Science Mondays--- Hearts

as yesterday's post came to an end, I realized I had not ventured into the science of hearts


1. Bleeding Hearts: the above variety from my front yard is pure white, but they do come in red and pink. It is a symbol of undying love. I hope to remember that this spring when they emerge and greet me as I walk down my porch steps. advice on growing this perennial

2. the rapidly beating heart. Generally speaking birds beat mammals which beat all else. It has to be with our "warm-blooded" metabolism. Hummingbirds can exceed 1000 beats per minute. Shrews win out for mammals which can have 800 beats per minute at rest and an excited shrew was clocked in at 1,511. It is believed that large mammals live longer because they do not wear out their body parts as quickly. The elephant hearts weighs in at 50 pounds and beats 30 times a minute.

3. the hibernating heart: The chipmunk goes from 200 to 5 beats per minute when it heads into hibernation.

4. The future heart transplant: Doctors have ventured into what would make amazing science fiction. They have found a way to take an organ, strip away all the cells, but leaving the protein matrix. Then provide cells and the right conditions and a dead heart can become functional again. If they master this technique, organ transplants could be revolutionized. Waiting to receive a donor liver would be replaced with waiting for your cells to create a new new liver on the matrix of another one. Rejection concerns would plummet. Watch the second chapter of this Nova Now to learn more.

5. 36 interesting facts about the human heart

6. no heart? If trees have no heart then how do they pump water to those high branches. The water is pulled by the leaves using the water and the evaporation out of the leaves (transpiration) and it helps that water is excellent at adhesion and cohesion so that the molecules can form a column. If the column broke, it would be hard to pull the water up.

7. Heart Mountain in Wyoming consist of material 300,000,000 years older than the rocks at its base.

photo by mayrussian7

8. The Heart Nebula is a place where stars are emerging.

...

the first part... thinking about land and a friend

Reflecting back on Saturday....

I am sitting in a retreat center with several members of my church. I am pondering if I will be a sweaty mess for the celebration I am attending later in the evening, and if I will survive a retreat which is so heavy on group time. But the retreat is a time for us to build relationships, so I relax into the group and hope to stay cool.


I am pondering who has been important in my spiritual journey. I pick up the stone to show the group I am prepared to speak and say... "John Touchberry." A few members ignore the fact that I am holding the stone and say, "His obituary was in the paper today." Now there are bigger things taking over my thoughts. I think of a trip to Bartram's Garden, and a year of weekly conversations, and how on a Christmas morning he began the cleansing of thoughts keeping me from a life with Christ, and about a friend who broke through years of silence to say hello just the other week on facebook, and of a trip to visit him on a mountain top, and I think about his wife, and I think about what an amazing blessing it was to know him....


Given free time I walk down a hill and I am standing beside the Monocacy Creek. My feet and spirit are at home. If I walked a mile south I would be in a highly favored birdwatching spot of my younger days. Turn north and go upstream, the creek becomes two... the east and west branches. There is a hill that divides those branches and that is where my family moved when I was five. In early spring I would race down that 2-3 mile hill on my bike, ride 10-20 miles and suffer my way back up it. By the fall, I would be exloring 60-80 miles on a weekend day. I can only hope that I will ever know a place so well.

John Touchberry loved that mountain in NC and because of that many folk were sad when he retired and left Pennsylvania.

At 2:20 my friends left the retreat center. I sat on a bench and waited for Mosaic Woman. In silence and in the shade, I had time to think some more.

Seven hours later I knew a haircut was going to happen (it has been years since the last)... but that is another story for another day.

...

Hermeneutics of Appreciative

Mountains in the middle of nowhere, Bolivia (Uyuni tour)
Originally uploaded by blueskylimit

When I returned to church ten years ago, I decided that if I would ever leave the church again, I wanted to know what I was leaving. So, I became a lay biblical scholar among other things.

I read the Bible from front to back and discovered a thing or two (thousand) along the way. Psalmists wanting enemy children bashed on rocks comes to mind. At that time , I had many doubts about God and so I think it was read with this lens of hermeneutics between me and the written word.

It carried forth into the time I began to lead adult classes at my church. I would go to commentaries and then talk about the meanings of Hebrew and Greek words. Talk about what was happening when the text was written. Talk about the story being told. If memory serves me as I reflect on this, it was this talk that was primary to my lessons. Reflecting on how the story touched my life was low on the priority. How scholars and authors across time had been touched by it was primary. I was in search of knowing what Christianity was about, not yet open to feeling an emotional response.


The above image of the mountain speaks to me as I think of one class which I taught. With concordance in hand I found fifteen passages from the Bible which mentioned a mountain. Each person in the adult class randomly chose a passage and then read it out loud. It was a whirlwind trip from here to there. Fascinating, but there was no time for reflection. They were read to tell the stories in the Bible, not to tell the stories in our hearts. I am looking at this image of a distant mountain seen through weathered rock. The mountain is framed. I am not seeing the full picture or fully experiencing the mountain.