A s those of you who have been with me awhile know, I enjoy Heron Dance and Rod MacIver. You can check it out at: www.herondance.org Here are some quotes from this issue. The Navaho word hozho , translated into English as “beauty,” also means harmony, wholeness, goodness. One story that suggests the dynamic way that beauty comes alive between us concerns a contemporary Navajo weaver. “A man ordered a rug of an especially complex pattern on two separate occasions from the same weaver. Both rugs came out perfectly and the weaver remarked to her brother that there must have been something special about the owner. It was understood that the outcome of the rugs was dependent not on the weaver’s skill and ability but upon the hozho in the owners life. The hozho of his life evoked the beauty in the rugs. In the Navaho world view, beauty exists not simply in the object, or in the artist who made the object; it is expressed in relationships. - J. Ruth Gendler, Notes on the Need for Beauty First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is. - Columnist David Brooks, New York Times , May 13, 2008 Our ancestral primate brains began to expand at an accelerating rate—two tablespoons of gray matter were added every 100,000 years. By the time the cerebral topping off had finished the human cortex had more than doubled in volume. Arguably, no organ in the history of life has evolved faster. Over the last 600,000 years, perhaps stimulated by dramatic fluctuations in global climate or by the need for still greater social cooperation, Homo sapiens’ brain size again almost doubled, from 835 grams to 1,460 grams. More important, by the end of the Neolithic era our ancestors could produce 2,000 centimeters of cutting edge out of a kilogram of stone. In short, brain size doubled, and tool-making efficiency grew 5,000 percent. From the scanty evidence available, however, it seemed that until very recently the evolution of human social organization lagged behind the evolution of tool making. - George E. Vaillant, from Spiritual Evolution, A Scientific Defense of Faith