To know what a person says, we must hear what remains unsaid. If we cannot hear silence, we do not know how to listen. ~ Mark C. Taylor, “Hearing Silence”
Wash the dishes relaxingly, as though each bowl is an object of contemplation. Consider each bowl as sacred. Follow your breath to prevent your mind from straying. Do not try to hurry to get the job over with. Consider washing the dishes the most important thing in life.
Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon by Tom Myers and Michael Ghiglieri
This book logs all the mistakes you can make at the Grand Canyon. There's an interview with the authors here. There have been some changes since the first edition. There are more environmental deaths, climbing deaths down in the canyon, and suicides than when the book was written. There are fewer deaths overall and fewer falls from the top of the canyon. Perhaps the park has improved safety and access to cliff tops to cause this change.
Q: What are common risk factors for death at the Canyon?
A: "Men, we have a problem," Ghiglieri said to an audience at NAU's Cline Library this winter, displaying a graphic with a skull and crossbones.
Being male, and young, is a tremendous risk factor, he and Myers found.
Of 55 who have accidentally fallen from the rim of the canyon, 39 were male. Eight of those guys were hopping from one rock to another or posing for pictures, including a 38-year-old father from Texas pretending to fall to scare his daughter, who then really did fall 400 feet to his death.
So is taking unknown shortcuts, which sometimes lead to cliffs.
Going solo is a risk factor in deaths from falls, climbing (anticipated or unplanned) and hiking.
Arrogance, impatience or ignorance also sometimes play a part.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. -- T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets". It appears in the second poem called "East Coker"
...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903 in Letters to a Young Poet
I felt some loneliness the first week I was here. But now, no. I have enough acquaintances to not feel lonely. The landlady, Marie, speaks English and her bf is American. And her niece, Emma, also…
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