Beyond The Hour

Beyond the hour (11thhouraction.com/blogs/11thhouraction/hundreds-millions-people-all-over-world-participate-earth-hour-2009)

“Take nothing but pictures. / Leave nothing but footprints. / Kill nothing but time.”- This gets to be known as the Motto of the Baltimore Grotto, a caving society, yet it may as well become your motto.

I sometimes envisage people as some crumbs, millions of crumbs crowded on some plain surface, yet it may equally well be an abrupt one…Yet, there comes a moment when the wind starts blowing furiously and takes these many crumbs away, mainly because even though they may live with the strong belief that no one can harm them they are but mere infinitesimal particles of a way much bigger universe. So are we, infinitesimally small compared to the planet which we inhabit.

Earth Hour (zipinotes.com/earthhour2008/)

An anonymous person once said that “Home is where you hang your @” and it looks to me that we have chosen to hang our @ in various parts of this world, homes that though placed at opposite corners will get to pass through one hour keeping it dark. It goes all beyond that hour, yet it gets to be all the more related to the planet which we inhabit and about helping it survive. It may all be resumed to the words of Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-general of the United Nations as he was the one saying that we should be allowed to use “60 minutes of darkness to help the world see the light.”

An hour spent in the darkness is not meant to really save the planet mainly because as it took quite a while to ruin part of what once used to be different than what it is today and it got to be referred to in terms of unspoiled nature, it gets to be impossible repair all the damages that have been brought through our irresponsible actions mainly in just one hour. Yet, the action globally known as the Earth Hour is perhaps meant to just trigger an one hour alarm, an alarm that may sound that loud to just wake up those who still haven’t woken up, finding themselves in a state of lethargy or hibernation (call it as you wish).

Earth Hour lights (flickr.com/photos/earthhour_global/3393791445/)

Much like William Blake once said “He who desires but does not act breeds pestilence.”Individualism has become the master word of these last few years, individualism that led many believe that only their home mattered and not the surrounding environment. We sort of dwell peacefully on our insular worlds, being woken up to reality only when tragedies start occurring in the same environment about which very few gave a damn thing about until that unfortunate, many times natural tragedy occurred.

Somehow this hour of darkness requires each and every of us who have either woken up entirely to see the consequences of their little deeds or just keep on blinking half awake, to just mediate on how to keep the lights of this planets turned on for as long as possible. Lights will switch off for an hour all around the globe and this hopefully will get to make us see the real lights…perhaps the ones coming from the candles, the ones coming from the shining stars of the night. Up there on the sky that dwells above us one may encounter if lucky enough a blanket of thousands stars. And if stars do not suffice then perhaps the soft light broadcasted by a candle long forgotten by many on a shelf will suffice to help you make it through that hour.

Earth Hour (http://foyupdate.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html)

“Praise the bridge that carried you over” – George Colman once said this, yet there was no where stipulated that the bridge may as well be the planet inhabited by us. Would one hour suffice to praise it? Better than nothing…One hour may trigger more hours and more hours and then entire days and months and years and perhaps a new way of envisaging things.

And by saying this I sense the hour approaching, only five minutes away (as you read this you may have already witnessed it) and as such I am going to put an end and ponder for one hour writing it in candlelight and quoting Charles A. Lindbergh who once wrote (I know not if by candlelight) in Reader’s Digest “How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?”11