snow day thoughts

today was my first snow day of the year. yesterday, i was feeling pretty sick. so today was spent mostly inside. around 5:00, the apartment turned blue, as the sun was almost completely down and the outside turned from daylight to twilight. i looked out of my living room window and the courtyard below reminded me of movies i've watched about the holocaust. something about the brick buildings, the lack of trees, the emptiness, the snow falling, the depressing blue color - it's like what i imagine auschwitz to have felt like. i saw birds flying in the sky above this courtyard - and i started wondering what people who are imprisoned think about birds. jealousy? or hopefulness? i'm not sure - probably a range of emotions. i watched a documentary on micheal jackson fans once who stand outside of neverland daily. they wait by the gates in hopes that they might be let in, or they might see micheal jackson. one of the women said, "those of us who wait here, we're jealous of those birds. they have the freedom to fly in and out of neverland. we wish we were birds." it made me think of this. my dad gave me this book a year ago. i read it sometime last summer.

it's from wallace stenger's book, "the sound of mountain water." the section of this book is called the coda - it's a letter. you should read the book if you can. the part i pulled out is just from the first few paragraphs.

dear mr. pesonen:
i believe that you are working on the wilderness portion of the outdoor recreation resources review commission's report. if i may, i should like to urge some arguments for wilderness preservation that involve recreation, as it is ordinarily conceived, hardly at all. hunting, fishing, hiking, mountain-climbing, camping, photography, and the enjoyment of natural scenery will all, surely, figure in your report. so will the wilderness as a genetic reserve, a scientific yardstick by which we may measure the world in its natural balance against the world in its man-made imbalance. what i want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses, valuable as those are, but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself. being an intangible and spiritual resource, it will seem mystical to the practical-minded - but then anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them . . .

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 clear air and dirty 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. and so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the word, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the brave new world of a completely man-controlled environment. we need wilderness preserved-as much of it is still left, and as many kind-because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. the reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. it is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. it is important to us when we are old simply because it is there - important, that is, simply as an idea.