He’s at it again. This time, the Friar Pope is championing what I call the “untouchable class” of Catholics, the single mother, also known throughout Christianity’s Dark Ages as the “UN – WED MOTHER.”
(Funny, but those Dark Ages seem like only yesterday!)  Continue reading
There’s a passage in Mark’s Gospel in which Jesus’ disciples complain that someone — one who is not one of them — is casting out demons in Jesus’ name. It seems that fundamentalists of all ages have held a belief that there was only one way to get to the kingdom; only one way, and that was through Jesus.  Continue reading
(Thanks for letting me tell my story – Therese)
How could I – a mother of two with a 10-year drug problem – be facing a life sentence for something stupid I did at the local Rite Aid store. Continue reading
When I was a child, I’d feel sorry for anyone who appeared less fortunate than myself. That would include the white-haired elderly who was stooped over with age, as well as the infirm, a word I didn’t learn the meaning of until I was much older myself. 
On February 5th, 2012, a friend who calls herself, the Frugal Xpat, commented:
Shifting into cruise control, I let myself glide through many of life’s activities nowadays. I relax, take several deep breaths, and seek a place inside where there are no thoughts, no worries, and no frets.
I’ve done what I have done and everyone can be satisfied with my efforts, including — and most importantly — me. Continue reading
While Neil Armstrong was taking a giant leap for all mankind, I had taken a small step toward adulthood one month after the moon landing, and I had no one to thank for it except my brother, who encouraged me to aim for the stars in becoming an Officer and a Gentleman in the Army of the United States of America.
I didn’t want to go back to Omega Institute this year. Each time I travelled to this land of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, I’d get high from the holistic experience. But then I’d change into an Ichabod Crane feeling chased by the Headless Horseman, who’d tell true-life stories that caused so much pain I couldn’t hold it inside. Continue reading
Cleaning a pot can be very meaningful, particularly if you block out all thoughts and concentrate on nothing but you and the instrument that has helped provide you with so much nourishment.  Continue reading
Death entered my life recently and I’ve felt so alive with its presence.  Continue reading
When I heard the song “Still in Saigon” the other day, I could have sworn a Vietnam veteran had written about his flashbacks and a need to process what was unprocessed as a young man.
There’s something in it that resonates with me. In my private moments, I try my best to connect with it, but once I start to analyze it, it vanishes. Continue reading
I get such a high while exercising that I can’t imagine why I haven’t done this more often in life.  Continue reading
There is a tradition in Eastern philosophies where you’re taught to view each person and other sentient being as if he, she – or it is your mother. I never knew how nurturing this could be until I allowed the child in me to reciprocate and bask in the most secure and loving place.  Continue reading
Saying you’re sorry can be downright scary.
After chanting a non-English mantra for some time, I finally learned its definition and discovered a gem of wisdom while contemplating its meaning. Meditating will never be the same, and I want to share with others a little of the enlightenment it’s provided me.
Reality shifted on me the other day, and it helped me realize that I have more control than my “resifted” thoughts allowed me to see. Now, with a “time-control outlook,” I can try to change my world for the better.  Continue reading
I don’t understand all the fuss that Catholic universities and hospitals are raising over providing health care for women that includes mandatory birth control provisions. Why not let “Practicing Catholics” follow the teachings of their church to “opt out” for the coverage, while permitting non-Catholics what doctors and women’s groups say is a health benefit?  Continue reading
Actively seek out someone in your church, synagogue or temple and befriend him so that what happened in Philadelphia last week never happens again.  Continue reading
It’s time for my disappearing act to begin. I close my eyes, wave an imaginary magic wand, and slowly begin to vanish from existence here. All thoughts and fears come to an end as I find protection beneath a cloak of invisibility, safe from the savages outside and the demons within.  Continue reading
I was seething when I saw my former US senator decry Blacks receiving food stamps from the government. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania told an Iowa audience this week that he would tackle this “race problem” if elected president, thus echoing the sentiments of his old congressional colleague, Newt Gingrich, who suggested poor students in city schools clean the bathrooms for their more affluent ones, rather than grow up to be pimps or prostitutes.  Continue reading
Ever wonder what life was like for ancestors living fifty, a hundred or even 200 years ago?
How’d you like to go back in time and correct mistakes made in the past? No, you couldn’t go back to the moment before you were conceived, or any other time in your far distant past. Go back to more recent moments – say in the past year or two — when you believed you knew so much about life and how to live it without doing harm to others.  Continue reading
It hits like a poison arrow causing me to drop what I’m doing and focus on the pain it inflicts.
I can think of no worse place to be than in a church, a temple, or a synagogue when an unbidden and involuntary giggle would invade my psyche and take control of me. A “giggle” is too mild a word: uncontrollable laughter would rise to the level of guffaws and downright knee-slappers, right at the most somber parts of a religious service. Continue reading
I didn’t know how much I needed a “fix” until my head slumped on my chest and I “awoke” to a restful, calm, and peaceful world I had been away from for what seemed a lifetime. I felt.
I’ll take them in all shapes and sizes, the old and the young, the rich and the poor.
If it wasn’t for women, I — and a lot of guys I know — wouldn’t even be here! Continue reading
Am I un-American or anti-religious when I tell you something I’ve been trying to say for years, but have been afraid of hurting your feelings?
The answer is: because I have to. I need the therapy to look deep inside to provide me. I’m not talking about surface writing. You know, the kind a reporter might type when covering some disaster, a meeting, or a political event that might include both. I write only after communing with some sort of truth that bubbles up from within.  Continue reading
No matter how hard I try, I can never count to 20 before an unbidden thought arises from inside of me. I get to three or four while meditating, and images pop up on an internal screen, capturing my attention.
“Did you hear what I said? I’m pregnant.
Aren’t you going to say anything Joseph?”
I saw more of the Divine in a beggar on the road to Calvary last year than I did in the three religions occupying Jerusalem. The beggar’s blindness beamed into me, and I’ll never forget the look on his face as I offered him Israeli shekels, and he bowed to me in thanks.
Continue reading
My best friend died before I could tell him how much he meant to me. Continue reading
I want to give “thanks” today, but don’t want to offer it the Norman-Rockwell, “fake-it-‘til-you-make-it” way of the holidays. Instead, I want to share how grateful I am for such taken-for-granted “gifts” that I am only beginning to realize most of us have been given. Continue reading
I’m a union man. Even though I held but one adult job as a dues-paying member, I will always be a union man. Why? Because I believe it’s the truly right path for the working man to walk.
On this Veterans Day, 11-11-11, what would you tell yourself if you could go back in time and greet that young man recently returned home from the war?
The phone rang, and Henry Rushing answered it, hoping the call would not delay his weekly trip to church services Sunday morning. The pastor of his Presbyterian Church was on the line. Continue reading
When I read the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators were unfocused and without a coherent message, I took a closer look at them in Philadelphia, and discovered some were disheveled street persons looking for handouts, and one was a graduate school political science major spouting Marxist teaching.
The greatest protest of our generation is seeking change in all shapes and sizes. You can see it in the signs the demonstrators carry, writing the letters out really big with magic markers so that passersby need not squint to get the messages.
Tone it down, America. You are cutting off your nose to spite your face. The face of the body politic, that is, we are creating needless hurt for the countrymen we’d like to lead to our mutual goal: the pursuit of happiness.  Continue reading
What do Israel and India have in common with Istanbul and Amsterdam? Other than all starting with a vowel?
A student at the WON Institute performed acupuncture, penetrating into my psyche as well as my epidermis. More importantly, she opened her heart with such compassion I wept, feeling her healing spread throughout my body and soul.  Continue reading
I heard some familiar words spoken in a foreign language by two women and a man sitting at the table next to me, but what drew my attention was something that sounded like “Kabbalah.”
I saw you as a little girl with a smile as bright as Shirley Temple, a chocolate-haired “Annie,” a young Rosie Perez.
How many times have you heard this? How many times have you said it? “Give something back.” Not sure what that “something“ is, but you know you got it, and you got a “need” to share “it.”
Could never be a good businessman. Did not love money enough.
Another Reality exists within the here and now, if I can disengage and step out of the World that I am sleep-walking in.
Each drew me like an oasis to a man walking alone in a desert.
Never thought an affair I had with a married woman before turning 21 would qualify for “conduct unbecoming,” but looking back, I see how conflicted parties to such an act could become.
Wearing a chest full of ribbons on a khaki-colored shirt with Russian-like epaulets on the shoulders, I grew lots of attention at the Russian Appreciation Day at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia yesterday.
I wanted so much to be the Queen’s Concert.
But at what age? What stage of her life called out to me the most, as we, the audience members, watched her grow into a Spiritual goddess, one I desired to be like, to become with as One?
“Make yourself a Rav, and buy for yourself a friend.”
— Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Perachya
All these feelings flashed through me as I slowly came out of what seemed like a trance, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, only to notice growth at a part of my body where there was none before.
Swimming meditation can work. You heard it here first. One can “nudge” out most thoughts and focus on the “here and now” as you swim one lap after another. I did. Got so relaxed, I lost count for a while, but then didn’t care how many lengths I had traversed.
“I love you” was not in the way you said it, but how you said it.
Bless me Father, for I have sinned. I have cursed out drivers on the open highway and prayed their mothers had never conceived them. In or at of wedlock, those dirty b . . . . . .
I dove into a World of Make Believe, changing from one past life to another while underwater and on land yesterday.
Felt disconnected from the World as I knew it yesterday.
When my father spoke Greek with the disciplinarian of the Catholic High School where I played hooky at age 14, I thought I had it made.
Continue readingEach day for twenty years, the spirit of Don Quixote welcomed me into my law office. This picture hung above my desk reminding me that it was the “impossible cases” a good public defender relished. The ones you didn’t expect to win, but somehow, now and then, you’d convince a jury to see the facts your way, which in most cases, was the right way.
Continue readingYou invited me to your House, and I broke confidence in you.
Heard some Christian minister was planning to set fire to a Muslim Holy Book, the Quran, to mark the Anniversary of 9-11 this Saturday, September 11, 2010.
Thank You Amy. Let the Good Times Roll!You don’t know how hard this is for me. To do nothing! Forget about the better part. The word “better“ implies you’ve been able to do “nothing” sometime in the past. Or that you can do nothing “better” than someone else.
We were young kids drawn to older kids who had little to occupy their time except hang out in our geographic circles, aka, the street corner. The “coolest” ones, the teenagers with the nice outfits and a quip for anything anti-establishment, got the most attention and adulation. I looked up to those “old heads” who could cuss up a storm and strut their stuff in walking down a street. And those were just the girls!
Like Midge Connerton. I think she was the first of the opposite sex that I noticed was more of a woman than a girl. Seem to always wear oversized sweat shirts (probably belonged to “Beanie” her brother) and jeans that rolled up at the end. Smoked cigarettes. And caused kids like me, two to three years younger than her, to look up to her as both a “roll” model, and a model you wouldn’t mind “rolling“ around with.
She was cute. And had breasts. At the age of 12 and 13, they stood out. They got attention, is what I mean. You put them in the mix with corner-lounging, cursing and smoking, and you got yourself a one-way ticket to juvenile delinquency and teenage pregnancy, is what our parents thought. We viewed it as juvenile delicacies and teenage prep for adulthood.
Good kids for the most part, cops would label all as trouble-makers, running us in, based on some flimsy complaint with the hope of scaring us off the corners. We’d go right back after our parents would “bail us out“ of the police precincts, lecturing us, as we’d swear before the Almighty we’d never do again whatever it was we were accused of doing in the first place.
Pitching pennies properly
My mother learned about this “police work” the hard way. Four or five of us barely into our teens were “pitching” pennies outside of our house at 31st Street and Girard Avenue in a section of Philadelphia called Brewerytown.
My brother, John, and I were using pennies we got from a jar my mother was saving them in.
Charlie Dell A’Casa, our next door neighbor, used his own pennies as did the other kids, all ranging from twelve to 14. (I was the youngest.)
A “red car” drove up the wrong way of 31st Street and pulled onto the pavement as two police officers jumped out of police car — all in red at that time — and rounded us up, grabbing the pennies lying on the pavement as evidence of our crimes. None would listen to what any of us had to say. Got threatened by one of the cops to shut up “or else,” as he indicated with body language what he would do with th club he carried on him.
Mom heard the racket inside the house, came out, and the last I seen her, she was holding open the screen door, shouting at the cops “They were my pennies. I gave them to ’em to play!“
Did no good. The law is the law. And a complaint is a complaint, no matter what or where it may have originated. Or whether it was ever founded or not.
We got released. But got no lecture from our folks this time. Never did “pitch” pennies again. The object was to get as close to the wall with your penny to win. We played the game with a deck of cards instead of money from then on. Learned to move our “Corner-Lounging” away from those corners that gathered the most complaints too. It was all part of the learning process in growing up in the city. Tough but educational. Just like Life.
Music touched an emotional chord in me that may have been different from most folks.
Rain pours on me outside, while soft music warms me on the inside. “Abraham, Martin, and John,” the song, plays from this relatively new gadget called a portable, hand-held, transistor radio.
What’s the difference between Shame and Embarrassment? Are they joined at the hip? Like twins?
Be careful what you wish for. You could get your heart’s desire and wish you had never asked for it in the first place.
Sat next to a long hair, skinny, “Hippie” guy at an orientation in a community college yesterday, and felt thrown back to a time years ago, sitting cross-legged on the floor across from a similar fellow wondering what the hell I was doing there.
I felt like Alice falling in the hole after chasing a White Rabbit. But, falling “upwards” defying the laws of Gravity and Rational Sense.
Got Blanket Absolution yesterday. And, it felt so good, I became a 12-year-old again. Ready to face the world with a clear conscious and a pure heart.
How do you explain “unexplainable” events?
Although you “passed on” after your 17th birthday, you’ll remain alive for me forever. I see you in my dreams. I “feel” your presence as I walk with you, watch you, and hear the footsteps on the steps leading from the dining room to the bedroom upstairs.
Grace suffocated and I retaliated by smashing my ego to help free up her passageway during group meditation this morning.
The pain feels like someone thrust a spear in my back. That I was in battle. At the city of Troy. Fighting with fellow Greeks for the foolish prize of a minor King’s run-a-way, but lovely, wife, Helen. She with a face that will launch a thousand ships.
The hawk glides across the sky, soaring high above us as the first person to notice shouts, “there’s one.” Like children, we stare toward the heavens, at the beautiful blue sky. A normally humid August has graced us with a mild and glorious summer day, blending light breezes and the scent of flowers that drift our way from below the wooden platform we look out from.
Contoveros 