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 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...]

We all have…problems.  And there’s a real good chance that we have a lot of…problems.  Life comes with problems.  It’s part of the deal.  It’s a natural part of this thing that we’re all doing called life.  Life comes with problems.  But the real problem is not that life comes with problems.  The real problem is what we do with them. The Problem … [Read more...]

The world is spinning in ways we once felt would only be experienced through fiction penned by authors and portrayed by various screenwriters who themselves lived in dark places and spent their days meandering through deeply foreboding thoughts.  The impossible, the absurd, the irresponsible, the irrational and the improbable were certainly the … [Read more...]

What is our narrative?  What is the story-line that we’ve authored to explain our world, or allay our fears, or justify our agendas, or excuse our behaviors?  What is the narrative that we’ve created to give ourselves permission to do whatever we want permission to do?  What are the story-lines, the spins, the bits of fiction that we create so that … [Read more...]

  I want to be happy, but I don’t think I want to be satisfied.  I want to experience a resilient and wonderfully endearing sense of contentment that neatly threads itself through every part of my soul, but I don’t want that contentment to morph into the baser mentality of complacency.  I want to keep a weathered eye on every horizon, but I … [Read more...]