Decisions, Decisions

All creatures, big and small, make decisions. Albeit, not by the intellect; that’s a human characteristic. Interestingly, that unique human capacity can also cause us to fail in even making a decision, let alone make a bad one. The lion will eat its young if starving. We can too. But faced with a similar dilemma most would choose to serve the young first. It’s in our truer human nature to do the latter.  

Often, we are faced with indecision about the many things in our lives. From large to small, from the critical to the trivial. We look at our needs and the needs of others (hopefully) as we seek that “correct” decision, that fulcrum we need to move ourselves along in a positive direction toward our future.

Planting and Picking My Brain

Seems these days I have neglected the blog-o-sphere and other stories - projects. If only there was more time. Writing is something I’m having trouble with lately. I have neglected the tools of writing, the keyboard, the books, the notes…and the imagination.

I have neglected the word. It has wasted within me from lack of care and watering. The word lay rotting amid the waste of my mind, not growing in meaning, but buried and atomizing. Selecting the right ones for sentences is pointless…they are falling apart.

My brain – petrified.

I do manage a little reading before bed. Right now I’m into the Gunslinger chronicles of Stephen King and the poetry of D.H. Lawrence. Weird eh?

Celebrate This: Coming to Terms Over The Killing of Osama Bin Laden

It’s been over one week since we learned that Osama Bin Laden was killed by the US Navy’s mythical Seal Team Six while conducting Operation Neptune Spear halfway around the world. It is only now that I can begin to put into words the thoughts and emotions flung into motion on the first day of May, 2011.

In the hours and days that followed, celebrations, planned and unplanned broke out. All forms of media were energized by the dramatic death of the most notorious man of our time.

News commentators and pundits of all types repeatedly made the amusing gaffe of transposing “Obama and Osama” in their sheer excitement to proclaim the “good news.” As I listened to this, I chuckled and thought, why don’t we just call him Bin Laden? This way we can avoid sounding like Ted Kennedy.

The Season of Change

We are visiting my mother-in-law for her birthday. My daughter asks me all morning for a trip to the park. Curiously, I am interested in the park this day; I am compelled to get some fresh air, to see…to see the sky, the trees, and the clouds, to smell the day. The seemingly bleak autumn morning beckons me like an old friend from long ago…“let’s go out and play!” I think, perhaps, I might create some cool images of her playing. I gather my camera and a second lens. My daughter changes her clothes …twice.

On Seeing Moon Shine

This short poem was inspired by a liminal moment experienced while driving home after midnight on May 27, 2010. I struggled for several days trying to get it to make sense for me; that is, to make the words express what I felt and saw that night. On the 30th I heard from the book of Proverbs (8:22) and the whole thing suddenly came into specific relief. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it. Most of all though, I hope it reaches you with the vision I experienced that night. And, that these words give you reason to pause and reflect. Blessings.

Resident Evil –Portal to Misology

Should Mt. Diablo be re-named?


There is small and inane debate popping up over whether Mt. Diablo should be re-named Mt. Reagan after the former President Ronald Reagan. The concern over re-naming the mountain originates from a local resident who believes we should not have a mountain named after the devil, Satan.

Moon Speck

I stepped out and saw it, the gibbous waning moon suspended high over the western horizon. And, I was drawn to it. In the mid-morning sunlight, in a bright blue dome of exalted space, it was fixed there, as though it knew its place and I did not. It looked right at me with its dead stare of life, like an old friend of years, but one you see less and less of over time even though you live in the same town. My sad old friend the moon, we had some times. We still do, don’t we old friend.

Gratitude on Veterans Day

Expressing gratitude can be a humbling experience when it is authentic. It can be expressed as the dizzying honor and awe that one feels when we owe our life to something greater than ourselves. And while most of us have no problem expressing it, I suspect that there are times we seldom give pause and reflect on the source and act of gratitude.

A WAR BY ANY OTHER NAME…revisited

I wrote the first article on 9-11 about one month after 9-11-01 and submitted it to the Contra Costa Times. (I have it posted here on my blog under the date of October 4, 2001) Of course, they never published it. What a surprise.


Looking back on my concerns of the time, I am saddened by the fact that what I feared has, for the most part, come true.

Raised In Your Shadow

Raised in your shadow, you are the boney earth on display
My soul or yours – O’ Diablo
You hold the ancient sea at your peaks
And the new earth at your feet
You are the convergence of time and earthly spirit
Weep for those that do not see, or hear it

BUZZED BY A HAWK

It was one of those truly sublime moments. If one does not record it, it will be lost forever like a single molecule of oxygen in an expansive bright sky. Some say that miracles do not happen. I say they are directly in our path. One just needs to see.

A WAR BY ANY OTHER NAME…

It has now been one month since our nation was transformed once again. On September 11, 2001, we were changed forever in the blast of fire, rubble, horror, and hate.