Water...

Listen to the voices: cacophony, perhaps, but only at first.      Animal voices, tree voices, fish voices: Trout shouts with a slap of his tail upon glassy lake Orca sings a harmony far, far off. Ash and oak whisper to each other, l eaves rustling in gentle breeze. Lion roars as Sun guilds the savanna sky with radiance: A voice of a mammal and a voice of warm photons. Listen closely: individual voices emerge amongst the hum of rising sea temperatures. Coffee-shop chatter: human voices, willfully ignorant. Insurrectionists screaming their credos, claps of thunderous violence. Two lovers entwined whisper in ecstasy: the voice of joyous sex. Populists, echo-chambers of the powerful reverberate with senseless platitudes— incoherent self-congratulatory-grunting-gravely, grating, death-rattles… Choking screams of something precious: the perishing voices of suffering, democratic-thirsty, freedom loving human individuals. Will our children have to purchase

I started this page thinking about so many details from this day.  It's okay not to write anything down at all. Electric is off, due to area specific thunderstorms, so working off my cell phone signal and this laptop.  I would like to write out longhand but probably won't.  Guess my son is in the writing mood tonight as well. I do not always find peace in solitude.  I often feel anxious when I go into solitude.  Sometimes I long to turn down the noise...the fan, the TV, the daily living noise. Do I want to really think about shit?  Do I want to think about how bothered I actually am by trivial stuff---that probably does not matter all that much in even 30 minutes and definitely not in 30 weeks. I am here now.  The rain is falling, the pebbles of rain fall across the landscape.  The order of things is unchanged.  Mary Oliver's eyes see what my eyes see.  I don't know my place in the order of things.  I do and I don't.  There is something that haunts me.  The Hunted S

 The validation of all a person, another human,     can mean to another....          may only be felt. Men have emotions:  deep emotions, not singular either.      The setting:  ( Provisions Bakery & Deli in a sleepy Ohio town, waking up amongst sweet smells of baked goods and people coming and going.  Two tables over a venerable elder sits, walking-stick stretched out on right of table.  As a dawning, attention is transformed, the table has become an altar: his wife is framed in a small 3x5 window in the center of that flat square. Three empty chairs surround the small table.  "Tuesdays through Saturday--it's my morning ritual," he almost has an apologetic tone.  It's Friday.)     Across the span of something we might call, Occupancy, that transitory reality       has dictated a type of musical chairs.          One two three or more.  Twenty or more filled with family and friends,                 today just one chair, yes... One today.  A profound story contained

 I am already home. If to be home already brings the possibility of having never left, It might follow then that strong arms have always held me safely:   Strong arms of my own existential beingness. These thoughts rolled through my mind as a I fitfully slept the other night.  There is fear.  There is storm.  There is peace and shelter in the inner sanctum--even for a free-thinker/atheist such as myself. The shelter within: fortress, bulwark, hearth, walls, gates, doors, windows. A castle secure from the onslaught of exterior circumstances.  I might say I am a castle impregnably stalwart.  Perhaps death is one enemy that I won't vanquish--thankfully.  And then there is this feeling: castle feels cold.   Home feels warm.  Warmth of hearth, joy of good family meals, chatter, companionship, all that it means to be at home, and be home.  It seems to me like it should be shoes kicked off, just pure relaxation. Storms do rage, for a time.  They are without.  Maybe there is a castle part

I've had a broadening realization:  I know more of the source of my anxiety.  I know my own anxiety(ies) all to well.  I've spent much of my life fighting against anxiety.  Today, we (different parts of me) have arrived at some uneasy truce. What is so striking is that at forty-five years of age, I think there is a part that is still growing up, I wish to emphasize the "a part".  This part feels the pressure to give out of it's non-existent resources. It got stuck in a time loop. The source of my anxiety has to do with parent/child role reversal.  Parentification is the technical term.  This part had to give to my mother, when it was actually my mother's responsibility and duty to give to me.  It was an impossible task for such a small boy. I had no life experience, and I tried so hard, and everything I tried seemed to fail except playing smaller and smaller, and not being a pain to mother and trying to guess how to make her happy, and then I was so unhappy, b

This may be a 30,000 foot view of life.  He's been in the planes looking down between the clouds to see a landscape, one that looks miniature.  Tierra firme!  He's a terrestrial.  Feet upon the ground and brain sometimes in outer-space. The steam of hot coffee, a Spring morning that is shaping up to be a Winter morning, but that is all part of the cycle of Springing in the Northern Hemisphere.  One cannot have Spring without som'more Winter.  Winter may not want to let go (please allow a personification), much like this man does not like to let go either of that which feels safe and the comfort of the "expected".  Then there is the "usual" which has changed and metamorphosed, and nothing is all that predictable.  Covid-19 perhaps it was more predictable than he or anyone thought possible.  Then there is the toy like scene from 30,000 feet of Ukraine and Monster Russia playing at something awful: war.  Predictable as well, he supposes, but this is not som

Trigger warning : Bible quotation. ....and a sermon will not follow, or perhaps something of a polemic might follow.  You decide.  I have more of interest in thinking about a topic that used to be near and dear to me:  hope.   Some thoughtful religious people think they have a corner on hope, and that I as a secular humanist don't have hope.  Many unthinking ones assume I possess a "false hope".  In the interchange of human ideas, the minds of humans all have something to think, even if "how" and "why" we have come to think similar ideas are very, very differently arrived at. I have long wondered at the limitation of words and "shared conceptions".  I wager that there are as many nuances surrounding "hope" as there are humans on the planet, well, thinking articulate humans.  God is another human conception that likely has as many perspectives as there are humans as well. Humans can and do change their minds on many topics and about

As I open my laptop this statement greets me: For a long while I've noted that my attention is drawn to the idea of befriending the unlovely in myself and others.  I've written  elsewhere  of the deep impact that O'Donohue has had on my thinking.  I'll mention another,  Pádraig Ó Tuama. What plays at the edges of my mind this morning is that "deepest tranquility"  (no tranquillities is not misspelled either), "fear," and the "yielding" part.  Let's explore.  Let's try to let ourselves think about loneliness of aloneness in the context of closeness, the warmth of hearth and the coziness of self-shelter. The loneliness of aloneness may be one of the superstructures upon which human dignity is supported.  The paradox is that I have a strong repulsion to the feeling of loneliness, until the moment I crave solitude, and then the pendulum swings the other way.  Befriending loneliness, my own, seems like an oxymoron. Maybe some space and t

The glance backward...he looks back.  Even in this space of "finding water"...the ebb and the flow of thought.  The seeping to the gushing, even roaring and thundering flows of thought. To create to day, in this moment which will add up to today....  Coffee, computer, lentil breakfast (kinda strange, but it was easy and quick and plus, seems like its the food of the souls of at least some thinkers any-who, and it is absolutely sad if you know with whom this author so arrogantly makes comparison).... continuing on....thinking about the silence here on this space.   Maybe over a year? The ebb and flow of life.  Some days and weeks, the bin has overflowed with the accumulated trash of life.  There is no energy to move that mountain.  Sometimes, life is like this. The writer has been engaged with perhaps the largest life-task to date.  There has been writing elsewhere.  On paper (his favorite).  Closed Facebook groups.  Lots of personal texts.  Some emails.  NO lack of words.   T