Nature vs. Nurture

Sensory triggers – those sounds, sights and smells that anchor us to a meaningful time and place – wash over involuntarily throughout our lives, quickly and spontaneously, leaving a reminiscent connection to the original event. One would think the triggers would dissipate with time, but life seems to add to the meaningfulness as we go, adding new relevance to what once may have seemed unimportant at that time. Continue reading

Free Will

If you’ve ever attended a workshop in which you were tasked with figuring out what your true values were, you may have been surprised at what you learned about yourself. It is one thing to generate an idealistic list of what should be important, but when it came to the ranking of your personal values, you had to figure out what was the most important, often making difficult decisions between freedom, family, and sometimes god. Continue reading

A Little Bit Country

It wasn’t for many of my childhood years until I realized another kind of music existed beyond Country (and also Western, as the joke goes). I remember turning on a radio in someone else’s house and American Pie was playing. This wasn’t Johnny Cash or Merle Haggard or Jeannie C. Riley. I was intrigued. Of course, my mother came in the room and acted like I had set off a fire alarm. Turn that shit down honey. It’s too loud! But try as she might to suppress it, the cat was out of the bag. During our stay at that home – Grandma’s no less – I found out about Kansas and Boston and Elton John. Continue reading

Milk and Honey

During the 1960s, my mother was a closet Liberal, whispering to everyone not to tell her parents that she wasn’t going to vote for Goldwater. In the 70s, she would walk between the color lines proudly in support of school busing, (never minding what a target that made me each day). During the 80s her rebellious lifestyle necessitated that she live at least one foot off the grid, avoiding taxes and politics as best she could, surviving just under the radar. And in the 90s she would go on marches for PETA and abortion rights and environmentalism and the screenwriters’ union. I still have her tattered old hemp-woven grocery bag, some faded cause printed in green on one side. Continue reading