A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe;” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
~ Albert Einstein
(Mathematical Circles: Mathematical Circles Adieu & Return to Mathematical Circles)
Tag: time
load of sadness

I should not dare to be so sad
So many Years again —
A Load is first impossible
When we have put it down —
The Superhuman then withdraws
And we who never saw
The Giant at the other side
Begin to perish now.
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #1233)
bits of stellar matter
We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.
~ Arthur Eddington
(Our Place in the Universe)
We’ve all got stardust in our bones.
~ Ben Harper
♫ (Get It Like You Like It) ♫
Our planet, our society, and we ourselves are built of star stuff.
~ Carl Sagan
(Cosmos)
We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
~ Joni Mitchell
♫ (Woodstock) ♫
a lifetime of mystery
mastering the wind

Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness … the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world man will have discovered fire.
~ Teilhard de Chardin
(The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World)
spring fever
It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!
~ Mark Twain
(Tom Sawyer, Detective)
We discover a new world every time we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow.
~ Henry David Thoreau
(Journal)
My slowly growing pysanky collection…
I made two of the (less prominent) Ukrainian Easter eggs myself several years ago when Aunt Delorma and I took a workshop. It’s NOT easy!!! Can you guess which ones?
second blooming
I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly you find – at the age of fifty, say – that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about. … It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.
~ Agatha Christie
(Women’s Words: The Columbia Book of Quotations by Women)
a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam
My next post was supposed to be about furniture arrangements and home decorating, but I’ve stalled big time. I’m hoping this week will be more productive as many things are sliding here on the home-front. Had a very annoyingly busy week and then when the time finally came to get back to finish moving the furniture I became glued to the TV, trying to comprehend all that was and still is happening in Japan. Sometimes the mundane things in life start to feel pointless. But then I guess that’s the horror of it, so many people with their lives interrupted or cut short – it’s overwhelming to try to take in… I don’t know anyone there, but I know that each life lost was the most important person in the world to somebody, and for them my heart breaks.
“Japan’s recent massive earthquake, one of the largest ever recorded, appears to have moved the island by about eight feet (2.4 meters), the US Geological Survey said.”
“The quake probably shifted the position of Earth’s axis about 6.5 inches, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge.”
These numbers boggle my mind. In one sense we’re safely spinning through space on our relatively little blue spaceship, but when the planet starts readjusting itself it abruptly reminds us of how precious this life is, and how precarious in the grand scheme of things, whatever that scheme ultimately proves to be.
I feel something like a Who on the speck of dust in Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” We feel so very small in the face of this. Such a pale little blue dot, our earth. But such a cataclysmic upheaval of our big beautiful and often frightening planet.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
~ Carl Sagan
(Pale Blue Dot)
As I’m writing this some of the lyrics of Pig, one of Dave Matthews’ older songs, one of my favorites, come back to me with added poignancy:
Isn’t it strange
How we move our lives for another day
Like skipping a beat
What if a great wave should
Wash us all away
Just thinking out loud
Don’t mean to dwell on this dying thing
But looking at blood
It’s alive right now
Deep and sweet within
Pouring through our veins
Intoxicate moving wine to tears
Drinking it deep
Then an evening spent dancing
It’s you and me
This love will open our world
From the dark side we can see a glow of something bright
There’s much more than we see here
Don’t burn the day away
~ Dave Matthews
♫ (Pig) ♫
All we have is this moment. Let us not burn our days away…