Topic started by Vishvesh Obla (@ 63.65.68.246) on Wed Oct 17 15:10:57 .
All times in EST +10:30 for IST.
Last weekend we drove around South Vermont. We had heard that Vermont is very picturesque during fall. This fall season, I have been home at Albany and it has been wonderful here. The trees are myriad colored, the flowers still blooming and Albany has been pretty enough for us that we were wondering what else can be there at Vermont. Anyway, we decided that we drive around, for it wasn’t much distant to where we live.
Vermont is a small state full of rustic villages and is rightly called the “Green Mountain State”. The mountains are not rugged as they are in the southwest regions. They are not tall either but they have dense vegetation and must look like the green billiards table tops in spring and summer. The foliage in this place seemed to me to acquire a special color, not found elsewhere in US. It is the same color patterns : yellow, orange, pink and red to be specific ; but they were very intense in this area. I could even say that this region had its characteristic shades added to the colors and that was much more than just being spectacular. One sees foliage colors throughout US, as it is there in the city I live too. While your minds gets impressed by the riot of colors at this time as seen everywhere, this place, it appeared to me, had something of a serene nature inherent in it that created a much deeper sensory perception ; you just don’t look at it, say “wow ! how pretty it is” and the very next moment start thinking of the toils of your everyday life. There are moments in everyone’s life when one enters into a few states of consciousness much above the mundane. Maybe when one gives up oneself to a faith inwardly, to a principle or a purpose in life or anything similar, one experiences:
………………………that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood,…
as Wordsworth puts it nicely. Such experiences are more poignantly felt with sensory perceptions, for the experience is more direct. I could feel myself going through that blessed mood in the serene surroundings of the tiny villages and mountains of Vermont. I have been going through a horrid time watching the recent developments of terrorist issues and pained so much to see what human life has today become in the long history of the exploitation of mankind. I didn’t feel my visit to Vermont as a respite from such anguished feelings ; it only did reconfirm my belief in the human capacity to respond to the finer things in life, and in the human potential that life, however it has progressed today, would still have some direction as long as we still hold the human mind that can respond to such finer things. It is not a matter of day-dreaming and that you escape from reality with such a response to a thing of the mind that could be seen everywhere in Vermont ; it, in fact, could give one an immense inward strength in life and a compassion for mankind as much as any physical endeavor for making this troubled world better can give rise to. I am here again reminded of Wordsworth:
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind…
This country is blessed with natural resources. The drive to Mt.Equinox reminded me of the various loop roads of the west, particularly Yellowstone and the Timpanagos mountains. I used to think that the west could be the best place in US, but the foliage pattern and the charm of the little villages in Vermont appeared to me as good as, if not better than, any of the other beautiful places I have seen in US. I am sure you guys would find a visit to Vermont, if not now in the near future, an enriching experience…
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