Dreams

Dreams
by Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Fire

Fire

by Judy Brown

What makes a fire burn

is space between the logs,

a breathing space.

Too much of a good thing,

too many logs

packed in too tight

can douse the flames

almost as surely

as a pail of water would.

So building fires

requires attention

to the spaces in between,

as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build

open spaces 

in the same way

we have learned

to pile on the logs,

then we can come to see how

it is fuel, and absence of the fuel

together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log

lightly from time to time.

A fire 

grows

simply because the space is there,

with openings 

in which the flame

that knows just how it wants to burn 

can find its way.

(Leading from Within, ed. by Sam M. Intrator and Megan Scribner)

Salonica

Here are some old photos / postcards that I found of Thessaloniki -- also known in earlier days as Salonique, Salonica, and so on.

Interesting Space Facts: Part II

Following on yesterday's post about space facts, courtesy of PlanetFacts.net:

It is estimated that within the entire Universe there are more than a trillion galaxies (the Milky Way itself contains 100 billion stars). This means that there are probably about 100 (to the 22nd power) stars in the entire cosmos.

Traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, light takes 6 hours to travel from Pluto to Earth.

The Sun burns 9 million tons of gas a second. At this rate, it has been estimated, it will burn out in another 10 billion years.

If the sun were the size of a beach ball, 32 inches in diameter, and were placed atop the Empire State Building, the nearest group of stars, the Triple Centauri system, would be somewhere in Australia, more than 10,000 miles away. The next “closest” star would be so distant that it would be off the surface of the Earth.

When astronauts first shaved in space, their weightless whiskers floated up to the ceiling. A special razor had to be developed which drew the whiskers in like a vacuum cleaner.

A sun beam setting out through space at the rate of 186,000 miles a second would describe a gigantic circle and return to its origins after about 200 million years.

The star known as LP 327-186, a so-called white dwarf, is smaller than the state of Texas yet so dense that if a cubic inch of it were brought to Earth it would weigh more than 1.5 million tons.

All the planets in our solar system could be placed inside the planet Jupiter.

Because of the speed at which the sun moves, it is impossible for a solar eclipse to last more than 7 minutes and 58 seconds.

Four million tons of hydrogen dust are destroyed on the sun every second.

When the Apollo 12 astronauts landed on the moon, the impact caused the moon's surface to vibrate for fifty-five minutes. The vibrations were picked up by laboratory instruments, leading geologists to theorize that the moon's surface is composed of many fragile layers of rocks.

If a baseball-sized piece of a supernova star (known to astronomers as a pulsar) were brought to Earth, it would weigh more than the Empire State Building.

Phobos, one of the moons of mars, is so close to its parent planet that it could not be seen by an observer standing at either of Mar's poles. Phobos makes three complete orbits around Mars every day.

Statistically, UFO sightings are at their greatest number during those times when Mars is closest to Earth.

According to Professor David Saunders of the Psychology Department of the University of Chicago, abnormally large numbers of UFO sightings occur every sixty-one months, usually at distances from 1,500 to 2,000 miles apart.