Thanksgiving.  To the destruction and detriment of those who live there, it will perish in an environment within which a sense of entitlement and greed rules the day.  Conversely, on the opposite end of that spectrum, a sense of thanksgiving will thrive and it will breathe life into any place where a heart of appreciation and gratitude refuses to … [Read more...]

As a kid, I remember the geese.  Living along the Atlantic flyway, we had front row seats to nature on a grand quest.  Nature’s dazzling palette had liberally painted the forests in burning reds, sizzling oranges and electric yellows as if nature had unleashed the whole of its artistic abilities in some massive brushstroke.  Cascading off every … [Read more...]

Snow had graced her simple headstone with white, embellishing a life of poverty with a garnish of royalty.  In similar fashion, winter’s kiss had regally adorned the muscular branches of the red oak that stood as a broad and gentle sentry above her grave.  She had always wanted to be buried under an oak tree for the simple reason that poverty, … [Read more...]

I started delivering newspapers when I was a tender nine years of age.  Had I been an adult looking at the nine year old that I was at the time, I probably wouldn’t have let myself take on the job at that age.  In fact, I might have thought such as idea as skirting the periphery of the insane.  But with my parent’s blessing, I started delivering … [Read more...]

We’re not all too bad at bobbing and weaving.  We’re pretty good at side-stepping and side-lining issues.  We’re quite adept at cutting and spinning, doing a bit of fanciful dodging, as well as deftly running the obstacle course without getting so much as a scratch on us.  We’ve learned to see things coming from a long ways away, and we’ve figured … [Read more...]

Slavery as an institution is pretty far removed from the minds of most of us residing here in 21st century America.  Slavery sits back plenty far enough in the faded, yellowed and brittle pages of history to create a more than comfortable chasm between us and itself.  We view that chasm of time and social development and modernism as broad enough … [Read more...]

Wikipedia states that a perfect storm “refers to the simultaneous occurrence of weather events which, taken individually, would be far less powerful than the storm resulting of their chance combination.  Such occurrences are rare by their very nature, so that even a slight change in any one event contributing to the perfect storm would lessen its … [Read more...]

We’ve forgotten who we are. We’ve forgotten who we’ve been called to be.  We’ve forgotten the privilege of having the liberties that were handed down to us by people who sacrificed for those liberties in ways that make our abuse of them shameful and inexcusable.  We’ve abandoned all that is good in a thoughtless trade-off for all that is not.  Oh … [Read more...]

We reap what we sow.  In other words, what we do is never free of an outcome that will be shaped by what we do.  The ‘cause-and-effect’ of life is such that what we do will always cause an outcome that is fashioned directly by what we do.  Despite the fact that we often think (or would prefer to think) that what we do is somehow isolated to the … [Read more...]

We are humans.  All of us.  And while we come from different cultures, and hold different beliefs, and embrace a variety of traditions…we are human.  Our dress may vary, our economics might be quite different, the language that we speak may be entirely unknown to others, and we may well be spread far across the socio-economic spectrum…but we are … [Read more...]