Like a Stained Glass Window...

People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within.  - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

The Last Day of Summer

Summer ends and Autumn comes and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night. - Hal Borland 

To all those of us living in the Northern hemisphere September 21st marks the end of Summer. As Autumn begins and the weather changes, we often slow down a bit and turn our attention to the visible changes in nature. We leave the undisturbed lightness of Summer behind and become more reflective. But one thing is certain. No matter what lies ahead, the next Summer will come for sure...

Dominique Teng

The World As I See It

By Albert Einstein

How strange is the lot of us mortals!  Each of us is here for a brief sojourn, for what purpose he knows not, though he sometime thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy.  A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men (and women), living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving… 

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a lone traveler and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude… 

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling. 

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel - is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the most profound reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… 

I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence - as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in Nature.