Tag Archives: age

Sixty Six for Sixty-Six, Part LXV: It Doesn’t Matter

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Posted by on in collaborating, distraction issues, Family, Personal Values, Social, Striving

October 31, 2017, Prescott-

Happy All-Hallows, to those who celebrate it as an evening of festive family and community enjoyment.

It doesn’t matter to me,

if you are Black, White, Brown, Red, Yellow, or some sort of hybrid.

It is superfluous,

if you are conservative, liberal, libertarian, progressive.

It is inconsequential, in my view,

if you claim adherence to the oldest of Faiths, to the Faith founded

two-thousand years ago, to the newest Faith or to no Faith at all.

It is of passing concern,

if you are heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual or just plain fed up with it all.

Male, female, “hybrid”;

child, adolescent, young adult, midlife, early senior, advanced senior, centenarian-

I have much to learn from you,

and much to offer, in return.

What matters is your spirit.

Who I am,

in this final month

of being sixty-six,

is largely who I have

ever been.

My labels do not define me.

God sees beyond the superficial,

the fleeting,,

the limited.

 

Sixty-Six

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Posted by on in Inner Struggles, Matters of Faith, Personal goals, Service Activities, Social, Striving

November 28, 2016, Prescott-Someone close to me says I am officially an old man.  Well, yes and no.  Consider today:  I went to work, told no one it was my day (though it’s posted in the office kitchen, which none of my co-workers ever enter) and had a normal work day, which means I put forth an effort.  I came home, took a 20-minute power nap.  Then, it was time to mark the occasion, so I went by a Christmas display, at Prescott Resort Hotel, had dinner at Texas Roadhouse and went to see the film “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”, a Harry Potter prequel of sorts, with a fine ensemble cast and a great story line; definitely four-stars.

Age does not affect what I have ahead, over the next few months, either.  December, though, is as far as I have planned, concretely, and then only in terms of those events that have to be planned well in advance.  It’s more a matter of keeping the bulk of my focus on my work and on my Faith, than it is of slowing down.

I will have more to say about the weeks ahead, but now it’s time to keep my bedtime routine- 10:30 is late enough.

It’s Time

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Posted by on in Community, Family, Personal Values, Striving

November 10, 2016, Prescott-

It has been two days, since this time of transition began.  People on the Left have vented their frustrations and spoken of their fears.  People on the Right have expressed their joy at being “vindicated” and spoken of their annoyance.

It’s time to start listening, hard, to one another.

It’s time to really take stock of how we’ve really been, towards one another.

It’s time to stop blaming one another.

Black Lives Matter did not create the recent round of violence against police.

The Tea Party did not create the outpouring of hate against transgender people.

It’s time for the common people, of all backgrounds, to recognize that we each achieve more, shoulder to shoulder, than we do nose to nose.

It’s time for those of us deemed “little”, by the media, to know wire-pulling and manipulation, when we see it.

It’s time for people of faith to expect elevated behaviour, from our leaders and from one another, rather than to overlook base actions and coarse speech.

Make no mistake: I love my friends in  Christianity,in the Baha’i Faith, those devoted to Judaism, Buddhism,Hinduism, Islam, Wicca, because their faith defines them;

I love my friends whose sexual orientation and gender identities differ from mine, because they are honest people, trying to make sense of  complexities that few of us in the “straight” world can really understand;

I love my friends who are young, gifted and from hundreds of ethnic backgrounds and dozens of religious traditions, because they will inherit the Earth, and need all the encouragement they can get;

I love my friends who live in small towns and crumbling cities, in the Northeast, Midwest and South, because they do not deserve to be cast-offs;

I love my friends who live on Reservations, in ghettos, in barrios and in ramshackle mountain hollows, because they do not deserve to be stepping-stones for the callous and the greedy;

I love my friends of colour, and of pallour, of youth and of age, because the blood that keeps each of us alive is the same, and too much of that blood has been shed, in the name of falsehood.

It’s time to share our Home, our America, our Earth.