Giants in the mailbox

It's Thor's day here in TulseyTown and the mailbox has been taken over by giants . . .

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on this date 220 years ago. The philosopher, poet, and essayist was born in 1803 Boston. Emerson first introduced the concept of Transcendentalism — the idea that spiritual truth could be gained by intuition rather than by established doctrine or text

Today is the 118th anniversary of Theodore Roethke's birth. The poet was born on this date in 1908 Saginaw, Michigan. For more on Roethke.

The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far. – Niels Bohr

. . .the only acceptable point of view appears to be one that recognizes both sides of reality — the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical — as compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously. – Wolfgang Pauli in Maria Popova's Marginalian (5/24/23).

Every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist – Einstein

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go. . . .

Man a second shadow throws

beyond the visible he knows:

the mind, untrammeled, can outfly

the nets of mutability

and shake the shade that holds him close. – Ted Roethke

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. – Emerson