Like time, the small invades like dust

It's Tew's day . . . and the heat-hammer spreads from Okieland to Portland, Maine.

We may think meditation will improve us, but it’s really about accepting ourselves as we are right now. We can still be crazy. – Pema Chödrön, whose 88th birthday was this past Sunday.

Today in 1945 the first atomic bomb was exploded at 5:30 a.m., 120 miles south of Albuquerque, near Alamagordo, New Mexico. It was the end result of the Manhattan Project, which had started six years earlier.

Missed while the dust was settling:

My homey Woody Guthrie was born 112 years ago this past Sunday in 1912 Okemah, Oklahoma. There's a superb museum in downtown TulseyTown right next door to an equally amazing archive dedicated to Bob Dylan. Two of America's greatest troubadors. Both are worth your time and there are hotels in short walking distance should you be so inclined to make the trip, which you “should.” If museums bore you, these won't.

Boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility. The former, it must be noted, breeds the latter. The more you learn about your own size, the more humble and compassionate you become to your likes, to that dust aswirl in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your table. Ah, how much life went into those flecks! Not from your point of view but from theirs. You are to them what time is to you; that’s why they look so small. – Joseph Brodsky, “In Praise of Boredom,” On Grief and Reason: Essays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1995

Let the last thing be song. – Poet and editor Hanna Fries