Crossing Nebraska

This may be a challenging post for many folks. So, let me just say right up front the words that I really want to leave you with – before anyone has the chance to get angry or offended: Let’s forgive ourselves. Let’s forgive each other. Let’s strive to do better. Okay, with that out of the way, let me begin again. One of the more interesting questions to be posed of any of the candidates this campaign season is whether or not they would kill the baby Adolf Hitler if they were somehow given the opportunity to go back in time and locate the infant evil incarnate. Certainly it’s an interesting question to pose for the array of answers it might elicit. Most interesting, though, is how the question itself reveals how many of us think about the nature of evil. Evil is “out there.” It’s a dark force that the hapless might stumble upon. It takes up residence in someone such that they then become evil. It’s a conscious entity of some sort – like Satan, for instance – that active...

My childhood was magical in many respects, but especially so for having fostered in me such keen awareness of the wonder of the natural world. Though we lived in a fairly developed suburban area, the family backyard opened onto a woodsy tract that has been with me either in reality or in reminiscence since I was old enough to venture beyond the confines of our little garden. Ostensibly, that plot of land was the plant cultivation area for a nearby garden supply retailer, which is why we in the adjoining neighborhood simply referred to it as ‘the nursery’. For all practical purposes, though, ‘the nursery’ was so infrequently tended and so overgrown that I experienced it then as I experience wilderness today.     A woodsy scene very reminiscent of 'the nursery'     A walk through ‘the nursery’ was a walk through a crazy-quilt of vaguely planned habitats stitched together and overlaid with whatever weeds and wildflowers and  woodland succession pla...