Everyone needs a relief valve. Day to day throughout one's life there are episodes of disturbing events occurring which cannot be escaped, waiting to be dealt with. And we do the best we can to meet those challenges. Each one takes a toll on us. It isn't just the personal events impacting our lives, but the influence on our thoughts and consciences of what occurs to others.

World news certainly can have an emotion-dampening effect on anyone. People choose a course whereby they shut themselves off from news from elsewhere that is so disheartening. Ignorance, for them, is a kind of relief mechanism; what you don't know and deliberately remain oblivious to can't possibly trouble you. The reasoning that each of us struggles with our very own challenges in our lives and adding the problems faced by others that in their volume and depth dwarf our own provides no balm whatever, however.

There are those who seek comfort in drugs or alcohol, substances that can dim awareness and set aside woes and for the most obvious of reasons resorting to either only adds to the misery that these people are attempting to escape but manage to complicate. There are infinitely more benign methods of soothing one's emotions, close at hand and achieved through the benevolence of nature and of the arts.

Music soothes like no other medium of human construction, while the plastic arts come a close second. The champion, however, in allowing human nature surcease from the burden of simply being and enduring life's fortunes good or bad, is closeness to nature. We have removed ourselves from close proximity to nature in our modern era like no other time in human history. Any small urban plot of land that has been permitted to remain green represents an invitation to a tired soul to come and bask in its peaceful atmosphere.

Talented people are capable of producing novels that enrapture us with their explorations of the human condition, and they too have the potential of distracting, informing, entertaining and allowing us to set aside if only temporarily, our own deep-seated concerns. A broad step removed from the value that literature brings to us in reading is viewing films, many of which convey to us visually what literature does in invoking our imaginations.

For us, the opportunities to immerse ourselves daily in a wide urban swath of greenery within a forest where trails take us for miles on a quest for serenity, the ultimate restfulness and renewal of spirit is possible. How did our Sunday reveal itself? Most pleasantly. With our two little companion dogs we ambled at a comfortable pace through a ravined forest we're fortunate enough to live beside. The pristine beauty of a forest in the direct wake of a winter snowfall has few peers. And so, this enabled us to enjoy ourselves to the fullest; taking due note of the landscape itself and watching as two little creatures disported themselves in an excess of energetic joyfulness through their own exposure to nature's arras.

In the evening, we viewed a superior film presented by the Cohen Media Group, a film from the heart of a Turkish director, Deniz Gamze Erguven, of the lives of five siblings, young girls raised by a doting grandmother, maturing to womanhood and the rude interruption and distortion of their existence as they become cultural/religious commodities. Mustang is a film whose value cannot be overstated.