As a high school principal, I often sought out smaller alternative gatherings and workshops that dealt with building meaningful communities, whether in neighborhoods, schools or corporations, rather than attending the larger conferences and conventions for educators and school leaders. At one such event offered by the Bali Institute for Global Renewal in 2006, one hundred… Continue reading Remembering Desmond Tutu, 1931-2021
Month: December 2021
Planet of the Apes
Evening entertainment in an Alaskan Arctic village during the summer of 1972 was scarce; I usually played my guitar or read. So, when the mail plane dropped off a feature film, even though it had been released four years earlier in the Lower Forty-eight, I made sure I got myself to the old Quonset hut… Continue reading Planet of the Apes
Open Door Klinic
In my prior post I featured the late photographer Stephen Cysewski and the influence his images of Alaska in the 1970s had on my writing. His photo of the Open Door Klinic at the top of this post became the memory trigger for this excerpt from Hardship Alaska. Here I’m recalling the second of two incidents… Continue reading Open Door Klinic
Stephen Cysewski
In 2013 while doing research for Hardship Alaska, my upcoming memoir about serving as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, I came across a website featuring hundreds of photographs of Alaska. Of primary interest to me were those from the 1970s capturing life in Anchorage, the state’s largest city, and Point Hope, a small… Continue reading Stephen Cysewski
Touch Hands
Sometimes words, whether a poem, a lyric or a piece of prose, can touch us immediately upon hearing them and stay with us forever. This happened to me during a Christmas Eve service at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Monmouth County in Lincroft, NJ in 1983. I was serving as the church’s music director, so… Continue reading Touch Hands