photo by Abe Green

 

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

January 1, 2026

 

the Dalai Lama has a busy day today

he has to remind everybody

to be kind to each other

 

F. O. Matthiessen coined the phrase “American Renaissance” in his 1941 book with that title. He was referring to the period between 1850 and 1855, which saw the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.

 

I’ve been thinking about the period between 1955 and the present as a “Second American Renaissance.” By an amazing coincidence this period coincides nicely with my own life. I was born in 1951. I’m using the term “renaissance” loosely to mean an exciting time of transformation and new ideas.

 

Though Mathiessen’s American Renaissance was short-lived, like the Italian Renaissance, it sowed seeds that continued to sprout everywhere. The Italian Renaissance lasted approximately 200 years, from 1400 to 1600. This Second American Renaissance, now about 70 years old, is still going strong.

 

When I think of the Italian Renaissance, the first people who come to mind are artists: Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Raphael, Botticelli. But there was more to it than painting. There were the Borgias and Medicis, Machiavelli, Petrarch, Galileo and Columbus. In the same way, the Second American Renaissance contains all kinds of big ideas and important changes.

 

Here are some of the Big Things that have happened:

 

Civil Rights Movement, Environmental Movement, Peace Movement, Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation, Humanistic Psychology and the Human Potential Movement, Eastern Influences: Meditation, Mindfulness, Yoga & Zen, Rock & Roll, Trip to the Moon, Whole Earth Catalog, (return to) Organic Agriculture, vegan & vegetarian diets, advances in medical technology, computers, cell phones—and a Knowledge Explosion.

 

And something I’m going to call the “evolution of consciousness.” I am going to put forward the crazy idea that there is even an evolution of love and of peace and of happiness and of wisdom. Sounds New-Agey, doesn’t it? And the reason is simple: this is a New Age. There was a certain feeling that many of us had between 1968 and 1972 that a Big Change was underway. We were right.

 

During a “renaissance,” not everything is groovy. Michelangelo and Da Vinci were rare birds. Not everyone who was living in what we now call “Italy” between 1400 and 1600 were actively remaking the world. The popes and political leaders were horrible people! There was lots of senseless warfare going on—not to mention plagues! So it wasn’t a particularly happy time. But, as in Periclean Athens, things were happening in the human imagination that changed the potential of what it means to be a human being.

 

That’s what I mean by the phrase “evolution of consciousness.” In one way, consciousness, or awareness never changes. Like Life (with a capital “L”) it just is what it is. But human potential—for understanding and for loving—can change and does change, both for individuals and for cultures. As Heraclitus and the Buddhists say: everything is always changing.

 

Each of our lives is full of possibilities! Let’s make the most of them in the New Year!

 

—Johnny Stallings

*

 

Driven to Exclaim

 

How can I be so happy!

There’s so much bad news!

Inside, my heart is crying! But

outside, the crows are shouting!

Don’t they heed bad news—ruffians!

Hard times are coming! Hard times

are here! Everywhere I look, pain!

Why are leaders such angry children!

I’m such a child I want to stay up

late loving the ruined world!

Even the crows are shouting

strange joy! All I can do is crow!

 

—Kim Stafford, Winter Solstice 2025

*

 

The Robin and You

 

Extravagant in praise he bows to her.

Tells her she is a falcon-ness, a phoenix

and in his quiet moments a swan.

 

She knows she is a plain woods robin

and what matters is her song.

Early before the worms, she practices her art.

 

Her flash of red breast a surprise

only to those who have no feel for the natural world.

Wrapped inside themselves, amidst their suffering

 

she sings for them.

Her beak is the vessel, her mate the morning dew.

Her only audience, the wise and patient yew.

 

—Elizabeth Domike

*

 

There is still magic in the world, whether it be natural or man-made.

 

Across the Columbia River from Hood River is White Salmon, Washington. Every year in early December members of the White Salmon Chamber of Commerce climb in their cherry picker vehicles and head out to Dock Grade, a half-mile, one- way road that travels from Highway 14 up the hill to White Salmon. They are laden with close to a thousand Christmas ornaments, huge ornamental balls and stars to hang in the trees overhanging the road. The ornaments can be 8”-10” in diameter, and they are suspended 10’ to 30’ up in the bare-limbed trees. You drive up the road and are surrounded by a thousand floating orbs, spheres, globes and stars. It feels like you’re floating through space in a spaceship, with celestial elements surrounding you, enveloping you. Sunlight shines down and lights each ornament from above. It’s a feeling of magic. The kind of feeling you normally lose as you grow up and become “too old” for magic.

 

But there’s the natural magic—the magic of nature. A terrible wildfire (one of many!) swept through Catherine Creek, a wildflower lover’s mecca, and left the entire area blackened, crushed, destroyed, last summer. A friend has been working on restoration there and she told me to head out and take a look—“Just go!” she said. So after the drive up Dock Grade I drove the ten miles out to Catherine Creek and started tromping around: charred, blackened tree trunks and limbs, and shrubs nothing more than crusty twigs. Heartbreaking. What am I doing out here??!!? But! I  look down and I  see thousands of tiny blades of green grasses, and atop many of them, the soft purple blossoms of the grass widows: the first wildflowers of spring! In bloom! In December!. They hardly ever appear before late February or early March. People make the trek out to Catherine Creek just to see the grass widows in March, knowing that blossoms mean spring! But here they are, nodding up at me, saying, Yep, the fires of summer gave us a jumpstart. Thought you’d like that. Like???!!! I love it! The magic of nature. The magic of life.

 

And this was all in just one day!

 

—Jude Russell

*

 

“Know that you are a child of the universe.”

—Yogi tea bag wisdom

 

Musings on a Winter sunny day…

  

When Winter comes in cold and bright, after days of rain that have turned Summer’s brown grasses back to green, I think, “Oh no, Spring is coming too soon.” I love the long winter dark, which is my excuse for reading and being cozy under quilts even in the daytime, and by the wood stove in the evenings.  

 

Here it is New Year’s Eve and Spring is in the air, coming up all around us in Autumn’s left over leaves—crocuses, scilla, hyacinth, a first pink camellia in bloom, daphne budding out. 

 

Thoreau wrote of this wonder in Walden, about the ponds in Winter, the first crack of the ice signifying Spring has begun. Frozen ponds are rare in the Northwest, and snow in the mountains is a month late, but we have subtle signs. Even in my body that wants to hibernate, I also want to go out looking for sprouts and buds, returning birds and bunnies.  

 

Recently I read about Thoreau’s extraordinary Kalendar. He had a daily habit of walking and noting what was happening through the season in his Nature neighborhood. His Journal is the record of these practices, and the Kalendar is their culminating gesture: the final major endeavor of his life. 

 

The charts of general phenomena derived from Thoreau’s long-held sense that ‘our thoughts & sentiments answer to the revolution of the seasons,’ and his equally long-standing desire to more fully experience and comprehend the complex network of relations—what we would now call the ecosystem—of which he knew himself to be a part. Though Thoreau had for many years been keeping lists and charts of individual observations of the natural world—bird migration times, the flowering and leafing out of trees—the Kalendar was a discovery: a crystallization of his long-developing ideas about time, the natural world, and the nature of perception.”

 

Reading through this makes me aware of how extraordinary it is to be alive, to be here at all at such a blip in the planet’s life. I also see this wonder in my puppy’s exploration of Nature. Being a Border Collie, she is dumbfounded by the squirrels that run up trees, and by birds and even airplanes in the sky—because these are moving things she cannot herd. She at least has chickens and rabbits and a giant Golden Retriever who visits on weekends. Then there is my granddaughter’s wonder at everything new—mushrooms coming out of the ground in leaves that have turned red!!

 

So, thank goodness for the seasons that return on their own timeline with no prompting from us. Hopefully we all fall in love with the magic of life and finally save as much as we can for the children and creatures coming along.

 

Here is a poem from my friend Barbara, a gardener and a writer:

 

Winter Solstice

 

The long nights recede

As the light slowly returns

And my heart lifts up

Stars in the night sky

Yield to an early sunrise,

Pink and orange sky

And evenings stretch out;

The light lingers longer now,

Warming the new buds

I come more alive:

The light feeds my hungry soul,

Starving for beauty.

More revealed each hour,

Leaves, buds, flowers greet the day

As the sun warms them

Welcome light’s return

Our gift for surviving the

Dark, cold winter nights.

 

—Barbara Blossom

 

Speaking of watching the wild, here is a funny aside from Gina Wilson, who sent this:

 

Gayle Highpine writes in her book on making friends with wild birds:

 

“To survive among us, they (birds) have to watch what we are doing, and we are odd and different from the other ground creatures they see. Cows and squirrels and cats and deer are understandable, and predictable. If you see enough cows, you have a good idea what to expect from any cow you see. But humans are different. They do different things—sometimes humans do things that nobody’s ever seen. Sometimes a human may change its clothing overnight and yet it is the same human.”

    

Gina wrote:  Never thought about how we change our “skin”—often numerous times a day!

 

—Katie Radditz