I am in Ottawa this weekend doing a little business. At the moment I am sitting in a cafe, drinking coffee and waiting for my friend to pick me up and take me to a place where we are going to play music.
I lived here between 1991 and 1994, during three incredibly rich years of learning. At the time I was working for a national Aboriginal organization, the National Association of Friendship Centres, but I was also doing a lot of reading and writing, and was a little active in the Ottawa literary scene as an associate editor of ARC magazine for a couple of issues.
That was a vibrant time in my life, as it occupied the years between leaving university and settling down to start a family. My journals from the time reflect a mind trying to come to grips with literary conventions, ideas for poems, chunks of text for an experimental novel I was writing and thoughts on organization, process and music.
One of the things I remember about Ottawa, and it was confirmed for me on this trip again, was the lively cafe and pub culture. There are pubs everywhere, little neighbourhood watering holes and places for people to gather and talk. And cafe talk is absoutely unique here, not simply because it is peppered with government jargon and Ottawa insider gossip. It is unique especially because it is largely bilingual. It is very common when eavesdropping on Ottawa conversation to hear people speaking French to one another until they come to a word that makes more sense in English, at which point the conversation switches seamlessly into English. If they come to a hplace where a French word is more a propos, alors ils reviennent au Fran�ais encore. Il m’a toujours stup�fi�…
Sitting meditation resources:
- Meditation Handbook approaches (and a lot of other stuff)
- Shinay Tibetan practice
- C’han sitting practice
- Jack Kornfeld sitting meditation
- Won Buddhism sitting practice
- Zazen practice
- Thich Nhat Hanh sitting meditation
- Comparison of Christian and Zen sitting practice
- Four sitting practices
- Tonglen practice while sitting
The other day I blogged that the Hubble photo was a glimpse into the suburbs of the universe. Of course this isn’t true at all. In fact we live on the edge of the universe. Every moment, as the universe keeps expanding, we get further and futher away from the Big Bang. So any photograph that sees 12 billion years into the past is actually looking towards the centre of the universe, or downtown.
In 1964, the echoes of the bigbang were discovered. The entire universe is bathed in cosmic background radiation which is essentially the sound of the Big Bang cooking everything up. If we look far enough back we see nothing but smooth energy. The above photo is a representation of this, except that it gives the impression that the cosmic background radiation is OUTSIDE of us, as if we live in a fishbowl universe, floating around. In reality our universe is more like a balloon, being inflated. We are on the outside of the balloon getting further and further away from everything. So the background radiation is in our past, in the direction from which we have come.
In other words, welcome to the suburbs folks.
More from the deep dark suburbs of the universe…
A massive cluster of yellowish galaxies, seemingly caught in a red and blue spider web of eerily distorted background galaxies, makes for a spellbinding picture from the new Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. To make this unprecedented image of the cosmos, Hubble peered straight through the center of one of the most massive galaxy clusters known, called Abell 1689. The gravity of the cluster’s trillion stars � plus dark matter � acts as a 2-million-light-year-wide “lens” in space. This “gravitational lens” bends and magnifies the light of the galaxies located far behind it. Some of the faintest objects in the picture are probably over 13 billion light-years away (redshift value 6).
Though gravitational lensing has been studied previously by Hubble and ground-based telescopes, this phenomenon has never been seen before in such detail. The ACS picture reveals 10 times more arcs than would be seen by a ground-based telescope. The ACS is 5 times more sensitive and provides pictures that are twice as sharp as the previous work-horse Hubble cameras. So it can see the very faintest arcs with greater clarity. The picture presents an immense jigsaw puzzle for Hubble astronomers to spend months untangling. Interspersed with the foreground cluster are thousands of galaxies, which are lensed images of the galaxies in the background universe. Detailed analysis of the images promises to shed light on galaxy evolution, the curvature of space, and the mystery of dark matter. The picture is an exquisite demonstration of Albert Einstein’s prediction that gravity warps space and distorts beams of light.
From hubblesite.org