Overcoming Ugly

With our eyes we see beauty. And ugly. With our ears we sense noise and pleasant sounds – purrs of kittens, mewling hummings and gurgles from babies, music that soothes ragged edges. With our feelings we know comfort and calm, tumult and chaos, love and nesting.

Encountering the tempo of daily routines and news, we are met with negative messages and images. What we do with those is in our power. We can do something with them that inspires, heals and improves upon them. We don’t have to accept them as ugly or destructive.

Poets made good thoughts happen in spite of war and pestilence. In place of sickness and death poets gave us soaring ideals. Historians searched for causation and logic. They inspired us with stories of leaders with vision who helped form great movements and whole new nations. Scientists who take a microscopic view of big ideas and discover whole new worlds of thought and possibilities.

All these souls overcame a negative. They propelled their lives toward something worthwhile, something that others would benefit from in sensation, value, or hope. Interesting, isn't it? Some people focus outside themselves. Steadily. Naturally. Most of their lives are shaped by this internal compass, always outward to something larger than the self. Perhaps we all do this in some way or another?

What impels some people to do this while others shrink into themselves with consequent scrunched futures? And what is the norm? What is expected and logical?

When I was quite small I remember idling in the back yard. Playing in the dirt. Wondering about grains of sand and clods of soil. Stones, too. How fresh they appeared. How normal. But what of trash and garbage. How does that affect the sand and soil and stones? How do we keep these good things safe and pure?

I don’t know why I thought those things. But I distinctly remember it that way. Later I wondered about keeping the air clean and pure to breathe. We lived in southern California and smog was a huge problem in the late 1940’s and early ‘50’s. Air pollution was a growing concern because it affected our breathing and health. Asthma. Allergies.

A ban on burning trash was one of the early regulations. Each home normally had an incinerator. It was an honorable chore in the family to take out the trash and burn it. But then millions of homes thus created smog and the practice was outlawed. So too was dumping paint, and chemicals in open lots. We had to find safer ways of disposing of our toxic garbage.

In California back then we worried about water supplies, keeping forests free from fire, and clean air. It was a sense of caring for our environment.

Moving east to New England there were no such concerns then. Plentiful water. Lots of fresh clean air. Thousands of square miles of woods and hills and nature. Pristine. Not trammeled like California. But surely there was a need to take care of our environment even there as well? No; not then. But yes now. We are all concerned.

It seems ugly comes from man’s inhabiting the earth. Careless inhabiting. Disposable inhabiting. Consumerist inhabiting.

Overcoming this ugly will take time. But first we have to see it. Recognize it.

When do you suppose this will be the new norm? Ever? Before it is too late?

December 26, 2013