120 Years

There's a sunrise every morning. Roger and I have been around long enough to have seen 23,000 of them. In our combined 120 years we've also seen a lot of joy and sorrow, so we tend to be pretty philosophical about life. We are highly opinionated; our families find us a bit bristly, and we've been known to have a row every now and then. We stay pretty much to ourselves, have a few friends who we break bread with, but for the most part, it's just the two of us and the cat day in and day out. We enjoy each other's company immensely, and we can happily spend hours and hours in our silence and solitude. Life, for us, is almost exactly how we want it.

So, why do we make an effort to stay engaged with the world, read the news, and complain about it? We've got our 2 1/2 acres, our south-facing house where eagles circle overhead on a good day, and a yard that attracts a wandering bobcat every now and then. We grow our own organic veggies, make stir fries with spicy tofu or tempeh, and enjoy a bottle of fine red wine with dinner every night. We laugh with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, we dance to music that streams out of our iPod. We're in good health, our families are as well. We hike beautiful trails on this good earth. We've got high-speed internet. What more could we ask for?

Life is good.

It's just that we take it so damned seriously. We can hardly believe how different the bigger world is from how we'd like it to be, how we think it could be. We can't seem to get over that, or how the leadership of our country acts so irresponsibly and worse, unconstitutionally. We ponder how things would be different if conquest and fortune were not always at the root of power. What would all of our 120 years have been like if cooperation and community were at the root instead? We have never believed that growing old meant relinquishing or denouncing our idealism. In fact, maintaining ideals into old age is the real fountain of youth and quite an aphrodisiac. We don't know how to be complacent. We never shrug off a terrible president, an illegal war, or our struggling planet. After all this time, we still take it all very seriously, even while we are laughing, clinking our wine glasses and toasting something at the end of every day.
Twenty-three thousand sunrises and sunsets and still waiting for the best of all possible worlds. We're not hopeful, but we'll never give up.

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Hope you've all sent a photo depicting the element "air" for this week's Good Planets to susannah at dccnet dot com. I sent mine in! Check out Wanderin Weeta.

We're going to tweak Good Planets a bit, and think maybe in March and thereafter, it should be twice a month on the second and fourth Saturdays. The March host will be amazing and wondrous Bev of Burning Silo. Would anyone out there like to grab April?

Have a great weekend, everyone.