Snowy February

It feels like spring today, as long as you don't look at the ground, which is blanketed in a new, wet layer of snow that fell overnight. The forest near my work is magical. Every branch, every tree, is highlighted by an inch of white. One feels themselves transported to a calmer place by just staring into the forest. Why does nature influence our moods so strongly? Some scholar friends of mine seem to think it is because we have been conditioned to see nature in this way; it is a cultural lens. I think they are spending too much time in windowless library offices and not getting their feet dirty enough. I think it is because we learned the very idea of meaning living inside a meaningful world. We are at home on Earth, of the Earth, this is our family. Nature says, see what I can do? And we smile.

Rumsfeld, the evil ideologue helping to destroy our country, is in Iraq today. He tells American troops that they must stay until Iraqi's can be trusted to run their own security. This is the first major disaster of the 21st century. It wasn't 9/11, it was the ideologues in office who turned that tragedy into a snowball of tragedies. Thoreau says, "Under a government that imprisons anyone unjustly, the only true place for a just man is also in prison." We should stop being so complacent and protest this tragedy in the strongest civil way possible. In the meantime, I can only hope their own arrogance destroys them, like Nixon.