Finding Our Way
Posted: October 30, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities 1 Comment
“Telemachus,” said Athena, “if you have indeed one drop of your father’s blood in you or one portion of his spirit, if you are as he was – one ready to fulfill both word and work, your voyage shall not be in vain. If you are different from what he was, I have no hope that you will accomplish your desire. But I have seen in you something of the wisdom and courage of Odysseus.”
Telemachus, the son, went in search of his father, while the father was wandering, struggling to return home – both guided by the Goddess Athena. Thus begins one of the great epics of world literature.
The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy, a retelling of the Odyssey was assigned by the Magister, and I have been reading along with my son. This telling was written by Padraic Colum, a leading figure of the Irish Literary Renaissance, who ranks among the many who have retold this foundational tale. Virgil reworked the story to chart the founding of Rome. Dante reimagined it, placing Odysseus damned in the Eighth Circle of Hell, where he recounts sailing past the Pillars of Hercules to his doom. Tennyson and James Joyce created their own masterpieces inspired by it, while Nikos Kazantzakis, the modern Greek poet, penned 33,333 lines detailing an Odysseus grown bored with Ithaca who took to the open road once more.
In cinema, Kirk Douglas starred in a 1954 adaptation – the highest grossing film in Italy that year. The Coen Brothers changed the road home to Depression-era Mississippi. Recently a three-hour IMAX blockbuster grossed over $1 Billion worldwide. Fascination with the Odyssey never lets up.
With Padraic Colum’s book in hand, my son and I embarked on a homeschool field trip. We went to the movies. Three hours for an R-rated film is no small undertaking. I wondered how my son would hold up.
Around the two-hour mark, after great battles and killing, I whispered, “We can leave if this is too much.”
My son replied, “I will let you know….”
He watched the entire film, Odysseus slaying the suitors, Telemachus assuming the throne. Walking to the car afterward, he asked, “Is that story based on real life?” I explained the history of Late Bronze Age Troy, introduced the word “epic” and together we explored myth, poetry, and a civilization’s collapse.
A father and son at the end of the Late Bronze Age speak directly to a father and son at the dawn of the post-literate age. Across 3,226 years, we find ourselves navigating a similar path.
INNER & OUTER
What does it mean to find our way home when the world we know is coming apart? Odysseus must recover not only his kingdom but himself. Telemachus must become a man in a world that has lost its bearings. I must prepare my own son for a rapidly changing future that no one can predict. The Odyssey suggests that the way forward depends on something more than strength, intelligence, or the will to prevail.
The Odyssey can be read simply as a travel adventure, across storm-tossed seas. More profoundly, it is an odyssey across the ocean of the human soul – everyone’s internal journey through trial and conflict to find their solitude of conscience.
Mateus Soares de Azevedo, writing at the Sacred Web, describes the struggle to embrace the human soul:
“…monsters and enchanted islands symbolize the phantoms of pride, passion, vice, and forgetfulness, against which the soul struggles to avoid losing itself. The decisive battle to reclaim our place in the world – our Ithaca – demands, apart from necessary force, the wisdom of patience and timing, the austerity of detachment, and the moral courage to become ‘Nobody’.”
Through the lens of the Perennial Philosophy, Odysseus’s decade-long return is a universal allegory of inner transformation, a jihad al-akbar, the ‘greater holy war’, as Sufi tradition terms it. The soul’s return to its divine source demands that one confront and conquer the ego, caprice, and worldly desires. Amidst the stormy ocean which is life, there are alluring islands of contentment, but the homecoming must go on through trials and purification.
Allegorical stages of Odysseus’s homecoming are outlined in Homer, Poet of ‘Maya’, an essay by Charles Upton.
- Lotus Eaters: A metaphor for addiction, this is the “World Trance” where sensory distraction blinds the seeker to spiritual reality. Ignorance is not bliss but stagnation.
- The Cyclops (Polyphemus): Polyphemus represents the dawn of awakening consciousness. His single eye – like Shiva’s third eye – is raw volatile energy. Matthew 6:22 reads, “The light of the body is the eye. If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” The Cyclops is the struggle to channel that light. Odysseus claims he is “Nobody” – the self-annihilation required for wisdom – but after blinding the Cyclops, he shouts out his true name, asserting his ego, and incurs Poseidon’s wrath. He loses everything.
- The Underworld (Nekuia): Odysseus sails to the western edge of the world, to the underworld, where he offers libations and invokes the blind seer Tiresias. Tiresias – having lived both as man and woman – transcends earthly duality. Blind to worldly illusion, like Homer himself, Tiresias advises Odysseus on the Path while warning of the fate of those who fail: “division and death, in a world woven on nothing but division and death, the world of the double cloak.”
- The Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis: The Sirens embody seductive spiritual beauty that overwhelms mortals not centered. Charybdis, the whirlpool, symbolizes the engulfing cycle of samsara – birth, death, and multiplicity. Scylla, the multi-headed sea monster, represents painful choice among competing material demands. Following the counsel of Circe, the divine sorceress, Odysseus chooses Scylla over Charybdis although it costs him more men.
The women who shape Odysseus’s journey all weave and the loom becomes a symbol of how a life’s story takes shape. The foundational threads of the epic are woven into rich fabric by these women:
Helen of Troy – “the face that launched a thousand ships” – embodies the worldly allure that deceives men, the catalyst of conflict. She weaves a double purple cloak depicting the Trojan and Achaean conflict, which is dualism and worldly power. But she becomes a nurturer. Back home in Sparta, after the war, when Telemachus visits and memories bring grief, she slips an Egyptian drug into the wine of the weeping King Menelaus and his men. Composed and seeing clearly, Helen consoles the men. She seems no longer afflicted by the worldly attraction that led her to Troy.
Penelope weaves a burial shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes. Her own cunning is to unweave at night what is woven by day. Helen’s cloak celebrates a King’s dominance, while Penelope’s shroud acknowledges the King’s death. Helen and Penelope are opposites. Penelope is the destination and goal of the reunited whole. Her enduring symbol is the marriage bed, which Odysseus built around a living olive tree, sacred to Athena, and rooted deep into the ground. Only the two of them know the bed cannot be moved, and so this symbol of constancy, loyalty and stability proves to Penelope that her husband has, at last, returned.
Circe is weaving and singing when the crew land on her island. She transforms the sailors into pigs – a symbol of their surrender to the lower passions. But Odysseus resists her charms and she is transformed: first restoring his crew back into human form, and then counseling him on how to complete his homecoming.
Calypso, a weaver, is daughter of the Titan Atlas, thus a goddess. She offers Odysseus immortal life. The price, however, is to lose his earthly identity and family. He spends seven years with her, until – urged by Zeus – she reluctantly helps Odysseus build a simple raft. She protests the double standard: the male gods take mortal lovers while the goddesses cannot, but she relents. A threat to the male world, Calypso is both enchantress and the one who enables Odysseus’s homecoming. Both Circe and Calypso are threats who become his guides. He sets sail.
Athena is the goddess of wisdom, war, and weaving who guides both father and son. She masterminds the Trojan Horse ruse, and directs Odysseus’s homecoming. Disguised as Mentor, a trusted family friend, she appears before Telemachus, inspiring him to confront the suitors and seek his father. In a patriarchal heroic age, it is the divine feminine that restores order, justice, and harmony.
While Odysseus wanders, Telemachus follows his own coming of age passage. Visiting kings Nestor and Menelaus, feasting at their high tables, he is told that his father lives, held on Calypso’s island, but gains no more information. His journey brings insight into how a leader acts, speaks, and commands respect. He learns diplomacy, evades a suitor ambush, and returns home transformed.
Odysseus arrives on Ithaca stripped bare: his fleet, crew, and spoils of war gone, and his royal palace overrun by suitors biding their time until they can marry his wife. The suitors have usurped the political order, consumed without accountability, and treated his home as their private possession. Disguised as a beggar, dressed in rags, he re-enters his home. Guided by the feminine, he must defeat the suitors to reclaim his home, which represents his world.
These weaving women – both mortal and divine – hold together the world Odysseus seeks. Their work – to weave, preserve, counsel, remember and discern – is what supports and makes possible the heroic quest. And the home to which the hero returns is not merely a place to possess or defend, but a fabric of relationships that must continually be maintained.
Athena could reunite one family and mend its fabric, but she alone could not keep the civilization from collapse.
FACING THE DARK AGE
Odysseus was wandering and Telemachus came of age during the Late Bronze Age, which came to a catastrophic end. Palace economies were burned, abandoned, and destroyed. Trade routes were severed. Linear B writing vanished, and centralized authority dissolved, plunging the Mediterranean into centuries of darkness.
As a Boomer raising a Zoomer, I watch our own world fracture. The post-World War II order built on trust and alliances gives way to multipolar instability: a world where might makes right, a world on fire. Artificial Intelligence inspires awe and anxiety, some calculating the probability of existentially catastrophic outcomes. Our children, nicknamed the “Anxious Generation,” grow up tethered to screens, soaked in digital noise, promised technological wonders of flying cars and life on Mars.
The post-war era – the Great American future – was built on unprecedented prosperity, cheap energy, and institutional trust. That legacy is now strained by wealth concentration, political polarization, hyper-individualism, and a warming climate.
How is a father to prepare his son for the future?
Anacyclosis (ἀνακύκλωσις) is a word that means, literally, “turning around in a cycle.” Polybius, a Greek historian, used the word to describe a cyclical succession of constitutional governments, shifting from public-minded to self-serving, from noble to corrupt.
The cycle begins with a wise monarch ruling for the common good. Hereditary succession, however, leads to greed and arrogance, which is tyranny. Leading citizens rebel, forming an aristocracy, the benign rule by the few. But over time, civic virtue loses to the pursuit of wealth and status, power among the few, creating oligarchy. The oppressed rise up and overthrow the oligarchs, seeking democracy, until the rule of law fails, mob rule follows and then might makes right. The authoritarian strongman ascends, providing order at any cost.
“The Iron Law of Oligarchy” was developed in 1911 by Robert Michels, a German sociologist. Governments, however noble or egalitarian they begin, inevitably consolidate into oligarchy. Ancient Athens and Sparta, the Roman Republic and the Republic of Venice; the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the French Revolution, Russian Bolshevik revolution, and post-colonial Africa and Asia have seen noble promises devolve into corrupt oligarchies.
I assign reading materials about Anacyclosis. My son asks, “Wait, didn’t the Greeks have democracy? So they had both?” Yes, I reply.
About “The Iron Law of Oligarchy” he pauses, then says, “So…the people who don’t like democracy, how could they vote in favor of the person they want? And those people in office would stay there?” I mention Russia. He mentions North Korea. The idea seems less remote to my son than to people my age.
The suitors are oligarchs in miniature, but Odysseus has his own version of their flaw. Odysseus reminds us the greatest danger is not always the monster we face, but the part of ourselves that cannot resist claiming victory. Having told the Cyclops he is “Nobody,” Odysseus announces his name. The desire for recognition undoes the wisdom of restraint. Power that cannot limit itself, wealth that cannot recognize sufficiency, and leaders who mistake personal glory for the common good threaten the very order they claim to defend.
My challenge with my son is to cultivate inner awareness, to focus on cooperation rather than competition, to find a balance between masculine and feminine aspects. Civilizations can and do collapse. But individuals can gain the skills and inner knowing to navigate their way through the wreckage, and to help build anew.
Patterns repeat over millennia. What if civilizational decline is not destiny, but a choice?
The America in which my son comes of age seems at a breaking point. The story of Telemachus and Odysseus reminds us humanity has stood at this precipice before—and can find its way home.
Promise to Pay
Posted: October 23, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Money & Banking 1 Comment
The November election is hotly contested, overly advertised, and focused upon the wrong issues. Here in our town, the Public Safety Bond Question asks:
“Shall the city incur indebtedness by the issuance of its general obligation bonds in the principal amount of $88,600,000 for a new fiire (sic) and police station…. Estimated interest cost: $61,798,500 and Total estimated principal & interest: $105,398,500 (sic).”
My son has memorized every piece of equipment for the Department. He knows which truck number is stationed where, every trucks’ manufacturer, and easily identifies the undercover police cars. No fool, he knows the Department is spelled “Fire.” Whoever proofread the ballot should be ashamed of the spelling error.
My son knows that $88.6 + $61.8 is far more than $105 Million. Therefore, our applied math lesson focused on the amortization of a bond. His assignment:
“For a new fire and police station, if our town wants to borrow $88.6 Million at 4.5% interest for 30 years, what is the total interest that will be paid? Over 30 years will the total cost of the station be (a) $120M, (b) $150M, (c) $180M, (d) none of the above? Show your math.”
With a sharp pencil and paper, we sit down to do math. Municipal bonds have a vocabulary of their own. We begin with “Bond Face Amount,” which is the $88.6 Million that the issuer promises to pay over 30 years. My son wrestles with the concept of amortization, so we begin with the grammar. We get out the dictionary.
I challenge him, “Is ‘amortize’ a noun or a verb? What is its grammatical function?”
From his English and Latin, my son knows this drill so he dutifully opens his Thorndike Student Dictionary and turns to A, then to am, then to amo…. He replies, “A transitive verb…extinguish or wipe out (a debt or other liability), usually by setting aside regularly in a special fund certain amounts of money to accumulate at interest.”
I ask, “What is the derivation?” He studies the page, and then says, “Old French…a form of amortir, which means ‘to deaden, kill, or destroy.’” He pauses, then says, “Does that mean they are going to kill you if you don’t pay off your debt?”
“No. You are not killed, but it means the debt is being ‘killed off’. So our town wants to spend $88.6 Million to build a fire and police station. They will ‘kill off’ that debt at what total cost? Our town uses the ‘Equal Annual Principal Amount’ so how much Principal is repaid each year?” After a long pause he figures that $88.6M divided by 30 equals $2.953 Million. Per year. Plus interest.
Our town has a AAA rating by Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. I explain how credit ratings work and what is their influence on a bond’s interest rate.
“Can the city pay the bond off sooner than 30 years?” he asks.
I explain, “Imagine you are a money manager in Hong Kong, London, maybe in Boston or over in Portland. You buy this bond because of its 30-year AAA-rated income stream. You count on that income. So you do not want an early payoff option.”
“But if the City pays it off early, won’t it save interest?”
“Most certainly it will,” I answer, “but our city’s 30-year bond is a promise to pay, and that is written into the bond’s terms. Money managers like certainty.”
“How does the city know it will have the income to pay this?”
My son was getting to the crux of the problem. I explain, “They will raise taxes. This bond will mean they have to increase taxes by almost $500 on an average home per year. They have calculations of all their expenses and all their income, and taxes are how they make up the difference.”
We need to calculate the annual interest. There is confusion over percentages. I explain, “100% equals 1.00. 45% equals 0.45. 4.5% equals 0.045.” I let him use a calculator. He stares at the paper, not sure whether to calculate against the annual repayment or the face amount. We go back and forth until he figures out the year 1 interest is $3.987 Million.
I tell him to write the numbers down on the paper, using the standard stacked format, in columns.
Principal repayment = $2,953,333
Year 1 annual interest = $3,987,000
I ask him, “So what is the total payment in year 1?” He wrestles with this. There are many numbers on the paper. I encourage him to stay focused. I ask, “What are the factors in the total annual payment?” He needs to do the math. I lead by asking, “How much principal is repaid? And what is the total interest paid in year 1? Are you going to add, subtract, multiply, or divide?”
“$6,940,333 is the total year 1 payment,” he decides.
“Okay. Let’s calculate year 2.” My son works through the entire exercise again. There are many zeros here, lots of digits. After a few times going around, he realizes the year 2 outstanding balance is lower than year 1. Year 2 principal balance is $85,646,667. He calculates the interest at $3,854,100 and has a eureka moment: “The total payment goes down each year!”
With pencil and paper we do one more year. His math is accurate.
Uncle Scoop weighs in by text, “Ideally you’ll do the math on the ballot measure twice. Once to calculate the ‘total cost,’ and then again to calculate the real cost. Real vs nominal, important concept. See Fisher equation.”
This is entirely new to me. Scoop gives us a hint, “Real is less than nominal when inflation is positive. So if the nominal is 4.5%, real is…”
We do our research. Irving Fisher was an American economist, statistician, inventor, eugenicist and progressive social reformer. He has been called by Nobel Prize winning economists “the greatest economist the United States has ever produced.” His equation expresses that the real interest rate ≈ nominal interest rate − inflation rate.
The ballot measure’s nominal interest rate is 4.5%. The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank shows the current 30-year expected breakeven inflation rate is 2.28%. I do my homework and learn that the exact form of the Fisher equation, (1.045 ÷ 1.0228) − 1, puts the real interest rate at 2.17%. We need to discount the value of future payments into today’s dollars. The real interest rate, 2.17%, is what borrowing costs after inflation is factored in, and deflating each payment by the 2.28% inflation rate shows that cost in dollars.
Our conversation turns to the time value of money, and into the dismal science. Physics is considered a hard science, using mathematics to study fundamental laws of the universe, matter, energy, space and time. Economics studies human behavior, trade offs, resource allocation, predictions and money. While physics deals with clear empirical reality, economics deals with scarcity, recessions and inflation; hard truths, and hence it is referred to as the “dismal science.”
But the term originated in the 19th century in a debate about slavery. The classical economists argued that all humans respond to incentives rather than a racial hierarchy. Thomas Carlyle, who was pro-slavery, referred to their science as “dismal,” because it supported universal laws rather than the Great Man’s power to lower costs by slavery.
The story of wealth versus human rights is a topic for another class. My son’s assignment today is to calculate our town’s total cost – the nominal and the real – “to kill off” a debt. I show how to build an amortization table at the nominal 4.5% rate of interest, and then how to deflate each future payment into today’s Dollars.
| Year | Principal outstanding balance | Less principal repayment | Interest annual @ 4.5% = Nominal | Annual Payment | Annual payment adjusted for inflation = Real |
| 1 | $ 88,600,000 | $ (2,953,333) | $ 3,987,000 | $ 6,940,333 | $ 6,785,621 |
| 2 | $ 85,646,667 | $ (2,953,333) | $ 3,854,100 | $ 6,807,433 | $ 6,507,317 |
| 3 | $ 82,693,333 | $ (2,953,333) | $ 3,721,200 | $ 6,674,533 | $ 6,238,049 |
| 4 | $ 79,740,000 | $ (2,953,333) | $ 3,588,300 | $ 6,541,633 | $ 5,977,551 |
| 5 | $ 76,786,667 | $ (2,953,333) | $ 3,455,400 | $ 6,408,733 | $ 5,725,568 |
| 10 | $ 62,020,000 | $ (2,953,333) | $ 2,790,900 | $ 5,744,233 | $ 4,584,847 |
| 20 | $ 32,486,667 | $ (2,953,333) | $ 1,461,900 | $ 4,415,233 | $ 2,812,803 |
| 30 | $ 2,953,333 | $ (2,953,333) | $ 132,900 | $ 3,086,233 | $ 1,569,304 |
| $ 0 | $ (88,600,000) | $ 61,798,500 | $ 150,398,500 | $ 112,876,907 |
We can link all of this to the Quadrivium, to Arithmetic, the art of number. Carl Friedrich Gauss was a German polymath, the “Prince of Mathematicians,” who as a child prodigy is said to have found a summation trick. Each year’s interest is charged on the balance still owed, which counts down from 30/30 of the loan to 29/30, and on to 1/30. For any linear progression of numbers, the average is simply the midpoint between the first and last numbers: (1+30)/2=15.5. The Face Amount of $88.6M times 15.5 = $1,373.3 Million, the sum of all 30 balances. 4.5% of $1,373.3 Million equals $61,798,500 in total interest. The Gauss shortcut simplifies the entire problem.
Gauss had a shortcut. We made the table. Either way, the answers are stunning. The total interest is $61.8 Million and the nominal cost is $150,398,500. That is what the ballot should say. The ballot’s misprint is $105,398,500; the digits are transposed, and no one proofread. My son has figured out that (b) is the correct answer on his assignment.
The larger lesson, however, is that inflation weakens the United States Dollar over time. The real cost of that 30-year debt, in 2026 Dollars, will be about $112.9 Million. We teach our children that it is good to save their money, but this lesson teaches that their savings lose value over time. $1 today is worth less tomorrow. It is a paradox: the debt will cost the taxpayers less, while the bondholders are repaid in Dollars worth less than what they lent. There are two sides to every coin.
The ballot errors led to a lesson on the impact of inflation. Which means that more than half of his investing gains will be lost just to keep pace with the cost of living.
Dismal, indeed.
Monad and a Margin of Safety
Posted: October 16, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, consciousness 1 Comment
Sacred Geometry notwithstanding, my son wants to learn to invest money. Our applied learning approach can accommodate both Sacred Numbers and investing; financial literacy is important while the Platonic solids are essential.
“Scoop,” my son’s Uncle, is a market maven in disguise. Licensed as a Certified Financial Advisor, he may or may not have clients but does manage money. In the finest fiduciary tradition, he says nothing about his work. His discretion is absolute. He could be managing tens of millions of United States Dollars, but you would never know. More than likely he is just the guy ahead of you at the butcher’s, buying bacon or bratwurst, or in a bookstore, browsing quietly.
He has never set foot on Wall Street, but has logged hundreds of miles hiking in the wilderness. A long term value investor, his preferred risk management is the wild place where predators roam. Doug Peacock, the Vietnam Green Beret medic turned wildlife activist is one of his heroes, best captured in this quote, “It ain’t wilderness unless there’s a critter out there that can kill you and eat you.” Scoop, more than likely is outside, beside some alpine stream, listening to bird song, breathing in the pure air. He is remarkably gentle, thoughtful, considerate.
I called Scoop, and with alacrity he made handouts on investing terms and principles. He mailed a copy of “How a Second Grader Beats Wall Street” by the financial planner Allan S. Roth. That simplicity wins is the book’s premise. Adults get lost in the hype of hope and fear, while the child ignores the noise. Behold then that ancient wisdom of practical virtue: “Verily I say unto you, Except you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom…”
Into the kingdom of investing our journey began, armed with our textbook, our tutor, probability and statistics, we learned vocabulary. “Book value” is the net worth of a company, its assets minus liabilities. “Market value” is the total capitalization, the stock price multiplied by the total shares owned. The difference between the Book and Market value can be significant.
In practical terms, I told my son, “Think of my tool bag with saws, chisels, clamps, and wrenches. Add up their cost and that is the book value of my tool bag.” My son opines, “We really should buy a cordless Sawz-all, a battery circular saw, and a torque wrench but ya, I get your point.” I continue, “Say I go to a client. They think I am really skilled, and agree to pay a premium rate. Or they think I am a moron and won’t pay much. That is market value.” He catches on, “So they want to pay more because they like it. Or pay less because they don’t like it. What happens when a business goes bankrupt? What happens to the stock price then?” My son was absorbed in our lesson.
Having already talked about Phi, the Golden Ratio, I continue, “The ratio of book value to market value tells you if a stock is overpriced. You need to understand the business. What do they do? Do they make money? Do profits increase? What is their debt? Does the business have a famous brand, unmatched technology, loyal customers? All of this factors into the price : value ratio. If the value is more than the price, then it is worth buying. If the business fails, you will only get book value, or less.”
We talk about stock picking, market timing, and asset allocation. Stock picking needs luck and skill, it rarely works. Market timing is even harder, trying to buy and sell at the perfect time, when missing the 10 best days can cut your returns nearly in half.
Asset allocation is Scoop’s approach. He diversifies risk, capturing long term growth using risk management. By analogy, Doug Peacock’s “critter out there that can kill you” is an absolute risk, a permanent loss “of capital.” The 2nd Grader approach is low-risk, broad market asset allocation. The 2nd Grader, in fact, outperformed both “call of the wild” day trading and the S&P 500 by 4% annually.
My 8th grade son has something to learn from the 2nd grader. My task is to show how investing relates to Sacred Numbers.
Sacred Numbers – the Quadrivium – are about observing natural cycles, patterns, ratios, and cosmic order. Pythagoras reportedly said, “Number rules the universe.” Euclid mentioned the Golden Ratio in his Elements, written around 300 BCE. Ἀγεωμέτρητος μηδεὶς εἰσίτω – “Let no one untrained in geometry enter” – was written over the door to Plato’s Academy. The Golden Ratio (Φ≈1.618) and the Fibonacci Sequence (discovered centuries later) are models of those patterns.
In the investment world, analysts use the Fibonacci numbers (23.6%, 38.2%, 50%, 61.8%, 78.6%) to trace market highs and lows to gauge support and resistance. The number 3, which represents balance, completeness, and structure – the past, present and future; birth, life, and death – is used to mark “triple tops and bottoms,” a theory known as the Elliott Wave Principle that divines mathematical patterns underlying market psychology. The concept has both critics and believers.
The 2nd Grader’s portfolio was based upon allocation in thirds: US stocks for domestic growth, international stocks for global diversification, the Bond market for low-risk yields. W.D. Gann developed an entire trading system based upon the relationship between price, time and pattern. His system is based upon recurring cyclical and geometric patterns, that when aligned with time cycles can demonstrate strength or weakness. His ideas are controversial, with critics arguing that followers highlight the rare successful calls while ignoring failed predictions. The glassy eyed banker almost certainly rejects sacred notions, but metaphysics does seem to influence the world, if not the market.
Scoop advocates a buy and hold strategy focused on index funds, also known as ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds). In sacred terms the ETF is the Monad, the one; a fund that owns the market as an ecosystem, rather than individual trees. My son responds, “So buying individual stocks is more like gambling, it’s all or none, but the index fund is safer, buying shares in the entire market.”
The Dyad, which is 2, is duality which in the market is gain or loss, hope or fear, market value or book value. Managing that relationship is the key, which means ratios – such as Phi – come into play. Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett are legendary masters of value investing. Scoop explains their concept of the “Margin of Safety,” which is the ratio between intrinsic value and market price. When the price is less than the value, you are buying at a discount, which gives protection when the market is volatile. Phi does not directly pertain to the Margin of Safety, but both describe a relationship between two quantities, a recurring pattern in nature, which is a way to manage risk.
The quadrivium includes astronomy, which is based upon the regularity of orbits, seasons, and rhythms. Winter always follows the harvest. In finance, this is the “Reversion to the Mean.” Market expansion (a bull market) is followed by contraction (bear markets). Historical averages bear out, so there is wisdom building a portfolio designed to endure all four seasons.
My son’s interest in financial literacy opens a wide array of topics. Algebra, probability, and statistics readily pertain, so too risk management and the cost of money. Our homeschooling has a practical application.
Our approach to life is “both/and,” our objective in teaching is not only applied; money is not the measure of the man and financial literacy is necessary but not sufficient. Sacred numbers afford a chance to connect a life skill to fundamental laws of harmony, truths of the very long term.
Mysticism runs counter to the modern world’s embrace of empirical science. But 483 years since Copernicus launched the scientific revolution is a mere fraction to the 2412 years since Plato launched his Academy. We navigate that 1:5 ratio at our homeschool.
A 2nd grader can teach an 8th grader long term investing, while this Boomer does teach a Zoomer about the long term tradition.
We are well beyond any standardized test.
______________________________
Our heirloom pole bean harvest continues. The Pink Lady apples ripen on our tree.
Not to the Test
Posted: October 9, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities 1 Comment
8th grade standardized tests contain questions like these:
A triangle has three angles in the following degrees: 70°, 30°, and x. What is the measure of angle x in the triangle?
A. 30°
B. 60°
C. 80°
D. 150°
My son knows all triangles have 180° so x can only be 80° when the other angles are 70° and 30°. “That wasn’t hard,” he says.
Marty has $80 to spend at a sporting goods store. He will spend $56 on a shirt, and then buy some darts. Each box of darts costs $6. He wants to buy as many boxes as possible. Which equation shows the number of boxes of darts, x, he can buy?
A. 80 = 56 + 6x
B. 80 = 56 * 6x
C. 80 = (56)(6x)
D. 80 = 56/6x
He knows that x can only be 4 if 56 + 6x = 80 but he deadpans, “I made an educated guess.”
Our homeschool ignores standardized tests. There is value in knowing social conventions, a functional literacy. He needs to know how to read a graph, how to reconcile a checkbook, calculate a discount, read fractions on a tape measure, recognize and solve an equation. Like “blocking and tackling” those skills are important, but to learn about number, we take a different path.
We follow the Quadrivium: the mathematical architecture of the Real.
Plato, in Book VII of the Republic, outlined the path away from ignorance up toward the light of eternal truth and the Good. Mathematical knowledge is like a ladder, allowing the student to ascend higher, “it leads the best part of the soul up to the view of the best among the things that are…”
In the Quadrivium, Arithmetic is “pure reason,” the art of number; Geometry is the “Form of the Good,” number in space; Harmonics/Music is “Beauty and Order” which is number in proportion and time; Astronomy is a “Diagram of the Pure” ordered motion in space.
Quadrivium means “a crossing of four roads,” a name used by Boethius, the Roman philosopher, around 500 AD for the four mathematical sciences. Combined with the three language arts – grammar, logic, and rhetoric, referred to as the Trivium – these became the Seven Liberal Arts. The origin was at Plato’s Academy, a private school founded around 387 BCE whose tradition of the mathematical sciences plus logic endured and influenced Christian, Islamic and medieval European scholars. In 529 AD, Emperor Justinian passed laws banning non-orthodox teaching, which effectively disbanded the Neoplatonic Academy.
Consider a 900 year tradition, and some of its students, these just a few among many who studied or were influenced by the Quadrivium: Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Cicero; Plotinus, Boethius, Dionysius the Areopagite, Bede; St. Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen; Roger Bacon, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Copernicus, and Johannes Kepler.
My son asks, “Why are so many places named after Greeks and Romans? St. Augustine, Florida. Euclid, Ohio… it’s by Cleveland.” We stop the math lesson and talk about St. Augustine, and Euclid.
The Magister teaches the Trivium, and so we pursue the Quadrivium. But what happened? Why did the Trivium and Quadrivium become obsolete?
The Dark Ages ended. Monasticism ran its course, universities were formed. The Renaissance Humanists arose, then the Scientific Revolution changed the focus from metaphysical truth to observation, experiment, the quantitative. The Enlightenment further emphasized reason, criticism, empirical knowledge: “I think, therefore I am.”
Then the Industrial Revolution brought standardized education; the school bell like the factory whistle training cogs in the machine. The seven liberal arts were neither technical, nor vocational, not the STEM path to employment. The modern world is about measurable and quantifiable output. Quantity, not metaphysical quality.
Our Art Farm Homeschool Academy is focused less on the measurable, more on perception, a quality of discernment, on understanding.
Sacred Number is mystic arithmetic, shared widely among religions, paths to wisdom, among all peoples, across all time. The fascinating question is why this is pervasive.
One is unity. The monad. The origin and point with no dimension. The Great Spirit. God. Permanence. The one name of all names. The shoreless ocean of Unity, it is circle, center, the purest tone, the indivisible All. The unmanifested Divine, the I am that I am.
Two is duality, polarization. Either/or, yin and yang, the two sides of every coin, left and right; shadow, opposite, and object.
Three, the first odd number, makes a triangle which is the first shape to hold space; a three legged stool can stand anywhere, a braid is complete by the third strand, life unfolds across the past, present and future; birth, life, and death. In music the perfect fifth vibrates at a 3:2 ratio, which resolves conflict; singing bowls tuned to 3:2 calm the nervous system. The circle of fifths is considered the cosmic spiral of becoming.
Four is manifestation. The cardinal directions and the elements of Fire, Air, Earth, and Water; in modern physics the building blocks are protons, neutrons, electrons, and neutrinos; the year is divided in four, as animals walk on legs of four.
And so it goes for all the natural numbers. Seven are the days of creation, the chakras, the classical planets, while 12 is the months of the year, signs of the zodiac, tribes of Israel, the disciples; the number of cosmic order, completion and time.
“These are not proofs of a cosmic numerology, but a pattern, a language humans have used to interpret order.” With a surprising confidence, my son says, “That is not too far out. It makes sense and I understand it. I have heard about that. I think I have heard you talk about that.” Somewhat taken aback, I reply, “Then let’s talk about zero.”
The Babylonians, around 300 BCE, and Mayans, around 30 BCE, used a placeholder to show an empty space; 501 is different from 51 because there is no value in the “tens” space. But the placeholder was not a number. It predates zero.
The Dark Ages in Europe were an enlightened time in India. A brilliant mathematician named Aryabhata developed the concept of zero and used it in calculations. In the 7th century the mathematician Brahmagupta defined the rules for zero: 0 – 0 = 0 but any number + 0 remains unchanged and yet 0 multiplied by any number = 0.
The concept traveled along the Silk Road and was embraced by Islamic merchants and mathematicians. An Italian, known as Fibonacci, brought the concept to Europe and popularized the Hindu-Arabic numerals. The merchant guilds favored Roman numerals, while the Catholic Church regarded “nothingness” as demonic and dangerous. Zero was a long process of adoption, resistance, and refinement.
But zero simplified bookkeeping, which merchant bankers embraced. Gutenberg’s printing press made clear that Arabic numerals were more legible than Roman numerals. Linear perspective was discovered, its vanishing point a single point of nothingness, visually equal to the void. Renaissance humanism loosened the Catholic Church’s grip, while Cartesian coordinates helped lay the foundation of calculus.
Zero changed the world.
“But what made them choose that symbol? What is so important about zero?” Flummoxed, I say, “Well, there is no accounting without zero. What is $100?” He counters, “Ten thousand pennies.” “No,” I say, “What is the number?” Dryly he replies, “Oh, a 1 with two zeros.” “Precisely,” I respond, “but it’s more.”
Zero is absence, the whole number of the empty set, what early Indian treatises called “Sunya,” meaning “void,” the abyss, the unknowable, not “nothingness” but the cosmic womb, that from which all other numbers and creation emerge. Zero makes the void calculable.
Pushing further, we discuss Phi, which represents the Golden Ratio, an irrational number equal to approximately 1.6180339887. Any line divided into two, (roughly 5/8 and 3/8) such that the ratio of the entire line to the longer line equals the ratio of the longer line to the shorter line yields Phi. Euclid wrote about this in the Elements.
“Fibonacci,” I explain, “that Italian mathematician, who grew up in North Africa, learned about the pattern where two numbers added together equal the next number in sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…) and when dividing any number by the one before it, the further you go, the closer you get to 1.618. 5/3 =1.667, 13/8 =1.625, 34/21 =1.619. The Fibonacci sequence relates to Phi.”
This ratio seems to show up everywhere: in the proportions of the Parthenon in Greece, Egyptian pyramids, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa; the spiral of sunflower seeds, the shape of pinecones, hurricane clouds and the shells of nautiluses appear based on Phi. The seeds and pinecones are undisputed, the art and architecture are disputed, the nautilus and hurricanes follow different ratios, but appear similar.
Everyday items, like credit cards and laptop screens are shaped closely like “Golden Rectangles.” To be precise, I get out the ruler and measure my credit card, which measures 1.586, not quite 1.618 but he sees the basic point. That Phi is a real, recurring ratio is beyond dispute, reason enough for our lesson.
My son and I go into the garden to look at the coneflowers. I show him images of the Parthenon, the Mona Lisa, The Great Wave by Hokusai, other paintings by Rembrandt, Raphael, Dali and Mondrian. He asks, “So this is not philosophical, but mathematical?” I reply, “It is a ratio, found throughout nature, art, architecture, in all cultures.” “I think I get this,” he quietly says.
We go to the piano and I play a perfect fifth, which is the ratio 3/2. 3 and 2 are Fibonacci numbers, but the ratio 3/2 equals only 1.5, too early in the sequence to equal 1.618. Phi is an irrational dynamic, spatial geometry, while the perfect fifth is harmonic symmetry, a clean pure resonance, number in time. I play the Prelude of Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, whose fanfare to the sunrise opens with a rising perfect fifth. He hears the sound, I show him the math.
The symbols in Phi ( Φ or φ ) look like a 1 passing through 0, curiously, but that may be a coincidence. We began by talking about natural numbers and zero, which lead us to void and unity, which lead to ratios and patterns, which are geometry, music, and planetary motion. The Quadrivium. The path we follow teaching number in the 8th grade.
But what practical application could this have? Here are sample Quadrivium test questions:
In classical arithmetic, two distinct positive integers a and b are called ‘amicable numbers’ if the sum of the proper divisors of a equals b, and the sum of the proper divisors of b equals a. Which of the following pairs satisfies this condition?
- 220 and 284
- 496 and 8128
- 118 and 182
- 140 and 200
In Pythagorean musical tuning, intervals are constructed using ratios of fundamental frequencies based on pure harmonics. If a reference pitch has frequency f, what is the frequency of the note that is an octave and a perfect fifth higher?
- 4 f
- 5/2 f
- 3 f
- 7/2 f
“Whoa! Dad, are you serious? This is hard!”
To go forward to his future, we go back 2,000 years.
___________________________
(NB: Quadrivium answers are below).
The gardens still produce, though late season. The tomatoes’ last harvest, while an abundance of pole beans hang still on the vine. Garlic shall be planted later this month, after the first frost.
A “proper divisor” of a number is any positive factor excluding the number itself.
Proper divisors of 220: 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55, and 110. Sum=1+2+4+5+10+11+20+22+44+55+110=284.
Proper divisors of 284: 1, 2, 4, 71, and 142. Sum=1+2+4+71+142=220.
Because the sum of 220’s divisors equals 284, and the sum of 284’s divisors equals 220, they “love” one another in the Pythagorean tradition. Of note, 220 and 284 was the very first pair of amicable numbers discovered by the Pythagoreans, who viewed them as a symbol of friendship.
An Octave corresponds to a ratio of 2:1. Raising a frequency f by an octave doubles it: Octave=2×f=2f.
A Perfect Fifth corresponds to a ratio of 3:2. Raising a pitch by a perfect fifth multiplies its frequency by 3/2 =1.5f.
Combining them: To go up an octave and then a perfect fifth higher, multiply the frequencies sequentially: Frequency=f×2×3/2 =3f.
The interval of an octave plus a fifth (a twelfth) vibrates at exactly triple the frequency (3f) of the fundamental tone. This embodies the Monad (1) expanding through the Trinity (3).
The Edge of the Map
Posted: October 2, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, What is an Art Farm 1 Comment
Our 8th grade year begins well, with confidence. In late August, before we began, I mentioned to my son that the Latin language will be included, to which he concurred. I told him there will be four days of Language Arts classes to which he replied, “I’m good with that!” I let him know we would focus on the language to get started, then add in science and math. He seemed quite good, even upbeat.
The Magister had felt that Latin would appeal to my son’s orderly mind, while deepening grammatical understanding. The Magister wasted no time in getting started, and time management has been a focus; our goal is not only to learn, but to use time well and productively.
Early on, my son arrived 2 minutes late for class. The Magister pressed him, emphasized he should arrive 2 minutes before class. Pausing for emphasis, he explained, “Our culture is all about distractions. We are fighting that tide. I want you to know when you see me becoming a bear it is for the reason to help you master your use of time. When we get to the end next spring, and you have finished the Latin book, you will say ‘I am somebody that I wasn’t last fall. I can do things I could not do then.’ That is why I am a bear on punctuality. You will be far ahead of everyone else.”
And so my son learns Latin, which communicates meaning through word endings, rich in grammatical meaning using case, number, gender, tense and person. English follows a strict subject-verb-object order, using prepositions and auxiliary verbs to clarify relationships. Latin has five cases (Nominative, Genitive, Accusative, Dative, Ablative) while English has three (Nominative, Accusative, Possessive). The difference is significant, and reveals how different cultures organize reality.
The Magister is firm, fair and demanding. My son is required to conjugate verbs, inflect nouns, determine phrases adjectival, adverbial or prepositional; learn the English derivatives for Latin words, use Roman numerals to cite historic dates such as when did the Roman Monarchy begin, or in what year and century did the Roman Republic end?
Pronunciation is practiced, with syllabification and correct accent on the antepenult, penult, or ultima syllables. The “r” sound is a trilled alveolar, somewhat like a snarling dog, what ancient grammarians referred to as “the dog letter.” Cursive handwriting is taught, both in English and Greek. The learning is multi-sensory: sight, sound, speech, and muscle memory. Rigorous it is – I am challenged to assist – but all proceeds well.
My son’s translations are charmingly literal. “Mars Rheam Silviam amat” is translated “Mars, the god of war, Rhea Silvia loves.” “Amulius Rheam Silviam vinculis claudit” becomes “Amulius Rhea Silvia with chains locks up.” He is literally capturing the Latin word order, rather than converting it into the subject-verb-object of English. Those differences open worlds of perception; every culture’s understanding of the world is different, and none are superior. In a world increasingly argumentative and combative, humility is a significant lesson.
Chinese does not have future tense verbs, but uses helping words to establish “time when.” In Urdu/Hindi, KAL (short a) means both yesterday and tomorrow, PARSON means both day before yesterday and day after tomorrow, TARSON is three days out while NARSON is four days away. The past and future are simply a direction from “now.” English forces us to say which direction (yesterday versus tomorrow) but Urdu/Hindi express that using context and verb tense.
Some languages conceptualize time as a flow moving toward you, others that you move through time, but for Urdu/Hindi proximity to “now” matters more than which side of “now” you’re on.
Albert Einstein once commented, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Grammatically speaking, his was a profound truth.
While learning his Latin, my son also works through the classical grammar of English; toggling back and forth stretches and strengthens a limber and keen mind. Our homeschool’s approach is “both/and”, which underscores that “reality” is not fixed but fluid, not absolute but perceptual. Intellectual humility is a trait of the wise.
English allows a vague, unclear relationship to knowledge, while many Amazonian languages require the speaker to state precisely how something is known: did you see it, hear about it secondhand, infer it, or dream it? One must specify “it rained (I saw it)” or “it rained (I’m told)” or “it rained (I woke up and the ground was wet, so I infer).”
If time is an illusion, then space has myriad understandings. Australian Aboriginal and some Balinese and Mayan languages have no words for “left” and “right” relative to the body; cardinal directions are used for everything (“move your cup a little to the north-east,” “there’s an ant on your south leg”).
Word order in English is essential to meaning (“the dog bit the man” vs. “the man bit the dog”) but Latin opens vast and varied opportunities for emphasis, rhythm, and rhetorical impact. The titans among Latin authors – Ovid, Horace, Virgil for poetry and Cicero and Tacitus for prose – wrote literature that influenced European authors for millennia.
I mention none of this to my son.
I leave him to his studies, trusting the grammar itself will open worlds. It seems to be working. Recently while doing his school work, his voice cried out, “I really like having the Magister as a teacher. I really like learning what many adults do not know. I like knowing something my classmates do not study.”
It is a paradox, but to learn a language deeply is to see the edge where the verbal “map of understanding” is one-off from life, itself, where that plays out. Essentially, my son gains insight to the limits of language.
Dorothy Sayers, a paragon of modern classical education and homeschooling, wrote in 1948, “…the incessant battery of words, words, words. [Students] do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.”
Aldous Huxley, a towering man of letters, author of Brave New World, described the student of languages, “He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”
We pursue the mystery. Grammar is our means to that end.
What Huxley described as, “…to cut holes in the fence of verbalized symbols that hems him in” the Magister has compared to “dwelling closer to that border and hem of all languages, beyond which lies…but a purposeful illusion.”
In an essay titled, “Learning Another Language” the Magister wrote:
The language we each are raised up with is truly our world, but if we take the trouble to learn a different language, we travel to another place, remaining ourselves in our central awareness of being, but dispossessing ourselves of all the peculiar ways of seeing the world which our first language determines and restricts. For when we name some object or event in our world (and what is language if not a collection of names), we make something what it is by saying in effect what it’s not. That’s a coffee cup next to me there, so don’t think its anything else. I’ve rationed it off, sectionalized it from the rest of experience by virtue of that word cup—and that is what we mean by a rational world: clear-cut and defined, permanent and explainable, reliable and real.
All that definition and permanency could very well be an illusion—not a delusion, but an illusion, a playing at (the original meaning of the word).
But that is what language does and must do: set the world up as a stage, believable for a time, but thankfully not believable always. And if we can command, to some working degree at least, another language, modern or ancient, we get a ticket to go to another play and see how those actors, those nouns and verbs and all they do together, make appear real what surely—just look around—will not last. All the world’s a stage, said, of course, Shakespeare, and all the men and women merely players. There is no performance without language, and every language will perform the world differently. So another language is another conceptual costume whose colors and folds and decorative buttons give us another character to watch—or even to play ourselves—while we look day by day for the really real.
My son does his work in the computer nook that he built. He made the measured drawings, we cut the wood, he sanded and varnished it, drilled the wire management holes, installed the brackets. He does his studies there, quiet some time, humming and chirping loudly at others.
I call out, “Hey, how is it going?” He calls back, “Going well. I have one more assignment.” He studies his declensions, learns his vocabulary, builds his sentences, dials in for his classes on his own. The focus on time management is paying off, his study paying dividends, his pride in “learning what many adults do not know.”
A grammar of being.
Our 8th grade is learning the Mystery.
And the Magister keeps it grounded, “See you at 9:58:00 ET Thursday. (0 seconds). Remember that the morning before class is only for review, not study.”
Gus
Posted: September 25, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Portfolio - David's work, What is an Art Farm 2 Comments
Framing a house rests upon its foundation. Building a whale does not. The whale will be too large to work in my workshop so I need to work outside. I need a series of crates from which to hang the whale, with enough room to work, all of which will be put upon wheels but narrow enough fit through exhibition doorways.
Industrial pipe staging seems an ideal solution but will not allow enough space for the head. Using dimensional lumber – 2x6s for the base, 2x4s for posts – I build a custom crate and double reinforce everything for stability. Weight is less my concern than stability during transit. A pair of 10 foot 2x4s goes on each side, diagonals crisscrossing to prevent the crate from racking.
Plates are installed in each corner where heavy duty casters will be attached when it comes time to move and install the piece. My crate’s dimensions are governed by the entrance doorway of the Bigelow Laboratory of Ocean Sciences. There is no margin of error.
On top of the structure I set an old barn beam – rugged, stout, strong – from which the entire head will hang during construction and every road trip. What I don’t know is that between all the installations, including time in storage, the crate will be in use for more than five years. What I do know is that it needs to be rugged.
As the sculpture grows, I will assemble a section of pipe staging, 5’ wide by 6’ tall by 7’ long, and spacing the staging a few feet behind the crate, will have a rectangle, about 20 feet in length, inside of which I will work. Planks and boarding – a very simple roof – go on top, upon which I lay a blue tarp, 20 feet by 40 feet, to cover the entire workspace. The studio is basic, watertight, and sufficient. We begin.
The Maven spray painted the root ball and trunk white. It is a surprising choice that moves the materials away from tree closer to his “right frame of mind.” The next task is finding the tipping point, from which the rootball/mind will hang. Engineers use a complex calculus of mass, torque and equilibrium to find the center of gravity. The Maven centers himself, goes quiet, then grabs my drill and a 1/2” boring bit and pulls the trigger. Once the hole is bored, we attach an 11” eye bolt with lock washer to the rootball/mind. Together we hoist it up and hang it from the scaffolding.
Next we begin making the skull. As a whale is not a house, so its skull is not like other mammals. Its skull is something majestic. A whale lives in water so gravity affects its skeleton differently than land-based mammals; buoyancy lifts the whale while gravity pulls down upon land animals. The whale’s face and forehead bones telescope as they move backward and overlap. The upper jaw bones taper forward into the snout. The nasal openings move to the top, not the front, forming the blowhole. The ear bones are detached, acoustically isolated. That complexity belongs to the Maven.
He grabs two sheets of 1/4 inch plywood, painted white, and draws a series of non-Euclidean shapes. I take my jigsaw and cut them out. Using the scraps, he draws several more shapes which I cut out. In short order we have our bones, more or less: mandible, maxilla, premaxilla, supra occipital, exooccipital, basioccipital, frontal, squamosal, nasal and tympanic bulla.
The whale root ball/mind hangs at a comfortable working height. During COVID people are encouraged to keep a 6 foot distance, but building inside my crate we enjoy no such luxury. We are outside, on a perfect early July day, and have work to do.
The bones by any name I need to assemble, creating volume in space around, but not touching, the root mind. This is an immense puzzle. When I was a child, a classmate in the 4th grade told me that his father was building a house from the top down. How wild, I thought! It always puzzled me why I remembered that but clearly, it was a premonition of this project: I am building the whale skull from the top down. I have no foundation upon which to frame and the root balls tangle of roots allows no purchase upon which to build.
It is July, peak of the summer, and sour cherries come ripe in our orchard. The Maven wanders off to sit under the Montmorency pie cherry tree. He plucks cherries and gazes off into the distance. Inside my cube of space I am alone, on my own.
Chuang Tzu comes to mind. In his famous story, Cook Ding carves an ox for Lord Wenhui by following the Dao, moving through the empty spaces between the joints, “as though he were performing the Dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Jingshou Music.” As a young chef, Ding saw only the mass of a whole animal. After three years of practice, he saw it as parts, not mass. Now, his inner spirit guides rather than physical eyes.
In a moment the solution arises: gussets. A gusset is simply an extra piece of material, added to give more space and strength. They are found in clothing, bags, envelopes and construction. For the skull the gusset solves the question of rigid form. To each of the Maven’s various shapes I attach cleats, using 3/4” stock and wood screws. The cleats can be sculptural in shape. What matters is they are a bracket, mass, attached to the left and right hemispheres, to which I can attach the gusset, “the extra piece of material.” I don’t need specific dimensions. The maven can hold the skull bones, then I can mark the gusset length, cut and sand it, then screw it into place.
During the afternoon I busily build cleat blocks which I attach, then secure using the gussets. The skull is a triangle, narrow above the rootball/mind but wide below. The rear is broad, the front narrow. The maven wants curving shapes for the jowl, which is easy given the flexibility of 1/4″ plywood. I simply cut those pieces longer, then bow them back into place. I have given structure to form.
It works remarkably well. So well I name the whale “Gus.”
Once the skull is assembled, the Maven returns and explains he wants bands surrounding the assembly in space, “like gyroscopic things.” We are using foraged materials and he has some boards, so I rip long thin pieces, 8 feet long by 1 inch wide by 1/16 inch thick. I can bend these easily, and gluing two layers together adds considerable strength. Nothing is structural here, and I can pin them discretely to the mandible using 1 inch #8 panhead machine screws, with washer, lock washer and acorn nut; the assembly arcs up, out, and around, creating complexity and mystery.
The Maven explains, “I want abstract decisions, not the idea why, organic decisions by geometric solutions. The “gyroscopic things” …what are they? Without those Gus loses complexity, and that complexity relates to what a whale is, to what a tree is, what anything is. I want a level of complexity that then feels alive.”
All I know is that we are on a roll.
Red Grooms is an American multimedia artist known for colorful kinetic constructions, using sculpture and painting, to depict hyper-detailed scenes of urban life. The Manhattan art critic G.R. Swenson described him as one of a generation of artists who, “took the world too seriously not to be amused by it.” An absurdist impetuous energy, rich with Marx Brothers’ puns, inform his constructions, which can fill up an entire Manhattan loft or office lobby. His work is legendary. He has been referred to as “a movement of one man that is open to everybody.”
In September 2017 Portland’s Artists’ Rapid Response Team staged a “Codfish Funeral” procession down Congress Street, through the Arts District during one of the First Friday Art Walks. Combining moving projections of water and codfish with live music and dancing it was an artistic response to the dwindling populations of the Atlantic Cod.
Among the artists was one woman, a force of nature, whose name is Anna. She was already familiar with Red Grooms work, and saw the opportunity to combine multimedia with science to raise awareness to the warming temperatures in the Gulf of Maine. She framed the problem in terms of an ecosystem rather than economics.
She worked with science teachers to reach more than 200 students at 16 schools, elementary through college level, in Southern and Mid-Coast Maine. Her idea was simple, which she leveraged through scale and reach.
In 2020, just as the COVID shutdown began, the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences asked her to host an exhibit. Nick Record, a senior research scientist at Bigelow became a key ally, “I think both scientists and artists are trying to look at the world through new lenses and show the world in ways people haven’t seen it before. Curiosity and discovery, trial and error, and creativity are essential, whether you’re a scientist, an artist, or somewhere in between.”
The Force of Nature contacted the Maven and proposed the “Majestic Fragility” idea and asked him to build a whale’s head. The Maven did not like her idea, and countered with something else, larger, a complete whale. She agreed. He made a model. She raised the funding. That is where I stepped in.
Because this is COVID, all of the artists work in isolation. Each artist has some component of the ecosystem, but no one will meet, until everyone gathers to install everything at the Bigelow Laboratory. Each artist has one specific component and the ethos is to use foraged or recycled materials. In the Red Grooms spirit, the energy of many colorful parts allows each artist latitude so that the whole will read as one, the individual parts subsumed into the collective.
The idea of foraged and recycled materials relate back to the ideas of Wendell Berry, the American novelist, poet, cultural critic and farmer. “There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. My belief is that our life and the world in it are conditional gifts,” he wrote. Life and existence as gifts, freely given not earned, and we do not “own” the earth but are mere temporary inhabitants. From this view the fisheries are not merely an economic input but part of an integrated ecosystem, entrusted to us on the condition of responsible stewardship. Fighting words to some, but common sense to many; the Force of Nature and her collective are using art to encourage dialogue.
Work on the whale skull proceeds well and we prepare to build the spine. We cut the white painted tree trunk into sections 8 inches long. I bore through each, a not easy task, to allow a 1/2 inch threaded rod, 5 feet long, to pass through. Between each section a smaller disc, cut from a narrower trunk, will be placed, like cartilage. The threaded rods are bendable, the trunk vertebrae strung like garlands on a bough.
The maven’s model rests on a table next to my cube of space workshop. The model gives us reference, but the whale as built becomes its own sculpture. Each vertebrae has small paddle-like pieces attached; odd shaped 1/4” plywood with a dowel attached to pin them into place. The thoracic vertebrae near the skull need ribs forming a cage to protect the heart and lungs. An assembly of curving 1/4” plywood pieces frame the rib cage nicely.
The assembly gets less complex, more narrow as it tapers further down the spine. Each five foot section has a coupling nut with an eyebolt attached at its end. We connect each 5 foot section by a lag bolt with hex nut. Common hardware store items source our materials. We can easily detach each 5 foot section when we move the entire whale.
Overnight rains come. As I lay in my bed I can hear the raindrops on the tarp, and repeatedly at 2am go outside to push the tarps up, to remove pooling water. Gus cannot get wet. It becomes a nightly ritual, which almost seems like a benediction; rains fall gently as Gus readies to move on.
The tail assembly is an exceedingly complex challenge. A whale’s head and its tail are dominant features, so the tail, which technically is a fluke, needs visually to balance out the head. I will secure the fluke to logs on the threaded rod so I first need to figure out how to stabilize it, so it does not rotate. To the maven, I leave the question of width that scales with the head.
Cleats screwed to multiple vertebrae, along the curving spine, will lock the fluke in place. The maven, of course, sees the fluke not as one mass, but as three separate pieces, each at different angles and shapes. Gussets again allow me to create volume in space. The assembly is both not a whale fluke and a whale fluke.
The remaining tasks proceed easily. Using birch logs and random shaped plywood we build two pectoral flippers, the short, broad paddle shaped fins on the side. We attach them to the skull assembly and hang it in space using 1/8” aircraft cable and ferrules.
The final step is more of the “gyroscopic things” for another dash of complexity along the spine. Bittersweet is an aggressive, woody invasive vine in Maine that is a bane to gardeners, but a boon to the Maven. He has foraged long lengths of it, which we attach like garland adorning the spine. Two pieces of bowed 1/4” plywood 4’ wide are attached from the tail to the sternum, adding more volume to the sculpture.
By late August we are wrapping up Gus, four months of work from the aggregate yard to completion. My commission is to build “head scratching wonder and irrational decisions.” By unanimous consent, in collaboration we have achieved that.
We are ready to rent a 25-foot box truck and take the show on the road.
__________________________________
Editor’s Note: Although this story is told using present tense verbs, the whale was actually built in the summer of 2021. The “Majestic Fragility” exhibit was on display at the Bigelow Laboratory of Oceanic Sciences through summer of 2022, then was moved to the Maine Maritime Museum for the “Sea Change” exhibit from February 2023 through 2024. It was moved to Bangor, where the exhibit is expected to become a permanent installation at the Wabanaki Public Health & Wellness center.
Place
Posted: September 4, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, consciousness, Permaculture & Home Renovation 1 Comment
“Place is the first of all beings, since everything that exists is in a place and cannot exist without a place,” Archytas observed, a Pythagorean mathematician, as recorded by Simplicius, the Neoplatonist. As a Pythagorean, he saw the kinship of all beings, a fundamental spiritual connection shared by humans and animals.
Niels Bohr, the pioneering Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, then won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, stood at Kronberg Castle in Denmark, in 1924 and, with a colleague, mused on place:
Isn’t it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here? As scientists we believe that a castle consists only of stones, and admire the way the architect put them together. The stone, the green roof with its patina, the wood carvings in the church, constitute the whole castle. None of this should be changed by the fact that Hamlet lived here, and yet it is changed completely. Suddenly the walls and ramparts speak a different language. The courtyard becomes an entire world, a dark corner reminds us of the darkness of the human soul, we hear Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” Yet, all we really know is that his name appears in a 13th century chronicle. No one can prove he really lived here. But everyone knows the question Shakespeare had him ask, the human depth he was made to reveal, and so he too had to be found in a place on earth, here in the Kronberg. And once we know that, Kronberg becomes quite a different castle for us.
To an American, this is a striking insight. To the Western Apache, it goes without saying.
Keith Basso was a cultural and linguistic anthropologist whose career was spent with the Western Apache, specifically the community of Cibecue, Arizona learning their reverence for place. He explains, that to the Apaches of Cibecue, “the past is a well-worn ‘path’ or ‘trail’ which was traveled first by the people’s founding ancestors and which subsequent generations of Apaches have traveled ever since.” Over time this path is no longer visible. The past has disappeared, and so it must be reconstructed through place-names, stories, and songs.
The place names, markers of culture, use specific identifiers to preserve not only the words of the ancestors, but graphic impressions: “Two Old Women Are Buried” (a hill); “Lizards Dart Away In Front (the eastern face of a mountain); “She Became Old Sitting” (a cornfield); “She Carries Her Brother On Her Back” (a steep slope).
The names offer evidence of change over time, shifts in climatic patterns, even change in the face of a geologic constant – all finding expression in the Apache place-world. Their names carry resonant cultural meaning. Life has meaning because it is rooted in place.
American exceptionalism knows nothing of such grounded sense of place.
The “Big Apple” is named not because of an old orchard but the big prize money at race tracks in and around the former Dutch colony. Thoroughbreds bridled and broken to race for the prize, to earn riches for the owners. “West,” a town in Texas, is in the north/central region of that state, named for its original Postmaster. “Poland” was a favorite song of the first settler of that town in central Maine, while “Rocky Mountain” North Carolina lies 1,800 miles east of the Rocky Mountains, 400 miles east of the Smoky Mountains, on the fall line between the foot hills of the Piedmont and the low flat coastal plain.
Our culture lives upon, but not with, the land.
Land is our commodity, a contract to be bought, sold and fought over; divided for its spoils, left then on its own. Manifest Destiny was our clarion call, ordained by God, of which the self-certain settlers reassured themselves as they staked their claims.
The Atlantic coast became crowded, gold discovered in Georgia, so five highly civilized cultures were forced to walk west, under US Military escort, on the Trail of Tears. The vast lands beyond the Appalachians beckoned Anglo immigrants, who flooded west to stake their claims.
Wagon trails became paved highways, and the great American road trip was born, the right of everyman to go-go-go on a quest for spiritual freedom, rejection of post-war conformity. “There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars,” wrote Kerouac, but racing at 70 miles per hour in search of everywhere is to know nothing of anywhere: no place, and no poetry.
Eventually that immense physical space became filled. Within our lifetime another frontier emerged – the internet – and now data centers consume place and power to drive AI’s limitless consumption of energy. Soon some will begin to colonize Mars, our insatiable need to dominate and take, onward, to “go where no man has gone before.”
The Wendat (Huron) or Iroquoian word Ontarí’io or oniatarí:io, which translates to “great lake”, “beautiful lake”, or “lake of shining waters” has been arbitrarily renamed in honor of an explorer and navigator from Florence, Italy.
A capricious act, how unserious we are.
And this was done not by the will of we the people, but unilaterally by one man’s ipse dixit command.
An uproar ensues. Maps will be changed, at considerable cost, while others promise to defy the name change. But a political fight seems impotent, just two sides of the same coin: place as object.
To our ongoing detriment we ignore our own relationship, and our ancestors’ relationship, to the earth that nurtures and supports us. How little we know, and how much less we understand, about place: the kinship of all beings, a fundamental spiritual connection shared by humans and animals. “Place is the first of all beings….”
Such has been the daily news, as eighth grade resumes and my son and I prepare to dig in the dirt.
The applied soil science class shall resume as a meditation upon place, the biology, chemistry and geology that under pins “the darkness of the human soul” which can open, through understanding, to the light. For history, we can study Manifest Destiny as collective myth, the guiding story of American civilization.
We will approach place with a renewed vigor, as a counter balance to the mindless news of the day, the aggressive taking, names that mean nothing but ego.
We will dig in the dirt.
And perhaps, in doing so, learn again where we are.
Ignorance or Arrogance
Posted: July 31, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Chronicles of a First Time Parent 2 Comments
When I was a boy, a common saying was “A man’s word is his bond.” I haven’t heard that spoken in decades. Today we speak of fake news, deep fake AIs, identity theft, accusations of fraud, corruption and cover ups. We liberally condemn each other with name calling like a grade school playground, but to speak of integrity seems increasingly uncommon. Our culture, it seems, wants to fight to the bottom.
Talk is cheap but we are accountable. Actions have consequences. This week’s homeschool lesson was a moral equivalent of Newton’s Third Law of Motion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Rather than give my son a lecture, I bought him a chain saw. My goal was to teach personal responsibility not as an abstraction but as a tactile physical experience.
I was not qualified to teach this class. My father was a wordsmith, who didn’t know a hammer from a nail; his tool was a typewriter and thesaurus, with which he was exceptionally skilled. He and I never bonded over power tools. I learned use of a chain saw through on-the-job-training: “this is the brake, here is the trigger, hold it like this. Go.” With a chain saw I am competent, but most certainly I have no command. I would have been pushing my limit to teach this course.
Often a boy learns best from an unrelated teacher, so I hired a journeyman; a 240 pound, 6 foot 3 inch tall, tattooed, muscular, shaved head white male who grew up on a homestead in the woods of New Hampshire. He has been using a chain saw since he was ten. A carpenter by trade, his skills are many, including plumbing and electric, a licensed firearms instructor, with training as a field medic. A published author, he is “The Everything Man.”
He required my son to buy and wear personal protective equipment: a helmet with face screen and ear protection plus chaps to protect his legs, steel toed boots and gloves. The class began at the back of his pick-up truck where an array of tools were laid out: a camp axe and a felling axe, his handmade bow saw, a machette and two gas powered chain saws. My son has an electric 16” chain saw and a pole saw.
A chain saw spins between 12,000 and 14,500 RPMs at full throttle, which is more than 6 times the RPM of an airplane propeller. You must respect that the blade will cut you down in an instant. During a brief opening lecture the Man explained that mistakes are caused “by ignorance or arrogance.” On the one hand is the lack of information, knowledge or training, while on the other is an excess of pride, a lack of respect for the tool. The class was designed to avoid the first problem, while the teacher’s humble honesty addressed the second.
Dressed in his protective gear, my son and the Man walked to the backyard to cut down a rotting maple tree. It is located outside our fence line, beside the sidewalk along a busy road. I had asked the town to take it down, but the arborist replied that it was our responsibility, and, once brought to his attention, it was on his list of trees to watch.
The trunk is thoroughly rotted. One large section fell years ago – before we owned this house – while the remaining branches reach over the fence, stretching almost thirty feet into our back yard. One large limb, about 14” diameter, grows straight up and becomes enmeshed in branches of other trees. This tree was a challenge, a lesson in strategy and gravity.
My son could use the pole saw to reach the lower limbs, but he needed to be mindful of where the limb would fall and then stand behind that. By cutting from above, the branch would fall down and his saw would not get pinched. A saw can get pinched, though, and that can become a serious issue. I was once cutting down an invasive maple, 8” diameter and 40 feet tall. A friend was holding a rope to pull the tree, but the rope was not firm enough and as I cut deeply, the tree swayed back pinching the saw. The saw could not cut, nor could I remove it; a frighteningly serious problem. I knew you cannot leave a tree halfway cut through the trunk. But I had no axe. I had ignorance. But thankfully, I had a neighbor who knew what to do, had a tree rope and chain saw, and saved the day. The Everything Man ensured my son learned from my mistake.
Once the limbs were on the ground, my son was handed a razor sharp machette and taught how to swing that blade, to slash cut away the smaller limbs, removing the clutter before using the chain saw. There is a logical process, moving from the smaller branches to the larger end, when cutting for firewood. The 16” blade equals the length of logs usable in our wood stove, and my son was shown how to use the blade as his measuring stick, for cutting to length. This work went quickly, but the tree was so rotted, we gained little useable firewood.
An electric chain saw is surprisingly quiet, while gas powered saws are ferociously loud and aggressive, commanding immediate respect. Its raw power leaves no room for carelessness.
The final exam came when The Everything Man got out his gas powered Stihl chain saw. He reviewed all the features, then handed it to my son. In learning how to handle such a powerful tool, my son grew in confidence. He experienced what it meant to command his tool, making each cut under his control. This lesson of accountability was a direct physical experience, not theory, not logic, not gaming online.
That one limb, 14” diameter, growing straight up into the canopy above, we left in place. That requires an arborist who can climb the tree, using tools beyond what we had. It would have been ignorance or arrogance, or both, to attempt to fell that, so our prudence was its own lesson of setting boundaries.
When the cutting was done, the class returned to the pickup truck, for a discussion about cleaning and maintenance. The Everything Man showed both how to dismantle the saw to clean wood chips from the inner parts, and how to sharpen the blade. It is a slow methodical process, three passes at 30 degrees, essential to maintaining the blade’s sharp edge, which is another form of integrity, of accountability. The teacher gave examples of one chain lasting a lifetime, or needing to buy new chains frequently; the only difference is care.
“Chop wood, carry water” is a maxim of Chan Buddhism, that teaches life is lived through ordinary work, not abstractions. Much about life is repetitive, dull, and unremarkable. Integrity is forged in the care of our tools, the honoring of our words, and the acceptance of responsibility. The chain saw was the lesson this week. I said very little. He repeatedly said “thank you.”
Failure
Posted: July 17, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness 1 Comment
Here at the Art Farm Homeschool, summertime living is easy, but not idle. We have created a July Book Club, in which the Magister zooms in, via telecomm, to discuss with my son a short story masterpiece. My son’s recalcitrance to join any club with peers, his aversion to leaving the house, his preoccupation with online gaming left us no choice. The book club is only 4 weeks, while summer break is 12, so the balance of time is definitely skewed to his leisure, but this month, like a fulcrum, he will engage in reading and thoughtful discussion.
This week’s short story is “The Egg,” by Sherwood Anderson. The story is set in the first decade of the 1900s in the fictional town of Bidwell, Ohio. The story’s narrator is a young child, and its protagonist, “the Father,” was “a cheerful and kindly man” whose work was idyllic as a farm hand on a pre-industrial farm. Once married, he “became ambitious. The American passion for getting up in the world took possession.…”
Their path to success was to raise chickens, but the venture fails badly. Having lost that farm, they move into town to start over. They borrow a horse and wagon, load their “cheap chairs” and a crate of live chickens, on top of which, like a crown jewel, the narrator’s baby carriage. “Why we stuck to the baby carriage I don’t know. It was unlikely other children would be born and the wheels were broken. People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging.”
The father rode on the wagon, while the Mother and son walked the long eight miles into town, “…a tiny caravan of hope looking for a new place from which to start on our upward journey through life.” The scene eerily foreshadows Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” when the migrants flee the Dust Belt, traveling Route 66 to the promised land of California. Long is the dark shadow of the American Dream.
Sherwood Anderson revolutionized 20th-century fiction with a probing and unsparing prose. His stories are set during the Second Industrial Revolution, the transition from steam to electricity, from iron to steel, assembly line production, urbanization, corporate consolidation. His core theme was the lonely, isolated individual, whose youthful truth had grown hardened, an unfulfilled longing, struggling for connection.
During the First Industrial Revolution, seventy years before Anderson, Henry David Thoreau railed at the “Iron Horse” of the Fitchburg Railroad, the tracks laid one-third of a mile from his beloved Walden Pond. The deafening roar of industry intruding on his idyll, he wrote, ”We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” He warned the machines were becoming our masters, rendering people into an impotent servitude, “The mass of men lead quiet lives of desperation.”
From Thoreau to Anderson the Industrial Revolutions had completely altered the American landscape. And yet the American Dream held firm, the myth of upward mobility, that each generation would succeed its parents; the tireless labor of one’s youth to acquire wealth, spent in later years to regain health. “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
As a child, I remember family discussions, at the Kitchen table, about the American Dream. For my generation the realization has been remarkable. Nearly 90% of Americans born in the 1940s and 50s earned more than their parents. Because of compounding asset growth in real estate and an essentially bull market since the 1980s, the Baby Boomers hold over $85 trillion in household assets.
The Third Industrial Revolution, the advent of semiconductors and the internet, unfolded during the careers of we Boomers. Since 1993, when the browser Mosaic was launched, catalyzing widespread access to the world-wide-web, the stock market has surged 3,100% further widening the gap between the have and have nots.
Now the world of algorithms and artificial intelligence represent the Fourth Industrial Revolution, during which my son’s generation, the Zoomers, come of age. It goes almost without question that the American Dream fades, the thought of upward mobility increasingly out of reach, while the mental health epidemic spikes.
A recent study published by the Dove Medical Press, an open access peer-reviewed journal, found that “17.14-24.19% of adolescents developed AI dependencies over time, while studies consistently show that mental health problems predict subsequent AI dependence, with social anxiety, loneliness, and depression serving as primary risk factors.” The isolation that Sherwood Anderson wrote about, and the desolation of which Thoreau warned, have only increased. Jacob Needleman, the high school teacher my son learned about in May, cautioned, “When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.”
My son will not read juvenile fiction this summer. The short stories that the Magister has chosen are considered masterpieces, and their hard edge is appropriate for a young man coming of age. Among his age peers, suicide rates have increased 62% since 2007, with boys having significantly higher rates, while Black youths ages 10 to 17 have increased 144% over the same period.
My son comes of age in a conflicted time, an age of skepticism. Sitting on the front porch, we discussed the American Dream, to which he replied, “That may be what it was supposed to be, but that is not how it is.” He is already aware that the American Dream was, at best, a cultural myth, or at least an historical aberration.
It is a sad irony that bankruptcy is used with increasing frequency by older individuals. According to the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, in the last 20 years, the number of people 65 and older filing for bankruptcy has increased to become its fastest-growing demographic group. We Boomers have enjoyed an economic abundance of historic proportions, but now aging, increasing numbers are falling behind.
At the age of 44 I declared a Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Mine was the good fortune to fail while young, to still have time to start over. I learned that forgiveness lies at the core of civil jurisprudence, and failure can bring a “fresh start.”
The legal doctrine known as the “Fresh Start” came from the 1934 landmark Supreme Court ruling in Local Loan Co v Hunt, 292 U.S. 234, in which the unanimous opinion, written by Justice George Sutherland, reads,
“One of the primary purposes of the Bankruptcy Act is to ‘relieve the honest debtor from the weight of oppressive indebtedness, and permit him to start afresh free from the obligations and responsibilities consequent upon business misfortunes.’ … [It] gives to the honest but unfortunate debtor… a new opportunity in life and a clear field for future effort, unhampered by the pressure and discouragement of pre-existing debt.”
A financial reset is a civil right, but an interior reset is a human necessity. The depth of my experience redirected my life and taught me that the purpose of life is healing, forgiveness a means to that end, which stands in stark contrast to American culture. Jacob Needleman commented, “The root of materialism is a poverty of ideas about the inner and outer world. Less and less does our contemporary culture have, or even seek, commerce with great ideas, and it is that lack that is weakening the human spirit. This is the essence of materialism. Materialism is a disease of the mind starved for ideas.” Our antidote to the isolation that AI and gaming breed is for my son and the Magister to read short stories during July and exchange ideas.
“The Egg” is told from the perspective of the son, as a grown man, remembering his Father’s failures. My son, a keen observer, forms his own thoughts now, which will include his reflections on my failures. His inheritance from me will be moral more than material. My task is to teach him skill with his tools, depth of character, and an informed view on the isolation plaguing his generation. What he chooses to do with that will become his healing story.
My career advice, should he ever ask, shall come from Thomas Carlyle, who influenced Thoreau and the Transcendentalists, “Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.”
Probably
Posted: June 11, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Chronicles of a First Time Parent 3 Comments
It is probable that teaching my son probability by playing Poker is considered morally degenerate, to some.
But then again, consider the society in which he comes of age: total lottery sales exceed $110 Billion per year, sports betting exceeds $166 Billion, while $391 Billion per year in total is spent on games of chance, a roll of the dice. How then to explain that his great grandfather, in 1918, was unable to borrow money to buy a car because auto loans were considered immoral, debt was viewed as a character flaw, cars were for pleasure not a necessity? Probability is a lesson in history and math.
The word “probability” comes from the Latin root probare which means “to test or prove,” while the word itself is derived from the adjective probabilis meaning “plausible, provable, that may be assumed to be believed.” The Roman orator Cicero built an argument upon that word, rejecting the idea that humans could attain absolute, perfect knowledge, he argued that probabilities were far more practical, politically feasible, a means to move the crowd in your favor. In 15th century Middle English the word was linked to legal credibility until it became a mathematical term around 1718.
I teach the mathematical application here at our homeschool. I am of an age that math properly should be taught using a sharpened pencil on lined paper, not online interactive like a game. I purchased a textbook from a local store. It has served us well, except, more than a few times the solutions were wrong. But even that is a teaching moment. “To test, to prove” teaches my son to question actively, not receive passively, the answers of authority. Textbooks, algorithms, and AI are not settled truth. My son needs to learn to roll up his sleeves, match and raise, have skin in the game.
My son did well on the probability chapter, but the textbook referenced playing cards several times; a noteworthy assumption. My son was unable to answer because he had never played cards. He did not know what was being asked. I was dumbstruck! I ran back to that bookstore to buy poker chips and playing cards.
I easily use equations in my carpentry, but teaching the volume or surface area of a dodecahedron, or a quadratic equation challenged me to relearn long-forgotten theorems. Ours is not the blind leading the blind, but more like the French proverb, “”Au royaume des aveugles, les borgnes sont rois” (“In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed men are kings.”)
“Papa,” my son’s Grandfather, on the other hand, is the rare bird who flies high in the world of pure mathematical truth. A PhD in Physical Chemistry/Theoretical Physics, in his first published paper, in 1977, he announced “a very fundamental conceptual error present in the traditional formulation of the entropic force between the ends of a single Gaussian macromolecule.” In other words, the classical theory of the academy was wrong.
His pioneering “Entropic approach to Brownian movement” was published in 1980 in the American Journal of Physics, and is considered the grandfather of modern Brownian entropic force modeling. In Brownian motion a particle’s movement is entirely random, but, connecting pure geometry and probability to thermodynamics, he showed that by measuring the probability distribution of a particle’s movement, there is a measurable intrinsic entropic force.
In his 2001 paper “Entropic Elasticity of Weakly Perturbed Polymers” Papa reasoned:
The probability of occurrence of an end-to-end separation r (r =|r|) for such a chain is described by r2P(r), where P(r) is the normalized field-free end-to-end distribution function, b3π−3/2exp(-b2r2) for r << Na.
From r2P(r) one may determine the standard deviation or dispersion (σ o) in r and compare it with the average value of r for a freely orienting chain not subject to an external force. σ ο 2 = <r2>o – (<r>o)2 = .23/b2. The absence of an external force is denoted by the subscript o. The result is:
σ o/<r>o = .42
Hard pressed to grasp that, my probability teaching centers on the mathematical truth:
________n!________
C ( n, k ) = k! ( n – k )!
Where n = 52 cards in the deck, k = the number of cards in the hand, and ! = the factorial function, which for 5 card stud is (5x4x3x2x1). My son’s probability of drawing any one specific hand is 1 out of 2,598,960. Steep odds, and so we began. I taught him to shuffle, to deal the cards, and the value of chips. “Applied theory” is my approach both to life as to probability; math lives at the intersection of intuition and calculation.
In poker, as in life, the odds of getting nothing are high, almost 50-50, but more precisely 0.9953015 : 1. One pair is an everyday occurrence, 1.36477 : 1, while a flush – the basic kind, neither a straight nor a royal – comes in at 507.8019 : 1, until at the apex, the summa elite, the royal flush has steep odds against, at 649,739 : 1. The unspoken lesson is that rare events can happen, so you should hold out hope.
Our poker playing plan was devilishly clever. My son is of the “anxious generation” also known as “the loneliest generation.” According to the National Social Anxiety Center, 60% of his peers report significant mental health challenges, including social anxiety, which can be paralyzing. Factors driving this spike include pandemic disruptions, consuming social media use, and diminished face-to-face interactions. Our homeschooling did not arise in a vacuum.
My son would prefer not to leave his gaming corner, let alone to leave the house, and so what better pedagogical tool than playing a game where bluffing is strategic, a “poker” face reveals nothing, while watching for “tells” is key. We play the game face-to-face, cards held high like a Maginot wall, each of us huddled behind our defense. In this bounded rule-governed space, interactions are intentional. If anxiety feels inevitable, probability suggests “we can think about this, we can figure the odds, you must play the hand you are dealt.”
We have alternated between the math text book and our game of chance. He does well with the pencil and paper – often doing the calculations in his head – but he beats me at betting more often than not. Poker between two players is less fun than with more, and he yearned to widen the circle.
That is a math lesson all its own. The odds of any one specific hand remain 1 out of 2,598,960 no matter the number of players, but the relative value of a premium hand increases. In our heads-up matches, one pair often wins. But with more players, a single pair will rarely win the pot. That means, mathematically, in a larger group you should bet more aggressively with a strong hand. Bluffing, on the other hand, is less effective with a larger group. With more people playing, the probability is high that someone else holds the premium hand, and anyone player can call your bluff, which means the odds of everyone else folding is highly improbable.
My son asked his sister and his Mother, the Goddess, repeatedly to join us, but somehow that never worked out; between work and school they are quite busy. So we invited my son’s former classmate, a close friend from before the pandemic, to come over to our house. He agreed. My son was ready with his chips and cards.
His classmate, of keen eagle eye and sharp mind, taught us to play black jack. Black jack, the most widely played casino banking game in the world, is significantly less social than 5-card stud. Blackjack unfolds between one player and the dealer, its focus only the math to reach 21. Quiet pervades, conversation is limited.
My goal inviting the “eagle eye” to our house was not math but socialization. My agenda not so hidden, nor did I intend it to be, I wanted my son to engage in play. What unfolded was exquisite and rare, more precisely a probability of 1 in 229,000 (.00044%), or maybe it was 1 in 401,138, or then again 1 in 1,153,500. My son and I are still calculating the odds.
My son dealt the cards, and we played several rounds, chatting away amicably. The pots increased in size, the chips moved back and forth. We played 5-card stud with three draws and betting rounds per hand. On the last hand, the Eagle Eye began to bet aggressively. I matched and raised. My son held back. Laying down his cards, all black, all spades, Queen, Jack, 10, 9 and a 4, the Eagle Eye smiled and quietly, confidently said, “Flush.” He was one card away from the Royal Flush.
I had an Ace up my sleeve: all black, all clubs, Ace, Jack, 7, 4, 3. Not royal, rather commoner, but Ace high beats Queen. Incredulously we gazed at the cards.
Quietly my son is coming to realize that anxiety is not an absolute, but probably, with love, devotion and surrender, he can find his way out of the gauntlet of his generation.
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