Water...

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 ...

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, bu...

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...