Christina Rossetti Poem: Changing Seasons

“January cold and desolate;
February dripping wet;
March wind ranges;
April changes;
Birds sing in tune
To flowers of May,
And sunny June
Brings longest day;
In scorched July
The storm-clouds fly,
Lightning-torn;
August bears corn,
September fruit;
In rough October
Earth must disrobe her;
Stars fall and shoot
In keen November;
And night is long
And cold is strong
In bleak December.”
~ Christina Rossetti

Quote ~ Nhat Hanh

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” – Nhat Hanh

Stephen Hawking

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘What is the turtle standing on’ ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the little old lady. ‘But it’s turtles all the way down.’

– Stephen William Hawking

Libraries

“There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.”

-Andrew Carnegie

Happy Birds

It’s early Saturday evening, and in an hour, the sun will be setting at 8:24 PM. Have the windows open, the baseball game is on the TV, and the best part is, the numerous birds all happy and chipper as they are tweeting away in one massive chorus. Sitting here listening to the birds, they are saying that there is still a lot to like about the earth, that we all call home. With a touch of Zen, life is grand.

Mother Nature

It seems that mother nature has a problem.
The problem is, she must have a very itchy scalp.
With all the dandruff falling from the sky above,
it looks like she needs a good shampooing, with
a good rinsing.
Then a apply some conditioning, then rinse
and repeat.
Now, all this dandruff is landing on planet
earth, and are the ones who have to deal with it.

When the weather warms up, then a real good
rinsing will commence, and then it will wash away
all the built up dandruff, that she wanted to
share with us.

— A Pondering Mind

Paradise

From the email inbox:

When everybody on earth was dead and waiting to enter Paradise, God appeared and said, “I want the men to make two lines.
One line for the men who were true heads of their household, and the other line for the men who were dominated by their women.
I want all the women to report to St.Peter.” Soon, the women were gone, and there were two lines of men.

The line of the men who were dominated by their wives was 100 miles long,and in the line of men
who truly were heads of their household, there was only one man.

God said to the long line, “You men should be ashamed of yourselves, I created you to be the head of your household!
You have been disobedient and have not fulfilled your purpose! Of all of you, only one obeyed. Learn from him.”

God turned to the one man, “How did you manage to be the only one in this line?”
The man replied, “My wife told me to stand here.”

We

We eat
We cook
We drink
We sleep
We talk
We walk
We read
We go to school
We study
We work
We play
We travel
We write
We type
We draw
We watch TV
We go to movies
We drive
We fly
We ride
We discuss
We argue
We laugh
We smile
We cry

All the things we do or, for some people some of them.
We’re all human, and since we’re on this planet for a very short time, we should enjoy everything we do.
It’s what makes life on Earth interesting.

A Pondering Mind 2014