Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With Strings

May 16th, 2014

This week I wanted to quickly highlight a few of my favorite things:

1 #

I’m definitely learning to deal with the chemotherapy side effects more effectively. It previously would take me about four days to feel back to normal, but last infusion session it only took three so I’m feeling good about that. Also, actively choosing to take control of my perspective has been invaluable as well.

2 #

As I alluded to in the previous entry, there was a creative project brewing and today I’m very happy to get to announce the birth of my podcast which is entitled “The Sound of Science.” You can listen to the first episode “It all Changed in A Flash” here.

I was at an event not too long ago hosted by Roman Mars, creator of “99% Invisible” a wonderful and creative radio show about architecture and design. He mentioned the fact that making radio can be a very solitary activity and given the fact that I have so much free time by myself, this has been the perfect opportunity to pursue this creative avenue.

There are a lot of things I want explain about the podcast, but for now let me just say that science can sometimes get a bad rap for being technical and boring (which it can be!) but there are incredible stories which really should be shared and that is what we hope to bring you with “The Sound of Science.” Amazing stories and the soundscapes that accompany them.

3 #

And finally, words that can’t be easily translated into English. And one word in particularly, natsukashii which very roughly means: “a wistful sense of longing and appreciation in the presence of beauty, laced with sadness at its transience”

To start, that word sounds like this to me.

This music comes from the band Hammock and I’ll share a reviewers’ words that capture the album so well: Departure Songs is an album about being there and not being there. And how it feels to both be there and have someone else not be there. Presence and absence. Love and grief. Hammock’s greatest success as musicians is to make music that is, at its heart, completely the saddest music ever made but expressed in a manner that is ecstatic. This is what makes Hammock special - ecstasy through exquisite sadness.

There was a time in life in which transience truly bothered me. The lack of certainty, but then I realized where the yearning was coming from! The great writer C.S. Lewis explained the feeling this way, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”