Doolberry's Driftwood

Funeral Notice: "Doolberry's Driftwood's" Demise

2006-05-29T10:25:00.000-07:00

Friends,
As a result of being invited and elevated to membership of the blog" Like a Two- Stroke", I am putting my blog "Doolberry's Driftwood" permanently to bed, to rest, to float in suspended animation in cyberspace. Self- immolation of the noblest kind.
If it is your pleasure, log on to www.likeatwostroke.blogspot. com, to renew your conversation with yours truly, The Dool, but more delightfully with Mark, The Two-Stroke, the blog creator and head honcho.
Signing off,
The Dool

Estivation time

2006-03-14T00:04:00.000-08:00

Pat and I will be off to Iowa later this week for 3 weeks. Pat will be teaching 2 courses at the Body Wisdom School of Massage in Des Moines. Due to our not having a laptop, this blog will therefore not have any new posting from me during that period. I am putting it into estivation.
Hibernation of animals is a winter phenomenon. Estivation ( or aestevation), from latin aestes for summer, is a summer phenomenon.
Some years back in Iowa, I remember someone at church commenting that the drop in church attendance, vitality and activity in summer was a pity, but was inevitable in such a climate where the prolonged winter brought about somewhat of a human hibernation, followed by the need for a hectic summertime of work and play. I remember thinking that the church, or at least this congregation, paradoxically was one of the few organisms that hibernate in summer, i.e. estivate, in the very season when the mission of the church was perhaps easiest to achieve : to "walk" with Jesus on the highways and byways; to go to all nations; to put on the "sandals" of the Gospel; to sow seeds; to aid the sick, the widows, the poor, ....
Spending summer in a state of drowsiness or torpor with a slowing down or cessation of activity and metabolism describes estivation in animals. It is usually to avoid high temperatures or extreme dryness. Relatively uncommon in the animal world compared to hibernation, estivation is a feature of the lives of a few animals including some insects, a few snails, amphibia such as some salamanders and frogs/toads, and some fish such as the Lungfish of Africa.
As its pond or lake dries up in the dry hot savanna summer, the Lungfish digs into the hardening mud creating a type of cocoon where it can remain alive, with a minimal metabolic rate, until the drought is over even if this be a number of years hence. A fish out of water will surely die rapidly, but the extraordinary lungfish is adapted to get enough oxygen for a very low metabolic rate while imprisoned in its mud cell, which can only be broken out of when softened by the next spring rains.
I bet many people feel much more alive in cold winters than in energy-sapping, humid summer
To avoid the "hibernating" effect of winter and its woes, some become "snow geese" and flee the winter for the sun of Florida, Texas and Arizona particularly. I have learned since coming to Monterey, California, that this area, with its mediterranean type of climate with dry summers in the 60s and 70s, is likewise sought by many in the summer, to avoid the torpid, sapping heat and humidity of their home area. They avoid the estivating effect of the home climate by migrating out here. In the fashion of their winter geese counterparts, is there a suitable name for these reverse snow geese : "summer salamanders", "torpid toads" ?

Scatology 401 Blow-outs

2006-03-09T09:11:00.000-08:00

Please see "Scatology 101, 201 and 301 for prior basic information.

"Blow-out Complications of Chronic Constipation"
A certain amount of voluntary "straining at stool" is normal for the act of defecation, but not the superhuman efforts, we all know of, required for the constipated "sinkers" of the average western low fiber diet.
Dr Denis Burkitt was the pioneer epidemiological researcher who first publicised the association of high fiber diet of 3rd-world rural Africans with their relative absence of the common diseases of western peoples on low fiber diet, namely : colon cancer, appendicitis, gall bladder stones and a group of conditions, which I call "Blow-outs" : hiatal hernia, diverticulosis, anal hemerrhoids and varicose veins of the legs.
At least part of the etiology of these 'blow-out", pressure -related conditions, is thought to be the chronic constipation and stooling habits of western people. In these folks, to achieve a defecation of hard sticky "sinkers", strong and prolonged straining at stool is needed to raise the intra-abdominal pressure abnormally high to aid the natural peristalsic pressure of the colon moving the contents downstream, and to supplement the normal adequate reflex muscular action of the lower rectum and perianal muscles.
An effect of this vastly increased intra-abdominal pressure, if a frequent and chronic occurence, is the development of "blow-outs" at those anatomical areas where the intra-abdominal cavity and organs have weaker spots, most susceptible to high pressure stimulus.
One can "blow-out upwards", which is the case in "Hiatal Hernia". The esophagus passes from the thoracic cavity into the abdominal cavity through an opening, the hiatus, in the diaphragm.
This lower end of the esophagus has sphincter musculature, which opens to permit swallowed food to pass into the stomach, then closes to its resting state to prevent reflux or regurgitation of food back into the esophagus, except when required, as in vomiting. Reflux causes so-called "heartburn" pain due to the esophagus reacting to the hydrochloric acid and acidity of stomach contents, to which the stomach linin ( mucosa), is insensitive. Increased belching/burping ( eructation), also results from loss of function of this sphincter.
Gradually the hiatus opening is widened and the upper stomach herniates through into the thoracic cavity with increased symptoms of the conditions of "Hiatal Hernia", "Gastro-esophageal Reflux Disease" (G.E.R.D.), known colloquially as Heartburn, Gas, Dyspepsia, Reflux, etc.
Chronic constipation may lead to "outward blow-outs" causing formation of diverticula of the colon. These are small, blind pockets, like little balloons, which the increased intraluminal pressure inside the colon pushes out at weak spots along the colon, resulting in the condition of "Diverticulosis". With time, retained stool may result in inflammation and infection ("Diverticulitis), with now, the very serious possibility of abscess formation, perforation into the abdominal cavity and peritonitis.
"Hemerrhoids" is also an "outward blowout" condition. This is, of course a very common problem, well known to most westeners. The lowermost part of the rectum, or anal canal, has large veins close to the surface. With chronic constipation, the back-pressure into
the lower abdominal and leg veins is vastly increased. With time, similar to the formation of diverticula, this may cause varicose enlargement and billowing out of the perianal veins into the lumen of the analcanal, taking the path of least resistance, creating internal hemerrhoids. These are usually uncomfortable, if not painful and liable to bleed with passage of hard "sinkers". With further growth these anal varicosed hemerrhoids may be long enough to prolapse out of the anus. Multiple treatments by injection, banding and a variety of surgical excision techniques are available, but nobody enjoys anal surgery and the messy post-op care of rear-end procedures.
An external hemerrhoid is differentiated from its internal cousin, by its more obvious situation originating at the very outer edge of the anus and usually acutely painful. It is very easily felt, when wiping, feeling like a grape or raisin, which if ignored, will in time shrink to be a now painless, persistent "anal tag".
Varicose veins of the legs are multi-factorial in origin, but are usually "blowouts downward" from increased venous blood pressure in the leg veins secondary to the raised intra-abdominal pressure of chronic constipators. As is well known, arterial blood is actively moved to the body tissues by the beating heart's pumping pressure, but has to be returned passively to the heart in the veins without the aid of any pressure from the pumping heart. Arterial blood pressure is dissipated in the capillary beds before blood collects again in venules leading to veins and hence back to the heart. Gravity and outside pressure from muscular contraction compressing veins, combined with a competent system of serial one-way valves in veins, creates the venous flow and return of blood back to the heart. It is not surprising, then, that being erect beings, the leg veins already faced with an uphill anti- gravity flow problem, might be easily susceptible to any increased venous back -pressure problems causing dilatation, or varicosing, of veins. Venous valves are of a semi-lunar flap type, flattening to the wall to enable onward flow , and flapping out to meet the opposite wall and thus close the vein lumen preventing any backflow, should the back-pressure temporarily be greater than the forward -pressure. However, with the permanent stretching and weakening of the leg vein wall under increased back-pressure, the vein diameter increases and local valves are no longer effective or "competent" . This process happens irregularly at the weakest points of the surface leg veins, producing the characteristic irregular pattern of "varicose veins". Not of cosmetic appeal, but more importantly, bad for circulation resulting in swelling of the lower legs, risk of vein inflammation (phlebitis) and vein blood clots (venous thrombosis), poor skin circulation and leg ulcers. Constant movement of the legs, periodic elevation and the wearing of compression hose knee-high or thigh-high are some of the useful preventative and treatmend measures.
The straining of delivering multiple babies and years of occupational standing with little leg movement are common contributing factors to varicose vein development.
Not of concern to us in this Scatology study, but of interest are these and other types of abdominal herniae related, at least in part, to chronic constipation and raised intra-abdominal pressure : this list includes groin (inguinal and femoral) herniae and bellybutton (umbilical) hernia.
When squatting on the ground to have a B.M., a la primitive man, and as is still the need in present-day rural cultures without outhouses, restrooms, etc., the veins leading into the upper thighs, the Femoral veins, are effectively flexed and compressed thus temporarily preventing any deleterious transmission of increased abdominal venous pressure down to the leg veins.
If you buy this blow-out notion, then the important pearl of this blog is that you need: firstly, to change diet to cure chronic constipation, and secondly, to at least minimise back- pressure effects by adding a step-stool to your restroom furniture, strategically placed at the foot of the stool, so as to force you to recreate an effective femoral vein-obstructing squat as you sit on the stool with feet elevated on a step-stool.
So much for the blow-out pressure effects of chronic constipation.
At least remember to :
" Be a sinker not a floater", and
"Take a stool to the stool to have a stool"

Scatology 301

2006-03-03T09:12:00.000-08:00

Why is "the restroom" so named?
What synonym do you use for this most essential room : toilet; bathroom; the ladies room (or gents); lavatory; loo; W.C.; the potty?
I grew up with the acronym PK of universal usage in Southern Africa and derived from "Picannini Kia", which is pigeon Zulu --also called Chilapalapa. The PK in the bush and on the farm was usually an Outhouse similar to that of US history, and I suspect a universal design. The substitute potty for night and bad weather use was ubiquitous.
You will know that before waterborne sewage systems came, it was the custom in many European towns, for the contents of the potty, the nightsoil, to be thrown out onto the street in the a.m., sometime into a kerbside ditch with flowing water. In China, the nightsoil is still used in some rural areas to fertilise the lands.
Of course, the most ancient way was to squat on bare ground. In the most primitive African wilds-- absent roads, power, sewage systems and other trappings of civilization-- it was often not convenient to get a "call of nature", especially at night. During the day, one can usually leave the footpath and easily, nearby in the bush, behind a bush, find a hidden, safe, thornless, sufficiently bare few square inches of ground. Experience teaches one which leaves are most suitable as natural "toilet paper" to gather on the way. Night-time potty times have special problems.
Aerial photos of African tribal villages easily reveal the characteristic pattern of timeworn footpaths radiating out from each village consisting of the few adjacent huts of a number of famiies and without toilets or outhouses. You can easily understand that, in the dark of night, few will venture far along a path or leave it in order to answer a call of nature. So, walking in the African bush, which is of necessity on these ubiquitous footpaths, could expose one to a special hazard of the African footpath ,in addition to the expected thorns, ticks and snakes, etc . Fortunately, the very high fiber stools from the staple largely vegetarian diet of corn, millet,yams or cassava,etc.,in this part of the 3rd world, are usually not odoriferous and are rapidly gobbled up by dung beetles,etc, or decay and disappear from microbial decomposition rapidly within a day or two in such a tropical climate.
Sociological scatological observations were not missed by "Fiber man" Dr. Denis Burkett, British missionary doctor and surgeon in East Africa, famous for his pioneering epidemiological work on diet. He noted the association of high fiber diet in these parts with the absence of many of the very common diseases of the western world largely on a low fiber diet, e.g. constipation, diverticulitis, gall bladder problems, hiatal hernia, colon cancer etc.
Jonathon Swift, Irish author of "Gulliver's Travels, must have been an observant walker around Dublin in the 17th century, because he too made scatological observations, studied and published an illustrated paper on the stool characteristics of the local population.
The universal outhouse was obviously a great progress in human development, with its "longdrop" pit design, a box to sit on and screening of some kind.
Still, however, with a hazard factor from its backyard siting and the snakes, spiders and other bugs now provided a new habitat. But for the first time, one could "rest" there.
Then came the indoor waterborne systems of the modern age. Primitively, just a hole in the floor, then with a seat, pan or stool and a gravity fed water system.
Originally employing a water tank, holding a few gallons of water, fixed about headhigh on the back wall with a release chain to pull; nowadays a china or enamel container with a lever to work the valve water releasing machanism and an automatic floating- ball type of water inflow faucet shutoff. My good wife, Pat, out of childhood habit, still bellows to a sometimes forgetful husband, "Dave, have you pulled the chain?" Embarrassing.
No excuses, Dolberry, but perhaps, in the modern restroom, we might tend to flush less immediately, and therefore is more likely to forget about it? Are we so intent on getting to the washbasin to "wash hands", an unforgiveable ritual to forget?( Yet, how often does our "paper technique" fail? How much "super-bug" highly-antibiotic resistance are we fostering by excessive paranoid washing with the totally unnecessary anti-biotic soaps?) I bet, however, even the most enlightened of us, are as fastidious and as ritualized as I am when it comes to toilet habits.
Perhaps ,also, is it to get to the inevitable restroom mirror that we are distracted to, to examine the tiny new skin bump we discovered with all the "resting' time required by our constipation?
Don't get me wrong. Proper toilet hygiene is needed and vital to prevent spread of E.coli, Hepatitis A and other fecal-borne diseases.
What a boon is the modern restroom. It's no longer a luxury. Why wonder why the loo in America is always in a room with a washbasin, and the bath/shower?. In the world of British influence, the lav was never in the bathroom and usually without a handbasin. Do we Americans smugly suspect the British therefore wash hands post- pulling-the-chain less than we do?
Not to confuse you any more, but the continental bidet has always puzzled me. What room is it in and what's it for?
Like me, do you wonder what the person is going for, who excuses himself to go to the bathroom : for a No.1, a No.2, to wash or to have a bath? None of your business, you might say, unless you are in the queue to follow. To "rest"? If so: from what? I can think of many reasons : for peace and quiet; to hide away in solitude protected by the unviolable unwritten law of "do not disturb when "engaged"; to guzzle in private a candy bar that would otherwise have to be shared with siblings; meditation and prayer; undisturbed reading time, etc.
Undoubtedly, all of us are very thankful for the privacy of the single stall lockable restroom. Public restrooms of multiple stall type and limited privacy are not our favorite places.
It seems to be a universal that we have a natural and very normal interest in and acceptance of our own stools and bowel habits, as being "ok". But the same attitude does not apply to the scatological characteristics and habits of other persons (mothers of babies excluded).
All in all, thank heavens for the modern restroom
I recommend you see Scatology 401 to learn what we lost when we no longer had to squat for a BM; when we could sit on the stool in order to have a stool.

Know Then Thyself

2006-03-02T10:15:00.000-08:00

Have you ever been tortured by having to make a choice : A fence-sitter; caught on the horns of a dilemma; frozen at a fork in the road; paralysed by indecision; confused; tossed to and fro by every whim?
Are these descriptions of me alone? Nay, uncertainty must be the constant companion of all who are honest and those who, perhaps vainly, yearn for truth and certainty and to know one's self. Absent that, and, if so trapped, then oh, how we long for at least a measure of boldness: to take a stand; to jump in the deepend of indecision; to put on the table whatever cards we have been dealt with, and stick with that.
What do you think of Pope's words? Enlighten me you students of poetry :

THE RIDDLE OF THE WORLD

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast;
In doubt his mind and body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Whether he thinks too little, or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself, abus'd or disabus'd;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.
ALEXANDER POPE

And Shakespeare's :

"Boldness be my friend,
And arm me audacity."
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE in "Cymbeline"

Scatology 201

2006-03-01T09:39:00.000-08:00

Are you a floater or a sinker?
A floater is a person who has floaters.
Floaters are the product of a diet high in fiber and sinkers of a less-healthy lower fiber diet. I bet all of us have experienced, at the extreme floater end of the spectrum of stool consistency, diarrhea illnesses with frequent, extremely watery, soft stools. The transit time is so fast that there is insufficient time to digest and absorb nutrients in the food and to reabsorb water, which is the main function of the colon (large intestine).Therefore, resulting in watery stools with a risk of dehydration acutely and malnutrition chronically.
In contrast, normal bowel habits are achieved only with sufficient insoluble plant fiber and water in the diet, producing a transit time of about 1 to 2 per day of semi-formed, soft, more gassy, moister and more bulky stool, which tends to float, or at least not to be a "cannonball" sinker. With floater consistency, peristalsic waves of intestinal muscle contraction are most effective in advancing the intestinal contents. The distension stimulus of bulkier stool in a fuller rectum, the lowermost storage section of the colon, results in more efficient anal sphincter muscle relaxation to enable defecation to occur more easily. Thus minimal or no conscious extra straining is needed to raise the intra-abdominal pressure for an extra "push". Therefore, less time of occupancy, no need for books in the toilet and less risk of developing painful and annoying hemorrhoid problems and the other complications of chronic constipation.
At the other extreme to diarrhea, is the sinker condition, or constipation, which is, out of ignorance, regarded by many westeners to be "normal". Sinkers are low in water content, drier, harder, stickier, less malleable, more dense and more formed stool. Thus making it much more difficult for natural peristalsic bowel and anal muscle function and requiring conscious straining to aid defecation. In western water-borne toilet pans, these high density scats rapidly sink, hence the term sinkers.
Interestingly, many mammals that are totally vegetarian with diets of massive fiber content, produce very dry, hard characteristically shaped dung without suffering from constipation problems, to my knowledge. The very dry grains of mice, pellets of rabbits,"apples" of horses, and huge rolls of elephants, etc., would be sinkers to humans reflecting significant constipation. Any vets., or other scatologists, out there to enlighten me?
It is the puttylike, sticky hard stool of sinkers, along with excesive toilet tissue, that can result in the most embarrassing desperate search in the bathroom for a plunger to relieve an obstruction. As you will know, this tool has to be immediately available, otherwise overflow is almost inevitable. Very unlikely to happen to a floater, though he may have to flush more than once to remove all trace of a stool and leave crystal clear water in the pan.
It is important to distinguish insoluble from soluble fiber, both of which are only of plant origin. The former is indigestible plant cellulose and therefore the anti-constipation type of fiber that I have been promoting above. Cellulose, which is the main structural substance of plant cell walls and the basis of all woody plant tissue, is the most chemically complex carbohydrate and cannot be digested by humans. It is the main component of grain husks and seed coats, e.g whole-grain wheat bread, brown rice; fruit skins and fibers e.g. prunes, citrus; leaves and stems e.g. rhubarb and asparagus; root crops e.g.potatoes,yams, etc.
The need for a high insoluble fiber component in human diet would appear to be primarily for a mechanical purpose and not for energy-supply. However, as you know, there are many herbivorous animals which obtain all their energy from plant matter because they can digest cellulose. All these animals have the necessary cellulose digesting enzymes supplied to them by micro-organisms, such as Protozoa, which live symbiotically in their digestive systems. Some examples are the herbivore mammals, grass-eating earthworms amd wood-eating termites.
Whilst touting insoluble fiber rather than soluble fiber for anti-constipation dietary value, it would be amiss not to mention the significant benefits of soluble fiber nevertheless for other reasons. Insoluble fiber is made of carbohydrates less complex than cellulose and which are digestible substances, such as pectins, gums, agar, etc., abundant in unprocessed legumes,grains, fruits and vegetables. Being complex carbohydrates, they take longer to be digested than simple sugars(the ultimate end-products of all carbohydrate digestion), resulting in slower digestion and absorbtion time with significant human health benefits for diabetes and cholestrol-related diseases, etc.
An important caveat is that a diet with a high increased insoluble fiber content must have an accompanying increased water intake to avoid the paradoxical constipating effect due to a now lower relative water content. Other than an increased volume of flatus, albeit of benign type, the only other side-effect of a high insoluble fiber diet to watch for, would be in people with low calcium problems, who are taking large quantities of bulk commercial insoluble fiber, such as pure wheat bran. The exaggerated amount of Phytic Acid in such concentrated, undiluted insoluble fiber may then significantly decrease calcium absorption from the diet.
Is the obviously longer time needed to defecate in western-diet peoples the correct derivation of the word "restroom"? ( To be continued in Scatology 301, pending)

Scatology 101 2.23.06

Quaking Aspens ( Populus tremuloides)

2006-02-27T19:07:00.000-08:00

Not to be confused with the Birches is the similar Aspen/ Cottonwood/ Poplar (Populus) genus of trees. Especially birchlike is the Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides), a ubiquitous tree of much of the Rockies and the higher elevations of the American West. So aptly named from its pendant leaves tremulous in the slightest breeze. Its magnificent fall golden-yellow leaf color is well shown in the photo. The bark is smooth and chalky-white to yellow-green and without the peeling or cross-stripes of the similar looking Paper birch (Betula papyrifera), often growing in the same habitat, but extending more northerly in New England, Canada and Alaska. The peeling bark character of this latter species was used by Native Americans for canoe coverings.

Birches (genus Betula)

2006-02-27T19:04:00.000-08:00

One of the loveliest trees of the Northern Hemisphere Forests is the birch, botanical name Betula. Probably best known of a number of species, especially grown in gardens and cities, is the European White birch (Betula pendula) with glossy white bark, black-fissured at the bole, and pendant branches and twigs.
This birch is very characteristic of vast areas of forest in Poland, Eastern Europe and Russia.
I was delighted to discover Robert frost's poem "Birches". When last we visited our son John and his family, who live in Poland, John and I tried to "swing birches" as best we could from the description of this in the poem. We could not emulate the feat or have the obvious fun of Frost's youth.
Here is the poem :

BIRCHES
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree~
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

2006-02-27T16:10:00.000-08:00

It is so important to know what we believe, what is our philosophy of life, what is our worldview. In which of the three categories are we camped : Believer, Atheist or Agnostic?
Michael Novak recently wrote, illuminatingly to me, in his article "The Truth about Religous Freedom", in the 'First Things' March 206 No.161 issue, while commenting on the moral crisis prompted in the West by the rise of secularism.

I quote :
"Atheism and agnosticism at first seem benign, for many who embrace them go on living almost as if they were still religious, according to civilized values of the religious past, with mercy, charity, compassion, and the other high qualities. Sometimes they seem even more moral than religious people of their own generation.
Atheism, however, may be a position of passionate commitment, but it cannot be a position of reason. No man knows enough about the conditions of of existence to know for certain that there is no God.
For this reason, too, agnosticism seems like a more tenable intellectual position, and a more plausibly and attractively moral position as well. It seems modest and humble, open and thoughtful. There seems much in agnosticism to admire.
Still theory is one thing and practice is another. Agnosticism may be attractive as a theory, because of its modesty, but in practice human beings cannot be so neutral. In practice, we must live as though God exists or as though God does not exist. Which of these practical roads agnostics choose to follow makes a great difference in their actual conduct. A mind open to God tends to be open to many arguments, that to one who lives as though there is no God are likely to seem dim and obscure. A purely secular society living as if there is no God tends to value individual liberty before any other good. This preference is proposed as public policy on the grounds that it is the most democratic principle, and on the grounds that all other policies are more dangerous threats against democracy. But this preference cannot be long maintained without falling into impossible contradictions.
For instance, the individual woman who chooses to have an abortion may seem to be exercising a fundamental human right of choice and thus, by reason of various complexities of her own life, even be entitled to our sympathies. Still, her choice necessarily demands the destruction of another individual life, that of the infant in formation in the womb, significantly different from hers. In this way, secularism ends up not treating all individuals as equal. Rather, it privileges some human individuals more than others.
In addition, secularism ends up destroying a fundamental principle of democracy, in the process of boasting that it alone protects democracy. For in granting the more powerful party (the individual woman) the right to exercise violence to destroy the weaker party (the infant in the womb), it privileges might over right. But it is the fundamental democratic principle, its very foundation, to privilege right over might. Secularism thus ends up, in its moral self-contradictions, destroying what it claims to love above all : democracy and pluralism. And abortion is not the only instance of this self-contradiction.
The greatest danger of secularism is that it steadily undercuts natural law, moral reason and religion - in the name of privileging personal preference, taste, and selection. It tends first toward moral relativism and then begins sliding toward moral nihilism. There remains little or nothing in the moral arsenal of secularism to slow a cultural tendency toward decadence or to empower a wave of moral awakening. Mesmerized by the glowing attraction of the individual as the central unit of moral analysis - together with the elevation of personal preference over objective reason and the priority of of will over intelligence - secularism tends to hold that moral truth cannot be grasped by the human mind. All there is to rely on is personal preference. In matters of social conflict, then, it is inexorable that power must become the ultimate adjudicating force.
Total decadence fortunately takes time on the slippery road of decline due to the slow drag on it by tradition and cultural inhibition, which save us for a time.
It would seem that secularism is a most unsure basis for democratic survival. Indeed for democracy to thrive, it does not need to be based on secularism.
What the West calls secularism is in fact in large measure a heavy draw on the religious heritage of Christian-Judaeo religion. That is the deepest source of current liberal ideas of liberty, fraternity, equality, compassion and progress. In fact, it is more owing to the specifically Christian values of the past that Communism was decisively defeated e.g. Solidarity, the Polish lsbor union and other dissidents who at last refused to be complicit in the Soviet regime of the lie. Both Fascism and Communism were based on false, inadequate philosophies under which it proved impossible for humans to live. Thus, even contemporary secularism owes its current peaceful thriving to to the recent victory over its deadly enemies, Fascism and Marxism, by the religions (and their morality of nature and reason) that it despises.
In order for democracy to thrive, it does not need to be based on secularism. In fact, secularism would seem to be a most unsure basis for democratic survival."

See www.firstthings.com

Whistling

2006-02-25T13:00:00.000-08:00

It was overcast early today, but this does not deter the numerous blackbirds here in Seaside, California.
Brewer's Blackbird (Euphagus cyanocephalus) has a species name referring to the iridescent glossy blue-green black head plumage. Similar to the ubiquitous European starling, which has a much shorter tail. These blackbirds make whistle -like sounds, to my ear, rather like a hoarse squeaky hinge, which often resembles a partial "wolf whistle". Not a melodious song, but they are at least not shy and they do raucously welcome the new day and have reminded me of the lines of the old hymn : "Hail to the morning, hail to the dawning, hail to the dawning of a new day. Morning has broken, blackbird has spoken, ...."
Their's is definitely a whistle-type of bird song. Other birds labelled as whistlers rather than melodious songbirds include the Bald Eagle, the Whistling Duck, the Blue Thrush, parrots, etc.
It was a great thrill for me to see for the first time a Western Mocking bird in Seaside last year.I saw this nondescript grey bird atop a roof,who issued forth a puzzling variety of calls and whistles as I watched him, before it eventually clicked to me that he was a mockingbird showing off his repertoire.
My Uncle Emil in Zimbabwe, had a pet African Grey parrot, one of the best talkers, named "Poopal". He was a wonderful mimic and talker, who greeted a visitor with: "Poopal, phffff-------, who farted?". Parrots and cockatiels, among pet birds, are also great whistlers.
To call and lure out some species, birders and hunters may use proprietary "bird whistles" or make a varety of human voice sounds, two of which are called "squeaking", made by blowing through pursed lips or loudly kissing the back of your hand, and "pishing", a hissing sort of pisssh pisssh pisssh.
The blackbirds here are oblivious to my "wolf whistles" directed at them.
As a teenager, I admit to wanting often to 'wolf whistle" at a beautiful girl. Never did I dare to do it alone. Like my friends at that curious and sensuous adolescent age, we were very normal and so fascinated by the opposite sex, but nevertheless shy and always hanging around the outskirts of very tempting situations at a safe distance but yet dying to see or get closer into whatever gave, but knowing we would always leave it to the more daring casanovas. I now believe that somebody up there, and my good mom's influence, was looking after me, as I look back at the great opportunities, temptation and potential trouble I never had the "courage" ( stupidity, with hindsight) to get into.
After marriage to Pat, how often did I embarass her by my using a wolfwhistle to find her in the depths of a Walmart, for example. If close, she would answer with a quiet, angry "Dave, sssh!, or ignore me and never responded with a loving "Yoo Hoo, Honey, on aisle 34". All the women in earshot, of course, turned to see who was whistling at them, and so did I look around in feigned innocence. How could I have kept up that annoying habit through 36 years of what I thought was a blissful marriage. Little bit of a selfcentred controlling macchiavellian, hey?
This year after our major retirement lifechange, resulting in our living from now on, more on top of eachother than ever before, in a small oneroomed flat and doing more together including shopping, dear Pat has very clearly put her foot down and told me it is time now to stop whistling for her. A small demand from the one I call "my queen" to the face of friends, yet have not treated as such.
Can you whistle? That ability does not seem to be universal or common in my experience in the US. I grew up with it and pride myself a little in my whistling skill, perhaps because I can't sing, so could not serenade my amour that way. Pat has a lovely alto voice but can't whistle.I must teach the grandboys.
Isn't the human singing voice the loveliest of musical instruments unmatcheable by any manmade noise box?
I think there is a lifting of the spirit when you whistle, or is it not sometimes an outflowing of spirit, or even a form of voice-doodling. Do you know the motivational song "Whistle while you work"?
The tribal African men were usually very good and loud whistlers. Calling one another from long distances and to call up cattle, the daily herding and droving of which in the bush was the traditional job of the young boys. Tribal music often involved loud whistling calls. They often used fingers in the mouth for certain whistles.
The loudest whistlers in the world are said to be the inhabitants of the island of Madeira, in the Atlantic ocean off the West African coast. This rugged volcanic island has a topography of very cavernous, steep valleys and very few roads, which led to the development of their exceptional long-distance whistling communication.
Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, of great influence to 20th century thought, had a remarkeable whistling ability in both beauty and in repertoire, being able to whistle whole symphonies of Beethoven.
I have discovered Daryl Worley, a country singer, who since 9/11 has written a number of great patriotic songs, one of which "Whistle Dixie", I am very taken with.
I would like Daryl's version of this well-loved, but controversial, song played at a celebratory service that I have suggested Pat and the kids have for themselves, if they want a service, when I go to whistle with the angels. Definitely don't wan't nobody standin' round sheddin tears and feelin sorry"!

WHISTLE DIXIE by Daryl Worley

I have walked greener pastures,
And i've made a lot of hay.
I've gone fast and even faster.
I've been lost and found my way.
Got a whole lot of livin', my simple southern life.
Tried to do my share of givin', and I know my soul's alright.

CHORUS
So, everybody , whistle Dixie, when they lay me in the ground.
When that cold wind comes to get me, I don't want nobody
standin' 'round sheddin' tears and feelin' sorry.
'Cause i'm gone to see my God. Everybody whistle Dixie,
let em lay me 'neath the sod.

There's a peace of mind in knowin' that some things are meant to happen,
Like the way my age is showin', and that you were made for me.
Like the sweet Savannah sunshine, and the Louisiana rain.
Things that make this life worth living and keep a man from going insane.

CHORUS
Lord, I love the land of cotton.
Yeah, but someday i'll say goodbye. 'Cause there's a better home awaitin'
(There's a better home awaitin') Yeah, there's a mansion in the sky.

Everybody whistle Dixie. (Everybody, everybody)
Oh when they lay me in the ground. (When they lay me in the ground).
When that cold wind comes to get me,
Don't want nobody standin' 'ound sheddin' tears and feelin' sorry
(Don't want nobody feelin' sorry),
'Cause I'm going to see my God. (I'm goin', I'm goin)
Everybody whistle Dixie. (Everybody whistle Dixie), Let 'em lay me 'neath the sod.
Yeah, everybody whistle Dixie. (Everybody whistle Dixie). Just let 'em lay me 'neath
the sod.
(Every body whistle Dixie, everybody)

See banjo@nativeground.com
www.cowboylyrics.com/worley

Trees

2006-02-24T09:25:00.000-08:00

In the grounds of the flats where we live, Sunbay Suites, which was built as a hotel originally, and has a heated outdoor pool, tennis courts and other amenities amongst beautiful gardens, there are some lovely old trees. Many of these are a weeping form eucalypt species with low straggling branches, excellent for granpa and young grandsons to climb.
Unfortunately they tend to rot in the axil at the base of the branches and seem to be susceptible to breaking off in the occasional high wind.
Seeing these during our normal constitutional a.m. walk today, made me think of that not-so-nice nursery rhyme, for which Pat with her excellent memory supplied all the words :

Hush a bye baby on the tree tops,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall.
Down will come baby, cradle and all.

As a tree lover, may I leave you with a better feeling for today in the renowned poem by Joyce Kilmer :

TREES
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain,
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Scatology 101

2006-02-23T11:01:00.000-08:00

As a medical man immigrating to this country in 1980 and required to redo residency, I soon realised how necessary this extra training was for us foreign medical graduates.
However, it soon became clear that my tropical 3rd world experience gave me an edge in a few fields. One was nutrition and gastroenterology (GI) diseases and the relationship of high fiber diet and GI diseases. Very common conditions in the US, and the western morld in general, such as, gall bladder problems, diverticulitis, appendicitis, diabetes, colon cancer, hiatal hernia, irritable bowel syndrome and especially constipation were very uncommonin the rural Zimbabweans, whose staple diet was corn with some vegetables but infrequent meat and animal products. This association is well documented in other 3rd world rural societies, where the staple may be rice, sorghum, wheat,corn, potatoes, cassava, yams,etc - all of high fiber type when unrefined. In many of the tribes of Native Americans in much of California prior to the Spanish settlement, I have recently learned that their dietary vegetable staple was oak acorns.
I was in on the case of the first documented diverticulitis in a Zimbabwean Arican - a condition ubiquitous in western people. Gall bladder disease was unheard of in these rural Africans. However, in the urbanized black Zimbabweans, with diet switching to more western type, especially with white bread replacing corn, the western spectrum of GI diseases was appearing.
Dr Denis Burkett, an English missionary physician/surgeon who spent his life in East Africa, was one of the pioneers of this fiber hypothesis. He became renowned as "Fiberman" or "The Apostle of Fiber, but his findings in 1980 were not yet widely known in the US.
My good wife Pat, herself a very knowledgeable nutritionist, high fiber
diet expert and excellent cook, kept her family on an excellent diet staple of wonderful, whole grain homemade bread, brown rice, beans, lentils and a general high vegetable diet. Did we not get lovely chicken and steak ? Oh, yes, and none of us are vegans at all.
Americans proved to have a fascination with their bowel habits and their B.Ms, some undoubtedly with an anal fixation. Constipation and its secondary complications were very common presentations at our Family Medicine/General Practice office, yet
patients, and indeed even my medical colleagues, were largely ignorant about high fiber diet and its benefit for gastro-intestinal conditions and health in general.
Constipation treatment, alone, is a billion-dollar industry and I had advice for patients about cheap life-changing diet and habit changes with tremendous benefits!
I did have a minor claim to some uniqueness among my peers. It was of no concern to me that our local pharmacists saw dropping sales of metamucil, Ex-lax, and other laxatives, as I educated patients about high fiber diet and proferred free samples of wheatbran, dirt-cheap. A product dirt-cheap and therefore, sad to say, lacking interest to many profit-driven medical industries.
Gastroenterology is the specialist study of the gastro-intestinal (GI) system, or alimentary canal, and its functioning. Without that specialty training, I could never lay claim to being a GI specialist, but could claim to be a scatologist, with my special experience and interest in this topic. Usually defined as the study of feces or fecal excrement, scatology has an additional meaning in referring to obscene language or literature dealing pruriently or humorously with this excretory function, which is not my concern here.
However the humor associated with bowel movements (BMs)is universal and proved to be a valuable graphic patient education tool, without needing to get "below the belt", "to close to the bone" or indelicate at all.
Scat is a widely used word, more widely used for animal scat or dung, and I recommend it to you as a word worth using. Otherwise, do you have to use "dog poop"?
Having lived and spent much time walking in the African bush, as it is for people in other parts of the world that lack toilets, one can't help but become a student of scat. Thus did Burkett in his travels note the characteristics of high fiber BMs and begin to draw epidemiological conclusions connecting the 2-3 per day, voluminous, soft pyramids of stool of Africans on high fiber diet and their relative lack of the common western-type of GI diseases.
As in any study, nomenclature needs to be defined. I found most patients knowledgeable of but unwilling to use the common terms of acceptable medical use : feces, defecation, etc. Stool and BMs, and even the word crap and the s--- word, were often used in patients' complaints. Other euphemisms you will have chosen personally and for family use : poop, pooh,job and No.2, etc.
Before we embark on the Scatology 201 course, I want you to do some homework in order to be prepared to answer the questions : "Are you a Floater or Sinker"?, which will bring us historically in the study of scatology to modern times of waterborne sewage systems;
and "Why is it called a 'restroom'"?

Am I Ozymandius ?

2006-02-22T08:29:00.000-08:00

As one ages I think most will wonder what, if anything, they will be remembered for.
The worst would to be not remembered, a nonentity.
Don't even think what would be a truthful inscription for my epitaph? What legacy will I leave behind? Better not to ponder such things and perhaps just to live each day thankful for another day of life, and to know that when up there the books are finally balanced, the truth will out. We can't help wishing for a positive judgement of virtue and goodness and "He loved his neigbour". Deep down I really want to know the truth and be set free by that but to reveal my true self to others?? Would that I had such courage.
A quote from British authoress, who wrote under the pen name of George Eliot :

"The majority of mankind rest in unvisited tombs and have left behind nothing of their former presence but perhaps a hackneyed scratch upon a stone."

Introduced to our family some years ago by brother-in-law Zimbabwean poet John Eppel, Shelley's poem :

OZYMANDIUS, King of Kings

I met a traveller from an antique land who said ...
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert, near them, on the sand,
half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
tell that its sculptor well those passions read
which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things
the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed -
and on the pedestal these words appear ...

MY NAME IS OZYMANDIUS KING OF KINGS
LOOK ON MY WORKS YE MIGHTY AND DESPAIR

Nothing beside remains, round the decay of that
colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and
level sands stretch far away.

Shadows

2006-02-21T08:35:00.000-08:00

Do you miss your shadow on overcast days? Perhaps you are not as self-absorbed as I am. I hope not, nevertheless you must have had fun with your shadow as a child.
The grandkids and I are often playing a game of stomping on eachother's shadow.
One's shadow is one's constant companion, a double, a doppel-ganger.
Its nice to laugh at our changed shape in our shadow, as in the "Hall of Funny mirrors" at a funfair.
Some say that the life of an important person "casts a long shadow".
T.S.Eliot's poem : "Sweeney Erect" has as its seventh verse :

(The lengthened shadow of a man
Is history, said Emerson
Who had not seen the silhouette
Of Sweeney straddled in the sun.)

It appears that Eliot, a humanist who became a christian, is mocking the famous Ralph Waldo Emerson, philosopher, essayist and transcendentalist for a humanistic tendency to self-glorification, which blinds him to the lower nature of man, as portrayed in Sweeney. This character appears elsewhere in a number of Eliot's poems and is described variously as "apeneck Sweeney", "broadbottomed" and a "hippopotamus". Some critics see here parodied the different personas of a constant shape-shifting Irishman revealing the animalistic aspect of human nature. Eliot has been accused of being a racist for this and other caricatures in his poetry.
I am far from being even a student of poetry, so forgive me if I have interpreted this all wrongly. However, I would have liked Eliot to have also included a reference to the blindness of man so often not seeing the obvious : that without the creator brandishing the flaming sun to light our solar system there would be no shadows let alone of man.
Sweeney does get to heaven in Eliot's poetry.
Who of us is not somewhat like Sweeney, perhaps not very loveable, except to his creator?
"Shadow" is a very appropriate name for your dog, when the pet has been well-trained to be a discipled faithful companion sticking to your heels.
How beautiful is the moon in all its phases due to the shadowing of the earth on it.
Have you ever experienced an eclipse of the sun and the strangeness of it, to us who take the sure daily rising of the sun so much as a matter of course.
How simple is the principle of the sundial clocks of history.
February 2nd is Groundhog Day' in the US when the hibernating groundhog (also called woodchuck) emerges and if he sees his shadow, then there will be six more weeks of winter. Not a shadow we like to hear of.

Skyscapes and clouds

2006-02-20T10:25:00.000-08:00

After two very grey overcast rainy days here at our new home on the Monterey Bay, it has been lovely to see the sky again. We are so spoilt with sunny warm days here in this Mediterranean climate. No wonder the similar climate of the south of France Riviera, Spain, Italy and Greece are such reveered European vacation sreas. Makes me hark back to the similar, though hotter, endless sunny, blue skies of the sub-tropics of Matabeleland, Zimbabwe, of my boyhood.
I love the blue dome of the heavens and sunny days. Skyscapes. God's everchanging and wondeful backdrop to the play of the daily scenes of the drama of our lives.
In his play "As You Like It", Shakespeare wrote :" All the world is a stage, and we are all actors". I don't believe we are God's puppets,totally pre-programmed robotlike. Neither do we have total free agency.I know I choose bad, wrong, (sin) when I could have chosen otherwise. The issue of God's Sovereignty versus Man's Freewill has baffled the most brilliant and honest philosophers and theologians since the beginning. Who am I to even mention this topic. All I know is that both are part of the truth, which perhaps sounds paradoxical, but I believe is not that the truth is beyond man's conception.
Are you, like me, continuously awed by the ever changing cloud picture of the sky? Do we give a resounding amen agreement that: "The heavens declare the Glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands."(1) Even the most atheistic nature-worshipper must marvel at the beauty of the sky and stand at least somewhat in awe of and maybe admit to a suspicion of an aesthetic imagination behind "Mother Nature's" skies?
Is'nt wonder such a precious thing and to be kept after childhood. Have you kept your sense of wonder? Do you hear it in the psalmist's song again : "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him ---"(2).
There is no blue like "sky blue" and with the white of clouds in an everchanging scene, how lovely is the sky with just two colours for the painter to play with. Until, of course, at the closing finale scene of the day when there may be a blazing coloured sunset climax of rapid and endless variation of the reds and oranges.
You will know that: the sky is blue due to the atmosphere reflecting primarily the blue part of white light's spectrum back to us; the thickness of the atmosphere to a slanting dying sun's rays creates the refraction splitting white light into its separate colours; likewise particular simultanious rain and sun conditions spreads the spectrum colours into a rainbow arch of primal beauty, a beautiful sight ( a symbol of hope since Noah, to many and leading to a pot of gold to some), and the fleeting but beautiful stage-lighting for a 'monkey's wedding".
I grew up with the magnificent towering storm clouds, at first pure white and then through all shades of grey to the "black" of a summer tropical thunderstorm, with accompanying awesome thunder and lightning but which usually soon dropped its deluge and swept through, to reveal a cleansed clearer bright blue sky and the lovely starker contrasts of wet brown earth and bark and green leaf and the reawakening of birdsong and insect life and the frolicing of monkeys. What is not happy and thankful with the return of the sun after a good rain?
These days, how few of us have the veranda or porch from which we can or will take the time, to enjoy the skyscape, especially the sunset in the cool of the evening. Only when travelling by car, does this opportunity avail itself to many of us and then are we not asleep; engrossed in a magazine; on the cellphone for hours; even watching a CD/video or so intent on 'getting there' as a driver, that we bear out the saying : "there are none so blind as those who don't wish to see"? What scenic and roadside landscape and skyscape thrills we miss.
Living and working in the constant shadowed street canyons between skyscrapers, as many of us city dwellers do, we should be all the more appreciative of the wide open spaces and skies, when we get a chance to flee from the city.
Similar in efect to me, though an ardent tree lover, are the smothering, dark, mostly sunless days of lofe in dark evergreen towering coniferous forests, with maybe barely a chink of direct sunlight at noon peeping through the canopy. The Taiga of Russia and Scandinavia don't attract me. Is my dark, depressing , brooding feeling about this habitat from a childhood with scary fables of wolves,witches,ogres and robbers who lie in wait in this dark,"Black Forest"?
Ever since I can remember, we have had fun travelling in the car identifying animals and humans in the sculpture of clouds: cartoon characters, birds, fish, etc. Never ending kaleidoscope of changing shapes. Can Rodin compare? I am sure he himself would never be so presumptuous.
I have flown through clouds and flown above them, but this is not nearly as awesome an experience of skyscape for me. Rather, I would prefer when above the earth, that there be no clouds, so as to marvel from this elevated view of the earth at the beauty of the land and detect, with the benefits of scale, such features as mountains, watersheds and intricate branching patterns of river systems.
How beautiful is "Earth" in the blackness of space, as reported by space astronauts looking back at this amazingly special planet with its still identifiable continents and oceans and cloud systems.
I know the commoner cloud type names, such as cotton-wooly cumulus and cumulo-nimbus of the tropical thunderstorms and the cirrus and alto-cirrus sky-high wisps of cloud. They are just as beautiful without any meteorological scientific knowhow.
Perhaps the sunset is the crowning glory of the "master painter" of skyscapes? Certainly loved by all, especially the painters and poets and sailors among us.
Are the dawns as magnificent? I suspect not. To my loss, I have seen too few dawns in this lazy life of mine, to know if they approach the beauty of sunsets. Any sailors, dairy farmers,mothers of newborns, bakers and newspaper boys care to enlighten us?
My parents divorced when I was ten, and we saw my dad afterwards no more than fleetingly for two or three occasions as he disappeared from our life.I remember very little of good about him through the grim, awful nightmare of his violent alcoholic ranting and ravings. In retrospect he was a totally emotionally absent or distant father to us four.
Amongst my few dim recollections of his nature, I do know that he liked sunsets. In my teens, while rumblng once through some boxes of old junk in the garage of Uncle Emil, mom's widower childless brother who took us in, I pulled out a sheath of old, creased painting canvases with a "V.Crozier" signing. That was him. They were all sunset scenes filled with the most beautiful cloudy skies and the smallest strip of horizon at the base. No flaming reds and oranges of tropical type but only the most beautiful, soft and subtly blending variations of pastel shades from greys through pinks,lavanders and pale blues, etc. Very amazing and lovely to even a totally non-artistic teenager. He must have loved those pastel- shaded sunsets. More like the more watery, greyer sunsets he would have seen in his boyhood in Northumberland before emigrating to Rhodesia. "Yes," Mom said sadly, "your father had many talents, including painting, and could be a sweet,loving man"
Perhaps my love of skyscapes and clouds comes from him, though I can't draw to save my life.
(1) Psalm 19:1
(2) Psalm 8:4

2006-02-18T20:00:00.000-08:00

Perfect Doolberry photo. Nov 2005

2006-02-18T19:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a recent photo of me and Pat on the couch.

The joys of car travel in the countryside

2006-02-18T09:49:00.000-08:00

Pat and I love to travel by car, particularily as we love just looking at the countryside. Not that we don't just enjoy each other's company,or love to listen to great muxic along the way or feel free and away alone together. How the cell phone has affected this.
It does not matter where we are or where we are going to, we are just happy to be looking at countryside and the landscape and skyscape - whatever there is out there. Distant mountains are lovely, but steep zig-zagging switchbacks with the cliffside in your face is disconcerting. Grey overcast days don't help and make me realise how much I love the sky and sunshine. Do you also rave at a rainbow and enjoy a "monkey's wedding"?
Grey skies are redeemable only from a rain's effect producing the striking colour combination of wet brown soil with darkened tree trunks and heightened green of vegetation against the grey sky. The prolonged grey of winter is depressing. Is that why the Scandinavians are prone to depression?
"New country" called to each other is always exciting, even if only a new road in a familiar district. How often have I got lost taking a new way just to do it,with t Pat's "I told you so", afterwards.
We generally drive more slowly these days at a speed more conducive to landscape watching. Its also easier to make the necessary sudden stops to examine roadkill or "rescue" orphan transplantable perennial roadside herbaceous plants. Did you know that I am self-appointed chairman and plant-catcher for our local branch of the Society for the Rescue of Threatened Plants? Far better to be cared for in the Crozier's garden than suffer the roadside neglect and inevitable death from mowing or herbicide spraying of the Highway Dept.
After too many speeding tickets, dangerously close to licence withdrawal, during my last few years of medical practice, when the perennial excuse of an emergency at the hospital sometimes worked, I am now a far more law abiding driver, even with no
fuzz, polizei, cops insight. Needless to say, Pat is a person of such personal integrity that she has never had this problem. I am also learning finally to control a tendency to road rage.
Our local rules give the driver authority to call the shots in regard to music selection, window height, climate control, to be supplied with his snack and drink of choice : trail mix, chips, Rollos, diet coke cans, etc. Larger drink bottle sizes not fitting in the drink holder are verboten by Pat, due to my abyssmal record of spills in Pat's beloved Honda.
On longer trips authoritarian old Dad demanded to have the driver read aloud to him, which of course meant the others heard too. Usually a classic of local interest for our destination. I recall Edward Abbey in the deserts of Colorado, Utah and Arizona; Marjorie Rawlings Of "The Yearling" and "Cross Creek" fame for Florida; John Steinbeck's "Tortilla Flat" and "Cannery Row" on our recent trip to Monterey, California. Did the kids like this? They often took turns reading
under duress and perhaps enjoyed it more than they let on at the time.
The driver, mostly me, had to agree, for safety, not to : write notes while driving;to let the passenger do the radioscrollng and CD/Tape changing; any detailed map studying and not to fall asleep. "High winds on the prairie?" became our family taunt when the driver hit the verge and had to swerve rapidly back onto the blacktop. Originated, I think with our daughter being taught to drive by me. Sarcastic comment,Dad! I have had the majority of such taunts directed at me since then, when doing a little nodding at the wheel. I do not have Sleep Apnea, by the way.
Did you have to develop secret, silent ways of driver and frontseat mom or dad sharing a new bar of chocolate or other candy without drowsy and sleeping kids in the back picking up on this subterfuge. Ian was our particular kid who easily fell asleep in the car, bur somehow he kept his ears switched on and never failed to hear even the quietest rustle of silver paper and candy wrappers. Without fail up would shoot a suspicious bleary-eyed face, just like a startled ferret or mongoose checking out a new sound or smell.
Our family were never much for singing songs together in the car unfortunately. A pity, as Pat has a store of chidhood classic songs, such as by Burl Ives, and rhymes she picked up as a child from trips with her dad. Some of the kids interest in good music may stem from repeated playing of tapes of some of our favorites: Beethoven symphonies, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Gilbert and Sullivan, Keith Green, great opera singers, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Irishman John McDermott and some old patriotic and folk Rhodesian tapes of our youth.
Did we often play games? Not often. I do remember: seeing who first got all the different states licence plates from the traffic; I spy; 20 questions; a general knowledge game choosing words in beginning with a chosen letter in catogories of town, plant, animal,colour; buzz and fuzzbuzz counting games, etc. I always wanted to play a game where you had to add to a rational remembered sentence made up from the sequence of car makes and brands we passed on the road. e.g. "I made an expedition to Dakota via Monte Carlo but rammed a mustang ridden by a cherokee chieftain chased by a cougar ---. Nobody wanted to play this with me.
Nowadays, with grandkids we play counting car colours. It didn't take 4 year old Bo to learn that yellow was a bad choice and white, black, silver and red all good ones.
I am fated with a curiosity and interest in most things, too many things. Would love to be really knowledgeable and excellent in many subjects. Oh to be a polymath or renaissance man. Not my lot. Too late anyway. I have loved reading, books and literature all my life, though have not formally studied literature. Lifelong I have collected books that I want to read and never signed or rare first editions, etc. as an investment. Always the cheapestand 99% secondhand after I discovered the huge and cheap availability of used books at secondhand dealers, sales,salvation Army, Goodwill and other thrifts in the US and latterly on the internet.I love to give away books, especially classics I recommend you read. How often, unknown to me , do these well-intentioned gifts rapidly end up at another thrift? I have been forced to downsize my books massively due to our living now in just a one-room flat and a trailer. I have about 2000 books I MUST read before I die. Will this bibliophile have time? Is he suffering from bibliomania? Even at 2 per week that is 10 years and there is so much else I want to do, so much travelling and countryside to see and I won't give up watching the passing scene in the car for more reading time.
I never miss the secondhand bookstore signs and thrift stores that flash by on our trips through towns and I admit to a sometimes devious private route planning by me and the spontaneous untruthful aside to Pat: " Oh, see that bookstore, how lucky to spot it out of the blue"
There is a great series of cheap regional secondhand book catologes that are essential for a travelling biblioholic.
If you need any book, never buy new and feel free to contact me. I may have it or can point you to a likely local secondhand source. E-bay can supply great bargains too.
How thankful to Pat am I for sharing the driving on a trip. Its easier to enjoy the many features of landscape as a passenger. Mountains and valleys and rivers and all landforms are fascinating: how did the geology of that mountain and the climate result in its morphology and the course of that river?: the change of vegetation types with altitude and aspect; see the white sycamore branches there, must be a river there. To this plant lover from the tropics, the deciduous trees in Fall and Winter have been a lovely sight and a challenge to identify species in winter by their tree form and bark. Any kind of fauna is interesting: squashed bugs on the windshield; roadkill or flattened fauna of all types; the silhouetted specks of distant cattle on the hills; a soaring turkey buzzard; the daring magpie at a carcase on the road.
I am not a purist naturalist eco-freak-type who despises anything human and therefore can only enjoy pristine, virgin widerness. I'm fascinated by the human effect on the countryside and love to see farms. I love the books and poems of Kentuckian Wendell Berry with his love for the rural community life. Especially did we learn to love barns from our Kentucky days. The sad relics of old farmhouses, barns and windmills are always worth a thought as to who lived here and what caused the demise of this farm, mine or abandoned rural village?
English philosopher Isaiah Berlin said people are either a "hedgehog or a fox."
The hedgehog type is interested in, concentrates on and becomes expert in one or only a few fields of knowledge. Whereas the fox knows only a little about a lot of subjects, as he can't keep his nose out of the continuous new things which come his way. I'm not sure this idea is true, yet I know my category. But am I "foxy"? What is your type?
Are you fascinated by the diverse world we live in and the life given you. At least
foxes can never be bored, but perhaps boring travelling through the countryside.

Divorce and War

2006-02-11T09:34:00.000-08:00

My parents were divorced. As a young person I would never voluntarily divulge this fact. I can be more honest now, but the divorce is still somewhat shameful to me.
The nightmare this causes for the children of many divorces is well known. However in my case,life after the divorce was like day after the night.
What is your experience?
Doolberry would love to hear your comments.

The Wall Street Journal Newspaper has an Opinion Journal website www.opinionjournal.com on which they feature a Five Best Book Ends series, with short comments by a reviewer on 5 books on the subject.The current one is on the subject of divorce, as follows :

FIVE BEST
Book Ends
Before you leave your spouse, leaf through these volumes.

BY RAOUL FELDER
Saturday, February 11, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

1. "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu.

Women entering the divorce wars would do well to worry less about Feng Shui and more about Sun Tzu. An impressive blueprint for battlefield victory, this ancient Chinese military treatise addresses, with marvelous succinctness, matters like the importance of vision, discipline and planning--all of which also happen to be central to the outcome of divorce-court warfare. As Sun Tzu observes, much warfare is based on deception: "When about to attack, we must seem unable." But the book's most telling message may be that to fight and conquer is not supreme excellence. Rather, supreme excellence lies in the capacity to "break the enemy's resistance without fighting." An especially relevant piece of wisdom for divorce warriors. Like all blueprints, of course, this one is only as good as its readers' capacity to behave as directed.

2. "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy (1877).

The technical people--which is really what divorce lawyers are--have, alas, limited insight into the motivation that propels divorce cases. But Tolstoy, who so famously opened "Anna Karenina" by observing that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," may be an more apt teacher than any psychiatrist or court precedent. Anna has beauty, social position, wealth, a husband and an adored son. Still, her life seems empty--until, yielding to her passionate nature, she begins an affair with a dashing officer, Vronsky. Anna asks for a divorce, her husband refuses, then later relents, but she demurs. It all ends tragically, of course, but this greatest of novels is an immortal portrait of the conflicts inherent in the breakup of a marriage.

3. "Too Far to Go" by John Updike (Fawcett Crest, 1979).

In this collection about a couple called the Maples, whose marriage is quietly disintegrating, one story, "Separating," stands out for its grasp of the issue that resonates in almost every divorce case. The issue is a question, really: Why? Years after their divorce, people often still have no answer. In this magnificent, if emotionally crushing, tale, Joan and Richard Maple have come to the long planned weekend when the children are to be told. Richard spends the day before working around the house, thinking on the unbearable. "Beyond four knifelike walls a new life waited for him vaguely." The agonies multiply, none worse than those that come with the passionate, the crucial, word--"why?"--whispered in his ear by his grown son.

4. "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce" by John Milton (1643).

The author of "Paradise Lost" was moved to write these divorce tracts after his wife, Mary, deserted him a short eight weeks into their marriage. It was, for his time, a radical document, particularly its argument (to Parliament) that incompatibility should be grounds for divorce and that both partners should have the right of remarriage. Most interesting to the modern reader, perhaps, is Milton's view that the chaste and modest are more likely to find themselves "chained unnaturally together" in unsuitable unions than those who have, in youth, lived worldlier lives and enjoyed the kind of varied experience that enabled them to choose partners wisely. Not for nothing did the outraged Presbyterian Church mount a blistering response.

5. "The Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Specifically, "The Wife of Bath's Tale," which, speaking to us from the 14th century, reveals a truth known to every couple and divorce lawyer. It's the story of a rapist knight who can save his life, he is told, only if he can discover what women most desire. When an old and ugly woman tells him the secret (women most want sovereignty over their husbands) and then demands that the saved rapist marry her, he accedes. Whereupon he finds the crone transformed into a great beauty--a proof of the timeless truth that people who marry seldom know who and what they are getting. That's why we invented prenuptial agreements.

Mr. Felder's most recent book is "Bare Knuckle Negotiation" (Wiley, 2004).

Poetry of our youth

2006-02-10T20:43:00.000-08:00

I was a sports-jock, arts and culture ignoramus and a literary philistine as a schoolboy and young man. Now, at 65 and having tasted the beauty of poetry, I rue the lost years.
I remember only some of the first line of the school hymn "He who would'st valiant be gainst all disaster". Is that correct? It does still give me a chill down my spine
Other than some nursery rhymes and raunchy rugger-bugger songs, the only poem I remember having any effect on me was Kipling's IF.
Was this because as a boy I was shy and always felt I was a bit of a ninny and a weakling who was always hanging around on the outskirts very interested in whatever the braver guys were up to but scared to jump in! I was desparate to become a strong and good man.
What is memorable about this poem, which has been voted the most popular in the United Kingdom? Is it just a list of aphorisms evoking traditional British virtue, Victorian stoicism and the "stiff upper lip"?
What do you think of this poem?
What was your experience of poetry in youth?

If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling, 1895.

some people's thoughts on 'The War'

2006-02-07T16:11:00.000-08:00

Defense Sec.Rumsfeld in a speech to the national Press Club last week, said of Islamic terrorists, "they will either succeed in changing our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs."

James Burnham in Suicide of The West wrote : Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization".

"Hussein Massawi, a former Hezbollah leader is reported to have said : 'We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you'. In fact the situation is even grimmer than Mr. Massawi suggests. For our new enemies are not simply bent on our destruction : they are pleased to compass their own destruction in suicide bombings as a collateral benefit."
Polish Philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, in an essay called "The Self-poisoning of the Open Society", commented on the large issue which has bedevilled liberal societies : namely, that in attempting to create the maximally tolerant society, we also gave scope to those who would prefer to create the maximally intolerant society. Liberalism implies openness to other points of view, even (it would seem) those points of view whose success would destroy liberalism. But tolerance to these points of view is a prescription for suicide. Intolerance betrays the fundamental premise of liberalism i.e. openness.
As Robert Frost once put it, 'a liberal is someone who refuses to take his own part in an argument.'
Our liberal pluralist democracy depends for its survival not only on the continued existence of its institutions but also on a belief in their value and a widespread will to defend them. The question is : do we, as western societies, still enjoy that belief? do we possess the requisite will?'
Can we resolve this basic antimony of liberalism? A good start to this problem is to realise that the 'openness" that liberal society rightly cherishes is not a vacuous openness to all points of view : it is not " value neutral". It need not, indeed it cannot, say YES to all comers, to the Islamofascist who after all has his point of view, just as much as the soccer mom, who has hers.
Western democratic society is founded on particular basic values e.g. the rule of law, respect for the individual, religious freedom, the separation of church and state, property rights. Part of this vision is a commitment to openness, but openness is not the same as indifference, which is apparent in large portions of Western society.
The Islamofascists have a fanatical belief that theirs is a holy mission, that incinerating infidels is their bounden duty. For them suicide is a gateway to paradise.
Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, Vol 24, No5, p4-9

The triumph of evil requires only that good men stand by and do nothing.
attributed to George Orwell

Frenchman Francois Revel has said : "Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it? Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself"

Roger Scruton, British philosopher has put it. " a kind of ' moral obesity " cripples much of Western culture, "to the point where ideals and longterm goals induce in them nothing more than a flummoxed breathlessness."

Are Western writers and artists sapped by the tropics?

2006-02-06T16:19:00.000-08:00

In a book I have recently read, Andrew Mitchell's A Fragile Paradise; Nature and man in the Pacific, the author comments on a trip he made to Western Samoa, which is still a paradise, and where he visited Robert Louis Stevenson's resting place on the property that he bought and lived on for 5 years before dying of a stroke. The property survived and is maintained as Government House:
"In the centre of a grassy clearing on the Stevenson Reserve was a simple tomb of white cement and on the side in bronze Stevenson's still-living words:
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will

This be the verse you 'grave for me;
Here he lies where he longs to be;
home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill. (2)

Lying on my back in the warm grass here where the view is magnificent, I wondered why so many writers and painters found so little happiness or inspiration in Paradise. The mystery of the South Sea islands has attracted many to Polynesia: Rupert Brooke, Herman Mellville, Pierre Loit, Jack London, Somerset Maugham and of course Gauguin. It is almost as if the beauty of the surrounding saps the creative will."(1)

Any thoughts on this?
After all, as Noel Coward wrote, is it not "only mad dogs and Englishman who go out in the midday sun"?
My brother-in-law John Eppel, poet/novelist/naturalist/teacher, has had a very creative lifetime in Zimbabwe, and I would love to hear his comment on Mitchell's observation about the effect of life in a tropical paradise on the creative will ?

(1) Mitchell,A. A Fragile Paradise : Nature and Man in the Pacific. Fontana. 1990
(2) Stevenson,R.L. poem Requiem

The sense of Wonder of Youth

2006-02-04T17:06:00.000-08:00

from the Editorial, The American Oxonian, Vol XCII No.4 Fall 2005 :

"In several recent conversations, my daughter has challenged me to think further about what it means to understand oneself as a learner. As an academic and undergraduate administrator, I spend a great deal of time encouraging my students to think about what it means to develop the habits of thought and being conducive to life-long learning. So, it was refreshing to have the pep-talk from someone else - and a delight, of course, to see a ten year old instruct her father. Her observation was a simple one : we often learn even when we do not set out to do so, but much depends on how we then respond to that experience of learning. She was at pains to understand how and why it could be the case that as one got older one ceased to delight in - and be changed by - what one learned. The matter was, for her, largely a theoretical roblem ( at east I hope this is the case). Her lively curiosity and that of her peers at the school she is fortunate to attend, stimulates a sense of wonder whose only pride is that of, as in Robert Penn Warren's words, going "naked into the pit" to struggle again with one's sense of what is true and beautiful. It is no surprise, then, that the possibility of not learning - and of not learning to adapt - is, to her, inconceivable."

"Go Naked into the Pit" - Thoughts on Writing by Robert Penn Warren

2006-02-04T17:05:00.000-08:00

From Steven d. Ealy's article (see 1) below :

" In his essay on Conrad, Warren provides us with a crucial insight into his own work as an author.' The philosophical novelist, or poet, is one for whom the documentation of the world is constantly striving to rise to the level of generalisation about values, for whom the image strives to symbol, for whom images always fall into a dialectical configuration, for whom the urgency of experience, no matter how vividly and strongly experience may enchant, is the urgency to know the meaning of experience.' Warren warns that this striving should not become schematic or deductive, because the documentation of the world the artist strives for must reflect the complexities of that world. It does mean however,"that he is willing to go naked into the pit, again and again, to make the same old struggle for his truth'.Warren's' struggle for his truth' revolved around questions of identity and self-understanding. The basic question that the protagonists in his novels always seem to ask is, 'Who am I?'We can gain some insight into this struggle if we examine the final two essays in section I of Warren's "New and Selectd Essays : 'The Use of the Past' and 'Why Do We Read fiction'.

In the 'The Use of the past', Warren wrote, "in a way, (the past) gives us nothing. We must earn what we get there. The past must be studied, worked at- in short- created. For the past like the present, is fluid. History, the articulated past - all kinds, even our personal histories - is forever being rethought, refelt, rewritten, not merely as rigor or luck turns up new facts but as new patterns emerge, as new understandings develop, and as we experience new needs and new questions".This line of thought led to a challenging, and perhaps controversial claim. "There is no absolute, positive, past available to us, no matter how vigorously we strive to determine it - as strive we must. Inevitably, the past, so far as we know it, is an inference, a creation, and this, without being paradoxical, can be said to be its chief value for us". And then a conclusion that ties together much of Warren's diverse putput: "In creating the image of the past, we create ourselves, and without the task of creating the past we might be said scarcely to exist."In "Why Do We Read Fiction", Warren begins on an important theme: "We read fiction and explore the stories of others because we are ultimately interested in our own story, and how our story will end. The reading of fiction and the inevitable role-planning and day-dreaming that accompanies such reading allows us to try on various personalities and selves in a non-threatening way.We gain knowledge of the world through reading fiction, which allows us to grasp the dynamics of life and the cause-effect patterns of the world we inhabit. But more importantly, we gain knowledge of ourselves through reading fiction, knowledge through 'imaginative enactment" in which we first identify with the hero, but then come to realise that we are not the hero of the particular story we happen to be reading. We also begin to recreate our self through this imaginative encounter with literature." Warren wrote "The individual is not born with a self". Rather, :" he is born as a mysterious bundle of possibilities which, bit by bit, in a long process of trial and error, he sorts out until he gets some sort of unifying self, the ringmaster self, the official self." That is, just as we are involved in the creation of our own self, or, in slightly different terms, we are intimately involved in the shaping of our own character.What perhaps sets Warren's understanding of "the self-creation of the self" apart from others is its anchoring in the historical context. In his writing on Joseph Conrad, a key term for Warren is "fate".But his understanding of fate is not one that takes responsibility away from a man by turning him into a cog in an impersonal machine that inevitably determines his behaviour; it is an understanding of fate that provides a context for the possibility of reasonable and responsible human action. One's fate can be seen not as the point where one is destined to end the journey, but rather as the point where one begins. Thus, for Warren, the self-creation all humans engage in is structured by a framework - " the past and its burden". Thus we are all engaged in the same old struggle, but we are all engaged in diffferent struggles also, because we each have our own burdening pasts - in terms of personal, family, community and national histories - which we must struggle to "accept". And, of course, "acceptance" does not mean one has to like one's history, but that one must come to terms with one's history.In Warren's words, one must be willing " to go naked into the pit, again and again, to make the same old struggle for his truth". This struggle for truth, for Warren, requires an acceptance of " the past and its burden" in the formation of personal and natonal identity, though "acceptance" does not mean one has to like one's history', but that one must "come to terms with ones's history."

Steven D. Ealy "Robert Penn Warren", The American Oxonian, Vol XCII No.4 Fall 2005Robert Penn Warren, New and selected Essays (Random House) 1989

Some characteristics of arresting literature

2006-02-04T17:04:00.001-08:00

This is from a book review on Arthur Versluis's Island Farm (published in 2000). Source: George A. Panichas, "In the Agrarian Conservative Tradition" in Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, Vol. 47, No. 4, Fall 2005, p. 376.

"To be sure, Island Farm is specifically about "the lay of the land," "ancestors," "characters quick or dead": "tree of knowledge, tree of life," "words, soil, plans"; and gives us salient descriptions of life on the farm (the last working farm within the Grand Rapids city limits) and about those who live there and sustain it, often against forces that "insist that the marketplace determines all values." In reading the author's luminous descriptions of farm and life scenes, one inevitably absorbs the author's philosophical and aphoristic ruminations, as one enters the deeper metaphysical terrain of the book: its visible and invisible world of farm living, planting, harvesting; and, of course, of the morality of work.

"Repeatedy and consistently one is arrested by Versluis's meditations, which are felicitously and fluently expressed. Again and again, one stops to consider what Versluis is describing or discerning, what he is saying about the human situation, about ancestors, about ourselves and our interrelationships. Clearly he has thought long and hard on troubling life questions and on our even more troubling times. Here we are in contact with a living text anchored in reverent attitudes and in humanist convictions and concerns. Often, then, we are suddenly surprised to discover that we must pause and ponder and wonder, generously invited and guided by the author to enter a sacred world; to behold a holy event as it unfolds, palpitantly; to glimpse the divine in nature and in man, to bring us into intimate union with otherness; to feel the touch and smell of nature, when an intrinsic and creative sense of order and stability prevail in the community and in the soul."

Doolberry's Driftwood?

2006-02-04T17:04:00.000-08:00

I'm picking brains of other people ... I have never had an original thought in my life. Quotes of truth and wisdom from people that seem to have had something worth saying, certainlyof meaning to me. Hopefully some wisdom of the ages; nuggets of gold; quotable quotes; random musings of erudition and truth. Ya-know-what-I-mean? I think these are worthwhile writings ... Hmmm? ...Wisecracks for whimps, hmm. No. Anyway, just chuck them if you want. Chasing after the wind perhaps? At least for this ageing doolbery, I think am finally discovering some of the wisdom of the ages. Too bad I have done so much damage in my 65 years from my own selfcentred, arrogant, presumptious, iconoclastic often thoughtless mumblings. Yet Darryl Worley says it for me in his song "Awful beautiful Life' : " I love this crazy tragic, sometimes almost magic, awful beautiful life."