To better days

I hope you all have a New Year's Eve full of friends and frolic. I'll see once again if I can make it to Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve. A friend of ours, the daughter person went to school with her, is back in Minnesota from Indonesia. She may be experiencing the world's definitive climate shock. The way this young woman has been living her life reminds me of a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson. He once wrote "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

Trail through the field             © harrington

That kind of thinking, and writing, makes me proud to claim Mr. Emerson as a fellow New Englander. As we look ahead to 2014, I'm afraid we've left our children with no option but to go where there is no path. Despite the current cold spell, our legacy to them will be global warming and a climate that's changing, an economy that fails too many of us and a broken political system. I don't know about you, but that's a legacy I'm not terribly proud of. It might sound trite, but my New Year's resolution is to do everything I can to leave my children a better legacy. Not more money or an easier life or more convenience and gadgets, but a better world. I hope you'll join me in this endeavor. We can start by using 2014 to create a better Minnesota. Ralph also wrote "Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail." W. S. Merwin calls our attention to the possibilities that lie before us.

To the New Year

By W. S. Merwin 

With what stillness at last

you appear in the valley

your first sunlight reaching down

to touch the tips of a few

high leaves that do not stir

as though they had not noticed

and did not know you at all

then the voice of a dove calls

from far away in itself

to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you

here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible

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Wishing you a better year and a better world next year.