27 May 2007
Peace is not a temporary respite from conflict. How can we know peace when there is work for us to do? The deep experience of peace involves a recognition that all is right and good in the world, and this derives from a perspective outside time, where the world ‘is’ its entire evolution from the Big Bang through the Omega point.
26 May 2007
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“...and those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” |
25 May 2007
“Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.”
– Rachel Carson is 100 years old this weekend, with a vision more alive and current than when she died of cancer in 1964.
“If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.”
– Ralph
Waldo Emerson, born this day in 1803
24 May 2007
Until recently, the scientific consensus was that brains were made in childhood, and the nerve cells we have when we are 12 must last us a lifetime. That theory was proved wrong, as it became apparent that older nerve cells in the brain were continually being replaced, all through life. A new study this week suggests that this process is central to learning. Lifelong learning stimulates the growth of new brain cells, and growth of new brain cells facilitates lifelong learning.
“New adult neurons showed a pattern of changing plasticity very similar to that seen in brain cells in newborn animals. That is, the new adult brain cells showed a ‘critical period’ in which they were highly plastic before they settled into the less plastic properties of mature brain cells. In newborn animals, such a critical period enables an important, early burst of wiring of new brain circuitry with experience.”
– from a Eurekalert
Science article
23 May 2007
Meditation
I have drawn my hands away
Toward peace and grey margins of the day.
The andante of vain hopes and lost regret
Falls like slow rain that whispers to forget,–
Like a song that neither questions nor replies
It laves with coolness tarnished lips and eyes.
I have drawn my hands away
At last to touch the ungathered rose. O stay
Moment of dissolving happiness! Astir
Already in the sky, night’s chorister
Has brushed a petal from the jasmine moon,
And the heron has passed by, alas, how soon!
I have drawn my hands away
Like ships for guidance in the lift and spray
Of stars that urge them toward an unknown goal.
Drift! O wakeful one. O restless soul,
Until the glittering white open hand
Of heaven thou shalt read and understand.
22 May 2007
“Each day, approximately 50 to 70 billion cells perish in the average adult because of programmed cell death. Cell death in self-renewing tissues, such as the skin, gut, and bone marrow, is necessary to make room for the billions of new cells produced daily. So massive is the flux of cells through our bodies that, in a typical year, each of us will produce and, in parallel, eradicate a mass of cells equal to almost our entire body weight.”
– Dale
Bredesen of the Buck Institute for Aging Research
21 May 2007
“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
– Plato,
born this day in 428 BC