Recovery. Sobriety. Living Wise.
Marsha and I like to walk over to Grand Avenue Park in Everett after dinner to watch the sun set over the Olympic Mountains. The scene is so picturesque, so grand, so serene, so beautiful. I remember as a boy watching the sunset from Discovery Park and feeling the same serenity. I lived away from the Pacific Northwest for 37 years and hardly a day … Continue reading What’s So Special About Beauty?
Charles Dickens’s novel, A Tale of Two Cities, opens with the classic description of the age leading up to the French Revolution. It speaks of a world in chaos and turmoil where contradictory pressures moved with equal and opposite force in a world with no North Star. The novel has been read and reread since it was first published in 1845, and as these same … Continue reading The Best of Times, The Worst of Times
My mother, Theresa Moriarty, was a towering figure in my life. She birthed not only my body but my conscious soul. Indeed, if there is a heaven and ever I get there, it’ll be on Mother’s passport. She was a plain-spoken woman, whip-smart, given to simple truths. She had an attitude some would describe as gnarly. As a woman raised in the teeth of depression … Continue reading In Praise of Honesty
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. – is sure to be noticed.” Søren Kierkegaard The danger of losing one’s self grows during times that feel unfamiliar. Think of how … Continue reading Beyond the Great Regression
Today I found a poem by Theodore Roethke sitting in my inbox. My good friend Neil Vance sent it without a message. It hardly needed one. The poem is entitled “Infirmity.” I read it and my soul was enlarged a thousand times. Theodore Roethke passed away in 1963. At the time he was living on Bainbridge Island near Seattle and teaching at the University of … Continue reading Infirmity