Blackbird Speaks.
It's Satyr's day … Okieland will likely miss out tonight on the Full Buck/Thunder/Hay Moon, but might hear of its presence with thunderstorms overnight. The weatherfeather says we'll get another chance Sunday night.
Today is the birthday of novelist and screenwriter Cormac McCarthy. The author of “No Country for Old Men” and “All the Pretty Horses,” among many prize laureats, was born in 1933 Providence, Rhode Island.
And its the 105th annuversary of Sir Edmund Hillary' birth. The explorer who was the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest 71 years ago this past month, was born on this date in 1919, Auckland, New Zealand.
Remain open for the unknown future to fill up your life with Creation's gifts of yet-to-come surprises. When we are fully present, we may find and enter the great space of awareness. However, it takes practice to come to know this space and to enter it willfully. Within this space we can find a different relationship to loss, pain, and trauma, allowing such emotions to dissipate and release themselves in that expanded space of awareness. – Grace Schireson
Poet to Poet to Poet
– after David Whyte
Don't name things too early. / Allow for the surprise that comes / with the step from this moment /
to the next arrival / you didn't see coming bringing / a wholly new you / into a world never before seen. /
There are no words here. / A silence deep as the sun is far / below the horizon, before first light /
without a hint of dawn's promise / until broken by the dove's love call.
8.1.2021 jab
Nothin' but blue skies . . .
It's Freya's day …
… and appropriately, today is the day that the Seneca Falls Convention began on this date in 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York. The assembly launched the woman suffrage movement in the United States. It took 70 years for the women's right to vote was finally won.
The French Impressionist best known for his paintings of ballet dancers, Edgar Degas was born 190 years ago on this day in 1834 Paris.
Nature and reality: Three Models: Dramatic, Mechanical, Organic. An excellent essay of clarification from Jeff Krasno at his blog on Commune.
Gesturing Toward the Miraculous
I won't settle for heavens, justice, and a metaphysics of arrivals and final utopias...Some haunting tune, vast and sprawling, round, foreboding, and bright, pressingly close, tells me there's more room - not in the distance, but in the intimate ordinary, in the overwhelm of the everyday. Don't you hear it too? – Bayo Akomolafe
Do birds dream of blue skies?
Not just another day . . .
It's Thor's day . . . and Okieland's version of a Summer Nor'Easterly continues to cool thing down to a warm, lovely Summer day . . .
“You think this is just another day in your life. It is not just another day. It is the one day given to you…. and the only appropriate response is gratefulness.” – Brother David Steindl-Rast
The fact that we are connected through space and time shows that life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact. We are not one living organism, but constitute a single ecosystem with many differentiated parts...nestled in each other....interdependence is an inexorable fact of life. – Lynn Margulis, in Maria Popova's Marginalian
Today is the birth date of Hunter Thompson. The initiator of “Gozo” journalism was born in 1937 Louisville, Kentucky. He and Richard Brautigan (I'll celebrate him on the 29th ) widened and refocused my world view.
We still need new metaphors. Only around 1-2 per cent of the entire human genome actually consists of protein-coding genes...at least some of the non-coding genome [most of it] is now known to be involved in regulating genes...Many disease-linked regions are in these regulatory sequences, where mutations don’t change the proteins themselves but, rather, the rate or chance of them being made at all. So, to understand how life really works at the genomic level, we need to understand gene regulation. And that...is not just eye-wateringly complicated but not at all what we have learnt to expect from the conventional molecular biology of the past 50 years. – Philip Ball in Aeon, “We are Not Machines.”
Anybody who thinks that 'it doesn't matter who's President' has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid war on the other side of the world-or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property-or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons-or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted. – Hunter S. Thompson