One small step to the good

When I go to bed at night, I’m very good at being able to empty my mind of the woebegone happenings of the day.

A long time ago I learned how, at shut-eye time, to pack a mental suitcase with any worries, frettings, and negative thoughts I might have and give them up to my higher power for safe-keeping until the next day.

I’m a firm believer that on any given night, we all deserve a restful sleep free of the dark, regurgitated materials that might have crossed our daily path.

As I’ve said before, I love to get up really early in the morning, especially during the summer months when by 5:00 a.m. I can catch a glimpse of the sunrise not yet written upon by the events of the coming day.

These night and day rituals renew my take on positive thinking, which aside from my appreciation for small wonders, is the currency of my endurance and my existence.

My beef continues to smolder with the media powers-that-be—who for reasons beyond my comprehension—believe that bad news is the way to jump-start the coming day.

In my view, it’s a sucker punch and something’s gotta change when it comes to the morning news.

Though I am smart enough to know at least some of the harsh realities of the world we live in, audio bytes about murder and hate crimes are not the first conscious thoughts I want planted in my soul at the start of a new day.

In my opinion, it’s all about the art of sensationalism, what sells, and the public’s thirst for the negative.

And while I’ll admit I’ve still a lot to learn in this Earth school and that I may be a small fleck of influence in the argument for the positive, I’m not alone. Even on a rainy day the birds of the pre-dawn morning sing good news songs—or at least they do in my neck of the woods.

The poet Pindar wrote, “Unsung, the noblest deed will die.”

Fill yourself up with good news once in a while. Go out and find it. Google it if you have to. Spread it around. Stand out from the crowd of naysayers. Fill up on positive thoughts and pay them forward.

It’s what my old wicker couch is for on the banks of Frog Creek. It is as Wendell Berry penned, in “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."