“You don’t have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.” — John Ciardi My last few trips to the village of Mendocino have coincided with the lunchtime release of the…
Posts tagged as “essays”
I never attended Kindergarten. I’ve had the audacity, over the years and decades, to claim that fact as the underlying reason for every life failure (or life lesson gone awry) that I’ve ever experienced since…
My brother, a successful Internet Technology person living in San Mateo, recently wrote, “I know the Bay Area is back because for about three years no one was going out to dinner and a concert,…
The importance of music can only be truly gauged by its absence. A bride walking down the aisle in silence is an act that thunders more loudly than a hundred trumpets and timpani. Likewise, watching…
If I were to sum it up using the current terminology, I would say my first childhood home had very good “energy.” It was a happy time for all of us — my father continuing to develop his ministerial skills, my mother beginning her teaching career (which continued for another 25 years), my brother entering adolescence and me beginning school and piano lessons (which continued for another six years).
Last night by the fire, our new (old) house enshrouded in dense fog, I said to Marcia that I didn't feel we were on the land where this house sits but rather on a boat, or possibly a raft, floating somewhere on the ocean of existence.
Writers and filmmakers have long liked apocalyptic stories. In the last century the dominant cause of the end of humanity became a nuclear holocaust, but a giant asteroid hitting Earth has also been popular. And then there are those pesky zombies. That's science fiction — so far — but out in the real world, it might well be that the most likely cause of our specie's demise will be a microscopic bug we cannot defeat, and that we vanish, or vastly diminish, not with a bang but a whimper.
“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” —…