My very first poem was written while sitting in a storage closet. I was trying to escape the all-seeing eyes of Commander Shedrack, our Director of Nursing at Quonset Point Rhode Island, my first duty station after boot camp. I had been a Professional Psychiatric Nurse before enlisting in the Navy but suddenly found a…
Before there was time I existed, in a dimension far different than now. My whole world was self-sustaining, to no one I needed to bow. But a question arose from somewhere inside, ‘How different would my world be, If I didn’t know all the answers and the future were up to me?’ In a burst…
I am not a perfectionist… I can accept the fact that mankind is flawed and that most of what I know and see in others is only a facade… behind which hides an undeveloped personage, that if given the chance, could become a luminary. This seldom happens, however, and the bud withers and dies without…
I remember that first time when I bowed to the Buddha, as the children were doing their chants. Such a simple act… and yet perhaps one of the most defiant and difficult things I have ever done in my life. I have certainly not lived the life of a Saint and, in fact, have been…
To believe in a Creator God is to believe that mankind is of little significance within the Universe… an imperfect creation of a perfect Creator with no purpose other than to worship that Creator, while enduring the pain and suffering caused by the imperfections he has woven into our being… hoping that one day we will…
Most of us have witnessed miracles and answered prayers at some point in our life. I certainly have had my share of them… from sitting with empty cupboards around a table with several hungry foster children to feed, offering up a prayer of supplication to God, and having the telephone ring, just as the Amen…
I can still remember sitting in the balcony of the Olivet Reformed Church in Grandville, Michigan…listening to the pastor preach a sermon on the Unpardonable Sin. It scared me at the time because even as a child I had questioned my religion and wasn’t sure if I had crossed the line yet or not. Fortunately,…
I no longer believe in a Creator God Entity that lives unseen somewhere outside our dimensions of time and space. To imagine such an entity, surrounded by winged subordinate beings, which control our world and manipulate our lives, seems a bit foolish to me now. There is no reality other than here and now… no…
Few People are aware of it, but while I was in the military and stationed at Bethesda Naval Hospital, I was court-martialed and found guilty on several counts of sales and use of illegal drugs, and on top of those charges they added participation in antiwar activities, such as marching in the Washington Peace march…
Many years ago I worked as a counselor at a youth center in the Southwestern part of the United States. Most of my clients were of Indian or Spanish ethnicity and were referred to me by the police. Occasionally, however, I would be asked by the local schools to see students, from other ethnic backgrounds…