Summertime

Maybe it’s because yesterday was a rainy day and things were moving underwater slowly.

Maybe it’s because I am approaching my 60^th birthday.

Maybe it’s because I spent much of the last year looking at the world through my grand-daughter’s eyes.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s because I’ve returned from a week-long visit of family and friends on Vancouver Island that flew by quickly although each moment was deliciously relaxed and well spent.

Maybe it’s because I sat down for the first time in about a week and followed a Twitter string of connections that started with MariaPopova @brainpicker and her recommendation about “the mysteries of time perception” transitioned through (following Twitter connections always seems to make time disappear) fond memories of reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (a mind expanding experience for someone who had stated for so many years that she hated physics) and ended listening to Gershwin.

Time: a wonderful and valuable dimension of learning

Taking time is one of the basic elements of site-based education.

Time to watch, revisit, ask deep questions, reflect, collect.

Time to lay down connections deep in a brain.

I listened while driving Friday, to CKUA’s Don Hill explain the Roman origins of the “dog days of summer” and that made me long to hear every recording I have of Gershwin’s Summertime. Thinking about a white, Jewish male writing in an American black voice caused me to reflect on how it is universally true that human beings have much more stuff deeply in common than we have apart.

A desire to hear led me to YouTubes of a few of my favorite Summertimes and since I could not decide which I liked best right now, I link you to the young woman, Nora Jones, whose roots are in Texas and India and the mature black woman, Ella Fitzgerald, recorded in Berlin. This could go on forever and isn't  forever a mind blowing time concept.

Time as experienced through those wavy mirage visuals that lift off the pavement on a hot summer day. 

A mystery of perception indeed.