F.H.C. Crick

"Few people realize what an astonishing achievement it is to be able to see at all. The main contribution of the new field of artificial intelligence has been not so much to solve these problems of information handling as to show what tremendously difficult problems they are. When one reflects on the number of computations that must have to be carried out before one can recognize even such an everyday simple scene as another person crossing the street, one is left with a feeling of amazement that such an extraordinary series of detailed operations can be accomplished so effortlessly in such a short space of time."

from "Thinking about the Brain," in The Brain, 1979, p. 130

The Fables of Leonardo da Vinci

5 stars:
This was a delightful read and one that has gotten me thinking about the connection between story and character formation or virtue education. For anyone with kids this provides wonderful bedtime material as da Vinci has mastered the fable as well as he seemed to master everything else he attempted. The seventy-three fables come alive with some fantastic color illustrations.

Published in 1973 by Hubbard Press
Interpreted and transcribed by Bruno Nardini
Illustrated by Adriana Saviozzi Mazza

health:

Something we are all in the continuum of losing.

thanks:

touching remembrance, the taste of gratitude, the sight of a well set table, the smell of turkey and yams, the sound of knife to plate while children laugh and adults converse, the taste of gratitude...

Vincent van Gogh

"It is true there in an ebb and flow, but the sea remains the sea."

x-ray:

The superhuman sight of comic book characters and doctors. It is the revelation of the skeletal nature of things. In its softer science we call it counseling.

inconsistency:

The non-agreement of oil and water - no compound made.

It is the bucket without a bottom, it just doesn't hold water.

Madeleine L'Engle

"And so story helped me to learn to live. Story was in no way an envision of life, but a way of living life creatively instead of fearfully."

from Walking on Water

weariness:

The leaf that hangs from a bare limb.

concentration:

The fine tuning of the mind to magnify the thought or object presented.

read:

Depending how you read it will determine what is read. A bit like the adventure of life.

Anne Lamott

"There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness, a sign that God is implicit in all of creation."

from Bird By Bird

short:

The time we have to live the length of our days.

long:

The length of our days and the need for sleep and dreams.

Soren Kierkegaard

"I found I had less and less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of God."

dreams:

What might be, seen through a glass darkly with rose colored glasses...

sleep:

A third of our life is spent in this state - not to mention the extra time given to it during the beginning and end of life. If we sleep on average eight hours a night, that means for every three days of life one full day is given to sleep...in a year's time that means 120 days are given to being in this non-conscious state. Makes one wonder how much attention we should give to our dreams?

tea:

It is the taste of morning and a good book.

Karl Barth

"Is it true, this talk of a loving and good God, who is more than one of the friendly idols whose rise is so easy to account for, and whose dominion is so brief? What the people want to find out and thoroughly understand is, Is it true?...They want to find out and thoroughly understand the answer to this one question, and not some answer that beats about the bush."

from The Word of God And The Word Of Man

silence:

It is the close of the eyelids and the sound of darkness; the guarding of sleep. But upon opening my eyes I see it is the sound of light as well. Either way, it is rest.

marriage:

The covenant of companionship. The playing field of the truest friendship.

Dorothy Sayers

"The amount of matter in the universe is limited....But no such limitation of numbers applies to the creation of works of art. The poet is not obliged, as it were, to destroy the material of Hamlet in order to create a Falstaff, as a carpenter must destroy a tree-form to create a table-form. The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction to rearrangement of what went before."

from The Mind of the Maker

key:

Suggests the ability to lock and unlock...a door, an idea, an emotion, a heart. We carry many of them on our key-ring of life.

zigzag:

It is the movement of emotion.

justice:

The collecting of water from a life-giving spring that sets an oasis in the desert of life.

Kathleen R. Fischer

"It is...on the level of the imagination that we formulate our initial response to the encounter with the divine; faith finds expression first as myth and ritual, sacrament, symbol, image and story. Only later does it become dogma and institution."

from The Inner Rainbow

election:

Living in the now of fate.

wealthy:

If you've ever had a coin collection this descriptor fits.

Greg Levoy

"I am no closer to feeling secure in the world for having lots of answers. Making peace with the questions seems the better lot."

from Callings

playground:

"Daddy watch this." "You can't walk there, that's lava." "I'm on base."