Musings of a Middle Aged Man

t is a wonderful vagary of the human mind that we are each attracted to differing aspects of the natural world. Thankfully, Earth offers exquisite variety. Each person can immerse themselves in a niche that brings them solace. Forests with tall trees visible in every direction make me feel imprisoned, despite my feeling a deep connection with individual trees. Prairies and their uniformity bore my...

I was born with an aversion to authority and an implacable resistance to being controlled. As such, I have a strong revulsion to forced patriotism and religious indoctrination. The tendency of patriotism to manifest as xenophobia and for religion to succumb to divine command theory has driven me to be wary of both even in their mildest forms. Both words carry an aroma that makes me want to retch a...

n our early days, humanity did a great disservice to itself in two arenas that continue to haunt us today, causing completely unnecessary suffering. Both are disguised as methods to unify people but, in actuality, are the source of great division. They create an us-versus-them mindset, leaving minimal to no space for a royal we. Both arenas are equally bad. When they combine, they espouse a partic...

In the dystopian and satirical novel, 1984, a dystopia slowly becoming true in the current state of the USA, power was the result of inflicting pain and humiliation upon others. We are not that predicted society...yet...but the sequencing of events leading to that dystopia is emerging, beginning with mass surveillance of the citizenry, heavy governmental polarization, propaganda messaging, and wid...

am drawn to the effulgence of trees. Though many sport flowers, they tend to be less ostentatious than their perennial brethren and sistren who require garish displays to attract pollinators for species propagation and perpetuation. Nor are they querulous, choosing instead to exist with quiet dignity in service to all who choose to partake of their fruits, their shade, their branches to hold nests...

A nimble mind changes when new information is consumed. Not change willy-nilly, the way a rabbit changes direction to avoid a charging predator. Changes with a graceful arc as new information is validated or changes course when it turns out to be faulty. Even if faulty, the information is not useless; rather, it can be stored as comparative reference when future ideas waft their way. An immature m...

I spent the past five days at the edge of a forest on two sides, a pond on one, and open prairie punctuated with tall trees on the fourth. The multitude of habitats should, in theory, attract a wide variety of birds and other wildlife. Mostly, I encountered birds by their vocalizations, occasionally glimpsing them as they emerged from deep shadows, flying from tree to tree in their unending quest...

I was born at the cusp of the 'Cultural Decade,' the 1960s, an era of massive cultural shifts. My formative years spanned the 'Me Decade' of the 1970s. Those 20 years witnessed massive social upheaval and the rise of the counterculture that challenged entrenched norms around family, gender, authority, and morality. The old guard had the US entrenched in the deeply immoral Vietnam W...

It is a human cognitive defect that we call some animals good and put them on a pedestal, with dogs and cats on the highest pedestal, while labeling those we don't like as evil, including rats and roaches, whom we target for annihilation. The warped approach is an offshoot of our obsession with sin, a word that meant missing the mark. It has come to be associated with offending God and is sadd...

A jaundiced approach toward divergent cultures is to rate them with reference to their own, which, unsurprisingly, is typically viewed as not only the best culture for all people but the only correct cultural expression. It is a form of jingoism with undercurrents and overtones of racism. It is perfectly normal to compare and contrast an unknown entity against a known quantity with the goal of und...

In terms of being a manly man, Crazy Horse was a virtuoso. To the colonizers, he was a bloodthirsty savage standing in the way of white prosperity and of the god-ordained Manifest Destiny. The term was a gimmick, a euphemism masking the horror of genocide and used to justify the forced removal of the indigenous, breaking treaties, military violence, reservation confinement, and the destruction of...

I assiduously monitor my beliefs, whittling away those that don't stand up to scrutiny and evidence, keeping those that do and adding them to my constitution of true truths...held loosely so they don't twist into a noose. Doing this helps ensure I am not weighed down by the burdens associated with untruths. I revel in the lightness of the freedom that comes with not carrying unnecessary fa...

It is not long after growing out of our layette that we become conscious of who we are, concerned about how we are perceived, and learn to wear the mask likely to show us in rose light when interacting with others. As we mature, those masks multiply commensurately with the number of people we encounter and engage with. The person we are with our parents bears little resemblance to the persona we e...

In human minds, our species, for those willing to acquiesce to the simple, indisputable fact that we are animals, is indomitable; that we are antipodes with respect to all other species with whom we share the grand and glorious planet Earth. That we are animals is hotly disputed by those believing mud man and rib woman are made in the image of a god...further proof we dwell in a special realm a sm...

Despite being portrayed as wifty, as beings easily distracted by bright, shiny objects, ravens are considered to be in the top 10 of the smartest animals on the planet. Humans set the criteria for measuring intelligence, meaning it is no surprise humans are ranked first on the intelligence scale. Intelligence, for the purposes of the rankings, is understood as the mental or behavioral flexibility...

Ever since I broke a fingernail grip and let go of my final, tenuous grasp on a need for an afterlife to assuage my ego, I have felt free as the birds who laugh at the borders they fly over without needing official government documentation. I no longer struggle with apocalyptic visions of the infernal destinations proclaimed in the Abrahamic unHoly Books. I no longer fear an eternity of hellfire a...

The capacity for love is almost universal in humans, the exceptions being those with mental conditions that are classified as antisocial personality disorders. These include sociopathy and psychopathy. Love began with mammalian attachment when natural selection favored caring for one another. That became the foundation for pair bonding to cooperatively raise offspring. From this evolved romantic l...

Tis a slapdash court, one with no credibility, that would sentence a person before a guilty verdict was returned by judge or jury. It would be a court compromised of integrity, a court people would not and should not trust. This is the undergirding for the growing concern for a US Supreme Court that appears to be looking for excuses to drive the administration's agenda rather than evidence to...

If I were to hazard a guess, I would point to the seminal, six-part PBS series, " Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth," as the key to the postern opening my fascination with religion and its impact on the human psyche, both collective and individual psyches. Raised a fairly strict Catholic, including attending primary and secondary schools named after saints, my exposure to other Chris...

The library of mythology undergirding the Christian religion, known as the Bible, claims in the second book, Exodus, that no man can see God's face and live. In the first book, Genesis, Jacob claims to have seen the face of God. Moses makes the same claim in Exodus. Yet, according to the mythology, both men lived. If Jesus was actually God, as the followers claim, many saw his face with no ill...

abels are used to quickly identify and communicate meaning efficiently. They help people sort, recognize, remember, and make decisions about what something is, how it should be used, or how it should be understood. Seems benign. So, what's the problem? Labeling is a means of shrinking a complex reality into an easily manageable symbol...that may or may not capture the essence of the labeled it...

ince the publication of my first blog post in September 2011, I have grown increasingly dedicated to my artistic expression via words, photographs, and paintings. I dabbled in all three for many years prior, more as an afterthought, squeezing art in between work, raising my children, and other activities tickling my fancy, including all aspects of soccer from playing to coaching and refereeing, wo...

What do a dead snag at Bear's Lodge, an exquisite petroglyph panel in Northern Utah, a saguaro forest with aged beings raising arms skyward, and a short path blanketed with brown, noise-dampening evergreen needles have in common?

There are times in my life when I find it necessary to disaffiliate myself from what has become mistaken for civilization, aka, syphilization. Civilization, by definition, represents an advanced stage of cultural, scientific, and governmental organizations, distinguishing it from more primitive tribal communities. The inherent bias in the definition is self-evident, leading me to believe it has be...

took the lily for a final walk before bedtime, down a short path carpeted with last season's light brown pine needles that muffled by heavy footfalls, through a swarm of mosquito-looking flying insects that did not bite or even alight on my exposed skin. I was shaking off the last dew drop when I realized I had entered a hidden world dense with birdsong in a multitude of voices from all around...