Life

you are born,
you laugh,
you love
you cry,
you die.

The only journey... kindness.

Dear Ms Collins

To my dear high school English teacher Ms Collins: I know I was by far your worst pupil - thank you for everything, especially your unbelievable patience. Please know the curse you placed on me some 40 years ago is alive and well. I read, and write, and re-read, re-write, and read more... I'm twice the writer you thought I would be and only half the writer I wish to be.

I crossed a new threshold - figured out I'm at 150 pages read/researched for every page of writing - that ratio will surely climb soon. I don't even want to consider how many of those pages have been re-read (at least once!)  The book stack "to read" now sits idling at 9 not accounting for pdf docs and journal reports... and then there is the wretched little reading list save eyeglasses on my mac laptop, it tallies 103!

So many words, so few great apes - ergh!

.

Sometimes War Is Silent

"We sacrifice our boys and girls
in silence. We pay our taxes
in silence. We make the bullets,
the bombs and the planes in silence.

We watch war films and play war games
in silence. When we get our chance
to say something in the poll-box,
our habit is too rock-solid."

except from Susanne Donoghue's 'Sometimes Silence is Silver'

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. ~Issac Asimov

“We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.”

- Rudyard Kipling

Every war is the war: the war that will end all wars; the war that will finally crush the aggressors; the war that will disarm our opponents and in so teach them a lesson that they will not be tempted to repeat; war, because (our) god has told us it is just; war, because the infidels have invaded our land; war, because they have disrespected our culture and religion; war, because of our obligation to protect the oppressed; war, because vital resources are at stake; war, because he is a bully to his people; war, because “[he] tried to kill my dad.”

and war, to prevent terrorism.

“We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”
~General Omar N. Bradley

Why do we have colleges of war, yet not one of peace?

Why is there no standing army of peace?

Where is the park monument erected to the pacifist, the antiwar leader, the draft evader?

Where is the world leader who can proudly say “no one died in violence during my term.”

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

~Issac Asimov

Walkabout With One's Self

From a mountain top I dream beyond the horizon,

there, where a world not unlike me exists,

there, where minds drift in concert, but not in forfeit of self.

Such a place seems real,

such a place dreams in others,

such a place lives in me.

Why from this mountain top does it seem so far?

So beyond grasp, beyond more than a dream?

Beyond a lifetime’s journey.

I am about to wander down from this mountain top and journey a road in search of that beyond-horizon-place of shared hopes and imaginings.

That road, traveled in stretches and segments all my life, now feels unknown,

a path of great mystery, filled with fear and emptiness.

I have months yet to think of wandering, of perambulating, of walking in reality’s shadow.

So for now that beyond-horizon-place is just that—a mental mirage.

It hasn’t filled a void or crushed a dream or sung a song of hope.

There remains a child in me searching for magic unseen,

a child wanting to touch a special dream.

A dream like that of no other, a dream that lives over the horizon and knows a possibility that we all claim to cherish, but fail to set free.

A child remains a child as long as he sits upon the mountain top,

a safe place to dream.

With trepidation I takes his first steps, knowing that day will lead to day and he will never return.

Only if across that new horizon there should be a new mountain top to climb will there be a chance to dream again,

and a child be once more.

Fear of what you will find

When the ancient cartographers created maps of a world they yet didn't know they marked the blank spaces with illustration and wrote "here be dragons." I fear the map I have chosen for my journey will soon have silent spaces with voids, "here be extinctions."

“And after they are gone, there will be silence. And there will be stillness. And there will be empty places. And nothing you can say will change this. Nothing you can do will bring them back.” 

- Bradley Trevor Greive

Discovering Who You Are Begins With Discovering Where To Begin

I have arrived on a portico fifty-seven years into my journey. I came to learn do the job intended with my life: to be a journalist, a story-teller of truths. After much procrastination I realize I am here because I first must be an apprentice. "My job is to tell people what they don’t want to hear. That is not what I set out to do. I wanted only to cover the subjects I thought were interesting and important. But wherever I turned, I met a brick wall of denial."

Those last words are not my words, but those of writer-journalist George Monbiot. They are the most accurate words to describe the past few years of my life, whether working the Gulf after the BP oil disaster or globally on great ape extinction.

 Like all apprentices I ultimately must find a teacher, at least a guide. My realization, and then pursuit of a mentor is at times known, but more often unknown. Equally important, mentors must change over time, the mystery is knowing when. When is often later than it should be. Monbiot's words come at an important time.

Becoming an apprentice means giving up on thinking you know something, almost anything of where you intend to travel. After experiencing degrees of previous success, the idea of starting anew has tarnished appeal. In my case success is supported by people's accolades and acknowledgements, fans.  To bastardize a quote: Nothing destroys the hunger to discover who you are more effectively than being treated as the hero you were.

The fear of apprenticeship is time. The time it takes to start over. And during the time of starting over you are not successful. There's a fear in that. Ironically, fear fosters procrastination—the squanderer of time. There are few apprenticeships anymore, there is no grace of time.

So, I have been sitting on the steps of the portico, staring out into the world of before, fearing to go inside and begin the journey into the world of after. I need to give myself permission to pass inside, to fail, to not care what others might think, to lay myself open to learning anew; no one else can grant that permission.

Monbiot wrote, "I still see my life as a slightly unhinged adventure whose perpetuation is something of a mystery. I have no idea where it will take me, and no ambitions other than to keep doing what I do. So far it’s been gripping." What I do know is I need to be a story-teller of truths, a journalist, I must find a way to tell people what they don't want to hear, in doing so, I know with conviction, I have heard it.

.