Out for my morning walk before dawn in order to beat the heat, I make my way through my Sun City, Summerlin, neighborhood. At the bottom of my street, I follow a glistening rivulet of water running in the gutter for three long blocks to its source: it is coming off a plot of lush […]
Like the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, I too studied the works of Ayn Rand in my youth. I read all her books, took courses on her philosophy, attended workshops around her ideas; I even heard her lecture in person in Boston in 1968. Unlike Paul Ryan, however, I outgrew Rand’s rigid world-view before I turned […]
The 2012 Hetrick Family reunion was all but over. Elders, adults, youth, and children all containing the same genes were packing up and heading out. Just three remained seated on folding chairs in the driveway of the old homestead farmhouse. As westerners, were their bodies simply still in a different time zone and thus were […]
As we come out of the introspective pause in Occupy activism and burst into the American Spring, the season of extraversion, here’s what I’ve come to realize about Why I Occupy. First, let me be absolutely clear that I am basically a raging introvert whose primary color is self-reflective blue…the exact opposite on the color […]
Is this an extra day for playing catch-up with our Star, or is this to be a day for setting into motion the quantum leap of consciousness that is needed for a viable planetary future? While we’ve been asleep, corporations and politicians, big banks and Wall Street, have been busy beneath the radar screen. And […]
Awakening in the pre-dawn of another Groundhog’s Day, I find myself wondering what’s the matter with ‘we the people’ on the North American Plate of Planet Earth?! We have just lived through the second warmest January ever recorded and are jokingly renaming it June-uary! Here in the Mojave Desert, where summer temps have gone from […]
While driving back to Vegas after spending Christmas in Denver, Milt and I talked about how to understand the Deep Time of our planet and our human place within it. In the fourteen hours of travel time, here’s what we came up with: We’d use the human body as a measure of all of Earth’s […]
Much of what we do over the winter solstice reflects a fascination with the cosmos. Take, for instance, the popularity of the poinsettia plants that appear in stores for only this season. Brought from Mexico by our first ambassador there, Dr. Joel Poinsett (I’ve visited his historic home in Charleston, S.C.), its blossoms delight us […]
How fitting to set aside a day each year to give thanks and pay attention to the fruits of the earth; perhaps this is the one lasting legacy of the indigenous people who loved this land. Of course they gave thanks daily to the earth and the water and the sun and the air that […]
It was a reunion of sorts: almost exactly ten years ago I stood on this very spot overlooking the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon and made a promise: the rest of my life would be dedicated to protecting the precarious environment of our precious planet. I’d even bought myself a ring, a small band of white […]