More words I'm reading now

     "I was with Priscilla today, and we were laughing at her boys. When it came time to write to Margaret Lynch, I found I was taking myself to task for those moments of lightness."
     "The challenge with death is that it can lift a burden, and we feel those two sensations - the lightness which you speak of, along with the melancholy, of loss. You have already suffered one, Maisie, so do not be taken aback when there is only one remaining and it is the one that brings with it moments of levity.  ... do not underestimate your feelings, and don't draw back from doors that open, now that the one closed for years has locked forever. Simon's spirit is at peace. Allow yours to be free as you live"

Jacqueline Winspear, An Incomplete Revenge.

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Words I'm reading now...

"What did he believe in, this young man who was, it seemed, so isolated? What God might he have prayed to, knowing that as an aviator he had taken on war's most dangerous work? As his craft took flight, what did he cling to when even the slightest malfunction, the tiniest fracture in the wing or fuselage, might send him to a fiery death? And what angels lifted him when that day came, when he crashed to earth behind enemy lines? To whom did he profess love, as surely he must have, when he felt the descent into his grave?"

--and--

"How must she have looked, to those she had passed? A woman wide-eyed, seeing not the streets along which she walked but a path she had traveled at another time. A time when hell was closer and, she thought, the gods even farther away."

Lovely words. Jacqueline Winspear, Pardonable Lies.

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A couple quotes that resonated

Matt Rutherford is circumnavigating the Americas by sailboat, alone. He has this to say 8 months and 20,000 miles in: "Lonely to the point where anything living is comforting. A bird, a fish, even a barnacle. I think I’m beyond lonely."

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And about Lake Vostok in the Antarctica:  "...pristine Lake Vostok — which hasn’t felt the wind for over 20 million years..."

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Black Holes on Spinach

From Science Daily 12/5/2011:

"For an astronomer, finding these insatiable black holes is like finally encountering people nine feet tall, whose great height had only been inferred from fossilized bones. How did they grow so large?" [Chung-Pei] Ma said. "This rare find will help us understand whether these black holes had very tall parents or ate a lot of spinach."

LOL! Who said scientists don't have a sense of humor!?!

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Crawling around with Rainer Maria Rilke this weekend - he fits my mood of late... Everything below is his from various writings. Indentation and text color brought to you by the vagaries of cut-and-paste.

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The only question is whether I will manage to keep out all intrusions and stay as quiet and undiscovered as I have been accustomed to being elsewhere.

Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.

Therefore, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside of yourself and meet no one for hours -- that is what you must be able to attain.

If there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things. Things will not abandon you. The nights are still there, and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands. Everything in the world of Things and animals is filled with being, of which you are part.

I beg all those who love me to love my solitude too, for otherwise I would have to conceal myself even from their eyes and hands, like a wild animal hiding from enemies bent on its capture.

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Growth

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."  ~ Anaïs Nin

In my opinion, a very Feldenkraisian way of looking at growth.  :)

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8.7 million species exist on Earth...

... according to an article in the Washington Post. I love what Jesse Ausubel (quoted in the article) said:

"There are 2.2 million ways of making a living in the ocean. There are half a million ways to be a mushroom. That’s amazing to me."

Half a million ways to be a mushroom! Sometimes it doesn't take much to make me smile...

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Thought for today: Epicurus

Epicurus once said, ‘If a little is not enough for you, nothing is.’ 

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