Cape Cod calling…
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the still rather chilly, cloudy and clearing island of Nantucket! Great to be with ‘y’all’ on this lovely Wednesday morning here at the Hyannis/Hyannis Port Waterfront(s), with a gentle northeasterly breeze keeping the sand bar and bobbing islands on the cool side of June, this third day of said month, in the year of our Lord 2015…
One could ask in this world of (never ending) blind and dangerous consumerism we all participate in today–threatening to destroy our planet–’what Lord do you speak of sir?’
The extension of the knee jerk reaction to the events of September 11th, 2001, i.e. “The Patriot Act”, in the form of “The Freedom Act” was passed into law yesterday, taking away the NSA’s ability to on spy on otherwise innocent American citizens, but still with wide access (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), to said records. But they will be ’safe’ (right?), with the giant multinational telecom corporations; monster conglomerates with no real oversight and/or loyalty to anyone.
Sounds like a great plan, I am sure there will be no abuse of that power in the future…
Henry David Thoreau–a famous American writer/philosopher/naturalist/political scientist–wrote a book called “Walden” in the mid-19th century, 1845 to be precise. He lived for a year and a half in a hut on the banks of this now important body of water, clearing his mind of civilization for that moment in said ‘time’; freeing himself from all it’s rules, customs and conventions. Thoreau’s fascinating, detailed account of his sojourn on the shores of Walden Pond brings alive a whole world–fish and birds, trees and crops, sun, stars and seasons. Seeking solitude, one might conclude he found clarity and intellectual freedom.
REAL FREEDOM.
Here is an excerpt from this magnificent work, an American original written before the American Civil War that only began 16 years later…the chapter is entitled, “The Pond in Winter.” A simple passage dedicated to my dear friend Lanore Lynch, a wonderful mother, who unexpectedly passed away last night. May yours be the Kingdom of God. May you forever rest in Peace.
Have a nice Wednesday folks!
…”What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest it corresponding depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. In our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to and indicates a corresponding depth of thought. Also there is a bar across the entrance of our every cove, or particular inclination; each is our harbor for a season, in which we are detained and partially landlocked. These inclinations are not whimsical usually, but their form, size and direction are determined by the promontories of the shore, the ancient axes of elevation. When this bar is gradually increased by storms, tides or currents, or there is a subsidence of the waters, so that it reaches to the surface, that which was at first but an inclination in the shore in which a thought was harbored becomes an individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its conditions, changes, perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea or marsh. At the advent of each individual into this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere? It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are not conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer from the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them.”
-Henry David Thoreau
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
