Notes From A Bear's Journey

     Oct...think of all the words that can form from that three-letter prefix: octagon, octopus, October, octogenarian.  Author Abigail Thomas turned 80 while writing her memoir , jotting down bits of memory before such thoughts slipped away: My memory is full of holes.  Maybe I wasn't paying the right kind of attention to my life.  Was I in so great a rush to get to the next thing that I forgot to notice the present?  Or maybe the weight of too many memories piled on top of others crushed some, deformed others...I discover that memory, mine anyway, seems to be an independent creature, inspired by circumstances rather than faithful to it.  I could dig my mistakes up by the roots, plant the more literal truth in my damp mind, but inevitably the memory, or the way my brain preserved it, grows back the way it was recorded... What happened last week?  I come up with nothing.  But nothing happened, which is a point in my favor.  Does lo...

     No, that title is not related to the rather famous novel about the German lock tinkerer , but close.  I was going back over a few notes and books, on fungi and mushrooms in particular, and out popped this piece by Sarah Richardson, PhD on bacteria.  Somehow, bacteria --sort of like sharks-- have gotten a bad rap.  We wash our hands of them, we dread the diseases they can cause, and we know that they can multiply faster than we can imagine.  Only Dr. Richardson says that we need to look at bacteria in a different way because, in her words, "bacteria run this planet."  Here are a few of her highlights:  --Bacteria let us breathe: One bacterial genus called Prochlorococcus  lives in seawater and is responsible for at least half of our oxygen. --Bacteria feed us: Most of the atmosphere is nitrogen, which is great because we need nitrogen in many molecules in our bodies.  But atmospheric nitrogen is inert. so what we breathe in we ...

     The word is aphorism, a word I didn't know.  And I wasn't alone.  Here's how television host Hoda Kotb put it in her book of quotations: I'd never heard of it until I started doing some digging into why so many of us --including me-- love inspirational quotes.  Sociologist Murray Davis describes aphorisms as "the finest thoughts in the fewest words." ...Media psychology expert and communications consultant Scott Sobel says that "inspirational quotes affect us on a primal level."  Describing human nature as "aspirational" performance psychologist Jonathan Fader says quotes can be powerful in changing our thinking and helping us see something in ourselves that we want to change or overcome.   As I read through her book, I somehow couldn't help but think of the many times I had said or heard the expression "thank God," as in "luckily no one was hurt, thank God."  Which made me also wonder when we use that phrase -...