A couple of days ago, my mom sent an email to my dad, my sister and me that said, “What the 18 minute video when you have time, it’s worth it.” This afternoon, as I was cleaning out my inbox, I came across her email again, and decided to check it out. The link took me here, to the video of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk at TED about the experience she had when she, a brain scientist, experienced her own brain hemorrhage and stroke.

The entire video was fascinating, but the thing that has stuck with me the most is the understanding she took away from the experience that we are beings that are made up of energy and that if we could just spend a little more time in our right brains, the place where we’re able to experience the peace and connectedness of this universal energy, that we might be able to make the world a more peaceful and joyful place to be.

I was flipping through pictures on my computer just a little while ago and came across the one you see here. Several years ago, the Portland streets department needed to dig up the sewer on their block and so they ended up getting the mouth of their driveway re-paved. When the curb was still wet, they ran out with a couple of chopsticks and wrote “Let Peace Prevail” into the hardening cement (my father has also written a song with that phrase as its name). The next time I came to visit, I took some pictures of those words.

Re-discovering those image today, after watching that talk and also knowing that today people all across the world are trying to do a little something for the planet by turning their lights off for Earth Hour, seemed somehow serendipitously connected.