Water...

  Empty is a full space. The void contains timelessness. I have been anxious to meet empty     very, very anxious. I have avoided empty feelings     only to notice empty more prominently. Sometimes I have saught for empty spaces     nature dressing up the unfathomable     sheltered, I have for brief moments,     relished a deep inhalation of empty air     pregnant with morning dew, ladened with pollens     empty air rushing into gasping, expanded     lung-sacks, permeable organic things     squeezed into companionship among billions     of cells made up of stardust.   The spaces between stars, empty? Between breaths, universes? Empty is not so empty: impish a-void-er!     Nothingness vastly embraces and fills you. Full of space, I step through the portal of this Thursday morning: 6/22/23

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...

Just this morning I finished my first reading of "Fear and Trembling".  It took me some time to get through.  I read it in conjunction to some thoughts that a more modern author published about Kierkegaard.  Earnest Becker makes quite a lot of Kierkegaard in his "The Denial of Death".  I'm not sure what this says of Kierkegaard or of Becker or me for reading.  I stumbled on Becker via Irvin Yalum's "Staring at the Sun".  I see life much as Yalum portrays, at least what I can understand of reading his writings.  I am not sorry I took the time to read this work. Not sure what I think exactly of "Fear and Trembling".  I used to be a Christian.  Revisiting my "old love" has it's own life.  I still abhor child-sacrifice, something I never saw as prevalent in the Bible when I was a believer.  It's in there though, more frequently than I would have ever admitted along with many other immoralities.  So Kierkegaard...

" Honest Atheism " First appeared in Free Inquiry, vol 35 issue 1 By permission of author: D. Cameron Webb this is the unedited version of the FI article: As atheists, we hear it all the time: how miserable our lives must be, how utterly devoid of meaning and purpose. Without the promise of eternal life, without knowing that our lives are intrinsically important to the machinations of a creator god, we must agonize daily, endlessly, under the weight of crushing despair and pointless suffering. This widespread notion was recently brought into sharp focus in a piece written for  The Week  magazine by Damon Linker. Asking “Where are the Honest Atheists?” under the guise of reviewing A. C. Grayling's book  The God Argument , Mr. Linker articulated what millions of Americans simply take as brute fact: The style of atheism rehearsed in these books has reached a dead end. It’s one thing to catalogue the manifest faults within this or that religious tradition, which...