Musings & Meanderings

My December was not a festive one, bringing, as it did, a new personal challenge. The posts I made since December 8th, one of which referred to the fact that I have not been able to walk since that day, were deleted, unfortunately, and the comments are not retrievable, although I do have the post texts on file. I won’t repost them here, but am keeping them for the archives of the new planned weblog, which has been relegated, together with several other non-essential projects, to a lower priority level for now.

So the old year ended with change for me. Will I walk again in 2007? This time around, a regular wheelchair doesn’t suffice, and the challenge is rather more complex medically. If application and determination will prevail once more, then walking will be one of my accomplishments in the year today begun.

Meanwhile, the unanticipated loss of physical activity has already delivered a gift, in the form of unexpected and welcome space for new thought.

New challenges. Better laid plans. Puzzles to solve and solutions to be found. The development of new and different perspectives. These I have always held as ingredients of the elixir of life.

Every ending is also a beginning.

May the coming year unfold pathways to new joy, happiness, and success in all our lives.

*****

”Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.”
Leonardo da Vinci

To my beloved husband, a lone wolf American who has given me a way to see far beyond the political caricatures to glimpses of what the United States was founded on. The Constitution of the United States of America may be the slimmest book I own, yet it is one of the fullest.

To Rose, the best mother in law ever.

To all my past, current, and future American friends and cohorts.

*****
It’s a good day to post this link to a terrific Milton Friedman Obituary Roundup by Tim Worstall on November 16th. Whether you agree with Milton Friedman’s beliefs or not, will you not join me in a salute to a true independent thinker? Those of us who enjoy the liberty to communicate original ideas out loud, and to respectfully disagree, have something to be thankful for indeed.

For those of you (fully sated with turkey and football, of course) interested in free market economics, and rights of ownership, here is a reprint of an article by David Friedman that appeared in Liberty Magazine. The article briefly and accessibly interprets the bases of Coase Theorem of Swedish Nobel Prize (economics) winner Ronald Coase.

Alain Ducasse took up Adam Roberts - The Amateur Gourmet - on his challenge.

The resulting post is a delightfully creative linking of physical and virtual reality. Now if we could only add electronic communication of smell and taste for those who don’t yet have related memories to trigger.

My mouth is watering.

This is why.

Can you imagine the difference if every one of us did something? I don’t know Kevin or any of the whys and hows and who else contributed beyond what is in the post I linked to above. What matters to me is the doing.

We too often feel that we can’t do anything. It isn’t true. Even the littlest things matter, something illustrated very well by the Broken Windows theory.
We too often close our eyes based on a confused interpretation of rights and freedoms …forgetting or ignoring the fact that they go hand in hand with responsibility, for ourselves and also for those around us, and especially children. Abdicating that responsibility, we leave it in the hands of government and authority, and then criticize their handling of it.
In reality, every one of us, through our actions or inactions, contribute every day to the whole.

I found this delicately carved ivory box in a little Chinese market stall about 30 years ago. When I held it in my hand, it decided to be mine; I felt compelled to purchase it. This is not the sort of thing I usually collect at all, yet it is unquestionably and permanently in my keeping and I love to see it and occasionally hold it in my hand. Some things we don’t need to understand intellectually.

Years later, I sought to interpret the characters carved on the side. Wandering into a well hidden Chinese art gallery, in a side street basement, I found an elderly gentleman with little English who lit up with passion at the sight of my box. The carved characters were a favorite poem of his, he managed to convey, written many years ago, and he spent weeks, with me stopping by to visit regularly, searching for a Chinese English translation among his thousands of books. He never did find it. Meanwhile I had the poem identified by a university student, but did not tell the Chinese gentleman this, as his pleasure in being visited by a young person who cared about her lovely object and about one of his favorite poems, was too pure not to simply enjoy.

The poem was written by renowned poet Meng Haoran, Chinese Tang (618-907 AD) Dynasty.
It is called Spring Morning (Chun Xiao).

Here is the translation:

This morn of spring in bed I’m lying,
Not to awake till birds are crying.
After one night of wind and showers,
How many are the fallen flowers?

I have to feel past the words to see it. It sounds a bit more stilted to me, the English translation, compared to the lilting sound of the elderly gentleman reciting it in a reverie of memory …but then, all words sound more beautiful when spoken with love.