Why this is here…
This website is founded and bounded in tradition, passion and, mainly, love.
Some 20 years ago or so, at a time when I was still a relatively recent college
graduate, I began my own Christmas holiday-time tradition by replacing
annual greeting card send-outs to family and friends with more personal,
handcrafted, heartfelt messages and poems. One such sample and example,
for your exploratory pleasure, appears near the end of this webzine.
In early December of last year, about the same time I was diagnosed with
colo-rectal cancer, I had concurrently began jotting down notes and working
on a new holiday message-poem that I had entitled Soul Rising. I enjoyed
thinking about it and working on it here and there, as bits and pieces of it
would come to me at various times and I was constructing it little by little,
peacefully.
When I learned of my health diagnosis the usual fear factor associated with
the very word “cancer” never kicked in with me because I had years earlier
researched and published a series in my own newspaper, Active Voice, about
some of the history and politics involved with cancer and related treatments.
I decided for myself to stay away from what I considered to be barbaric
conventional treatments and embarked on putting together my own selfinduced healing therapies, compiled and programmed from various trusted
and well-researched sources and references.
As time moved on and I continued with my therapy, and also continued
working at my manual job, construction on Soul Rising grinded to a halt and
it was left uncompleted in my computer files, although bits and pieces of
concluding segments for it continued to stir in my head, with the goal of
completing it and sending it out when I was fully healed.
Loving nature and the outdoors, I began a backyard project in the Spring of
2013 in order to stay active and also to stay close to the inspirations of the
trees, the birds, the deer and other wildlife around the property, the sunshine,
and God. I began implanting rows of wooden, beam/posts as a pathway
through which I would eventually create a walk-through arbor. Visions had
been circulating within me regarding this idea from many explorations I had
over the years while on trips to historic sites and gardens around the country.
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