Saturday, February 28, 2009

Through a glass darkly

"Physicists looking for gravitational waves may have discovered instead the noise of space time breaking down into individual grains; these quantum convulsions, said one physicist, would confirm the theory that the universe is a blurry holographic projection of a distant two dimensional plane." -- Harper's, March 2009.

And then there's this.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

remember you are dust

and to dust you shall return...

that's the recitation when the officiant (today it was me) puts the cross of ashes on the foreheads of those in attendance at the Ash Wednesday service. It was interesting. we lit lots of candles, and everybody had a reading, and we were relatively penitent. other than Kirsten's horror when she thought I was going to put ashes in her hair.

I'm giving up chocolate for Lent. Sigh. I may have to stockpile mini eggs and spend
Easter eating nothing but them. I know, that's not the idea.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Books

I always tell the kids not to lend out a book unless you are prepared to not get it back. And it's funny, because I've started to think of books as sort of fluid, I buy them, people give them to me, I give them to other people, sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't. I went to a rummage sale last spring, before Ben and Christy were leaving (perhaps you'll remember the wedding on top of Mount Pelly?) and I bought a couple of books. One of which I read and then it was lying about when my friend Karen came over. She saw it and said, "Oh, I've lost my copy of that, and I haven't read it yet." I said, "Did you lend it to Christy?" She replied that she may have done. I gave her the book. A week or so later, I was at Patti's and saw a Minette Walters on the floor that I haven't read. I asked to borrow it. When I brought it back, Patti looked at it in confusion and said, "Actually I don't know that that was my book in the first place." Last time I was at her house, it had moved to a shelf. Hopefully its owner feels the same way we do.

If you haven't yet, read Three Cups of Tea. It's not at all related to the Five People you Meet in Heaven stuff, like I thought...