I can be ferocious if I want to.
I ran across a note in my file from August 2013. Although it was written over four years ago, there is an uncanny aspect to its application for today and may affect the design of our lives tomorrow. In light of today’s climate in almost any segment of American society—politics, entertainment, and religion to name three—there is a pervasive attitude pregnant with outsized self-importance. This shaded truth is explained as an alternate reality as though one phenomena can have more than one factually based truth. Claiming something to be true and factual when it is only my interpretation is claiming authority I don’t possess. (more…)
There are times when I still think Barbara, my wife of forty-five years, is in the room. I almost say something to her, but when I look around she’s not there. Then the loss and the pain of it washes over me anew. After many years of her presence, five years of her absence has not erased the emptiness that arrived expectantly but undesired on September 27, 2012 when she died after being ill for over two years. Michael Piazza, pastor of Middle Collegiate Church in New York City wrote in a recent post in reference to the loss of his husband, “My experience has been that the adage ‘time heals all wounds’ is probably a lie.”
A kaleidoscope, the kind shaped like a hand-held telescope, contains pieces of material, each a different color. The viewer looks through the lens like looking through a telescope and sees a colorful pattern through two or more reflective surfaces. As the instrument is turned, the colorful patterns change. 
Someone asked me recently what my blog was all about. I directed him to the “About” page on the blog and then gave him the short answer “How people shape their lives and how their lives are shaped by external influence.” Here is a longer answer: 
