We Teach Our Children to Share, Then What?
Violent Simplicity and the Circular Succession that Nurtures Nature
Sophia: Look around, friends. The world moves in cycles—life feeding life, giving and receiving. There is an economy of care in which nothing is truly lost.
Do not let the bread of the hungry mildew in your larder! Do not let moths eat the poor man's cloak. Do not store the shoes of the barefoot. Do not hoard the money of the needy. Things you possess in too great abundance belong to the poor and not to you. You are the thief who steals from God if you are able to help your neighbor and refuse to do it.
— Christine de Pizan (1364-1440)
Christine de Pizan: Yes. Too often, abundance becomes a burden when it is withheld. Bread left to spoil, shoes kept from the barefoot, wealth hoarded—these acts are theft against the natural order and the divine spark in humanity.
Galileo Galilei: And yet, even in the vast complexity of the cosmos, the sun offers its warmth to every grape without discrimination. Each rotation, each orbit, nurtures countless lives, as if nothing else exists.
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
— Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Lord Byron: I find my heart drawn more to the rhythms of Nature than the follies of man. Its cycles, its silent generosity, surpass human ambition and desire.
Gustave Flaubert: To work creatively, one must first cultivate discipline and order in daily life. Then, from that structured foundation, one can strike with the boldness of originality—the violent simplicity of true creation.
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
— Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Wallace Stevens: And yet, death is woven into this circle. It is from endings that beauty emerges, from closure that the fullness of life and dream is realized.
E. O. Wilson: Nature itself teaches us the deepest lessons. Its patterns provide satisfaction to our senses, intellect, and spirit, reminding us that life thrives when nurtured in balance and reciprocity.
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
— Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
Sophia: So we see the principle clearly: to hoard, to neglect, to ignore is to break the circle. To give, to tend, to live in harmony with the cycles of nature is to participate in its violent simplicity—the forceful, uncompromising order that nurtures life.
Christine de Pizan: Generosity is not mere kindness; it is alignment with the very laws that govern existence.
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Galileo Galilei: And attentiveness, even to the smallest act, mirrors the grandeur of the cosmos. A single grape, ripened, is a testament to that universal care.
Sophia: Let us then live with disciplined purpose, generous hearts, and reverence for nature’s cycles. Only in such alignment does creativity, beauty, and fulfillment flourish.
Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
— E. O. Wilson (1929-2021)
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Heraclitus
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