“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
I have not been sleeping well. Big deal. Since 2016, the number of partial insomniacs world wide must be in the hundreds of millions. Wendell Berry understood: “When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be ….”* Two or three nights a week at 2:17 or 3:03 or some […]
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This begins with innocence. I was throwing rocks in a stream for the pleasure of the splash, for the pleasure of throwing rocks into a stream or to see how far I could make them go. I was 12 or 13, old enough to know. There were ducks fifty feet or so upstream. I aimed for the pleasure of aiming so wrapped up in the mere physics of moving. No […]
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Pick up anything that fits the hand and I’ll bet you’ll toss it in the air or want to throw it as if you mean to strike a target. Twirl your arm in a circle like a propeller, your body the joint, as if your shoulder were the ball bearing it swings upon. Hold a ball and look for a tree or a post. Wind up, turn and let your […]
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From the vantage point of 67, I now see that our childhoods are fashioned more by emotion than thought, more by the moment that smashes into us than by any contemplation. The fundamental impulses of joy or disgust, fear or euphoria are immediate in their impact. They abide in memory. When I was very young, three moments forged a moral core in me that has never changed, one that I […]
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