Robert Krulwich

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All Creatures Great and Small

“How great are Your works, O God! You made them all with wisdom, the earth is full of Your creatures.” Psalms 104:24 

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It rained today.  Actually more like a heavy mist that gently moistened the air and wet the ground.  In Southern California that qualifies as rain.  When it’s anything a bit heavier it’s called a storm . .. A parade of ants appeared in my bathroom.  Well it was a bit more than a “parade” . . . an infestation of hundreds, probably trying to escape their water laden home.

 “A man is not a great man because he is a warrior and kills other men; but because he hurts not any living being he in truth is called a great man.” —Dhammapada (Buddhism)

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Clients frequently come to see me for Interactive Guided Imagery(sm) or hypnosis because of a chronic medical condition which usually involves pain.
There are lots of things I will teach them but one of my favorites is a simple meditation I made up:
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“Close your eyes and focus on all the parts of your body that are not crying out for attention. No need to deny the parts that are hurting, the parts crying out for attention.  Just let them be . . . while you  shift your attention to tiny little places that are silent – like an earlobe, an eyebrow, an inside organ even your belly button or a toenail  .. . you’ll know where to find them in their silence .. . they’re always there … and share your gratitude in any way you choose . . . from head to toe,  inside  and out . . . gratitude to the thousand of cells that are silently doing just what they were created to do.”
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When I read this  fascinating article written by “my man”, Robert Krulwich (I love his reporting) I flashed to that easy meditation I’ve probably shared hundreds of time.  I also flashed to the ants – the fact that I pay more attention to the large things that pass through my awareness:  The red-tailed hawk that swoops by, a tree, an elephant . . . and only pay attention to the tiny things when they invade my space (like the hoard of ants in my bathroom yesterday) . . . or bite me.
 Ok, back to “My Man’s” article: I am in awe of the bio diversity of this planet that is our home
It’s mind-boggling!

And mind-rattling about our ignorance, often propelled by our search for quantity over quality, our greed, our sense of superiority when we ignorantly eradicate  the tiny creatures we pay little attention to . . . when they are causing “problems”. 

I do feel a bit guilty about killing the ants.  I just didn’t know how to lead them outside.

cornstalks-everywhere-but-nothing-else-not-even-a-bee?

Read this article,  you’ll better understand my reaction.  It’s short, has pictures and won’t take you but a minute.

” . . . the growth and development of the vegetable world is impossible without the existence of the animal kingdom, and the maintenance of animal life is inconceivable without the co-operation of the vegetable kingdom. Of like kind are the relationships that exist among all created things.”Bahá’u’lláh, Baha’i

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Marred by Varicose Veins

Spidery Black Things

New Theory

Spidery black things

planet mars varicose veins?

Mine are all purple

Are Those Spidery Black Things On Mars Dangerous? (Maybe)

by ROBERT KRULWICH

“You are 200 miles directly above the Martian surface — looking down. This image was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Jan. 27, 2010. (The color was added later.) What do we see? Well, sand, mostly. As you scroll down, there’s a ridge crossing through the image, then a plain, then dunes, but keep looking. You will notice, when you get to the dunes, there are little black flecks dotting the ridges, mostly on the sunny side, like sunbathing spiders sitting in rows. Can you see them?”

“What are those things? They were first seen in 1998; they don’t look like anything we have here on Earth. To this day, no one is sure what they are, but we now know this: They come, then they go. Every Martian spring, they appear out of nowhere, showing up — 70 percent of the time — where they were the year before. They pop up suddenly, sometimes overnight. When winter comes, they vanish.”

You GOTTA click here! to see the INCREDIBLE PICTURES and

read the rest of the really interesting article.

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Don’t always SEE what you BELIEVE!

Robert Krulwich WAS one of my favorite authors/reporters.  I am seriously thinking of starting a national boycott of him for ruining my view of reality. He could have kept this information to himself instead of upsetting & shocking everyone. DO YOU AGREE?

They Did It To Pluto, But Not To Pink! Please Not Pink!

“Pluto isn’t a planet anymore. It’s been demoted. Now it’s pink’s turn. I’m talking about the color pink. It turns out (and this is not a new development, it’s just something I didn’t know), there is no pink in a rainbow. It isn’t there.

Red is there. Violet is there. Green is there. Blue, too. They are bands of light that scientists can measure. So they are out there. They exist.

Rainbow

iStockphoto.com

Curiously, however, when you look at a rainbow, you will notice that red is on one side, violet on the opposite side.

This is a problem. Because pink happens when the red and violet sides get together, but they don’t get together — which makes pink an act of wishful thinking, or, to put it bluntly — pink is a made up color.

I am shocked.”

This one minute-long animation has the details.

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A Poet and a Beetle, NO, NOT RINGO!

Robert Krulwich is one of my favorites.  A wonderful writer with an eye for the small wonders of life.  So it’s no wonder that he writes of  this nobel prize winner for literature.  I share this with you in the hope that it will enrich your day as it does mine.  

Look down. Please notice. Please read. 

Two Deaths: A Poet And A Beetle

“She’d wake up like we do, look out the window just like us, rummage through her days, but somehow what caught her attention — a grasshopper’s hop, an infant’s fingernails, plankton, a snowflake — when Wislawa Szymborska noticed something, she noticed it so well, her gaze reshaped the thing she saw, gave it a dignity, a vividness.”

“She was a poet and she died this week. She was, the obits say, a modest woman. When she won the Nobel Prize for literature, she was so discombobulated by the attention, she stopped writing poetry for awhile, until the world settled down and she could be ignored again. She needed the quiet to notice the astonishing, quiet things we might see every day, if we only had her eyes.”

“She had eyes for modest creatures. One time, she was wandering down a path — in my imagination it’s a dirt path through a field somewhere in Poland where she lived. She looks down, and there, lying on its back, sits a beetle. It is dead. Nobody notices. Which is the point:”

A dead beetle lies on the path through the field.
Three pairs of legs folded neatly on its belly.
Instead of death’s confusion, tidiness and order.
The horror of this sight is moderate,
its scope is strictly local, from the wheat grass to the mint.
The grief is quarantined.
The sky is blue.

To preserve our peace of mind, animals die
more shallowly: they aren’t deceased, they’re dead.
They leave behind, we’d like to think, less feeling and less world,
departing, we suppose, from a stage less tragic.
Their meek souls never haunt us in the dark,
they know their place,
they show respect.

And so the dead beetle on the path
lies unmourned and shining in the sun.
One glance at it will do for meditation —
clearly nothing much has happened to it.
Important matters are reserved for us,
for our life and our death, a death
that always claims the right of way.

“Wislawa Szymborska’s passing is as precious as that beetle’s. No more. No less. She taught us about weight in the world. We all have it. Every last one of us”.

“Seen from Above” from Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997 by Wisława Szymborska. English translation copyright © 1998 by Harcourt, Inc. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

NPR News

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Incredible! Cuttle up to a Cuttlefish

Cuttlefish getting ready to camouflage to Green Seaweed

“I am in awe of you, you even got NPR on your project. I am bowing down to you in admiration. Is there no end to your powerful influence???!!!! I think not. Love and Cuddlefish (Hugs) your friend, Laurie F.”

 http://hibernationnow.wordpress.com

Dear Laurie F.  This is the best FISH post ever!  

Make sure you see the video below!

Even his antennae mimic the seaweed!

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“He’s a little odd-looking, for those of you who aren’t familiar with this animal. A relative of the octopus and the squid, cuttlefish have tentacles, squishy bodies, no bones and a remarkable talent for mime. Place this guy next to a plastic underwater “plant,” and in no time, he will assume the guise of his neighbor. He will pucker his skin, splay his body, hold his tentacles, and adjust his coloration in a Marcel Marceau-like attempt to blend in. Cuttlefish can hold an attitude for 20 minutes or so. Like so:”

“They are so good at this, in part because they don’t have bones, but also because they’ve got big brains and a distributed intelligence that allows them to pucker, stretch and sculpt themselves in ways we can’t even remotely copy. Our skin? We do goose bumps. They choose these attitudes. This is their art. Next to them, we’re pathetic. When I was at ABC News, I got marine biologist Roger Hanlon to introduce me to one of his lab cuttlefish, who matter-of-factly disappeared before my eyes. Or tried to.”

"Humph!"

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What you see is not always what you “get” – rhythm

“I love illusions, where your brain makes weird things happen. Those of you who come here often have seen some doozies, but this one … oooh, this is one of the strangest.

The question is: Which is more powerful, your eyes or your ears? Watch this clip and experience “The McGurk Effect.” Your ears will feel ashamed.”

“The McGurk Effect is named for a psychologist from Scotland, Harry McGurk, working with John MacDonald. The experiment shows that while our senses seem separate — you wouldn’t think what you see should affect what you hear — it turns out, that’s totally wrong. If our eyes see one thing and our ears hear a different thing, when sight and sound grapple in our brains, the eyes win. Eyes tell ears what to hear. Or so it seems.

Not only that, even if your brain knows this is an illusion, you still can’t hear the truth unless you close your eyes. The illusion is that powerful.

Why Does This Happen?

Does sight always beat sound? Professor Lawrence Rosenblum in the video seems to suggest that experimental results may vary depending on which sense is “more salient.” I’m not sure what that means. Nosing around, I found some experiments where you see lips saying “gah” while the sound is saying “bah” and my brain chooses neither of them, and settles for a middle-of-the-road “dah.” But nowhere could I find an explanation for why my ears keep surrendering to my eyes.

Does anybody know?”

Sight and sound grapple

Ears surrendering to eyes

Our reality?

Earth zips through space-time

All the senses unaware

What’s reality?

Time an illusion

Eternity an unknown

The reality?

Why and what are we ?

 Breathing rhythmically with life

Only God can know