By Don Arnoudse
Bio
After our discussion was over, I
found myself thinking about the energy of the conversation. Sara was
bemoaning her uncertainty in the face of so many choices. She was
feeling the fear of, perhaps, making some wrong ones. She was hungry
for life, with an appetite for tasting many things, but knew that not
all of them were possible. She was exhilarated at the prospect of
working in Washington, DC with a non-governmental agency that’s focused
I got a gentle reminder last week of how precious and potentially fragile life is. I had a very minor medical procedure done that required outpatient surgery and sedation. When I woke up, everyone was smiling and assuring me all was well. Within the space of a few minutes, they were expressing concern because I was having some heart irregularities. It was all handled very professionally and, at the end of the day, I was lucky: it turned out to be one of those inexplicable anomalies that happen
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is third in a five-part series.
It is inevitable that the pressures of the past that are felt by the present have to be contained in some sort of manageable context. Life must be worth living.Gazing upward to the crumbling decks of
those forlorn leviathans from my canoe on the Yukon River, I wondered
about the men who worked those paddlewheel steamers. Back-breaking work
it must have been to feed those enormous furnaces. Even the ship’s
wheel needed to be six feet across to achieve the mechanical advantage
necessary to turn the fat twin rudders under the paddlewheel. It must
have required Herculean
A wealthy old lady decides to go on a photo safari in Africa, taking her faithful aged poodle named Cuddles along for the company.
One day the poodle starts chasing butterflies and before long, Cuddles discovers that he’s lost.. Wandering about, he notices a leopard heading rapidly in his direction with the intention of having lunch.
The old poodle thinks, "Oh, oh! I’m in deep doo-doo now!" Noticing some bones on the ground close by, he immediately
People are my everything,
Senses reaching out, embracing someone.
Wanting to touch and be touched—to delight
In each small gesture and utterance—
Finding wonder in soft words
And love in my heart
I remember loving.
Never tasting the Sweet fragrance
of a soft belly in the Way I do now—
Feeling each centimeter of skin—
Aging fingers still capable and Tender
caressing each other until we shudder—
in sublime delight
I am more romantic now.
Vulnerable and open—
accepting love
without
I notice I am getting more ‘age’ jokes in my email these days. Most of them are kind of silly: they’re either about leaky parts or real or imagined sexual fantasies among octogenarians (watching or wishing in all sorts of unusual circumstances, like learning to bounce your walker on a trampoline so you can peak at the nude beauty in the next yard). Like most humor, it is about people laughing at themselves or their situation. I don’t find most of them particularly funny, probably because
Thanks to Google, I’ve learned that Valentine’s Day is so old a tradition that we’re not even sure how it began. It probably goes back to pagan rituals that were later “Christianized” around the time of Claudius and probably “commercialized” by Hallmark. Whatever its origins, it is about romance and love and letting the special men and women in our lives know how we feel about them.
For me, Valentine’s Day is extra special because it comes right after my birthday, which for
By Marilyn Hay
How many people truly listen well? How much more common is it to ‘hear’ what we expect to hear, or to jump in to put our own views forward rather than concentrate on what the other person is saying? Sometimes we make assumptions about what the speaker is saying, about their intentions. We color everything with our worldview, with what matters to us. If we don’t trust the boss, we won’t believe what they’re saying or we’ll think they have some hidden agenda. If we feel vulnerable, we may well perceive threats that are implied, not real. If we have something to sell, we may listen for an opening to put our ideas or goods on the table. How often do we bemoan or hear others wail, “Nobody listens to me!”Listening takes work and effort. It takes
consciously setting aside ingrained expectations or beliefs. It
requires we take a real interest in the other person, and that we
engage in really wanting to understand what they are saying.
The
experience of being actively listened to is so rare that encountering a
person who listens with such focused intensity can be disconcerting. It
is an uncommon experience. When you feel you are actively being
listened to, that
I guess one’s 65th birthday is a kind of milestone, though I am not sure why. Perhaps this is the line between being ‘almost 65’ and ‘approaching 70’! As far as I can tell, like most of my other significant birthdays—21, 30, and 50—they are more symbolic than anything. At 21, I could drink and vote. At 30, I reached my goal of earning as much as my age. At 50, I was officially ‘middle-aged’. This one was supposed to be the moment I ‘retired’, but the fact is I am just getting
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is second in a five-part series.
Those paddlewheel steamers on the Yukon keenly awakened my sensibility
that all things—regardless of how grand or wonderfully complex at the
time—have their time. If we are lucky, they, like us, will live on in a
sweet memory, rife with nostalgic editing that carves away the worst.
Like
a distant love affair that once seemed to have held the very purpose of
life in its hands, it is possible to be reminded of happier moments