Crop circles seen from space

Pl click the above link and read the story as appeared in http://www.earthsky.org

Natarajan

Source…. http://www.eartrhsky.org

Source: http://media.radiosai.org

When the mirror of the mind is soiled, it cannot perceive anything in its true state. This is the reason why man is unable to recognise his own true nature. Hence it is necessary to cleanse the mirror of impurities on it. How is this to be done? By regulating one’s food and recreational habits. It is important to ensure that the food that is eaten is obtained by righteous means. Many of the ills which people suffer today are due to the fact that the things they consume have been got by unrighteous means. So to purify your mind the first prerequisite is pure food. But it may not always be possible to ensure purity in every meal, in every respect and at all times. To overcome this difficulty, make an offering of your meal to God and accept it as a gift from God. Before eating, when food is offered to God, it becomes Prasada(gift from God). All impurities in the food are thereby removed. This helps the process of cleansing the mind. This practice must be kept up continuously.

The 1930s were some of the driest years in American history. Eight long years of drought, preceded by inappropriate cultivation technique, and the financial crises of the Great Depression forced many farmers off the land abandoning their fields throughout the Great Plains that run across the heart of mainland United States. When the high winds came, it lifted the topsoil from barren lands and carried them in large choking clouds of dust for thousands of miles. Many dust storms started around the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and touched adjacent sections of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. But eventually the entire country was affected forcing tens of thousands of families to abandon their farms and migrate in search for work and better living conditions.

The early European explorers thought the Great Plains was unsuitable for agriculture. The land is semi-arid and is prone to extended drought, alternating with periods of unusual wetness. But the federal government was eager to see the land settled and cultivated. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, a series of federal land acts were passed granting settlers hundreds of acres of land. These acts led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Great Plains.

A stretch of unusually wet weather in the beginning of the 20th century confirmed the belief that the Plains could be tamed after all, leading to increased settlement and cultivation. Farmers ploughed through the land eliminating the native grasses that held the fine soil in place. When crops began to fail with the onset of drought in 1930, the bare soil became exposed to the wind, and it began to blow away in massive dust storms that blackened the sky.

These choking billows of dust, named “black blizzards”, traveled across the country, reaching as far as the East Coast and striking such cities as New York City and Washington, D.C.

“The impact is like a shovelful of fine sand flung against the face,” Avis D. Carlson wrote in a New Republic article. “People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk… We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions. It is becoming Real.”

The term “dust bowl” was coined by Edward Stanley, Kansas City news editor of the Associated Press. Originally it referred to the geographical area affected by the dust, but today the entire event is referred to as the Dust Bowl.

After the winds passed and the dust settled, President Franklin Roosevelt initiated a huge project to plant hundreds of millions of trees across the Great Plains to create a giant windbreak. Known as a shelterbelt, it consisted of 220 million trees stretching in a 100-mile wide zone from Canada to northern Texas, to protect the land from wind erosion. The shelterbelt wasn’t a continuous wall of trees, but rather short stretches protecting individual farmlands. By 1942, there was more than thirty thousand shelterbelts across the Plains. To this day it remains the largest and most-focused effort of the US government to address an environmental problem.

Now many of the shelterbelts are either gone or no longer provide the benefits that they used to. The trees that were once essential have now become a burden to the farmers whose focus is now to put more land into production. Some fear that the loss of these trees might lead to another crippling dust storm in the future.

A dust storm approaches Stratford, Texas, in 1935. Photo credit: George E. Marsh 

Source…Kaushik in http://www.amusingplanet.com

Natarajan

Pl click the link below to read the story as appeared in http://www.earthsky.org

Natarajan

Giant iceberg on the move

Source….www.earthsky.org

Source: http://media.radiosai.org

Source: http://media.radiosai.org

The supreme Shakti manifests herself in the form of Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati. Durga grants us energy – physical, mental and spiritual. Lakshmi bestows on us wealth of many kinds, not just money but intellectual wealth, the wealth of character, the wealth of health and so on. She grants untold riches to us. And Saraswati bestows on us intelligence, the capacity for intellectual enquiry and the power of discrimination. Your own mother is the combination of all these Divine beings. The life of a person who cannot respect and love one’s own venerable mother is utterly useless. Your mother provides you with energy, wealth and intelligence. She constantly desires our advancement in life. So she represents all the three goddesses that we worship during the Navaratri festival. Recognising your mother as the very embodiment of all divine forces, show reverence to her and treat her with love. This is the true message of Navaratri.

Source: http://media.radiosai.org/

Pray intensely and with faith. Then, Grace will be showered on you. When your heart is soaked in Love, it cannot be contaminated by egoism and its evil consequences. Just as you crave for physical health, which means health for the limbs of the body, you should strive for the health of humanity, which means peace and joy for all sections of society in all nations. If you dwell in that wider outlook, you will start feeling less and less for your own troubles and worrying more and more about the troubles of others. That is the initial offering of yourself in the great ‘yajna’ (ritual sacrifice) called ‘living.’ You should merge your welfare with the welfare of the world. How can you be happy when your neighbour is in misery? Therefore I call upon you to give up praying for your own advancement; pray for the peace, prosperity and happiness of all humanity, irrespective of clime or colour.

See it! Young moon and Jupiter

Pl click the above link and read this story as appeared in http://www.earthsky.org

Natarajan