Originally written March 8th, 2006, expanded January 2023 “The Japanese have a word, AWARE, for the feelings that arise from the beauty of an ephemeral thing.” Those words were featured in an article that I came across recently while paging through a National Geographic magazine. There it paraded a...

Written (Mostly) May 16th, 2009 I have never considered Willie Nelson among the great guitar players of the world. Actually, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t considered him much at all, and certainly not among my pantheon of Guitar God’s. From my view of things, he was just another...

Written September 27th, 2022 For those unfamiliar with the phrase, it was Joseph Campbell who first introduced it to me. First from his famous interview with Bill Moyer (The Power of Myth), and later from his first book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”. It was there that he...

Written April 26th, 2009 I have no explanation for my resistance, but for some inexplicable reason a curious apathy kept me from watching this movie, even though it had won an Academy Award for “Best Picture” in 1999 and all the reviews I read supported that honor without fail....

Written February 23rd, 2020 This note is long overdue. In fact, I find it embarrassing to admit just how many years have passed since I first intended to write about this. I began an essay a decade ago due to my love of the song in question, but it...

October 24th, 2020 Don’t ask why it took seventeen years for me to finally get down to the business of watching this movie, because I wouldn’t have an answer for you. It just doesn’t make logical sense, especially since it had been near the top of my ‘really need...

Written October 15h, 2021 I have purposely placed his portrait right up front, with full intent, in order to make it necessarily unavoidable. The painting is by Louis Michel VanLoo and dates roughly to the mid-1770’s and captures Denis Diderot, the aging ‘radical’ of the French Enlightenment, at what...

I am prominently presenting this photo, as much as I loathe it, due to its ominous, if not blatant Orwellian threat. Orwell wrote extensively against the Fascism of his day, particularly of it’s reliance on propaganda to convert credulous minds…….but before wading into that cesspool, first there is a...

Written November 9th, 2017 “Walking in the Pastures of Wonder” That is the title of a new book that just arrived today by the Irish poet/philosopher John O’Donohue, who has been a wonderful discovery for me recently. The book, along with his general outlook is closely aligned with the...

Written February 21st, 2019 I will make this brief, even though this photo inspires so much thought and wonder that I’m left speechless at the sight. The photo (click it to expand) was taken from an app that I have on my Droid tablet, which gives me a live...