Peace

Culture wars. Budget wars. Collective bargaining wars. Democracy wars. I think I'll post a picture of my daughters instead.

Winter Doldrums

Sometimes I'm too tired


to figure out what's going on in our nation's capital.


Everything seems like a jumbled mess;


the pieces don't fit.


On these days, I'll settle for a sink filled with clean dishes.

A Cape Cod Holiday

Cape Cod at Christmas was a blast of New England cold, a landscape both foreign and familiar, an oasis of water and stars, and a home with family and friends.

The Work of Christmas

by Howard Thurman

"When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart."

Early Winter in Carolina

Sculpture in the Garden

You never know who you'll run into at the annual outdoor sculpture show at the North Carolina Botanical Gardens in Chapel Hill. This year's artists were asked to interpret the theme "Celebrating Life Forces--earth, air, fire, water, spirit."

Amazonian cats, ethereal women, angry stone men, they're all there to discover as you wander the lovely gardens. With friends and family, the show is a great way to spend a fall afternoon in Carolina.

The Court Jester

Walter Berglund, the frustrated environmentalist in Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom, captures America today when his anger finally erupts: "This fragmentation . . . it's the same problem everywhere. It's like the internet, or cable TV--there's never any center, there's no communal agreement, there's just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation . . . All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli."

How depressing, and how true. Examples of distracting noise abound--most recently in the mid-term elections, awash with dishonesty and inanity.

Enter Jon Stewart, comedian and host of The Daily Show. If you missed his interview with Rachel Maddow, watch it. Finally, two people in sustained conversation.

Stewart gives me hope. He exposes the noise of round-the-clock cable news for what it is: divisive and polarizing and distracting. He calls out red and blue activists alike for failing to tackle corruption and dishonesty. And he does so with humor and self awareness.

Jon Stewart for president? Not yet. But a lot of people producing politics and news could learn from him. He understands and articulates better than most the direction we need to go.

Take heed, all of us, of the comedian in our midst. He's a gem of a court jester, and we'd do well not just to laugh, but also to listen.

Veterans Through the Ages

The North Carolina Monument at Gettysburg honors our state's 14,147 soldiers who fought there in 1863. Close to 6,000 North Carolinians lost their lives in 3 days at Gettysburg, over 1/4 of all Confederate casualties.

To date, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have claimed nearly 5,800 American lives.

Does it matter how many die? Civil War numbers boggle the mind. Iraq and Afghanistan numbers, in comparison, seem like mere skirmishes. Many of us don't know anyone who's been killed this time around; I doubt if many southerners could say the same in 1863.

The dead, no matter how many they are, ask little of us. We, in turn, pay almost no attention to them. Perhaps on this Veteran's Day we can be reminded of the simple request made clear by this monument: May "[our] valorous deeds [be] enshrined in the hearts of men long after these transient memorials have crumbled into dust."

Summer Days Driftin' Away

As the leaves start to fall and the earth travels far from the sun, I remind myself to keep alive the memory of the summer. Melancholy takes hold. A simple bucket of flowers can help.