Tag: Embroidery
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Norwegian Wood
Among all of the Beatles’ ballads that I listened to in my youth, Norwegian Wood stood out for its romantic tune and peculiar title. I didn’t understand English as well then, but a read of this song’s lyrics is anything but. As the authors had clarified straightaway, it was about an affair gone awry. As…
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The Snow-Queen
“Except ye become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of God.”– Matthew 18:3 When I was a child, I knew of Finland as the garden of the Snow-Queen. In Hans Christian Andersen’s story, a little girl named Gerda rode a reindeer, passing Lapland to reach Finland in order to…
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The Birch Tree
At Loschwitz above the cityThe air is sunny and chill;The birch-trees and the pine-treesGrow thick upon the hill. Lone and tall, with silver stem,A birch-tree stands apart;The passionate wind of spring-timeStirs in its leafy heart. I lean against the birch-tree,My arms around it twine;It pulses, and leaps, and quivers,Like a human heart to mine. One…
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Neptune
The planet Neptune is the farthest planet orbiting the Sun and is invisible to the naked eye. In 1613, Galileo Galilei had mapped the planet with his telescope, but he mistakenly perceived it as a star, even though he appeared to observe that it had moved relative to other fixed stars. Rather it was unexpected…
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Jupiter
In 1307, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri wrote The Convivio, a sort of encyclopedia of general knowledge of his time. In its second volume he paid tribute to his lifelong muse Beatrice Portinari, who lived “in heaven with the angels and on earth with [his] soul.” Proceeding to discuss the heavens, Dante allegorized them to…
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Mars
The planet Mars, also known as the Red Planet, is named after the Roman god of war. The association between Mars and war goes back to the Babylonian civilization, in which the planet was known as Nergal, the deity of death, fire, and destruction. Anthropologists disagree upon whether warfare was common throughout human history, but…
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The Moon
While the global calendar in use for official activities is the solar calendar, which keeps track of the Sun’s position relative to the stars, many parts of the world also maintain another calendar, which keeps track of the Moon’s phases. The moon makes a complete orbit around the earth in 28 days, but it takes…
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Diamond
As the hardest substance on earth, diamond has come to embody resilience and toughness. The name diamond derives from “adámas,” the ancient Greek word to mean unbreakable. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote that “the hardness of adámas is indescribable, and so too that property whereby it conquers fire and never becomes heated. Hence…
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Rose Quartz
My grandma spent her career as a pharmacist. When we think of a pharmacist, we visualize someone managing a pharmacy at the back of a supermarket, dispensing prescripted medicines to patients. Among career-minded folks, it’s seen as a boring, but stable job, with a stable income. But that’s not how it was for my grandma. …
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Jade
The Tang Dynasty, which ruled China until the 10th century, marked a high point in Chinese civilization, entering China into a golden age of cosmopolitan culture, new technologies, and a flourishing economy. Their territory reached far and wide, with the southern border reaching past An Nam territory, now Việt Nam. Under the Tang, An Nam…
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