Work, Bread, Water, and Salt

Quotes for the day:
“Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all.”
~ Nelson Mandela
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“The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people.
The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.”
— Eric Hoffer
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“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
— John Muir
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“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”
— Walter Lippmann
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“There is a geometry of art as there is a geometry of life, and, as the Greeks had guessed, they happen to be the same.” — Matila Ghyka
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“We have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world — as far as we can grasp it…”
— Albert Einstein
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“One of [the brain’s] functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, and turn the unusual into the usual.
Otherwise, human beings, forced with the daily wondrousness of everything would go around wearing a stupid grin, saying “WOW” a lot.
Part of the brain exists to stop this happening. It is very efficient and can make people experience boredom in the middle of marvels.”
—  Sir Terry Pratchett

Gratitude List:
1. One boy loves to browse antique stores. While shopping isn’t my most favorite thing to do, I love walking through antique stores watching him discover old things. Yesterday the fun treasure was a coffee table someone had made from a ship’s hatch found on the Ocean City beach in the 1970s.
2. The Westitute. It’s really the Wetlands Institute, but once a small boy transformed it into the Westitute and the rest of us refuse to say it any other way now. Purple Martins with the sun on their backs, lots of osprey (three hatchlings on the ospreycam eating their fish dinner), white egrets, big sandpiper-shape, little sandpiper-shape, redwing blackbird displaying his epaulets.
3. More Westitute: diamondback terrapins, horseshoe crabs, and my new friend Nelson the Octopus. I love octopuses, and Nelson really wanted to connect with the people on the other side of his glass.
4. Ice cream for lunch at Springer’s. Half a waffle (the real thing, just made, not a cone) with a two scoops of ice cream on top. Prohibition Tradition is a kahlua-based ice cream with a fudge swirl, and Cease and Desist is a coffee ice cream with Heath bar chunks.
5. The things people are doing to save the world. The folks at the Westitute, distressed by the high numbers of female terrapins hit on roads, rescue and rehabilitate the ones that can be saved, or perform eggectomies on the ones that are dead or dying and incubate the eggs to release new terrapins to the wild. People who plant trees. People who fight pipelines. People who study the natural world.

May we walk in Beauty!