Notes From A Bear's Journey

   It's been years since I visited Japan, a country rich in heritage and history.  I experienced one of my déjà vu moments outside a royal palace in Kyoto, a scene of having been there before only centuries earlier.  It puzzled me since I had little knowledge or background on the area and yet the image was as clear and as real as such déjà vu incidents are.  It was a shock to discover that the efficiency of the culture led to people being both rude and courteous, the timeliness of the trains leading to people pushing and bumping and crowding; yet when I missed my stop due to trying to "politely" exit he train, a young man got off with me at the next stop and escorted me to the correct platform to get back...who does that?  It was routine in Japan, I discovered.  The trains, as with so much else, is run like clockwork.  If a train is scheduled to leave at 8:02, then the doors shut at exactly that moment (much of what my wife and I experienced in Europe's rail system wa

   Something the other night proved extremely disturbing and confusing.  Let's start with the number $100 billion.  It's a big number, and even larger when you consider that the number represents only the profits and not the expenses.  What company makes that?  Not Nike.  Not Microsoft.  Not Starbucks or Google.  In truth, that figure represents more profit than all of those companies combined.  And it comes from selling teenage children.  Sex trafficking is big business (although still not as profitable as gun sales or drug sales), and the average age of a kidnapped child is truly that, a child at 12-14.  They are put into the fold almost immediately and what's worse (in my opinion) is that there is a steady crowd of men waiting and willing to pay to use and abuse them.  All of this emerged (again) in a book and resulting film, Trafficked .  Said the author and screenwriter, Siddharth Kara :  Males across the world treat women’s bodies as transactional -- something to be

   Life -- we are surrounded by it, watching it grow, living it, seeing it everywhere.  But as the late anthropologist, Loren Eiseley , said, "Seeing is not the same thing as understanding."  We --with some 100 organs, 200 bones, and 600 muscles-- are filled with life, yet we still wonder why an unborn child who is moving, kicking, and so comfortably alive in his mother's womb can tell us more about life than anything we could describe.  We are filled with expressions (we have more separate muscles in our face than any other animal), yet still wonder why a baby's hazy stare and girgling laugh can so unspeakably describe our own happiness.  We are among the one percent of animals that are warm blooded and are equipped with inner machinery so delicate that only a few atoms out of the billions in our blood are enough to prevent disease.  Yet we have little idea of what keeps it all working, this perfect blend of thoughts and dreams, of love and emotion.      So where d

   Legend in Hawaii talks of the goddess Pele, sometimes appearing to people as a beautiful woman hitchhiking on the side of the road, and sometimes appearing to be a vengeful old witch-like lady.  The native Americans believed in a Great Creator (as do many religions) and to an outsider, Pele could be considered that goddess, the princess of fire and creation, the maker of the islands, her sacrifices changing from ohelo berries to bottles of gin (last I heard).  Indeed, walking alongside the edge of one of her craters, it would be easy to believe that throwing yourself into the crater and into her arms would be the right thing to do, your mind altered a bit with the enormity and majesty of her creation alongside you (although there is no record of Pele ever "wanting" human sacrifices and none were apparently taken unless you had somehow offended her); hiking inside the Halemaumau crater there are still places where the footprints of early Hawaiian warriors were caught off-gu

   Here in the U.S. the day just passed was a marketing bonanza, a time of $7.99 greeting cards (all thrown into the dumpster by today) and endless batches of flowers, also now on sale in cart after cart at the grocery stores.  The upside of all of this was that it pointed out to many that today was a day to stop and both thank and celebrate your mother (other countries have similar days but celebrate it at a different time of year); it was Mother's Day.  My brother texted me that morning, surprised that for the first time there was no one to call.  Another friend graciously wished me well and offered support at getting through my first such remembrance without a mother.  Oddly, I didn't know what to feel.  Perhaps because I had spent so much time with her, or perhaps because I felt that she had lived a long life, or perhaps a thousand other reasons entered the picture and I wasn't aware of the blast of confusion.  I went to bed early.    We've all lost someone, no ma

   The word comes from the Greek and basically means "similar stillness."  It also came from a piece by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee who bravely and successfully wrote a massive tome of the history of cancer, a book which went on to win him the Pulitzer Prize ( The Emperor of All Maladies ). But in this case, his piece was about how fortunate most of us are to have our bodies just stay the same, for that wound to heal or for the back to grow less sore...indeed to just wake up each morning.  His story emerged after a fall from his father and of now seeing him hospitalized "...slipping down some evolutionary chain, through a series of phylogenetic trapdoors...toward a primitive, reptiian consciousness."  His reflection on his father's age, dementia, bodily collapse is something that, if we're lucky, will await us all, that ebbing of life and its conscious beginning of the process of throwing in the towel, of finally acknowledging that the stuggle is growing too d

   It's dying I guess, the drink now as irrelevant as the Tom Collins, Stinger and Rusty Nail; ahh the days of college and bold livers (those of you who are much younger and steadily growing tired of creative concoctions such as the Appletini and Horchata, saunter up to the bar next time and ask for a Manhattan or an Old Fashioned; if you happen to get an older bartender, you might just get a sly smile).  So it is with these blogs fading away or so one hears, the written personal e-posts soon riding off into the sunset to be replaced by the newest craze, the personal podcast (wait, you'll have to listen??).  Nothing against any of the changes because even we listen to Desert Island Discs and their radio/podcast which has been ongoing for over 75 years (our favorite of the batch is quite likely the aging reflections of a rather humorous Dustin Hoffman, now 80).  But following the shift from a blog to a podcast just wouldn't be for me, my speaking voice being far from optima