Archive for the ‘EMOTIONAL GHOSTS’ Category.

KILLING GIANTS PULLING THORNS

Killing Giants Pulling Thorns

“The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though
we talk about them as if they do.”

– Wayne Dyer

Safety rides in the crowd. Strength flows in numbers. But when all is stripped away, we are who we are at our core when we are alone. It is in these times, these cycling vacuums of solitude that we are subjected to the raw side of life. It is in these moments that we fall prey to the thundering voices of GIANTS and the relentless persistence of THORNS.

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SEEING RED

I blame it all on my childhood and my first baseball experience at the tender age of six. Something catastrophic happened that spring that left an eternal scar deep within my being. Back then, we played a lot of sandlot ball at the neighborhood park and Little League had not yet discovered Tee Ball. This was back when six and seven year old kids could play more than three innings of hardball and the score would never approach the eighties.

We faced live pitching from another kid our age. And, in our league, there lived a Fire-Baller who had a rocket of an arm which enabled him to reach the plate without a bounce and with only a minimal hint of an arch on his pitches. He must have blistered the mitt at 40 mph on a consistent basis. Most of us feared this miserable wretch and unfortunately he was the only pitcher we ever saw. Well, almost. . . Let me explain.

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THE ISLAND WHERE PASSION CAME TO DIE

There is an island just off the coast of Croatia, a little less than a square mile in size. It packs a riveting backstory that’s led to a captivating mystery. The island’s actual name is Baljenac, but it’s become known more popularly as Fingerprint Island.

It’s barren;  with the exception of a little vegetation, there’s not a single living thing on the island that rates higher than a bug on the food chain. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that it wasn’t always desolate. It’s quite easy to see that there was a time when the island played host to thriving human activity and animal life. But it’s gone now and the question of what happened is one that’s drawn substantial attention from archaeologists and historians. What led to the abandonment and death of a small island that sits so close to a rich culture?

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FANNING PASSION’S FLAMES

I went to bed with a book last night. Granted, not nearly as much fun as a buxom forty year old, but my wife is roaming around the Bigfoot haunted woods of northwestern Washington this week on a job related assignment and won’t be back home until Sunday morning. A good book seemed like the best option.

The book, a mystery thriller, was one from my childhood that I read for the first time in third or fourth grade. I was most likely 8 or 9 at the time. The book was the second installment in a series by Robert Arthur called, The Three Investigators. I’d just finished book one, The Secret of Terror Castle, a few days earlier and was several chapters into book two, The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot.

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FRIENDSHIP AND ACCEPTANCE

BL_Balcony

When my wife and I first started dating, many of our initial dates consisted of walking and talking. The walking part? Well, she lived down in “Yesteryear” (my pet name for the historic district of Fernandina Beach, FL). The talking? We had both been in relationships that left more emotional bruises and scars than magical memories. The magic here was that both of us not only talked, we listened and listened intently.

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