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Aug22017 by Jamie Dedes3 Comments

Of Writers, Spiders, and Everyday Life

On Facebook, there's a video going round that gives us a view of a spider at work on his web. As I was watching it - fascinated, though spiders are not my most favorite creatures - I thought how like a writer this little guy is. He starts to spin his web without a thread in sight. In effect he spins on faith. It's a faith very much like that of a writer when she picks up a pen or sits down at the keyboard. Often we writers don't know what the words will be, how the story will end, or what is the best cadence and flow for each subject we chose to address or the story we are inspired to tell through poetry or fiction. We proceed in the faith that the perfect word, the perfect ending, the perfect cadence will come to us. We have confidence (perhaps a shaky confidence at times, but confide...

Mar12017 by Jamie DedesNo Comments

Celebrating Sixty-Seven Years on the Razor’s Edge

"Life" Issues, disability, Family, General Interest, Healthcare, heart, inner peace, Joy, serenity, spiritual growth

"Rise, awaken, seek the wise and realize. The path is difficult to cross like the sharpened edge of the razor, so say the wise." Katha Upanishads, verse 1.3.14 SURPRISED TO HAVE MADE IT TO SIXTY-SEVEN In gratitude today, I celebrate sixty-seven years of life, forty-seven years with my world-class son, and sixteen years of survival beyond my medically predicted expiration date. In 1999, I was diagnosed with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) and given two years to live. (No, I have never smoked in my life.) Thanks to the boundless patience and kindness of my son and the compassion and good offices of an extraordinary medical team, I'm still here, sometimes home-bound and always bound to toting an oxygen tank. These complications don't keep me from enjoying the CitySon Philosop

Aug252016 by jrcowlesNo Comments

ISTP, ENFJ, MIC, KEY, MOUSE

"Life" Issues, Archetypes, critical judgment, epistemology, heart, Jung, mind, Mystery, Mythology, Psychoanalysis, Rationality, Skeptic, Spirituality, Statistics, Thinking, Wholeness

I spent just under 3 years as a full-time student, from the summer of 1998 to the winter of 2000-2001, getting an MDiv from the School of Theology and Ministry (STM) at Seattle University. In retrospect, I realize now that this was largely an egregious – and jaw-droppingly expensive -- waste of time. (I was on a "vocations" jag at the time. Long story ... ) With the exception of specialized courses like the single required course in Catholic canon law, I could have taught most of the classes I took, and I did teach one class – hermeneutics – in a secular context at a different school in a previous professional incarnation. But the single most egregious waste of time in this almost-3-year-long Death Valley of wasted time was the time my fellow students and I spent taking what I have co