose to study.

One boy did the aurora, with lots of scientific facts about its movements and the different colours which comprise it (pink at the bottom, red towards the top). Did you know there were also aurora on Jupiter? Amazing!

Another boy researched the statues of the world, and somehow got hold of samples of the different rocks that each was made from and write about how the qualities of the material used had influenced the shaping and maintenance of the statue.

One girl compared Japanese and Korean customs towards the elderly, and the way that culture had “diffused” from China across the Asian contient and been adapted along the way.

There was a display about the different constellations that make up the horoscopes and the distances of the stars from one another even though we see them as constituting one “object”; there seven incredibly detailed sketches of Japanese woodpecker species and a full itinerary of the differences in beak size, tree preference, diet and location within Japan; there was the history of Japanese proverbs from the pre-kanji (Chinese script) days and how certain expressions evolved once the new writing system was introduced.
And then there was an entire wall covered with one little nine year old’s watercolour paintings of fish. They were all done to scale, some up to a metre long and some as short as my finger, and all had their colours and yes, SCALE patterns painted in exquisite detail. The boy who painted them was very quick to point out to me the differences between their fins, which changed what “kind” of swimming they could do. There were maps outlining where (a) they existed and (b) he personally had seen them, and then a kind of food chain showing which fish ate which other fish…

Okay, I’m probably writing at excessive length about this. But it was truly amazing. I saw these displays, and their eagerness to tell me all about them, and I was reminded of this goal. The childrens curiosity, their eye for detail, their enthusiasm and their genuine interest in things we often as adults trample on or ignore was really quite a humbling experience.

Note to self: look for more in the world of what children see.