Swinging at Dennison Park - 1956

I lived on Sylvania Road in Cleveland Heights until I was 11. I had a gang of friends in the neighborhood, just like most kids everywhere. We would ride our bikes up and down the side walk, or roller skate with the metal skates that clanged along the concerte walk. We played hide-and-seek in neighbors' yards and kick-the-can in the street at night.

One of my favorite memories was on the weekend. My Dad, Rodger, would walk with me to Blue Stone Road and then up to Dennison Park. The only thing I needed in a park was a good swing, and they had some with very tall frames and long ropes to the seat - that meant you could go very high. My Dad would push me as high as he could and I would fly up to the sky. When he did an underdog and ran out from under my swing I felt a rush of adrenaline that gave me a thrill.

Thanks, Dad, for giving me your time at Dennison Park, I think of you and our time together often - it is one of my favorite memories.

A Sky for Memorial Day

I like this sky - it looks like a painting!

Is This Haiku? Sky Stories

I wanted to see if others were writing poetry about the sky - here is something I found from Pleiones universe [now Pleiades]:

I should not have waited. It would have been better To have slept and dreamed, Than to have watched night pass, And this slow moon sink.
- Lady Akazome Emon
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Though the purity Of the moonlight has silenced Both nightingale and Cricket, the cuckoo alone Sings all the white night.
- Anonymous
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The purity of the moonlight, Falling out of the immense sky, Is so great that it freezes The water touched by its rays.
- Anonymous
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I go out of the darkness Onto a road of darkness Lit only by the far off Moon on the edge of the mountains.
- Izumi
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Someone passes, And while I wonder If it is he, The midnight moon Is covered with clouds.
- Lady Murasaki Shikibu
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This is not the moon, Nor is this the spring, Of other springs, And I alone Am still the same.
- Ariwara No Narihira
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Involuntary, I may live on In the passing world, Never forgetting This midnight moon.
- The Emperor Sanjó
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Since I left her, Frigid as the setting moon, There is nothing I loathe As much as the light Of dawn on the clouds.
- Mibu No Tadamine
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When I see the first New moon, faint in the twilight, I think of the moth eyebrows Of a girl I saw only once.
- Yakamochi
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A wild sea- In the distance, Over Sado, The Milky Way.
- Bashó
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The cicada sings In the rotten willow. Antares, the fire star, Rolls in the west.
- Anonymous

And We Are Peaceful

Spring still,
The morning mist hangs low,

Nearly to the ground
As the day sorts out its desires.

The breeze picks up and

Waves the fresh, new lime leaves

Across the yard

With fragrances mixing

Honeysuckle and earth.

And skin tingling with

The day's promises.

I am ever so grateful

As the simplicity of the

Moment enraptures

And I smile away the hours.

Time for deciding

What goes on the canvas next

As my mind's eye views

A spot, a place

Another slice of what is

Real, yet only where finger tips

Meet the brush, and touches

The place where I hope

To cast - something, not sure.

Mac and Dori dance circles

Around my feet

And race down the stone steps

Into the green and inviting

Landscape, awaiting our pleasures.

Now it is so quiet,

The day is turning to night

As the sky grays and the air slows

And we are resting

And we are peaceful.

Genius: Science, Art, and Creativity

Today I am looking at the life of Isaac Newton, as I saw a program on his life and was reminded what a remarkable intellect he had, what a genious he was.

So something about Newton:

Newton's greatest achievement was his work in physics and celestial mechanics, which culminated in the theory of universal gravitation. By 1666 Newton had early versions of his three laws of motion. He had also discovered the law giving the centrifugal force on a body moving uniformly in a circular path. Newton explained a wide range of previously unrelated phenomena: the eccentric orbits of comets, the tides and their variations, the precession of the Earth's axis, and motion of the Moon as perturbed by the gravity of the Sun.

Newton practiced alchemy with a passion. Though he wrote over a million words on the subject, after his death in 1727, the Royal Society deemed that they were not fit to be printed. The papers were rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century and most scholars now concede that Newton was first an foremost an alchemist. It is also becoming obvious that the inspiration for Newton's laws of light and theory of gravity came from his alchemical work.

As a practicing alchemist, Newton spent days locked up in his laboratory. Perhaps that explains one of the oddest things about his life. At the height of his career, instead of accepting a professorship at Cambridge, he was appointed Director of the Mint with the responsibility of securing and accounting for England's repository of gold.

For the "secret writings" made it clear that during the crucial part of Newton's scientific career - the two decades between his discovery of the law of gravity and the publication of his masterwork, the "Principia Mathematica" - his consuming passion was alchemy. Bunkered in his solitary live-in lab at the edge of the fens near Cambridge, Newton indulged in occult literature and strove to cook up the legendary "philosopher's stone" that would convert base metals into gold.

And a penchant for the occult was not Newton's only quirk. He is reported to have laughed just once in his life-when someone asked him what use he saw in Euclid. He took to decorating his rooms in crimson. He stuck a knife behind his eyeball to induce optical effects, nearly blinding himself. He was a Catholic-hating Puritan who secretly subscribed to the Arian heresy, which denied the divinity of Christ.

I am facinated by genius and insanity. Edgar Allen Poe wrote: "Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious whether all that is profound - does not spring from disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."

William James wrote: "When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas posses them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions of their age"

Edvard Munch wrote: "I want to keep those sufferings." He said that emotional torments "are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and it would destroy my art."

That's all for today - but a topic to explore more!