Here By Glimpses Known

Pretty much in our backyard...

On the Basque coastline, La Pile D'Assiettes (the stack of plates), which is just two-minute walk from where I like to go to write:

  For a billion years the patient earth amassed documents and inscribed them with signs and pictures which lay unnoticed and unused. Today, at last, they are waking up, because man has come to rouse them. Stones have begun to speak, because an ear is there to hear them. Layers become history and, released from the enchanted sleep of eternity, life's motley, never-ending dance rises out of the black depths of the past into the light of the present. — Hans Cloos Conversation with the Earth (1954)

And in context:

Gradually the sunken land begins to rise again, and falls perhaps again, and rises again after that, more and more gently each time, till as it were the panting earth, worn out with the fierce passions of her fiery youth, has sobbed herself to sleep once more, and this new world of man is made. — Charles Kingsley; 'Thoughts in a Gravel Pit', a lecture delivered at the Mechanics' Institute, Odiham (1857). The Works of Charles Kingsley (1880), 282. 

Quotations from TodayinSci

The Monkey Heart [1]

On Sunday, while sitting above the waves, these (unedited) lines occurred to me:

She no longer had a heart; it lay deep beneath the ocean waves. She had not forgotten her heart, but she would no longer recognize it, now encrusted with white coral, its atria home to ribbonfish.

Then, on Monday, I had a cyst removed from my inner thigh, a cyst I always called my "egg" for the size and shape it had beneath my flesh. But when the surgeon cut it out and held it up to show me (yes, I asked to see it), "A heart!" I exclaimed to myself. "It looks just like a monkey heart."[2]

The one thing has nothing to do with the other, but it is odd how our minds work and give us ideas, images, or snippets that  resound with us across days or weeks in totally different contexts.

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[1] Yes, I know that is not a monkey in my icon; it's a maki (lemur) from Mayotte, but it is the closet thing I have. :P
[2] I actually don't know what a monkey heart looks like.
[3] Yes, I know there is no 3 above, but frigg, you are not getting a picture of the incision. Just because J shared his doesn't mean I have to. :P
[4] khiemtran the prostetic spit testicles will be another operation. :P