People hear the word healing and usually think return. Return to normal. Return to the person you were before the loss, before the betrayal, before the night you could not sleep, before somebody or something put a mark on you. I do not know if life works that way. A wound closes, but the skin […]
A dollar does not know what neighborhood it is in. People do. That is the part that matters. Somebody gets paid on Friday, buys gas, grabs groceries, pays the phone bill, picks up food, maybe buys something for the house. By Monday that money may be somewhere else entirely. Nothing mysterious about that. Money moves. […]
Peace sounds good until it has to live with people. Everybody can say the word. Governments say it. Families say it. Preachers say it. People put it on shirts, walls, signs, social posts, whatever. I broke it down differently in Excelsior: personal, private, public. Three peaces. Not because three is magic by itself, but because […]
Call somebody a name long enough and people start treating the name like evidence. That has always interested me. A person does something, then the action gets turned into a title. The title gets repeated, the repetition starts sounding official, and before long nobody is asking what actually happened. They are arguing about the label. […]
Writing is my passion. I said that plainly in Excelsior, and I meant it. Before the alphabet was sitting where it sits now, people had picture-thought, symbols, hieroglyphs, marks carrying meaning. A picture says something. A word says something. Neither one arrives in your head exactly the way it left somebody else’s. That space between […]
Sleep is ordinary only because we do it so often. That is what makes it easy to overlook. You lie down, the room is still there, the clock keeps moving, people keep living their lives, and for a while you are not participating in any of it in the usual way. Then you wake up […]
Ancestry gets turned into paperwork too easily. A surname, a box, a country, a race, maybe a family tree if somebody took the time to build one. Useful, yes. Complete, no. In Excelsior I wrote about heritage because names on a page do not explain how people moved, what they survived, what they hid, what […]
Walking away has a bad reputation with people who think every confrontation needs a winner standing over somebody else. I never understood survival that way. There are times to hold your ground. There are also times when staying in the fight proves nothing except that pride can spend more than wisdom ever would. In Excelsior […]
Progress is a word people like to use after something changes. A law changes, a door opens, a sign comes down, somebody enters a room they could not enter before. We call that progress. Sometimes it is. I still ask the question I wrote in Excelsior: are we progressing or regressing? Not because I think […]
Fame has a way of making the person look larger while making the private life smaller. That is the contradiction that interests me. Everybody sees the name getting bigger. More attention, more money, more access, more people repeating what you said. What gets harder to see is how much of the person is still allowed […]
