Considering Reincarnation, Karma and Compassion “I think I was ten different people in this lifetime.” I hear words to that effect quite often and share that sentiment. Looking back on some of my beliefs, things I’d said and done, it’s hard to believe it was me. Who was that guy? How was that possible? I’m […]
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and […]
Human activity: Toward what end? This image reminds me to appreciate and not take for granted the opportunities I had along the way to choose work that I enjoyed doing. My parents didn’t have that luxury. I think of the difficulties people had in finding jobs during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era, including […]
The Power of Emergents The earth’s atmosphere with watery clouds was established about three billion years ago. When creatures emerged with eyes around 100 million years ago, they probably beheld skies something like this. While researching the evolutionary timeline for this information, my attention peaked at the word “emergence,” defined by science as a process […]
Where is our true home? As these geese take flight, returning to the places they were born to find food and mates, my thoughts turn to the place we call “home.” For some, it’s where we were born, the house we lived in the longest or where we live now. If “Home is where the heart […]
Life before and after them In the summer of ’76, the year Linda and I were married, we went to the Cayo district in Belize so I could better appreciate where and how she’d lived for a year, teaching English to high school students under the auspices of the Papal Volunteer’s—the Catholic church’s version of […]
Introduction This begins a series of posts on the subject of whole systems thinking. After the topic is introduced, I’ll offer a contemplation that relates to the headline photograph and text. Historically, patterns observed in nature were discussed and documented in China five thousand years ago, before they were articulated by Lao Tzu (Gia-fu Feng, […]
Approaching the perennial questions A mind game that has enhanced my appreciation of the scope of the universe began when, on a clear day somewhere in the 60s, I sat on a park bench overlooking the Ohio river. Having recently read about laser technology, I pointed an imaginary laser into the sky and wondered how […]
Our backgrounds reveal who we once were and how we got to where we are While writing my novel Soul Train, I wanted to model one of the characters after a dear friend and colleague of twenty years. He’d recently passed away and I realized that the only thing I knew about his personal life, […]
I recently encountered a metaphor relating to reality. I passed over it quickly so I’m not able to reference the source, but the image stuck with me—perhaps because it aligned with Plato’s notion that the reality we experience is akin to shadows projected onto the wall of a cave. In my reading, the author […]
Contemplative Photography 