History of Vaccines (by The College of Physicians of Philadelphia)

 Timeline | History of Vaccines

Tree Dreaming (by Christine Valters Paintner)

 

I swallowed a

seed last night

and dreamed

I planted myself

in a sea of loam

sometime before

the periwinkle dawn.

 

The awful ecstasy of

cracking open,

stretched taut between

dark earth embrace and

a crown of stars circling.

 

Time no longer

measured in clock ticks

but by arrival of a

glut of blossoms,

plump fruit hanging low,

 

followed by

death’s jeweled spectacle,

wind-ravished,

branches naked,

shadowed silhouette

in the feeble winter sun.

 

Let me linger here

with delights of

the grey squirrel’s

soft burrowing into

my body, all breath and fur,

a murmuration of starlings

filling my limbs with music,

chorus of wild irises’ golden

tongues wagging at my feet,

or the pleasures of

being rain-soaked

on a summer afternoon.

 

Let me sleep

a while longer.

 

As Winter Remembers Itself (by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer)

 

Despite the wind with its whipping twists

and the sting of the fierce face slaps of snow,

 

the day invites us to enter, to go lightly

into its rumpled hills--though the path

 

is erased by drifts, though we fall and struggle

to stand again. Sometimes the call

 

to fall in love with the day is easier to hear

when it's hardest to imagine how.

 

Bitter gusts and swirling gusts

and gusts that steal our words.

 

Trying to fall in love never works.

It is more a matter of getting out

 

of our own way--not trying to orchestrate

the storm, just finding a way to play in it.

 

Heavy snow. Dim snow. The sky rushes

to fill in the tracks where we've been.

 

There are no tracks for where we're going.  There is a call to fall deeper in.