{"quotes":[{"text":"Genuinely intelligence-led operations have to be embedded into both processes and more importantly mindsets to bridge the gaps in Risk Management.","author":"Pearl Zhu","tags":["gaps","risk"],"id":3967,"author_id":"Pearl+Zhu"},{"text":"Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. \tYou are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. \t“He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","consciousness","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","enoughness","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","living-in-the-present-moment","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":16223,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"He slept under the sky, holding her hand, filling the gaps between her fingers and losing himself inside the soul in the course of counting the stars, she was hiding inside her eyes.","author":"Akshay Vasu","tags":["count","counting-stars","eyes","fingers","gaps","hand","hide","lose","sky","stars"],"id":28167,"author_id":"Akshay+Vasu"},{"text":"Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":32108,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what?\t I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. “For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,” says Ruysbroeck, “and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else.” But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred, it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn’t catch the consonant that shaped it into sense.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","consciousness","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","enoughness","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","living-in-the-present-moment","longing","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","ring-the-bells","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":51793,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings…They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn’t that have been a sight to see?","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","consciousness","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","enoughness","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","living-in-the-present-moment","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","ring-the-bells","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":85801,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"Don't fight your thoughts. Allow them to come, but don’t cling to them. The small gaps between thoughts create the power in meditation.","author":"Azim Jamal \u0026 Brian Tracy","tags":["allow","cling","gaps","meditation","power","small","thoughts"],"id":107574,"author_id":"Azim+Jamal+%26+Brian+Tracy"},{"text":"Historical gap is created due to missing written records.","author":"Lailah Gifty Akita","tags":["advice","archives","books","documentation","education","gaps","history","inspiring","missing","record-keeping","self-motivation","university","wisdom-of-lailah-gifty-akita","write","writing"],"id":142376,"author_id":"Lailah+Gifty+Akita"},{"text":"I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. \tI am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. I’ve learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. I’ve read books; I’ve gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…I would like to see it all, to understand it, but I must start somewhere, so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of three hundred redwings from an Osage orange and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems. \tSo I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one…The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","consciousness","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","enoughness","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","living-in-the-present-moment","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":159828,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.","author":"Sara Sheridan","tags":["blank","gaps","history","stories","storytelling","writing"],"id":162670,"author_id":"Sara+Sheridan"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":34,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}