Musings of a Middle Aged Man

I have oft wondered at my visceral attraction to deserts despite growing up on the Midwest plains, frequently experiencing more rainfall than can be absorbed by the increasingly cement-burdened environs. I am not referring to the sand dunes comprising 20% of desert surfaces, although they do have their undulating charm despite hosting virtually no vegetation. I am referring to the other 80%, also...

t is a well-established fact that the human animal seeks out patterns with which to evaluate our environment. In our prehominid days, pattern recognition was crucial to surviving life on the savannah, helping our ancestors avoid predators and recognize where reliable sources of water and food could be found. As we evolved, pattern discernment enabled them to interpret social cues, including facial...

I feel compelled to practice my art daily, be it planting seed quotes at the top of a blank page that will grow into handwritten essays with the pruning relegated to those later hours when my peak creativity has subsided from those morning devotions, or I am carefully laying acrylic paint on canvas when it is too cold to create outside, or composing the images that will be captured in my camera, o...

Unlike in the US, where we hide our elderly in semi-permeable prisons with others of their kind visiting them as time in busy schedules permits, indigenous peoples who tended to venerate the aged kept their mature family members living with them. They were fully aware their ancient ones had earned a lifetime of wisdom from which they offered apples of knowledge for the asking, a tradeoff far outwe...

I am sure it is a nearly universal trait that humans imagine themselves as gods wishing they could magically right a perceived wrong so the world could be, if not a kinder, gentler space, then, at least, one where fairness is the ultimate outcome of all inter-species and intra-species interactions weighted slightly toward the benefit of the human playing god. Most of us outgrow this childish fanta...

Back in my fifties, when I lived in Pune, India, I met a Polish gentleman living in the flat below mine. We met when our landlord, the only Zoroastrian I've ever met, invited the two of us to a 'get to know you' dinner. I learned the Polish dude had lived in the building for one month, to my two. He revealed he was struggling to adapt to solo living because he missed all his friends ba...

If ever there was a man before his time, a man who would bring a revolutionary idea to mankind, that man would be Aldo Leopold. He was an avid hunter and outdoorsman envisioning a hunter's paradise teeming with game animals whose numbers could be boosted by eradicating all predators except man and his long gun. His radical new idea was that nature is not a simple collection of random species s...

My reality begins each morning when I wake from a dreamless sleep, make a mug of Earl Grey tea sweetened with a 60% honey, 40% brown sugar combination. I carry the steaming mug with a white base decorated in black with Ancient Ancestor, geometrical patterns copied from the stone puzzle walls at Chaco Canyon, place it beside me on the altar I made from a slab of beechwood painted with turquoise, ma...

Humanity owes the fruit-bearing serpent a huge debt of gratitude for showing us the way to escape from a state of punishment to one of liberation. Eating the fruit was to break free of bondage, setting humanity on its way to achieving our full potential. The simple act of disobedience put the human in humanity. Eden was never a paradise. Rather, it was a prison designed for continual surveillance....

write on paper, almost daily, to the tune of one and only one sheet. That amounts to 365 pages over the course of a year, accumulating to 3,650 pages in ten years. In tree terms, that is somewhere between 0.37 and 0.44 trees per decade. This does not account for the bound books I read, a number that is steadily decreasing to a few per year.

As a lover of the written word, I devour books, not as a snake swallows a single book whole rather nibbling at various books as a butterfly flits from beautiful flower to beautiful flower, sipping at their nectar, experiencing an intellectual high of many flavors. Books are as important to my spiritual life as breathing sweet air is to the health of my body. Indispensable! As such, there are books...

For as long as I can remember, people have been captivated by the idea of life existing beyond Earth's boundaries. Little green men (assuming they are not hermaphroditic) visiting Earth surreptitiously to either live among us, abduct us for anal probing experiments, or plotting our demise allowing them to strip mine Earth for resources unavailable elsewhere in the multiverse.

I typically feel fear as a constricting knot in my stomach before realizing my building anxiety exists, prior to becoming fearful, and in the most extreme cases, a panic attack finding me curling fetal in my bed, wishing my demons away. Even when the symptoms start, it takes time for me to recognize my pain is psychological, not physical. Upon recognition, I move forward, rearranging the debilitat...

It feels, for most of my life, I have been told, ordered, and cajoled to be obedient, to attend church, excel in school, graduate from university with a degree that would support me, follow the rules of the road and land, respect authority, and other such trite nonsense ostensibly to have and enjoy the good life. The implication is that being an obedient drone will lead to prosperity and happiness...

For as long as I can remember, I have prided myself on knowing things, obscure things with little value other than making me appear smarter than I actually am. It was an adrenaline rush shouting out the correct answer before anyone else could raise their hand, earning praise and admiration for my correctness, notwithstanding the egregious relational errors in the process. But, does knowing bits an...

For some, rebellion against injustice comes easily. It is because some of us were born with a rebellious streak hard-wired into our DNA that drives us to confront rather than avoid inequity. A rebellious nature can be viewed as a curse because we have difficulty going along to get along. A rebellious spirit is actually a blessing because rebels are not blown about like chaff in a stiff wind genera...

I read the news today. Oh boy! About an unlucky people about to lose 250 million acres of public lands to the wealthy, helping them stockpile more money than they can realistically spend in a lifetime, while they cheat their employees out of decent wages. The news was rather sad. Well, I just had to cry. I would like to blame wannabe king TACO, but he is little more than a pawn

Unlike in the US, where we hide our elderly in semi-permeable prisons with others of their kind visiting them as time in busy schedules permits, indigenous peoples who tended to venerate the aged kept their mature family members living with them. They were fully aware their ancient ones had earned a lifetime of wisdom from which they offered apples of knowledge for the asking, a tradeoff far outwe...

Growing up, as I did, indoctrinated in a parochial school system and regularly attending church from birth until I figured a way, in my late teens, to pretend I was going to church while, instead, trying to help the mother ship fight off the invaders from space at the local arcade, the concept of kindness was etched into my psyche as the proper way to conduct oneself in the world. The classic text...

The first Law of Thermodynamics states the cosmic reality that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form to another. In the simplest form, sunlight energy is converted into plant form energy that becomes animal form energy before morphing into microbial energy. Unlike the Laws of the Game for Soccer with its common sense clause that bestows upon the referee the powe...

There is a progressive conceptual framework when attempting to achieve personal development mastery called SHU-HA-RI. SHU, the initial or beginner stage, is geared toward understanding and mastering the fundamental techniques by meticulously following the prescribed rules without deviation. The neophyte, in Kung Fu terms, the Grasshopper, repeats the fundamentals until they can be executed perfect...

The surest sign that organized religion is a sham is the assignment of gender to the singular, omnipotent deity, who is and has been orchestrating the universe since pre-time. The deity conjured human life by creating a graven image from the dust on the ground, then breathing into its nostrils. Mary, the proclaimed Mother of God, conceived the second member of the Trinity, not through intercourse...

One of my success factors when leading global software development teams was understanding the way national culture influences values, behaviors, and social interactions. If you were not aware of the differences, there hangs the assumption that everyone is more or less thinks and acts with similar motivations to our own. Understanding that not everyone thinks like me or embraces the norms dominant...

There was once a dream that was America. In that dream, the founders envisaged a perfect Union based on justice, domestic tranquility, general welfare, and the blessings of liberty on them and our posterity. It was a wild dream, a vivid dream, a dream not readily available in Europe riddled as it was with despots, kings, and an unhealthy political affiliation with the Catholic Church itself flaili...

In the technology world, there is a generally accepted axiom to skip the initial release of a product and await the second iteration before making a purchase. It is well known, time to market is of utmost importance, more important than the quality of the product, to a degree. The first version, although inspired by a flash of genius, is rushed to market for exposure while knowing it is not featur...