Notes:
- Photo: Igor Shpilenok on the banks of Manych River which is in the Black Sea-Caspian Steppe of Southern Russia.
- Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again
Tag: Russia
T.G.I.F.: It’s been a long week
A child holding tulips during the Flower Run race marking International Women’s Day in Moscow’s Fili Park. (Mikhail Tereshchenko/Tass/Zuma Press, wsj.com March 8, 2018)
Puppies. Warm all hearts.
Russian President Vladimir Putin kisses the Turkmen shepherd dog that Turkmenistan’s President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov gave him during a meeting in Sochi, Russia. (Maxim Shemetov / Reuters, wsj.com 10/11/17)
Miracle. All of it.
I was born in the afternoon of March 14, when a fault opened deep below Bucharest. The inky tips of seismographic recording needles trembled as the tectonic blow rolled through the Carpathians toward Kiev and Moscow, gradually receding. The face of the world was distorted, as if in a fun-house mirror: avalanches fell from mountains, asphalt roads buckled, railroad tracks turned into snakes. Flags shook on flagpoles, automatic guns rang out in arsenals, barbed wire across state borders broke under the strain; chandeliers in apartments and frozen carcasses in meat processing plants swung like metronomes; furniture on upper floors swayed and scraped. The thousand-kilometer convulsion of the earth’s uterus gave a gentle push to the concrete capsules of missile silos, shook coal onto the heads of miners, and lifted trawlers and destroyers on a wave’s swell.
My mother was in the maternity ward, but her contractions had not started. The tectonic wave reached Moscow, shook the limestone bedrock of the capital, ran along the floating aquifers of rivers, gently grasped the foundations and pilings; an enormous invisible hand shook the skyscrapers, the Ostankino and Shukhov towers, water splashed against the gates of river locks; dishes rattled in hutches, window glass trembled. People called the police—“ our house is shaking”—some ran outside, others headed straight for the bomb shelters. Of course, there was no general panic, but this was the first time since the German bombing that Moscow reeled …
Mother worked at the Ministry of Geology and was part of a special commission that studied the causes and consequences of natural disasters…When the maternity ward was shaken by a gentle wave from the center of the earth, my mother was the only person to understand what was happening, and the unexpectedness of it, the fear that the earth’s tremor had pursued her and found her in the safety of Moscow and induced her into labor. The earthquake was my first impression of being: the world was revealed to me as instability, shakiness, the wobbliness of foundations. My father was a scholar, a specialist in catastrophe theory, and his child was born at the moment of the manifestation of forces that he studied, as he lived, without knowing it, in unison with the cycles of earth, water, wind, comets, eclipses, and solar flares, and I, his flesh and blood, appeared as the child of these cycles.
~ Sergei Lebedev, from Child of an Earthquake in “The Year of the Comet”
Notes:
- Photo: Caitie @ ktnewms (via A Joyful Journey)
- Post 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.”
- Related Live & Learn Posts: Miracle. All of it.
The Girl From Tiksi
Do NOT miss the entire photo series by Evgenia Arbugaeva: A Girl From Tiksi.
“Born in the town of Tiksi, located in the Russian Arctic, photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva often looks back into her homeland to tell the stories of the remote lands and their inhabitants. In the series ‘Tiksi’, the internationally acclaimed photographer tells a fairy-tale-like story about a girl living in the small town located on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, in Siberia. Created in the aesthetics of a documentary series, the images present everyday scenes and surroundings of the town. Possibly based on photographer’s personal story, the project features a poetic text depicting a picturesque scene of a girl walking beneath Aurora Borealis. After waking up early in the morning during the Polar Night, the girl dresses in her pink jacket she steps out of the house to walk into the endless fields of the frozen tundra. As she walks by, she notices the wondrous colors of the Northern Lights projecting onto white snow. “She loved these colors very much. Walking through them made her imagination come alive. She liked to think of the fields as blank canvases for Mother Nature to paint upon. Was she part of the painting too, in her pink jacket and red hat?” follows the text, making a visual journey into this remote land a complete experience.”
Source: Ignant.com