My Family and I spent a couple of days in Yosemite the Week of Christmas and it was the best time of the year for me. The year was difficult for so many of us and yet I know that I am blessed, far more than so many of us on this planet, so many who live on much less than I do in one day than they may in a week or a month.
The new year often brings resolutions, promises and regrets. I don't believe in New Year's resolutions, last year's regrets, etc. because they don't rarely provide positive results and often set us up to fail. Energy wasted.
I think the best thing to do is look forward, make plans, think about the possibilities and be thankful for what was good about the year that was. Despite losing my job, I kept my house. Even though I've struggled with chronic health issues I can still remain fairly active, I've attempted to be involved in my community and I've gone back to school for Ecological Restoration. And most importantly, I have accessible and very affordable health care.
So all I ask is this, make yourself a list of things that you are grateful for and things that you hope to see transpire. No regrets and no promises.
Many pulled through a tough year for the better and hopefully smarter, stronger and wiser. And for those of us who are not doing well, the rest can attempt to do the best we can for them in the coming year. Community is the best medicine for hardship, whether it be a quilt, a fund raiser or just a celebratory diary. It matters, all of it.
Progressives should not expect perfection, it's progress people, not perfection. And the frustration with the rate of that progress is very reasonable, the range of my emotions over the last few months has been all over the map for various reasons. And the various approaches are valid in their own way, this diary is not about that. It's about how we can think about the new year and reflect on the last 12 months.
Progress, not perfection.
It's my motto for a reason.
Perfection is futile, it's not something worth working for because it's an illusion to me. And it means something different to everyone.
But most people can recognize progress when they see it.
So Happy New year and please enjoy the photos and quotes from our trip to one of the most beautiful places I've been to in my life.
Charlotte couldn't wait to get herself in the snow, this was as soon as we checked into the hotel.
"The Silence of a shut park does not sound like the country silence: it is tense and confirmed."
- Elizabeth Bowen
"Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty."
- John Ruskin
"Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons; it is to grow in the open air and eat and sleep with the Earth"
- Walt Whitman
"Man did not weave the web of life - he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."
Chief Seattle
"The first act of awe, when man was struck with the beauty or wonder of Nature, was the first spiritual experience."
Henryk Skolimowski
"What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism"
Albert Einstein
"We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do."
- Barbara Ward
What You Get When You Hook Up With The Power Company:
(Source: Gary Dorn, Permaculturist, Austrailia)
1. Never ending source of pollution from the production of the
electricity at the source
2. Mining of a finite resource
3. Visual pollution around the land
4. High voltage towers and cabling cris- crossing the landscape
5. Support of a local monopoly
6. Ever increasing price for electricity
7. Crappy energy consuming buildings
8. Power failures, blackouts, and poor quality power
"The weight of our civilization has become so great, it now ranks as a global force and a significant wild card in the human future along with the Ice Ages and other vicissitudes of a volatile and changeable planetary system"
- Dianne Dumanoski
"Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs, --
To the silent wilderness,
Where the soul need not repress
Its music."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Education is not just about k-12. I have a nature girl, who is lucky to live so close to mountains and beaches with a creek right behind our housing track. Not so many kids have access to so much nature. We also have to make sure that more kids get a chance to see and interact with the beauty that some of us take for granted.
"As a young man, Muir felt he was a student in what he called the ‘University of the Wilderness,'" Gisel said. "Yosemite was his graduate course. This is where he decided who he was, what he wanted to say and how he was going to say it."
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
""The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.""
John Muir
There were so many saplings from our drive up the mountain well into Yosemite Valley and all I could think was the future forests. That's what I saw, the future forests in those saplings, the tiny trees that would someday tower over me if we allowed them to. They would be the future of our world, with or without us. Let them grow.
"Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground." - Anon.
"We won't have a society if we destroy the environment."
- Margaret Mead
"For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length--and there I travel looking, looking breathlessly."
-Carlos Castaneda
"For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports."
- Sandra Postel
"For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports."
- Sandra Postel
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed."
- Mohandas K. Gandhi
"He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.-
- Langston Hughes
See that tiny speck out there, that's Charlotte, she wandered out, way out. This is our nature girl. She will care about what happens to this valley, the waterfalls and the trees. She will care about the "Future Forests" and she will grow up pushing for more reform. We can continue to teach our children what matters.
"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul."
John Muir
We woke to fresh snow, it wasn't supposed snow to under six thousand feet. It snowed under 4,000 feet. Charlotte was beside herself, it was "soft" snow.
And my Woozle Emma, I made her a lolcat, just because...