Living With Intensity

It's possible to live with intensity for just so long, and then one must back of and take care of oneself. I hope somebody has told that to the taskmasters who run the network news media reporters. I feel sorry for those people.

I have to back off for a while now, to find some quiet places within myself. Balance is the order of this day.

Somebody forgot to tell that to Mother Nature, though. Outside we have the return of March, and of Winter. It's raining and cold and the wind is blowing so hard it blew down my hanging plant from the porch -- a new plant, pink jasmine. I went out and sympathized with it for a few minutes, making sure it was OK.

While I was out there, I had a couple of balancing-type thoughts that followed from what I wrote here yesterday. One was that I was unfair to my own ancestors by calling them "losers." They were poor people who had worked the land in Scotland, but had had their land taken from them by some English land reforms (I'm fuzzy on the details of my history, sorry about that), and it was no fault of their own. They went to Ireland and tried to start over, but did not fare well there either, and so came to this country and ended up in the Southern Appalachians. That's on my maternal grandmother's side. I don't think you can call anybody a loser who has failed to thrive through no fault of his own. America was founded, and populated, by mostly poor people, and it's the bullying rich who come up with labels like " losers."

The other thing I thought was that no matter what else may be thought of us Americans, we can't be faulted for lack of courage. The courage that it must have taken just to get here across the Atlantic to the New World in one of those tiny ships just stuns me. And the settlement of the West, no matter how crude the men -- and some of the women -- were, is also a record of immense courage. Yes, they were crude and cruel and killed Indians and slaughtered buffalo and created the whole cowboy mythos which today is NOT a good thing ... but they faced, and faced down, conditions that most of us today cannot even imagine. To read their diaries (the original sources) or good biographies of the settlers of the West is a real education into both the paradox and the courageousness of what it means to be an American at that point in time.

We are not all bad.