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Changing Polarities
The great philosopher Willie Nelson once said, “once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones you’ll start having positive results”. There’s a quiet habit many of us carry without noticing: we rehearse our worst thoughts. We repeat them, polish them, give them front-row seats in our minds. “I’m not good enough.” “This will fail.” “Nothing […]
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Life Finds A Way
I live in a desert. Not the most stereotypical kind, with blowing sand dunes for miles under a searing sun. No this is the high desert, an elevation of over 4500 feet and rippling mountain ranges looming over the sagebrush filled valleys. This desert gets a little more moisture than others, usually in winter and […]
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The Mystery Beyond The Visible
We live in a world that often insists everything must be proven, measured, and explained. Yet, despite all our science and technology, there remains something deeply mysterious about existence — something we might call the supernatural. Not necessarily ghosts or miracles, but the quiet sense that life is larger than logic, that something more is […]
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It’s In The Past
This past weekend our dog Tom committed suicide. I don’t mean that literally, as in he intended to die, I doubt dogs think like that. But we took him to the dog park, and while we weren’t paying attention he ate quite a bit of grass. The grass stopped him up and he couldn’t cough […]
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The Zen of Fencing
Last weekend I traveled to Western North Carolina to visit my parents. The area had been recently hit by the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which dumped multiple inches of rain, causing catastrophic flooding and destruction. My parents, fortunately, came through just fine, thanks to a goodly amount of preparedness and a fortunate location high on […]
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Lystrosaurus
I recently watched a series on TV wherein Morgan Freeman details in mellifluous tones the epochs and fauna of the earth. I learned that there have been at least five extinction events, moments in time where, for various reasons most of life on earth was eradicated. Over millions of years life would then return, each […]
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The Infamous Sparkle Creed
I recently became aware of the Sparkle Creed, a super progressive version of the Apostle’s Creed, modified to include the LGBTQ+ community. It popped up on the religious radar from a recent video of a pastor at the Edina Community Lutheran Church in St. Edina, Minnesota. The Creed is an actual part of that church’s […]
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Seldom Seen Slim
Seldom Seen Slim, aka Charles Ferge, was a wandering prospector who lived in the ghost town of Ballarat, California during the first half of the twentieth century. For decades he wandered the hills prospecting his various mining claims, never becoming rich. Instead he was content to eke out a living from the unforgiving desert rocks, […]
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Here and Now
This might be a little morbid, but I drove past the funeral home the other day and smoke was coming from the stack at the back. You know what that means, someone has passed on, leaving this life behind, and moving on to the next spiritual plane. It got me thinking, in spite of all […]
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God vs. Us?
Some initial thoughts, early this morning, about the possible nature of God: Would a loving, involved God send a massive tidal wave to kill thousands of random people, or continue to allow mass shootings that kill children? The way some people behave, that divine spark seems to be missing in a lot of us. So […]