"Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated., When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind."
Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley 1925
Despite the fact that I'm Jewish I have an odd obsession with Christmas music. After Thanksgiving I always have Pandora set on "Holiday Cheer."
Rock pillars emerge like dark zombies from the flat earth below. The yellow Mercedes bus putters up the mountainside as I try to stare straight ahead. I am scared to look out the window because I know if I do a car coming down the mountain will drift into our lane, the bust will swerve, and myself and the rest of the passengers will plummet to our deaths. I hold my stomach and clutch a plastic bag as I will my body not to throw up.
Meteora means “suspended in the air.” The structures that protrude out of the ground with monasteries on top, just outside of the little town of
Once the bus reaches The Holy Monastery of Great Meteoron I stumble down the stairs and I am finally able to exhale. I stand there, stunned, as varying heights of enormous gray pinnacles rise towards the sky. It is strange to think that these have been sculpted over thousands of years and they will continue to evolve over other thousands of years, while in less than one hundred years I will be gone. And really it won’t matter. The monasteries on top that blend seamlessly may dissolve and the monks and nuns will evaporate but the rocks will keep living. And it will matter.
It is disturbing how limited human beings are in comparison to the enormous conglomerate rocks that rise from the ground. The rocks have the uncanny ability to make one feel insignificant. They seem to be aware that they have to power to make humans feel this way. We always think that they are able to be in charge of everything and that we have the ability to control everybody and everything, but how silly must we seem to the towering rocks formed by the wind and the rain. Like the ancient Greek Gods the pillars stand and chuckle at humans for thinking that we are in control. They would think to themselves that horrible human powers such as coercion are nothing compared to the wind and the water that shaped them into the rocks of Meteora.
In the ninth century hermit monks settled within the caves in the rocks to pursue a life of asceticism and to get away from the expanding Turkish occupation of
Looking at The Holy Monastery of Great Meteoron on this June day it becomes apparent to me that just like the majestic conglomerate rocks of Meteora, human creations will be whittled away by the wind and washed away by the rain.
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Researchers are suggesting that because people have become frightened of getting skin cancers they are avoiding the sunshine, but sunshine offers one of the best sources of vitamin D which protects the body from a number of diseases.
Sunlight stimulates the body to produce vitamin D which has been proven to offer protection from some cancers, osteoporosis, rickets and diabetes.
The scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and colleagues at Norway's Institute for Cancer Research in Oslo, say the health benefits from some sun exposure are far larger than the skin cancer risk.
Lead researcher Johan Moan says modest sun exposure gives enormous vitamin D benefits and though certain foods contain vitamin D, the body's main source is from the sun.
The researchers have worked out that given the same amount of time spent outside, people living just below the equator in Australia produced 3.4 times more vitamin D than people in Britain and 4.8 times more than Scandinavians.
They say even though rates of internal cancers such as colon cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer and prostate cancer are greater in the north than the south, people from the southern latitudes were significantly less likely to die from these internal cancers than people in the north.
Richard Setlow of the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, who worked on the study says current data provides a more information on the beneficial role of sun-induced vitamin D for cancer prognosis.
Setlow says although increased UVB exposure may result in an increase in non-melanoma skin cancers these are relatively easy to cure and have very low mortality rates compared with the internal cancers vitamin D appears to protect against.
Moan says for people living in countries such as Scandinavia where long winters and short days during the year limit exposure to the sun getting more vitamin D is critical to help the body's immune system work properly.
Moan has estimated that doubling the sun exposure for the general population in Norway would also double the number of annual skin cancer deaths to about 300 but that 3,000 fewer people would die from other cancers and he believes the benefits could also be significant for people in other countries.
Moan recommends daily sun exposure for about half the time it takes a person to get sunburn; another way to access more vitamin D could be by designing sunscreens which block the long ultraviolet wavelengths that trigger the deadliest forms of skin cancer while letting through short ultraviolet wavelengths that produce the vitamin.
Vitamin D is present in many foods such as cod liver oil and milk, and in can also be taken as a dietary supplement.
The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Nothing Gold Can Stay
By Robert Frost
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
This picture is from a New York Times article last month about the wildfires in Greece. More than 30,000 acres of forest, farming fields and olive groves were estimated to have been destroyed in the fires.| This Compost By Walt Whitman Behold this compost! behold it well! | |
| Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—Yet behold! | |
| The grass of spring covers the prairies, | |
| The bean bursts noislessly through the mould in the garden, | 20 |
| The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward, | |
| The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches, | |
| The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves, | |
| The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree, | |
| The he-birds carol mornings and evenings, while the she-birds sit on their nests, | 25 |
| The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs, | |
| The new-born of animals appear—the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare, | |
| Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves, | |
| Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk—the lilacs bloom in the door-yards; | |
| The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead. I have just recently been watching the T.V. series "Six Feet Under" on HBO. This section of the Whitman poem reminds me of the show a lot. |
I have been back in the states now for three months now and I still miss Greece every day. I took this picture in the town Oia in Santorini when I was there in April. It had been stormy weather all day until the second I took this picture. Then it became sunny! I want to go back....NOW!
