The minds of children -- of the young -- are supple and fragile.
The minds of adults -- those with deeper accrued age -- are congealed and brittle.
The mind of a human is like a puzzle whose pieces come together to represent a map.
The mind is born jumbled and confused, all the pieces mixed-up and with many, many, many missing.
Life experiences -- daily actions and lessons, thoughts and gestures, places and assumptions -- add new pieces that always fit into the puzzle.
But the puzzle isn't always coherent. One piece may fit into another but the path running from the existing piece may be led by the new piece into an abyss, a tunnel, a valley, or a hidden no-man's-land. Yet the pieces always connect. And sometimes the pieces can lead to coherence. Another piece may add an alternate route connecting paths into oceans of opportunity, a mountain range, a nebulous city, or even an entirely new world.
To teach is to give away the gifts of such puzzle pieces. To teach is to hand these puzzle pieces out, bags of them, sacks full of different options.
The best is when a puzzle piece fits and connects the landscape -- the map represented, printed and carved -- into and from the other pieces' material bodies -- to develop new meaningful landscape.
The best is when that landscape then grows new forms, new landscapes, and upon which young minds -- or even the old -- find themselves lost within -- lost within the landscape now emerging within their mind.
And the mind then realizes the detail within this landscape so rich, so rich it is as detailed as the real world itself -- the world of the mind is the real world.
And lost within this landscape composed by the puzzle pieces of knowledge and experience, one discovers they may transcribe new topographies into the surface. The landscape is theirs to make, they learn. The landscape, they find, is their life; theirs to discover, to build, to husband and birth.
(c) M. Waxman, 2007.
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