• Poetry - Psychology

    Piercing the Clouds of Unknowing:
    Ciona Rouse’s “Red-Shouldered Hawk”

    March 30, 2024 - By 

    The spiritually inclined 20th century psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of “synchronicity” is in the driver’s seat with this post. After I began assembling another selection for this blog’s “Brilliant Songs” series, I thought the better of ignoring the long-deceased Dr. Jung’s clear message to me across space and time to veer over into the poetry realm instead. Perhaps I should explain. My blogging friend over at Loren Webster.net is a longtime birder whose post the other day featured, among other winged creatures, the gorgeous portrait of the red-shouldered hawk that you see above. After admiring its fierce, self-possessed bearing before…

  • Philosophy - Plays - Psychology

    Heaven, Hell and OTHER People:
    Finding Happiness in “The Good Life”

    November 12, 2023 - By 

    French philosopher and playwright Jean Paul Sartre’s 1944 play, “No Exit,” envisioned a hell devoid of searing flames, torture devices or red-eyed devils pitchforking inhabitants for eternity. But that doesn’t mean the punishment for unredeemed sinners wasn’t awful beyond imagining. Sartre instead placed multiple people in a locked room—in this case, two women and one man—carefully selected to provoke maximum and mutual psychological discomfort upon one another by picking astutely at the scabs of the moral failings that landed each of them in this dreaded situation. Yes, for all eternity. “Anything but that!”, we can hear ourselves saying in sympathy with…

  • General Nonfiction - Psychology

    A Larger Vision:
    Frank Bruni’s “The Beauty of Dusk”

    April 29, 2023 - By 

    “We have no control over what happens to us; we have enormous control over what happens to us. I’ll spend the rest of my life better understanding and better accepting that paradox, which I understand and accept better today than I did before October, 2017, before that first day of incomprehensible blur, before an education in neuro-ophthalmology that became an education in so much more.” That sentence near the end of “New York Times” columnist-turned-college-professor Frank Bruni’s 2022 memoir, “The Beauty of Dusk,” underpins most all the reflections on his ongoing experience of a rare stroke that robs him of vision in…

  • Politics/Culture - Psychology

    American Distemper:
    On Not Letting Our Daubers Down

    January 16, 2022 - By 

    Roger Craig was an avuncular figure in the sometimes rough-and-tumble, sometimes over-sentimentalized world of major league baseball. He was a better-than-his-record starting pitcher mid-20th century, enjoying a 12-year career and four World Series appearances before staying in the game first as a scout and coach and then through a successful decade-long run as a manager. It was during his eight-season run (1985-92) managing the San Francisco Giants in that cosmopolitan citythat the slightly drawling Durham, North Carolina native became known and celebrated for a down-home phrase to keep his players’ spirits up, especially when they were leaving the clubhouse after…

  • Psychology

    Virus Dreams

    April 13, 2020 - By 

    You don’t have to be a Jungian psychologist to know that dreams can be the most confounding things. Your long-dead mother is brewing coffee and turns to you with a beatific smile as a torrent of word salad comes out of her mouth, whereupon a parrot flies right through a closed window and hops onto her shoulder to translate it as a long poem by Sophocles, the meaning of which you grasp instantly even though you hate poetry, have never read Sophocles in your life and wouldn’t know him from Maya Angelou. Then the parrot dons an apron and asks—in…