thoughts on tomorrow

quick thoughts on the convective environment tomorrow

I’ll skip all the synoptic mess, assuming that you can see that on SPC discussions, etc.

I don’t like using CAPE too heavily but it is a nice starting point as always

12Z GFS valid 21UTC/ 4PM CST

12Z GFS valid 0ZUTC/ 7PM CST

12Z GFS valid 3ZUTC/ 10PM CST (nighttime)

The GFS paints a pretty band of CAPE across the central plains, especially towards the KC metro and points southward.

The next step is to compare that to the shorter-term NAM.  Since it is right around 3PM now, the new 18Z model is coming in, so we’ll use a different time for this one.

This is the 18Z NAM valid at 21UTC/4PM CST

and 24/0Z

The 3Z doesn’t merit posting here.  So why the pretty stark divergence?  Both seem to pick up appreciable instability along the n/s oriented boundary to the west of KC, but only the GFS brings up the e/w oriented instability in the afternoon (the NAM does see an element of this — clear from the 18Z run valid at 18Z tomorrow)

especially through the ozarks. Notably, the CAPE here is also further north — which is nice for your target.

I like using the simulated reflectivity as a nice first glance too as well, a product the NAM can offer but not the GFS.  When push comes to shove, I love the hrrr model — found here — for that purpose.   Really the game changer recently.  Anyway, for now, the NAM shows initiation:

Which matches, pretty nicely, its anticipated CAPE field.  By 7PM, the model shows three distinct areas of convection: a pre-frontal cell in central MO, a KS/NE/MO cell, and a southern KS cell.  For distance I’ll focus on the KS/NE/MO (probably your target) and leave the central MO (the storm of greatest interest to me) alone.  Here’s that output,

a little glance at the GFS progged precipitation shows weak initiation, esp in north central KS, an area of higher CAPE in the GFS.

by comparison, the NAM shows a more intense solution:

what this suggests, to me, is that the CAPE will be at least used — that the western band of CAPE is more likely to exist (agreed on in both models) and that the storms should be up and running by 4PM ish. This is in an area of SPC slight risk at the present moment.

First order of business — what is causing initiation here? For this, I’m going to fire up GARP, which is excruciatingly slow this far from school but worth the wait.

This is from the NAM again, and is a plot of surface temperature — in the gradient — and surface winds, plotted as streamlines.

At 21Z, a clear area of surface convergence is present.

This grows out of a surface circulation visible at 18Z

and moves east by 24Z — note the cold pools developed by the precipitation

so it seems that we have a forcing mechanism that should be identifiable too. That’s good to know.

Let’s look at the parameter of EHI — helicity multiplied by CAPE and divided by a massive number (i think 162,800). This is a great measure of storm rotation and initiation, and by far my favorite means of predicting severe weather. The NAM can provide this, the GFS can’t.

NAM 0-1KM shows a finger of >1EHI, but not much, at 21 Z

at 24Z there is an area of intensification to the west:

which is all well and good, but isn’t quite where we want it — after all — that’s not quite where the models prog storm location. Though close enough for what I’ll call “fudge factor” — If i chase, though, I’ll favor southern cells in this mess.

For the record, 3KM EHI at this time is actually pretty impressive:

So that seems to suggest rotation is possible.

Looking more at shear parameters, the helicity is healthy, owing to that surface circulation

which tells us this so far:

1.) The storms should fire by about 4PM along a surface boundary denoted by a wind shift
2.) Storms should have ample instability, especially west of the Mo/KS border
3.) Any storm towards central KS at about 7PM will have decent helicity, and the helicity increases with time.
4.) storms in IA/ NE look less promising

So it seems we are narrowing the target region down a bit towards, say, Topeka — Lawrence, KS esp. points a bit nortward of that line.

Lets look at forecast soundings in that area.

First, the hodograph for OZ near topeka, KS:

which shows a nice right turning profile in the low levels — with a defined ‘sickle’ shape — a positive sign!

The overall profile shows a moderately unstable profile, with decent CAPE — no surprises there.

and the GFS equivalents: Here, a bit east to show the slightly more quick moving nature portrayed by the GFS.
hodo again showing a nice proflie

and a slightly drier, but steeper lapse rate, sounding:

The NAM progs lows LCL heights:

Storm motion appears to be manageable — certainly NOT the 60mph mess of march 22, which I chased.

In the end, what I get out of this is the following plan:

1.) Early: check SPC outlook day 1 — look at tor potential
2.) check RUC/NAM for new EHI forecast
3.) Begin to monitor surface obs for surface convergence
4.) Do a subjective analysis (break out the colored pencils) one that is clear
5.) Watch GOES for cu development
6.) Read SPC MD of area — head out if WW likely, area maximized, reachable and back in under a tank of gas
6a.) Use HRRR as progging tool
7.) play existing storms (no radar on the road for me), using weather radio, storm structure, and a nowcaster as guidance.

A few thoughts:
1.) Initiation by 3:30-5PM along surface convergence
2) Little time for diurnal heating my limit severity
3.) Storms that can form south towards central KS may play out better on current forecast
4.) GFS seems a little hesitant on imitation comparably
5.) want the HRRR run to confirm all above

there is not a thread about this on stromtrack yet — so when the real experts begin to play I’ll see how this analysis stacks up!

a few simple poems

Im not much of a poet, but somethings I prefer to write poetry.  Today,  I thought I’d play with short, simple poems of a few lines.

It’s no Denali — true;

in reality, it’s not even a park.

It’s not a rushing stream –

and — true — there’s no waterfall.

and — true — it’s no salmon

but minnow’s leap back into the culvert from which it came

is no less reason for awe.

–

A single, fleeting moment

shared by no-one or no-thing

and i, inexplicably happy.

–

i reach into the creek and mindlessly pull out a piece of asphalt.

i reach in again and pull out a piece of basalt.

The rock feels much stronger.

–

stumbling awkwardly down a hill,

my tattered sneakers find a single patch of mud

I smile, and stand back up,

pleased with myself.

–

A shadow draws my eye up from the blackberry blossoms.  A hawk’s dalliance eclipses the sun.

–

a stream

a sparrow’s song

a simple symphony

Lines composed above Pilsen

on the roof of St. Procopius

the incandescent glow of the street-turned writing lamp

illuminates my napkin turned journal

on the roof turned desk.

silence is turned sound and sound turned word

The lumbering rumble of the L my lullaby

and speeding sirens my siren, lulling me to rest

on my desk turned bed

where my heart turned flame

My Catholicism and the Mass

This is part 3/n of my mini-series on my Catholicism.  The first two posts, about abortion and war, can be found on my home page or by following the links directly.  

Today, I want to talk about the ritual and rites of Catholicism, specifically the Mass.

So, we know what mass is.  We know it has two parts, the Liturgy of the Word and Liturgy of the Eucharist, that there are some special prayers, that the priest lectures us and asks for money, that we hold hands and pray, that we eat some Jesus and leave before the last song is starts because we want to get to the car in the parking lot so we can leave first.  The sad thing is, that’s what the mass often becomes.   

And since the mass is such a normal part of Catholicism, and because it contains the most important of our sacraments, the Eucharist, it wouldn’t hurt for every person who considers themselves Catholic to take a look at the mass and what it means for them.  Here is my take. 

Let’s dive in by looking at the best known parable of them all, the parable of the Good Samaritan. We all know it: after being asked “who is my neighbor?” Jesus replies with a story.  His story, paraphased and abridged, goes along the lines of  ” A Jewish man walks from Jerusalem to Jerico, and was robbed and left dying.  A Jewish priest sees him,  and crosses to the other side of the road and continues.  A temple attendant, a Levite, walks over and looks at the man, but then also passed to the other side.  A Samaritan walks by shows compassion and cared for him’ – the neighbor is the one that shows mercy.  

So what am I doing using the parable in a discussion about Mass?  Isn’t it about justice? The answer comes in a closer reading of the parable. The entire thing is very sparse in detail, yet it gives specifics in four important places: the road was to Jerusalem,  a priest and temple attendant went to the other side of the road, and a Samaritan showed compassion.    The last detail is insignificant here, but it is normally the focus.  So let’s look a little deeper.  What would a priest and temple attendant be doing on a road to Jerusalem?  A very plausible explination is that they are going to Jerusalem, where the temple is.  And both the priest and the Levite walk to the other side of the road.  Why?  Is it because they can’t stand the sight of blood?  In a hurry?  Or, if the above assumption that they were going to temple is correct, is it because they are ritually clean?  If this is so, then they can’t dirty themselves and touch the dying and the bleeding, because they would become unpure.  So they walked to the other side of the road and in doing so decided that being ritually clean and “priestly” was more important than saving someone else’s life.  So, it could be read as such:  sometimes, ritual gets in the way of doing the right thing.  

And for a great period of the Church, ritual has often been obscuring.  It was meant to inspire awe and fear and succeeded in both.  It is a shockingly beautiful and meaningful action when it is performed by people of faith with the intention of being a community, built of living stones, of agents of change. Unfortunately the mass often, instead of being the impetus for a daily life as a Catholic, becomes the sole public expression of our Catholicism through the week.  And this is inexcusable — more on this in a later post. 

People often hide behind ritual, and in doing so, lose sight of the purpose of the mass. We do not come to mass to be watch a show lead by the priest.  We are participants.  We are the Mass.  The priest is more accurately called a presider — he oversees the worship of the community — his role is the role of a pastor, of a shepherd, not a magician.  And that community must have full, active, and conscious participation.   This means not just saying/singing the same words, movements, or being silent but rather being present and entering into the action with the fullness of one’s heart. Not easy to do, at least consistently. And it is the community that helps us to enter into being fully present.  

And the concept of full, active, and conscious participation is precisely why the mass is in the vernacular.  Latin isn’t a holy language.  Things said in Latin don’t have a more direct line to God.  If you are so into dogma to believe the converse, you’d also likely believe in an omnipotent God.  You’d think an omnipotent, all knowing God, would understand English and Spanish and the language of the heart.  To think a ritual is only holy because it is in a certain language, probably one that you can’t understand, is naïve.  If you can’t understand the mass, you cannot be present, and cannot be fully, actively, and consciously participating.  The mass is challenging and comforting, reinvigorating and thought-provoking.  And if you are doing little more than acting along, performing memorized lines, then, well, you are just acting, not participating, and not putting into or getting out of the mass what you should be. When that happens, people begin to hide behind the ritual and let the ritual become the central part of the faith.  And while the mass and Eucharist are central, it is not the act of the ritual that is paramount.  Rather, it is the community and symbolism of the mass as the prototype of our larger lives that is.  

 I’ve seen, in my life, in my own relatives, extremely ‘traditionalist’ people use dogma and ritual and hide, to the point of shuttering of those ‘unworthy’ — in their own family, their own parents, even – entirely from their lives.  They close themselves off, sanctify the ritual and lose sight of all the other teachings.  The faith becomes not the teachings of Jesus but rather a single action.  And this is not right. Remember, before Catholicism was called Catholicism is was simply called the way. Catholicism is a way of life.  It is not an hour a week.  And it is certainly not isolationist or exclusionary. 

The mass, and the contained Eucharist, is a central tenant of the organized Church.  It is our weekly gathering as a people of faith, as an ecclesia, the Body of Christ incarnate, to pray. And it is a time for us to be reinvigorated and a time to be challenged.  

Perhaps the most important, and succient way, to see this is in the word mass itself.  It comes from the Latin missa, or dismissal.  Missa has now taken on the meaning of  a ‘mission‘.  The mass is important.  But its name also shows that it is our weekly mission and go out and live a faith that does justice — something that I will talk about in the capstone post of this mini-series in a few days.

My Catholicism and War

This is a continuation of my mini-series on what Catholicism is to me.  It is part 2 of n, with the first being about abortion, found here.  It is also my longest post yet, so I thank you in advance for your patience in reading this carefully.

Below is a movie I made tonight.  It’s all stock World War Two footage, set to Kurt Vonnegut reading a passage about war in reverse from his Slaughterhouse Five. Enjoy! (watch in high quality if that option is available)

Most people have an idea about what Catholicism says about war.  They know there is a just war theory, and that there is a commandment, thou shall not kill.  And most of the time, their knowledge ends there.

So, since it is such a cornerstone, here  the central tenants of the just war doctrine:

the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

there must be serious prospects of success;

the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition

These seem to be logical, simple guidelines, ones most people would follow.   There has to be a grave cause, all other means (including nonviolent aggression)  must be exhausted, the war must be winnable, and the war can’t cause more harm.

More simply, just war theory can be limited down into two distinct categories, Jus ad bellum, the right to go to war, and Jus in bello, proper conduct within the war.  The above list clearly only deals with Jus ad bellum, and does a good job of it.  Therefore, I’d like to go on to Jus in bello.   This principle states that war must be directed towards enemy combatants, and not towards non-combatants caught in circumstances they did not create.   It also states that military conduct should be governed by the principle of minimum force.

So our two current wars been just?  Iraq?  I don’t see a grave harm against our country — one could question cause most certainly.  Afghanistan? At least 849,845 people have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, since the U.S. and coalition attacks, based on lowest credible estimates  [the Lancet study]. This is 283 times more than were killed in 9/11.  Clearly, there is not jus in bello. Let me make that large number more understandable.  That is 1,700 747 jumbo jets fully loaded crashing.  That is eight times the number of people killed in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.  That more than the population  the entire Omaha metropolitan area (837,925). In December 2007, the Iraqi government reported that there were 5 million orphans in Iraq – almost half of the country’s children  Jus in bello?

Proxy wars during the cold war — Vietnam, Korea, did not have direct aggression against the US. And no war has, save for WWII (and, arguably, Afghanistan, to an extent).   So lets look at this sole war.   And we see, that there was no minimum force, no regard for the civilian, on any side.  The Allies (and Axis) brutally carpet bombed cities for the sole purpose of inflicting terror on the occupants (an act of distinct terrorism).   We used the atomic bomb on two cities, both with minimal military value. Jus in Bello?

“But what about the Holocaust?”.   And the Holocaust was devastating.  And yet we knew about it and then…well, we didn’t do a heck of a lot  about it.  And we’ve known about other genocides since.  And we haven’t really acted.  Stalin killed 20 million of his own people.  Rwanda? Up to a million.   Either way,  We could have moved about with more tact and more concern for the innocent in WWII.   Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t think there was anyway to stop the holocaust other than by direct attack.  But 4% of the world’s population died in that war.  Jus in Bello?  

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. … This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. … Is there no other way the world may live? — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Lets quantify the monetary cost of our war today.  It is 21% of our budget, and it will be around 950 Billion Dollars. [$] That is $3,200 per man, woman, and child in the US.  12,800 dollars, in theory, from my family alone.  Missile defense cost 9.4 billion dollars in 2009. [$]  That is enough money to: Hire 170,000 teachers for a year, at $10,000 more than they are paid on average.  A single B-2 stealth bomber costs 2.1 billion dollars[$].  We have 21. Well, 20, one, The Spirit of Kansas, crashed because it was raining and the sensors freaked out.  Cost for just one?  1 billion meals at $2 a piece.  But hey, it can carry 16 nuclear bombs on a rotary launcher.  Newest aircraft carrier?  9 billion dollars, with an additional $5 billion in development. 13 billion dollars.  [$] At $2 a meal, that would feed everyone in the world one meal.    Every single person.    Which foreign policy do you think would convert the people?  500 pound packages of 4000 degree white phosphorous incinerating your flesh dropped in the dead of the night or cans of food dropped in the light of day?     And all this talk of billions is hard to comprehend, so let me try to make it clear.  If you were given a billion dollars to spend in a year, it would require you to spend 2.73 million dollars a day. The cost of the military budget? $26 billion a day.  More than enough to feed the world.  It costs $44,000 to fly an F-22 raptor for an hour.  That is the yearly salary of a k-12 teacher. [$][teacher]

Closer to home. To give every US college student a full ride? It would cost less than a third of the total budget, assuming an average cost of $23,000/yr, and 16 million college students.

The world at war is unsustainable.   It is an inexcusable use of resources.  It is an inexcusable use of lives.   It is inexcusable.  

When I see a video of someone dying in war, this thought often crosses my mind.  That person has a family, friends.  He went to school,  he ate, he lived.  For his whole life, society worked for him to produce him.  He wants nothing more than to survive.  He didn’t, in all likelihood, want to go to war.  And yet he died.  And that’s it.   Done.  All neatly summed up with a line underneath. The last scene of The Mission may portray this better than any.   I won’t ever let that be me.  I hope, I won’t that be anyone.  But so far, I, and the rest of our world, have done an abysmal job of this.

This is our own life, our one life.  This is our own world, our one world.  We are one people, we are one human village, and we insist on exaggerating our trivial differences rather than living in our cornucopious similarities.  We make bombs, not food.

Isn’t it time we do things differently?  Isn’t it time we dream out loud?  Isn’t it time for us to realize that in killing another we are killing, no matter how just it seems?  Isn’t it time, in one voice, as one people, that we stand up, and yell, “enough!“?  And  what will that take? Another world war?  War on our soil instead of theirs?  A mushroom cloud, made of vaporized flesh and dreams rising over an American Pompeii? What more could spur us than history?  War is a human institution.  So is peace. 

 ”Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place” — The Alchemist.

-Tim

Finding Joy in the Simple Things

   Today, I made tea.  The real way.  Boiling water, straining leaves, the whole bit.   And to make the tea, I needed to make a better strainer, because I don’t like using a tea ball as an infuser — loose tea in water tastes better.   So, I tore apart the ball I have, salvaged a hemisphere, and decided to attach it to a stick, so I could hold it while pouring tea through it.  Not a new idea, but, hey, I was bored and wanted a little project.  And did not want to drive to a box store to buy one, either.  So I took a little walk in the woods, and found a willow, and took a branch.  I boiled the branch, releasing some of the most pleasant aromas I’ve ever smelt.  And, if I wanted, I could have drank the infusion that I made by boiling the branch and it would make a great pain reliever — willow bark contains the precursor to salicylic acid (asprin), and it has been used for centuries for the same purposes our ubiquitous pills are today.

   I bent a coat hanger and used some bailing wire and twine and sanitized the entire mess in boiling water and now I have a tool that does its job perfectly, and I enjoyed making it.  Most importantly, it forced me to slow down, be creative, and to relax.  

   Today, our shrinking world is increasingly homogenous,  increasingly impersonal, increasingly sensorial.   I talked about this a bit in my last post.   But  what I really want to talk about is the lack of real experience we have.

   All day we consume bleached white bread, watch false life in a glowing box, reading books of facts in vain attempts for knowledge.  We can, in a day, go anywhere in the country and find interchangeable stores filled with interchangeable goods produced by interchangeable workers in faceless factories half a world away.  We are quickly becoming the Eloi of The Time Machine.  Think about it.  What was the last thing you did that you felt truly alive doing?   What made you feel alive?  Do whatever that was, and do it liberally! 

    We are alive only a very short time, and how we can rationalize the familiar and accept realities and things that don’t give us joy befuddles me.  ” There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.” Henry David Thoreau.  I find joy in discovering, in doing, in being present.   In our sterile, ubiquitous lives, we often lose contact with our humanity and our connection to nature.   “Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup” Wendell Berry.    There is no reason to not live.  There is no reason to live each moment of our lives as an eternity. 

   And there are so many skills that we can learn that connect us to our own past and to our nature and to our greater story, and we are losing them in pursuit of the iPhone and instant tea and convince.    We have in ourselves everything we need to be fully happy.  And it is in simplifying that we can keep this at the forefront of our minds. 

   So, for this new year, consider doing something the hard way.  Get out and try things.  Learn.  Live.  There is a great joy in self-reliance.  And the tea tastes a heck of a lot better too.

“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about? ”  Henry David Thoreau 

 

‘Life enriching moments’

I intend to continue my mini series on Catholicism, but found, both times when I sat to write a continuation, a lack of conviction or of even cohesion, and decided I’d rather write, today, about the ordinary. 

Or, perhaps, the lack of the ordinary.

    Life is unbearably short.  At 20, going on 21, I am already, statistically, 1/4 to 1/3 through my life, perhaps more, unlikely less.  And that is a moment of pause.  

    I don’t believe in life changing events. Don’t get me wrong, a single event can and will change your life.  But every event will, for better or worse, shape you.   And to highlight one as the point where a change happened is to neglect the ordinary.  But these moments will none the less stand out — for me, the May 4th tornadoes, Sitting, talking over Kairos, Rosebud and the Inipi ceremony, The SOA vigil, my first jaunt through the woods after a rain, alone, camera in hand.  So I like to term them life enriching moments.  Times when you are most truly alive, most truly yourself, in short, when you are closest to, well, divine. 

     But the realization we must make is that all moments present themselves as a possibility of being these life enriching moments.   And often, we chose to follow the path of least resistance, that well worn rut of non-identity.    And I can’t stand the idea that, for the last 20 years, I have done little outside of this rut.   And that many people will never have the ability to see out of the rut they cut so deep.    I can’t stand to be Eloi, to stand by and let others learn and do and be and me accept a sensorial reality because it is easier.  The path which is easier is never as rewarding.   

   A story.  I worked at a grocery store for a few summers.  I did about the most mind numbing, least rewarding job possible — taking stuff off shelves, cleaning the shelves, and putting the stuff back.  No one really notices, and the shelves just get dirty again.   8 hours a day, 5 days a week.   But as a plus, I got to, once and a while, talk to customers.  And out of the faceless crowd of literally thousands of hurried shoppers whose sole aim is to find the elusive condensed milk, macaroni and cheese, that potato bread that just never seems to be in stock, whatever, I can only remember one person.  He was about 60, 65, shorter.  He walked slowly, was always smiling, and, bless his soul, he had a knack for forgetting where something was.  And he must have liked shopping, because he came to our store a couple times a week.  And he’d always ask, nicely, for something.  And I’d take him there, and, per my custom, say “my pleasure, have a great day”.  And, without fail, he’d lean in towards me, with a smile stretching his face, and say in a loud whisper, “There isn’t any other kind, all days are good, just some days are better than the rest!” and smile and walk away.    And this happened many, many times.  I don’t think he remembered me, and that’s fine with me.  But I do remember him, and hope to retain the optimism and appreciation for beauty and desire to share that he had if I am as blest as he to make it to that age. 

   I sometimes fear that my chosen path is too esoteric, too wrapped in layers of calculus and jargon and false certainties that I will lose sight of my desire to simply know.  That orgastic feeling of knowing something not as fact and but as truth, a truth that you discovered.  And it doesn’t matter that millions of people have found this identical, timeless truth before you — the value comes in it being yours.  So often we confuse knowledge for wisdom, and spend our time memorizing and regurgitating and forget to take time to learn and to think and to know.  We make ourselves busy and our minds race at a thousand divergent miles a second and  forget that fundamental joy in silence.  

   So what I long for most is real meaning, real truth.  And I don’t have to travel to exotic places to find it.  It sits on the bluffs along the Missouri, in the tranquility of an urban wood, in just wandering, aimlessly, pensively.  It lies in a real conversation with a friend or a stranger.  In the endless beach of the cosmos and in the most mundane of event and things. And I know this. But I fear with my upcoming school load and my obligations and aspirations I’ll just settle for the path of least resistance again out of seeming necessity, choosing to do nothing but the minimum.   

    So I am making it my goal to be as open as possible to possibility.  To seek, actively, moments of kairos in my temporal chronos.  I chose to realize the ordinary as the extra-ordinary.  I chose to stand and say, with my life, presente!  I am choosing to make it my goal to truly live. And if that isn’t a resolution I can keep, I don’t know what is.  Happy new year. 

A few thoughts:

“optional experiences are presented daily. why is it i prefer the comfort of mundanity? the great perhaps cannot be reached without a foray into the possibility of optional possibilities” — Patrick Miranda, http://exerciseincreativity.wordpress.com/

“In life, there are no ordinary moments. Most of us never really recognize the most significant moments of our lives when they’re happening.” -Kathleen Magee  

“When each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises.” Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“One always dies too soon – or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are – your life, and nothing else.” — Inez, No Exit,522-7

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide. 

Now. of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

– A.E. Housman (1859-1936)

And finally, one of the more moving instrumental pieces I’ve ever heard, Yo Yo Ma playing Gabriel’s Oboe and The Falls from The Mission