Conversations

Adore you. ..beautiful thread and new post...so blessed for you in my life. ...I know you can't log in here much due to the nature of your life..but your messages touch me...and well..im so blessed by our friendship and connection. ..grateful

Hope

Hope

The most uplifting of words. Often it encompasses the best of human thought. The opposite of immediate and reactive despair, fear, and anger. Crucial to our success as a species.

Hope requires us to use our less primitive brain. The part of our brain that took millions of years to evolve. It requires us to engage a complex and far reaching network of neurons.

Hope sustains us. It provides nourishment for our souls. It pulls us out of darkness and depression. It gives us resilience.

It gives us that most unfathomable of human traits of grit.

Hope is the defining characteristic of America. It is hope that makes us the shining light of the world. It is hope that makes others turn to us for help.

It is hope that allows us to recover better than any other country in the world when we fall.

I found myself standing in front of an American flag. The usual mixture of emotions flooded me. I had to fight hard to keep from tearing up.

I asked myself why am I effected in such a powerful way.

Distilled down. After removing all the pageantry and propaganda. There are three overwhelming emotions.

Hope.
Immense gratitude.
Pride.

We started as a hopeful idea. We were not born of a tribal boundary or a kings boundaries or even a religious boundary. We are the result of an idea. That makes America incredibly unique.

That idea and hope for the future has led to a great nation. We are and always will be a great nation. We will never loose that greatness. For it is not based on a tangible thing. It is not our wealth or our military might. Those are our tools.

Our essence is an idea. A hope. Hope can not be destroyed. It is part of being human.

Perspective

The prism of life. The palate that colors our perception. The essence to discovery. A uniquely human ability to adapt and change our perspective. A key characteristic of intelligent beings, self aware beings.

Perspective often is the difference between a mundane photograph and a frame worthy picture. A story captured in a moment of time and light.

The difference between Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics.

The difference between a pulsating mass of gelatinous tissue laid bare under a surgeons scalpel and saw vs the small electrical pulses of a neuron. All part of a whole. The source of perspective. Love. Anger. Hate. Compassion. Empathy. All that makes us unique. Human.

A man sits in an airplane and looks down. He looks down at a land that has given him more than he ever dreamed possible. He looks down on patches of fields. Some green some brown. Some with streams. He looks down at the bright lights of a city. The head lights of cars traveling along the arteries of the city. Yellow hues alternating with reds. Must be rush hour. Red blood cells making there way over and over through blood vessels.

A forest spread out below him. Far. Distant. A mass of darkness with unruly borders among the neatly divided fields with precise straight edges.

His mind wanders. It wanders to a place of warmth and closeness. A sense of belonging. A sense of gratitude. Warm morning sun against his cheek. Light filtering through the cold morning dew. The forest floor wet. His ears filled with the chirps and squeaks of the forest. A chipmunk scurries past making his morning rounds. He looks up. Careening his neck. Feeling the muscles stretch. Shoulders sinking down. He opens his eyes. The sweeping branches of a eastern white pine. Arching there way up. Up to the light. There is a logic to this place. A purpose for its creations. A hand shake. The rough contours of the bark reminding him of his grandfathers hands. The knobs reminiscent of swollen and deformed knuckles. Hands with character and wisdom. He reaches out and tears of a few spruce needles. Crushing them into his fingers. The oil spreading over the pads of his fingers. Bringing them to his face and inhaling. A slow pleasurable deep breath.
A guilty pleasure.

He will always carry this place with him.

Joy of Discovery

Joy of discovery

Science has been the guiding light of my life. It's not a noun but rather a verb. It starts with the fundamental and most powerful of human traits of curiosity and imagination. It begins with the simple mental task of asking a question. The key however is in how that question is answered. The scientific method has impacted humanity perhaps more than anything else. Good and evil. It can be our salvation and our demise.

The beauty of science is in its simplicity. The asking of a question. Leveraging our curiosity. Employing our imagination to devise experiments to test the hypothesis.

A collective human effort. No one nation or race can claim it. It is ubiquitous.

A simple process that leads to grand answers.

I have had the privilege of being a part of the process.

Today I sit in a hall. Staring at a screen. Humbled. Awed. Amazed.

A smile slowly spreads across my lips.

Often the most powerful of ideas are also the simplest but with a different perspective.

What made you smile today?

Voices

My Voice

If the eyes are the window to my soul then my voice is the gateway to my thoughts.

It is the expression of my soul.

A voice is unique to a personality. An individual. It is owned.

Voice allows for a unique connection. We learn the inflections and pauses and tones of the voices that make up our lives. The essence of what is said is coded in these word free zones of our language. The words often hide the essence.

It is this mode of communication that conveys feeling and emotion. Feelings occupy the word free zone. It is this part of our speech that matters to us and affects us far more than the content.

An obligatory polite thank you vs a sincere heartfelt thank you. The words are the same yet we immediately know the difference at a visceral level.

It is the non word part of our communication that we risk loosing, in an electronic world of letters, abbreviations, texts and emails. We give our electronic milieu voice by inventing emoticons. They try to give essence of feeling to our written words.

We sometimes avoid phone calls because with hearing a voice come feelings, and feelings are a messy thing.

Voices form our memories not because of the content but because who they belong to and how they made us feel. We can all hear a voice when we close our eyes.

Those voices in our heads guide our behavior more than most of us like to admit.

Identity

A topic I had never thought much about.

What defines us? Who we are?

Not the facade that we show the world.

Nor how the world judges us.

Rather how we see ourselves.

Is it our family.
Is it our culture or religion.
Is it our faith.
Maybe it's the language we grew up with.
Perhaps the city or town we grew up in.
Maybe it is the region. New England. South. Midwest.
Rural vs urban.
The color of our skin. Our eyes. Our hair.

I believe it is the choices we make that define us and form our identity.

The world will always judge us on the way we look first. It is our appearance that people see first. Hence the saying dress the part. Race certainly does form part of that equation.

Thankfully for most of us, all of that is over ridden by the content of our thoughts. Our speech matters.

In many parts of the world identity is based on ones last name. Family. Tribe. Skin. Language. It is not just that others judge one in that manner but rather that individuals judge themselves in that manner.

The US is unique in that most of us define ourselves by the choices we make. That to me is the essence of being an American.

In this time of division and hate, Innuendo and blame, Us vs them, Native vs foreign born. It is hard to remember sometimes what it is that we honor and celebrate on the Fourth of July.

I pray that we survive this season of discontent without loosing the essence of being an American.

Exploration2 said:

A topic I had never thought much about.

What defines us? Who we are?

Not the facade that we show the world.

Nor how the world judges us.

Rather how we see ourselves.

Is it our family.
Is it our culture or religion.
Is it our faith.
Maybe it's the language we grew up with.
Perhaps the city or town we grew up in.
Maybe it is the region. New England. South. Midwest.
Rural vs urban.
The color of our skin. Our eyes. Our hair.

I believe it is the choices we make that define us and form our identity.

The world will always judge us on the way we look first. It is our appearance that people see first. Hence the saying dress the part. Race certainly does form part of that equation.

Thankfully for most of us, all of that is over ridden by the content of our thoughts. Our speech matters.

In many parts of the world identity is based on ones last name. Family. Tribe. Skin. Language. It is not just that others judge one in that manner but rather that individuals judge themselves in that manner.

The US is unique in that most of us define ourselves by the choices we make. That to me is the essence of being an American.

In this time of division and hate, Innuendo and blame, Us vs them, Native vs foreign born. It is hard to remember sometimes what it is that we honor and celebrate on the Fourth of July.

I pray that we survive this season of discontent without loosing the essence of being an American.

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So love this- I always love your writings...and miss them...wish you would write more...lets catch up soon...you are the most beautiful Spirit...miss you...