http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/sky-writer-6448321
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/features/rapp.htm

These are biographies of two men that have had some influence in my life, astronomer Robert Burnham, Jr, and musician Tom Rapp.

The articles are long, but please read them. They are fascinating tales of tragedy and triumph, as are all our lives. It occurred to me while reading these that we ALL have stories like these, every single one of us, and these stories together make up the highest level of organization and complexity in the cosmos. Yes, we are more complicated than quarks and strings and particles and waves, more important (at least as far as we're concerned) than superclusters of galaxies or supersymmetry and branes.

Think about it.