I recently had the opportunity to meet with one of my students on the Jumeirah Beach in Dubai, U.A.E.
We discussed how certain marine life lived in, and created, the carbonate sediments of that part of the world.
She questioned everything I told her. She did this not because she did not believe me; it is the way she learns.
She is very smart.
She said she wished I could be her mentor; I didn't know what to say as no one had ever said that to me.

dead thing house

Stop to ask why before you move along.

If you do not agree with what you hear,
or if you want to change why something is what it is purported to be,
then at least you have thought about it more than most have, even if you are wrong.

Some call a shell washed up on the beach
(a beach of ground grains of older shells that support us now)
a dead thing house.

While the name of hers will likely be lost to time for most,
the lesson to me, as well as its teacher, will stay with me forever.


13 May 2003
Dubai


“I don’t like the name fossil, I prefer to call it a dead thing house.”


“We are always influenced by our past, but now it seems we are also supported by it.”

- J. M. my mentoree




Later I showed her two shells I found on another beach; one was small the other large. I told her that if I was going to be her mentor, we had to have something in common to connect us. I suggested the two shells as our nexus. I told her the one of us who is going to do the majority of the teaching should have the large shell and the one who is going to do the majority of the learning should have the small one – I gave her the large one.

I met a amazing man some time ago.
He has neither a negative cell in his body, nor a negative thought in his mind.

When you ask, "How are you today?" his reply is always .....

fine as usual

You have lived a life others where I come from cannot imagine.
To us, your life lacked what we seemed to require and relish.
To us you had every hardship and every chance to fail, yet you remain strong and steadfast.
You see hope, and good, and praise, and grace where others of your ilk,
and we as well, see despair, and doom, and failure.
You are ebullient, and enlivening, and exhilaratory; you are my hero.

For most of us life is the constant battle and balance of positive with negative,
right with wrong, good with bad, winning with losing, twisted and aligned.
With you, my friend, there is only the positive; you cannot see the negative in this world.

Although I fail to touch and see and understand the world in which you live,
I admire, perhaps more than you will ever know, your ability to sail and steer clearly in that world.
Yours is a world without regret, and without gloom, and without predigest, and without guile.

You see the world today as most only hope to see it in eternity.
While here, you inspire us all so we can arrive there a bit prepared.


19 May 2003
Dubai