The violin is a ruthlessly honest seismograph of the heart

a few gems of interest I found in the book Free Play by Stephen Nachmanovitch

"Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules." -William Blake

//Anthropologists have found "galumphing" to be one of the prime talents that characterize higher life forms. Galumphing is the immaculately rambunctious and seemingly inexhaustible play-energy apparent in puppies, kittens, children, baby baboons--and also in young communities and civilizations. Galumphing is the seemingly useless elaboration and ornamentation of activity. We galumph when we hop instead of walk, when we take the scenic route instead of the efficient one, when we play a game whose rules demand a limitations of our powers, when we are interested in means rather than in ends.

//A girl child, age eight, complained of the day her third-grade teacher pretended that negative numbers don't exist. While the class was doing subtraction tables, a boy asked, "What's 3 take-away 5?" and the teacher insisted that there is no such thing. The girl objected, "But everyone knows it's minus 2!" The schoolteacher said, "This is the third grade and you're not supposed to know about those things!"

I later asked this girl, "What does a minus number mean to you?" She said without hesitating, "It's like looking at your reflection in a pool of water. It goes as far down as you go up."