Great Throughts Treasury

"We were never promised a life free from fear and struggle. We were offered the hope that by committing ourselves to the struggle for a righteous society in solidarity with the wretched of the earth we would discover the secret of life."

"My mission is to encourage, inspire, and enliven women to dance with everything... I’m a dancing social worker who practices finding the words to write about it all."

"On July 4th, the physics world launched their own particular fireworks. The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider announced that after a long search for the Higgs Boson particle, it has been found. The particle only exists for a septillionth of a second, which gives new meaning to the expresson, “in the blink of an eye.” No wonder they had to trawl through enormous amounts of data to find it. (15 million gigabytes per year x many years) Since the Higgs Boson process starts as a movement, it seems to me to be a kind of dance. A dance in which energy is only transferred, never created or destroyed. When the movement begins interacting with the Higgs field, the kinetic energy slows down and is converted to mass. (Remember Einstein’s E=MC2) Sonification Of Higgs BosonHiggs_Boson_Atlas I loved hearing that researchers in GEANT, a European Academic Communications Network turned the data points of Higgs Boson into a melody. And staying true to the intervals in the data, they created a piece of music. The results of this “sonafication” process resemble a Habanera, like the well-known aria from Carmen. Makes me want to shout Ole!"

"Did you know that your body can know something that you don’t consciously know?... As we engaged in a process to reconstruct the dance we realized that my body was the archive. Although I couldn’t remember much consciously, as we played the music and I began moving, my body remembered. On a kind of auto-pilot, getting a bit further with each repetition, my body was able to re-create the dance through its “muscle memory.” This amazing, seemingly magical skill taught me the importance of our body’s wisdom and of doing something often enough, and with enough fullness and awareness, to get it into your body. Once that happens, it belongs to you."

"When we’re dancing, the struggle is gone."