…ya’know he was like something out
of a W.P.A. project like Dorothea Lange…
Walker Evans, James Agee an’them…
people who had this sense of America…
as a country under seige.
Undergoing a trial during the depression…
a society that… needed it’s dignity back.
Corlis [Benefideo] believed that in order
to effect any political or social change…
you had to know exactly what you
were talking about.
You had to know what the country itself…
the ground… the real thing…
not some political abstraction…
was all about… so he proposed…
Barry Lopez (via The Mappist)
Inspiration to Cultivate
The world is a miracle unfolding in the pitch dark. We are lighting candles.
—Barry Lopez
Red Aurora Over Australia
Credit & Copyright: Alex Cherney (Terrastro, TWAN)
Explanation: Why would the sky glow red? Aurora. Last week’s solar storms, emanating mostly from active sunspot region 1402, showered particles on the Earth that excited oxygen atoms high in the Earth’s atmosphere. As the excited element’s electrons fell back to their ground state, they emitted a red glow. Were oxygen atoms lower in Earth’s atmosphere excited, the glow would be predominantly green. Pictured above, this high red aurora is visible just above the horizon last week near Flinders, Victoria, Australia. The sky that night, however, also glowed with more familiar but more distant objects, including the central disk of our Milky Way Galaxy on the left, and the neighboring Large and Small Magellanic Cloud galaxies on the right. A time-lapse video highlighting auroras visible that night puts the picturesque scene in context. Why the sky did not also glow green remains unknown.
The world is a miracle unfolding in the pitch dark. We are lighting candles.—Barry Lopez
An Excerpt from Asking For Directions
In the first of two stories about mapping and seeking, Barry Lopez’ “The Mappist,” a master map maker shows the way to a younger man in search of meaning in his life. The reader is Joe Spano.
