great conjunction crescent

 

An individual's striving to become whole, access one's core, is yoga or integration.

Kshema is myriad expressions of one's core, in the world - differential benefic manifestations.   

Once, an industrialist wanted me, to visit his home. 

He drove me in his expensive car, as we surveyed his sprawling estate; and arrived at his tucked away villa. 

A uniformed guard greeted us, opened gates. The driveway snaked through well kept gardens -  a gardener tended in the sunshine. We cruised into a plush portico paved with Italian marble. His wife hurried out to greet us, with billowing, blown hair.

The man turned to me, said apologetically, "What to do Swamiji; my prarabdha."

- Swami Chinmayananda

Great Green Wall

 !5 kilometer wide Great Green Wall project of the African Union, stretches from Atlantic Senegal to Red Sea Eritrea for 7,775 kilometers.

Billions of trees to be planted as buffer by 2030 to counter Sahara's southern spread. 

It is expected to restore 100 million acres of fertile land, cut 250 million tons of atmospheric Co2 and create 10 million green jobs. . 

Ethiopia has made great progress since 2007. But the initiative has reached only 15% of it's targets, in a decade - according to the United Nations.  

Green belt project -  DW television.

Wirus - the other side

Human DNA has a fair amount of wiral ancestry.

Human genome has about 100, 000 known fragments of wiral genetic material - about 8%.

Ancient wiruses that housed into our DNA, millions of years ago, may be our puppetmasters.

"We are creatures controlled by wiruses,"  says Luis Villarreal, evolution scientist, University of California. His team showed that a viral gene is needed for formation of placenta.

"Genes borrowed from viruses give cells ability to grow into tissues and organs. Without these, animal life may have remained, to blobs of cells," says another New Scientist article.

Jan Carette, a Stanford virologist says, "We would not exist without viruses."

Humans may not have existed without viruses 
- Times of India,      April 21, 2020

return of Caryatid

Greece's President Prokopis Pavlopoulos has called for UK to return a set of classical sculptures.

Polling conducted in 2014 suggested that the British public mostly back the marbles' return or are largely ambivalent.

YouGov found

37%  think statues must go back to Greece.
32% did not mind it either way.
23% said they should remain in Britain.
7%  said they did not know.

 - Greece demands return of Parthenon  marbles 

Democracy and Freedom

Hong Kong activists have been pulled into the debate, with Joshua Wong urging the zoo to call the cubs, Democracy and Freedom.

- The Guardian 

A trillion trees ?

Sunlight, shadows, black bitumen roads

Shaded arbors, canopied groves

Walker-by walker-by walk attentively

There lies on your path

A fallen yellow leaf

Rahu @ Gemini

Before Christianity, a Gallo-Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter stood at the site of Notre-Dame. Evidence for this is the Pillar of the Boatmen, discovered in 1710.
Four churches succeeded the Roman temple, before Notre-Dame.

The twin towers are 226 feet high, and were tallest structure in Paris, until the Eiffel Tower.

- Wikipedia