Read not the "Times." Read the Eternities.

"How rarely I meet with a person who can be free, even in thought!  We live according to rule.  Some people are bedridden; all are world-ridden.  I take my neighbor, an intellectual man, out into the woods and invite him to take a new and absolute view of things, to empty clean out his thoughts of all institutions of men and start again; but he can't do it, he sticks to his traditions and his crotchets.  He thinks that governments, colleges, newspapers, etc., are from everlasting to everlasting."

"The last two Tribune newspapers I have not looked at.  I have no time to read newspapers.  If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire, - thinner than the paper on which it is printed, - then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them."

"Read not the  ' Times.'  Read the Eternities."

Henry David Thoreau

Photo: Aspen trees and the Vedauwoo Rocks glow in last light; Medicine Bow National Forest, WY; November 2, 2012.  Obviously, we in these complex times will continue to read the newpapers and think about what kind of government we have.  But perhaps we can take a tip from Thoreau and focus a bit more of our attention on larger realities.  Time spent in Nature is one way of helping us make this shift.