More Than Enough Room

[Image: postcard, “The Big Shot” (the Big Room, Carlsbad Caverns, NM). For more information, see the note at the bottom of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Freedom means being able to choose how we respond to things. When wisdom is not well developed, it can be easily obscured by the provocations of others. In such cases we may as well be animals or robots. If there is no space between an insulting stimulus and its immediate conditioned response — anger — then we are in fact under the control of others. Mindfulness opens up such a space, and when wisdom is there to fill it one is capable of responding with forbearance. It’s not that anger is repressed; anger never arises in the first place.

(Andrew Olendzki)

…and (regarding February 29):

Today is an ephemeral ghost. A strange amazing day that comes only once every four years. For the rest of the time it does not exist.

In mundane terms, it marks a leap in time, when the calendar is adjusted to make up for extra seconds accumulated over the preceding three years due to the rotation of the earth. A day of temporal tune up.

But this day holds another secret — it contains one of those truly rare moments of delightful transience and light uncertainty that only exist on the razors edge of things, along a buzzing plane of quantum probability.

A day of unlocked potential.

(Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration)

Not from whiskey river:

Space, as Douglas Adams once so aptly wrote, is big.

To try imagining how big, place a penny down in front of you. If our sun were the size of that penny, the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be 350 miles away. Depending on where you live, that’s very likely in the next state (or possibly country) over.

Attempting to imagine distances larger than this quickly becomes troublesome. At this scale, the Milky Way galaxy would be 7.5 million miles across, or more than 30 times the distance between the Earth and the moon.

(Wired, “How to Picture the Size of the Universe” [source]; also be sure to visit the wonderful Scale of Universe site, which demonstrates these concepts with a clever and slick but almost “No, jeez, too much, stop, please!” clarity.)

…and:

Altitudes

I
Look up into the dome:
It is a great salon, a brilliant place,
Yet not too splendid for the race
Whom we imagine there, wholly at home
With the gold-rosetted white
Wainscot, the oval windows and the fault-
Less figures of the painted vault.
Strolling, conversing in that precious light,
They chat no doubt of love,
The pleasant burden of their courtesy
Borne down at times to you and me
Where, in this dark, we stand and gaze above.
For all they cannot share,
All that the world cannot in fact afford,
Their lofty premises are floored
With the massed voices of continual prayer.

II
How far it is from here
To Emily Dickinson’s father’s house in America;
Think of her climbing a spiral stair
Up to the little cupola with its clear
Small panes, its room for one.
Like the dark house below, so full of eyes
In mirrors and of shut-in flies,
This chamber furnished only with the sun
Is she and she alone,
A mood to which she rises, in which she sees
Bird-choristers in all the trees
And a wild shining of the pure unknown
On Amherst. This is caught
In the dormers of a neighbour, who, no doubt,
Will before long be coming out
To pace about his garden, lost in thought.

(Richard Wilbur [source])

…and:

Each thought has a size, and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product. Once in a while, a thought may come up that seems, in its woolly, ranked composure, roughly the size of one’s hall closet. But a really large thought, a thought in the presence of which whole urban centers would rise to their feet, and cry out with expressions of gratefulness and kinship; a thought with grandeur, and drenching, barrel-scorning cataracts, and detonations of fist-clenched hope, and hundreds of cellos; a thought that can tear phone books in half, and rap on the iron nodes of experience until every blue girder rings; a thought that may one day pack everything noble and good into its briefcase, elbow past the curators of purposelessness, travel overnight toward Truth, and shake it by the indifferent marble shoulders until it finally whispers its cool assent — this is the size of thought worth thinking about.

(Nicholson Baker [source])

…and:

The Raspberry Room

It was solid hedge, loops of bramble and thorny
as it had to be with its berries thick as bumblebees.
It drew blood just to get there, but I was queen
of that place, at ten, though the berries shook like fists
in the wind, daring anyone to come in. I was trying
so hard to love this world — real rooms too big and full
of worry to comfortably inhabit — but believing I was born
to live in that cloistered green bower: the raspberry patch
in the back acre of my grandparents’ orchard. I was cross-
stitched and beaded by its fat, dollmaker’s needles. The effort
of sliding under the heavy, spiked tangles that tore
my clothes and smeared me with juice was rewarded
with space, wholly mine, a kind of room out of
the crush of the bushes with a canopy of raspberry
dagger-leaves and a syrup of sun and birdsong.
Hours would pass in the loud buzz of it, blood
made it mine — the adventure of that red sting singing
down my calves, the place the scratches brought me to:
just space enough for a girl to lie down.

(Karin Gottshall [source])

__________________________

Note (about the image): The caption printed on the back of this postcard reads:

The Big Shot
Worlds Largest Flashbulb Photograph
Carlsbad Caverns National Park
New Mexico

History was made on August 19, 1952, 750 feet below the surface of the earth, at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Tex Helm fired off 2400 number 2 Super Flashbulbs, lighting 55million square feet of surface in the Big Room, to capture the beauty of this view. Never attempted again, this magnificant “Big Shot” is a result of Mr Helm’s technical know-how gained through 30 years of photographic experience throughout the world.

(Found it here.)

According to answers.com, Tex Helm had been hired by Sylvania to demonstrate the effectiveness of flash bulbs (vs. old-style magnesium flashes). (It adds, “National Geographic noted that this was the most vivid flash since the atomic bomb was fired in 1945.”)

Note that the photographer was Ennis Creed “Tex” Helm, not to be confused with George “Tex” Helm. The latter, a mid-19th-century frontiersman, was peripherally connected to a variety of outlaws at the time — notably his brother, or perhaps cousin, Boone Helm. The same source identifies Boone as a “desperado” and says (on the page before Tex’s entry) that he had “matured as a wild and unruly young man, inclined toward bowie knives, horseplay, alcohol, and rough companions.” Which is hardly the half of it, as you can see from his entire entry (if no one else has ever written a book about Boone Helm, I hereby claim dibs!). I was so enthralled that I forgot to check Wikipedia about him — where, of course, he’s got an entry.