CHAPTER 4: LEARNING TO SEE

From the position of the sun in the shy, Somerai could deduce that it was early afternoon. She still had time to make some headway towards the mountain. Before she set out it seemed a good idea to check what resources she had on her for completing the mission.

Somerai opened her backpack. Inside she saw all the items that were mentioned by Dharma. She took out The Guide. The cover read: “Questions are your tools.”

What was that meant to mean?

What do YOU think it means? Yes I’m talking to you listener, you who is listening to this audiobook. Upon it’s creation by sages of the disco era, The Guide was imbued with the ability to connect to it’s listener’s through sound waves that enabled introspection and contemplation within their internal minds. This encouraged active listening and reflection in the listener’s world to extend learning into their own reality. Furthermore observation and experimentation was used to make subject matter visible and tangible as well as test ideas in the real world. Yes this is the part where YOU the listener start reflecting alongside Somerai as she learns. You too are part of the story.

The first section of The Guide provided a description of the different species of plants and animals in the African savannah.

It read: The Pied crow (Corvus Albus) is widely spread across Sub-Saharan Africa. They have pronounced beaks, a muscular frame and feed on small animals, fruit, grain, insects and injured wildlife. They are highly intelligent and social and have been known to drop rocks onto ostrich eggs to break them open. They are opportunists. The pied crow is a striking bird, black in colour with white colouring on its breast and shoulder.

As Somerai read she always asked three cardinal questions: What? Why? And How? She would ask herself these questions as she read almost having a conversation with the author, and in the process compare the concept to her past experiences that were similar in nature and build an image in her mind’s eye of the bird’s physical structure, it’s feeding patterns and interactions with it’s environment. Once she visualised it, she had made it meaningful to her.

You try to do the same now. Think of birds from your experience that are similar to the pied crow. From the description of the pied crow above how would you describe the what (what does the pied crow look like, what are it’s traits), why are pied crows important in the ecosystem and how do they get their food?

The Guide continued: Pied crows are both strong and intelligent, they have the best of both worlds. If they do not get their way by force they can outthink and outmanoeuvre their opponent. And moreover they are eternally curious.

Somerai had always been curious as a child. As a baby she looked at everything around her. She wondered: “How did everything work?” Touching and grasping to understand the density and make-up of material objects to build her tactile skills. Play was learning.

When she’d gone to the park with mum to learn how to ride a bike, she’d noticed how the wind would sweep the leaves neatly together on one side of the park. From watching the wind, she realised there were bigger forces at play. She couldn’t see the wind but she could see it’s effect on light objects.

From watching golf on TV, she’d learnt to throw grass into the air to find out in which way it was blowing. She learnt about vectors this way. It was still unclear to her why the wind sometimes blew in a straight line and sometimes in a spiral with plastic bags and leaves sometimes moving about in a tornado-like swirl.

When walking past a stream have you ever thrown leaves into the water to discover the direction of the current?

For Somerai it was interesting to learn about how water flowed around rocks, swirling to form microcosmic-rapids and then rejoining the mass movement of the current with one purpose. As Somerai turned to her left, perched on the outermost branch of an acacia tree there he was, a proud pied crow in his white armour looking convinced of himself as if he was part of the savannah’s Imperial Guard. Somehow his self-pride made her think about her own ego.

His walk made him feel important but did the world really care, did the world think he was important? Probably not. She wondered how he flew and managed to stay in the air, what kept him up? She separated the process of flight into separate phases: Take-off, flying and landing and observed these parts separately when watching the crow in motion.

As he was about to depart she noticed that to take off he had to first jump up and then push off with his legs before flapping his wings for upward movement almost like a helicopter. When he flew to the next branch he had to fly upwards at the end of his flight path in order to perch on a higher branch.

Like she was using a DLSR camera she zoomed in on his wing. To fly upwards at the last minute he adjusted the angle of his wings. It was fascinating what she could learn about how birds fly just by observing them closely.

To keep a record of this observation as her memory sometimes failed her, she pulled out her pencil and notebook to sketch a sequence of images and storyboard the different phases of flight while labelling the key parts of the crow’s anatomy and it’s function in each phase. It was quick and dirty but it would help her remember the details.

Hello again listener, your mission is to complete a Sherlock Holmes Neighbourhood Safari. Go for a walk outside and like Somerai did, observe how a bird of any type takes-off, flies and perches.

Note down the species of bird and it’s characteristics and look for clues to the key things the bird does to enable flight. The aim is to practice your powers of close observation and using this skills to learn from your environment.