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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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: 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: 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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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.
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FIRST/PERSON: Choice words on Ukraine, Putin, Navalny & Zelensky
J. Michael Willard worked for Sen. Robert C. Byrd and Jay Rockefeller then went on to international career that landed him for years in Ukraine, where he raised a family. Excerpts from his thoughts on Putin's brutal invasion of the country where two daughters still live.
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Thich Nhat Hanh in the West Virginia Hills
The great Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh, who died this week, once led a retreat in the West Virginia hills in 1993. I was there with some friends, finding myself at one point serenading the beloved monk. Thirty year later, the retreat continues to resonate in the lives of those of us who went.
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10 Illuminated Thoughts About Life on Manchin Island
The stakes are high in WV senator Joe Manchin's Build Back Better gamesmanship. What happens now that he blew up negotiations — and now it looks like they're coming back together?
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The sink as a refuge of sanctuary & solidarity
'I am at one with a long line of the faithful, monks of Ireland, or Tibet, or France, silently preparing or cleaning up from the day’s meals, mindfully caring for community, or in readiness to offer hospitality.
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Teach your children well — but not what to think
'Your children are not your property. They belong to the future. You cannot make them duplicates of your opinions, values and habits. And if you did, life would soon break them, teaching them that the ideas and understandings of the last generation do not serve the next.'
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REVIEW: Channeling Dorothy Parker in West Virginia
Dorothy Parker was a figure out of a Dorothy Parker story. Fleshing out the life of the critic, poet, short-story writer and screenwriter after seeing her depicted in a fine new production of "You Might As Well Live" in St. Albans, W.Va.
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FIRST/PERSON: How COVID concerns ate my homework and (maybe) saved my life
Had I just been infected? Was he sick? It's a question we've learned to ask ourselves in this year and a half of plague. I had let my pandemic guard down.
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MEMOIR: ‘The Garden and the Grief’ by Connie Kinsey
Gardens usually signify growth and the boundless, restorative invention of Nature. Yet what happens when they fall into tangles as life's misfortunes overwhelm and distract us from turning their soil? Connie Kinsey's short memoir on on the dance between her garden and her grief.
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ELEPHANT ANKLES: Life with Long COVID
"This is a good day. I have been sick for months, but I did not die. I am happy to be here. I can do this, but I reserve the right to whine. I also reserve the right to be angry.'
