If you hit the target every time, it’s too near or too big.
—Tom Hirshfield
Trio of sparrows
Runaway morning glories
Late summer garden
Many happy returns to green fingered John Gabriele of 1962 vintage
ABC Illawarra - If you missed out on the Compost Heap this... | Facebook
If you missed out on the Compost Heap this morning, follow this link to hear John Gabrielle's Tip of the week. http://bit.ly/1997aFT.
Tanguy Viel–ARTICLE 353
“Nobody wants to fall overboard fully clothed into the ocean anywhere in the world, even close to shore – it’s such a surprise for the body to find itself in this new element. One moment, the man is on a bench in a boat, chatting at the stern rail while rigging his lines and the next he’s in another world, with gallons of salt water, numbing cold, and the weight of wet clothes making it hard to swim.
Kindness can forward the will to live in depressed individuals who feel isolated and different; that is why performing ... Kindness is potent in strengthening a sense of community and belonging.
“Real writers take seriously what writing is about—wrestling with words. Words are not inert counters like cloak-room tickets. They are living creatures which resent being treated as if they were knives, forks and spoons. You cannot take them out of a drawer, use them, then stow them away again. They are stubborn and they sometimes refuse to mean what the writer wants them to mean. It’s not merely a matter of the word itself—there’s also the delightful agony of arranging them in patterns, making music out of them.”
'The Delightful Agony of Arranging Them in Patterns'
Slovak’s dream orchard drawing volunteers from across the world
Sad u Harušťákov orchard planned as ideal space for ecological projects
The sentence
by
He sat at the desk across from his reflection
watching him where it hung above the mantel
and studied the hand there writing what he wrote,
something about the ocean in midsummer
something about the ocean in midsummer
when he was a child, the glint, the flecks of spume
tossed up where breakers thundered on the rocks;
tossed up where breakers thundered on the rocks;
the truth was a sentence they composed together
for no one else but the quiet of the house:
for no one else but the quiet of the house:
the tide he dreamt and the one he could remember,
subject and verb and the sun-touched swells they made
subject and verb and the sun-touched swells they made
of the past itself now blended with invention,
his left hand moving the right hand in the mirror
his left hand moving the right hand in the mirror
and time a distance in the room between them
spread out there like a childhood shore where waves
spread out there like a childhood shore where waves
broke on the sand and retreated to the green sea.
The Wild Orchid Mystery - Includes orchid collection photos and a podcast: “You probably know orchids as the big, colorful flowers found in grocery stores and given as housewarming gifts. But those tropical beauties represent only a fraction of the estimated 25,000 orchid species worldwide. While their showy relatives fly off the shelves, North America’s more understated native orchids are disappearing in the wild. Scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center are working to protect these orchids and their habitats, but first they need solve a surprisingly difficult problem: how to grow one…
Mystics of the Imagination.
Mark Vernon, in this beautifully written and artfully constructed book, uses Barfield’s key insights and amplifying historical and literary scholarship, to trace the development of Christianity’s two founding traditions – Athens and Jerusalem – articulating how they embarked on similar journeys from original participation to an individualizing break to a new sense of humanity’s place in the cosmos. No longer inhabiting a field in which the gods pulled the strings of fate into a world governed by a unitary, ordered universe in which recognizable persons could, in freedom, respond either to Yahweh as person or in law or to the ordering Good or Logos. These two traditions, Vernon argues, merge in Christianity and give birth to a new dispensation, a new reconciling participation, witnessed to and embodied in the person of Christ.
The insatiable curiosity of Phillip Adams - Conversations - ABC
Well, it is tring to get at a mystery …
“When a sentence is called senseless,” he said, “a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation,” and “it is not as it were its sense that is senseless.” But we cannot appreciate what we have achieved unless we find some way to commemorate our lost illusions and “get a clear view of the . . . state of affairs before the contradiction was resolved”—a task that called for imagination, tact and poetic skill rather than quick-witted cleverness.
Biography as autobiography …
I chose to write about Saint Paul because, first of all, I considered him the inventor of Christianity, a figure almost equal to Plato in his influence on western thought. But, in this case, one has only a handful of letters—perhaps six of the thirteen Pauline epistles in the New Testament are considered authentic by most scholars. The Acts of the Apostles provide a partial biography of Paul. But this is a sketch. It’s for the novelist to imagine the contours of Paul’s inner world, to guess at his motives. I saw him as a repressed homosexual, a man of amazing visionary powers, a godly person who heard voices—including the voice of God.
'A pressure cooker for dark urges': Tasmania proving to be perfect backdrop for gothic horror
Forget sunny skies and glistening beaches — it's Tasmania's bleak, austere and gloomy locations which are drawing in film and television producers, with their creations having such a unique look and feel that experts have coined a name for the sub genre — Tassie Noir.
Politics of graphic design A Contentment with Things as They Are'
“A world
without irony would have to be either an earthly paradise, where it could never
arise for there would be nothing to provoke it, or else an earthly hell, where
it was never allowed to show its face. Our world seems unlikely ever to become
an earthly paradise.”
The
theory behind micro‐expressions posits that when people attempt to mask
their true emotional state, expressions consistent with their actual
state will appear briefly on their face. Thus, while people are
generally good at hiding their emotions, some facial muscles are more
difficult to control than others and automatic displays of emotion will
produce briefly detectable emotional “leakage” or micro‐expressions
(Ekman, 1985).
When a person does not wish to display his or her true feelings s/he
will quickly suppress these expressions. Yet, there will be an extremely
short time between the automatic display of the emotion and the
conscious attempt to conceal it, resulting in the micro‐expression(s)
that can betray a true feeling and according to theory, aid in detecting
deception.Amid fears about the death of books, finding new ways to bring them to life - The New Yorker – “A physical book is good for much more than reading. In our house, we have several large art books propping up a movie projector. A thin paperback is wedged under a couch leg in a spot where our old floors are especially uneven. One summer we pressed wildflowers between the pages of a gigantic book about the Louvre, and later used it to flatten out a freshly purchased Radiohead poster. I am not the first person to choose a large, sturdy book as an impromptu cutting board: the cover of the Exeter Book, a tenth-century repository of Anglo-Saxon literature, bears knife marks from what looks like chopping. Stains on its ancient vellum suggest that, like the big atlas of Vermont in our living room, it was also possibly used as a drink coaster. Twenty years ago, I had a very large bump on my wrist. The doctor examined it and told me it was a harmless fluid deposit—nothing to worry about. His remedy, delivered cheerfully in a French accent, has stuck with me: “Slam it with a book.”
As Leah Price suggests in her brisk new study, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading” (Basic), physical books—which, ten or so years ago, many fretted might soon be obsolete—show no signs of going away. Nobody would try to pop a cyst with a Kindle or prop open a window with a phone…”
The book’s subtitle is “Seventeen Brushes with Death,” and that’s
exactly what it is: essays about seventeen times O’Farrell faced death,
sometimes very immediately and dangerously, sometimes in a more
distanced but still real and frightening way. O’Farrell has lived a
pretty exciting life, with lots of travel and serious illness, and she
has a certain recklessness that leads her into trouble sometimes. But
still it seems to me like seventeen brushes with death is a particularly
unfortunate record. O’Farrell writes about these experiences simply, in
a straightforward manner without much direct philosophizing about life
and death. But she still manages to be evocative and to inspire
reflection even as she sticks to the story at hand. The experiences
build on one another, later stories inspiring memories of earlier ones,
hospital experiences contrasting with one another, childhood dangers
helping us understand adult ones. The essays are not in chronological
order, but they still add up to a full sense of the person that
O’Farrell is. The book is labeled a memoir, and it feels like one, even
as the individual essays can stand alone as well. The last chapter is
the most wrenching, and it brings the book together beautifully.