I can feel the ghost particles moving through me since I read a piece in Live Science yesterday. An estimated 100 trillion neutrinos—known as “ghost particles”—pass through your body every second. This information escapes my capacity to understand it. Neutrinos are nearly massless, electrically neutral subatomic particles produced by nuclear activity—most of the ones passing through us come from the fusion powering the sun. They are called ghosts because they almost never interact with ordinary matter: they pass through your body, and even through the Earth, as though neither were there. Perhaps only one will interact with an atom in your body during your entire lifetime.
This morning has a lot of faces. At six it looks like the fires of Mordor are burning but by 7:30 there’s mist in the valley. No deer today.
My mother-in-law told me that at church yesterday they were talking about Dolly Parton. Dolly grew up in the adjacent county. A little more than a half hour from where the church was in which she was being discussed. After the readings the kids gather on the steps of the altar. “A very famous East Tennessee lady named Dolly Parton died,” started the spiritual teacher who has the delicate job of talking to the kids in front of a congregation of adults. “People of your generation know her as the book lady,” she explained, locating the subject of her talk: Parton’s sweeping generosity. A few more sentences joined the world and then a child reached for the microphone to interrupt. “Not only was she generous,” said the young girl, clear and loud, “but she thought that being a billionaire was an actual failure.”
Nice work Dolly.
