I just got back from hiking a small part of the Appalachian Trail, and Lo, my whole life is close to turning upside down.  I definitely have some thoughts from the trip I want to share with you, but they will have to wait until other matters get sorted out.  In the meantime, here is a piece of doggerel I composed on my final day, when the dehydration had really taken its toll…

A spring day in early May
The morning sky was pale,
Two groups of campers came to hike
The Appalachian Trail.

One group were time-worn veterans,
Strong and tough with age;
They’d climbed these hills for many a year,
They were old and hard and sage.

The other group was young and strong,
As taut as well-bound rope;
With anything that came their way
They knew that they could cope.

They both set out from upper Georgia
North towards Tennessee,
They only wanted to hike a bit
And enjoy the scenery… Read the rest of this entry »

Over a year has passed since my first post on spiritual weight loss, and it has been, frankly, extremely difficult — and at times harrowing. At first, things went very well; but then I began to lose ground — slowly at first, and then rapidly. In the spring, my health quickly became much worse, and I began to fear that I had serious problems.

But let me be clear: this was not because the spiritual weight loss program was failing. On the contrary — without the principles of the program to guide me, I would probably have been a lot sicker, and I certainly would not have made the complete turnaround and nearly-full recovery I achieved in July.

But I’ll begin at the beginning. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1997 I was in graduate school, and I was coming to that dreaded point where you have to decide on a dissertation topic. I enjoyed linguistics, and there were dozens of topics I could have chosen; but whenever I asked myself, “Is THIS what I want to study the rest of my life?”, I had a sinking feeling that I was a terrible fraud, and that I was in the wrong place entirely. I didn’t know what I should be doing, but graduate school just didn’t seem right anymore. What should I be doing? What was the purpose of my schooling? What was the purpose of my life? Read the rest of this entry »