I would have liked her.

What began my thought processes in this area was an absolutely *took my breath away* dream I had about twenty years ago.

I bet your wife and I could have amazing talks about this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=4ypj4rrjlZQ

The easiest conclusion one came come to is he brought this talent in with him.

Or maybe it’s just something to do with some area in his brain.

I don’t know.

Although I am most familiar with her marine trilogy, Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea, her fame and notoriety rest primarily on Silent Spring, which practically started the 1960s environmental movement in the United States.

She’s dead now, and I never met her, my only contact with her is through her writings. But I love her. If there is a heaven, and if I get to meet her there, I’d love to go tide-pooling with my sweet Rachel.

It has been a rocky road.

Eventually others will understand.

Therefore “God” exists in the minds of some men, and when the last believing man dies, God dies with him.

If we notice, the “Gods” of the Maya, Inca, etc., have suffered that fate. They no longer exist because no one believes any more.

At least we now have some limits on “God”. Much like the Higgs boson, we may not have captured it but we are cornering it.

- Rachel Carson (1955)

“Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us — a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself.”

Rachel Carson is proof that science can be a spiritual enterprise, and scientists can be poets.

My wife was brought up a block from her house in Springdale, Pa (Ms Carson had moved away by the time Mme Reclus was born). The Carson Homestead is maintained as a historical monument to this day. I would often drive by it on my way to visit my inlaws and I would pause and reflect on the paragraph above, which, next to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, I consider to be the most beautiful piece of English prose ever written.

In a sense dying is life’s greatest adventure.

SWEET