Feel the heat!

- July marked Earth's warmest month ever recorded since record-keeping began in 1880, NOAA says, and 2015 appears certain to become the warmest year on record

Nagasaki

Hiroshima
Photograph courtesy U.S. National Archives
On August 9, 1945, an American warplane dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing 74,000 people. 

Ideas from Palmer

Be reckless when it comes to affairs of the heart.

[...]

What I really mean ... is be passionate, fall madly in love with life. Be passionate about some part of the natural and/or human worlds and take risks on its behalf, no matter how vulnerable they make you. No one ever died saying, “I’m sure glad for the self-centered, self-serving and self-protective life I lived.”

Offer yourself to the world – your energies, your gifts, your visions, your heart – with open-hearted generosity. But understand that when you live that way you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail.

To grow in love and service, you – I, all of us – must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success... Clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life. So, cultivate beginner’s mind, walk straight into your not-knowing, and take the risk of failing and falling again and again, then getting up again and again to learn – that’s the path to a life lived large, in service of love, truth, and justice.

Refugees at sea

Aegean Sea

Photo by Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

A dinghy overcrowded with Syrian refugees drifts in the Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece after its motor broke down off the Greek island of Kos, on Aug. 11, 2015.