“We are a link in a chain in making a contribution that goes well beyond our own life. And that’s part of what makes dying tolerable. That’s what makes being a mortal creature tolerable.”-- Atul Gawande
“My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”Stephen Hawking opens his new book with a marvelous old anecdote. A famous astronomer, after a lecture, was told by an elderly lady, who was perhaps under the influence of Hinduism, that his cosmology was all wrong. The world, she said, rests on the back of a giant tortoise. When the astronomer asked what the tortoise stands on, she replied: “You’re very clever, young man, very clever. But it’s turtles all the way down.”
—Stephen Hawking, 1981
“An Eskimo [Inuit] custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape; the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage.”
"Desire lines, also known as cow paths, pirate paths, social trails, kemonomichi (beast trails), chemins de l’âne (donkey paths), and Olifantenpad (elephant trails), can be found all over the city and all over the world, scarring pristine lawns and worming through forest undergrowth. They appear anywhere people want to walk, where no formal paths have been provided. (Sometimes they even appear despite the existence of formal paths, out of what seems to be sheer mulishness—or, perhaps, cowishness.) Some view them as evidence of pedestrians’ inability or unwillingness to do what they’re told; in the words of one academic journal, they “record collective disobedience.”Robert Moor, 'Tracing (and Erasing) New York's Lines of Desire.' The New Yorker, 2/20/2017.
Between hitchhiking lifts, [Long] stopped in a field in Wiltshire where he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed this work ...(I have a copy of this on my wall...thank you natalie!)
What do I believe in? Imagination, gardens, science, poetry, love, and a variety of nonviolent consolations. I suspect that in the aggregate all this isn't enough, but it's where I am for now.Teju Cole, from 'A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon' in Known and Strange Things. (found via evencleveland)
-- Rebecca Solnit A Field Guide to Getting Lost"The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.
Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world."
"Life makes shapes. Life is a natural, evolutionary process in which series of shapes are continually forming. These shapes are part of an organizing process that embodies emotions, thoughts, and experiences into structure. This structure, in turn, orders the events of existence. Each person?s shape is his embodiment in the world. We are the body we inherit, the one that lives us, and a personal body, the one we live and shape through voluntary effort. We are citizens of two worlds, rooted in the animate, immortal and timeless. Molecules and cells organize into clusters, which further organize as layers, tubes, tunnels and pouches. These give structure to liquid life and set the stage for embodied human consciousness. Through the act of living, a personal human shape grows, one that is changed by the challenges and stresses of life."
"The body is not like a machine, an assembly of various parts put together to create a greater whole, and we must stop thinking of ourselves like that.- Peter Blackaby
We are organisms that evolved in complex ecosystems, with layers of interdependence. There are no units that act alone or have any sense autonomy - there are only relationships."
"It is evident that a child will learn a piece of music more quickly where there is melody, rather than an exercise in which only technique is required. Therefore beauty comes first. In the same way, yoga will be accepted by the body when it is done without resistance. The wave along the spine is like the melody in music. When the beautiful flow of extension is in action, this wave (felt along with the magical attraction of gravity) will help the body find the right adjustment in the performance of the various movements."
“Everybody has a little bit of the sun and moon in them. Everybody has a little bit of man, woman, and animal in them. Darks and lights in them. Everyone is part of a connected cosmic system. Part earth and sea, wind and fire, with some salt and dust swimming in them. We have a universe within ourselves that mimics the universe outside. None of us are just black or white, or never wrong and always right. No one. No one exists without polarities. Everybody has good and bad forces working with them, against them, and within them."
