#15. A Thing With Feathers
I know you've heard that line before--that hope is a thing with feathers. It's possibly Emily Dickinson's most famous poem. But I didn't understand what it meant for most of my life. (Why does hope have feathers? What's hopeful about feathers?)
Let's look at the full poem. (Don't worry! It's short!)
"Hope" is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the Gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I 've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
Now, forgive me for being obtuse, but I'm not good at figurative language, so I kind of have to walk through this:
Hope is a bird, and that bird lives in the soul, and it sings (it provides hope) and it never stops.
And hope is best heard during the storm--in fact, a storm must be incredible to get rid of hope (which is comforting so many people during the storm).
And, hope is everywhere. And yet, through it all, I've never had to give anything to hope--it comes naturally.
(Did I read that right? I am definitely not a literature major, so there's probably tons of subtext that I'm missing. But, I'm a bear of very little brain, so this will have to do.
ANYWAY.
Why am I talking about hope right now? Well, I had a conversation last week with a friend of mine that went a little something like this:
Me: The world really sucks right now.
Him: I try not to get worked up by every little thing.
Me: I get why that would help your mental health, but it feels irresponsible for me to not pay attention to such important events.
Him: Six months from now you won't even be thinking about these events. You probably won't remember these events with any specificity. You'll be worrying about something else.
Me: But if everyone took that perspective--if no one fought back--then things will be significantly worse six months from now. You have to draw the line somewhere.
Or something like that.
Because last week, hope seemed in rare supply. And then Saturday happened, and hope soared. But it also fell. Because despite the largest peaceful protest in United States history, there was also shocking political violence (unrelated to the protests). And then, at the end of the day, when I was remarking to that very same friend about how great it had been that protests had not turned into riots, there was an evening shooting at a protest in my hometown of Salt Lake City.
But hope, that darned feathered hope that perches in my soul, is getting me through this gale and keeping me warm.
Because nothing was going to WIN anything Saturday. No despots were going to be overturned. No constitution's threads were going to be sewn up. Not during one single protest, no matter how enormous that protest was.
But what happened is that, during that gale--that sore storm--the feathered little bird hopped out and said "Hey Rob. I'm still here."
Because hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.
Bits and Bobs from the News
#1. A weird and unexplained thing in the universe? Rob, it seems like you've talked about one of those not just last week but also the week before that. Well guess what, suckers: there's another one. It's the thing in this picture in the little circle, and it doesn't have a name. It is possibly two stars, possibly a dead star, possibly a dwarf star, but the weird thing about it is that it emits radio waves and x-rays in pulses about 44 minutes apart, all day, all year, forever. They don't know why! Seems like we shouldn't defund NASA right now!
#2. I love all things archaeology, and I especially love American archaeology, and I especially especially love indicators of big civilizations in North America. Chaco Canyon, Poverty Point, Cahokia--I love all of it. But because so much of, well, everything has been explored it seems weird to find new evidence of new big civilizations, right? Well, in Michigan, they have recently found (through drones and LIDAR--same stuff they're using to explore the Amazon) a HUGE area of raised garden plots. These are mounds, rectangular, and laid out for the best possible irrigation and harvesting.
They've mapped 300 acres of these things, and they say there's more out there. It's weird to find this here, partly because no one knew about large populations, but also because it's kinda far north and a little cold for maize farming. They are on Menominee land, and the tribe is honoring and protecting the site as ancestral. The Menominee have been in that area for about 1000 years, but they are believed to be descended from the Old Copper Culture, that was there starting 10,000 years ago. Anyway, I really like this kind of thing.
#3. This one is also archaeological, but not (in my opinion--you can make up your own mind) as neat. This one is just that in a Roman fort in northern England, they have found this big shoe. Everything I can find about this emphasizes that it is an unusually large shoe, but they haven't compared it to modern shoe sizes, so whether this was a Shaquille O’Neal shoe or not, I don't know. Still, it's cool to find anything as personal as a shoe that has lasted 2000 years.
#4. So, you know how platypuses are duckbilled mammals that lay eggs? There's been this other species of duckbilled mammal that lays eggs that biologists have known about, but which they thought was extinct. Well, it's NOT. It's called the Zaglossus attenboroughi, a long-beaked echidna, and it lives in Indonesia. And yes, it is named after David Attenborough. This is a drawing of them from when they were first recorded in 1837.
Diversions and Distraction
This first video is of Tim Minchin singing an important song titled "Prejudice", which is very relevant to my identity.
Letters Live is a production where famous people read very real letters. And in this one, Lawrence Fishbourne reads an 1865 letter that a slave wrote to his former master. And it's great.
On a totally different topic, I am fascinated by listening to experts talk about their area of expertise, and I've recently gone down the Insider rabbit hole in their How Crime Works series. In this video, a man who scammed casinos out of $25 million dollars explains how he did it and never got caught. (He now works as a consultant teaching casinos how to not get scammed.)
That's it for this week. If you want to learn more about me, visit my website.
And, as always, I have friends everywhere.
