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  • Is there a genius in all of us?

    Great article about research on where and how people become geniuses. It’s the nurturing that makes the nature of things.

    From the BBC article: “Where do athletic and artistic abilities come from? With phrases like “gifted musician”, “natural athlete” and “innate intelligence”, we have long assumed that talent is a genetic thing some of us have and others don’t.”

    Image of Milky way with hills in the foreground.

    Taken with my phone looking south.

    But new science suggests the source of abilities is much more interesting and improvisational. It turns out that everything we are is a developmental process and this includes what we get from our genes.

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  • music from: Riff Cohen – A Hole In The Heart ∙ ריף כהן – חור בלב

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  • Brokenness of Others

    I am a deeply spiritual, mildly autistic, and overly optimistic person. That’s not just how I define myself, for decades that’s what people have been saying and occasionally labeling me as. 

    Mrs Fenimore was my 4’th grade teacher. Born and raised in South Carolina, she had the sweetest accent I had ever heard in my young life up to that point. Later on, as a teen I heard a Quebecois womyn calling my name and for a brief moment I felt like I was floating on air. But that’s another story for another day.

    You see, in the middle of the fall term in Mrs Fenimore’s class a new kid joined. ‘Jay’ must have been one of the last kids in early 1960’s America that had contracted polio. Jay had a limp, wore a special shoe on one foot, and used a cane. This freaked me out.

    Meeting this kid was my first and unexpectedly deep experience of the brokenness of others outside of my own family. I wept for Jay. Literally wept for this kid. I kept thinking, why him? Why not me? Why did this happen?

    I think that as a kid asking these deep questions came from a place of sincerity, compassion, and confusion. They came from a place of ego too.  What with my autistic tendencies and being diagnosed with a heart condition at a very young age, here was someone who seemed to be more broken than me….

    Mrs Fenimore was soothing and encouraging, mainly to redirect me back to school work. She encouraged me to become friends with this new lad, which was challenging for me as he was an outsider and was constantly made fun of and taunted.

    I distinctly recall suddenly realizing that my class mates were treating him in the same way my family treated me. With that realization I made the choice to become friends with ‘Jay’ and the other shunned kids in my class. We united in our brokenness.

    Generic photo of lad with adult shoes

    “Wounding and healing are not opposites. They’re part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. It is our loneliness that helps us to find other people or to even know they’re alone with an illness. I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.” Rachel Naomi Remen

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  • 2025 Medicare Advantage and Part D Star Ratings | CMS

    Report here from CMS.

    “Ensuring that Medicare works for seniors and people with disabilities, and that people with Medicare have access to robust, stable, high-quality, and affordable options for the coverage they need, are top priorities for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).”

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  • Brookings Institute: Watch Advancing inclusive development in rural towns

    “Brookings Metro and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) will bring together national, state, and local leaders from rural America to discuss community-centered and bottom-up approaches to inclusive economic development. The event will spotlight the experiences and lessons learned from an in-depth Brookings and LISC-led “Learning Lab” deployed in three rural Indiana towns, which was devoted to advancing economic inclusion by linking disinvested rural districts to broader regional growth strategies. It will also offer concrete policy recommendations for how state,local, and federal governments can better advance inclusive access to opportunity, quality of place, and quality of life in rural America.”

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  • Charter for Compassion

    The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.
    What have you done for compassion today? Compassion for yourself, compassion for others ~ peope, animals, plants, rocks, water …… click  http://charterforcompassion.org for more info.
    “We promote empathy, peace, social justice, environmental sustainability, and intercultural understanding in a world riddled in turmoil. By encouraging compassionate action the Charter for Compassion aims to create compassionate communities where individuals can connect, collaborate, and support each other in their efforts to create a more compassionate world. These communities foster a sense of belonging and provide platforms for sharing ideas, resources, and initiatives related to compassion.”
     

  • watch music from: Ÿuma – Bin Thara | بين الثرى

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  • Watch: Mud flat mailman | DW Documentary

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  • Seeing Time

    Imagine if you could see time laid out in front of you, or surrounding your body. And you could physically point to specific dates in space.

    Important dates might stand out – birthdays, anniversaries. And you could scan a visible timeline – to check if you were available – whenever you made plans. No actual diary necessary.

    According to Julia Simner, a psychologist from the University of Edinburgh, there is a reasonable chance you can. And that you may use the experience, unconsciously, every day. MORE FROM THE BBC

  • Top Songs I Listened to in 2023: The Molokans – “The Lord Almighty says”

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