As with many of my friends and music fans, I have long been interested in finding, discovering, or inventing various ways to make sense of it all – this life, this existence – “all and everything”, so to speak. However, I am not a professional philosopher, by any stretch of the imagination. My real calling, in a focused way, has for decades been more about setting up conditions conducive to “hearing” and “feeling” rather than about “knowing”. Although I am strangely intrigued by contemporary hard science developments – in such areas as astrophysics and bio-mimicry (this is a really promising area of study – learning from Nature, herself), I am more essentially interested in discovering new meanings, via metaphor and in other ways, than external accomplishments, however stupendous they may be.
In the interest of inviting more collaboration with my friends & allies, somehow, in this search, I am once again sharing an excerpt from my live concert – “The Nature of Water” – given and recorded on August, 17, 2014 – and played on a superb Fazioli Grand Piano. https://soundcloud.com/david-salminen/the-nature-of-water-part-2
Recent news of another Mars landing should remind us of the preciousness of water, and of our watery planet – suggested by such iconic space-age images as “The Blue Marble – a photo of our Earth from space, and “The Pale Blue Dot” – a photograph of our Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager I, when it was already out well beyond Saturn, looking back at Earth. NASA then shut the Voyager cameras off, to save power for the long mission ahead, out beyond the “Termination Shock”, the “Heliosphere” and various other scientifically specified “edges” to our Solar System.
This “Blue Marble” image of the Earth was taken by the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s Earth-observing satellite referred to as Suomi NPP. It’s a composite image that used a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface – taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed ‘Suomi NPP’ on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin. Suomi NPP is the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth. It is carrying five instruments on board, but the biggest and most important instrument is probably The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite or VIIRS. We shall see!
Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring
David Salminen 
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