elemental forces...

Its a rainy New England morning and the wind is howling.  Most of my wonderful family live in the Midwest and a "Christmas Blizzard" prevented travel this year, postponing the annual gathering of brothers and sisters and cousins at my parents house.  The weather is, of course, an "elemental force" that cannot be tampered with, only bent to...    This from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Perpetual Forces."

"What I have said of the inexorable persistence of every elemental force to remain itself, the impossibility of tampering with it or warping it, - the same rule applies again strictly to this force of intellect ; that it is perception, a seeing, not making, thoughts. The man must bend to the law, never the law to him...

For man, the receiver of all, and depositary of these volumes of power, I am to say that his ability and performance are according to his reception of these various streams of force. We define Genius to be a sensibility to all the impressions of the outer world, a sensibility so equal that it receives accurately all impressions, and can truly report them, without excess or loss, as it received. It must not only receive all, but it must render all. And the health of man is an equality of inlet and outlet, gathering and giving. Any hoarding is tumor and disease...

I delight in tracing these wonderful powers, the electricity and gravity of the human world. The power of persistence, of enduring defeat and of gaining victory by defeats, is one of these forces which never loses its charm...

We arrive at virtue by taking its direction instead of imposing ours."

(Thanks to sister-in-law Stacy for the photo of the water tower in the town where she, my brother, and their two children live) 

Blessings