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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.”
Tag: Albert Einstein
Black Sun (Miracle, All of It)
“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.
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.
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.
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. Continue reading “Miracle. All of It.”
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