...the best comes from them

"Above all, don't fear difficult moments," she said. "The best comes from them."





ROME – Rita Levi Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, said Saturday that even though she is about to turn 100, her mind is sharper than it was she when she was 20.

Levi Montalcini, who also serves as a senator for life in Italy, celebrates her 100th birthday on Wednesday, and she spoke at a ceremony held in her honor by the European Brain Research Institute.

She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine with American Stanley Cohen for discovering mechanisms that regulate the growth of cells and organs.

"At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20," she told the party, complete with a large cake for her.

The Turin-born Levi Montalcini recounted how the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s under Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime forced her to quit university and do research in an improvised laboratory in her bedroom at home.

"Above all, don't fear difficult moments," she said. "The best comes from them."

"I should thank Mussolini for having declared me to be of an inferior race. This led me to the joy of working, not any more unfortunately, in university institutes but in a bedroom," the scientist said.

Her white hair elegantly coifed and wearing a smart navy blue suit, she raised a glass of sparkling wine in a toast to her long life.




Sharper at 100 than at 20, that's unusual, but I don't think it should be. What a great lady.

I'm sure we all have come to fear and despair when the moment is difficult, but this is where we can bring out the best... Or the worst, I think the choice is ours!

March Challenge

MIND
Finish reading:
Coyote's Guide to Mentoring(3 chapters left),
Guide to Connecting with Nature(2 exercises left)
Paleo Diet (still on chapter 2)
Red Cell (not started)
Added books


Fablehaven 1-3,
39 clues 1-3,
Ranger's Apprentice 6,
Um (4 chapters)
Mycellium Running (5 chapters)
Energy Work (2 Chapters)
Septimus Heap Book 1
The Last Apprentice(whole book)
Chi Running (whole book)
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (Reread book, have redone 5 exercises)




BODY
Continue to progress with Crossfit. (Have misses 3 workouts, all weekends)
Implement either Paleo or Zone diet.(Zoneish eating for solid 3months 80% compliance, 20% effect from delicious cakes and cookies)
Progress with Parkour basic move training - (no additional training outside of crossfit)
Progess with internal Hung Guar training, from 5 Animals 5 Elements to Hase Fu (sp?) & Iron Wire (5 Animals 5 Elements form has transitioned to ligament and structural changes to my movements, greater efficiency and sensitivity to others movement)

SPIRIT
Thanksgiving Address (every morning from Dec-present, when time crunched-performed on ride to work)
Spirit Plate - implement at every meal (only when eating alone- averaging a little over one meal a day, sometimes I get in two)
Sacred Songs, Hymms, Poems etc - research more into this fascinating and culturally diverse field. Particular attention will be paid to the Native American, Celtic, and Phillipines.(no work in this area)
Religions (read some web sites and wiki info in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam- just general info)


Overall there's good reason for celebration! Everyone's really making great strides and more often than not we've all bit off more than we can chew. Certainly the physical accomplishments have been the most highlighted, but that's no small victory, and in truth all things are connected.

I've been given great mentors, friends and family. The gods have been very kind and the journey has been a great adventure so far. I've toiled and learned much, but much still remains to be done.
From my heart, mind, body, soul, and spirit I give thanks to everyone and look forward to the rest of our journey.

Peace

Leap to Track. Rescue Man. Clamber Up. Catch a Train.

Chad Lindsey, 33, near the subway tracks where he lifted an injured man to safety as a train approached on Monday. Then he went on his way.


March 18, 2009
Leap to Track. Rescue Man. Clamber Up. Catch a Train.
By MICHAEL WILSON
Subway heroes, as they are inevitably tagged even before the grease from the tracks is rubbed off, come along every now and then — indeed, as the story of Chad Lindsey suggests, perhaps more often than we know.

Minutes after rescuing a man who had fallen onto the subway tracks at the Penn Station stop on Monday, Mr. Lindsey managed to melt back into the anonymity of the city, escaping the notice of the police, paramedics and subway workers.

“I’m of many minds of being in the spotlight,” he said after a call from this reporter, whose short account of the accident on The New York Times’s City Room blog on Monday prompted one of Mr. Lindsey’s friends to disclose his identity on Tuesday. “But what the hey,” he said.

Mr. Lindsey, 33, is from Harbor Springs, Mich. He moved to New York City three years ago and settled in Woodside, Queens.

He can take it from there:

“I was waiting for the C,” he said from his office on West 30th Street, where he works as a proofreader. “I’m an actor — shocker.”

He said almost everyone seems to be an aspiring actor nowadays, but in this case, it is a critical point to the story: Mr. Lindsey currently appears in an Off Broadway show called “Kasper Hauser,” in a role that requires him to repeatedly lift a character who cannot walk.

On Monday, as he waited for the train, about 2:30 p.m., he was thinking ahead to the reading he was heading to. “I’m kind of zoned out, and I saw this guy come too quickly to the edge,” he said. “He stopped and kind of reeled around. I felt bad, because I couldn’t get close enough to grab his coat. He fell, and immediately hit his head on the rail and passed out.”

Mr. Lindsey said he sensed a train was approaching, because the platform was crowded. “I dropped my bag and jumped down there. I tried to wake him up,” he said. “He probably had a massive concussion at that point. I jumped down there and he just wouldn’t wake up, and he was bleeding all over the place.”

He looked back up at the people on the platform. “I yelled, ‘Contact the station agent and call the police!’ which I think is hilarious because I don’t think I ever said ‘station agent’ before in my life. What am I, on ‘24’?”

The man wouldn’t wake up, he said. “He was hunched over on his front. I grabbed him from behind, like under the armpits, and kind of got him over to the platform. It wasn’t very elegant. I just hoisted him up so his belly was on the platform. It’s kind of higher than you think it is.”

He stole a glance toward the dark subway tunnel that was becoming ominously less dark, with the glow on the tracks, familiar to all New Yorkers, signaling an approaching train.

“I couldn’t see the train coming, but I could see the light on the tracks, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to get out of this hole.’ ”

He remembered the subway hero of 2007, Wesley Autrey, who jumped on top of a man who was having a seizure on the tracks and held him down in the shallow trench between the rails as the subway passed over them. “I was like, ‘I am not doing that. We’ve got to get out of here.’ ”

People on the platform joined the effort. “Someone pulled him out, and I just jumped up out of there,” he said. With time to spare: “The train didn’t come for another 10 or 15 seconds or something.”

The man lay bleeding on the platform, and the police arrived. Mr. Lindsey soon got on another train. A large group of riders who had been on the platform entered the subway car with him, smiling and clapping him on the back and saying thank you.

“Then I sort of freaked out, and I was nervous and shaky. These five women opened their purses and gave me Handi-Wipes. I was covered in blood and dirt from the subway tracks.”

The fallen man was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan and was later released.

The police identified him late Tuesday afternoon as Theodore Larson, 60, of the Bronx.

Mr. Lindsey, of course, never learned the man’s name. His story told, he said goodbye, adding, “It was quite a New York day.”

Al Baker and Trymaine Lee contributed reporting.

Save the Earth, One step at a time

I you your not familiar with the planetwalker, John Francis, then I highly recommend learning about him.
I must say that I was deeply humbled by his talk (see link below) not only for his accomplishments, but family, friends, and even strangers that helped him along the way. It's given me pause many times over the past few weeks to relearn how to listen (or maybe even learn to listen for the first time). And discover what my own prisons might be. As a tracker, its clear that all of our footsteps make an impact, its that impact that they make is what's important. I need to take a closer look at my tracks...


For almost three decades, John Francis has been a planetwalker, traveling the globe by foot and sail with a message of environmental respect and responsibility (for 17 of those years without speaking). A funny, thoughtful talk with occasional banjo.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/john_francis_walks_the_earth.html

The Unlikely Scrum

If you want to know what sports is all about(or should be), check out the Hyde School Rugby Club.

FOX sports -

http://multimedia.foxsports.com/m/video/21892456/hyde_rugby_a_new_world.htm


NY Time piece (article and video)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/sports/othersports/15rugby.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1226763258-kwuNRQolk0Q0wLYwulehkQ

WASHINGTON — The rugby practice field at Hyde Leadership Public Charter School bears little resemblance to the manicured lawns of the English boarding school where the sport was born. It is more brown than green, and sirens sometimes drown out the shouts of players. Then there are the occasional interruptions, like when play was briefly halted during a recent practice as a man darted about wildly on a nearby street, calling football plays and evading imaginary tacklers.

But this patch of mud and grass is more than the home of what is believed to be the nation’s first all-African-American high school rugby team. It is also where a growing number of students have been exposed to a sport they once knew nothing about and to parts of society that once seemed closed to them....

Creating Moments

Now I see the secret of the making of the best person. It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth.
-Walt Whitman





There is a great little workbook called CONNECTING WITH NATURE - Creating Moments That Let the Earth Teach - by Michael J. Cohen. I picked up a copy off of Amazon.com after reading about it in Coyote's Guide to Mentoring. It's an excellent scientific approach to reconnecting with nature. The exercises are quick, simple, and fun. If nothing else, the listing of 53 senses was worth the price (I got mine for $8 a few months back.) If you've been taught, like I was, that there are only 5 senses, then pages 8-9 can really open up a new field of experience for you.


"The original sin is to limit the desire to be. Don't"
-Unknown

The Cahills are the most powerful family the world has ever known. 39 Clues hidden around the world guard the family's power, and it's up to YOU to find them. It's Cahill versus Cahill in a worldwide race to find the Clues . . . and beat the competition.

To find the 39 Clues:

Read the Books – Each 39 Clues book unlocks one Clue.

Collect the Cards – Game cards help reveal Clues.

Play the Game – Find Clues through online missions.

Win the Prizes – Play and you could be eligible to win prizes!

I'll admit, I'm a huge fan of children's books, ever since I was a child. I love the use of history, mystery, and the internet. Join in! Perhaps we can form an alliance?

Just remember, Trust No One....