Guidelines

At some level, we are all servants. Perhaps we are all here to be of service, to make some difference in the lives of others. Whom do you serve? God? Yourself? Family? Friends? Neighbors? Community? If you determined your wealth not by money and possessions, but by the cumulative service you have rendered to others […]

The common cold of the soul just may be irritability. Or so a group of us determined during a recent meeting. To be like the common cold, it has to be readily “catchable” by others. And what is more catchable than another’s irritation? It is easier to catch than the horrific Covid virus. Irritation spoils […]

More on love and picking berries. A few more things I discovered while my wife and I picked raspberries and blueberries at the Bock Berry Farm, close to Iowa City, Iowa. When we began, I somehow sensed that a berry patch could teach me some things about love. Nature will grant us insights into life […]

Picking raspberries has some things in common with loving. I realized this a while ago when my wife and I spent an idyllic late afternoon in a raspberry patch. The weather was flawless, the fruit abundant and succulent, and our conversation as intermittent and intimate as the breezes which intertwined us. We joyfully, carefully labored […]

We all have our inner naysayers. We generally prefer not to talk about these harassing little daemons, though it can help us when we do. By “daemon,” I am not referring to some objective evil or the devil; I mean something akin to a computer virus, or a bacterium that can dis-ease our bodies. Healthy […]