I like to think about David Douglas, the Scottish naturalist who named many trees and plants and whatnot, looking up at the tall trees we know of as Ponderosa Pine, and saying out loud to himself, “huh, I wonder what we should name that one.”

Does it ever seem to you that our cultural expectation of life is that it is meant to be a 24/7 orgasm?

Nausea, nautical, argonaut, aeronautical, cosmonaut. The Greek word “naus” means boat or ship, and the original meaning of nausia was seasickness.

Here’s a quote from Brene Brown via a conversation she was having with Tim Ferriss that is above my typewriter:

If I’m not a little bit nauseous when I’m done, I probably did not […]

MONO = one.

Monogamy, monotheism, monologue, monotone, monk, month, monarchy, monopoly.

I’m a big fan of three of these, two of them not so much, and three could go either way.

I recently fell in love with lichen- that stuff that’s usually green and not moss hanging from trees or clinging to sidewalks and rocks mistaken for old gum. It was a classic “right in front of your eyes the whole time” scenario. There are over 28,oo0 named species of lichen. Lichen…

… is ubiquitous, and yet […]

Ancient Egyptians believed in a KA. One understanding of KA was that it was your spiritual self that lived on after your death, some said that it was your internal decision maker. At least my memory of my high school psychology textbook tells me this. I still remember being very amused by one proof of […]

Eastern Oregon is full of Juniper trees. The berries are fragrant, and often used to make gin. I heard Kim Stafford (the new Oregon Poet Laureate) tell a story recently about a kid from eastern Oregon who went to western Oregon to go to college. He kept in his pocket a matchbox full of sage […]

Idioms are fun. My wife and I still laugh about the difficulties in sharing English idioms with our students in Hungary. “Balazs has such a BIG FACE!” You start thinking about this kids face, and it seems developmentally appropriate, and just as big as Zsolt’s face, or Gergely’s face, and then it clicks. Head. He […]

Context is important; often it’s missing (See: C is for CONTEXT #3 of 312). And when context is missing, our understanding can be patchy, incomplete, or way off (See: E is for ELEPHANT #5 of 312). This is true of everything, and certainly the Bible.

Habakkuk is a book of prophecy in the Old Testament. […]

Angela Duckworth defines grit as “passion and perseverance for long-term goals.” It wouldn’t be a waste of time to think about grit, gravel, sand, oysters, pearls, perseverance and passion. And if it feels like it is, I would say keep going until it isn’t.