Harvard’s Glass Flowers

  • Post published:02/19/2011
  • Post comments:4 Comments

While the northeast is blanketed in snow and ice, even in Cambridge, Massachusetts, amazing flowers made of glass are blooming at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. In a darkened room on the third floor of the museum, glass cases sparkle, carefully lit to best show off grasses with their seed heads, delicate wildflowers, cocao plant and seed, one of the economically important plants on display, and more familiar flowers like rhododendron, mountain laurel, iris and dahlia. Each…

A Year of Compassion

  • Post published:12/30/2009
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When we were living in China we were once taken to a temple where we saw a small statue of Guan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion, with her thousand hands, each of which has an eye in the palm. I thought this was a grotesque image until someone explained that it was a metaphor for her compassion. It is said that Guan Yin has a thousand eyes to see the troubles of the world and a thousand hands…