Posts

Showing posts from September, 2009

Hope

Image
Hope is a curious emotion, one that hangs around even when most or all of it is gone. I think we sustain hope because it allows us to connect our future to our present in an exciting fashion. We hope for good things, usually, and in the case of our enemy (or rival, to be more gentle) we hope for either misfortune or bad luck. Hope, they say, springs eternal. I am more inclined to believe that it's something that never goes away. It drives us to get up every day and start the process of moving forward. On the back side of hope lies the other version of it. That would be our memories, which connect our present to our past. Inside that are the subtitles of fulfillment and perhaps regret. Had we known where we'd be when we had all that hope, we could understand our memories. Maybe if we did that, we could make sense of our present.

Happy, sappy

Image
A recent conversation with an acquaintance about the relationship between happiness and wealth yielded the predictable response. Money can't make you happy. This, of course, coming from somebody who doesn't have to worry about that problem. Poverty can't make you happy either. What we are about in life, generally, is our ability to make choices. That's why we cherish our American way, calling it "freedom" but meaning something else. What it means is that we aren't required to be peasants just because we were born under the sign of peasantry. Choices. Stupid people have stupid parents. Given the choice, most folks would choose intelligence over stupidity, unless they didn't know the difference. At that point, they'd say they were blessed with "common sense," a vague way of rationalizing their unwillingness to understand anything beyond what their minister told them. Most Americans ("most" being a term loosely connected to our gov

Wildlife

Image
In varying degrees, all forms of wildlife come equipped with a cuteness quotient. I presume that's a form of protection from people. I doubt other animals relate to cuteness. I don't speak for them, but my assumption is that most animals see other forms of life as either: a. their potential to threaten b. their general ability to provide food. In the case of this particular chipmunk, I found him cute. He sees me as an endless source of unsalted peanuts. As of this photo, he'd stashed about 2 pounds somewhere in the back of the yard. By now, he's taking them from my hand, staring into my face begging for more and is generally becoming my personal rodent welfare case. But he's small and has a very high cuteness quotient. Of course he has a name. He just isn't telling me what it is.

As life goes by

Image
Sometimes we are reminded that we need to be careful what we wish for. But I do have to admit that a warm Saturday morning in September, just over my house, quietly drifting along ... I wished I was someplace else.