So, you’d like to be a writer? Start keeping a journal. Everyday write something. Even if, and especially if it’s raw, words that can’t be polished, that take heroic effort to release and get down on the page. No matter how disjointed, incoherent, unappealing your emotional storms may be, –do your best to find…
On Borders by Yevgeny Yevtushenko In every border postthere is something insecure.Each one of themis longing for leaves and for flowers.They saythe greatest punishment for a treeis to become a border post.The birds that pause to reston border postscan’t figure outwhat kind of trees they’ve landed on.I supposethat at first, it was people who…
…in his or her own way of course. As you’d expect, I continue to read Slavoj Zizek — with more care the second time around. The European intellectual wrestles with the problem that confounds me: how to address a virulent ethnic hatred that matastasizes as a ravenous cancer in our society. Our President and…
This morning as I opened my browser, this graphic caught my eye. I felt compelled to read the story. The image is of Mount Everest. I have never been a rock climber and I am well past the age to consider climbing a mountain. I thought it common knowledge the Everest was the severest…
The Socrates Café discussion of this past evening was stimulating, open-ended, a probing exploration for a definition of freedom. Our quest to find or to fashion a definition of freedom came from a quotation from a book, “To Fight Against This Age” by Rob Rieman: “He who remains a slave to his desires, emotions,…
The final gathering for 2019 for our philosophy group took place last night at Taste of Paris in Mundelein. The surprise, unforeseen was that half again as many showed up than had sent me their RSVP of their intentions. A sign that the life of the mind, the tactile experience of exchanging ideas, is…
The emotionally intelligent person – knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation. The emotionally intelligent person – awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an…
How good is any story? Logic dictates that it would be impossible to assess while the story is being created. Only after the finish will someone else, in the telling of the story, know the quality of the tale. Whether something qualifies as a story or not depends upon the teller and the audience…
There is nothing arrogant about mentioning ordinary people’s material concerns: the poor have the right to do it, and to talk about a readiness for great sacrifices, or suffering ‘whatever the price‘, is as a rule the ideology of the privileged, who are quite content to let the people suffer for them. So do…
We have to accept that we live on a ‘Spaceship Earth’ responsible and accountable for its conditions. Earth is no longer the impenetrable background/horizon of our productive activities. It emerges as another finite object that we can inadvertently destroy or transform to make it livable. This means that the very moment we become powerful…
