Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

GOOD CHEER IN THE SKY

This image grabbed my fancy.  (From a friend's email.)

HAVE YOU THOUGHT OF THE BENEFITS OF GOING OUTSIDE?

Jonah Lehrer offers useful observations in his article, "Mom Was Right: Go Outside."  Scientists are outlining the benefits of spending time in natural settings.  Lehrer writes:

Humans are quickly becoming an indoor species.

In part, this is a byproduct of urbanization, as most people now live in big cities. Our increasing reliance on technology is also driving the trend, with a recent study concluding that American children between the ages of 8 and 18 currently spend more than four hours a day interacting with technology.

As a result, there's no longer time for nature: From 2006 to 2010, the percentage of young children regularly engaging in outdoor recreation fell by roughly 15 percentage points.

This shift is occurring even as scientists outline the mental benefits of spending time in natural settings. According to the latest research, untamed landscapes have a restorative effect, calming our frazzled nerves and refreshing the tired cortex. After a brief exposure to the outdoors, people are more creative, happier and better able to focus. If there were a pill that delivered these same results, we'd all be popping it.

A GUIDE TO BIRDING GUIDES

I continue going through old clippings and want to have access to this Wall Street Journal article, "Knowing a Hawk from a Handsaw."    A quote: 

"Roger Tory Peterson's 'A Field Guide to the Birds' has set the standard since 1934.  But has a new generation of birding guides finally knocked him off his perch?" 

If you have access to the WSJ, this is a useful article.  Click here.

THE LIFE OF FLOWERS (VIDEO) - MUST SEE!

This is undoubtedly the most beautiful video of flowers "opening"  that I've ever seen.  The YouTube uploader of the video cited Ps. 98:1 - "Oh sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things!" and John 1:3 - "All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made."  You can't view this video without thinking of God's transcendent glory and His delight in beauty.

 

AWESOME PHOTOS OF THE VOLCANIC ERUPTION IN ICELAND

Many more photos. . .  (HT: Jonah Goldberg)

KILAUEA LIGHTHOUSE

Courtesy of Bing -

APPRECIATION OF NATURE

"Mother Skylark" offers a quote from Barbara Kingsolver's Small Wonder  that I find poignantly beautiful, one of the best pieces I can recall reading on the appreciation of the natural world.

"Let me back up and say that I am breathless with gratitude for the collisions of choice and luck that have resulted in my being able to work under the full-on gaze of mountains and animate beauty. It's a privilege to live any part of one's life in proximity to nature. It is a privilege, apparently, even to know that nature is out there at all. In the summer of 1996 human habitation on earth made a subtle, uncelebrated passage from being mostly rural to being mostly urban. More than half of all humans now live in cities.  The natural habitat of our species, then, officially, is steel, pavement, streetlights, architecture, and enterprise—the hominid agenda.

With all due respect for the wondrous ways people have invented to amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find that this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant's way of making love, or what silence sounds