“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” ~ Vincent van Gogh
Well THAT’S a dry spell, huh?
What’s been going on lately? Um, nothing.
No, wait, that’s not true.
We went to DC for Christmas. It was wonderful. I have no good photos of the experience. We went to the National Zoo, and the Museum of Natural History, to the National Gallery and Air & Space.
At the zoo I came face to face with a king vulture as he loped over to the front of his enclosure. (Vultures do that on the ground, you know. They can walk and run, but they seem to be most comfortable galloping.) We had a moment of mutual consideration. (You might commune with a whale or dolphin and consider it communication, but birds don’t seem to be communicative in that way.) It was amazing.
At Air & Space we marveled over the Wright Brothers exhibit, and then the manned space missions exhibit. Did you know that those two “events” were less than 70 years apart? Really, how amazing is it that we went from not having flying machines to going into space?
Flight 85: Orville in flight, covering a distance of approximately 1,760 feet in 40 1/5 seconds; Huffman Prairie, Dayton, Ohio. Public domain photo from the Library of Congress, via Wikipedia.
How cool is it that the Wright brothers got inspired by the notion of flight and then did the work to make it happen? And how amazing is it that with equipment that looked like it could have been purchased at the hardware store, we sent men (and chimps and dogs) into space? Trial and error. Test and refine. Learn as you go. Keep going.
There were clearly some great minds at work there, and an overabundance of courage.
And I’m sorry, but I’m just not getting that in my real life. Presidential politicis? Puh-leeze. Wall Street? Right. Did you know that a lot of brokerage houses want nothing to do with you if your assets are valued at less than $250,000? I’m tempted to become a financial planner just to deal with the “poor.” (According to Merrill Lynch you’re poor if you have less than $100,000 in assets.) The message I’m hearing is that we’re supposed to be able to pay for our own insurance, and retirement, in an economy where traditional savings vehicles no longer work the way they used to, and we’re just supposed to know how to do that… at least until we’ve accumulated enough wealth to make it worth it for a financial advisor. What?!
OK, so it’s time to ignore that TV machine.
One of our local parks is renovating their “mirror” pond to make it pretty… and pretty much devoid of ducks and frogs and turtles. We live in an age where kids don’t know how to behave in the presence of nature, which leads them to trample wetland plants, threaten herons with baseball bats and carry turtles around with them (instead of leaving them be and observing them). I’m not sure how sterilizing an already man-made pond helps with that.
See? What did I tell you? I’m Debbie Downer… sigh.
My self-assigned task for the next week: seek out inspiration.
Other things on the to-do list: find a job (I see a change in direction on the horizon), draw more (better than therapy!) and cook some yummy non-food-hangover-inducing food.