A five year old girl from a particular Aboriginal tribe can immediately pinpoint which direction north is when asked, but has no concept of left or right. Learning new color words improves one's ability to discriminate colors. In Chinese, the past is talked about as being in front of you and the future behind you because what is in front of you is visible and what is behind you is not.

I would imagine that most of us never think that language shapes our world, but instead that the world shapes our language, that language is a responsive act driven by the necessity to communicate about and to the world. This isn't wrong, but it's not a complete picture of how language operates. As English speakers, we easily imagine time running linearly, the past at our backs and the future in front. We orient ourselves in a relative spatial sense, with things to the left and right of us, but without any sense of absolute locality to cardinal directions. In certain ways, it's a language of immediacy and preciseness. We don't handle the vague very well, and even when we're confronted with it, there's often a binary that has a sharp definition of what it is not.

Time in Chinese is fascinating. Days exist with a top to bottom structure, the past is what you face everyday, the future exists in the void behind us (if light shines on an object but there are no eyes to see it, does it exist?), the philosophical/theological universe was not not born from a moment or event but always was. Binaries are also fascinating. In Taoism, binaries are born by the act of imagining one of the units (therefore, "good" cannot exist without "bad" being born in the same instant). These things inform their language and shape the way they relate to their world.

Are women taught to know more colors from an early age, or is it something that develops throughout life? From my own experience, there are tons of color swatches that look like a sick joke from the paint company, yet people (usually women) insist there's a difference. The learned differentiation between shades of whites allow for "ghost white" to exist with "ivory." I would love to learn more color names. Does the world look prettier with more colors in it?

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"If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a café at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be memory,

learn,
as you stand
at this end of the bridge which arcs,
from love, you think, into enduring love,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come – to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
which tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing."

Galway Kinnell

I sometimes forget how nice it is to read good poems.

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I also sometimes forget how nice it is to listen to music that let's you simply be with it.