Tovertafel: Magic Table!

Tovertafel creator Hester Le Riche spent months of her life with dementia patients, developing and fine-tuning her therapeutic magic light table.

"Le Riche wanted to make something that would be in the care home’s main area, that could be done in groups and that required no special supervision. She soon settled on light as the perfect medium: energising, attention-grabbing, clean and completely safe."

Art: Mother Earth

As of February 2015, Métis artist Christie Belcourt's painting "Wisdom of the Universe" was voted the most favourite work of art at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada. Stunning, with a message to be seen and heard.

"In Ontario, over 200 species of plants and animals are listed as threatened, endangered or extinct. Of those, included in this painting are the Dwarf Lake Iris, the Eastern Prairie Fringed Orchid, the Karner Blue butterfly, the West Virginia White butterfly, the Spring Blue-eyed Mary, the Cerulean Warbler and Acadian Flycatcher.

Globally, we live in a time of great upheaval. The state of the world is in crisis. We are witness to the unbearable suffering of species, including humans. Much of this we do to ourselves. It is possible for the planet to return to a state of well-being, but it requires a radical change in our thinking. It requires a willingness to be open to the idea that perhaps human beings have got it all wrong. ...." --Belcourt

Author: Mark Twain: Truth vs. Fiction

Yet again, more wise words from Samuel Clemens / Mark Twain. He said it first, and he said it best:

"Truth is stranger than fiction--to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it."
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar

--from Chapter 15, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (1898)

Author: Jonas Lie

Norwegian lawyer, author, poet and playwright Jonas Lie was not fated to be a sailor; apparently he had poor eyesight. He became a lawyer instead, studying at University of Christiania (now University of Oslo). He first began writing while practising law in the town of Kongsvinger. Jonas married his cousin, Thomasine Henriette Lie, who would collaborate with him on The Visionary: Pictures from Nordland. Inspired by the great folk tales of the North, Lie with his writings would become one of the Four Greats of Norwegian literature, the other 3 being Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Henrik Ibsen, and Alexander Kielland.

Jonas Lie wanted his readers to see, hear and feel his subjects' experiences and comprehend them with the utmost intensity. In that case, probably best to read his stories in the original Norwegian.

image: Lie gravestone in Stavern cemetery

Film: It's about love...

So great it deserves it's own post. In the last scene of the movie Still Alice, daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart) is reading from Tony Kushner's play "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes" to her Mom, Alice (Julianne Moore):

Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America.
God! It's been years since I was on a plane.
When we hit 35,000 feet we'll have reached the tropopause...
The great belt of calm air.
As close as I'll ever get to the ozone.
I dreamed we were there.
The plane leapt the tropopause...
the safe air and attained the outer rim...
the ozone which was ragged and torn...
patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth
and that was...
frightening.
But I saw something only I could see...
because of my astonishing ability to see such things.
Souls were rising...
from the earth far below...
souls of the dead of people who'd
perished from...
famine, from war, from the plague...
and they floated up like skydivers in reverse.
limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning.
And the souls of these departed
joined hands...
clasped ankles and formed a web,
a great net of souls.
And the souls were three atom oxygen
molecules of the stuff of ozone...
and the outer rim absorbed them
and was repaired.
Nothing's lost forever.
In this world, there is a kind of
painful progress.
Longing for what we've left behind and...
dreaming ahead.
At least I think that's so
That's it.
Hey.
Did you like that?
Hmm, what I just read.
#Did you hate it?

[Alice mumbles incoherently]
[Alice continues mumbling]

What...
What was it about?
Love.
#Love.
Yeah mom.
It was about love.
The End @
STILL ALICE

Alzheimer's Poem: Owen Darnell

After musing about the movie Still Alice, I will now explain the poem part.. first the poem:


Do not ask me to remember,
or try to make me understand,
Let me rest and know you're with me,
Kiss my cheek and hold my hand,
I'm confused beyond your concept,
I am sad and sick and lost,
All I know is that I need you to be with me at all cost,
Do not lose your patience with me,
Do not scold or shun my cry,
I can't help the way I'm living,
Can't be different though I try,
Just remember that I need you,
That the best of me is gone,
Please don't fail to stand beside me,
Love me till my life is done.


I had most recently seen the poem posted on Richard Branson's blog. Thankfully he credited the author! I found an online article from the 14 June, 1996, Orlando, Florida Sentinel Newspaper written by Bo Poertner about Owen Darnell;


"A few months before Esther Darnell died of Alzheimer's disease, she sat in a nursing home and studied her husband's face as if it held some great mystery.

Owen Darnell, 74, of Daytona Beach was all too familiar with his wife's puzzled look. It was the same one he saw when she struggled to read the clock or to understand the TV news.

Esther had been a beautiful, loving and intelligent companion. She had studied at Columbia University and had earned graduate degrees in pharmacology and natural sciences at the University of Havana in Cuba. She had taught high school math.

But the disease gradually tangled her thinking and erased her memory.
....


Owen Darnell wrote about his experience in caring for his wife in a 26-page booklet titled A Room Without Doors. I don't know if he's still alive today, but I'm sure he'd be happy to see this:


A Caregiver's Response by Albert Reinsch, Sr.

(This poem is a humble response to the inspirational and informative poem, An Alzheimer’s Request, by Owen Darnell.)

I shall do my best beloved,
To do all you've asked of me.
When I fail you must forgive me,
For where you are I cannot see.
What I know is that I love you,
More than the world can ever know.
Yet, so often I fail to show it,
I'm so ashamed that this be so.
Please forgive me for my failings,
It is not for lack of trying.
I know you need me to be strong,
But it's so hard when I am crying.
I, too, need you so much my darling,
Until we're renewed in heaven above.
Your smiles reward and give me courage,
Our hugs and kisses seal our love.

Film: Still Alice

I'd seen a poem posted on the internet a lot recently titled "Alzheimer's Poem". Maybe it was unearthed due to the popularity of the 2014 movie Still Alice based on Lisa Genova's (fictional) 2009 book of the same name. In the movie, Julianne Moore is Alice Howland, neuroscientist and linguistics professor who just celebrated her 50th birthday. She is also beginning to suffer from a rare form of early-onset Familial Alzheimer's disease. Moore won the Academy Award for her epic performance of wife, professor, and mother of 3 children slowly losing control of her life due to the devastating illness.

Alice's daughter Lydia asks her what it actually feels like to have Alzheimer's. Her response:

Well, it's not always the same. I have good days and bad days, and on my good days I can, you know, almost pass for a normal person. But on my bad days I feel like I can't find myself. I've always been so defined by my intellect, my language, my articulation and now sometimes I can see the words hanging in front of me and I can't reach them and I don't know who I am. And I don't know what I'm going to lose next. .... Thanks for asking.

Thanks for asking, indeed.

Solar Eclipse

sunday solar eclipse..

gif monkeysee

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_201ttTSG30 youtube

Cat!

On 7 July 2015, workers from the Dutch ministry of transport Rijkswaterstaat stopped traffic on one of the main highways, A28, to successfully save a cat that was caught in the median (middle) of the road. #Heroes.

Sunday

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Where to begin? transcendentalist, philosopher, abolitionist, Evolutionist, naturalist, land surveyor, essayist, and poet... the philosophy of Thoreau (born 12 July 1817) is as relevant today as it was during his life over 150 years ago. From Chapter 1 of Walden (1854);
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. .... A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.--

For sure, the games and amusements available to us today and the obsession with self via social media is ever-present in our world. For millions, too much.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.--Ch. 18, Walden


[he] knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance. .... Thoreau was sincerity itself ... -- from friend Ralph Waldo Emerson's Introduction to Thoreau's Excursions (1863).

I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer amount of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.-- "Walking" (1861)

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.--Ch. 2, Walden

We're intent on decluttering our lives while we drown in mountains of plastic which some noble individuals are trying to clean up. Climate change, continued institutionalised racism, world banking greed and corruption, ... what could Thoreau possibly say to this mess? It doesn't really matter. Mother Nature doesn't really need us.

Tour de France :)