A little bit of Zen

As a child, I developed a great fondness for the Czech writer Karel Čapek, a marvellous fabulist and wit (I particularly liked his collection of outlandish re-imaginings of famous moments in history, Apocryphal Tales). Today, alas, his work is falling into obscurity, but he has attained enduring fame as the begetter of the term 'robot' for a humanoid mechanical servant (although he would generously acknowledge that he got the idea to use this word from his elder brother Josef, a painter).

Gardening was one of Čapek's great passions, and he wrote a rather oddball book about it - which includes perhaps my very favourite piece of his, a prose poem called 'How To Grow Clouds'. A few years ago, I discovered online a delightful piece of visual poetry inspired by this piece, a stop-motion animation by a young Polish art student, Alicja Cioch (you can read about the process of making the film on her blog here, and also see some of her charming original storyboards for the project).

How to grow clouds
It takes a lot of work: it is necessary to weed very carefully, to toss out muck and small stones by hand, to kneel on the earth, bend over, dig about in the soil, water profusely, collect caterpillars, exterminate aphids, loosen the ground and serve the earth; when your back hurts from all this and you straighten up and look at the sky, you will have the prettiest clouds. Probatum est.
Karel Čapek (1890-1938), translated by Andrew Malcovsky

Whenever somebody asks me for my 'philosophy of teaching', I direct them to this.