Lake Michigan, the five great lakes are inland seas. The imagination fails at the immensity of the amount of fresh water, 21 percent by volume of the world’s surface fresh water. While wading on a sand bar at the edge of Lake Michigan my attention was drawn by the sand that enveloped each step. …
It is a delight to travel. I’m in Michigan wine country, just outside of St. Joseph. With a brief two hour drive, the big city of Chicago is west of us. Benton Harbor and St. Joseph are situated on the other side of great Lake Michigan. The environment of soil and weather and proximity…
Falling in order to rise…… the destruction of received models and forms is necessary in order to clear a space for spontaneous thought to arise. From the cathedral of our own feelings, from the void of the blank canvas, then, comes the space for revelation. We are fragments of an unutterable whole. Meaning is…
Aristotle wrote in his Ethics that the end purpose of philosophy is purposeful action. Disciplined thinking is essential to living well, deciding what action to take. And since to be human is to be a social creature, we make innumerable decisions that materially affect the lives of others. A group of us met last…
Tuesday morning, and I have nothing in particular to say. A few interesting stories are on the front page of the New York Times. None of that affects me, at least not yet. Up until quite recently, say the last one hundred years, nothing that occurred outside of your village had an impact on…
The boundaries of causation always exceed the boundaries of consideration. –Wes Jackson Mystery, the unknown, our ignorance always will be with us, to be dealt with. The farther we extend the radius of knowledge, the larger becomes the circumference of mystery. There is, a boundary that may move somewhat, but can never be removed,…
Verse—whether spoken or sung— appears to be deeply encoded in the human brain. Cursing, singing lyrics, and reciting poetry are understood as instances of automatic speech, as distinguished from propositional speech…. that constitutes most everyday conversation. –Oliver Sacks Today I attended the April Verch concert in Long Grove. The Long Grove Arts and Music…
How much is enough? The question arises often and in many forms. The time came for transition from employer based medical insurance coverage to Medicare. Transition has proven to be challenging, complex, with a fair amount of anxiety. After all who cannot be protective of physical health once the youthful stage of life has…
To think the thought of weaponized Nature is to entertain dissonance of heretofore contradictory ideas. Nature is conceived as the totality of a life supporting, living context that common sense tells us that we are a part. A weapon is a human artifact created for the purpose of taking life. For humans life is…
It is raining hard, a deluge for the past 20 minutes. At 6AM this morning upon waking there were signs that the downpour, with thunder and lightening of the early morning hours had passed. The sky was much lighter, and nothing was falling, the birds were singing. Standing in my driveway I encountered a…
