A new Hubble deep field photo
From the Hubble Space Telescope comes this view of the very early cosmos:
The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies – the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals – thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old.
In vibrant contrast to the rich harvest of classic spiral and elliptical galaxies, there is a zoo of oddball galaxies littering the field. Some look like toothpicks; others like links on a bracelet. A few appear to be interacting. These oddball galaxies chronicle a period when the universe was younger and more chaotic. These oddball galaxies chronicle a period when the universe was younger and more chaotic. Order and structure were just beginning to emerge.
The description notes that this slice of sky is comparable to looking through an eight foot long soda straw.
Sometimes, it just helps to know that there is a bigger universe out there.
Two new websites of interest to Open Space Technology practitioners and friends. First, my friend Lisa Heft has finally got her consulting practice website up and running. After being in business for 30 years, she really knows what she is talking about and she is one of my all time favourite space openers. She has taught me, more than anything, how to model enthusiasm and cherish participants.
Also, my other California friend (and close friend of Lisa) Jeff Aitken, has just launched his own weblog which is going to rock you. Jeff’s blog impresses me with his ability to hold a multiplicity of worldviews all spinning together at the same time. Jewish, Celtic, Hopi, Buddhist, Hindu, Grateful Dead, all swirl together in a stew of emergent meaning. Dig it:
the unspeakable ontological breakthrough at the climax of the est training. (now called the landmark forum. really, no matter the unusual subculture, you must do this. then you can take or leave the language.)
buddhist meditation. breathing from the belly for years. (don’t forget to do situps or the abs get soft, if you care.) koan practice: the ten thousand things return to one; to what does the one return?
recovering indigenous mind. here’s a boggling ride. walk back the migrations of your ancestors, literally, right back to the center of their tribal ceremonial worlds, leaving their traditional prayers and offerings all the way, asking permission from the ancestral spirits of every land you walk upon. learn their creation stories, follow their ceremonial cycles, speak their languages; find yourself re-woven (always were woven) into this original medicine. honor their migrations, grieve their colonizations, take a new name, stand around the fire with your new friends who never left this “immanent conversation” (kremer). the vast sweep of progress melts into the good mind of balance, here and now, our relations all around us. dew re-sonno dhys! shalom!
guru devotion. da is brilliant, but the devotional path is not my path. i did follow jerry garcia around for thirteen years, but we all knew that it wasn’t jerry, it was the fountain of fire that moved thru him and transported us thru strange and compelling worlds. no, i prefer the zen master who shows the truth — is the truth of course, but kinda steps aside from that dynamic. until saniel bonder came along. “lots of teachers want to make meditation popular… i want to make realization popular… to lift a sublime (my word) baby out of the murky (my word) bathwater” of the guru path. friends, this guy is onto something. waking down in mutuality: realizing our true nature as simultaneously infinite and finite, both Consciousness and our messy, embodied, quirky, neurotic individual selves. i’m on the bus; stay tuned.
He’s one of my very favourite embodiments of post-modern identity – holding open the reality of living within a multiply paradoxical identity. I’m tuned in. Welcome Jeff and Lisa!
Canada’s Best Blogs has just released the March list of the Top Blogs. These don’t mean anything other than the fact that the blogs have been nominated and judges liked what they saw.
But the fun part is that Hockey Pundits, a group blog I am a part of, got picked this month. Congrats go out to all the Pundits who keep that group blog a fun place to write about hockey.
I’m off again on another business trip, this time to Fort St. John, British Columbia, located on the praries EAST of the Rockies. Yes, BC has praires too. A whole different kind of scenery than the Skeena Region. Following that, I’ll be in Kelowna.
So in the absence of any meaningful blogging, here is my latest list of linkage, featuring 10 sites worth spending time on:
- A collection of Anarchist writings via plep
- Queen of Suffereing: A spiritual history of Korea via MetaFilter
- Grow…a game. via Bifurcated Rivets
- The Winning ways of Alinsky and Gandhi via Wealth Bondage
- The Nobel Prize, including lectures and articles by laureates
- Chapter 11 of Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene from (the now bilingual) Tesugen
- An interactive version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook from the British Library.
- How stories affect human action in organizations, a great paper via Plexus
- Italo Calvino via Wood s Lot
- The Tyee, a British Columbia online current affairs mag, celebrates 100 days.
I’ll expect a full report on each link when I get back.
Narvaes Bay, Saturna Island
by Toni Onley 1928-2004
March came in like a lamb here on the West Coast of Canada, but Toni Onley left life like a lion, roaring into the Fraser River in his float plane near Maple Ridge.
Onley was one of Canada’s great painters, and he was a real bridge between generations. He painted with members of the Group of Seven including Varley and Jackson and was renowned for his contemplative renderings of the British Columbia coast.
He loved flying, and had actually survived one previous crash 20 years ago on a glacier in the Coast Mountains.
He will be missed.