by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

via My Modern Metropolis

I am tired, Quilan. I have waited for these memories to lose their force over the years and decades and centuries, but they have not. There are places to go, but either I would not be me when I went there, or I would remain myself and so still have my memories. By waiting for them to drop away all this time I have grown into them, and they into me. We have become each other. There is no way back I consider worth taking.

Look To Windward by Iain M. Banks
384

Capture on film at high speed.

And get this splendid image.

I love how the shape of the water within the now-defunct balloon is preserved, even though the container has been reduced to a few splotches of material.

By Lex Augusteijn. (More images on his site)

via Eugene at MyModernMet

These are firefly trails! Photographed by a German guy named Kristian Cvecek.

And guess what? He’s a physicist. Aww yeah. Science and art, thank you very much.

via Alice at MyModernMet
read more at DailyMail

sewing needle + razor blade +pencil – magnifying glass +oodles of patience = Dalton Ghetti’s PENCIL LEAD sculptures

Dalton Ghetti on his work:

“…But when I tell people how long it takes, that’s when they don’t believe it. That’s what amazes people more, the patience. Because everything nowadays has to be fast, fast, fast.”

Sandy Lefkowitz on Dalton Ghetti:

“When people are passionate and creative and they can produce something unique, what they say to the world is, ‘It’s all possible,’ ” she said. “When something in this chaotic world can make you stop and focus, I think it’s very serious.”

More from Dalton Ghetti:

His current projects include a handsaw and a single rice-grain-sized teardrop for every victim of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“The idea is, as you walk in, you’ll see a huge tear drop far away,” he said. “As you walk up close to it, you’ll see that it’s made up of tiny little ones. So I make one a day. I was watching the whole thing from Sherwood Island State Park, and I broke down and cried all day. I had a vision about doing something about it, and that’s what I came up with. It’ll probably take about 10 years to do it.”

Read more at the NYTimes.

via Amy at MyModernMet.
and Wonderment and Telegraph
(more pictures at the above links)

iphone timelapse of St Petersburg Florida sunset from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

This guy made a timelapse video of a gorgeous sunset entirely on his iPhone!

What struck me most was the contrast of the slowly morphing clouds versus the frenzy of the frantic humans.

A commenter noted that “the seagulls create a sort of ‘old film filter’ effect” which I find to be a thoroughly spiffy observation.

iphone timelapse of sunset (Vimeo)
via Cameron Moll

There were bison crossing over the road–two thousand pound mammals crossing over the road… It was about 60 below 0. And the bison, as they breathed, their exhalation would seem to crystallize in the air around them and there were these sheets, these ropey strands of crystals kind of flowing down from their breath…

I felt like, this was the first day. And this morning was the first time the sun had ever come up. And the shadows that are being cast right now is the first time those shadows have ever been cast on the earth.

And I was all alone but I felt I was in the presence of everything around me and I was never alone.

It was one of those moments when you get pulled outside of yourself into the environment around you and I felt like I was just with the breath of the bison as they were exhaling and as I was exhaling and they were inhaling it was all kind of flowing together…

All I was thinking of was that a single moment in a place as wild as Yellowstone, and most of the National Parks, can last forever.

Shelton Johnson in National Parks, Episode 2 on his encounter with bison while delivering mail on snowmobile in Yellowstone National Park.

Insanity is wasting your life as a nothing when you have the blood of a killer flowing in your veins. Insanity is being shit on, beat down, coasting through life on a miserable existence when you have a caged lion locked inside and the key to release it.

Morgan Freeman as Sloan in Wanted

All the Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
Layin’ in the sun,
Talkin’ ’bout the things
They woulda-coulda-shoulda done…
But those Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
All ran away and hid
From one little did.

by Shel Silverstein in Falling Up

I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with a map, with strangers’ contradictory anecdotal evidence. … Times when some architectural detail or vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home. Stories that make the familiar strange again… Conversations that make everything around them disappear. Dreams that I forgot until I realize they have colored everything I felt and did that day. Getting lost like that seems like the beginning of finding your way or finding another way, though there are other ways of being lost.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 13