Visitors

Hey, I'm sorry it took so long to reply to Michele's question about visiting in Germany. We still don't know much about arrival dates in Germany because there is a holdup with my paperwork. Our best guess is that we will arrive in early July and stay on the base in temporary military housing (much like a tiny furnished apartment). Our belongings should arrive by August 20 or so. We should have found a house or large apartment off base by then. The base has a "lending closet" of stuff for us to use until our own stuff arrives. So, let's say Sept. 1 would be a good time to start having folks stay with us, unless you want to get involved with helping us decide what goes where in the house. I hate that part and welcome the help of someone who can visualize how to put a room together. Patrick hates that part because many things go many places until I make up my mind.
And now for something completely different.....Clare only got to go swimming once before the weather got yucky again and it's driving her nuts. Too cute!

Mexican NASA

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - They may be light years
away from fulfilling their dream, but Mexican lawmakers are
preparing to launch a national space agency they hope could one
day stand tall beside the United States' NASA.
Mexico's lower house passed a law on Wednesday, which if
approved by the upper chamber, would create a space agency to
coordinate research and work with universities and the private
sector to launch communication and weather satellites.
With an initial budget proposal of less than $2 million,
the backers of the Mexican Space Agency say it would struggle
to challenge its northern neighbor's National Aeronautics and
Space Administration, or NASA, but hope it would draw Mexico
into the international space community, bringing access to
cutting-edge technology and research.
"We'd love it to become the Mexican NASA, but obviously the
levels of investment are incomparable. It's very distant,
perhaps not in the vision but in resources," a spokesman for
the Mexican Congress's Science and Technology Commission, which
drew up the law, said Thursday.
The spokesman said the agency would help Mexico advance in
diverse fields of science and technology, including robotics,
electronics and telecommunications.
The commission hopes the law will be swiftly passed in the
Senate, allowing the agency to start operating next year.
However, not all politicians support the plan. The ruling
National Action Party, which has a minority in Congress, voted
against the initiative, saying the money would be better spent
on eradicating widespread poverty.

We are going to a wedding tomorrow (actually, it is a "pagan hand-fasting"), and the couple plans to read this passage. I was writing to someone about friendship when I saw this, and it seemed to me that it applies in some sense even to friends (although I'm not sure about the "gathering honey" part...).

Passage adapted from "Letters to a Young Poet"
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and caress and salute each other.

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of their solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both of their fullest freedom and development.

But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and before an immense sky.

When we love, we must not forget that we are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love -- we must learn love, and that (like all learning) takes calm, patience, and composure.

To take love seriously and to bear it and to learn it like a task, this it is what young people need. Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work. So whoever loves must try to act as if they had a great work to accomplish: they must be much alone and go into themselves and gather and concentrate themselves; they must work, must become something.

For the more we are, the richer is everything that we experience. And whoever wants to have a deep love must collect and save for it and gather honey.