Advent Lectionary: Day 9 – from The Meaning of It All by Richard Feynman

December 8, 2008 at 7:42 pm (advent, babies, child-rearing, christmas, family, father, fathers, happiness, life, music, parenthood, parenting, science) (, , , , , , , , , )

the ancients believed that the earth was the back of an elephant that stood on a tortoise that swam in a bottomless sea. Of course, what held up the sea was another question. They did not know the answer.

The belief of the ancients was the result of imagination. It was a poetic and beautiful idea. Look at the way we see it today. Is that a dull idea? The world is a spinning ball, and people are held on it on all sides, some of them upside down. And we turn like a spit in front of a great fire. We whirl around the sun. That is more romantic, more exciting. And what holds us? The force of gravitation, which is not only a thing of the earth but is the thing that makes the earth round in the first place, holds the sun together and keeps us running around the sun in our perpetual attempt to stay away. This gravity holds its sway not only on the stars but between the stars; it holds them in the great galaxies for miles and miles in all directions.
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Advent Lectionary: Day 8 – A Winter Wish

December 8, 2008 at 7:23 pm (advent, poetry) (, , , , , )

A Winter Wish
By Robert Hinckley Messinger
(from bartleby.com)

OLD wine to drink!
Ay, give the slippery juice
That drippeth from the grape thrown loose
Within the tun;
Plucked from beneath the cliff 5
Of sunny-sided Teneriffe,
And ripened ’neath the blink
Of India’s sun!
Peat whiskey hot,
Tempered with well-boiled water! 10
These make the long night shorter,—
Forgetting not
Good stout old English porter.
Old wood to burn!
Ay, bring the hill-side beech 15
From where the owlets meet and screech,
And ravens croak;
The crackling pine, and cedar sweet;
Bring too a clump of fragrant peat,
Dug ’neath the fern; 20
The knotted oak,
A fagot too, perhap,
Whose bright flame, dancing, winking,
Shall light us at our drinking;
While the oozing sap 25
Shall make sweet music to our thinking.
Old books to read!
Ay, bring those nodes of wit,
The brazen-clasped, the vellum writ,
Time-honored tomes! 30
The same my sire scanned before,
The same my grandsire thumbed o’er,
The same his sire from college bore,
The well-earned meed
Of Oxford’s domes: 35
Old Homer blind,
Old Horace, rake Anacreon, by
Old Tully, Plautus, Terence lie;
Mort Arthur’s olden minstrelsie,
Quaint Burton, quainter Spenser, ay! 40
And Gervase Markham’s venerie—
Nor leave behind
The holye Book by which we live and die.
Old friends to talk!
Ay, bring those chosen few, 45
The wise, the courtly, and the true,
So rarely found;
Him for my wine, him for my stud,
Him for my easel, distich, bud
In mountain walk! 50
Bring Walter good,
With soulful Fred, and learned Will,
And thee, my alter ego (dearer still
For every mood).
These add a bouquet to my wine! 55
These add a sparkle to my pine!
If these I tine,
Can books, or fire, or wine be good?

A long and wonderful day. Got the tree, got some lights up. More tomorrow.

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