Just the few of you left now, your stubborn clinging spent, a mighty December wind sending you finally to freefall. Reclined in the steaming waters, I see you torn from your branch, spinning violently, a micro tornado, coming to rest smack in the middle of my forehead. You are small, seven-pronged, maple, and as you become my third eye, I look with renewed surprise heavenward, your cycle now blessed and complete. *** For periodic and brief posts of inspiring words from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied by lovely photography from my Flickr friends, see my public Facebook…
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It’s such a sweet time of year, sugared stuff everywhere in front of us. So in the spirit of the season, today I offer you yet another heap of delectables, but these of the eye candy variety that contain abundant nutrients but not one more calorie to add to your seasonal total. How’s that for a generous, health-wise, and environmentally conscious holiday gift? You’re welcome! All thanks and praise to the marvelous photographers whose own generosity and creative flair have added such rich visual context to the words on this page over the past two years. I hope these single…
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How do murder and torture square with a religious point of view? Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, practicing Methodists both, expressed no hesitation recently in curtly dismissing the Senate investigation into the CIA’s torture tactics against suspected terrorists. Cheney called the entire report “a crock,” and Bush praised agents who approved and administered waterboarding and other torture methods as “patriots.” Well. One cannot read the actual descriptions of what takes place during euphemistically labeled “waterboarding” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” without cringing. To imagine yourself (or perhaps worse, your loved ones) on that table, suffocating, passing in and out of…
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Forty-five years ago today, I got a “Dear John” letter from my high school heartthrob who had gone away to college. It was my first major heartbreak (there would be others), and as I collapsed onto my bed sobbing while beholding my girlfriend’s sincere but crushing words, my mom hurried into my room and proceeded to pull me close to her as I wept onto her shoulder for a good long while. Ah, me… I have always remembered the date because it was one I had marked on my internal calendar many months before. My junior college basketball team was…
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THE EMPTY CLOSET By Andrew Hidas The suddenly cavernous closet sprawls in front of me and stops my breath, as if a street sweeper has barreled through, and not knowing me from a leaf from a blouse, has sucked all into its maw, its dark convulsive dark. A black stain on the door frame catches my blurred wetting eye (her coat? her dress? did she have a black dress?) and I reach to touch it, curious, my head bumping the now empty hangers,…