Musings of a Middle Aged Man

Powaqa invades my dreams...

Powaqa invades my dreams...

Powaqa invades my dreamscape...

Twenty years ago, death infiltrated my life when my father, at 73 years, was diagnosed with stage four cancer that had already spread to his brain, bones, lungs, and liver. Much too late for any real hope at a cure or much, if any, reprieve. He did endure one regimen of chemotherapy and radiation, which, if it did actually prolong his life by a few weeks or months, left him wheelchair bound then b...

Growing up without many things due to the economic realities of a large family, I splurged on stuff once I started earning money. Probably not the best use of my limited financial resources, but that is water under the proverbial bridge in a raging river from which it is not possible to claw back the money that floated away. It wasn't until later in life that I learned money invested in experi...

Having a place that feels like home provides profound psychological comfort, reduces stress and anxiety, and enhances physical as well as mental well-being. There have been places I have lived for extended periods. While some gave me a measure of comfort, I have always felt as if I were a transient, a vagabond mole burrowing into a place to lay my head temporarily, knowing it will be fleeting. Par...

As an A-Deist, I struggle with the conceptual existence of separate spiritual and physical components comprising a whole human being. Atheists tend to deny that humans have a spiritual side, along with having no place in their worldview for an immortal soul, attributing consciousness, an emergent property of complex brain activity, to electrons firing in the human mind. While I mostly agree with t...

I have spent time lying in a meadow surrounded by a circumambient blanket of color and felt a deep and abiding joy, infected as I was by the laughing and tittering of the flowers radiating ephemeral colors accompanied by heady perfumes and evanescent arias wafting from the throats of radiant birds rapturously praising the glory displayed by the flora. Alighting from flower to flower, drunk on the...

Now that I am retired and no longer obligated to occupy my mind for the benefit of a large corporation, I am free to focus on topics of personal interest or follow my mind as it wanders to and fro. Sometimes, those wanderings are drawn to a topic that elicits deep focus. My monkey mind tends to bounce between being the horse drawing the cart and the cart being drawn by the horse. I must be careful...

Beauty, it is said, lies in the eye of the beholder. I oft wonder why formal definitions of beauty tend to omit the feral in favor of the carefully coiffed, eschew the chaotic in favor of the meticulously organized, believe anarchy should bend a knee to the ordered, even if the ordered is dysfunctional. Letting the chaos reign long enough, complex patterns will emerge, a type of intricate order bo...

We spend years in school absorbing the supposed truths set out for us by authority figures...teachers, principals, school boards, and politicians who are more interested in pushing their personal agendas at the expense of an education beneficial to the sponges that are children. This aberrant conditioning runs parallel with the religious institutions that preach dogma, claiming it to be unimpeacha...

When I was raising my children, I did everything in my power to help them transcend limits, to believe there were no horizons they could not overcome as long as they worked hard, that their potential was limitless. This should not be confused with the new agey phrase, believe to achieve. That saying omits the critical strive, the third leg of the stable stool, without which the stool is a dangerou...

There is a phrase, "seeking the miraculous in the everyday," that the New Ageists love to glom onto as their own. They leverage as a supposedly newly found and profound insight that their attitudes wear like a shiny cast over their rage clothing. Only, this concept, they believe, is for a new age, is actually old school, older than Uncle Walt's verbose rendering. A trip in the waybac...

Uncle Walt Whitman was on the vanguard of what is categorized as the Romantic era of American literature. The era is marked by an emphasis on individualism, imagination, the spiritual dimension of nature, and skepticism toward the pure rationalism that claimed reason is the primary source of genuine knowledge independent of sensory experience, empirical observation, or tradition. Me thinks this er...

The Kesh Temple Hymn, a Sumerian praise poem composed circa 2600 BCE, is often cited as the earliest religious text. The words were inscribed on clay tablets and were associated with worship in ancient Sumer. The poem pays homage to the goddess Ninhursag (Nintu), praising her temple in the city of Kesh, while also highlighting the roles of the supreme god Enlil, who authorized the temple's con...

Conundrum: Do I have a propensity for silence because I have powerful spiritual tendencies, or does my propensity to dwell in the spiritual drive my tendency to seek out and inhabit silent spaces? Of course, there is also the very real possibility that there is neither causation nor correlation between the two, and I am simply a malcontent unsuitable for human interaction. To be clear, in my mind,...

I stumbled upon literary works by Ojibwe Canadian author Richard Wagamese late in 2025. Of the 93 books I read and rated this year, I rated six with top marks. Five of those books were works of fiction penned by Wagamese. I don't rate many books this highly, let alone multiple books by the same author, unless said author is the deceased prophet, Edward Abbey, a scribe proffering extraordinary...

Other than war and romance movies, possibly the next most popular genre involves aliens visiting Earth. Almost all end with some type of epic battle from which the primitive earthlings emerge victorious over the advanced alien race. Primitive humans? Indubitably. Any beings who can master star travel have to be more advanced technologically than one whose most advanced exploration method is by rem...

Religion and spirituality are both concerned with humanity's role in the sacred. Religion tends to be institutionalized, communal, and governed by dogmatic doctrines. Spiritually (but not religious) is geared toward the individual and heavily experiential, rendering it more fluid than the static state characterizing religion. The notion of the sacred typically revolves around god, goddesses, u...

Despite there being not a smidge of evidence for the existence of an immutable, eternal soul, its existence is a deeply held belief, likely echoing from the dawn of modern man, perhaps even a conviction of our Neanderthal ancestors. This assumes the Neanderthal propensity for ritual burial is evidence of their belief in some sort of afterlife. There is a hidden presupposition in this question, nam...

Religion was primitive humans' first attempt at pseudoscience, their first attempt to make sense of the mysteries encountered by the primeval brains of a nascent species with minds able to soar from the physical to the abstract on wings powered by imagination. As with any first attempt, it was clumsy and riddled with holes invisible to fledgling brains, rightly focused on satisfying physiologi...

To level set: Superstition is a belief that attributes supernatural significance to specific objects, actions, or events despite lacking scientific evidence or logical connection. Faith is a profound trust and belief in someone or something, often transcending mere intellectual acknowledgement, to involve deep reliance and commitment. Both involve faith ( a form of not knowing ) in unseen, superna...

Silence is typically defined as the absence of sound. Incomprehensible is the inability to understand. The question rejiggered would be "What does it mean to be an absence of sound that can't be understood?" Silence can also refer to a book omitting pertinent data, effectively silencing knowledge, ensuring the topic can't be properly comprehended or is purposefully manipulated to...

There was a time when a child was meant to be seen, not heard. Told to stop crying or they would be given something to cry about. More often than not, they were instructed not to speak unless spoken to and, in even less enlightened times, were used to do menial and dangerous labor for a pittance, if any compensation, because they were viewed as more expendable than the more robust workers in the l...

There was a time in my arrogant younger days when I would have responded with an unequivocal yes. I thoroughly bought into the anthropocentric doctrine proclaiming that the only valid moral choice would be to choose human survival over the survival of any and all non-human beings. The arrogance arises from the pompous belief that humanity was somehow more special than our evolved brethren of the n...