I want
I want
“Creativity is light,“ writes chef Ann Kim. “We need more light in dark times.”
Watch this video of Diffusion Choir, a kinetic sculpture that visualizes the organic movements of an invisible flock of Tyvek birds moving in harmony. Every 15 minutes the “birds” gather and create special choreographed gestures. Amazing!
Art and beauty can sustain us.
A few years go, Krista Tippett interviewed the bold oceanographer Sylvia Earle, who has seen and experienced the depths of the seas in ways most of us mere mortals will never comprehend, walking at depths more than a quarter of a mile beneath the surface of the ocean. And she’s been advocating for protection of our aquatic habitats for decades. One of those places is Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Monument. So, it was with a great deal of joy that I happened upon this video of President Obama meeting Dr. Earle after he recently expanded recently Papahānaumokuākea to be the world’s largest protected marine reserve, home to more than 7,000 species.
“We don’t know what to do with our own weakness except hide it or pretend it doesn’t exist. So how can we welcome fully the weakness of another, if we haven’t welcomed our own weakness? There are very strong words of Martin Luther King. His question was always, how is it that one group— the white group— can despise another group, which is the black group. And will it always be like this? Will we always be having an elite condemning or pushing down others that they consider not worthy? And he says something I find extremely beautiful and strong, that we will continue to despise people until we have recognized, loved, and accepted what is despicable in ourselves.”
“Two Countries”
Skin remembers how long the years grow / when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel / of singleness, feather lost from the tail/ of a bird, swirling onto a step, / swept away by someone who never saw / it was a feather. Skin ate, walked, / slept by itself, knew how to raise a / see-you-later hand. But skin felt / it was never seen, never known as / a land on the map, nose like a city, / hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque / and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope. / Skin had hope, that’s what skin does. / Heals over the scarred place, makes a road. / Love means you breathe in two countries. / And skin remembers–silk, spiny grass,/ deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own. / Even now, when skin is not alone, / it remembers being alone and thanks something larger / that there are travelers, that people go places / larger than themselves.
(via beingblog)
Musée Des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or
just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the
torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything
turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
W.H. Auden
“The leopard meets the tortoise on a lonely stretch of road. The leopard has been trying to catch the tortoise for a long time. The tortoise is a trickster, and so obviously has been escaping. And then on this day the leopard finally catches up with him and says, ah-ha. You know, now I’ve got you. Prepare to die.
And tortoise says to leopard: Can I ask you one last favor? And the leopard says, yes, why not? And tortoise says: Give me a short time to prepare myself for death. And the leopard looked around, said: I don’t see why not. Yes, go ahead. But then instead of standing still and thinking, as the leopard had expected, the tortoise began to dig and scatter sand all over the road, you know, throwing sand in all directions with his hands and feet.
And the leopard says: What’s going on? Why are you doing that? And the tortoise says: I’m doing this because after I am dead, I want anyone passing by this spot and seeing all this sign of struggle on the road to say: A man and his match struggled here.
And the moral of this is the importance of struggle, that we cannot - no one is going to guarantee us the outcome. Nobody’s going to say if you struggle, you will succeed. It would be too simple. But even if we are not sure how it is going to end, what success will attend our enterprise, we still have this obligation to struggle.”
— Author, Chinua Achebe in a great conversation with Terry Gross.
Photo Source: Literary Arts
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” — Desmond Tutu
(photo by Nicholas Kamm)
Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.
What’s better than classical pop covers by a lake?
“Shady Grove” is a folk song, passed down through generations. A mesmerizing cover from cellist Takénobu.
(Sound familiar? You may have heard Abigail Washburn sing the first few lines in her interview with Krista Tippett)
I hope that in the future they invent a small golden light that follows you everywhere and when something is about to end, it shines brightly so you know it’s about to end.
And if you’re never going to see someone again, it’ll shine brightly and both of you can be polite and say, “It was nice to have you in my life while I did, good luck with everything that happens after now.”
And maybe if you’re never going to eat at the same restaurant again, it’ll shine and you can order everything off the menu you’ve never tried. Maybe, if someone’s about to buy your car, the light will shine and you can take it for one last spin. Maybe, if you’re with a group of friends who’ll never be together again, all your lights will shine at the same time and you’ll know, and then you can hold each other and whisper, “This was so good. Oh my God, this was so good.”