bierkergaard

We are a world that is preoccupied with steps, formulas, and strategies, to enhance our lives, reduce our waist size, grow our bank account, and inculcate happiness ad naseum. Spiritual alchemy, potions, and tricks. Self-help runs rampant like a bull on the streets of Pampalona. That which gores us, self-help, is supposed to save us, if we can just figure out the right way to run. Technique triumphs Truth, or more accurately Truth is a process and not a destination.  The Devil specializes in distraction unto destruction. Just one more book, show.       I have likewise yearned for answers that I could employ for my betterment. Yet, the older I get, the more I see that just because I can imagine my life a certain self-pleasing way, hardly means that it will become what I want. And I should often not even want what I want. The bull runs as it desires, not according to my plan, but  by forces beyond my control and mani...

I was just raking the leaves out front of the house. It looks like the three Birch trees have recovered from the assassins parading as aborists three years ago who turned the trees into naked goal posts. The leaves this year came on like a deluge. I snapped my rake handle half-way through the job and spent the rest of the time raking with a tool more suitably sized for a hobbitt. Nonetheless, I finished the job stooped over. Raking the leaves reminded me of when, as a kid, we would drag the leaves from our gigantic oak tree out front, to the ravine down the block. The really cool thing was that after enough of our neighbors deposited their leaves in the huge gulf, there was a cushion of ten to fifteen feet on the floor of the ravine to absorb us jumping youth like leafy pillows. We would get a running start from twenty feet or so and rev ourselves out into the air and for that brief moment of weightlessness, whe...

The Civil War is still with us. It has just changed and we don't recognize where it came from and what needs to be done to reduce the divisions in society. Up until industrialization, most Americans were farmers (including slaves) or in occupations related to farming (tradespeople, textiles, etc). With the advent of tools, techniques, and technology, society was able to get ahead of the curve of fighting for daily food. Because in pre-Civil War America, people had their hands full with mere survival, politics was mostly local. We didn't have the means or the time to create vast structures to develop public policy. Federal Powers were directly enumerated. There were disputes between the Jeffersonian and the Hamiltonians on how powerful the Federal branch of the government should be. Yet, over time, local government was the responsible agent for most of the laws of the land. But, slavery posed a question of jurisdiction that tore at the fabri...