sharing the biking love

Hi Kostya!
I just wanted to let you know that you have indirectly inspired multiple first time bike rides to work today. Earlier this summer, I told my sister that she should bike to work because it's the best, and she bought a bike yesterday and rode to work today! And my mom has been talking all summer about how she's going to ride my bike to work, and she finally did for the first time today! (Completely coincidental that it happened on the same day... or cosmic.)
Hope all is well,
Sarah

Reflections in windows of a forgotten workstation

These were taken at an old automobile service station that is on my way to work. It is actually a building I pass about 5 minutes before I get to my hospital, but I'd wager that many people at McLean aren't aware that this sits there.
These were taken at an old automobile service station that is on my way to work. It is actually a building I pass about 5 minutes before I get to my hospital, but I'd wager that many people at McLean aren't aware that this sits there. It is empty and just a little bit creepy because I felt like I was the only one around. Everyone else was in a car speeding by. Fascinating, I think. What I really like about this building is that there is still some architectural input and influence. They are slight and probably were kept to a minimum based on the utilitarian purpose of this building but they are still quite apparent. The curvature of the office building, the typeface of the sign's letters, the brick design. To me, these are references to another time. Perhaps this building was constructed in the 50's or 60's. What made people add a unique touch to their buildings then? Today, buildings created for this purpose are identical and located in the expected places next to strip malls and car dealerships. I like that this one is kind of lost along this lonely road, far away from any of that. A physical representation of utilitarian aesthetics that seems to have left the canonical convention. Pay attention to these hidden cues in other buildings as you walk around your city. Places in their cramped facades where someone may have added a hand's touch or an extra hour of work.
























I also found this guy next to this building. The first sight of him made me stop and gasp, literally.

These are so great

From WNYC's Radiolab. Robert Krulwich produced this. I hope you enjoy it, whatever country you're in and whatever language you speak.

And life.

dream meditation

I've been thinking a lot about courage lately. I've been working in a lab since I was 20 years old. I was thinking today while I was riding home what that really means to me. How did I get onto this career track? Sometimes I can't believe, looking at myself, that lab work is my life, that's my thing. I know others that go to offices everyday, wear suits everyday, that work with kids, that help others, that help people use or get use out of computers, that have skills that are so different from mine. This realization, that I am specialized and skilled at something, stopped me momentarily on my way home today, and not just physically. A life-evaluating pause at a traffic light. So fascinating the little whirring's going on inside everyone's head during undoubtedly dull moments.

What does this have to do with courage? I find that I am all of a sudden inspired to find my own. Moving to Boston, I suppose, required quite a bit of courage, but it was as if I used it all up before winter came and I sort of sat on my life for a while. While the break was quite welcome, I found myself recently not so certain of my future after this job ends next summer. Interestingly, while I struggled with creating a home here in this new city I really fantasized finishing my work, popping out the last day and walking away from science for a while, totally into some sort of setting sun, swallowed up into uncertainty and "real life" struggle. But as I have grown to love Boston more and more, to make friends and to fill my time this summer with interesting activity, I've been less and less inclined to continue this desire of a floating life. What takes more courage? Having no direction or taking steps to achieve a goal? I suppose one's goal could be broadly defined, but to me the vagabond life seems quite easy to achieve, but the work required of me to continue on my path in becoming a scientist is certainly daunting.

Currently, the synonym I've assigned to courage in my life is Integrity. The identification of a dream, once it is born from your inner depths, and taking the steps necessary to achieve it. This drive to identify the path and to follow it is courage. One is either born with it or one has to learn it. I know I am in the category of having to learn it. But I am learning it and I am thrilled about this. The problem, it seems, is that everyone has to learn it themselves. There is no instruction. Teachers exist, I believe, but they can only provide examples and recounted stories of their own struggles; the inspiration, perhaps, to move on to find your own way.

And today I may have realized that I am slowly on my way. Ha, didn't even know it.

When did you see the ocean last?

Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length

Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length

Oh, stormy stormy world,
The days you were not swirled
Around with mist and cloud,
Or wrapped as in a shroud,
And the sun's brilliant ball
Was not in part or all
Obscured from mortal view—
Were days so very few
I can but wonder whence
I get the lasting sense
Of so much warmth and light.
If my mistrust is right
It may be altogether
From one day's perfect weather,
When starting clear at dawn,
The day swept clearly on
To finish clear at eve.
I verily believe
My fair impression may
Be all from that one day
No shadow crossed but ours
As through its blazing flowers
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude.

-Mr. Robert Frost
_____________________________

Did you forget?

Remembering D-Day, 66 years ago - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Inman Square

Here are some pictures I took around my Neighborhood in April. My writings are supposed to be about summer right now, but I nonetheless feel that these pictures are very nice. Recently I've let my camera gather dust and I've not made bread. Other things kind of took my attention. I will reveal one of those things in due time but some of these pictures point to what I've been so focused on recently. Oh, so ambiguous.

Let's see here...

Goodbye, Michigan

Things I Didn’t Know I Loved: After Nazim Hikmet

I always knew I loved the sky,
the way it seems solid and insubstantial at the same time;
the way it disappears above us
even as we pursue it in a climbing plane,
like wishes or answers to certain questions—always out of reach;
the way it embodies blue,
even when it is gray.

But I didn't know I loved the clouds,
those shaggy eyebrows glowering
over the face of the sun.
Perhaps I only love the strange shapes clouds can take,
as if they are sketches by an artist
who keeps changing her mind.
Perhaps I love their deceptive softness,
like a bosom I'd like to rest my head against
but never can.

And I know I love the grass, even as I am cutting it as short
as the hair on my grandson's newly barbered head.
I love the way the smell of grass can fill my nostrils
with intimations of youth and lust;
the way it stains my handkerchief with meanings
that never wash out.

Sometimes I love the rain, staccato on the roof,
and always the snow when I am inside looking out
at the blurring around the edges of parked cars
and trees. And I love trees,
in winter when their austere shapes
are like the cutout silhouettes artists sell at fairs
and in May when their branches
are fuzzy with growth, the leaves poking out
like new green horns on a young deer.

But how about the sound of trains,
those drawn-out whistles of longing in the night,
like coyotes made of steam and steel, no color at all,
reminding me of prisoners on chain gangs I've only seen
in movies, defeated men hammering spikes into rails,
the burly guards watching over them?

Those whistles give loneliness and departure a voice.
It is the kind of loneliness I can take in my arms, tasting
of tears that comfort even as they burn, dampening the pillows
and all the feathers of all the geese who were plucked to fill
them.

Perhaps I embrace the music of departure—song without lyrics,
so I can learn to love it, though I don't love it now.
For at the end of the story, when sky and clouds and grass,
and even you my love of so many years,
have almost disappeared,
it will be all there is left to love.

-Ms. Linda Pastan
_______________
The summer is beginning and I find myself finishing my move to Massachusetts. I want to apologize to everything I left behind. The departure we all experience at one point or at many points in life truly is beautiful, but only now, only after I cried and I was angry, after I dreamt that home was Ann Arbor and Catherine St. so earnestly. I always tell people that my home is where-ever I am currently living but for the first time in a long time was my life shaken by my own departure. As a person with simultaneously no homes and many homes, I am slowly becoming adjusted to living here in Boston. But wow, its taken so long and was such a struggle.

I am happy to find Linda Pastan's poem today on Garrison Keillor's blog. Last night my friend Andrew and I stood watching a thunderhead plunder across the sky towards the ocean, arching lightening into itself and illuminating from within. So beautiful and so frightening, I almost didn't want to turn around when I saw the horror on my roommate's face, but was glad I did.

I didn't know that leaving Michigan would also be so frightening. It wasn't a sudden shocking strike but a gradual healing of all those torn roots that slowly became painful. Like a deep cut you only notice later. Now I can begin my new garden.

Sonar by Renaude Hallee

Sonar from Renaud Hallée on Vimeo.

Бабушка!!

"Babushka! It's spring! It is so good to be alive on this earth, for all good people and even for such as I. Nature, the air, everything is drenched in hope, future, a wonderful future. ... When I think about it more soberly, I know perfectly well I am nothing but an old frozen potato, rotten, cooked and served up with a tasteless sauce full of lumps, but the springtime has such a powerful effect on me that I sometimes catch myself imagining I am a plant that has just opened and spread its leaves among all the other plants and is going to grow up simply, peacefully and joyfully on the good Lord's earth. ... Make way for this wonderful plant that is filling out its buds and growing in the spring." L.Tolstoy