Aspiration to an experience.

This morning, a friend who reads this pointed out to me the difference between training
(as typified by the Gloucestershire County Council Emergency Management day last week) and education, that which draws you on, enlarging your mind to embrace new thoughts and possibilities...something that David Hoyle does most excellently. Clearly, I will continue pondering, without reaching any definite conclusion for the foreseeable future, and I'm fine with that.

“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time.”

I did say that anything that sent me to Four Quartets was clearly intent on nourishing my soul, and there is perhaps something here about a truth understood at an indefinable but real depth, which is pertinent here.

Special thanks to Paul, for comments on yesterday's post...not least the last sentence
Just for today I feel God is simply to be experienced
That is not only very helpfully true, but also connects with this poem, which David produced as an additional sideways perspective on the whole question. It was new to me, though as I've found it on a website subtitled "A poem a day for American High Schools" I suspect it may be laughably familiar to some readers. In any case, it's a beautiful expression of the need to experience rather than dissect.

Introduction to Poetry
Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.