In times like these, especially in times like these, when words are just upchucked by annihilationists, institutional arsonists and a world-historic, nihilist-narcissist whose much-kissed ring gleams with saliva, only poetry makes sense. And a few well-chosen images, quotes, and quatrains.
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8 DAYS AFTER 9-11: At a Buddhist Retreat in the West Virginia Hills
Eight days after the frightening, world-shaking events of 9-11 in the year 2001, I was at a long-scheduled retreat at a Buddhist monastery deep in the West Virginia hills. Osama bin Laden was there, also.
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FIRST/PERSON: Prostitute Pasta & Way-Out Family Restaurants in West Virginia
'I am dreaming of a plate full of fluffy, cheesy scrambled eggs, streaked with a couple of red skid marks of Tabasco and a side plate of triangles of buttered toast. Preferably, wheat. But I will take white, if it is all Minney has got ...'
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QUOTABLES: Luminous skies, mucky alleys & chiaroscuro evenings
Photographs from around the neighborhood, allied with some quotations worth quoting and notations that may or may not align, but it's all good.
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Saying Goodbye to Bill | In 3 Parts
Bill Hart, a dear traveling companion through this vale and holler of light and darkness, passed from this mysterious world on Friday evening, on Feb. 9, 2024. Here are some thoughts and images about a notable human being, artist, and world-class craftsman. And, to be sure, a genuinely offbeat, unconventional, and bohemian soul.
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One night, out strolling in the cool, high air of Appalachia
Take a break from worrying about the fate of the Republic, beyond the locked gates of a forested park where the pine trees offer fine company and conversation and the view from on high poses some good questions.
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Where Walden meets West Virginia
Recently inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame, Barbara Nissman has a story to tell about how her globetrotting career as an acclaimed pianist landed her deep in the West Virginia hills, where she faced deep loss and artistic renewal.
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GUEST ESSAY: Sermonizing on what Joni Mitchell said
Spinning up a sermon from how Joni Mitchell's song “Passion Play (When All the Slaves are Free)" speaks to the mandate to reach out to those the powerful and mighty consign to huddling in the darkness—just as stories of the life of Jesus show him doing constantly.
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GUEST ESSAY: ‘Dad, Donald Trump and My Mountain Mama’
"As limited as his formal education was, dad was a smart and insightful person. I think he would have seen through Trump’s use and manipulation of a religious faith that was the sustaining factor in my dad’s life ..."
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FIRST/PERSON: Finding Yo-Yo Ma playing cello in the West Virginia hills
Who was that man bowing a cello against a tree in the New River Gorge? Why, it's none other than one of the world's best known and loved instrumental maestros. And he has something to say as well as to play.
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READINGS: “THE OUTHOUSE: When you have to go, you have to go”
Over there sits a narrow, tiny, upright building of loosely-fitted, weathered boards painted Theravada Buddhist orange. It has a peaked roof covered with black shingles. It is a monk’s outhouse in the Appalachian hills. I know who built it. He’s a friend of mine.
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FIRST/PERSON: Why I Have Four First Names
"They were both the most cussed, stubborn people you’d ever meet, my Dad and Mom, when they come together over something that stood them apart. “Both would not give up their position on the proper naming of you,” said K. “So, they agreed to disagree. And gave you all four names.”
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FIRST/PERSON: ‘A Wild Woman Love Story’
Once upon a time, a round-faced girl with curly hair and identity issues was told by someone (that genuinely loved her) that she was not "model pretty" like her sister but that she could be "mother pretty" ...
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FIRST/PERSON: A Turtle Rescue Out on Pluto Road
"The first time I tried to save a turtle on the move it peed — or pooped, I’m not sure which — in my truck. I had stopped when I saw a box turtle in the middle of Pluto Road one afternoon maybe ten years ago. I hit my brakes right there in traffic ....
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FIRST/PERSON: A few highly personal words on choice
"Three pregnancies. No choice in any of them. I have never chosen to get pregnant. I was foolish, I was sucker-punched, I was surprised. I was naïve, I was savvy. I wasn’t ready, I was ready. Such a basic right that everyone deserves. CHOICE."
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MEMOIR: Why ginseng hunters & trappers bearing bloody hides wanted in my house
One morning, I stumbled down to the kitchen when I heard a noise. There standing was an unkempt man holding bloody hides and smoking a cigarette. "Excuse me?"
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FIRST/PERSON: Traveling West Virginia’s backroads in the Byrdmobile
"I once worked for a man who had been an Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan — and I’m proud of it. Not because he was a Klan member more than three-quarters of a century ago, but because of what he became afterward ..."
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How the Russian army helped to nationalize my country of Ukraine
A Ukrainian exchange student who studied in Charleston WV, reflects upon the devastation he finds all around him and his family in Mariupol after the Russian invasion of his homeland.
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The heart-rending and oligarchic view from ‘Coal Country’
The incendiary, heartbreaking "Coal Country," a play drawn from interviews with survivors and family members of the deadly 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia, made a splash Off-Broadway. Here's a reaction to its staging for the first time in the Mountain State, 35 miles from where the tragedy fueled by corporate malfeasance that killed 29 miners occurred.
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FIRST/PERSON: On the streets in “the capital of pain”
There are mayapples unfurling on the banks of the Kanawha River in the darkness of West Virginia's capital city. There are humans sleeping there, too, on this cold and rainy April night, and we are among them.
