One Hundred Pages on Wizzley: Enjoy the Journey Because the Destination Approaches Anyway

Thanks to the gravitational pull of this watery planet, my feet have been planted, firmly and gracefully, on a shifting landscape of land and water.

This firm anchorage has afforded me the leisure of appreciating and participating in an inspirational vista: that of nature's infinite and intricate grandeur.

Among the many artistic, literary, scientific, and spiritual sources that have guided me in my enjoyment and understanding of nature, two twentieth century thinkers in particular have encouraged my pilgrimage through the natural world by way of their compelling writing:

• Boris Pasternak (February 10, 1890 - May 30, 1960) and

• Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 - April 18, 1955).

Smuggled out of the former Soviet Union in 1957, Doctor Zhivago was first published in Milan, Italy. The next year, on October 23, 1958, the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to the historical, romantic epic's author, Boris Pasternak, in recognition of his dual achievements as a contemporary lyrical poet and as a writer in the "great Russian epic tradition."

In the sweeping tale of Russia in the first half of the twentieth century, Boris poetically yet succinctly nuances the charismatic idealism of Lara Guichard, one of the main trio in Doctor Zhivago, through her rapport with nature:

"For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment, and to call each thing by its right name. By its right name."

Widely recognized as a genius in his lifetime, physicist and violinist Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. Forty-four years after his death, his still familiar image closed the twentieth century by gracing the December 31, 1999, cover of Time magazine as "Person of the Century."

Through interviews and writings, Albert imparted a sense of awe at and oneness with the natural world. In a tributary biography which aired in 1991 on A&E Network (Arts and Entertainment), Hanna Loewy Kahler (September 20, 1925 – March 31, 2007), stepdaughter of Albert's colleague and friend at Princeton University, Erich von Kahler (October 14, 1885 – June 28, 1970), recalled Albert's comforting words to his stepdaughter Margot Lowenthal Einstein (December 3, 1899 - July 8, 1986) after the death of his sister Maria "Maja" Einstein Winteler (November 18, 1881 - 1951):

"Look deep, deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better."

I have been so busy interspersing pages on ringtails, my favorite fauna, with film summary tributes to actress-diplomat Shirley Temple Black (April 23, 1928 – February 10, 2014) that I was not noticing the tally of published articles.

Fortunately, Mira visited my writeup of "The Little Princess," one of Shirley's better-known films from her tween years, noticed the milestone of 100 on my profile page, and left a congratulatory comment.

Although I joined Wizzley over a year ago, I did not start publishing until the end of September last year, 2013. Five months have passed, and I am happy to see that now my profile page, as I scroll down the screen, features several "more" tabs to replenish my growing portfolio.

Would I have guessed back in September 2013 that the honor of being crowned as page 100 would fall to a Shirley Temple tribute?

No, because back in the autumn I thought that I had plenty of time to profile Shirley's films. I had no way of knowing then that Shirley would quietly make her final bow, at the elegant age of 85, on February 10, 2014, two months two weeks and two days shy of her 86th birthday.

If I had given a thought to the topic of my hundredth page on Wizzley, I probably would have pondered with a blend of bemusement and bewilderment the perfect process by which I could single out one natural science illustrator or one butterfly or one ringtail or one rose for the honor of lucky 100.

All in all, though, "The Little Princess" fits well into its milestone status.

In the process of attaining this first milestone, my creative flint was sparked through weaving my interests into symbolic nests and anchoring them with careful links to Amazon and AllPosters.com. Of special relevance for my nature topics are Amazon's large collection of photo jigsaw puzzles, which offer the double charm of being educational as well as entertaining.

To demarcate the end of my articles from Amazon and AllPosters.com capsules, I selected the public domain image with the tags "Farmer Animals Camp Camping Dividers Horses" from among the 27 images responding to my search term, "dividers," on Pixabay.

That image by OpenClips appears on all of my pages on Wizzley. I entitled it as "the end which is also the beginning" because farming and ranching are locked into a never-ending cycle, with the close of one day's chores leading into the dawning of the next day's activities.

The appreciation of nature and the pursuit of knowledge also offer never-ending cycles. Thus, the ending of one article on Wizzley promises the beginning of another, and so forth, and so on.

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli (land surface, shallow water, clouds); enhancements by Robert Simmon (ocean color, compositing, 3D globes, animation)
source: NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), onboard the Terra satellite; data acquired Feb. 8, 2002: NASA Visible Earth, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Earth_Western_Hemisphere.jpg; via NASA Visible Earth @ https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/images/57723/the-blue-marble

"Screenshot from a public domain film The Little Princess (1939) starring Shirley Temple and Richard Greene.": Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Little_Princess_4.JPG