Toward a Happy(ier) New Year!

Despite all the books patiently waiting for us to read them, stacked in corners and piled on top of book cases, plus the books added to those stacks and piles at Christmas, we've decided there are at least two more books we need to read early (1st quarter?) next year. Why? Because they're reported to be optimistic, realistic, and offer positive responses to the trumpster fire that was 2017.

The first book was published a few years ago and somehow escaped being picked up on our radar screen. An interview with its author, Jonathon Porritt, published in ensia, came to our attention this morning. The book is The World We Made. Here's the "take-away" from the ensia interview:

"I think that the most important thing we can do now is not to give into temptation to spend all of our engaged minutes learning everything that’s going wrong and focusing on the slow sliding away into the apocalypse. Psychologically, we spend too much time on that. We devote a huge amount of our political and psychological energy to trying to stop more bad things from happening. We’ve got to use our available advocacy time and capacity to persuade people that good and exciting things are there and are available. What I’d like is for people to say, “Yeah, OK, I’ve got it. Let’s grab a little bit of that and make that happen in our community, whether it’s a community farm, or renewable energy, or we’re going to think about this differently.” Whatever it’s going to be, do the solutions as well as keep your mind alert to the problems."

The second book is by someone whose works we've been reading for years. Paul Hawken has recently published Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. Hawken delivers a message (un)surprisingly similar to Porritt's:

When it comes to global warming, Hawken says, we’ve been “focusing too much on the problem instead of the solution…. Regenerative development is development, whether it’s on an urban, transportation, housing, marine agriculture, or health level. It’s development that actually heals the future as opposed to stealing from it, which is what we’re doing today.” 

We've notice that, since election day 2016, our mood has become darker and darker. We've been focusing more and more on the problems. For the new year coming, we're going to remember, as Buffalo Springfield taught us long, long ago,

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
Step out of line, the men come and take you away

Since we've often been told that "The best defense is a good offense," we're going to be more positive in 2018 and do our best to be as offensive as we can creating a better world on terms we think are best. We've also been told, time and again, that "the proper definition of a problem is half the solution." Our new, proper, we hope, definition of the problem will be to focus on solutions and let the problems take care of themselves.

Burning the Old Year

Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.   
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,   
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,   
lists of vegetables, partial poems.   
Orange swirling flame of days,   
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,   
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.   
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,   
only the things I didn’t do   
crackle after the blazing dies.

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