Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Circles)
The Drop, that wrestles in the Sea –
Forgets her own locality
As I, in Thee –
She knows herself an incense small –
Yet small, she sighs, if all, is all,
How larger – be?
The Ocean, smiles at her conceit –
But she, forgetting Amphitrite –
Pleads “Me”?
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #255)
I’m saying open up
And let the rain come pouring in
Wash out this tired notion
That the best is yet to come
But while you’re dancing on the ground
Don’t think of when you’re gone
~ Dave Matthews
♫ (Pig) ♫
Conjecturing a Climate
Of unsuspended Suns –
Adds poignancy to Winter –
The shivery Fancy turns
To a fictitious Country
To palliate a Cold –
Not obviated of Degree –
Nor eased – of Latitude –
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #551)
The Mayflower II (above) is at Mystic Seaport for restoration. This replica of the original Mayflower was constructed in England and launched in 1956. Her home port is Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts.
You mustn’t rush about
in endless rings
but learn to love
the nearest things.
~ Arne Paasche Aasen
(The Ways of Water)
Not all the lanes were plowed in Elm Grove Cemetery so we couldn’t get to the graves of my White ancestors, but the cemetery was full of interesting snow drifts and shadows, and views of the snow and ice covered river.
You must rejoice in life every day; don’t wait until the moment has passed you by before acknowledging what a good time it really was! Don’t pin your hopes on the happiness of days to come. The older one gets, the more one realizes that the ability to savor the moment is a state of grace, a glorious gift…
~ Marie Curie
(Seasons)
It is that dream we carry
that something miraculous will happen
that it must happen –
that time will open
that the heart will open
that doors will open
and that the rock face will open
that springs will gush forth –
that the dream will open
and that one morning we’ll glide in
to a harbour we didn’t know was there.
~ Olav H. Hauge
(The Dream We Carry: Selected & Last Poems of Olav H. Hauge)
I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.
~ Anne Sexton
(Letter to W. D. Snodgrass, November 28, 1958)
Genealogy becomes a mania, an obsessive struggle to penetrate the past and snatch meaning from an infinity of names. At some point the search becomes futile – there is nothing left to find, no meaning to be dredged out of old receipts, newspaper articles, letters, accounts of events that seemed so important fifty or seventy years ago. All that remains is the insane urge to keep looking, insane because the searcher has no idea what he seeks. What will it be? A photograph? A will? A fragment of a letter? The only way to find out is to look at everything, because it is often when the searcher has gone far beyond the border of futility that he finds the object he never knew he was looking for.
~ Henry Wiencek
(The Hairstons: An American Family in Black & White)
Recently Tim & I had our DNA tested for fun, to see how well our genetic material lined up with our known family histories.
The biggest surprise for me was finding out that I have absolutely no Native American ancestry! There was a story handed down that one of my mother’s ancestors married a Wampanoag Indian. So now I know why we were never able to find such an ancestor and will let go of that research goal. Another curiosity is that 13% of my ancestors came from the region of Italy and Greece. I had no idea!
BARBARA
38% Great Britain (my mother’s New England ancestry)
34% Europe East (my father’s Ukrainian ancestry)
13% Italy/Greece
4% Scandinavia (my Norwegian 3rd-great-grandfather)
4% Europe West
2% Iberian Peninsula
5% Traces of Asia Central, Caucasus, Finland/Northwest Russia, European Jewish & Ireland
Because Tim’s maternal grandfather was the son of Austrian Jewish immigrants we had assumed that would be about 25% of his ancestry. But he’s only 2% European Jewish! And he also has a few Scandinavian ancestors. The only ancestry Tim has that I don’t have is a trace of Asia South. And the ancestry I have that Tim does not have is 34% Europe East and traces of Asia Central and Finland/Northwest Russia.
TIM
65% Great Britain (Tim’s New England/Nova Scotia ancestry)
20% Ireland (three of Tim’s Irish 3rd-great-grandparents)
4% Europe West
3% Scandinavia
2% Italy/Greece
2% European Jewish
2% Iberian Peninsula
2% Traces of Asia South and Caucasus
We are finding all this utterly fascinating! I’ve also been watching Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on PBS. It can be seen online for anyone who is interested. It’s amazing what researching the paper trail left behind by ancestors, combined with DNA testing, can reveal.
Can the child within my heart rise above
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides
Can I handle the seasons of my life
Well, I’ve been afraid of changing
‘Cause I’ve built my life around you
But time makes you get bolder
Even children get older
And I’m getting older too
~ Stevie Nicks
♫ (Landslide) ♫
My love for gulls is no secret. Yesterday evening we went down to the beach and found the gulls pleasantly eager to pose for my camera. Incredibly, I came home with 79 pictures of these common and seemingly unremarkable shorebirds.
It was a very windy day as you can tell by the ruffled feathers in some of these shots.
It’s a good thing I took so many pictures of the other kinds of gulls last summer because we aren’t seeing many of them here this year. (But we did have oystercatchers this year, much to my surprise and delight!) These ”regular” ring-billed gulls seemed very happy to have their beach back to themselves… I envy them at times…
Some bodyminds have more stormy weather systems than other bodyminds, just as some geographical locations have more stormy weather than others, and it is neither helpful nor relevant to compare ourselves to others. It is also very liberating to realize that change always happens on its own timetable, not on the the timetable the thinking mind conjures up. Especially in our speeded-up, fast-food, modern culture, we tend to want instant results, and life just doesn’t work that way. Most changes in nature happen slowly.
~ Joan Tollifson
(Nothing to Grasp)
As I sit here wishing for another bout of figurative “stormy weather system” to pass me by, communing with the gulls reminds me that change always happens on its own timetable…
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
~ Carl Sagan
(Cosmos: The Persistence of Memory)