Baby Z and I have been walking quite a bit the last week or so.
As the weather gets cooler, it becomes a lot more pleasurable to be out in the fresh air, working up a sweat from movement (and not from humidity!).
All of the smaller creatures are busy. I love to watch them go about the hard work of storing up a winter’s worth of food. I once learned that they will bite a nut before tossing it down. The damage to the shell prevents the nut from being able to grow into a tree.
Lately, I’ve been exploring the The Complete Tassajara Cookbook. After several postpartum weeks relying on the generosity of friends and family to cook my meals, I am finally back in the kitchen! From this one cookbook, we’ve enjoyed everything from delicious mushroom, green bean, and bell pepper quiche, to vegetable fried rice, to ginger muffins! I never tire of these delicious, simple, and wholesome vegetarian recipes.
{this moment} – A Friday ritual, inspired by SouleMama. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.
That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
~ Carl Sagan
If anyone is reading this blog, I apologize for my mysterious absence over the last couple of months. I found out at the end of November that I was pregnant with my second child, and between fatigue and morning-noon-and-night sickness, I just haven’t had the inspiration to blog. I will return to this space when I am feeling better – hopefully soon!
“Fetus” by George Chamaa