It's been nine months since I posted here?!  That tells me I'm overbusy.  I generally post when I have time to reflect and no time for reflection is bad ( Read more... )

It's so much darker
when a light goes out
than it would have been
if it had never shone.
--John Steinbeck

“Do not ask your children ( Read more... )

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. ( Read more... )

I am just home. The man who died was in his early 60's. He has three children. We were on the Farmlands section of the White Salmon. I am not accustomed to feeling completely useless but there I was unable to save a life. Many of us there unable to save a life, only 6 feet from shore. We were still trying to get his body free from the log ( Read more... )

( by April Bernard )

He was 68 years old. He died in hospice of melanoma, which was discovered last year in his brain. He never recognized the skin lesion. He was one of my original paddling buddies here in Portland, a retired engineer and a budding Buddhist. He loved his wife and their home by the Washougal river, where he could watch osprey and otters. His hospice ( Read more... )

Kindness ( Read more... )

The relief of suffering and the cure of disease must be seen as twin obligations of a medical profession that is truly dedicated to the care of the sick. Physicians' failure to understand the nature of suffering can result in medical intervention that (though technically adequate) not only fails to relieve suffering but becomes a source of ( Read more... )

He didn't last long after stepping down. ... ... Lighting a candle.

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This is his 2005 Commencement address at Stanford where he tells three stories from his own life. His parting words: Stay hungry, stay foolish.