Cider Mills Organic Farm, High Rolls, New Mexico. (Cheryl Howard/Borderzine.com)

Gods of the garden

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Teaching and Learning and Caring Blog

EL PASO – Milan Kundera wrote in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “I have said before that metaphors are dangerous.” They are a way to intuitively grasp difficult and complex concepts such as love, but … Kundera also says: “Love begins with a metaphor.” Metaphors are so powerful and flexible that we often use them to gloss over the difficulty of confronting the “thing” itself. We have sports metaphors, weather metaphors, sexual metaphors, but one of our favorite metaphors is the machine. We love our machines; they are so inserted into our daily lives that we are tempted to view all sorts of constructs in mechanistic ways. At least since the time of Newton and his laws of motion, we have found this way of looking at the world very handy.

(Cheryl Howard/Borderzine.com)

The Color(s) of El Paso

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Teaching and Learning and Caring Blog

EL PASO – Many years ago, one of our graduate students, Elea, wrote in her thesis: “the color of El Paso is brown.” I argued with her vehemently. She saw brown everywhere. I saw color everywhere:  purple sunsets, yellow sunflowers, blue sky, green chiles, all the colors…even in the desert. Color was vibrant and alive…in nature, in murals, in clothing, architecture and food. ‘ Yes, there were brown people; they weren’t invisible, but some of them were Chinese, Korean, Lebanese.