“Sanctuaries of Silence” takes you on a virtual journey into one of Earth’s last remaining bastions of true quiet — the Hoh Rain Forest, in Washington State. Shooting in beautifully immersive 360 video, directors Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee follow acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton as he explores the mossy, green heart of silence. In “Sanctuaries of Silence,” the threat is not so much to a place, as to our very ability to encounter the natural world on its own terms. As Hempton puts it, “Silence isn’t the absence of something, but the presence of everything.”
Recently Maria Popova featured a small book called Words of Pain. It was written in 1909 by a young woman, Olga Jacoby, after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. Unusual for her time, to say the least, Olga defines a good life and her God…
“Love, like strength and courage, is a strange thing; the more we give the more we find we have to give.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
Half a century before Frida Kahlo made her impassioned case for atheism as a supreme form of freedom and moral courage, before Robinson Jeffers insisted that the greatest spiritual calling lies in contributing to the world’s store of moral beauty, before Simone de Beauvoir looked back on her life to observe that “faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly (…) a German-Jewish Englishwoman by the name of Olga Jacoby (August 15, 1874–May 5, 1913) — the young mother of four adopted children — took up the subject of living and dying without religion, with moral courage, with kindness, with radiant receptivity to beauty, in stunning letters to her pious physician, who had just given her a terminal diagnosis. (…)
This week Larry Lynn, co-founder of the grief and loss website After Talk, featured Rabbi Berger’s famous Yom Kippur sermon, which he delivered shortly after the 1986 Challenger spacecraft exploded and all on board died. I understand why Berger’s sermon is read to this day. What is incomprehensible is his own demise a few years later.
FIVE MINUTES TO LIVE is a famous sermon given by Rabbi Kenneth Berger on Yom Kippur day in the fall of 1986. It was inspired by the crash of the Challenger space shuttle on January 28, 1986 and the subsequent revelation that the crew had likely survived the explosion and lived for another five minutes while the craft plunged 48,000 feet into the ocean. The catastrophe compelled Rabbi Berger to contemplate what those five minutes would have been like for the seven crew members.
Three years after he gave this sermon, Rabbi Berger, his wife, Aviva, and his three children were returning from vacation on United Airlines flight 232. An engine exploded, and for 40 minutes passengers were told to prepare for a crash landing. The plane exploded on impact, killing 112 people including the Rabbi and his wife. His three children survived.
The scene still haunts me: It was perhaps the most awful moment of the past year. Against the pale blue sky on a crystal clear Florida day, the space shuttle Challenger exploded before our very eyes. Seven brave astronauts, who just a few hours before were chatting with the press, schmoozing with proud relatives and friends, were suddenly gone.
I bring this to your attention because life and death is a major theme of Yom Kippur. We read in our prayer book:
Who shall live, and who shall die?
‘Who shall attain the measure of man ‘s days and who shall not?
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
Danusha Laméris is poet laureate of Santa Cruz County, Calif. Her next book, “Bonfire Opera,” will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
I am not one to watch short animal YouTubes, but this four-minute video of the reunion between conservationist Damian Aspinall and Kwibi in the African jungle is truly bittersweet. And incredible.
Kwibi grew up with Damian at his Howletts Wild Animal Park in England. When he was five, he was released into the forests of Gabon, West Africa as part of conservation program to re-introduce gorillas back into the wild. Now Kwibi’s over 10 years old, much bigger and stronger.
I am posting Frank Bruni’s New York Times column about how we approach hate.
He offers grey to those of us who think in black and white–reminding us that our point of view can 1) bring people together or 2) drive people apart.
Broadening the topic to the world at large, I know I participate in discussions that are “too limited,” and I cop to being naive at times. How could I not be? It is impossible to absorb all of the elements of an argument. Critical thinking is hard.
However, admitting one’s point of view is vulnerable is a step toward disagreeing more and hating less.
Frank Bruni New York Times
With part of a recent column of mine, I disappointed myself, and maybe I disappointed some of you. I don’t get a do-over, but I do have this newsletter, in which I can own up to my error and make amends.
I’m referring to “Hate Is So Much Bigger Than Trump,” which was published a week and a half ago. It reflected on the mass shootings in El Paso and in Pittsburgh and made the point that the kind of hatred that motivated the gunmen predates the current president and will survive him.
