THE WAITING GAME John Milton closed his poem, “On His Blindness” with the now famous line: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Presumably, the words are meant to give hope to those who feel useless because of some impediment like blindness or paralysis or a crippling
THE LESSON OF A TRAP DOOR SPIDER I’m not the first to have recognized that certain characteristics are shared between insects and people. Henry David Thoreau in “Walden” recounts a struggle between an army of red and black ants which he compares to human conflicts that g
THE UNINVITED Almost everyone knows Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall.” In it he repeats a warning refrain: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it do
A SOAP BOX OF ONE’S OWN Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play, “A Doll’s House,” was critical of marriage norms though Ibsen demurred that his work was not about women’s’ rights. Rather, he said, the play was about the human need to identify oneself beyond a role or job description i
On Thursday, July 14 my blog post, “A Soapbox of One’s Own” will be published. I’m asking anyone with a conscience to read it and to speak out by writing their Congressmen and the President by letter or e-mail. Or if it suits, write a blog about justice.
TRUTH IN AN ORDINARY LIFE In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” the Prince of Denmark remarks that, to him, the world seems “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable” (Act 1, ii). Stale and flat are remarkably docile words coming from a young man who doubts his mother’s virtue and
A YAQUI WAY In the 1980s I began reading the works of Carlos Castaneda, a Peruvian born citizen who, several years earlier, was studying anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles. His first work, “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge” was d
OF SQUIRRELS AND MEN Looking out my kitchen window this morning, I saw two squirrels at play. One had a nut of some kind and was being chased by the other. They ran up the bark of one tree and swung to the next with a speed difficult for my eyes to follow. Eventually they disappeare
THE OLD MAN AND THE TREE An early walk through the park brought me to the tree where, months ago, I saw a homeless man sheltering from a May shower (Blog: 5/9/2011). At the time, all his possessions were gathered in a plastic bag, which he carried in a shopping cart. Today, he was kee
HOW TO MAKE A HELL OF HEAVEN In Dante’s vision of hell, he reserves the fourth circle (Canto 7) for sinners guilty of avarice and envy. Of course it could be argued these sins are sprinkled throughout the Inferno as certainly the betrayer, Lucifer, who resides in the deepest pit, wa