Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? And what does it matter when light enters the room where a child sleeps and the waking mother, opening her eyes, wishes more than anything to be unwakened by what she cannot name?
— Mark Strand, from “No Words Can Describe It” (via awritersruminations)
The government is cutting music programmes in schools and slashing Arts grants as gleefully as a morbidly American kid in Baskin Robbins. So if only to stick it to the man, isn’t it worth fighting back in some small way? So write your damn book. Learn a Chopin prelude, get all Jackson Pollock with the kids, spend a few hours writing a Haiku. Do it because it counts even without the fanfare, the money, the fame… .
— Concert pianist James Rhodes articulates the urgency of finding your purpose and doing what you love. As a wise woman eloquently put it, “Start with a big, fat lump in your throat, start with a profound sense of wrong, a deep homesickness, or a crazy lovesickness, and run with it.” (via explore-blog)
“Do it because it counts…” “Start with a lump in your throat…and go from there.”
The way we try to recruit girls into STEM fields is all wrong. We typically compare them to some great woman or someone that has gone before them. We are saying, “Hey, you can be like Madam Curie or Sally Ride.” It is recruiting by intimidation. We need to change that message. We need to recruit by appealing to WHY we need them in STEM. We NEED you to help make the world a better place We NEED you to help discover the cure for cancer. We NEED you because you have the ability to change the course of humanity for the better.
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Tim Holt on why we still see the number of females in STEM fields fall way behind their male counterparts. Also see how geography paved the way for women in science.

