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The low sandy beach and the thin scrub pine,
The wide reach of bay and the long sky line,—
O, I am far from home!

The salt, salt smell of the thick sea air,
And the smooth round stones that the ebbtides wear,—
When will the good ship come?

The wretched stumps all charred and burned,
And the deep soft rut where the cartwheel turned,—
Why is the world so old?

The lapping wave, and the broad gray sky
Where the cawing crows and the slow gulls fly,—
Where are the dead untold?

The thin, slant willows by the flooded bog,
The huge stranded hulk and the floating log,—
Sorrow with life began!

And among the dark pines, and along the flat shore,
O the wind, and the wind, for evermore!
What will become of man?

George Santayana - (1863 – 1952) ~ Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, was a philosopher, essayist, poet, critic and novelist. Born in Spain and raised and educated in the US from the age of eight. He left his position at Harvard at the age of 48 and returned to Europe permanently. Santayana was the author of many books and is popularly known for his aphorisms. He was profoundly influenced by Spinoza's life and thought. Although he was an atheist, he treasured the Spanish Catholic values, practices, and worldview in which he was raised.

By Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

No, Earth did not recently acquire six more moons! Today’s APOD is a combination of images following the Moon, Venus, and the Pleiades across a southern Sicilian sky as twilight turned to evening on April 19. From 2023 to 2029, the Pleiades' and the Moon “visit" each other once per month due to the Pleiades' location in the ecliptic plane. April 2026 saw the celestial alignment of their visit with Venus. About six stars in the Pleiades cluster (Messier 45) are typically visible with the unaided eye. Due to the cluster’s visibility across the world, there are many myths and legends across cultures associated with the Pleiades. The Haudenosaunee people of North America, for example, say that seven boys danced so enthusiastically that they lifted off into the sky. Astronomers recently found thousands more Pleiades members, showing that after thousands of years of gazing upon this cluster, there is yet more to learn about the Pleiades.

Photo by Gianni Tumino Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II)

Golden jackal (Canis aureus) in azureum flowers (Jim Corbett National Park, India).

Giles Laurent, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

By Stefan Mächler on Unsplash

Photo taken near Valley of Fire State Park, United States. Captured with Canon EOS 6D.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

They're like mountain peaks, but they are forming stars. Bright-rimmed, flowing shapes gather near the center of this rich starfield toward the borders of the nautical southern constellations Puppis and Vela. Composed of interstellar gas and dust, the grouping of light-year sized cometary globules is about 1300 light-years distant. Energetic ultraviolet light from nearby hot stars has molded the globules and ionized their bright rims. The globules also stream away from the Vela supernova remnant which may have influenced their swept-back shapes. Within them, cores of cold gas and dust are likely collapsing to form low mass stars whose formation will ultimately cause the globules to disperse. In fact, cometary globule CG 30 (upper right in the group) sports a small reddish glow inside its head, a telltale sign of energetic jets from a star in the early stages of formation.

Photo by Marcelo Salemme

Pilot boat outside Öja island (Landsort), Stockholm Archipelago's most southern point.

Arild Vågen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.