American Landscape

According to David Morse, America's untouched, natural beauty served as a catalyst for the growth of Romantic thought in our nation. The seemingly endless landscape inspired a feeling of the "unlimited potential of the American character."

The pioneering painter Thomas Cole believed that the American artist had an advantage over one of Europe because he did not have to paint what so many men had already captured but instead had a "pure, immediate and spontaneous encounter with nature" which gave him a greater sense of his own power. With this inspiration, Cole painted natural Americ "in the grand Romantic manner." Before leaving America in 1829 to study painting in Europe, Cole made a trip to Niagra Falls in order to be "infused with the genius loci" and the "independence and originality" which it inspired even in the face of the masters of tradition in Europe.

Immanuel Kant, the author of Critique of Pure Reason and a predecessor of Romantic thought, believed that staring at the grandeur of the natural world would not make a man feel overpowered and insignificant but would instead be a "revelatory moment of his inner potentiality for greatness."

As Americans we have been incredibly blessed and influenced by our land. In protecting the wildness of our nation, we protect what makes us American.
In wildness is the preservation of our world. -Thoreau

He is risen!

In church this morning, I was struck by how much more powerful promises of rebirth and the story of Jesus's resurection are now that I have a child. Understanding the forgiveness of sins and the new life we have been promised is incredibly significant when these gifts are offered not only for oneself but also to the most precious thing in one's life. What a comfort to know that we really can store up treasures on Earth and that the work we do bringing up our children in God's love will be rewarded when we meet them in Heaven.

Anne Frank

How wonderful that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

--Anne Frank

Little Women

In our novels and films, we allow the perfect, moral character to die. We cry because it is unfortunate to see life taken from one who is so innocent. The reality, however, is far too tragic to portray. The flat characters are healthy and robust while the daring and passionate are taken from us. When death bypasses Beth and suddenly seizes Jo, we cannot cry the sweet tears of injustice, but instead weep bitterly for the light has left the world. Thank God our novels are not so cruel, those left behind know that giving the dying a face or a personality rather than pure virtue would make the parting unbearable. I miss your flaws and your spirit. I love you, my Jo.

Coincidence

My sister went into labor 6 weeks before her son was due. The doctors tried to give her medication to delay his birth but were only successful for about 24 hours. A month later, my sister died in a head on collision. Was it coincidence that her son, who should not have been born for two weeks more was at that moment safe with his adoptive parents?

On this little boy's six month birthday, I was in a head on collision which totaled my car but left me unharmed. Am I crazy to think this was more than just a coincidence? That the day a boy who should not have been born reached the six month mark completely healthy and safe I should come face to face with the circumstance that killed his mother?

I cannot believe these events to be unrelated or insignificant. I cannot believe the universe to have so random a design. I cannot believe there is no message in this madness. I am certain there is a plan for this child. There is a reason he is alive today. There is a reason I am alive today.

Wallace Stegner

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."
-Stegner, Wilderness Act

Thoreau Gets It

"The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?"
-Thoreau, On Walden Pond