Ever since I broke a fingernail grip and let go of my final, tenuous grasp on a need for an afterlife to assuage my ego, I have felt free as the birds who laugh at the borders they fly over without needing official government documentation. I no longer struggle with apocalyptic visions of the infernal destinations proclaimed in the Abrahamic unHoly Books. I no longer fear an eternity of hellfire and brimstone. Nor do I fear the equally hellish place in the clouds where I would be forced to bow down and praise a megalomaniacal deity for endless days and nights, a chattel slavery marketed as bliss. I can't put a finger on the auspicious moment I accepted the afterlife is a myth designed to manipulate the fearful, only that I have unshackled...

The capacity for love is almost universal in humans, the exceptions being those with mental conditions that are classified as antisocial personality disorders. These include sociopathy and psychopathy. Love began with mammalian attachment when natural selection favored caring for one another. That became the foundation for pair bonding to cooperatively raise offspring. From this evolved romantic love, emerging some 5 million years ago after the split from the Great Apes. It is tied to...

Tis a slapdash court, one with no credibility, that would sentence a person before a guilty verdict was returned by judge or jury. It would be a court compromised of integrity, a court people would not and should not trust. This is the undergirding for the growing concern for a US Supreme Court that appears to be looking for excuses to drive the administration's agenda rather than evidence to support unbiased verdicts in lockstep with the Constitution. It is a concern that should result in questionable judges being relieved of duty, if there is not even a hint of impropriety. The integrity of the court is too important to do otherwise.

If I were to hazard a guess, I would point to the seminal, six-part PBS series, "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth," as the key to the postern opening my fascination with religion and its impact on the human psyche, both collective and individual psyches. Raised a fairly strict Catholic, including attending primary and secondary schools named after saints, my exposure to other Christian sects and non-Christian faiths was pert near zero. As all good, by that I mean indoctrinated...

The library of mythology undergirding the Christian religion, known as the Bible, claims in the second book, Exodus, that no man can see God's face and live. In the first book, Genesis, Jacob claims to have seen the face of God. Moses makes the same claim in Exodus. Yet, according to the mythology, both men lived. If Jesus was actually God, as the followers claim, many saw his face with no ill effects. Rather than admit the Bible is not inerrant, the cultists employ a myriad of illogical paralogisms to rationalize away the blatant falsehood. It is Cognitive Dissonance on steroids.

abels are used to quickly identify and communicate meaning efficiently. They help people sort, recognize, remember, and make decisions about what something is, how it should be used, or how it should be understood. Seems benign. So, what's the problem? Labeling is a means of shrinking a complex reality into an easily manageable symbol...that may or may not capture the essence of the labeled item, resulting in confusion. The label 'desert' can be used to describe the golden, shifting sands of the Sahara where vegetation is virtually non-existent, or the Sonoran Desert delineated by the range of the majestic Saguaro reaches toward the skies, or Antarctica, a frozen land that is the largest, driest desert on earth.

ince the publication of my first blog post in September 2011, I have grown increasingly dedicated to my artistic expression via words, photographs, and paintings. I dabbled in all three for many years prior, more as an afterthought, squeezing art in between work, raising my children, and other activities tickling my fancy, including all aspects of soccer from playing to coaching and refereeing, woodworking, knife making, and reading. All but reading slowly faded due to lack of interest or necessity. Grown kids tend to prefer autonomy as they come of age, something a decent parent diligently prepares them for rather than stifling their drive to be independent.

What do a dead snag at Bear's Lodge, an exquisite petroglyph panel in Northern Utah, a saguaro forest with aged beings raising arms skyward, and a short path blanketed with brown, noise-dampening evergreen needles have in common?

There are times in my life when I find it necessary to disaffiliate myself from what has become mistaken for civilization, aka, syphilization. Civilization, by definition, represents an advanced stage of cultural, scientific, and governmental organizations, distinguishing it from more primitive tribal communities. The inherent bias in the definition is self-evident, leading me to believe it has been refined over the years by those who have lost touch with life outside cities. Is it civilized to cram hordes of people into substandard living space for which they pay extortionary fees?

took the lily for a final walk before bedtime, down a short path carpeted with last season's light brown pine needles that muffled by heavy footfalls, through a swarm of mosquito-looking flying insects that did not bite or even alight on my exposed skin. I was shaking off the last dew drop when I realized I had entered a hidden world dense with birdsong in a multitude of voices from all around me. The voices never conflicted or drowned out their neighbors. It was auditory harmony touching something deep in my blood memory. I felt primordial, primeval, pristine. The birds themselves were mere shadows darting through the dense undergrowth, around old snags in the early stages of decay, and swooping between the branches drooping in the shadows.