A tribute to C.B. Hyde
Saturday, April 6, 2024 at 9:11 p.m.
My friend from down south sent me this picture of his wife welcoming a new day in Peini, facing east with the Honduran and Guatemalan hills in the distance. Just above the beautiful sunrise are angry, ominous storm clouds threatening to spoil a promising day with a deluge. I’m kind of obsessed with this photo, both because of its beauty, with the rising sun and clouds reflecting on the calm sea, and because of the woman’s stance, daring those clouds to spoil her day! And no, I’m not going to use it as a metaphor for threats on our sovereignty, even though I could.
For me it’s more a reflection on our mortality, our time on this blessed Earth. Even though we abuse her every chance we get, she gives us these spectacular moments to digest and to store in our memory banks. The sun, that hath kept watch over man’s mortality, as Wordsworth describes it, gives us light and life and colors and hope. The same with the sea, that bares her bosom to [the] moon, again quoting Wordsworth, every chance she gets. These are simple things that we take for granted, nature’s gifts to us, and yet we barely notice them. We’ve taken the Earth for granted, like we take our spouses, or jobs, our very existence, for granted. We fail to recognize the awe and majesty of it all.
I realize that I keep repeating a different version of the same theme, in A minor and B flat, to steal a musical inference, but I think it’s important to remind us of all the beauty that surrounds us. The beauty that we fail to recognize because we are too busy working or watching TV or gossiping or walking around with our heads up our a**es. We don’t stop to take it all in, to breathe it in, as it is slipping from us, little by little, day by day. I walk around in my neighborhood, and every day I see something different, something new, that excites me!
As we creep towards the inevitable journey into old age, when we start realizing that our mortality is real, not some imagined occurrence that we can escape, I believe we should take the time to look at those storm clouds, the sunrise and the sunset, the beauty of this planet, and suck that marrow out of life!
Go for a walk; leave your headphones at home; and as you walk, listen to the music of nature! Be grateful for the blessings nature has provided us during our lifetime. Life is too short and unpredictable; no matter how long we live, we will never have enough time to take it all in. So, take as much as you can get, and hope that the hunger and thirst for more pleasing moments is never satiated! As the Publisher would say, mortality is real, Jack!
“The clouds that gather round the setting sun, do take a sober coloring from an eye that hath kept watch over man’s mortality!” – Wordsworth
Glen