“Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.”
(Golda Meir)

You all know I love scientists. I’d be one if I had more guts. A quote for today:

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” -Galileo Galilei

One of my favorite blogs did a post about windows to the soul. It inspired me to think about what some of those are for me – favorite vistas, images that remind me of those rare times when I see fundamental truth or know complete calm.

In no particular order, here are a few:

1. The Connecticut coast from the window of the acela (above).
2. Looking through the front window of a favorite restaurant and seeing the neon sign of the restaurant’s name, backwards.
3. The dark sky that held both the southern cross and the big dipper as I began towards the summit of Kilimanjaro at midnight in June 1998.
4. The first time I saw Grace, noticing immediately the cleft chin that echoes mine, knowing in a visceral way that she was my child.
5. Looking out of airplane windows at the clouds below.
6. The view out of Marion harbor, swollen with masts in summer, desolate and barren in winter.
7. A row of blooming magnolias along a flagstone walk, through the iron-paned window of a dormroom at Princeton.

The blogger that I love asked that we include links at the bottom of our post to others writing on same topic, so here they are:

Jen with Seven windows of my soul
Tracy from Tiny Mantras
Defiant Muse from Musings

Help. I took a Saturday morning walk with the children. As we strolled, smelled flowers, picked up trash, and balanced on stone walls, Grace announced to me that she was going to vote for McCain. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she would do no such thing, for another 13 years, but I did ask why. She announced, in her classic often-wrong-never-in-doubt intonation, that “Obama is going to take more of our money. So I’m goign to vote for McCain.” Hmmm. She made a sign when we got home and taped it on the fence next to the Obama sign. I don’t even have words to begin dealing with that logic.

Grace inherited a lot of things from me: my cleft chin, my exquisite-to-the-point-of-pain sensitivity, my standard-issue brown eyes, my deep desire to please, and my strong preference to be in control. She also seems to have inherited …

my bladder.

The child pees constantly. All night long and all day long. Crikey. Long road ahead for her, filled with short car rides because the long ones are too painful.