courage2

This is one of the few South Indian songs I know. Bhaja Govindam -- an 8th century song about devotion and renunciation, part of a Hindu spiritual tradition known as bhakti.



The beautiful old singer MS Subbulakshmi was extremely famous in India. Think Elvis with 4 times the population base for potential fandom.

courage2

Every Tuesday I walk by what is possibly the largest armory in the world, a giant and abandoned brick edifice behind chain link fence and a living wall of weeds and debris.

I've been noticing a flower there but unable to identify it. Today I realized the plant isn't a vine -- it's a shrub whose younger branches have merely grown up entwined around the fencing. Then I could identify it -- it's a Rose of Sharon, rose mallow, or hardy hibiscus, Hibiscus syriacus.

courage2

I saw some people surfing off the Jersey Shore. I have to spend some time on waves.

biminiblue

That was an amazing video. That wave at that location is magnificent. Wait. Did I say terrifying? Yeah, that's what I meant!

courage2

Today I saw a NYCPD traffic cop chanting, using what I think was a mala, Hindu prayer beads. The best I can guess is that he was from Kerala, where it's the rainy season month and traditionally the eldest man in a household reads the Ramayana aloud from start to finish.

courage2

The gift of metaphor.

I heard a girl on the playground say,
"Now, I'm a bird!"

courage2

I wandered back here after a long time away. The 'now I'm a bird' woman is my laptop's backdrop these days. Which makes me think of the gift of computing. One of the abundant things silicon allows us.

As far as I can understand, this is the tip of an ingot made from a single crystal of highly refined silicon.



This is another detail of the same crystal:

courage2

Where I originally come from, I expect the corn seedlings planted in mid-to-late April are starting to emerge from the soil left by glaciers on what became the Great Plains.

courage2

Tonight I watched a waning gibbous moon rise. Gibbous mean swollen, bulging, protuberant. You can call it the humpbacked moon.

courage2

There's a church in my neighborhood that has a corner garden where the irises are just now coming into bloom. To me, there's no flower so beautiful.




There are worse things to do with an evening than look at high-definition images of yellow bearded irises. When the black ones bloom, I'll post one of those too.

courage2

They're blooming.

Gilmer

I think irises might be my favorite flower (I like tulips, too).

My mom was great with landscaping and flowers.

Every Memorial Day she used to make a big bouquet from flowers all over the yard and put it on my grandfather's grave.

Irises were the stars of the show!

courage2

the fleshy muscular organ in the mouth of a mammal, used for tasting, licking, swallowing, and (in humans) articulating speech.

Tynesider22

I am a big music fans but most of the tunes I've listened to over the past few years have been under the influence.

Very rare I appreciated a good tune whilst fully sober. Something I'm looking forward to doing.

I'm on a mobile so I can't post links, but one of my songs is 'Former' by Arturo.

courage2

Nose snout proboscis beak -- a different world comes in through the nostrils.

courage2

I worked too hard editing this image to discard it because it didn't make the 15 minute window.

fini

so delighted to see this thread revived.

thank you, courage2

courage2

Hi fini! Please contribute

fini

no camera, no cell phone, so i can only copy and paste others' 'gifts'...

courage2

Marble