Foreign agricultural trade statistics for fiscal year 1977, just released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, reveal some startling and potentially dangerous developments for America’s embattled family farmers. Production of food for our own dinner plates is being transferred rapidly to foreign lands.

For myself, I remember no early trauma, sudden realization, concerning death. I was not even much shaken by the death of a grandfather early in my childhood. I can remember no moment when I did not grasp intellectually the concept of death. But in the year I was sixteen, on the first day of that new year, my father died, and since that time I have longed hopelessly for a paradise that will never return.

It is very easy for us to develop an “open” attitude only toward those ideas which the “New Age” is bringing to the fore. The danger lies in self-righteous deification of alternative methods at the expense of modern approaches to health care.

Experience is worth a thousand words about color. When I do color therapy with people, the person becomes the screen. The color is moving onto and through them. You look into the beam as it comes from the projector, just long enough to get into your consciousness what it is.

It’s not raining and that makes it worse. Or better, you tell yourself, it is better that the begonias die. But the begonias don’t die. Right now while our good God peeks through the clouds Mrs. Ferguson is mumbling a bit of a prayer and tilting the waterbucket, gently. Those are pretty little drops that glaze the leaves and tumble, given to the earth.

There’s something to be said against encouraging hopefulness. Henry Miller said it: “I do not want to give hope to others, nor to inspire others. If we knew what it meant to be inspired, we would not inspire. We would simply be.”