“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in... Read more
I had trouble sleeping, still adapting to the humungous time zone shifts. But, up early. And then an adventure taking a taxi to the Airport Rail Link. After all the warnings about being ripped off by taxi drivers, I was relieved he immediately started the meter and was straight ahead. At the station I was, again, confronted with being an illiterate. But also as an old guy, a young woman saw me staring in confusion at the... Read more
Here I am. In Bangkok. That was the longest flight I’ve ever taken in my life. Fourteen hours in the air from LAX to Taipei. Flying Eva Airlines. A three hour layover. And then another four hours to Bangkok. I still can’t figure out how I’ve lost a day in that trip. But, it is Friday the 27th back home in Long Beach and Saturday the 28th, here in the Big Mango. I arrived just ahead of midnight. Passing... Read more
Here I am ensconced in Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX. I’ve made it through security. Apparently the heavy lifting will be on the other side when I arrive (by way of a three hour layover in Taipai) in Bangkok some twenty-one hours from now. If I am lucky once I make my way through customs I will be greeted by a driver from the hotel. This is all adventuring for me. I’ve rarely been abroad.... Read more
“If you spliced the genes of Hillary Clinton, Madonna, Heidi Fleiss and Margaret Thatcher, you might have someone like Victoria Woodhull.” Atlanta Journal & Constitution I shared this a couple of years ago. I thought it worth sharing again. So, I’ve tweaked it a bit, and here it is… Victoria California Claflin was born the seventh of ten children in Homer, Ohio, on this day, the 23rd of September, 1838. When she married just shy of two... Read more
Wrote this a couple of years ago. Lightly edited and reprinted… Leonard Norman Cohen was born on this day, the 21st of September, in 1934, in Westmont, an English-speaking enclave of Montreal. His mother was the child of a renowned rabbi and scholar, his father the son of a founder of the Canadian Jewish Congress and its first president. The family was Orthodox and the themes of Judaism would become currents that informed his full life. The family... Read more
Once upon a time long ago and far away the sage Wonderful told a story. “In a land of the poor if a woman had ten golden coins and discovered she’d lost one, wouldn’t she do everything she could to find it? Light candles, even though they’re expensive. Sweep the entire house. Looking with all her heart and energy until she found it. And then when she found it she would call her family and friends together, and celebrate.”... Read more
Araminta Ross was born a slave somewhere around 1820 in Maryland. One of vastly too many. Her life was brutal. At one time when one of her owners threw a heavy weight at another slave while she tried to intervene, she was accidentally hit. She would suffer spells of dizziness and pain for the rest of her life. While it was illegal she married John Tubman, a free man in 1844, taking his family name. She also... Read more
Last year I noticed that today, the 16th of September, 1885, was the birthday of the noted Neo-Freudian psychoanalyst Karen Horney. I riffed a bit on her and her connections to Zen Buddhism, and how significant it was. I looked and thought I’d like to tweak it slightly, and share that here. Horney was one of a relatively small band of psychoanalysts and psychologists who would take their original inspiration and often direct instruction from Sigmund Freud and then... Read more
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