Simple Thoughts and Me … on Nature, Spirituality, Hope, some Science and the ongoing Star Wars Saga.

    Saturday, December 18 (2021) 8PM   ‘A Quiet Reflection on the Nature of Winter’   Two nights ago was the Big Winter Wind Storm of 2021.   It took me two days to notice the Big Blue Spruce uprooted by the house on the corner, lying on its side, roots splayed in a circular pan shape. A Standing One at least 50 years old, laid to rest.  In 2023 it will remain where it lays today barely changed. How slowly the nature of time leans on the living until the moment of impact, especially in Winter. It seems every town has a place they call the Ponds.   At our Ponds, the cattail bogs, already dried out from an unseasonably warm Autumn, are frozen and suspended in windswept animation, completely still, leaning into the storm’s path as it swirled across the plains. In the aftermath came the freezing temperature of winter’s edge, the motionless landscape stopped in its tracks.   The edge of thick iced over ponds where the water fowl once sociali...

  Thursday, December 16 (2021) 10PM ‘Vivid Momentary Insights’   I didn’t understand Shakespeare until I turned 53. It was like a cloudy sky opened up and shone the light of clarity on my perception—a key unlocking the door of my consciousness. Word appreciation. Understanding my own struggle. Bringing with it reward. An understanding of others. May Sarton (in House By the Sea) speaks of journaling as a means of “trying to sort out and shape experience”, and growing old as “…accepting regression as part of the whole mysterious process. The child in the old person is a precious part of his being able to handle slow imprisonment. As he is able to do less, he enjoys everything in the present, with a childlike enjoyment.” And so as the child inside emerges, she brings clearer vision to a present life once crowded by daily distractions disguised as self-truth. Within it, what’s really going on in and around oneself is finally revealed as if a clouded veil you have lived with...