Thought for the Day - Mar 28

Subject: Thought for the Day - Mar 28
From: Peter T.
Date: 28 Mar 00 - 08:19 AM

Very few of the natural places in my city are untrafficked -- by which I don't mean pure wild, since we have only one or two places that were not chopped down at least once or twice in the last two hundred years -- but places that are not managed as official parks with roads and signs. They are not wilderness spaces: they are more like delinquent spaces (from the Latin, delinquo, meaning to do wrong, with an associated reference to linquo, meaning to leave home, to abandon the world of laws and boundaries), or, well, less poetically, abandoned sites, neglected ravines, patches of scrub under noisy overpasses. In March they are especially bleak and empty: but I go there and wander, just to see what is happening out along the margins. The beaten-up rivers flow through them too, and a day ago I went to check on one particularly deranged space, where the continuing impacts of a chemical spill that happened further north a few weeks ago have been fouling the downstream rivers ever since. The whole area is a horrible tangled mess of weeds and rubble; and this winter has been very dry, so the soils and grasses are in terrible shape, stained in multi coloured blotches of purple and lime green.

Yet there are faint flags waving above the ravaged battlefield. And there are tiny wrapped messages of new green working their way along battered boughs of slashed trees along the edges of the site. Birds are beginning to stake out the greybrown terrain, like survivors from the aftermath of some wartime clash picking out where their farms used to be. And the sun, just beginning to take on some warmth, peeks out from behind the grey gloomy afternoon. I find a dry piece of rubble, sit down and stretch out my legs in the sun. A student of mine said in a class the other day: "Global climate warming is an attack on spring." Interesting thought: we are now expanding the human enterprise into the smearing of the seasons. We are polluting the wellsprings of spring.

Well, I guess it is all true. But I can also see that if you sit gazing around in a junk littered landscape, your mind begins to twist, rust and corrode to match. To despair about the future of spring even as it begins to unfold in the present is just too grim to be sustained. Spring hope springs eternal that there will be spring. We have to take the spring as we find it, where we find it, as long as we find it. All we can do is rally under the faint flags, unwrap the little messages from headquarters, regroup, and whistle our ragtag way over the sundappled, greenmisted, birdvoiced wreckage to wherever it is the struggle to save spring is unfolding tomorrow.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - Mar 28
From: wysiwyg
Date: 28 Mar 00 - 08:40 AM

Hardiman doesn't often open the T-o-t-D threads so I will share what he has often told me.

When Hardiman was a young boy he lived in a tough neighborhood on Chicago's south side where the steel industry was enjoying its last gasp. Long THE employer of his particular area, steel was dwindling now and the income no longer supported the healthy function of the neighborhood. But Hardiman's family stayed, as the emptying mills began rotting to rust one by one... as the good men who'd poured their lives into our steel got older and more and more bitter... and his family stayed, and stayed awhile longer, as the area exchanged ethnic groups and the neighbors they'd known for years fled.

One of Hardiman's particular pleasures was to walk along the rail bed. It became his custom, from a very young age, to enjoy the diamonds glinting from the ground on sunny days. "Diamonds?" I asked him when he first told me this. "Well," he said, "it depends on how you choose to see things. I guess it was just broken glass. But it was the prettiest thing to look at, so that's what I looked at."

Hardiman grew up with a love of the natural setting that leaves him in perpetual wonder at mountains, forests, and open spaces. He's the best camper I know and is completely at home anywhere.

Now we live on the edge of a working hardscrabble dairy farm, renting the house that used to house the owners and later housed the tenant farmers and their hands. In this season we are surrounded by the odor of melting manure spread on the field last fall to nourish the fragile topsoil. And each evening, early, if you look out back at just the right place, at just the right time, the deer come down the hill behind the house and cross the pasture on their way to the water flowing all around us.

It's still a choice, what to notice in the day.

~Susan~

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - Mar 28
From: Little Neophyte
Date: 28 Mar 00 - 11:30 AM

Susan makes a very good point. Your mind still has a choice every day on what it wills to notice.
I wake up every morning to a concrete landscape littered with garbage. And though I would much rather see a natural wilderness setting, I am overwhelmed by the miraculous beauty of a little flowering plant peaking its way through the cracks on the sidewalk.

Little Neo

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - Mar 28
From: MMario
Date: 28 Mar 00 - 11:57 AM

Sometimes you have to overlook the clearcutting and see the individual tree...to stay sane.

Case in point. I spent 4 hours Thursday nite in a parking lot waiting for a gas station to open. But if I had not, I would not have had a lovely ferry ride across the Potomac the next morning on the historic White's Crossing Ferry. The ferry ride DID make up for the wait.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - Mar 28
From: annamill
Date: 28 Mar 00 - 12:03 PM

Yeah, that way you don't have to see the bad stuff, huh? My river is waking up. We had our windows open for the first time this year and the honking of the geese and ducks woke us this morning instead of that damn alarm clock. It was magnificent. I actually didn't mind getting up so much.

So Peter, is your point that hope springs eternal, or spring brings eternal hope, or is it that spring is no longer eternal...Me, I just enjoy the warmth.

Love, annap

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - Mar 28
From: Magpie
Date: 28 Mar 00 - 02:43 PM

Meself, I'm fortunate enough to live in a contry where you still can find (relatively) large uninhabited areas, where nature (for the most part) has been allowed to live its life in peace. We can still breathe the air without having to worry too much about smog, exhaust from cars and factories and such like. We have more than enough space, and still a bit to spare.
For months now, it has been a dead, white surface. Black, leafless apple and cherry trees, dry brown raspberry bushes, and my south-west wall has been covered in a greyish-brown maze of dormant honeysuckle.
But now sprig is here! Tiny, tender leaves of green grass can be seen, the honeysuckle is courageously showing its first green buds, and in my flowerbed against the wall tiny yellow, blue, white and purple flowers are showing off their finery.
When I come home from work, there are still a couple of hours of sunshine on my terrace. We are waking up! Coming back to life! Both meself, my son and my garden, and it is sooo wonderful!
My son and his best buddy are doing their darndest to wear out their new bicycles (and the lawn), my mother is getting a nice tan from doing her quilting on the veranda, and my father is getting back in shape for this summer's bicycle competitions. And me? Well I find my old energy seeping back. I take my son for picknicks on the roof of the shed.(There's such a lovely view fron up there!) I write long, longing letters to my boyfriend, who hasn't received a letter for months. I find myself finishing all the half-done knitting projects I started in the winter, but never had the energy to finish. I smile to my collegues and pupils, and I laugh when the tram is delayed in the morning, because it is just too lovely standing there waiting in the morning sun.
Yes, spring is truly a wonderful and lovely time, with tons of promise, life, energy and initiative. Life is great!

Magpie

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - Mar 28
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 29 Mar 00 - 02:42 AM

When we were looking at buying our home several years ago, I was engaged in conversation with the owner when I saw him suddenly stare hard at something, his jaw clenched in anger. I turned to see a fox loping across the lot, disappearing into the trees. " Alright!" I said, " do you see foxes very often around here?" He grimaced "yes, unfortunately."

After we bought the house he admitted to me that this particular female fox (vixen) had been denning under the storage shed for several years, and he was afraid that eventually she would damage it. He had tried filling the den-opening with cement, driving rebar into the ground, using noxious chemicals, but nothing stopped her. We moved in in July, and didn't see a sign of her until snow-melt in March, when I noticed fresh-dug soil around the perimeter of the den-hole. By mid-April, four baby foxes had emerged accompanied by their parents. We watched them grow until late May, when suddenly there was no sign of them. No sign until March of the following year, when the vixen returned to nurse a new litter in the peace of the den beneath the shed.

I long ago decided that, if the shed should collapse, it was of little importance compared to the privelege of sharing our home with these beautiful creatures, the honor of watching life renew itself every March through this family of foxes. It sometimes occurs to me that we, and not they, are the visitors here in this parcel of still-near-wilderness.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - Mar 28
From: Little Neophyte
Date: 29 Mar 00 - 09:02 AM

About Foxes
Known for the magic of camouflage and invisibility. It is one of the most uniquely skilled and ingenious animals of nature. It can teach these skills to those whose life it enters. It can reveal what is growing and shapeshifting (or needing it) within your own world.
An examination of fox behaviors and characteristics will reveal much about the role it represents for you individually.
The coat of the fox serves as a camouflage and most fox coats have variations of color within them. This facilitates their ability to stay camouflaged and remain relatively unseen. The fox also has the ability to run up trees if it is necessary. This reflects an ability to move into new dimensions and call upon new resources instinctively. The fox also has very acute hearing. They are like mini-antennae. They can pick up the squeal of a mouse over a hundred and fifty yards away. They can teach you the ability to hear what is not being said, as well as any whispering that may be going on. They have a keen sense of smell, teaching you to discern, discriminate, and who to socialize with. Probably the fox's cleverest hunting technique is "charming". In this technique, the fox is seen near a prey, performing various antics. It will leap and jump and roll and chase itself, so that it charms the prey's attention. While performing the fox draws closer and closer without its prey realizing, as it is caught up in the seemingly non-threatening antics. Then at the right moment, the fox leaps and captures its prey. This teaches those who have the fox come into their life that they can capture any prize they truly will.

From Animal Speaks, by Ted Andrews

LN