Hang with Me, It Gets Better--Staggeringly Awesome Information

Dear Folks,

For the last few weeks I have been trying to find my footing with The Muse Newsletter. Isn't that the way it goes when beginning a new venture? "I wrote something on Saturday, took it out on Sunday--all in all, it was a good weekend."

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Don't be intimidated by a notice encouraging you to join a paid subscription. It isn't required. It's the way Substack can offer a free site to writers. Substack will take a percentage of the subscription fees and leave the rest for the author. That way, both stay in business.

This is the second The Muse Newsletter this month, posted March 27, 2025

I just had to forward some Staggeringly Awesome information.
(Is there such a word as staggeringly?)

 

 

March 27, 2025

Hang With Me, It Gets Better

Staggeringly Awesome information

My desk sits atop two stacks of two file cabinets—one of which I use like a suggestion box where I leave the drawer ajar and slip in papers--statement receipts, miscellaneous receipts, medical information, bank statements, brochures, strange notes, important things and, you know, some things I should have thrown away long ago. It was a mess.

You don't do that, do you?

Did I find the one thing I wanted?

Nope.

But I filed papers in file folders and was rewarded with clean, organized drawers, and in the process, I found this quote:

"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."

 –Peter DeVries

Yep.

After the drawers were clean, I couldn't leave the avalanche of papers on my desk's surface, so I shoveled, went into the back yard picked some flowers, and took a picture to prove I can have a clean desk for a millisecond once every six months, and found this:

"Worrying is praying for things you don't want."

—Jen Sincero (I love that girl.)

Oh boy, The Muse is talking to me.

And then I found something that dwarfed everything I had just written.

It was Staggeringly Awesome.

Husband dear had told me about an earth-penetrating device where investigators could map beneath the planet's surface down to over one mile. It is like Google's surface map, but this one is in 3D and underground.

It's a CAT Scan for the earth.

I looked up something I had heard regarding the pyramids and found that a team of researchers using SAR technology were looking inside the Great Pyramid, and found something beneath it that was startling.

Under the Khafa Pyramid, the second largest pyramid on the Giza plateau, they found massive structures that go down 648 meters. That would be 1,944 feet!

Capella Space and Umbra announced on March 16, 2025, that SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) found massive underground structures beneath the Khafa Pyramid on the Giza Plateau.

Eight cylindrical structures extend from beneath the pyramid to mammoth square structures beneath.

Some have supposed that the cylindrical structures are wells and that coils wrapped around them could be stairs. (Climbing 1,944 feet of stairs would take massive muscles and joints made of iron.)

Listen to Jay Anderson tell about it—his enthusiasm is contagious.

https://x.com/TheProjectUnity/status/1902380527002275890

 

I couldn't help but think about the intellect exhibited by individuals who can create such astounding technology as a non-invasive earth-penetrating device, which starkly contrasts with the intellect running our country right now.

That could be the way it works, Power vs Innovation.

"Never doubt what a group of individuals can do—whoops, I've quoted Margaret Mead many times.

For those who haven't read it:

"Never doubt what a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

--Margaret Mead

May the Muse be with you.

 P.S.

To read the first The Muse Newsletter, March 24, 2025 please go to:

https://joycedavis.substack.com/p/the-muse-newsletter-official-beginning

 

 

 

The Will to Live

Hope and Survival—How did I miss this for 24 years?

After a month of grizzly work removing rubble from Ground Zero ( the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers in NY), Rebecca Cough, a lady in a hard hat, noticed that a tree, about to be scooped up by a bulldozer, was burned and badly damaged, but it still showed signs of life.

 

Only a few leaves hug from a single branch of the tree. Its roots were snapped and burned, and its boughs were broken. Yet the workers were determined to save the tree. They sent it to the Van Cortlandt Park for convalescence under the care of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Park workers said they weren't sure the tree would make it, but the tree did. In the spring of 2002, she sprouted a riot of leaves, and a dove made a nest in her boughs.

 

It is The Survivor Tree, a Callery Pear tree planted in the 1970s and had been humming along, providing beauty, shade, and protection for wildlife who either lived there or were passing through.

 

When Ronaldo Vega became the special project manager in 2007, he remembered the story of the tree and went to the Bronx to find it.

 

"Where's our Survivor Tree?" he asked his colleagues.  "I know there's a Survivor Tree.  I've heard the legend.  I know it's out there." (It had been lost for a few years as there are many Callery Pear Trees are in NY.) Finally, Vega emailed some of his former colleagues at the Department of Design and Construction.  Rebecca Clough, an assistant commissioner, replied, "I know where that tree is."

 

"I fell in love with her the second I saw her," Vegas said. "She was a fighter. We knew she was going to come back here." And so, after nine years of rehab in the Bronx, the Survivor Tree went home. She was planted at the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum, where she stands 35 feet tall, scared but robust, and offers her branches to birds and shade to those passing by.

 

I learned of the Survivor tree in Jane Goodall's book HOPE with Douglas Abrams. Upon looking up the tree on the Internet, I saw that Goodall visited the tree on Peace Day on September 21, 2012.

 

Thank you, Jane and Abrams, for telling me this story.

 

The Survivor Tree is 50 years old.