Some thirty years ago, I was given the opportunity to be a part of the reclamation of a gorgeous seventy-three room colonial-style mansion, as well as the property and numerous out-buildings that were part of this massive, rolling estate.  It had set empty, hauntingly still and seemingly comatose for several decades, with suffocating layers of … [Read more...]

Christmas was an intentionally intentional decision of the most magnificent design.  It was a decision wrought from an angst borne of incomprehensible love, wholly tempered by an inconceivable and unsullied forgiveness, and it was relentlessly energized by a relentlessly infinite compassion.  It was the greatest, most intricate, most ingenious and … [Read more...]

We all have personal agendas, and typically we have quite a boatload of them.  When we’re in a feverish pursuit of our agendas, we can, and we frequently will rob, pillage and/or discard many things along the way in order to achieve our agendas.  Oddly enough, we can even destroy the very things that allowed us to pursue those agendas in the first … [Read more...]

Endings can be incapacitating and painful for a variety of reasons, most of which we never identify because we’re too caught up in the loss to see anything but the loss.  We don’t really identify what we’re actually doing with whatever the ending is, or what the ending is actually doing to us because we’re too lost in the loss to even begin to … [Read more...]

It seems there’s been an evolutionary warping of the most rancid sort where we’ve come to define “abundance” as having whatever it is that we feel we need. Sadly, abundance today appears to imply the possession of a liberal quantity of whatever it is that we deem important, or desirous, or bright and shiny, or voguish, or trendy, or whatever might … [Read more...]