Jake

Parable of the Mexican Fisherman:

An American banker explains to a Mexican fisherman how to spend the next 20 years building a better life.

The fisherman asks a simple question that makes the whole plan sound ridiculous.

Worth remembering the next time you catch yourself putting off living until you've "made it."

There's a pool in the Nevada desert where two young divers disappeared in 1965, and an earthquake more than 1,500 miles away can send its water sloshing into four-foot waves.

It's called Devils Hole. From behind the fence it looks like a slot of blue water barely bigger than a backyard pool, but underneath it drops more than 500 feet into a cavern nobody has ever found the bottom of.

Up near the sunlight, the last wild population of one of the rarest fish on Earth depends on a single shallow rock shelf to feed and spawn.

Most of us will never stand at that fence, and that's the point. Some places are worth knowing about even when the best thing we can do for them is leave them alone.

The people of northern Laos have an old explanation for these stone jars. A king named Khun Jeuam defeated a tyrant on this plateau and ordered them carved so his army could brew rice wine for the victory celebration. The archaeologists who came later found something a lot less festive.

Finding out who carved them means working around what a much newer war left behind. American bombing in the 1960s and 70s left craters among the jars and unexploded weapons in the ground around them. In 2021, researchers reported that fewer than one in ten known jar sites had been cleared.

Scientists tested the soil beneath the jars to see when those grains last saw sunlight, and the results suggested some jars were set in place sometime between 1240 and 660 BC.

We can measure how long the ground beneath these jars has been dark. We still don't know what the people who carved them called themselves.

Hundreds of people packed the square in Hull today to welcome home Karl Bushby, who left at 29 and swore he wouldn't come back until he'd walked the whole way from the southern tip of Chile. He's 57 now.

It took 28 years and 31,000 miles, and not once did a plane, boat or car carry him forward. He crossed the Bering Strait on shifting ice and swam both the Caspian Sea and the English Channel rather than break that rule.

Even after the crowd and the speeches, the walk wasn't finished until he reached his mother's gate across town. When he got there, she asked him where he'd been.

Most of us talk about the big thing we'll do someday. He walked out the door and spent half his life doing his.

222 people live on Tristan da Cunha. No airport, a supply ship every three months, and a 15-day boat ride just to get there. You'd think that much isolation would make people hard.

Then you hear a man in his shed describe what happens when one of his neighbors has work to do, and you realize the most remote town on Earth held onto something a lot of crowded places lost.

🎥 @RuhiCenet