Hidden Gems
Remember that old saying, that sometimes you find good things in the most unexpected places? That's been happening a lot to us recently. Call it serendipity or luck of the draw, coincidence or fate; but when it happens it seems to bring about a sense of wonder, or maybe helplessness, as if suddenly having the realization that one is even smaller in a gigantic world (or universe)...the complexity of life and the sorting of it all, the grand chess game once again well beyond our understanding and now being played out. Here's one tiny example: my wife and I go out to have a quick bite of lunch and afterward decide to visit a newly opened store across the street; we wander through, taking our time, then decide to head back to the restaurant's parking lot to our car, waiting patiently for the light to change in the crosswalk. It does, and we begin to cross when the lead car nearest us --and waiting-- honks; we glance through the windshield and it's our friend from across town, like way across town; he just happened to be finishing some business in the area and was planning on stopping somewhere for a bite to eat. He parks, we meet him and gab for about thirty minutes, and in the conversation my wife mentions a few of the problems she's been dealing with regarding her back and innrer thigh and how she's been to physical therapists, acupuncture, massage people, even her doctor, all with minimal results. Our friend recommends a specialist who deals almost entirely in back issues, someone he has personally gone to and gotten results; she calls the doc (who happens to be booked for the next six months), gets put on a cancellation list, and within a week receives a call and an appointment for the following week...someone has cancelled. The doc spends well over an hour with her, explaining everything clearly and slowly (including her X-rays and MRIs), offers his advice (not as bad as she thinks) and his belief that her current exercise regimen and time will take care of the problem. No shots, no surgery, just patience. But what became more important to my wife was that she now feels that she at least has a better idea of what she likely has and what might have happened to cause her ailment.
Okay, was that all supposed to happen? Another ten seconds in the store or waiting for the next crossing light and we would have missed him; or if we had been crossing and he was the third or fourth car back in the line he likely wouldn't have seen us...or a hundred other possibilities. Here's another one; a week earlier our friends had arrived from England and in hiking with them we discovered that their daughter (a budding actress who had not only gotten accepted and finished her schooling in a prestigious dance school there [sort of the Julliard of the U.S.] but had already toured China and several Scandinavian countries with an acting troupe) was now going to stay in the U.S. and try to find work in her field. Interesting, I think (as if I could help), then I open my email the next day and there is a notice for a local production company having auditions that night. Why send such a notice to me, I thought, then I wondered if our friend's daughter had seen it for surely it must have been sent everywhere and been in circulation for months. I called and passed it on; she went to the audition, and got the lead role in two of their upcoming productions (and no, she and her agent had no idea that this theatre were holding auditions).
Such events and their timing seemed to be summed up in one of the covers from a recent issue of Wired magazine: How We're Born. How We Live. How We Die. -- It's All Going to Change. I tend to call these odd déjà vu or vu jàdé moments our hidden gems. Some might say guardian angels or random luck or whatever; but generally such happenings tend to be for the betterment of someone, even if not yourself. This happened several times in reading as well, hidden tidbits that were just waiting to be discovered, such as this from The Library: What we now call bookworms takes on an entirely different meaning to curators of libraries. Typically, true "bookworms" are insects from the order Coleoptera, which are sheath-winger beetles...Beetles account for one-fifth of all living species, so the lineup of subspecies is wide. Beetles live through four stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. Most damage to books is done at the larval stage, which can extend for years...In one famous infestation, a single insect chomped a straight hole through twenty-seven contiguous volumes. (such worms and bugs have bothered libraries from the days of Mesopotamia when earthworms settled in still-drying clay tablets and ruined the cuneiform markings...and it's still happening. Or this from The Language of Kindness: In the second century AD, Galen, a Greek biologist and philosopher who practiced medicine (he was a surgeon to gladiators), said that "throughout the body the animal arteries are mingled with veins, and veins with arteries." There was a belief that veins contained natural spirits, and arteries contained animal spirits. During medieval times, arteries were thought to contain spiritual blood -- the vital spirit. (and) Hospitals have always been places of sanctuary. King Pandukabhaya of Sri Lanka (who lived from 437 to 367 BC) built lying-in homes in various parts of his kingdom -- the earliest evidence anywhere in the world of institutions dedicated specifically to the care of the sick. A psychiatric hospital was built in Baghdad in 805 AD. These early hospitals were forbidden by law to turn away patients who were unable to pay for care. The Qalawun Hospital in thirteenth-century Egypt stated: "All costs are to be borne by the hospital, whether the people come from afar or near, whether they are residents or foreigners, strong or weak, low or high, rich or poor, employed or unemployed, blind or sighted, physically or mentally ill, learned or illiterate.
And recently this from The Last Cowboys* about a local ranching family in the southern part of my state. I figured that cattle and ranching were all around me, somewhere, (as evidenced by the full meat counters in virtually every store that I enter) but that I knew nothing about them. And as much as I tried to ignore the scope and vastness of the beef industry (still well over 100,000 cows slaughtered everyday in the U.S. to keep those shelves and those cans of dog & cat food full), it was and still is a lifestyle for many a family. But not as much as I had supposed: Bill wasn't a big-time rancher. By raw numbers, owning two-hundred-some head of cattle put him in about the top ten percent of ranchers, which sounded impressive, but ranching had become a game of haves and have-nots. Like a lot of the American economy, it was hollowed out in the middle. The only categories that were growing were operations with five thousand head or more, and those with fewer than ten head. The haves were the big corporations with thousands and thousands of cattle, and the biggest one percent of them were responsible for almost half of the beef sales in the country. The have-nots were those with just a few cows, enough to make cattle a hobby but not a career, and certainly not something to pass to the next generation. Make no mistake, this was tough work and not something pleasant or easy, at least to me. Here's the branding scenario once the new-born calves are separated from their mothers: The ropers lassoed the calves by their back feet and dragged them on their sides, across the dirt to the other end of the corral, where a team waited at each stake. When a calf arrived, they scrambled in side-by-side fits of action, like pit crews at a racetrack. Everyone had a job. One person wrestled the calf's head into the metal harness as the cowboy on horseback kept its hind legs pulled taut with the rope. The calves, moaning and wild-eyed, were stretched long onto their sides. Once the animal was secured and still, the rest of the team converged. Two with syringes stuck the calves in the hip. One with an ear punch tagged the ear with a colored plastic marker...Another person pulled a white-hot branding iron from the nearest fire. With someone else resting a knee on the calf to hold it still, the brand was pressed hard against its back hip. The hide sizzled, smoked, and sometimes flamed. The air, already swirling with dust and noise, soon filled with the putrid scent of burning hair and flesh...Castration was quick. Bill or one of the others familiar with the procedure pulled a knife from a holster, tugged on the scrotum, and sliced away the testicles. They dug their fingers inside the steer and pulled out bands of tissue and sliced them away again. Young boys, cousins, and grandkids, sprayed the area with an antiseptic...Each calf took little more than a minute, never more than two. The men and boys on horseback slacked the ropes as someone pulled the harness off the head. The calf clambered to its feet and rushed away from its torturers, bleating for its mother. They were reunited in the freedom of the pasture.
While any and all of that may not be my lifestyle (or one which I would choose), it exists. And to me, the more I can discover about other people, places and cultures --even if only by reading about it in a book or magazine-- the more it will help to bring balance to my being and my understanding. As Patricia Hampi wrote in her book, The Art of the Wasted Day: The job of being human is not figuring things out, but getting lost in thought. So last one, a book on sale titled Under the Sun, Desert Style and Architecture. Now why would I pick that up, this fancy coffee-table book full of both simple and elaborate homes. But inside from the authors came this: Overall, deserts are dry, although the amount of rainfall and humidity can vary widely in any given year. Deserts can be high, such as that on the south side of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, with its snow-dusted peaks and frigid winds that whip around hillsides or its intense heat that settles into the valleys...Deserts can be low, like the Anza-Borrego Desert in California, which at one point sinks to 273 feet below sea level...There are coastal deserts, which include most of the shoreline around Baja California...The Sahara, or Sahra, meaning "desert" in Arabic, [on a side note, the word "adobe" also comes from the Arabic language] is the largest expanse of desert in the world, covering roughly three and a half million square miles of land surface in North Africa, an area equivalent in size to the United States. It has a fragile ecosystem, characterized by extremes. Elevations range from one hundred feet below sea level to more than 11,500 feet. Temperatures can soar to 135 degrees Fahrenheit during summer days, with a ground temperature of 170 degrees Fahrenheit, then plummet more than 50 degree as night takes over, the humidity rarely exceeding 10 percent.
Which brings me back to my earlier post (the book written by the divorce attorney and also the article of why happy people cheat); it left some of the my friends scratching their heads (no worries on the first and never on the second, if my friends are wondering). But I was fascinated by the subject as much as any of the others. From the article came this: The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote that in modern life, there is always a suspicion "...that one is living a lie or a mistake; that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried and unexplored; that a vital obligation to one’s own authentic self has not been met, or that some chances of unknown happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have not been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever." Bauman speaks to our nostalgia for unlived lives, unexplored identities, and roads not taken. As children, we have the opportunity to play at other roles; as adults, we often find ourselves confined by the ones we’ve been assigned or the ones we have chosen. When we select a partner, we commit to a story. Yet we remain forever curious: What other stories could we have been part of? Affairs offer us a view of those other lives, a peek at the stranger within. (but)...Sometimes when we seek the gaze of another, it’s not our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves. The Mexican essayist Octavio Paz described eroticism as a “thirst for otherness.” So often, the most intoxicating “other” that people discover in an affair is not a new partner; it’s a new self. How did I happen upon that book, or those other books, or that particular article, all while nestled comfortably in my life? Perhaps unknowingly, unexpectedly, undeservedly, it was all meant to be. A new self...I like it. Serendipity and all out of my control. And it's all going to change, said the editor...
*Written by Pulitzer Prize winner John Branch, and much more readable that I had expected...
Okay, was that all supposed to happen? Another ten seconds in the store or waiting for the next crossing light and we would have missed him; or if we had been crossing and he was the third or fourth car back in the line he likely wouldn't have seen us...or a hundred other possibilities. Here's another one; a week earlier our friends had arrived from England and in hiking with them we discovered that their daughter (a budding actress who had not only gotten accepted and finished her schooling in a prestigious dance school there [sort of the Julliard of the U.S.] but had already toured China and several Scandinavian countries with an acting troupe) was now going to stay in the U.S. and try to find work in her field. Interesting, I think (as if I could help), then I open my email the next day and there is a notice for a local production company having auditions that night. Why send such a notice to me, I thought, then I wondered if our friend's daughter had seen it for surely it must have been sent everywhere and been in circulation for months. I called and passed it on; she went to the audition, and got the lead role in two of their upcoming productions (and no, she and her agent had no idea that this theatre were holding auditions).
Such events and their timing seemed to be summed up in one of the covers from a recent issue of Wired magazine: How We're Born. How We Live. How We Die. -- It's All Going to Change. I tend to call these odd déjà vu or vu jàdé moments our hidden gems. Some might say guardian angels or random luck or whatever; but generally such happenings tend to be for the betterment of someone, even if not yourself. This happened several times in reading as well, hidden tidbits that were just waiting to be discovered, such as this from The Library: What we now call bookworms takes on an entirely different meaning to curators of libraries. Typically, true "bookworms" are insects from the order Coleoptera, which are sheath-winger beetles...Beetles account for one-fifth of all living species, so the lineup of subspecies is wide. Beetles live through four stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. Most damage to books is done at the larval stage, which can extend for years...In one famous infestation, a single insect chomped a straight hole through twenty-seven contiguous volumes. (such worms and bugs have bothered libraries from the days of Mesopotamia when earthworms settled in still-drying clay tablets and ruined the cuneiform markings...and it's still happening. Or this from The Language of Kindness: In the second century AD, Galen, a Greek biologist and philosopher who practiced medicine (he was a surgeon to gladiators), said that "throughout the body the animal arteries are mingled with veins, and veins with arteries." There was a belief that veins contained natural spirits, and arteries contained animal spirits. During medieval times, arteries were thought to contain spiritual blood -- the vital spirit. (and) Hospitals have always been places of sanctuary. King Pandukabhaya of Sri Lanka (who lived from 437 to 367 BC) built lying-in homes in various parts of his kingdom -- the earliest evidence anywhere in the world of institutions dedicated specifically to the care of the sick. A psychiatric hospital was built in Baghdad in 805 AD. These early hospitals were forbidden by law to turn away patients who were unable to pay for care. The Qalawun Hospital in thirteenth-century Egypt stated: "All costs are to be borne by the hospital, whether the people come from afar or near, whether they are residents or foreigners, strong or weak, low or high, rich or poor, employed or unemployed, blind or sighted, physically or mentally ill, learned or illiterate.
And recently this from The Last Cowboys* about a local ranching family in the southern part of my state. I figured that cattle and ranching were all around me, somewhere, (as evidenced by the full meat counters in virtually every store that I enter) but that I knew nothing about them. And as much as I tried to ignore the scope and vastness of the beef industry (still well over 100,000 cows slaughtered everyday in the U.S. to keep those shelves and those cans of dog & cat food full), it was and still is a lifestyle for many a family. But not as much as I had supposed: Bill wasn't a big-time rancher. By raw numbers, owning two-hundred-some head of cattle put him in about the top ten percent of ranchers, which sounded impressive, but ranching had become a game of haves and have-nots. Like a lot of the American economy, it was hollowed out in the middle. The only categories that were growing were operations with five thousand head or more, and those with fewer than ten head. The haves were the big corporations with thousands and thousands of cattle, and the biggest one percent of them were responsible for almost half of the beef sales in the country. The have-nots were those with just a few cows, enough to make cattle a hobby but not a career, and certainly not something to pass to the next generation. Make no mistake, this was tough work and not something pleasant or easy, at least to me. Here's the branding scenario once the new-born calves are separated from their mothers: The ropers lassoed the calves by their back feet and dragged them on their sides, across the dirt to the other end of the corral, where a team waited at each stake. When a calf arrived, they scrambled in side-by-side fits of action, like pit crews at a racetrack. Everyone had a job. One person wrestled the calf's head into the metal harness as the cowboy on horseback kept its hind legs pulled taut with the rope. The calves, moaning and wild-eyed, were stretched long onto their sides. Once the animal was secured and still, the rest of the team converged. Two with syringes stuck the calves in the hip. One with an ear punch tagged the ear with a colored plastic marker...Another person pulled a white-hot branding iron from the nearest fire. With someone else resting a knee on the calf to hold it still, the brand was pressed hard against its back hip. The hide sizzled, smoked, and sometimes flamed. The air, already swirling with dust and noise, soon filled with the putrid scent of burning hair and flesh...Castration was quick. Bill or one of the others familiar with the procedure pulled a knife from a holster, tugged on the scrotum, and sliced away the testicles. They dug their fingers inside the steer and pulled out bands of tissue and sliced them away again. Young boys, cousins, and grandkids, sprayed the area with an antiseptic...Each calf took little more than a minute, never more than two. The men and boys on horseback slacked the ropes as someone pulled the harness off the head. The calf clambered to its feet and rushed away from its torturers, bleating for its mother. They were reunited in the freedom of the pasture.
While any and all of that may not be my lifestyle (or one which I would choose), it exists. And to me, the more I can discover about other people, places and cultures --even if only by reading about it in a book or magazine-- the more it will help to bring balance to my being and my understanding. As Patricia Hampi wrote in her book, The Art of the Wasted Day: The job of being human is not figuring things out, but getting lost in thought. So last one, a book on sale titled Under the Sun, Desert Style and Architecture. Now why would I pick that up, this fancy coffee-table book full of both simple and elaborate homes. But inside from the authors came this: Overall, deserts are dry, although the amount of rainfall and humidity can vary widely in any given year. Deserts can be high, such as that on the south side of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, with its snow-dusted peaks and frigid winds that whip around hillsides or its intense heat that settles into the valleys...Deserts can be low, like the Anza-Borrego Desert in California, which at one point sinks to 273 feet below sea level...There are coastal deserts, which include most of the shoreline around Baja California...The Sahara, or Sahra, meaning "desert" in Arabic, [on a side note, the word "adobe" also comes from the Arabic language] is the largest expanse of desert in the world, covering roughly three and a half million square miles of land surface in North Africa, an area equivalent in size to the United States. It has a fragile ecosystem, characterized by extremes. Elevations range from one hundred feet below sea level to more than 11,500 feet. Temperatures can soar to 135 degrees Fahrenheit during summer days, with a ground temperature of 170 degrees Fahrenheit, then plummet more than 50 degree as night takes over, the humidity rarely exceeding 10 percent.
Which brings me back to my earlier post (the book written by the divorce attorney and also the article of why happy people cheat); it left some of the my friends scratching their heads (no worries on the first and never on the second, if my friends are wondering). But I was fascinated by the subject as much as any of the others. From the article came this: The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote that in modern life, there is always a suspicion "...that one is living a lie or a mistake; that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried and unexplored; that a vital obligation to one’s own authentic self has not been met, or that some chances of unknown happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have not been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever." Bauman speaks to our nostalgia for unlived lives, unexplored identities, and roads not taken. As children, we have the opportunity to play at other roles; as adults, we often find ourselves confined by the ones we’ve been assigned or the ones we have chosen. When we select a partner, we commit to a story. Yet we remain forever curious: What other stories could we have been part of? Affairs offer us a view of those other lives, a peek at the stranger within. (but)...Sometimes when we seek the gaze of another, it’s not our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves. The Mexican essayist Octavio Paz described eroticism as a “thirst for otherness.” So often, the most intoxicating “other” that people discover in an affair is not a new partner; it’s a new self. How did I happen upon that book, or those other books, or that particular article, all while nestled comfortably in my life? Perhaps unknowingly, unexpectedly, undeservedly, it was all meant to be. A new self...I like it. Serendipity and all out of my control. And it's all going to change, said the editor...
*Written by Pulitzer Prize winner John Branch, and much more readable that I had expected...
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