The Touch of the Unknown
I don’t know that a year can go by without me vowing, again, to read all the poems in The Giant Book of Poetry (edited by William H. Roetzheim) that I bought in 2011, when I decided to embark upon…
We Are Not Crazy
Our disconnection from nature and our disavowal of interior depth—of soul—from animals, plants, and landscapes occurs all the time in all of us. But there is more depth than we have come to believe, than we have been taught. Connection…
Hold onto It with Both Hands
In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would have at once become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the…
Get In the Boat
I didn’t mean to post my sailboat drawing here at The Ruff Draft. I have another, slightly more clandestine (I like that word) blog called Ruff Edge Design that I think of as the place for my art attempts and…
Where Does One Begin?
Now, it is no longer a child who is going to tell this story and that is regrettable. It is a man. Worse yet, it is the university professor I have become. I will have to guard myself very carefully…
Expand
I sometimes think of myself as a word collector or a knowledge collector. Either of those is a label I can live with, and after attaching one to my breast, I want to delve a bit. Do I collect knowledge…
How Real is Your World?
The subconscious mind has no ability to question, reason or consciously comprehend and can be programmed to override basic instinct. … Our brains are amazing, yet they can be lazy if we are not mindful of driving them. Mind control…
White, Grey, Black
“I asked him what prayers. He said they prayed to Yezu Klisto and someone called Simon. Is that the same as Simon Peter?” “No, not quite the same. The fathers could tell you about Simon. He died in gaol nearly…
How Did We Get Here?
Placing that image of me up there was easier than I thought it would be. Yesterday, when Henry, Sam, and I were out in the woods, I handed Henry my camera and asked him to take a few shots of…
Cowardly Bravery
“Practicing courage, compassion, and connection in our daily lives is how we cultivate worthiness. The key word is practice.” —Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection I am tempted to copy down more of the paragraph from page 7 of Brown’s…
Daring Despite the Danger
“The known, our current story, protects us from the unknown, from chaos—which is to say, provides our experience with determinate and predictable structure. … When we are in the domain of the known, so to speak, there is no reason…
What Makes Us Whole?
“The central issue in this book is the conflict between the things we feel—the things our bodies register—and the things we think we ought to feel so as to comply with moral norms and standards we have internalized at a…
