Gator Country

It's bad. We all know it but like the proverbial elephant in the room everyone knows is there but doesn't acknowledge, no one really wants to talk about how bad it could possibly get. It's as though ignoring the horrendously possible scenarios will somehow make them disappear. Abracadabra! Out of sight; out of mind.

I do think about these things, some would say to a degree that is more than healthy. The urgency and the scope of the crisis greatly disturbs me because of our unpreparedness...

Cistercian (Trappist) monk, Father Louis, Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O.

CHAPTER VI
Of Silence

Let us do what the Prophet saith: "I said, I will take heed of my ways, that I sin not with my tongue: I have set a guard to my mouth, I was dumb, and was humbled, and kept silence even from good things" (Ps 38[39]:2-3). Here the prophet showeth that, if at times we ought to...

President-elect Obama's incoming WH Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, when asked if the new administration will jettison the controversial "don't ask, don't tell" military policy, announced the ban will be revoked. No timetable was announced for its repeal and it is probably not high on the priority list of 'things to do' for the incoming president. Clinton tackled it early on in his first term igniting a firestorm of controversy that was never clearly settled leaving us with the less than...

Shortly before Christmas last year I found myself hit with tumultuous waves of emotional upheaval. Most of it having been brought on by the marriage of my daughter in mid-December and the resulting change in our family dynamic. My three married children and four grandchildren all live in other states; the closest is almost 1000 miles away. I see them fairly frequently but not all holidays are spent together. They have the in-laws to see, also. I respect that but it doesn't help much to mitigate...

When my children were young we lived in rural Connecticut in an area abundant in milkweed, the preferred food of Monarch caterpillars. Each summer at the end of July we would wade through a field filled with milkweed near our home searching under each leaf for the tiny eggs laid by the female on her way south. Not every plant had an egg but each plant that did for certain would have only one egg. Nature's...