So Good and So Right

I started to write so many times today, about the upcoming holidays and the war in Iraq and no matter how I began it always ended up negatively. While there is no way to put a positive spin on the war, there is a way to look positively about the holidays. This year is the first Christmas season that I have ever experienced without benefit of TV. I dropped my cable service last February (sometime around then) and because of my home location on the lower slopes of Green Mountain, I don’t get any TV reception without an antenna. So when I say I don’t watch TV that means not only do I chose not to but I am not able to. I don’t receive any newspapers and I seldom listen to radio. My only source for news is the Internet and I do read the news, local, national, and international. I do keep up on what is going on in the world but miss out on a lot of the sensational news.

One of the biggest blessings of this lifestyle is that I am blissfully unaware of all of the advertising hype. I don’t see it and I don’t get anxious about all of the things I supposedly need. I spend so little time at the mall that when I went this week to replace a broken appliance, I felt like I was in a foreign land. I spend my time reading, learning things on the Internet, hiking, taking photos, listening to music, reading blogs and writing my own. And yes, I do work full time. One of my favorite writings on the subject of stuff is a recent column by Mark Morford, “Why Do You Have So Much Junk? Oh yes you do. And there are TV shows to prove it. Question is, what are you gonna do about it?” http://tinyurl.com/cgx76. I haven’t always been this detached from the media and buying things, so my house is living proof of what Mark Morford writes about. It is pathetic that my house is so cluttered so long after making this lifestyle change. I hope to spend some of my time in the near future getting rid of stuff. Maybe that is why I love spending so much time on Green Mountain – it is an escape from all of this stuff! But then again, maybe my house is cluttered because I spend so much time up there.

This morning on Green Mountain, the show of color was definitely before sunrise. There were clouds hanging along the horizon and extending up into the sky. The color was so intense that I had to stop and breathe it in. The first half of my hike up the mountain is with my back to the rising sun. When the colors are this intense, it seems like I should walk backwards but even so, I can feel the beauty on display behind me and I turn frequently to see what has happened. For a change, the color of the sky turned gray after the sunrise and there was a definite chill in the air. Maybe that was why I started thinking about the war in Iraq. Everything I experience on my hikes seems so good and so right. Nothing about the war seems this way. Trying to bring American democracy to Iraq is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Even if there is some kind of resolution to this war, I don’t ever think it will seem good or right. And our country is changing for the worse because of our participation in this war as each day passes.

I have a friend who seems to live his life with this philosophy in mind – what he does needs to be so good and so right or he stops doing it - not a bad way to live your life.