Musings of a Middle Aged Man

Since my early 20s, I have fantasized about escaping the large, midwestern city to which I was unfortunately born for someplace more rural with a landscape that would feed my imagination with surreal apparations that I could work into interesting reading. Countless situations have arranged themselves such that my vision has never been made manifest. I currently live in the heart of the city that I...

The first riddle encountered with the Raven tribe is they are not black. To human eyes, they appear black but that's because we hairless apes are locked into the "visible" spectrum and lack the eye cone that would allow us to also detect waves in the UV spectrum. To their own kind, they are tinged with bluish, dark red, or greenish undertones complementing the black base...

his opening quote ostensibly falling from the prepubescent mouth of John Lennon appears to identify a fractious mind when compared to another Lennonism in the form of lyrics claiming " Happiness is a Warm Gun. " There is no written record of John ever telling this story still it has been attributed to this man who, along with three compadres, revolutionized Rock 'n Roll music helping it soar to va...

My hands have not flowed over canvas in months. Not a color imagined. Not a brush of liquid pigment leaving a snail trail on the white, waveless ocean. Not an inkling of beauty finding its way out of my head where, once visions had to fight for a line place and imminent exposure to the light of day. No queue remains for the beauty, any beauty has become ash and was blown away into oblivion by the...

I am watching a live stream that bubbled up on one of my social media feeds. The stream is of a procession led by Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th and incumbent Dalai Lama, each a reincarnation of his predecessor and a manifestation of Avalokiteshvara, the original Bodhisattva of Compassion. The Dalai Lamas are revered as high spiritual leaders in Tibetan Buddhism. They are not viewed as reincarnations of...

If you would ask my mother...could ask my mother...would have asked my mother before cancer ate away her body and soul, she would have told you with a roll of knowing eyes that I emerged from the womb with fiery red hair and an ingrained, hardwired rebellious streak. Was it the red hair? Perhaps those recessive genes came encoded with rebel tendencies because those of my ilk had to fight to surviv...

I often wonder what prehistorical event or sequences of events drove early humans to morph from adapting to the myriad vagaries of dynamic nature into humans doing everything in their power to force nature to adapt to human proclivities, proclivities that are frequently detrimental to our survival. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle required a degree of social nimbleness and activity as they followed s...

Aside from declaring the US is not the greatest country in the world, the two most blasphemous utterances one can make in the USA are, in no particular order, that humanity is an evolutionary mistake and that God was made in man's image. A close third for half the population would be any assertion that Dumb Donald is not the second coming of Christ despite his being identifiable in multiple script...

When I think of the SNAFU that has become the US government and the SNAFU society embraces thinking the US is a freedom paradise, which is a matrixed simulation, it is a wonder each and every one of us has not run afoul of some government agency and has been elevated to an enemy of the state status.

I've been tempted more times than I can count to pull an Everett Ruess and disappear into the backcountry somewhere bounded by the Colorado Plateau. To date, the nearest I have come to following the leader was a two-week camping excursion ranging from Bear's Lodge in Northeast Wyoming down to Chaco Canyon in Northwest New Mexico via Capitol Reef and Canyonlands National Parks. It was while...

What has the shift from community to commodity, from partner to slave wrought on us? Separation, loss, anxiety, ignorance. Isolation from the Mother that bore and provides for us. Loss of intimacy with plants and animals transitioning companionship to segregation. Anxiety as to how we will survive disconnected from the source of all known life. Ignorance of the Garden of Eden...

In the context of the late 1800s and early 1900s when Muir was alive, an era when Christianity had venomous claws deeply impaled in human consciousness, this was a radical, if not blasphemous, utterance. It was probably the most sacrilegious, with respect to Christianity, utterance until Edward Abbey burst onto the literary scene with the highly influential books, "Desert Solitaire" and...

I will harken back to the beginning, to the purest, holiest, healthiest time in a human's life, a timeframe that starts with the onset of curiosity and ends when we become judgmental, defined as quickly forming critical or harsh opinions in lieu of understanding the individual. It is one of the most impoverished forms of humanity, one that eschews curiosity. It is particularly vile when manife...

With the return of the wolves, the Park experienced a trophic cascade leading to significantly healthier environs. Wolf predation on Elk led to a series of connected ecological changes. Fewer Elk resulted in healthier vegetation communities which drew in pond-making beavers, aquatic birds, better fish habitat, and more diversity in the songbird populations. Soil erosion was reduced...

Just Say No To Empathy?

The roots of tyranny are nourished with the blood of the innocents by random acts of unkindness that grow into rampaging rivers of destruction fueled by the raging flames of fiery hate frequently unleashed in the pitch of night to gain plausible deniability made possible by the absences of witnesses...the absences of living witnesses...for the dead see all...

It was while polishing up the first essay-story that I discovered a mechanism, a technique where reality holds no sway, allowing me to enter a canary aria world bordering on surrealism and create a beauty I was unaware could originate in my frog brain. The technique of which I speak is dreams, visions, dream-visions, vision-dreams, wherein the character enters a world that has absolutely no respec...

I am aware this can come across as nihilistic with the rejection of the generally accepted aspects of human existence, including objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. I reject the notion that Ego-free existence has any relation to nihilism rather is an idealistic form of existentialism freeing us to reject societal expectations and create our own purpose and meaningfulness.

The live and let live in relation to a mosquito piercing my flesh does go out the window when I reflexively slap at the point of pain leaving a flat skeeter and a droplet of my blood smeared on my skin. And a mouse entering my home does so at its own peril but, for the meeses, I am exonerated because the executioner is a cat living in my abode. The cat is not bound by my preference to live life st...

While no culture functions flawlessly, there is always room for improvement, the culture works in its context otherwise the society would implode before rebounding with a new set of cultural norms built through trial and error into one that 'works' in their context.

The night of the mouse incident was cool so there was the very real possibility the venomous reptile, sensing the heat from the Mouse's body, might have crawled up and into my sleeping bag to avail itself of my body heat before slinking off for prey it was capable of swallowing whole.

Humans dream when the sun sets and the moon rises. Because Owls are denizens of the night, it is believed they carry messages between the physical and spiritual realms, similar to the diminutive hummingbird...

We operate under the assumption, the delusion, that everyone experiences life the same as we do. That assumption is as unprovable as the existence of a Supreme Being. Oh, we can speculate on the nature of another person as we speculate on the nature of God but there is no knowing with absolute, provable certainty...

It takes a special kind of evil to vilify the empathy necessary to live with understanding and harmonious coexistence. Neither political party desires harmony. It is by sowing the seeds of dissension they divide We the People to draw a majority to their side with the sole aim of winning elections allowing the elected to maintain power so they can control the laws that subjugate the electorate incl...

How do I worship thee? Let me pray the ways? No. Let me meditate the ways. I choose to sit naked on slickrock ensuring direct, physical connection with the beloved. Better, I lay prostrate, arms extended, toes pointed maximizing connection points to absorb Earth energy, to mingle my essence with Nature's marrow. For are Nature and Humans not one? Two seeds in the same gullet dovetailing with a...