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Once upon a time not so very long ago, in a place not so far away. In the middle of the season where the days are short, the sun is weak, and water drops from every leaf on every tree...there lived a woman who wanted so badly to understand about the pain of others, that she might understand pain in herself. Since she was a little girl, when she saw her friends crying and being sad, she too felt a …Read More

A tear slowly rolled down my cheek as we stood in the airport, at the interface between insecurity and the security zone. The point at which goodbyes are said. The awkward transition between the known and the unknown. Hundreds of people around me were saying goodbye to family...to friends...to business colleagues. I stood awkwardly with my hands in my pockets watching my sixteen year old daughter …Read More

(Author’s note: This is part two of a two-part blog entry, that began about three weeks ago.) But the equanimity did not last. There was dissonance and pain and strange discordance between the Boy and his wife. And it would not go away. And it got worse. The boy screamed in pain and sorrow. The life he had known for twenty-five years was no more. He looked up and saw the dragon of impermanence. …Read More

(Author’s note: This story will be blogged in two separate postings, one now and the other within the next few weeks). There once was a Boy, fair of skin and blue of eyes, who was born in the middle of the U.S.A. It was a green land of oaks and sycamores, soybeans and hog farmers. There were cicadas and fireflies. The people talked slow and went to church. They were conservative, and slow to ado…Read More

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