Monthly Archives March 2021

When restaurants open fully up again and we can begin to enjoy all the familiar rituals such as our server exclaiming “Awesome choice!” when we order the chocolate truffle rather than crème brûlée off the dessert menu, I will suppress the urge, being the generally kind person I try to be in most every circumstance not involving Ted Cruz, to snag my phone out of my pocket and click onto the You Tube channel featuring the video footage I am going to show you below.

That will include refraining from even light-hearted but definitive commentary along the lines of, “Oh, you poor sheltered child, you don’t know from awesome! HERE is Awesome!!”

I am moved to share these sentiments after spending a good part of my morning marveling at the sheer, well, awesomeness of the volcanic eruption that began lighting up the mountains some 25 miles outside the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik on March 19...

There come times in every life when we turn a corner. Big notable birthdays, graduations, jobs. Recoveries from accidents, addictions, illness, broken relationships. Blinding insights into Where We Have Erred and What We Must Do.

Significant deaths—of mentors, parents, siblings, dear friends.

The resilience these losses require.

And then we come to facing the loss of our very own selves into the great beyond, there to be grieved over by others (or so we hope!). The living, breathing, animated self we were, now gone silent and still at last..

At one level—and early stages of life—we can barely imagine a world without us in it. But the imagining impinges on us as we age, those notable birthdays becoming all the more notable still...