Rebekah has made the deck a pleasant spot this summer, especially for Coco.

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

— Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (via Austin Kleon)

The sky tonight from my little freckle on the earth.

“Eventually we realize that not knowing what to do is just as real and just as useful as knowing what to do. Not knowing stops us from taking false directions. Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention.”
— David Whyte

I would add that not knowing what to do is when we finally get around to asking for help from a qualified source.

“And now, O Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of David my father, although I am but a little child. I do not know how to go out or come in… Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil, for who is able to govern this your great people?”
— Solomon

Night Sky in Iceland from APOD
Photog: Wioleta Gorecka

Saw this big horn on top of Pikes Peak yesterday. He didn’t care.

Scenes seen at Meow Wolf in Denver.

The Man Who Knew Too Much
Alfred Hitchcock, 1934

Just watched the original British version with Peter Lorre as the heavy. Charming 30s clunkiness from early in Hitch’s career. The orchestra scene was simpler, but delivered on the rising tension. What surprised me based on the relative restraint of the American remake was how the ending of this one turned into a shootout with quite a high body count. It also didn’t go easy on the kidnapped girl, who looked truly traumatized in the end even when her dad was telling her she was fine. Low-nonsense crime drama. Good stuff.

Asked ChapGPT to write me a haiku about Mr. Lorre:

Eyes wide and haunting,
Peter Lorre’s eerie presence,
Forever unique.

Not A+ work, really. How about:

More than just evil
Eyes reveal a broken heart
Disguised as weirdness

Indeed

Hiking is back. Had never been on this side of the second reservoir above Palmer Lake before. Was curious: Did this little tunnel happen on its own when the rocks fell just so or did a couple of county guys spend an afternoon with an excavator putting it there?

Coco’s new batch.

Goodwill Sunday

One man’s creepy doll is another man’s bargain. Stopped by our local Goodwill to look for … something … and found everything else.

A single shot of the earth and the moon taken by the Korean lunar orbiter Danuri.

“Salamanders in a carnivorous pitcher plant” - Nature’s Pitfall by Samantha Stephens © Samantha Stephens | cupoty.com

Let There Be

Ikiru, Take 2

I did finally watch Ikiru last night. It’s an amazing film, of course. I somehow never realized that “Parks and Rec” borrowed it’s opening premise from this film, with Leslie Knope finding purpose in becoming the irresistible force pushing the creation of an Indiana park through the unmovable object of city hall bureaucracy.

The soulful Takashi Shimura is impossible not to feel with as he absorbs the news of his terminal diagnosis and reacts first by abandoning himself to all the pleasures of distraction he had faithfully avoided and then, finally, by deciding to use himself up in “making something” meaningful as his way of emulating the irrepressible, glittering energy of young Miki Odagiri’s character. I loved the extended scene toward the end where all his fellow paper-pushers slowly realize what a truly heroic thing Watanabe accomplished as they gradually get more and more drunk at his wake.

Most poignant of all, for me, are Watanabe’s unrequited feelings of longing to connect with is grown son before his death, something he abandons as hopeless, thinking his son cares only about his retirement bonus and savings. Kurosawa does not attempt to solve the questions of the meaning life, but he does suggest that a bit of redemption can be found in overcoming the inertia of existence to serve others before we go.

Downtown Saturday night