Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
‘Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.’

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

‘Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.’

— Richard Wilbur is 90 years old today

The world is fundamentally a great wonder.

Purpose

What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.

— Alexander Graham Bell, born this day in 1847

Embrace the dying

“Feel me to do right,” our father said on his deathbed. 
We did not quite know—in fact, not at all—what he meant. 
His last whisper was spent as through a slot in a wall. 
He left us a key, but how did it fit? “Feel me 
to do right.” Did it mean that, though he died, he would be felt 
through some aperture, or by some unseen instrument 
our dad just then had come to know? So, to do right always, 
we need but feel his spirit? Or was it merely his apology 
for dying? “Feel that I do right in not trying, 
as you insist, to stay on your side. There is the wide 
gateway and the splendid tower, and you implore me 
to wait here, with the worms!” 

Had he defined his terms, and could we discriminate 
among his motives, we might have found out how to “do right” 
before we died—supposing he felt he suddenly knew 
what dying was. “You do wrong because you do not feel 
as I do now” was maybe the sense. “Feel me, and emulate 
my state, for I am becoming less dense—I am feeling right 
for the first time.” And then the vessel burst, 
and we were kneeling around an emptiness. 

We cannot feel our father now. His power courses through us, 
yes, but he—the chest and cheek, the foot and palm, 
the mouth of oracle—is calm. And we still seek 
his meaning. “Feel me,” he said, and emphasized that word. 
Should we have heard it as a plea for a caress— 
a constant caress, since flesh to flesh was all that we 
could do right if we would bless him? 
The dying must feel the pressure of that question— 
lying flat, turning cold from brow to heel—the hot 
cowards there above protesting their love, and saying, 
“What can we do? Are you all right?” While the wall opens 
and the blue night pours through. “What can we do? 
We want to do what’s right.” 

“Lie down with me, and hold me, tight. Touch me. Be 
with me. Feel with me. Feel me to do right.” 

— May Swenson

Do we need another reason to exercise?

Exercise reduces the risk of chronic diseases and extends life expectancy. Whether endurance exercise can attenuate the cumulative systemic decline observed in aging remains elusive. Here we show that 5 mo of endurance exercise induced systemic mitochondrial biogenesis, prevented mtDNA depletion and mutations, increased mitochondrial oxidative capacity and respiratory chain assembly, restored mitochondrial morphology, and blunted pathological levels of apoptosis in multiple tissues of mtDNA mutator mice. 

— from a recent study at McMaster university, Tarnopolsky’s research group

Translation: Mitochondria are organelles within the cell that trigger apoptosis or cell suicide.  They are linked to aging in mice, humans and other mammals.  Mitochondria have their own DNA, and when new mitochondria are created, the DNA needs to make copies of itself.  When mice are mutated deliberately so that DNA copying is sloppy in the mitochondria, they age prematurely...BUT...

If these same mice are induced to exercise hard each day, they can have normal life spans (for a mouse).

Article by Gretchen Reynolds in the Science Times last week

Kinetic wave sculpture

Reuben Margolin invented his own art form.

How amazing...

are the countless states of mind, so compelling yet so transitory; urgent in one moment and a dream in the next.

— Bo Lozoff

What does it take

to shake us out of our boredom with the ordinary and remind us that our lives are an celebration of reverence and wonder?

Listen to Karl Jenkins Gloria, movement I, a grand extravaganza, performed by the Really Big Choir and a for huge orchestra in Albert Hall, London,

and  Psalm, movement III, in a more intimate setting.

Why must we answer the call to awaken?

Why must we follow the questions of our soul? Because it is through habitual, non-inquisitive living that we lose our sense of wonder. Because eventually, even the strangest or most magical things become absorbed into the routine of the daily mind with its steady geographies of endurance, anxiety, and contentment. Without conscious intention, curiosity dims and fear of the unknown binds us; we cling to the known. Only seldom does the haze lift, as we glimpse for a moment the amazing plenitude of being here in the heart of the greatest story ever told—our own lives.

—John O’Donohue

Animal morality

Do animals have a sense of morality? Do they know right from wrong? In the book, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, philosopher Jessica Pierce and biologist Marc Bekoff argue that the answer to both of these questions is a resounding yes. Ought and should regarding what’s right and what’s wrong play important roles in the social interactions of animals, just as they do in ours.

Darwin suggested that human morality is continuous with similar social behavior in other animals. He paid special attention to the capacity for sympathy, which he believed was evidenced in a large numbers of animals. Darwin wrote, ‘Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts ... would inevitably acquire a moral sense of conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well-developed, or nearly as well-developed, as in man.’

Consider the following scenarios. A teenage female elephant nursing an injured leg is knocked over by a rambunctious hormone-laden teenage male. An older female sees this happen, chases the male away, and goes back to the younger female and touches her sore leg with her trunk.

Eleven elephants rescue a group of captive antelope in KwaZula-Nata.  The matriarch elephant undoes all of the latches on the gates of the enclosure with her trunk and lets the gate swing open so the antelope can escape.

A rat in a cage refuses to push a lever for food when it sees that another rat receives an electric shock as a result. A male Diana monkey who learned to insert a token into a slot to obtain food helps a female who can't get the hang of the trick, inserting the token for her and allowing her to eat the food reward.

A large male dog wants to play with a younger and more submissive male. The big male invites his younger partner to play and when they play, the big dog restrains himself and bites his younger companion gently and allows him to bite gently in return.

Do these examples show that animals display moral behavior, that they can be compassionate, empathic, altruistic, and fair? Yes they do. Animals not only have a sense of justice, but also a sense of empathy, forgiveness, trust, reciprocity, and much more as well.

— Wild Justice

Birthday Moon

The moon is full tonight, an illustration for sheet music, an image in Matthew Arnold glimmering on the English Channel, or a ghost over a smoldering battlefield in one of the history plays.   It’s as full as it was in that poem by Coleridge where he carries his year-old son into the orchard behind the cottage and turns the baby’s face to the sky to see for the first time the earth’s bright companion, something amazing to make his crying seem small.

And if you wanted to follow this example, tonight would be the night to carry some tiny creature outside and introduce him to the moon.   And if your house has no child, you can always gather into your arms the sleeping infant of yourself, as I have done tonight, and carry him outdoors, all limp in his tattered blanket, making sure to steady his lolling head with the palm of your hand.  

And while the wind ruffles the pear trees in the corner of the orchard and dark roses wave against a stone wall, you can turn him on your shoulder and walk in circles on the lawn drunk with the light. You can lift him up into the sky, your eyes nearly as wide as his, as the moon climbs high into the night.  

— Billy Collins is 70 years old today

Neural Plasticity

My father had polio in his leg, and his upper body developed powerfully to compensate. We are not surprised. But when the brain remodels itself, growing new neurons and new connections among the existing neurons, it is cause for wonder.

For people who suffer a stroke, this means that lost capabilities – language or motor or coordination – can be re-learned in a different part of the brain.

And for those of us who haven’t had a stroke, it reminds us of the power of our habits of thought. Whatever thoughts we entertain habitually become gradually hard-wired into the brain.

Geoffrey Murphy and Jack Parent of University of Michigan recently demonstrated neural plasticity in mice.    News article from Science Daily   Research article in PNAS

Maybe we’re all Martians

According to many planetary scientists, it’s conceivable that all life on Earth is descended from organisms that originated on Mars and were carried here aboard meteorites. If that’s the case, an instrument being developed by researchers at MIT and Harvard could provide the clinching evidence.

The idea is based on several facts that have now been well established. First, in the early days of the solar system, the climates on Mars and the Earth were much more similar than they are now, so life that took hold on one planet could presumably have survived on the other. Second, an estimated one billion tons of rock have traveled from Mars to Earth, blasted loose by asteroid impacts and then traveling through interplanetary space before striking Earth's surface. Third, microbes have been shown to be capable of surviving the initial shock of such an impact, and there is some evidence they could also survive the thousands of years of transit through space before arriving at another planet.

— read article at PhysOrg

Here’s an earlier Scientific American article that offers an even higher estimate for the rate of Martian rock falling on earth.  How can anybody know, when examining a meteorite, that it came from Mars?  How much scientific effort is being devoted to finding these earthly missives from Mars, and how does the budget compare to the cost of a Mariner space probe?

The Great Turning

• Collaborative living arrangements such as co-housing and eco-villages
• Community gardens
• consumer cooperatives,
• community-supported agriculture,
• watershed restoration,
• local currencies...
  
  These structural alternatives cannot take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them. They must mirror what we want and how we relate to Earth and each other. They require, in other words, a profound shift in our perception of reality—and that shift is happening now, both as cognitive revolution and spiritual awakening.
  
  The insights and experiences that enable us to make this shift are accelerating, and they take many forms. They arise as grief for our world, giving the lie to old paradigm notions of rugged individualism, the essential separateness of the self. They arise as glad response to breakthroughs in scientific thought, as reductionism and materialism give way to evidence of a living universe. And they arise in the resurgence of wisdom traditions, reminding us again that our world is a sacred whole, worthy of adoration and service.
  
  — Joanna Macy

It’s not fair

to listen to Haydn with the music of the intervening 250 years in our ears.  Before Haydn, there was only baroque music, and his innovations in style and structure were every bit as radical as Beethoven’s or Debussy’s or Stravinsky’s.

It’s difficult for us to hear the drama in Haydn, because it seems understated compared to Tchaikovsky.  Suppose we compared it to Bach?  And you might think humor might be the most dated, but I think some of it comes through, even though composers in the 19th and 20th centuries were free to do much more outrageous things on stage than instructing the performers to pack up and walk off, one by one. (This stunt was actually a political statement, reminding his patron patron, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy that his musicians needed holiday leave to be with their families.)

Haydn, inventor of the symphony, wrote more of them than Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Dvorak, Bruckner and Mahler put together.  And they’re all good, too.

Listen to a movement from the Frog Quartet with 18th century ears.  This performance is, in my opinion, entirely too graceful and restrained.

Here’s the Finale from piano trio Hoboken XV:28, played by Jamie Laredo &Co.

Watch a pre-teen piano trio performing Haydn like pros.

Franz Josef Haydn was born this day in 1732. 

Bach’s collected works are catalogued at the Gesellschaft in Vienna. 
Haydn’s humor continued after his death, as he chose Hoboken, NJ as the archive for his opera.