If I may impose on you

[Padraig18]

I keep a journal, and have for many years. It contains many things--- essays, poetry, random thoughts, screeds, etc.--- all manner of verbal hodge-podge. Any way...

After a sleepless night this Ausust just past, I got myself out of bed about 4:30 one morning, made myself a cup of tea and went out onto the deck of our apartment to sit, and to think, and I took my journal with me. This is what I wrote that morning, and my apologies for inflicting it upon you. ;)

" Thoughts on a summer morning"

It’s hot and sultry, high summer in the heartland, the corn grown high and the beans thick in the fields. It’s not always comfortable, except for those times after a midnight rain when the morning dawns clear and cool and the vivid green contrasts with the deep blue of the dawn sky. For a brief moment, as a soft breeze rolls off the seemingly endless prairie, it’s easy to believe that I am safe at home, that I am in an earthly paradise.

These days, so much intrudes on this Midwestern illusion of warmth and safety, of being at home. Television and the Internet and even the radio remind me that it is a dangerous and desperate world out there beyond the lush, green cornfields and the sleepy villages and bustling towns that make up my immediate world.

What’s worse is the nagging conviction that the slow, ugly war of attrition in Iraq, and our slow, stagnant economy, and the coiled but hidden threat of al Qaeda and a hundred other groups of desparate men and women, the reports of disease and starvation in nations grown too feeble to resist the onslaughts, revolution and a hundred other nagging reminders of human wretchedness over the face of the globe, all these combine to give me the sense that things are far, far removed from 'going well'. Perhaps the center of my world will not hold, and then...

Not that there is no wellspring of deep, profound gratitude for the simple gift of being here, in America, instead of any number of the many places where mere survival remains the sole priority of humankind. There is hunger and want in America, but we are spared the type of grinding poverty and squalor that obtains throughout much of the world. Still, on a particularly fine morning, here in the heartland, it’s enough, perhaps, to give thanks for life and love and and health and friendship and the many blessings in my life that I too often take for granted. It’s easy to do this when I am distracted, as I too often am, by the relentless crush and bustle of American life in this post-modern era.

As an American, safe in the Midwest, I need not worry whether the rebel soldiers will come and lay waste to my village and my home, or whether I will find enough food for my babies to eat today, or clothes for them to to wear, or fuel to keep us warm at night. But nonetheless, worry I do, for the very nature of my fast-paced life gives me stress by the bucketful.

I have needs, important needs: for good schools, the best in health care, the finest cars, the latest fashions, the best set of friends, and, of course, cheap gasoline --- all those things that I know I must have to be happy because the television tells me so, does it not?

Anything that threatens these things that I have been taught to believe are essential to my happiness and well-being is a source of stress, whether it’s the threat of the unemployment line, or the possibility of being set upon by Muslim terrorists bent on jihad or any number of other unpleasant possibilities.

And so, fueled by what Thoreau once called 'quiet desperation', I pursue my education and career, I exercise, I negotiate traffic, I work long hours, and I sometimes threaten to stretch myself to the breaking point with every form of distraction. In the process, I lose sight of what’s important in my life.

Yet life in all its beauty and grandeur is there when I choose to see it. It’s there --- grand in its simplicity --- in a friend’s smile, in the laughter of a child, in lending a helping hand to someone ---and, yes, in that quiet moment when the sunlight glints off the rain-soaked fields on a summer morning and I am able to see, and in the seeing, to know that I am home.

:)

[Rowdyboy]

1. Very nice...

Thanks...

[Padraig18]

2. Thanks!

:)

[SiobhanClancy]

3. That's lovely,Padraig

thanks for sharing:)

[Padraig18]

4. Go raibh maith agat!

:)