Another day in North Carolina. I cannot escape the memories that attend a visit to the Durham area. I grew up in Bragtown just off of Roxboro Road a few minutes from this Holiday Inn. We walked down main street last night and marveled at the massive transformation underway in the old downtown area….
Arriving yesterday in Raleigh-Durham we deplaned into seventy-five degree sunny weather. Today will be the same. It is February the 23, and this is winter? I know that weather is not climate. Climate is what we call those more or less stable patterns governed by the jet stream, ocean currents, and probably much else…
Persons are joined to families families to communities, etc., by disciplines that must be deliberately made, remembered, taught, learned, and practiced. –excerpt Standing by Words by Wendell Berry
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough, to choose what to pay attention to, and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. –excerpt, This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living…
Today is Fat Tuesday, tomorrow is Lent, a season of abstinence. I was not raised Catholic, but I understand the logic of deprivation as preparation for newness, the emergence of new life. The truth is ancient, predating the Christian era. That’s the dynamic of life, of reality, of Nature, and the arc of human…
Can I be honest with you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? I mean really, really, honest? Sometimes I get sooo scared! I’ll wake up in the middle of the night all alone, hundreds of miles away from anybody, and it’s pitch dark, and I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to me in the…
All that really belongs to us is time; even he who has nothing else has that. —Balthasar Gracian So began our essay, Flavors of Time by Dean Buonomano. We awaken to consciousness upon birth, a consciousness that increases with the mastery of motor skills and then of language. Observe a child over the year…
I finished the essay on the subject of time. That’s my second read. And I’ll likely read it again. I’ve been intrigued with “time” for many years. I cannot help but notice that a great deal of poetry happens to be verses that meditate upon the difference that times passage makes in human consciousness…
How do I say this? On this Sunday afternoon the Superbowl spectacle is to be staged in Minneapolis. I find it hard to care. I am stuck back on groundhog day, February the 2nd. It was a sunny day, Punxsutawny Phil returned to his burrow and thus six more weeks of winter are in…
The link between excellence in parenting and a happy childhood is obvious. There are not many excellent parents. From my observation of families, and of my own experience a majority of us greet our newly born child as if we were Adam and Eve. I am sobered to acknowledge that most of us enter…
