The Mesosphere: Beautiful Things from My Travels.

I travelled a lot in December, and have been greatly changed by it. I went to the Philly burbs for my brother's wedding, went to Amsterdam with a dear friend, came back to DC, then drove to Mississippi where we moved my grandfather into an old folks' home called Wellington Place...then drove to Tennessee to see my mother and sister...then went to Atlanta just to mess around.

Here are some of the beautiful things I would like to post here:

Painting: "Great Bridge, Sudden Storm at Atake" by Ando Hiroshige. There is a replica in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam because he liked it so much he painted his own version. I love this painting. If you could see detail, the little people on the bridge are rendered very expressively; they are kind of freaking out in their wet kimonos and running. It's very humorous and cute and it reminds us that, in the end, we are just little clueless fumbling human beings in a much larger universe.

BOOK: This is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read.

It's about Paradise. I did not think that Aldous Huxley was as good as creating Paradise as he was at creating Hell. But I should have known.

I bought it at the Friday bookmarket in Amsterdam. They have a book market every Friday in the same place! It's what people do on Friday nights.

While in Atlanta I went to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change; there was much I did not know or understand until this trip, and it was fortunate I was there. I particularly want to read his last book, written in 1967. It also struck me how different it was for him and the SCLC organizing in Southern vs. Northern cities. (see below, a clip of King on nonresistance vs. nonviolent resistance.)