Category: Reflection
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Reflection: Oh, no. Not again (2025)
In desperation and anger, people were willing to try something new–like Mussolini’s Blackshirts, who marched into Rome in October of that year.
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Reflection: Moving on
“Everybody’s moving, if they’re not already there. Everybody’s got to move somewhere.” –Bob Dylan The leaves are leaving. The army of leaves that have fed the tree all summer now deserts, one by one, floating down in their dried uniforms to the ground. Soon whole regiments will be abandoning their posts, borne away by late…
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Reflection: American dreaming 2025
Last weekend the American president continued his evisceration of constitutional norms by militarizing the police, taking over museums, and personally choosing who gets the national Kennedy Center honors. He wants to be seen as a strong, fearsome father, and he sides with war criminal Putin’ to set’s terms to stop the carnage in Ukraine. His…
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Reflection: Dreams then and now
“…whoever directs my dreams deserves an Emmy. I find myself mid-dream, blown away by the ingenuity of the plot as it unfolds. These “lucid” dreams are as good or better than any Hollywood production I’ve seen.”
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Memoir: Safe spaces (animist edition) (2023)
Is it a coincidence that when there was nothing but lawn about those beds, we were sorely preyed on?
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Reflection: What I can no longer do
I find that with the loss of that youthful confidence in eternal sunshine, I cannot live a day without the grounding awareness of mortality, disease, and disability.
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Notes from an Alaska trip (2025)
“I enlisted in the Marines when I was 17, and when I got back from Vietnam two years later, I was an E5 Sergeant, 19 years old. It was 1970. And I couldn’t buy a beer.” Our white-bearded, energetic driver smiled at his reminiscence. “The age was 21. Well, here in the state of Alaska,…
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Memoir: What I Wouldn’t Do
This ambassador-neighbor would do what I would, but cannot–study my dear offspring and act compassionately for them “on the spot,” not ineffectually hearing about their trials and opportunities weeks or months later, or at all.
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Memoir: Pain management (1973-present)
Whichever hobbyhorse you ride–sports, gardening, music, travel, baking, arts and crafts, your dog or your cat–you ride it away from dukkha.
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Reflection: Joy, joy, despair (2024)
“Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.” –MLK’s Nobel lecture, 1964 Notwithstanding Dr. King’s claim, here’s my attempt to describe it in words. The most pleasing of all human…
The Wikiness 