Good Things

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At the end of a calendar year–

Almost at the end of an epic 4 1/2 year voyage through the five books of Torah –

(We'll get through the end of the journey in January!) –

(And start on the very Shiny New chapter of Life is a Sacred Text in February!)

In the middle of innumerable Hard Things happening out there–

While the days are short and the nights are long over here in the Northern Hemisphere–

I thought you could use some good things. 🌼

Let's start with some radical amazement, care of the scientist educators still employed by the US government (seriously, a lot of cool stuff here, save to play around with later):

Universe - NASA Science

What is (or was) the big bang? Learn this and more with “Astro-Investigates,” the video series that explores and explains big astrophysics topics with the he…

NASA ScienceJeanette Kazmierczak

Next: Virginia Woolf began her memoir, A Sketch of the Past, in 1939, but never finished it. It's now published in a volume titled Moments of Being. Here's an excerpt that I love. It opens with two very early memories, and then she reflects,

“I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start. But the peculiarity of these two strong memories was that each was very simple. I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture.”

(When are we only containers, vessels, for something else? When should we be?)

Then, later in childhood–

Week after week passed at St. Ives and nothing made any dint upon me. Then, for no reason that I know about, there was a sudden violent shock; something happened so violently that I have remembered it all my life...The first: I was fighting with Thoby on the lawn. We were pommelling each other with our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. ... The second instance was also in the garden at St. Ives. I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; “That is the whole”, I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower.

and then, later, she muses,

From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool [of the mundane] is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven... we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.... It proves that one’s life is not confined to one’s body and what one says and does...

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... but rather, what, do you think?
How might you connect her insights about the flower and us being the music, the thing itself?