When we get frustrated with people and begin to skirt the periphery of hatred, maybe we should consider a few things.  When we come to despise them and wish to rid ourselves of them, maybe we should ask who they really are and what they’re really experiencing.  When our tolerance level has long been surpassed and rage is all we know, maybe should … [Read more...]

I grew up in the shadow of a generation who faced the depravity of the Great Depression and then fought through the horrors of World War II.  The deep sense of patriotism and solemn respect for our country ran high among these great people. Therefore, as the Fourth of July once again rolls around on the calendar, I find it appropriate to take a … [Read more...]

Do I really want to see myself?  Really?  Not as I might prefer to see myself in order to have some rickety and ill-placed semblance of peace.  Not the image that grants me permission to stay a course that maybe I should stay away from.  Not the perception of myself that allows me to side-step guilt, by-pass accountability, and circumvent … [Read more...]

We are not a terribly observant lot.  And we are not because we are focused on speaking into life instead of letting life speak into us.  We have our well-oiled agendas, and we have honed our biases to a razors-edge.  We know what we want, and we’ve effectively tied those wants to a rather harrowing sense of entitlement.  Therefore, it’s not that … [Read more...]

“Who am I?”  The question seems a bit overused these days.  It’s something more like a vogue, trendy kind of question that pulls us out of the doldrums of living among the masses and plants us in the more desirable currents of the intellectual mainstream.  The question suggests that we’re exercising our intellectual acumen to probe our existence, … [Read more...]

I grew up under the tutelage of a generation who faced the depravity of the Great Depression and then fought through the horrors of World War II.  The deep sense of patriotism and solemn respect for our country ran high among these great people. Therefore, as Memorial Day once again rolls around on the calendar, I find it appropriate to take a … [Read more...]

We’re building memorials every day.  Whether we realize it or not, or whether think about it or not we’re very much involved in the business of building memorials, and we’re doing it every single day.  The memorials that we’re building are the ones that will be about our lives.  Every choice, every decision, every action, every inaction, every … [Read more...]

There are those deeply magical places that we all recall as a kid; those places that seem misty, mysteriously surreal and yet warmly captivating.  Those places that you’d love to savor again, even if you know they weren’t quite as real as you had imagined them being.  If you’re lucky enough, they continue to hold some small bit of magic even as an … [Read more...]

In large part, Memorial Day has devolved into a weekend that represents the onset of the summer season.  It’s something like the starting gun at the beginning of a race.  It’s the day that officially frees us from the doldrums of winter and gives us some sort of permission to play for the next three months or so until Labor Day reminds us that it’s … [Read more...]

We tend to rather blithely categorize times of crisis simply as happenstance occurrences that reflect the frequently volatile and somewhat unpredictable nature of life.  Because we tend to conceptualize crisis in this manner, we readily place times of crisis in this convenient “us-versus-them” category so that our focus is on managing the crisis … [Read more...]