Notes: Source: Lunch Time @ Monterey Bay. Post Title: Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.”
Black Sun (Miracle, All of It)
June 14, 2022 by 17 Comments
“Beautiful, dramatic and a little bit scary’: Danish photographer captures starling murmurations” (WBUR.org, June 13, 2022). A photo of starling murmurations from Soren Solkaer’s “Black Sun.”
“If you’re lucky enough to have watched it, it’s a sight you’ll likely never forget: hundreds of thousands of starlings covering the sky, undulating, shifting, forming giant fluid patterns that morph from second to second. The technical name is a murmuration. But in Denmark, where the birds fly above the northern stretches of the Wadden Sea, it’s called the Black Sun. That’s where Danish photographer Soren Solkaer first saw these mysterious patterns as a child — but it wasn’t until more recently that he pointed his camera at the phenomenon, spending the last five years following the birds on their migrations around Europe.”
Notes:
- Thank you Lori for sharing!
- Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.
Walking. In a Flash of White.
May 21, 2022 by 28 Comments
Walking. @ Daybreak. Cove Island Park. 746 consecutive (almost) days. Like in a row.
Fog. Dense Fog. (Square alignment with mental state on 4.5 hours of sleep. Yes, we’re back b*tching about insomnia. And we were doing so good.)
No mystical Deer stepping out of the shadows. No Atlantic Gants preening. No Swans-A-Swimming. No Humans. And one Human rapidly losing enthusiasm here. I adjust the backpack, strap on left shoulder biting. Damn, why so heavy today.
I walk.
The shoreline is layered in fog so dense, air brushes my face with infinitesimal droplets of rain.
My footfall sinks an inch or two into the beach sand.
I walk.
There’s a white flash. It’s moving too quickly. Auto focus can’t lock in on her, can’t get a clear shot of her in the fog soup.
An Egret. Legs tucked together tightly, platform diver, wings flapping ever so slowly, all of it keeping her airborne. Miracle. All of it.
And White. Oh, so white. Snow white against the all-world gray morning. A palette no computer can replicate.
Why this white? This so white.
Why not black, or green or fuchsia? Why just egrets this white. Why not all Birds-of-a-Feather be this white?
And who decided?
And I stand watching. Standing in the same fog. With the same heavy backpack. Yet, all of it is lighter. Clearer.
Delia Ephron, in her “Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life“: “Out of this convoluted, mixed-up thinking, I manage to spin a little hope…I do feel that I was thrust into darkness and given back light. And it opened me up to feeling part of a larger world, I’m not sure why…Like everyone else, I have a time here and it will be over…This gift could be snuffed out at any moment.”
The image persists… an old black and white photo decaying on its edges…the egret wing flaps…her legs elegantly tucked tight behind her, she flies. Lightly, child. Lightly.
This gift could be snuffed out at any moment.
Note:
- Photo: Egret, this morning. 5:08 a.m. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More Photos from this morning here.
- Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.
- Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
Miracle. All of it.
November 30, 2021 by 30 Comments
The next time you look into the mirror, just look at the way the ears rest next to the head; look at the way the hairline grows; think of all the little bones in your wrist. It is a miracle. And the dance is a celebration of that miracle.
— Martha Graham, Blood Memory: An Autobiography
Notes:
- Quote Source Credit via Alive on All Channels. Thank you Beth.
- Photo: Alexander Yakovlev – Dancers Frozen in Flour via FreeYork
- Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.
Miracle. All of It.
September 12, 2021 by 13 Comments
Stop. If you’re inside, go to a window. Throw it open and turn your face to the sky. All that empty space, the deep vastness of the air, the heavens wide above you. The sky is full of insects, and all of them are going somewhere. Every day, above and around us, the collective voyage of billions of beings.
…There are other worlds around us. Too often, we pass through them unknowing, seeing but blind, hearing but deaf, touching but not feeling, contained by the limits of our senses, the banality of our imaginations, our Ptolemaic certitudes. […]
They had heard about the butterflies, gnats, water striders, leaf bugs, booklice, and katydids sighted hundreds of miles out on the open ocean; about the aphids that Captain William Parry had encountered on ice floes during his polar expedition of 1828; and about those other aphids that, in 1925, made the 800-mile journey across the frigid, windswept Barents Sea between the Kola Peninsula, in Russia, and Spitsbergen, off Norway, in just twenty-four hours. Still, they were taken aback by the enormous quantities of animals they were discovering in the air above Louisiana and unashamedly astonished by the heights at which they found them. All of a sudden, it seemed, the heavens had opened.
Unmoored, they turned to the ocean, began talking about the “aeroplankton” drifting in the vastness of the open skies. They told each other about tiny insects, some of them wingless, all with large surface-area-to-weight ratios, plucked from their earthly tethers by a sharp gust of wind, picked up on air currents and thrust high into the convection streams without volition or capacity for resistance, some terrible accident, carried great distances across oceans and continents, then dropped with the same fateful arbitrariness in a downdraft on some distant mountaintop or valley plain. […]
On August 10, 1926, a Stinson Detroiter SM-1 six-seater monoplane took off from the rudimentary airstrip at Tallulah, Louisiana. […] [O]ver the next five years, the researchers flew more than 1,300 sorties from the Louisiana airstrip […].
They estimated that at any given time on any given day throughout the year, the air column rising from 50 to 14,000 feet above one square mile of Louisiana countryside contained an average of 25 million insects and perhaps as many as 36 million. [Read more…]
Miracle. All of It.
March 25, 2021 by 20 Comments
Yes
It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.
It could, you know. That’s why we wake
and look out – no guarantees
in this life.
But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.
— William Stafford, “Yes” in “The Way It Is”
Notes:
- Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 6:33 am, March 24, 2021. 39° F. Norwalk, CT
- Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Miracle. All of It.
September 8, 2020 by 32 Comments
My eyes graze his binoculars and without a word he passes them over. And like that the birds are no longer smudges, but elegantly detailed and purposeful and real. They steal my breath as they always do, these creatures who think nothing of having wings.
— Charlotte McConaghy, Migrations: A Novel (Flatiron Books, August 4, 2020)
Notes:
- Photo: Cormorant. Spirit Bird. Sept 7, 2020. 6:48 am. The Cove. Stamford, FT
- Back Story: Walking. In Search of my Spirit Bird.
- Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Miracle. All of It.
December 29, 2019 by 19 Comments
Human beings are creations more profound than human beings can fathom…
That’s one of the proofs of God…
there’s no other explanation.
~ Niall Williams, “This Is Happiness” (Bloomsbury Publishing; December 3, 2019)
Notes:
- Art. Finger painter (by default). Artist Mary Jane Q Cross (New Hampshire) with “Breath of Heaven” (via Mennyfox55)
- Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Miracle. All of It.
December 6, 2019 by 34 Comments
“There is a beauty in falling in love with a language—the strangeness of its sounds, the awe of watching the sea-surf of a new syntax beating again and again the cement of your unknowing. Learning to speak again can be erotic—the unfamiliar turn of the tongue, the angle of the mouth, the movement of lips.”
~ Ilya Kaminsky, from an interview conducted by Edward Clifford in the Massachusetts Review titled “(Not Quite) 10 Questions for Ilya Kaminsky”
Notes:
- Quote via Violent Waves of Emotion. Photo: Biancaa.R with mouth.
- Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Miracle. All of it.
August 4, 2019 by 29 Comments
Notes:
- Photographer Megan Loeks made this photograph during bath time that was joined by a curious feline onlooker. (National Geographic, August 2, 2019)
- Post Inspired by: Sometimes, in the afternoons, I would get into bed with her for a nap, and she would lie beside me drinking her bottle, her eyes fixed in fascination on my body. A preliminary wave of sleep would roll warmly over us. I could feel us falling together through the bright constellations of our thoughts. Even as I crossed the line into sleep I felt her cross it too; I felt her go to sleep just as when I was a child I used to feel snow falling outside my window. Later I would open my eyes to find her sleeping head on my stomach, her body curled as if in homecoming around my side, and I would lie very still, knowing that if I moved she would wake.~ Rachel Cusk, ”A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother“
- Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Miracle. All of it.
July 7, 2019 by 27 Comments
Some transfer of significance has occurred: I feel it, feel the air move, feel time begin to pour down a new tributary. The world adjusts itself. The doctors hold the baby up over the screen so that I can see her. She is livid and blue and her face is a rictus of shock and fear. I recognise her immediately from the scan. Only I knew the secret of her tranquillity, the floating world of her gestation. She is borne off to the far side of the room, away from me, and as if she were a light I fall deeper into shadow the further away she goes. The midwives crowd around her. I lose sight of her but her cries reach me like messages. Presently she emerges clothed and wrapped in a blanket. Her father takes her and holds her. His offers of friendship must suffice, must compensate for her lack of proper passage, for the clock of experience has started ticking and won’t wait for me. Her life has begun.
~ Rachel Cusk, ”A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother”
Notes:
- Rachel Cusk’s book was named #16 in The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by the The New York Times (June 26, 2019)
- Post inspired by: “The boys don’t wear mittens anymore. Their feet are much bigger than mine… But I still miss their baby feet, and their patter, and the piffle of childhood. I reel at a baby’s cry. I swoon at strollers. I don’t understand why all the love songs aren’t about babies. ~ Jill Lepore, “The Lingering of Loss” in The New Yorker (July 1, 2019) (Thank you Sawsan)
- Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
- Photo – Hand-in-Hand by J’ ose
Miracle. All of it.
May 24, 2019 by 10 Comments
Notes:
- An astronaut onboard the @ISS captured this last February, focusing the camera on the 100 mile (160 kilometer) wide Irrawaddy river delta — the largest river in Burma (Myanmar) and one of the country’s most important transportation arteries. (NASA on Instagram via this isn’t happiness)
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
- Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Miracle. All of it.
May 19, 2019 by 11 Comments
You’ll be driving along depressed when suddenly
a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through
and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably
won’t last. But for a moment the whole world
comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives—…
Your eyes are on fire.
It won’t last…
but you’ll
remember that it felt like nothing else you’ve felt…
~ Lloyd Schwartz, from “Leaves” in Goodnight, Gracie
Notes:
- Photo: Rye Hills Sunrise (West Virginia) by jimmah. Poem via: to escape from the commonplaces of existence
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
- Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Miracle. All of it. (15 sec)
April 25, 2019 by 38 Comments
Notes:
- Thunderstorms rolled through Chicago on April 22, bringing a spectacular lightning display that lit up the city’s skyline. And no worries, Sawsan and Cher are safe!
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
- Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Miracle. All of it.
April 7, 2019 by 34 Comments
Spring has finally arrived, and it makes me smile every time I step outside. New green leaves are pushing themselves into the sunlight as plants build the solar panels that will fuel them throughout the year. The first spring flowers are already in bloom, and a bright showcase of cheerful rainbow color is rapidly replacing the gray-brown palette of late winter.
I love the constant small surprises as new flowers appear. But each new sighting makes me wish for a superpower: the sort of expanded vision that could show me all the colors these flowers have to offer. Human beings can see some of them, and birds and bees can see a little more. But the potential range of invisible colors is mind-boggling, and science is only just starting to get a grip on it.
Our color vision is neatly summed up in our perception of a rainbow, sweeping from red, the longest wavelength of light that our eyes can detect, to violet, the shortest. But we can’t detect each shade individually; in order to make sense of this continuous spectrum of colors, we use a clever shortcut. Our eyes have three types of cone cell that respond to different colors—red, green and blue. Our brain figures out how much of the light that we see falls into each category, and it recombines that information to construct the myriad colors that we register. It is both beautifully efficient and frustratingly crude…
~Helen Czerski, from Colors That Only Bees and Birds Can See
Notes:
- Photo: Spring Flowers by Paul.
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
- Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Miracle. All of it.
March 15, 2019 by 22 Comments
Right now your heart is beating in utter darkness inside your chest.
~ Francis Weller, in The Geography Of Sorrow. Francis Weller On Navigating Our Losse
Notes:
- Sources: Quote – Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Photo Credit
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
- Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
- Inspiration: “For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.” – Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1.
Miracle. All of It.
March 3, 2019 by 15 Comments
Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.
– Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
Notes:
- Quote – Liquid Light & Running Trees. Photo: Feet by kate marie
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
- Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Miracle. All of It.
January 27, 2019 by 23 Comments
“The hospital corridors were quiet, the midwife was quiet. She whispered—that’s how I remember it—that I needed to see the doctor and have an ultrasound. She helped me gather my things and sent us even farther down the corridor. I remember lying on the doctor’s examining table in a dark cubicle, only the ultrasound machine emitting light. I remember covering my face with my hands. After a while, the doctor touched my arm. “Look,” he said. My husband took my hand in his. The doctor pointed at the screen and moved his finger carefully around the sonogram, as though showing us a rare map, and then, because we couldn’t quite believe what we were seeing and what he was telling us, he turned up the sound so we could hear the steady beating of the heart…”
~ Linn Ullmann, ”Unquiet: A Novel” (W. W. Norton & Company, January 15, 2019)
Notes:
- Photo of sonogram: Kim Pham
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
- Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Miracle. All of it. (This Year on Earth)
December 30, 2018 by 51 Comments
In 2018,
- Earth picked up about 40,000 metric tons of interplanetary material, mostly dust, much of it from comets.
- Earth lost around 96,250 metric tons of hydrogen and helium, the lightest elements, which escaped to outer space.
- Roughly 505,000 cubic kilometers of water fell on Earth’s surface as rain, snow, or other types of precipitation.
- Bristlecone pines, which can live for millennia, each gained perhaps a hundredth of an inch in diameter.
- Countless mayflies came and went.
- More than one hundred thirty-six million people were born in 2018, and more than fifty-seven million died.
- Tidal interactions are very slowly increasing the distance between Earth and the moon, which ended 2018 about 3.8 centimeters further apart than they were at the beginning. As a consequence, Earth is now rotating slightly more slowly; the day is a tiny fraction of a second longer.
- Earth and the sun are also creeping apart, by around 1.5 centimeters per year. Most of the change is due to changes in the sun’s gravitational pull as it converts some of its mass into energy by nuclear fusion.
- The entire solar system traveled roughly 7.25 billion kilometers in its orbit about the center of the Milky Way. This vast distance, however, is only about 1/230,000,000th of the entire orbit.
- There were two lunar eclipses and three partial solar eclipses, each a step in the long gravitational dance making up the roughly 18-year saros cycle. During one saros cycle, eclipses with particular characteristics (partial, total, annular) and a specific Earth–Moon–Sun geometry occur in a predictable sequence; at the end, the whole thing starts again. This pattern has been repeating for much longer than humans have been around to see it.
I like knowing these bits of cosmic context because they link me to a larger world. I can echo the words of Ptolemy: “Mortal as I am, I know that I am born for a day. But when I follow at my pleasure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the earth.”
~ Mary Hrovat, from “This Year on Earth” (3 Quarks Daily, December 24, 2018)
Don’t miss the rest of her essay here: This Year on Earth
Notes:
- Photo: Phys.org.
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
- Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Miracle. All of it.
July 22, 2018 by 26 Comments
It must be a great disappointment to God
if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.
~ Mary Oliver, from “Good Morning” in Blue Horses
Notes:
- Photo: good4thesoul (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
- Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Live & Learn 
