We hear a lot of things.  A whole lot of things.  We’re incessantly bombarded with sheets and shards and streams of information.  It’s about bits and bytes and boatloads of data that we ingest and digest without even realizing that we’re doing that.  Either consciously or unconsciously we compile all of that sordid stuff into some sort of choppy … [Read more...]

Complacency is a potently tragic hallmark of our lives.  We’ve certainly got bunches of it.  In fact, as the old saying goes, we’ve got it “in spades.”  Complacency is conceived in the bosom of familiarity, where something becomes so commonplace that we errantly render it as ‘common.’  We’ve yet to beat this terribly corrosive tendency we have to … [Read more...]

  It seems that real love is something that we can touch, but rarely grasp.  Sometimes it visits us in massive surges that effortlessly sweep over us and leave us utterly breathless in the aftermath.  At other times love dissipates into some thin and sparse pool that is barely deep enough to dip the tip of our fingers in.  And at yet other … [Read more...]

It seems one of the oddest dichotomies.  Life is full of strange and downright weird contradictions.  At many times in our lives, at many points both important and not so important we find ourselves pulled in two completely opposite, but equally compelling directions.  At times it seems that two entirely different people reside within us, each … [Read more...]

  What’s love?  That question is probably a topic to be debated.  We’ve got a million different definitions for this thing that we call “love.”  It seems that we’re in love with the idea of “love,” but we’re not all that caught up in the sacrifices that love will demand of us.  And so, we craft and we carve and we contort love to be … [Read more...]

I am only one.  That’s all I am.  I am only one and I will always be only one.  I was born as one, I will live as one, and on the day of my death I will die as one.  In this journey that we all call life, I will always be completely restricted to being one and only one.  And all of those daunting realities strike me as miserably pathetic.  Sadly, I … [Read more...]

It seems that the idea of taking a stand is perpetually taking a beating.  The whole idea of taking a stand is driven by the conviction that at certain times the need to take a stand is unarguably undeniable and inescapably inescapable.  Taking a stand is taking a risk, and sometimes a big one.  Unfortunately, not many people take a stand.  But … [Read more...]

What would I do with a new start?  I mean a really new, ‘new’ start?  Not something that looks new because we’ve vigorously spit-shined something that’s old to a new luster.  Not some radical make-over of something that’s radically old so that it looks convincingly new.  Not a meticulous restoration that’s going to erase the footprints of time and … [Read more...]

We stand on the escarpment of a New Year.  In many ways, it seems that what lies ahead doesn’t rally us with energizing hope, but rather it seems to rattle us with deep apprehension.  From the vantage point we stand on at the beginning of this New Year, the landscape that lies ahead looks uncertain at best and disastrous at worst.  We see a world … [Read more...]

She was born into an emerging America in 1890.  Through the ninety-five years of life that stood in front of her she would watch an Industrial Revolution unfold, Henry Ford roll out the Model T, and Edison light the world.  She would read the headlines of dough boys marching off to fight a Kaiser in what was originally called the ‘Great War’.  Some … [Read more...]