A Moment with Nature

We had the big rain come through the northeast this week. The next day, in my area, a remnant rain squall quickly blew across the ridge where I live above a river.

The skies rapidly darkened from patchy clouds to a dark roiling gray. The wind intensified as it twisted, twirled, and gusted sending fallen leaves back up into the barren tree branches only to fall again. A pelting rain punctuated the squalls passage.

The sight through my picture window was mesmerizing and deeply spiritual in the ever present portal to nature. It reminded me of a passage in The Immortal Wilderness, by the late naturalist John Hay.

He wrote: “There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the undercurrents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.”

If you’ve never tasted the aroma of a pine forest after a summer rain you are missing a Divine connection to the Source. If you’ve never sat in a blooming rose garden, or watched a stubble field fill up with snow or just listened to the wind in the silence of a moonlight walk. You are missing what Mr. Hay is talking about.

Tell your doctor...

Sometimes you hear things that make you wonder.

The medical advertisements on television are a case in point.

It doesn’t matter what they are selling. At the end of the commercial the announcer lists all the side effects of the medicine and if you have them call for medical attention immediately. Most of them sound worse that the disease you’re trying to cure.

One of the last lines in the commercial is my point.

The announcer says: “Tell you doctor about all the medicines you are taking for some may have adverse reactions to this medicine.”

My question is, wouldn’t your doctor know all the medicines you are taking? I hope so.

Gossip

I happened to be busy in the kitchen when one of the nightly celebrity gossip shows came on my local television. With my hands in soap suds, I listened to what I normally turn off. It was a litany of  who is divorcing whom, who beat up an ex-boyfriend, who’s cheating, who’s worth this many millions and how settlements might be confrontational.

We, the American television public, are the supporters of gossip and television programs that are the purveyors of gossip. Why do we watch these kind of shows? This stuff if pure voyeurism. It’s peeping Tom stuff. It’s none of our business.

Gossip columns have been of interest since the early days of tabloid newspapers, but television has taken it to an obnoxious level since the newspaper days of Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper.

 I remember gossip columnists in New York City writing about me when I was a nightly local newscaster. Some wrote about what I did or did not do. How much money I allegedly made and what restaurants I visited. Other than spelling my first name correctly, mostly they were wrong. I had one columnist call me one day to say he was going to write that I dined at a specific restaurant, was that OK with me. I said, no, and he was angry.

Frankly I think it’s time the American viewing public censor their appetite for the private crap in other people’s lives.