Musings from Deeptime

  Sunday Morning Meditation 5 am July 25, 2 When the Spider's Web Entangles One of Our Own. I rolled out bed and after taking my morning meds and doing my morning meditation routine, I open my email and my eyes fall on a late-night email from my church's elder...asking for prayers. It is never a good thing to get a late Saturday night email from your elder asking for prayers, and when I opened it my fears were confirmed, a young person who traveled in an outer orbit of our church, was fighting for their life after overdosing. I sit and I say a prayer the victim and the mother. I know none of the details, yet I know all of them, for they are played out again and again in our county. Addiction is insidious, it is an equal opportunity evil. It cares not wit if you are 22 or 62, owe the bank or own the bank. A soul is a soul is a soul. They all look the same bagged and tagged, don't they? I consider how wonderfully we are made, the insanely complicated body we are lent f...

  Sunday Meditation June 17th, 2   cog·ni·tive dis·so·nance /ˈkäɡnədiv ˈdisənəns/ noun PSYCHOLOGY the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change. Definition from Oxford Languages.   I'm not sure how to approach this subject, so I'll just kinda throw the bloody carcass on the table and see who grabs a steak knife; In business, periodically The Company sits down and asks itself, "What are we doing right, what are we doing wrong, what are we not seeing?" I think the American christian churches should consider doing the same.  The pandemic is in its second year, and while many consider the battle won, I am aware God has a fondness of forever tinkering with the genes of all living things and I don't dismiss the possibility of a more virulent form showing up.  That said, enough time has passed, we have enough data points we can sit down and look at how we played the cards God dealt u...

Maybe, read this first,  You read any book on aging and I guarantee you the subject of older folks repeating themselves will be mentioned.  I already find myself guilty of this.  It's like somebody randomly goes through my file cabinet of subjects and experiences I have been part of, and removed the post-it notes that remind me, "...discussed this with wife two days ago", "told this story to the grand-kids last night".  If you are in your sixties or older, you know exactly what I'm talking about.  I see the same thing happening in my FB and Blog posts—I repeat myself, I continually come back to subjects that I appeal to me, subjects that trouble me, subjects that I have continually wrestled with, etc. Combine this with my habit of periodically writing out my core beliefs to see what's been abandoned, qualified, or newly endorsed and you soon see a similar repetitive pattern emerge, certain subject are of enduring interest to me and over the years I have ...

  Core Beliefs and Starlings on a Wire "In the course of figuring out where I fell on the issue of anti-abortion, pro-life, pro-choice, etc, the only thing I can come up with that I can say with no exceptions is that " Life is precious ". Life is, and always will be, precious, and needs to be nurtured and protected by all in positions of authority, at all times, in all the facets it presents itself. It is not a voice speaking from within a roiling threatening cloud hiding the mountain top, or the Bible or other sacred texts that brought me to that conclusion. It was Carl Sagan penning, "The Pale Blue Dot ". In penning The Pale Blue Dot, Sagan managed to find the word picture to break through the culture filters, the class filters the I-Other filters that I was so unaware of, yet so meticulously maintained. Sagan, who was an atheist, fully grasped the implications of the Earth, a mere mote of dust, spinning it's way through an inky black vacuum, whose...