Water...

"Some voice said, Here's a map, drive off it. When do I come back? I asked You don't." * On vacation with my partner, near Mill Creek Bridge, CA June 2025 near Mill Creek Bridge, CA Highway 1 (PCH) a bit south of the Bug Sur Landslide This haunting:  some parts still remember being stuck in pretend straight.  My pulse still quickens, adrenalin still rushes in anxiety at times, and then I remember that was then.  Now is different.  Some time ago, back in some other part of the journey, I once startled at  the long-held premonitions of "driving off the map?"  Now I can call it: "my journey toward wholeness."  Some rumble, from beyond the joys of today, groan on about loneliness and rejection from others--voices once believed. It was only a few, who could not accept gay.  Many are just fine with gay, even before I was okay with admitting to myself--"I am gay".  Most were just fine with gay.  The journey, that map, wasn't pointing toward...

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...

I close my eyes . . . what do I see?  At first it's blackness.  Then a moment of thoughtfulness.  Images emerge.  Some vivid images of peaceful spaces.  Imagination plays with settings that seem to be the perfect essence of joy and fulfillment. There is the edge of consciousness that seems hazy...peer there and something seems to emerge hazily.  A flitting image.  Observe.  Stand still.  I hear a robin to the left.  I smell the scent of some wild mountain flower.  A bee buzzes behind me.  Warm light over-head shines down on my perception of this personage I call: me.  The illusion is real, with breeze, gurgling brook faintly titillating in the background.  The words rise and fall in my mind. Grass sways, there are a million stimuli, and I sit . . . eyes closed, imagination creating, painting, creating. I think in the saner moments of life, there is a  whole lot of creativity emerging.  I'm curious...

" 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...