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Food for thought

  • Then I heard other people

    ,

    I built an opinion
    from TV reports
    while sitting on a comfortable couch,
    throwing out clever lines
    triggered by nothing more
    than a raised eyebrow.

    Then I heard other people
    repeating the same rehearsed phrases,
    and it hit me,
    those thoughts weren’t mine.
    It hurt.

    So I went quiet
    and started rebuilding.

    I learned an opinion
    is never finished,
    and touching it
    is always painful,
    especially on mornings
    like this one,
    reading the brutal map
    of incarceration in Brazil    ,
    letting the discomfort
    do its work.

  • I don’t work with Captain Ahabs

    , ,

    A tip to all the Captain Ahabs out there:

    “Be careful when hiring young men with dreamy faces, thin bodies, and deep eyes; be very careful, for whales must be spotted before they are hunted. A boy fond of meditations will take your ship around the world ten times without seeing a single whale.”

    From Moby Dick

  • Missing Letters

    I received, 500 years later, a letter from a traveler (Pero de Magalhães Gandavo) who once wandered through a place vulgarly called Brazil.

    Among his writings, this observation caught my attention:

    “The language of these natives along the whole coast is one; it lacks three letters, you will not find F, nor L, nor R in it. A remarkable thing, for thus they have no Fé (Faith), no Lei (Law), nor Rei (King); and in this way they live without Justice, and in disorder.”

    Pero de Magalhães Gandavo

    Oh, Gandavo…

    I wish we had kept our lives without those letters.

  • Ahimsa

    ,

    One curious thing about nonviolence is that, in most languages, there isn’t an active term for it: the concept exists only in opposition to the main one: violence.

    Ahimsa, in Sanskrit, is a compound word: himsa, meaning “to cause harm,” and the prefix a, meaning “not.”

    It seems like a small detail, but what if language is a thermometer of our priorities as a society?

    “If we lived in a world where there was no word for war except non-peace, what kind of world would that be? It wouldn’t necessarily be a world without war, but one where war would be seen as something aberrant and insignificant.”

  • Do Things, Not Countries, Dieguito!

    , ,

    “My friend has done South America…”

    – Old Diego

    Definitions for “did” include: carry out, undertake, discharge, act, behave, suffice, to serve a purpose, prepare, make, organize, create or produce, decorate, style, present, grant, pay or render, work out, calculate, solve, to be employed at, manage, cope, succeed, move at a particular pace.

    Lessons from Do things, Not Countries by Jennifer Sutherland-Miller