My mother died on Oct 4, 2014. It was not unexpected but, as
I have learned from this experience, a heart-pounding surprise. She had battled
ovarian cancer for 4 years but finally slipped away in a hospital bed with her
glasses on her nose and a book on her chest, thankfully comfortable after a day
facing pleading-with-God pain.
This morning I read (following the wonderful suggestion of
Maria Popova’s Brain Picker and the
book’s arrival for pick-up by me at my Idylwylde Branch of the Edmonton Public Library) Krista Tippett’s Einstein’s God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit. It touched me in so many places, I could not put it down.
And it has driven me to write (in more than 140 characters)
which is something I have not managed for more than a year.
I realize, this morning that I am finally emerging from the
darkness of the last year. Activities like reading something meaningful from
cover to cover and forming thoughts that could make it to print have just not
mattered. I have been numbly going through all the motions of my life and am
finally rediscovering the joy that has been there.
I met with my writer friends this week in a small café in my
neighborhood. I never got to creating anything with my own words. By the time I
had caught up on various aspects of their lives like travel, health and the
Alberta election, I recorded a few prompts and then had to leave to collect my
grand-daughter. This morning I turned to those prompts I had chosen to copy
down. My subconscious was definitely trying (it appears it was shouting) to
tell me something.
“But
how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything? Prepared
for a sunset, prepared for the moonrise, prepared for the ice storm. What a
flat existence that would be.” Margaret
Atwood; Stone Mattress: Nine Tales
“Death
is outside life….. It leaves a hole in the fabric of things…” Salley Vickers; Miss Garnet’s Angel
“You
never come closer to owning the whole world than when you wake up before
everyone else.” Åsa Larsson; Until Thy Wrath be Past: A Rebecka Martinsson
Investigation
“All my
journeys start with an anxious pang of doubt.
… You point your mind to an invisible land-fall.” Lawrence Durrell; Sicilian Carousel: Adventures on an Italian Island
“…..in
the hours of that first darkness, were astonished by love.” Alice McDermott; Someone
Krista Tippett interviewed a wonderful collection of
brilliant thinkers and pulled together their thoughts exploring the nexus (what
a pleasing word) of science and spirituality. One of her distillations is
“…modern science increasingly suggests that contradictory explanations of
reality can be simultaneously true.” She
then examines the puzzle of light as particle or wave and the discovery that it
is both. “And here is the key that made
the discovery possible: how we ask the
questions affects the answers we arrive at. Light appears as a wave if you ask
it ‘a wave-like question’ and it appears as a particle if you ask it ‘a
particle-like question’. “
And what should I find Maria Popova has tweeted to me this morning but a lovely jazz
treatment, Heisenberg’s Aha by Lori Henriques from Lori's album titled How Great Can This Day Be. Those lyrics contain this take on the nexus
of art and science:
And remember your imagination
is a voice inside that can help you
to understand quantum mechanics
and so many more things about you.
Then Google reveals to me that scientists have actually just
now (research posted March 2015) photographed light as both particle and wave.
“But how can
you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything?”
How great
can this day be?
