Met up with two friends this morning.  Walking along the riverfront, in the presence of waterbirds congregating on the far bank, commenting on the old buildings, built by several generations before the present, the buildings rehabilitated, upgraded not only for our end use purposes, but a reminder that we are not the first to live along the Fox River Valley, and will not be the last.  What will we leave behind?  Will the bonds between us be strong, strong enough to leave behind something that will endure,  something as long lived as the stone walls of these old factory buildings?  I hope so.

We admire the waterbirds, Canada geese, wild ducks, and the great white herons that gathered by the island in the distance.  Certainly the large magnificent birds felt safe by the island.  They moved about calling raucously to one another.  We homo sapiens, are “of Nature.”  Is Nature divine?  Such a use of language does no violence either to Nature, our mother, nor to what we mean to say when we use god-talk.  Nature is the great framework for all of our projects, for all of the things that we care about, for which we are willing to expend our passion.

Friendship is a rare, a precious experience.  Friendship describes what happens “between us” when jokes are freely told, when laughter is shared.

Did you know that god sent out a memo about how to be a good person?

Well, what did the memo say?

I do not know…

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Ukraine

should not be forgotten.  The war is a calamity of indescribable dimensions.  The imagination stutters to grasp the wholesale destruction of cities, the murder of civilians attempting to escape the hell of cold, hunger, and shrapnel.  My instinct tells me that the freedom of the West pivots upon the resistance of Kyiv to the Russian assault.