A Spade A Spade

Maybe "genius" for me has lost its original intended meaning--the weight, profundity, the gasp.  My way of recognizing genius is its fruit.  All of humanity  gets such a sweeping non-linear, formless gift that we all get to jump into a new paradigm of thought and behavior.  Many of us are not cognizant where the shift began or when, and we are sometimes unaware that yes, we have just collectively and impersonally made the shift.

I had heard a lot about Sally Goddard Blythe from the Brain Gym community and her work with autism and primitive reflexes.  For whatever reason (it took years) I am finally reading one of her books.

I am compelled to share the first page, the dedication page, from her book, The Well Balanced Child: Movement and Early Learning (Hawthorn Press Early Years).  Genteel, intelligent and sophisticated, this is what genius sounds like, this is how genius behaves and makes you feel.  This dedication could be about anyone in any field, at any time, it is irrefutable and universal, and it happens before she even gets into the gift or content of this book, before her sweeping work in neurophysiology and neural psychology:

Over the last 15 years I have been particularly lucky to meet men and women who were world experts in their field.  These were people of extraordinary intellectual and creative stature--pioneers who had spent a lifetime developing and testing their ideas.

Their published works often showed only a fraction of their thinking.  In hearing them lecture and in discussing ideas with them, I have learned more than in a thousand pages of reading.  With each one, I was struck by how these most brilliant of minds never belittled the ideas of others, and I have constantly been reminded that ideas are rarely born of individuals; rather, they are conceived as a result of thoughts and discussions shared.  In other words, creativity is usually born from shared experience and the sparks that fly between.

This book is dedicated to all the men and women of ideas who have shared their thoughts and wisdom, and by so doing allowed the knowledge of today to be, and the dreams for tomorrow to exist.