Recent Entries

• There’s always a road to New Hope, somewhere

  March 17, 2025

  I’m back in the Memory Vault, reading essays I wrote many years ago. This one brought back both dreadful and bittersweet memories of a year and time that marked a new beginning after my second struggle with a long period of unemployment, followed by major depression and anxiety. Most of 1994 was ...

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• A cherished and transcendental experience on an early Spring afternoon

  March 11, 2025

  Walking through the world in the way I choose—by which I mean, with attention, by which I mean, leisurely—has given me a great many things, such as life itself, the ability to go on, the ability to see what is beautiful, and to understand what is worth seeing. Mary Oliver – Upstream (2016) To lea...

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• Rivers, creeks and streams: a retrospective look back, and a glimpse of what I treasure today

  March 4, 2025

  Handwritten journal entry, Fall 1986 Relaxed this afternoon in the shade of a sandbar beside Black Creek. The stream flowed by as moving leaves on the surface marked its passage. The water level was the lowest I’ve yet seen for the creek, and will get lower as the dry month of October approaches....

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• Once upon a time in Nebraska

  February 23, 2025

    Back in the 1980s when I was traveling around the country every year like a nomad or Gypsy, I crossed Nebraska several times and always marveled at it’s wide open spaces, hilly Sandhills grasslands, small towns in the middle of nowhere, spring-fed rivers and a general feeling of bring in A...

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• Some thoughts on why I write

  February 19, 2025

    Writing is the axe that breaks the frozen sea within. Kafka Journals hint at what’s long been hidden under the ice. They shimmer with patterns of longing, secrets, untold stories. The diarist plays detective to his own days, uncovering the extraordinary in the ordinary, the true story bene...

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• The objects we collect are more than meet the eye

  February 13, 2025

  You know how there are little tokens, icons, “things” which people buy on a whim or pick up at souvenir and gift shops? Some people have frog collections with cupboards and china cases full of the little green amphibians in every guise and pose, funny and serious. Philosopher frogs and dopey, dum...

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• The simple life was never going to be the one for me

  February 6, 2025

  The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have, and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach. Lin Yutang,
Chinese writer,
1895-1976 Years ago when I had no permanent job, no money, and no immediate prospects for a job, everything was very different. I had no pos...

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• Remembering the vast and lonesome high desert of southwestern Wyoming

  January 30, 2025

    Sometimes I really understand why the ocean is such a magnet to me. It is the lure of the horizon, coming to the end of the road, stopping, getting out of the car and making your way to the edge of the continent and looking out over 180 degrees of sea and sky. Expansive,…

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• The bottomless hole of the search for ego gratification

  January 22, 2025

  People will often enter into the compulsive pursuit of ego gratification and things to identify with in order to fill the hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel better about themselves...

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