temporaryreality

 I had a flurry of work over the last two weeks and now have at least a day or two off, so I thought I'd post an update of the various goings-on and revisit them in my downtime.

• The trivium project: I had to give in and order a hard copy of Hawkings A Brief History of Time. Having to wait for available library ebooks coupled with the hard two-week deadline meant I just never had the book at the right time. So, a real book has been duly ordered. I continue to make my slow way through The Cosmic Doctrine, and haven't touched any other creation stories, though the few books I have that are relevant still sit in a pile in the living room. There won't be much headway until I make headway through this cosmogony section. I'll probably post, though, something on what I'm reading and what I think of it. Feel free to ignore :)
• The sonnet project: this also languished over the last two weeks, so I've written a grand total of one sonnet and one additional (mediocre) quatrain.
• The elemental divination project: This is newly upgraded to actual project-status! This last Monday, I finally 'fessed up that I'd not been following the instructions as given in The Druid Magic Handbook and much to my delight it turns out I'd found an acceptable loophole in the directions and wasn't going rogue! So, right now my daily meditation theme is focused on determining if there's a schematic/emblem onto which I can set each of the elemental correspondences as a kind of "map" or conceptual framework that expresses some of their relationships. I might be way off the mark or way too early in the process to be successful at this part of it. In the meantime, I've been typing up my handwritten notes and will probably have something to share at some point down the line.
• The garden project (not exactly related to this here blog, but might as well report on it since I've talked about my garden in the past): This is not going very well! We had two scorching heatwaves, regional fires, and I was busy when we did have tolerable weather. The vegetable garden is what I'm trying to establish and right now it's a dry barren plot. At least the fruit trees aren't dead, but I am late to get a load of compost (need to really enrich the soil), not to mention start seeds. I do have a few cabbages and kale seedlings going, but... seriously, it's been a dispiriting weight on my mind. Also, we lost a chicken in the heat and ended up giving away the remaining bird when I couldn't find any adult hens to adopt-in. 

From the second portion of the prologue of The Well-Trained Mind, we are given a basic idea of what a (traditional) classical education provides and the way it's organized, as viewed by someone who was educated in this manner and who subsequently became an educator herself. I note here that the book's co-author, Susan Wise Bauer, has written another book that is probably a better fit for what I'm undertaking here: The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had.* Regardless, the book I do have is providing some groundwork for ways I can approach (re)investigating several subjects

The trivium is composed of three portions. The first, called grammar, has to do with learning the fundamental "building blocks" of various systems. It includes facts, rules (of math and language), vocabulary, classifications, and descriptions. I'm unsure why poetry is in this category, but perhaps it's because grammar includes information that is frequently memorized. Poetry, particularly for children, can function as a kind of condensed, memorized, conveyor of meaning that only gets sussed out later, so this makes some sense. The second part of the trivium is logic. In this context, logic is typically more abstract than grammar, and is applied to all academic topics. It allows for the organization of information. The third "leg" of the trivium is rhetoric, the skill of using the facts and information one has learned, organized logically, to express conclusions.

Ultimately, this framework is applied to (or used to access) topics systematically, with a focus that is language-based, and that follows the above-mentioned three-part pattern to interrelate all knowledge. It takes "history as its organizing outline, beginning with the ancients and progressing forward to the moderns in history, science, literature, art, and music." (p.15) With such an "organizing outline," each historical era is linked (when it's reasonable to do so) to history (whether human or geological), mythology, religions, literature, fairy tales, philosophy, astronomy, science (biology, astronomy, classification, anatomy/physiology, earth sciences), and math.

Here's how The Well-Trained Mind (TWTM) conceptualizes this system in relation to studying science (p. 16):

The Study of Science in the Framework of History

Name of Period	Years Covered	Scientific Subjects
Ancients	5,000 B.C. - 400 A.D	Biology, Classification, Anatomy/Physio (Human Body)
Medieval - early Renaissance	400 - 1600	Earth Science, Astronomy
Late Renaissance - early modern	1600 - 1850	Chemistry (incl. alchemy?)
Modern	1850 - present	Physics, Computer Science

As I hinted at with my reference to geological ages, I'm intending to expand my timeline. Right now it looks like this:

Cosmologies Cosmogonies (origin/creation stories)
Geological eras (the forming of the earth and its metamorphoses that eventually allowed for life to "occur")
Evolution of life
Prehistory and early Neolithic
Recorded human history:This may be refined or changed as I go along, but that's what I have for now.
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*I don't happen to have that book so for now I'll just continue with The Well-Trained Mind, but I think I'd like to at least take a look at it to see if it can help me in this endeavor. I'll post what I find if my library has a copy.

Today JMG opened his Magic Monday post with this quotation from Dion Fortune (from The Training and Work of the Initiate): 
"The good occult student should have a sound general knowledge of natural science, history, mathematics, and philosophy. He cannot, naturally, have a thorough knowledge of all these subjects, but he should know their outlines; he should be familiar with the principles of all the sciences and know the methods of philosophy.  Then, when he acquires special knowledge, he will be able to see it in relation to the cosmic scheme of which it forms a part, and hence will know it in a very different way from the man who perceives it apart from its environment."

In the way of such things, it was a perfect fit for the increasingly apparent sense I've had that my education was insufficient, a sense that had me trying to figure where to start reading history - by which I mean the era, not the location in my house - or whether and how to refresh my basic understanding of biology and ecology. It is a sense that perhaps learning some mental math might make up for my abysmal calculating abilities, and that I would benefit from more memorization (I'm partial to poetry, but there are more things I'd like to memorize and I've kind of lost my "oomph" or motivation over the last several years), as much as from improving my vocabulary and learning more about rhetoric and logic.

A few days ago I pulled The Well-Trained Mind off my shelf and started reading it. Geared toward homeschooling families - in other words, the education of children - I'm reading it with another purpose, namely to adapt it to filling in the gaps I feel so keenly in my own education. So many books I haven't read! So much history about which I am ignorant! So many basic skills - math, memorization, argumentation, analysis - in which I have only the basic ability!

It was all really brought home to me the other day when I read an article that alluded to literature and made cultural references (old cultural references) that I didn't get. I wanted to read and understand and instead I found myself spacing out due to being in over my head.

Periodically (because that's how I roll with blogs, it seems) I'll be posting interesting and relevant thoughts from The Well-Trained Mind. I'll also be coming up with a plan of approach to how I want to learn the things I either always wished I'd learned or have lately come to understand I ought to have learned.