25 November 2012

Week 48: 'But perfect.'

Wonder spawned in: When the dinosaurs were about
Wondered into being by: No-one really knows
Wonderspan: About 10 minutes


Have you ever found a bird skull on a beach?  Hugh MacDiarmid did and it led him into a short, wondering sort of poem, called Perfect:
‘That fixed the tilt of the wings’.  Each ‘th’ in that line reminds me of beating wings, perhaps the long thuh-thuh-thuh of a pink-footed goose coming in to land in Essex at the end of its winter migration from Svalbard in the Arctic Circle.  Or it might be the near-invisible thththth fanning of a ruby-throated hummingbird – barely as long as a thumb and weighing less than a walnut – flying 1,500 feet above the Gulf of Mexico on its solitary autumn journey from the Canadian prairies right to the edge of the Andes.

It’s Monday morning, wonder time, and this week we’re in love with the migrations of birds, ringing the Earth as they do in their millions every spring and autumn.  Apart from the whales and maybe humans, there is probably no animal other than a migratory bird which inhabits so much of the Earth and is so freely able to live beyond its immediate habitat.


Meet the migrants

Some migrations are stunning achievements.  Bar-headed geese will fly non-stop from India to Tibet.  That’s remarkable in its own right, but all the more so when between the two lie the Himalayas!  Not only do the birds need to climb higher in a few hours than any other animal has ever been – up to 29,000 feet – but they must also survive the extreme cold (-50C) and thin air.  The birds have to generate sufficient lift and absorb enough oxygen in air less than half as dense as it is at sea level; in doing so they suffer hypoxia and just seem to fly right through the pain.
There are two birds with more or less the longest annual migrations.  Many sooty shearwaters migrate from the Falkland Islands, where they don’t care whether they are Argentinian or British, to Norway.  Their migration allows them to experience summer all year round (such as it is in Norway and the Falklands); the long days and short or non-existent nights give them plenty of time to breed.  As the crow flies, the journey is 8,700 miles, but the shearwater isn't a crow; it's more of a global tourist with a round-the-world ticket.  Many shearwaters leave New Zealand for Alaska or Eastern Russia but prefer to cross the Pacific to Chile first, before heading north up the Americas' Western seaboard – this way round, the return trip is some 40,000 miles.
The Arctic tern flies even further – over 42,000 miles per year, or nearly twice around the Earth.  It lives almost entirely on the wing, hardly ever landing at all.  They’re just up there, floating on the air, or on the sea, feeding.  Only when they breed – and that's not every year – do they need to make use of the land.
  • In this short film, Greenlander Carsten Egevang takes us through the lonely, uncertain, mildly dangerous and rather thankless task of tracking the terns’ migrations. Again, Arctic terns like their migration to take in quite a bit of the globe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bte7MCSBZvo
Bar-tailed godwits have a record of their own, too, in being capable of the longest non-stop migratory flight: the 8,000 miles between Alaska and New Zealand.  Stopping is out of the question, for they have only the Pacific beneath them and they can’t swim, so they double their weight in readiness for the trip so as to store enough fat.

So what does 'fix the tilt of the wings'?

How do these long-range migrants find their way around the world?  Birds need somehow to ‘know’ to migrate and when, to know in which direction to fly in, to know how long to fly for, and to know when to alter their migration pattern when needed.  And they have to do all this with a brain the size of a pea.

Surely, it’s genetic.  We know it is because migratory birds become restless when the time comes to take flight.  Even fledglings which have never migrated before and in experiments are shielded from other influences begin to get agitated as migration time approaches.  This agitation is indeed a genetic trait, but there is nothing genetic that tells a fledgling bird where to fly to, or even in which direction.  For this, in many species a bird’s first migration takes place alongside its parents or flock.  On the way, the new migrant will remember visible landmarks – mountain ranges and coastlines, for example – and even smells, and so learn the way.  The bird is likely to form an attachment to the route and its precise destination for the rest of its life.

So migration is also a learnt behaviour, but this still doesn’t explain how birds find their way when there are no obvious landmarks or when it's cloudy or dark.  What if most of the migration is by night over the sea?  Neither a genetic trigger nor a learnt pattern of behaviour can help with that.  How do they manage?  After all, no airline pilot would set off from New York to London on a cloudy night with only their own eyes to work out where they were.

On the face of it, we might imagine that a bird can just fly in the same direction as it did last year and hope for the best, but if the wind is even slightly different – and it will be – then it will certainly be blown off course and never reach its destination.  To make up for this, birds are able to use the sun and stars as a combination clock and compass.  With the sense of time and direction that this clock-compass gives them, they can tell when to turn, gain height, or look for land. The most remarkable thing of all is that many species of bird can detect the Earth’s magnetic field.  With this information, the bird’s tiny brain can tell, in effect, north from north-east even on a cloudy night over the sea.

The secret appears to lie inside the bird’s skull, right where Hugh MacDiarmid was looking when he wrote his poem.  Here, small amounts of magnetised iron, called magnetite, are concentrated.  Magnetite reacts under the influence of a magnetic field and in birds it is connected to the nervous system.  It’s possible that some birds might even be able to see the Earth’s magnetic field, for it appears to affect the behaviour of certain photoreceptor cells in the eye.  (I imagine sheaves of colour on the sea’s horizon like a permanent, shifting aurora.)  Just in case you don’t believe me, here’s the science: http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~jkirschvink/pdfs/WiltschkoPigeonPulse.pdf  (see pp. 3031-2)

What happens when the magnetic field is disrupted, as it is when there are high solar winds?  Do birds get lost?  Scientists have found that homing pigeons do indeed lose their way during solar storms.  So if one of these whips up a solar storm, we'll not only see the northern lights as far south as Scotland but we'll also know that there are pigeons somewhere having to stop and ask for directions.  If you don’t believe me, ask a Belgian; there are more racing pigeons in Belgium than anywhere else, and that's a fact.  And if you missed it earlier in the year, there is more on the northern lights here: http://www.waysofloving.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/week-15-i-would-like-to-apologise-to.html

Magnetite is found in many other animals, too: bees, many bacteria, termites, fish, whales, sharks and, wait for it… wait for it… … people!  Unless you’re anaemic, there is magnetite inside the bones of your sinuses.  No-one knows why.  In one experiment, bar magnets were placed on the heads of blindfolded people, which affected their ability to get home.  For anyone with a surfeit of common sense who rightly refuses to take my word for this, here’s the article in the journal Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/210/4469/555.full.pdf?sid=471a7280-e207-4bf3-a412-9f7d093d97c5. 


The wonder behind the wonder…

…is perhaps the feather, which gives the bird its flight, warmth, protective coat and colours.  Feathers evolved through the same process as hair did.  Some dinosaurs were heavily feathered to help them keep warm.  Although many feathered dinosaurs couldn't fly, some could, like Archaeopteryx, whose feathers look as sophisticated as a modern bird’s.  Despite these discoveries, perhaps because of them, the development of feathers and then wings for avian flight still puzzles evolutionary biologists (and it's a favourite topic on creationist websites).

It really does seem puzzling.  Even rudimentary flight would require a highly complex anatomical development.  To achieve this, wouldn’t a long succession of genetic mutations be necessary before the change gave the new animal species an advantage in the processes of natural selection?  If so, how could each individual mutation have been selected for?  And how could such an intermediate species survive without usable forelimbs, when presumably it would have been making good use of these before they started to change into something wing-like?  Even if a 'flying' animal were only gliding between trees, it's a big jump (literally) from that to being able to sustain flight - and it's not something that an animal could get away with only half-doing.  So how did evolution pull it off?  Well, I don't know much about evolution, but it is a wonder to realise that the five fused bones in a bird's wing evolved from the same ancestral digits as did a dolphin's flipper, or the digits you're now using to scroll down the screen.

To finish, here is a succession of images that take use ever closer into the feather's structure, right down to the barbules and hooklets which part and remarry themselves again and again through preening (you can zoom into some of these for a closer look).  In the lightness and curve of a feather is the magic of flight.
  1. Wings: http://th01.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/i/2012/156/5/5/bird_wing_by_littlebluestocking-d52d3rf.jpg  Credit: LittleBlueStocking
  2. Primary (i.e. flight) feather: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/Eagle_Owl,_Bubo_bubo,_primary_feather.jpg  Credit: Wikipedia (you can zoom in to see the detail better)
  3. Rachis and vane: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Turkey_feather_close_sdetwiler.JPG  Credit: Wikipedia 
  4. Barbs: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23663218@N06/3353973920/lightbox  Flickr: j_brittin
  5. Barbs closer up: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23663218@N06/2403323613/lightbox Flickr: j_brittin
  6. Barbules and hooklets: http://iooe.org/articles/dinosaurs-evolved-to-birds/Scales%20to%20Feathers4.jpg
Have you seen your first migrant bird yet this autumn?  It’s probably not too late – you might still get to watch a winter thrush, fieldfare or redwing arrive from Siberia or Spitsbergen if you’re lucky.


Extra:

Here's a clip from the French film Winged Migration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q40h8dPmgwQ

____________________
www.waysofloving.com

Posted by Justplaindavid at Sunday, November 25, 2012 0 comments

18 November 2012

Week 47: 'If I haven’t money in my pocket it’s one thing nobody can rob me of… it’s mine…’

Wonder spawned in: 1973
Wondered into being by: Hannah Hauxwell
Wonderspan: 12 min
To experience this winter at its best: Click on the full screen icon

I'm 40 today and I've been wondering on the marvel of ageing.  It is associated with decline but the word 'ageing' contains no such suggestion - it just means passing through life, starting from when we're born and ending when we die.  When not marred by undue suffering, ageing is the most beautiful process in the world.  It is how we belong with the seasons.  Between young and old is a whole landscape.

This Monday we hear from one older person in particular who is anything but 'old' in the misguided sense of 'spent'.  In 1972, the year I was born, Hannah Hauxwell lived on her own in a farmhouse high in the hills of County Durham, miles from the nearest road.  She farmed her 80 acres alone, selling one bullock annually and living mainly from that income for the rest of the year.

The filmmaker Barry Cockcroft included Hannah in his documentary about people living through hard winters in the hills.  His project was one of several pioneering films appearing in the early 1970s (the extraordinary World At War documentary series was being made at the same time).  I find the film full of humanity; like the best documentaries it allows people to be themselves as far as possible.  Hannah Hauxwell is tough and gently spoken, highly articulate and wholly down-to-earth.

I recommend the whole film - it's very beautiful indeed.  But if you only have a few minutes then go straight to 18:30 and watch through to 30:30.
For Hannah Hauxwell her daily life is a way of loving; later in the film she quotes an unnamed William Longstaff poem she likes very much:
Lone silent hills
Clear singing streams
Mind them
Be near to God.
Thanks to Sunniva T for suggesting this film.

Extra...

Teresa Hsu is 113.  A century ago her family were extremely poor in China.  The experience led her to dedicate her life to supporting the poorest of all people.  Here she is being young:
Here's a more lighthearted take on ageing while in love... these are excerpts from When Harry Met Sally.
And here's how to grow old in Dutch:
And what happens when we die?  We enrich the soil.

____________________
www.waysofloving.com

Posted by Justplaindavid at Sunday, November 18, 2012 2 comments

11 November 2012

Week 46: 'A public statement, a celebration of where we live.'

Wonder spawned in: various times
Wondered into being by: everyone who ever lived
Wonderspan: less than 10 min


So, wonder-lovers, the statistics tell me that you're mostly erotic, storgic and agapic, and I can only say that I'm not surprised.

I don't have much time today so I'll get straight to it.  It's maps.  Motley maps of space, time, life.  The categories are old maps, maps of outer space, maps of the Sun, maps of the Earth, maps of localities, maps of people.  Pick a category and go exploring...

Oldest maps in the world
For a while the oldest map was thought to be Babylonian, around 5th century BC, chiseled into stone.  It was intended to show the entire world, with Bablyon at its centre and three islands situated around this axis, known as island-"place of the rising sun", island-"the sun is hidden and nothing can be seen", and, most compelling of all, island-"beyond the flight of birds" (says Wikipedia).  There's a swamp and a canal and the whole thing is surrounded by a circle of sea, beyond which are objects from Babylonian mythology - always just there but beyond the reach of humankind
It turned out that wasn't the oldest map after all.  According to the admittedly not-the-most-authoritative Ancient Wisdom website, the oldest map was found inscribed on a mammoth tusk - yes, a mammoth tusk - in a tomb in Ukraine.  It dates to 11000 to 12000 BC.  It shows a river and some dwellings, think the experts, although they don't really know.
And here's a map on a wall from 6000 BC, which today resembles an unusually arresting work of modern art.  Have a look and guess what it is, then I'll tell you what the Ancient Wisdom website says it is: http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/Images/countries/Turkish%20pics/catalhuyukmap.jpg

So the answer is... 'the streets and houses in plan form, lying beneath the profile of the mountain of Hazan Dag with its volcano erupting', of course.  Well done if you got that right.  I think I'll print that one off an hang it up at home - it's beautiful.

The Ancient Wisdom website has these and other very old maps here: www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/cartography.htm
.
Outer space
When we found out the universe was bigger than you could map precisely on a stone, we kept mapping anyway.  Prepare to be stunned by this.  Nick Risinger travelled 60,000 miles in the space of a year to create the photographs that would become this Sky Survey.  When you click on the link you'll see our galaxy, The Milky Way, with every star visible from Earth photographed as if they lie on the ceiling of a 360-degree sphere.  That's pretty wild already, but you can also navigate the image.  Use the arrows at the bottom of the screen to move up, down, left and right, and to zoom in.  Click the icon on the left to show the constellations:
The sun
Here's a video of the sun undergoing a coronal mass ejection, which is when the star sheds some of its matter in a huge explosion.  This one is big enough for Jupiter to pass through the ring it creates.  One of the YouTube comments (mine, as it happens) is: ‘It must have eaten a huge vindaloo last night.’ www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmm3J0WAres&hd=1  Here's the same thing scaled against the size of the Earth: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/gallery/images/large/molten304_earth.jpg
Coronal mass ejections create solar storms, which interfere with our electronic equipment and allow us to watch the northern lights at lower latitudes, such as in Scotland.  We did just that earlier in the year, in Week 15.

This is a false-colour image of the sun taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory showing up various features on its surface and in the coronosphere: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/gallery/images/large/trico1.jpg

Here's an image closer in to the sun's surface, where magnetic tubes of plasma called spicules create a sort of chocolate-pudding-mix effect. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9p7P0mhU0wBRoH2j-8aidy9jP-to58it4j37TdijqXR2GyKZtJe5jD6PD_TlnzzbcfdrWJmcM90mFp2Frri3y1B88H9ec6Wh_VJZoyl-Ozb7vjKt9fUksfIw5Dolm_0Dnl7v2Vit4qCs/s1600/spicules_sst.jpg

This is a sunspot.  The sun has a seven-year sunspot cycle, which is said to interfere with our weather - some people say it even affects society's moods.  If you zoom in you can see huge waves of golden plasma on the sun's surface, like a sea, at about 6,000 degrees centigrade: http://photoshd.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/sun1.jpg

Watching these videos and images of the sun I feel like I'm looking at a god.

Earth
  • Here is the Earth right now, in real time, from the International Space Station: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/iss_ustream.html
  • Here are how our cities appear to astronauts, who set up their own DIY photographic system in the space station to picture them for us.  They remind me of the Monday wonder a couple of weeks ago when we looked at the thread-like mycelia of fungi, pushing out tiny filaments through the soil.  From space the cities look like single living organisms: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItX8M55-65g  
  • Here are our flights across the Earth in a 24-hour period, looking a little like a plague: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gkJTJIPWqo
  • Here is the patchwork of industrial agriculture in Kansas, introduced by the European Space Agency's Kelsea Brennan-Wessels (who seems to be waiting for her job in TV to come through) and backed with some pretty awful corporate synth-musak: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6rwCkV0R4&hd=1  - argh!
  • And here is the loss of Arctic sea ice projected, due largely to air travel, industrial agriculture and other trappings of consumer-capitalist society - note how the image of the right gradually loses its covering... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z2RpwSrNAU  And if Greenland and Arctic ice melts completely, this is what happens to the UK!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skMO4GN1rns 
And finally, here are some non-topographical maps of the Earth from Worldmapper.org:

Local

The campaigning organisation Common Ground has a wonderful project facilitating people to make maps of their locatities based on what they think is most important to them.  Many of these 'parish maps' have been published and I think they're still running the project.  Describing the beautiful parish map of Thirsk, North Yorkshire, its creators wrote:
'The idea started with Civic Society concern over the proposed development of a supermarket on the nearby nursery site.  
'Things can all too easily disappear before people realise what is happening and are able to do anything about it, so we decided to illustrate what people value most in the community, and the map will now be a permanent record.

'It will have a powerful influence on future development where people might be unaware of the importance of what the community did not want destroyed or damaged. People would be able to tell developers:'here it is on the map'. I am sure that if outside developers had some idea before they make plans for an area just how the community feels, they would think twice before investing their money in destroying things that other people value. The map is a public statement, a celebration of where we live.'
Also have a look at Christian Nold's emotion maps of localities, showing how our anxiety leaps at road crossings and diminishes in the park.

People

The coding of the DNA map of human beings has been printed out and fills a hefty stack of bookshelves.  The whole DNA double-helix is crammed in a tiny ball called a 'fractal globule', crammed in turn into the nucleus of each of our trillion cells.  Only 3% of it actually does anything. 
And here's a handy way to explore human anatomy in your spare time: http://health.yahoo.net/human-body-maps

*   *   *

I've barely scratched the surface - there are so many incredible maps out there.  What is a map, why do we map this and not that, what can be mapped and what can't, what is a map a metaphor of, is a map a mirror of reality or its dream, who are the map-makers...?  I wish I had more time today to wonder at these questions before clicking 'Publish'.   I wonder if map-makers wonder the same thing.


___________________
www.waysofloving.com

Posted by Justplaindavid at Sunday, November 11, 2012 0 comments

4 November 2012

Week 45: 'Because you cared.'

Wonder spawned in: since forever
Wondered into being by: everyone who ever lived
Wonderspan: less than 10 min

Thanks to Sunniva S for sending in her smile quotient findings for the Victoria Line, which scored a creditable 25%.  It's difficult to create a smile count for the universe by averaging only two scores, but let's - the provisional World Smile Quotient is now ((9/36)+(56/500))/2, which is 18.1%.  There is still time for others to join in.  If anyone else has a go and lets me know how they get on (just leave a comment at the bottom of this post) then I'll report back here and add it to the global Smiles Map for Incidental Life Enhancement (S.M.I.L.E.).

So, we've looked at all manner of ways of loving since January - from a man who stood in front of a Chinese tank to a woman who has spent 20 years counting ants, to a man who opens his home to everyone, to women singing their protest song, to scientists marvelling at our precisely balanced and abundant universe, dancers dancing, musicians playing on the streets, people who make bicycles, watch the northern lights, murmurations of starlings or even just trains, rapt with love for the thing - all ways of loving, all wonder-full in their way, and there's more to come.  What we haven't done yet, at least not directly, is spend a little time wondering at people being in love with each other.

So let's go back to 1968, credited as it is with bringing in a new era of love and freedom.  The Vietnam War sinks to new depths and protests against it reach new heights; the civil rights movement reaches its acme - it's shaking up the old orthodoxies so much that Martin Luther King is assassinated, following Malcolm X's assassinatation five years earlier (whose  legacy lives on in 1968 with the  black power salute at the Mexico Olympics); Eastern Bloc people's resistance movements begin to stir as Czechoslovakia tries to act independently of the Soviet Union in the Prague Spring and Russian tanks roll in to stop it; cultural sanctions against apartheid South Africa begin this year; feminism gathers momentum as a social and political force, women strike for equal pay in Dagenham and win the political argument; Baader-Meinhof revolutionary activists wreak havoc in Germany; Poland erupts with student protests, mirroring the Prague Spring and triggering a national crisis; Paris explodes with student/worker revolutionary protests and new avant-garde arts and political movements, which nearly bring the government down; the first manned orbit of the moon is completed by the US ahead of Russia, just to remind us that the Cold War rumbles on and gets a little scarier each year; amid this tumult there's a shared sense (so we're told) that whatever mess we are making of the world, new ways of being and doing are becoming possible...and then there's a whole lot of loving in the wake of the Summer of Love the year before. Loving, loving and more loving - free love, Easy Rider love, polygamy and polyandry, experimental love, lots and lots of making love.

Or was there?  Some older have told me that there wasn't that much free loving going on.  On screen, you could see people starting to have covered-up sex, people talked about sex a bit more than before, men and women could study together in universities, but for most people life wasn't very different from how it had always been.  Love played second fiddle to marriage, which meant marrying the right person, and that didn't necessarily mean a good person.  For many, marriage for love was saved for fairy tales and sex kept in a cupboard with the best china for special occasions or dragged out like a half-empty bottle of whisky whenever they (or just he) felt like it.  But the hippy revolution was having some kind of effect - at least people were starting to try things differently - the idea that you could marry for love, maybe even ought to, was gaining ground.

It was around 1968 that a social scientist called John Lee started to wonder what people meant by love.  He noticed that when people talked about their partners, they used the word 'love' to mean some quite different, sometimes very different, things.   He decided to collect statements about love from books - fiction, non-fiction, the Bible and so on - and he gathered these until he had hundreds.  He set about wondering whether the statements could be clustered together and managed to order them into six broad groups, each corresponding, so he reckoned, to a different attitude of 'love' for a partner.  He called these six attitudes 'colours of love' and in 1973 published his theory in Colours of love: an exploration of the ways of loving.  Magazine editors were delighted - they had a new 'What kind of lover are you' quiz for their irrationally and insatiably quiz-ravenous readership.

For today's way of loving, you'll be finding out, without too much gravity, which love 'colour' is most you and you'll be directed accordingly to your very own Monday wonder, which will be waiting for you and it to ravish one another, hold hands, or at least say hello.  First, we need to find out which love colour is yours.  Please don't assume this is real science, but have a look at the six groups of questions below, which are based on an abbreviated, modified version of Hendrick and Hendrick’s (1990) love attitudes scale to fit John Lee's theory.  As you go through, think about which group of statements you most agree with, then follow the links below.  The questions ask you about your partner - if you ain't got one (and many of us ain't) then think of the last partner you had.  Off you go...

Group One
  • My partner and I were attracted to each other immediately when we first met.
  • My partner and I have the right physical chemistry.
  • The physical part of our relationship is intense and satisfying.
  • My partner and I were meant for each other.
  • My partner fits my ideal standards of physical attractiveness.
Group Two
  • I try to keep my partner a little uncertain about my commitment to her/him.
  • I believe that what my partner doesn’t know about me won’t hurt her/him.
  • I could get over my relationship with my partner pretty easily.
  • When my partner gets too dependent on me, I back off.
  • I enjoy playing the field.
Group Three
  • It is hard for me to say exactly when our friendship turned into love.
  • To be genuine, our love first required caring.
  • Our love is the best kind because it grew out of a close friendship.
  • Our love is really a deep friendship, not a mysterious or mystical emotion.
  • Our love relationship is satisfying because it developed from a good friendship.
Group Four
  • I considered what my partner was going to become in life before committing myself to her/him.
  • I tried to plan my life carefully before choosing a partner.
  • In choosing my partner, I believed it was best to find someone with a similar background.
  • An important factor in choosing my partner was whether she/he would be a good parent.
  • Before getting very involved with my partner, I tried to figure out how compatible our goals were.
Group Five
  • If my partner and I broke up, I don’t know how I would cope.
  • It drives me crazy when my partner doesn’t pay enough attention to me.
  • I’m so in love with my partner that I sometimes have trouble concentrating on anything else.
  • I cannot relax if I suspect that my partner is with someone else.
  • I wish I could spend every minute of every day with my partner.
Group Six
  • I would rather suffer myself than let my partner suffer.
  • I am usually willing to sacrifice my own wishes to let my partner achieve her/his goals.
  • Whatever I own is my partner’s to use as she/he pleases.
  • When my partner behaves badly, I still love her/him fully and unconditionally.
  • I would endure all things for the sake of my partner.
Alright! Click on the link for you below if you agreed mostly with the questions in:   
The science behind this looks a bit dodgy but there's probably something in it (and some social science research supports parts of the the theory).  Maybe we need more words for love: I'm ludicrously ludic about you; I'm feeling so pragmatic about you right now that I could kiss you; you bring out in me a great and enduring mania, darling, do I do the same for you? Say I do, say I do!...  This would all aid communication considerably.  Love should be to us as they say that snow is to the Inuit - we need more than one word for all its textures.

On 14 May 1904 Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a letter to a protégé poet:
To love is good, too: love being difficult.  For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.
(And when it comes to love, we're all young!)
____________________
www.waysofloving.com
Posted by Justplaindavid at Sunday, November 04, 2012 0 comments
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