One of Us
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One of Us

The headline in the electronic newsletter came was written in large font: “She’s one of us.” My favorite magazine that offers hope and harmony to people living with bipolar depressions, bphope, called attention to the recent disclosure that actress Catherine Zeta-Jones lives with bipolar depression. By the time I received the newsletter, I had already…

Empty
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Empty

My favorite slogan of the environmental movement is the edict that we should: “live simply so others can simply live.” It’s a basic truism that most of us who are living in the world’s wealthiest nations find incredibly difficult to enact. The everyday components of our lives – driving to work, flying to visit family…

Flight
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Flight

  This is part three of three parts. See part one “cry it out” and part two “falling” Human beings have long admired and envied a bird’s ability to soar through the skies. I imagine that this initiated the design of the kite, and reaches its pinnacle in space exploration. I do most of my…

Falling
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Falling

  This is part two of three parts. See last week’s part one, “cry it out” In 2001, the rock band, Creed, released their album Weathered that featured a song that climbed into the top ten of the Billboard music charts. “One Last Breath” has stayed with me in the years since it received a…

Cry It Out
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Cry It Out

I experience one of life’s greatest pleasures when a child hugs me. Warm fuzzies head to toe in less than two seconds. When I was a child, hugging adults usually conveyed a familial or extended family relationship, and joy for the adult’s presence. And like many other children, there were occasions when I needed a…

Silence
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Silence

I’ve long felt that the Christmas season begins too early and ends too soon. This is not a religious complaint. It’s a commercial complaint. In the consumer culture of the United States, Christmas decorations appear in drug stores and grocery markets before Halloween. By mid-October, I feel inundated with red and green paper, images of…

Gratitude
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Gratitude

The American holiday of Thanksgiving kicks off a season where a spirit of gratitude pervades society. From the media to faith communities, the notion of thankfulness abounds. I’ve always found it problematic that the value of gratitude is so closely tied to an American myth of cooperation that was really about genocide. Most school children…