Notes From A Bear's Journey

     Certain things about our personalities and minds continue to amaze me.  From doctors to engineers, to mathematicians and the everyday person, I find it fascinating how a random group of cells can create our thoughts and ideas and dreams and memories.  Just one example is this "basic" phrase for medical students: She looks too, too pretty to catch her.   It's a shortcut for remembering the muscles of the wrist (scaphoid, lunatum, triquetrum, trapezium, pisiforme, trapezoid, capitate, and hamate), wrote Dr. Suzanne Koven in her book, Letter to a Young Female Physician  (she's now in her 30th year of practice); the publisher described her writings as a book which: ... sheds light on our desire to find meaning, and on a way to be our own imperfect selves in the world.  So when my wife and I had both a retired ER nurse and a retired lung specialist over for dinner, the conversation between these two friends who hadn't seen each other in many years, turned to opera

    Remember this little tidbit from ages ago -- you are reading this because of photons.  Wait, what??  If you were drifting in space and could actually see the clashing of atoms shattering apart in our sun's center, you would witness the creation of photons which take hundreds of thousands of years to break free from our sun before they can then shoot out in every direction (at the speed of light, no less) reaching our eyes as sunlight some eight minutes later (it will take those same photons four hours before they'll reach Neptune).  But this isn't about that...okay, it's a tiny bit about that but mainly it's about me admitting (again) that I'm not an expert in anything despite my spewing out of such random factoids; truth is, I'm not even a jack of all trades.  One of my friends politely described me as "intellectually curious" which is a label I'll gladly accept since I am eager to learn (isn't everyone?), even if I don't unders

     Get lost.  Beat it.  Take a hike.  It wasn't too long ago when such terms were positive in meaning instead of a prelude to a door being slammed in your face (or behind you).  The early fall that arrived in my area (snow is due tomorrow) came suddenly, catching many people and trees off guard.  In the hills and mountains, perhaps their higher location still keeping them more in tune with the wild, the colors changed quickly on the leaves and their falling to the ground was rapid,*  In many ways, it was nature's light show...or warning.     The Washington Post had a piece on the fires in Greece, a story that was headlined: The fires in Greece are shocking.  But shock doesn't always lead to change.  The story elaborated with this: For years when it comes to climate change, and millennia when it comes to other crises, humans have fallen back on what seems an essential, ineluctable truth: When people finally get scared enough, they will change. There is an immense amount o

     After any vacation of a week or two, the urge to get right back into one's routine can be both tempting and deceptive.  There are bills to be paid, food to be restocked, plants to be watered, and pets to be attended to; and there's also the few pounds that may have decided to now become part of your "new" look.  For me (with my annual physical coming up just a week later) I decided to return early to my rec center, doing 2/3 of my normal exercise routine, then diving into the full routine the next day...which proved a mistake.  It was a lesson for me, one that clobbered me in a sense for not only was I not ready physically but it seemed that I had failed to learn the mental and spiritual side of our trip...wait, what the heck am I talking about?      A few "routines" did return easily, one of them being a visit to my library where a book titled The Power of Awareness caught my eye.  Written by Dan Schilling , basically a 30-year veteran of Special Ops,