At 12:32 AM -0500 2002/02/21, Ray Evans Harrell wrote:
>I live in a city where my costs for transportation are low and I take cabs.
>I don't own a car and I work in my home. My food is from some of the best
>restaurants who deliver the meals and they are not that much more expensive
>than my doing it at home except I would lose the time at work doing all of
>that preparation. I have a cleaning lady while my wife and I earn more by
>being able to work while she cleans. The museums are the finest you could
>imagine, the Opera is great and the symphony is first rate. Three of the
>greatest halls in the world and every culture you could desire to visit not
>more than a couple of miles from me. No one in the regions could touch
>what I have here on five times the salary. I also have one child who has
>gotten a world class education in high school. We don't use a lot of
>energy and we don't have gas guzzlers as required by living in cities on the
>plains or in the suburbs. We also have several million people within a
>ten mile radius. I would put the efficiency of the NY Subway system next
>to any in the world and you could put most of the world's cities in the
>NYCity Subway system and still have a seat.
Hi Ray,
Canada has all kinds of room! We have 1/10th the population of the US
and we are bigger than you. Great Britain would fit nicely into south
central/eastern Ontario. Friends who visit from the UK can't get over
how much space we have. We took them on a trip to the west coast
(about 3000 miles) and they couldn't get over the vast amount of
space there is along portions of the highways with nothing but
forests, fields, lakes, mountains and no people or buildings.
Toronto, which is a 2.5 hours drive west of me, is the most racially
diverse city in the world I'm told; 160 different languages spoken.
It has excellent museums, theatres, restaurants, symphony, subway. I
enjoy visiting there once or twice a year.
My sacred place is a log cabin on the edge of a spring fed lake( we
drink the water) about one hour north of my home in Kingston . My
father and I built it from scratch 20 years ago.My children spent
their formative summers there and Walt Whitman was right when he
wrote:
THERE was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of
the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red
clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the Third-month lambs, and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the
mare's foal, and the cow's calf,
And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side,
And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there-and the
beautiful curious liquid,
And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads-all became part of him.
-------------------------------------------
I feel very fortunate to have this retreat. It is truly a place of
re-creation for me. I get to do hard physical labour (Tolstoy was
right when he said this is good for the soul) as I cut, spilt and
haul firewood.
Wendell Berry captures my feelings beautifully with:
The
Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
------------------------------------
I've never had this experience in Toronto. And the last three lines
of this poem much more powerfully express what I feebly tried to say
in an earlier posting concerning Whitman's Learned Astronomers poem.
It had nothing to do with science and everything to do with wordless
wonder and awe.
Take care,
Brian McAndrews
--
**************************************************
* Brian McAndrews, Practicum Coordinator *
* Faculty of Education, Queen's University *
* Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6 *
* FAX:(613) 533-6596 Phone (613) 533-6000x74937*
* e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
* "Education is not the filling of a pail, *
* but the lighting of a fire. *
* W.B.Yeats *
* *
**************************************************
