Rest Points

The voters of one large American city were recently asked to pass a measure which would have forced the city council to enact programs and policies to reduce the stress points in the lives of its citizens. The Colossians text shows us how we can find rest points, not stress points, in our daily lives.

Joyce Kilmer, early 20th-century poet, wrote many poems before dying in action in France in July 1918, but he is remembered for only one: “Trees.”

It begins, “I think that I shall never see/ a poem as lovely as a tree ...” And it concludes, “Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.”

Ogden Nash, the 20th-century iconoclast who produced 19 volumes of poetry and wrote for many years for The New Yorker, wrote the following words about 35 years after Kilmer: “I think that I shall never see/ a billboard lovely as a tree/ Indeed, unless the billboards fall,/ I’ll never see a tree at all.”

This quatrain sums up the crisis of the modern urban ecosystem: How does one live a stress-free life amid urban sprawl, crowding and congestion, gridlock and noise, smog and pollution, poverty and despair — and boom cars with turbo-charged sub-woofers stashed in the trunk that thump in the traffic, inflicting tinnitus on a captive audience?

It’s so bad that some subscribe to the “breeder”...