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Is anything an island entire of itself?
For some reason, I find it interesting that we feel compelled to wrap ourselves in our own unique identity. I assume I am my named island, and forget -or don’t realize- that I am actually ‘a piece of the continent, a part of the main’ as John Donne opined in his famous Meditation (XVII). I…
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But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, all losses are restored and sorrows end
Although I am old now, and should know better, I still have not figured out loneliness. It is not avoided, as I once assumed, by having a lot of friends, or things to occupy my time; it is not so easily definable. As St. Augustine was said to have observed when asked about Time: If…
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Looking a gift horse in the mouth
I’ve never thought much about how deeply gifts are ingrained within our culture, within our interactions, within our expectations. I have always looked upon gifts as merely acts of caring and altruism on the part of the giver: offerings that expect no return but gratitude; a feeling that both sides benefitted from the exchange, albeit…
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Furry Worry
Why do I find myself always behind the times? I read, I listen, and I watch with what I assume are open eyes, and yet I’m always discovering new things that everybody else seems to regard as old things, passé things no longer worthy of prolonged scrutiny. Okay, I’m old, but so is the world,…
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Regret-me-nots
Sometimes if I awaken during the black of a cloudy moonless night, I am gripped by an uncomfortable feeling I can’t identify, a feeling whose source is almost within reach, yet blurred and formless like a ghost. And then, as silently as it approached, it disappears again into the night leaving only shards like broken…
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And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees
I’ve always felt a part of Nature, but now that I’m in my autumn years, there seems to be a special urgency to it. Still, the continued rebirth of green each Spring gives me hope; the longevity of trees that will continue to stand long after I cannot, inspires me; or perhaps it is simply…
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Troops of friends
“Do you ever have trouble with your friends, G?” We were walking along the Stanley Park seawall at the time, and I hadn’t expected a question like that from Arvid; we’d been good friends since our university days -we’d even roomed together for a few semesters then to save on expenses. We’d both acted as…
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What’s gone and what’s past help
How many of us actually try to clarify in words, what we think we’re feeling? Affect labelling it’s called; apparently, the very act of labelling a negative emotion, can blunt its harmful effects even without a conscious goal in mind. In fact, labelling positive emotions seems to have a similar salutary effect.[i] The mechanism is…
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A touch of Nature
Sometimes I feel a little bit like the famous essayist Michel de Montaigne, when I write. Not with his skill or wisdom, I hasten to add, but more in his ability to readdress the same topics without embarrassment. It’s just that some things impress me again and again, and each time cry out for comment.…
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Deliver me from evil…
We take a lot for granted nowadays, don’t we? Our individual life-spans are short, our collective memories only slightly longer; most of us cannot even imagine how things were before the advent of modern medicine, before the recognition of germs as a cause of infections, before Semmelweis, a 19th century Hungarian doctor, realized that deaths…
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