Musings of a Middle Aged Man

There is an inordinate amount of inane chatter in the US claiming that the people of the country, the entire world, need healing from their fallen ways. By that, they mean that God needs to be inserted into everyday life via laws based on biblical standards so people can live moral and prosperous lives. It includes posting the 10 Commandments in school classrooms to indoctrinate the students into...

It is natural for children to be afraid of the dark. The physical darkness, absent ambient light, forces them to navigate by tentative touches to get an incomplete feeling for the immediate surroundings they cannot see. Is the elephant a wall, a snake, a spear, a tree, a fan, a rope? The visual can say none of the above. The blind hold steadfast to their misaligned interpretations. It is, after al...

Our nearest evolutionary ancestors, the Neanderthals, existed for 400,000 years, during which time they successfully inhabited less than 10% of Earth's landmass. They lived primarily in Europe, Western and Central Asia, extending into southern Siberia. Their highest densities were in France, Spain, and Italy. Homo Sapiens, our species, has existed for 300,000 years. In that time, we have manag...

I have recently stumbled upon a BBC television series highlighting the scientific facts along with the cultural and emotional threads tying modern humans with the evolutionary past and the six other human species, born by Earth mother, that have existed over the past 300,000 years. Ritualistic behaviors were moderate in our closest ancestors, the Neanderthals with whom we interbred, as identified...

The security in which an artist should never seek refuge is either personal or financial, which drives them to avoid provocative or innovative works, fearing backlash, censorship, or persecution with the corresponding loss of income. This can weaken the arts' impact on society because the art is safe. Safe art is not doing the job of art. Worse than that...

There are several adventures that have been on my bucket list for what seems like forever, but it is closer to forty years. Two were planted in my psyche by author Colin Fletcher when he wrote books about his 1958 walk from the bottom to the top of California and his book about hiking the length of the Grand Canyon in 1963. Those books placed both the Pacific Coast Trail and a rim-to-rim hike of t...

Growing up, I remember being indoctrinated into the colloquialism that 'practice makes perfect' as a way to encourage the repeated rehearsal of actions or behaviours to perfect our ability to execute them as flawlessly as possible, with the ultimate goal of perfect execution. The fundamental flaw in the expression is that practicing anything imperfectly achieves excellence in imperfection,...

For a significant portion of my life, beginning from when I was eleven years old, my parental units owned a cottage in central Wisconsin lake country. Not blessed with generational wealth, we spent the majority of our vacations from the early days of tent camping, through a camper, eventually replaced by a prefab cottage, lovingly termed the summer estate, making visits easier and more frequent. E...

I have posted over 4,500 blogs on the interweb and have written two unpublished books with a third underway, and have numerous other writings either collecting dust in journals scattered throughout my home or long lost in the scrap heaps of time. Estimating an hour per blog entry, the investment is more than 180 consecutive days of writing 24 hours a day, nonstop. Realistically, the two books writ...

It is not uncommon to view birth and death as extreme opposites on a linear life continuum. But are they? This is a concept fitting the thought patterns of a Western mind indoctrinated in linear time thinking, not so much for a person inculcated into the Eastern mind viewing time as circular. Birth and Death could be envisioned as the same swinging door...

t is a long-standing and well-established fact that the majority of humans will experience Presbyopia beginning sometime in their 40s to 60s that will see them requiring reading glasses or some other form of near vision correction to see clearly in close quarters. By the early to mid-60s, the degeneration plateaus negating the need for stronger and stronger corrective lenses. My near vision does s...

My first reaction upon walking through the Chaco Canyon ruins was to be struck by awe, awe and wonder, then marvel at the masonry still partially standing more than one thousand years after the bricks were carefully laid to exacting standards using earthen mortar between the carefully shaped sandstone blocks by ancient hands. Those craftsmen are long lost to the mysteries hidden by long time. The...

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...