Tag: Discipline

The Mufti and the Ten-Year-Old

negativegeography4 Comments

I want to share a video of a ten-year-old Islamic boy. There is something about this child that stands in stark contrast to the children I tend to see in America. I don’t mean this as a judgement against our own children. But in watching the video, or in knowing something about the many indigenous American cultures, a deficit in the general American culture can be seen.

I think it’s good to notice the beautiful qualities of a people that we are intent on “bombing back to the stone age.” (I know the video is not about people from Iran. But this war is being sold to the US soldiers as a war against Islam).

And I think it’s healthy to recognize deficits in ourselves to balance out all the one-sided stories we hear in our own propaganda machines.

Here is the video of the Mufti and the boy: https://youtu.be/13UZJbaVSSE?si=NaLHmREBrIXurnV6

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Limited Infinities

negativegeography2 Comments
Train track infinity eastern Colorado by Carol M Highsmith is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

 

The reader is being reimagined. While this is happening, I’ll shake my notebooks free of the rejected scraps of previous essays.

After that, maybe a new phase can begin. A phase in which writing plays second fiddle to something I can’t really name. I’m not a writer and I have no intention of being hitched to any writerly discipline.

The commitment to a discipline feels narrowing. An intentional commitment feels like I’m putting on blinders and being yoked to a practice that promises its own enticing infinity. An infinity within a narrowing frame.Read More »