My introduction

Funny how our paths in life can go in directions we never anticipated. It's the damndest thing! So here I am after being "absent" from here for a few years....yes, years....a bit of an embarrassment. It is good to be back. I have a feeling it will be like discovery all over again.... My life has three main facets: as a journalist I am driven by political instinct on matters of public policy to dig beneath the lies and deceptions of our times, and try to sort through them and pass along my thinking as to what is really going on beneath the facade that is fed to us as our "reality." Like is our "democracy" more illusory than real? A second aspect deals with faith as a personal calling, to seek to know the dynamics of the relationship between man, existence and God, or Allah, Great Spirit, or by whatever name we give all of creation and the creative force that has authored this universe for us to travel through, and to be able to discern between those that either enrich us....or corrupt us. And then there's music. For me it is an avocation. And it goes deep, as it so often does as a living experience all humans share. I need it to relax, to set myself free of the entanglements of our times, from the intensity of our conflicting war of ideas, of our penchant for self-delusion in our path toward self-destruction. Will we fail to wake up in time from our nightmarish ways to keep from sliding off the edge of sanity? I find mine mainly in jazz and soul, and related. Jazz pianists like Ahmad Jamal, the genius of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue depth of spirit, upbeat vocals as the marvelous Ledisi, or Modern Jazz Quartet legend Milt Jackson's vibrato sounds ebbing both inward and outward. And lately, Esperanza Spalding. I have not been so enthralled this much about a jazz vocalist since Nancy Wilson some 30 years ago. I identify with this music....It is what helps me keep my balance in a world filled with chaos, confusion, desperate and destructive acts....and isolation from each other and from our common humanity. In our moments and minutes, hours, weeks and months ahead....where will we find ourselves? And where, and how, will we find each other, and in under what conditions and circumstances?