It is a beautiful Spring day in Portland, Oregon. I turn in my chair to look out the big skylight in my office. A stately dark green Maple tree is perfectly framed. Honey bees are busy visiting the small cream-colored flowers. The sky is that color of blue that reminds me of the sea above a shallow coral reef. I check in with my heart. My heart checks in with me. The clear message is that I want t…Read More
Spring...1986 I am curled up in the fetal position. Clad only in swim trunks and a t-shirt, I lie in the bottom of a wooden ship, sailing in the open waters offshore of Somalia and Kenya. The night is deeply and painfully black. The ship is fifty feet long at most. As I lie in the shallowly-keeled bottom, I feel the rough thick mango wood of which it is comprised, against my skin. I am floating in…Read More
Some life experiences bring us into razor sharp focus. They allow us to look into the small eyepiece of the microscope, magnify, and lay bare that which really matters in the world. I have had two such experiences. Both of them had me standing upon the brink of the abyss...on that thin line between life and death. I will share one of them with you now. Perhaps I will speak of the other at a latter…Read More
In two weeks, on the evening of Monday, February 11th, I will facilitate the first session of “Men in Transition”, a men’s group. We will meet weekly for 8 weeks at the office of Two Rivers Counseling. Four to six men will meet to lay their stories out. The stories will likely be about change and the sometimes painful, sometimes beautiful, paradigmatic shifts that are the bread and butter of…Read More
I held my two year-old son close. Wrapped up in a furry, orange, wool blanket, he and I looked up into the night sky. I could smell his hair and traces of blueberry juice that persisted on his tiny pink lips. I held him so close that I could hear both of our heartbeats, each in it’s own rhythm...one heart so young and yet to fall from grace, and another, older, that had stumbled and fallen and g…Read More
In the highlands of East Africa, where the equator and Mount Kenya embrace each other, I met an old man who taught me something about acceptance. He introduced himself as “Mzee”, which means old man in Swahili. When first we met, he was walking slowly down a slippery red clay road during the equatorial monsoon. His legs were bowed from years of traveling...down this and other unpaved trails. T…Read More
He was 11. She was 12. The sky was blue. The fields were a vast ocean of brown wheat waves that rolled and broke with the hot breeze of August. The big-peopled cities of England were a week’s ride away on a fast horse. On the muddy banks of a green river that moved imperceptibly, he lay next to her. They were silent. She wore a white homespun linen shirt and an old powder blue dress that hung lo…Read More
“You have a leaf in your hair.” The checker points toward my head, having scanned my last item. Her comment catches me by surprise, nudging me out of my patterned customer routine. I hesitate. I reach up to check. In my hand is a crinkly, brown paper birch leaf. I examine it. The person in line behind me pushes forward, imperceptibly irritated. The checker looks at the leaf as I roll it betwee…Read More
I walked into the courtroom and saw the judge dressed up like a jester. Hanging from the rafters were orange, yellow, and blue bunting. Balloons were everywhere. In the middle of the court room was a huge piñata. Over four feet, top to bottom, a deep ruby red. It was in the shape of a heart. Beside it was the most beautiful wooden gavel, two feet long with thin silver filigreed inlay. Around the …Read More
It was May in Nairobi, Kenya. At midnight in this great metropolis, the floral scent of Jacaranda trees wafted into the windows of our small cement second-story flat. I lay half asleep, thinking about my daughter. She had come into this world, almost one month previous. She was small and fragile, and unbeknownst to us, she had contracted malaria. Born in the hospital during the incessant downpours…Read More
