Welcome to August’s Poem of the Month!
Wow – this summer seems to have flow by faster than any others I can recall. We’ve had an action-packed Summer, which is partly why you haven’t seen a Poem of the Month appear in your inbox recently. Jody and I spent a wonderful first anniversary in Venice – well, at least the Venitian in Las Vegas. Instead of my annual fall trip to Portugal for the Port wine harvest, I opted for the May trip which pairs the visit to Portugal’s Douro valley with a trip to the Island of Madeira to taste, yes, Madeira wine (quite a treat to taste 8 or 10 Madeira produced in the 1800’s). Coincidentially, and quite unplanned, I will be returning to Portugal in about a month, with Jody joining me for her innagural visit to the country, courtesy of the Portuguese National Tourism Board and the 2010 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition. Needless to say, I can no longer claim that I never win anything, despite not actually remembering entering the sweepstakes when I visited the visitportugal.com website.
The summer also saw the Todds spending a week camping in the San Juan Islands with all of Jody’s family, which was a fun week full of hiking, swimming and enjoying the sun. To round out the summer, I accepted a new internal position at T-Mobile, managing a team of Instructional Designers who are responsible for creating the training programs for our employees out in our T-Mobile stores. I’ve never been busier (while still managing a great work-life balance of course), and I have found that I enjoy not only the new challenges, but also the great people on my team.
It’s hard to believe that the last rays of summer are slowing sliding into fall. there have been several events this summer that led me naturally to this month’s selection, William Worldsworth’s The World Is To Much With Us. The one event that will likely stay on our minds for a very long time was the Gulf Oil Spill. Sure, we are all thrilled that the well looks like it has now been plugged. But that certainly seems like a bittersweet victory, given the millions and millions of gallons of oil that leaked into the Gulf, all of the lives so dramatically impacted by this tragedy. Now come the Congressional Hearings, and talk of how corporate greed led to shortcuts, which in a long chain of events resulted in something that they said could never happen…
Other vignettes from this summer really fit nicely with this month’s poem:
Seeing Kerry Killinger, former CEO of the former Washington Mutual, testify before Congress about how they were protected by powerful interests, and how Wamu was excluded from this inner circle and hung out to dry. Politics, power, money, influence… Jody and I celebrated our first anniversary in July with a quick return trip to Venice – well, at least to the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Vegas is one of those places that is so indulgent that it’s almost fun just to laugh at how over-the-top it really is. I mean, come on…real gondolas and canals through the center of the hotel? I started a new position at T-Mobile as Manager of Retail Training Design, which is a wonderful opportunity for me, but hiring a staff, and jumping into a new role in a break-neck speed industry has been both tiring and exhilarating. The swirl of events, and life in general, left me nodding my head at the opening of Wordworth’s poem.
Wordsworth would have been very proud of us had he known that we balanced out the buying and spending, the din of commerce and industry with a wonderful week of camping with the Kealy clan in the San Juan Islands. It proved to be wonderful, lazy days swimming in the lake, hikes on Mt. Constitution, time to sit and enjoy the wonderful and joys of our natural world.
William Wordsworth
(1770 – 1850)
The World Is Too Much With Us
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
