Notes From A Bear's Journey

      There's another special by illusionist Darren Brown called Miracle ; in it he talks about "now" and that of being in the moment, all while enthusiastically telling you about his giving and the taking of your thoughts.  Beyond the random pick-a-word showmanship (and indeed, he is quite the British showman), he soon moves on to the spoken words of evangelicals and their words of "healing," even citing specific phrases from The Bible and causing people to faint from feeling "the spirit;" and people do readily come on stage to give testimony of how they have indeed been "healed."  He's not making fun of revivals and preachers when he does this, but rather trying to show the audience that even as an avowed atheist, this "power" comes not from him or from some outside spiritual entity, but from inside each of us, that each of us has the power to "heal" what ails us...a power which comes from our mind.  The "miracl...

     While I've written about breath and breathing before , I was caught by a recent piece in Discover about the topic and how the average person should ideally be breathing about 6 times per minute; that's one breath every ten seconds.  Even better would be to breathe only 4 times per minute or one breath every fifteen seconds.  I tried it and felt as if I was about to drown.  My own breathing is about 11 breaths every minute, and no, I won't be a candidate for free diving (such divers often hold their breath for six minutes or more).  My friend can hold his breath for well over two minutes without much effort (truly, gasp!).  But it was a different piece in The Atlantic that caught my eye, one on friendship, and what happens when they suddenly (or more often, slowly) dissolve.      Okay, I wrote about this topic in an earlier piece , but this particular article made me think of those "friends" who had simply dropped out of our l...

      Here's are some lyrics I wrote one evening, and don't ask me why; sometimes it just happens.  Each of us may get a thought or an idea and mostly, we just let them slide away into the nether.  But for some reason I felt the need to jot this down (on a side note, I was listening to Al Stewart's love song,  The Year of the Cat , and felt that this rewrite fit better in my life):  Well the clock struck one, was the end of fun, for the older person inside you; behind the curtain you were never certain that you ever knew.  On the distant shores you kept wanting more, as if the seas were yours alone; watching the waves rise till they lost the sky...you were all alone.  Your parents left, now you're fifty-three and the feeling's strange.  So the path was clear, now it's disappeared, like you stepping off to the unknown.  So many others, far behind, but you feel alone.  The next morning even I had to ask myself, what was that ...

      Escaping the heat seems to be the goal for much of the world, the drought in many areas only adding fuel to the fire, so to speak.  The combustion created adds more heat while also adding small particles into the air, making a hot situation even hotter.  Homes and wild animals are lost as forests and brush fall victim to conditions we humans seems to have helped create...sigh.  So with that bit of reality, my wife and I "escaped" and headed to the Lakes.  Okay, they're not really called that but to be fortunate enough to view three lakes within a short distance is rather enough to gain such a moniker in our minds.  And besides, the temperatures at this higher elevation were some 20F degrees lower than at our house (our area had already tied the record for most days over 100F degrees in one summer).  But besides the beauty of hiking through an area still spared from fires and and from infestations of pine beetles, I was struck by the rea...

    It began, with a batch of photos, the old type, the ones printed on paper.  The benefit of such old-school paper photos, I should note, is that you can not only frame them to display, but when you mail them to others --especially if they're from 25 years ago-- it comes as a total surprise.  So I was doing just that, gathering up some photos from decades ago, adding a little letter to go with them, and dropping them in the mail to old friends.  But unbeknownst to me, when I returned home there would be a letter from one of my friends with...photos of me from decades ago.  I bring this up because I was thinking of the day when I'm gone and someone has to clean out my desk and comes across these hundreds and hundreds of photos.  Who are these people, he or she might say, right before dumping the entire batch into the trash.  And rightfully so (imagine going through your grandparents' photos).  So, what better time than now to start mailing t...

     Agree or not, that phrase "We, the people" --once so instrumental in the founding of our government-- has become a shell of itself.  One could almost argue that even the words "these United States" have weakened since our states now seem to be far from "united."  Trying to define "the people"  --not only here but pretty much for any country-- is now almost an impossibility.  Those are not MY people, or that's not what "people" really think.  Just as the Supreme Court ignored the high percentage of what the "people" wanted, so too have our presidential elections through the decades (I should note that 5 Republican Presidents lost the popular vote but were elected anyway).  And no, this is not about conspiracies or false results, even if 139 Congressional representatives refused to acknowledge the results of the recent election (what??), perhaps afraid of whatever, or perhaps actually echoing a lost trust in our legal...