nests...................

 

     Towards the end of his life, riven with chemotherapy, John threw fistfuls of his hair out his window, hoping they would commingle with the sheep wool floating about his neighbour Tim Conner's field.  A few months later that hair was the lining of a chaffinch's nest where she laid her egg and reared her young.

Let us all have a nest with a lock or two of John's hair in it.  God knows what could grow from it.

-Martin Shaw's introduction to John Moriarty's, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

I regarded it as a fraud..................

 

My problem was that for my first ten years in school, I was at the back of the class.  In the end, I came to see myself as my teachers saw me and as everyone in my class saw me.  Without knowing it I made a compact with being last.  And when, eventually, my exam results showed that I was first, I regarded it as a fraud.  Nothing so trivial as a fact could give the lie to an old sense of self.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

Opening paragraphs................

 

     I'm walking on Revere Beach outside of Boston where the low tide has pushed the ocean far away from the shore, and the wet sand is squishing between my toes.  I came here for no particular reason—just to clear my head after two frantic weeks in the city surrounded by noise, construction, and crowds.  A briny, sweet smell hangs over everything in the thick humidity of September.  Warm air and wafts of cool breeze intermingle—it is T-shirt and jacket weather both at the same time.

-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine

bridging.....................

 

We may think of science and art as standing in opposition to one another, but they are bound by a common objective.  Science seeks to find truth in the natural world; art seeks to find truth in the emotional world.  Medicine fits somewhere in between, bridging science, art, and the emotions that move us toward the will to survive, to heal, to take our medicine, to exercise, and to put in motion all those things that keep us healthy.

-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine