Saturday morning. My gaze is drawn to the window, to sunlight that streams into the room. The blue sky beckons me, thin gray clouds scuttling southward, drawing away from the dim glow of this screen (a necessary tool). Desire. What is desire? Desire is inclination for movement, for pleasure of bodily movement, the wind…
A man of Zheng, called Huan, studied his books in a place called Quishi. In three years he became a Confucian scholar, bringing benefits to the three classes of his family relations as the yellow river extends its beneficial influence for nine li. He encouraged his younger brother to study the doctrines of Mo,…
Yan Hui asked, “What do you mean when you saythat there is no beginning without ending?” Confucius said, “All thingsare undergoing a continuous changebut we do not know who sustains the processof transformation. How do we know the ending?How do we know the beginning? What we can do is simply to follow the natural…
Zhuangzi was once fishingin the Po river when the ruler of Chusent two ministers with a message,“I wish to trouble youwith the charge of all territories.’ Zhuangzi continued to hold to hold the rodand without looking around said,“I have heard that in Chuthere is a sacred tortoisewhich died three thousand years ago.The ruler keeps…
Sunday, the sun is brilliant and the air cool. Fall. The seasons are reliable, delivering the rhythmic weather essential to the community life here in the Midwest. You might guess that my subtext, about which I struggle to write, — the political upheaval, the social unrest that troubles Chicago and our suburbs. The advent…
My love affair with drag racing reaches back in time to my sixteen year old self. A visit to Great Lakes Drag-a-way in Union Grove Wisconsin comes with sensation of connection. Just inside the gate in the distance is the shutdown area for the quarter mile race track. Before my vehicle is parked I…
Back at last. Ten days in France became twelve. The airline cancelled our return flight. The lesson was learned which I suppose all seasoned travelers know. When reservations are upended by circumstance one thing alone matters, – to hash out the details of an alternate flight yourself. The airline is unlikely to independently reschedule…
Travel in a foreign country asks the traveler to adapt. Humans can be very adaptive. Or frozen, by patterns of past experience, those impossible expectations paralyzing the mind, and then spinning like a top, after energy is spent, wobbling to fall over. It is Sunday morning, I compose these lines at the end of…
The day three, another outstanding breakfast at our hotel. The French feature of flakey, buttery pastry and fresh fruit, plus a charcuterie board is impossible to beat by my breakfast standards. My standard of what makes a good breakfast has been elevated. Today is Sunday. We arrived at the church of Saint Augustin, where…
This is to be our second day in Paris. I have a strange sensation of being in a country, and a city that in my fathers time suffered four long years of German occupation. I cannot exactly describe the feeling of walking along the Seine yesterday afternoon, the air filled with the sounds of…
