• General Nonfiction - Odds & Ends

    The True “Twilight Zone”

    August 30, 2013 - By 

    When I was 9 or 10 years old, my brother landed a paper route, distributing the Eagle Rock Sentinel on Thursday and Sunday mornings. It meant getting up at 5 a.m., walking six or seven blocks to the drop-off point, bagging up papers on the street corner in the dark, then hoofing it up and down a hillside neighborhood for a couple of hours, dropping a paper as near to every porch as possible (especially those whose owners were known to tip an extra dime on top of the 40-cent monthly fee). Pete was three years older and already showing…

  • Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    Conversations With
    My Massage Therapist

    August 21, 2013 - By 

    We have a problem. It’s a knot, a tangle; we’re not quite sure whether to pull or push or just set it afire. It’s thorny, unapproachable, but we want a solution, we want to ditch this pain, this tension, the one in our shoulder especially, the right shoulder, the one that always bitches at us as it takes on our woes. (Or does it cause them?) This big bag of skin, encasing these mysterious organs moving blood and bile, and this exquisite system of levers and pulleys and pivoting joints, muscles for climbing and lifting, smiling and punching and kissing—our…

  • Personal Reflections - Religion

    A Sermon on Forgiveness

    August 18, 2013 - By 

    The kind people at the Unitarian Universalist Community of Lake County invite me a time or two every year to step into their pulpit and deliver a guest sermon. Earlier today, I shared this message on forgiveness with them, which serves as a kind of followup and elaboration to my post last April in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. I found it useful to return to this topic in a more expansive way after some time had passed, and I hope readers may get further food for thought as well. Forgiveness is one of those topics we’re never…

  • Odds & Ends

    Darkness, Troubles & Sunflowers

    August 12, 2013 - By 

    Life ain’t easy. “When you’re dark and troubled…” begins the Carole King song that was made even more famous by James Taylor. When we hear these first words to “You’ve Got a Friend,” all of us inch right up to the edge of our seats and bob our necks forward in anticipation, because we know in our bones this what of being “dark and troubled,” oh yes we do. It’s the human lot, at least on occasion, and when the Brood Brothers descend and linger, wearing their dark suits with midnight-black shirts and matching hankies, we know they’re not our…

  • General Nonfiction - Religion

    John Muir and the Wild Calm Within

    August 6, 2013 - By 

    *Why do I always feel, when I am meandering about in the mountains, so wildly free and self-possessed, and at the same time so puny and insignificant? Does the vastness and majesty of the setting release some heretofore unknown chemical that allows me to settle contentedly into my niche as a speck of cosmic dust, desiring nothing more than to exist in this moment of plain clarity and calm? These are questions the naturalist John Muir may well have asked himself at age 30 when he nixed an offer of a partnership in an Indiana machine shop that made wagon…