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Everything I Know About Being Polish

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  I’m an American with a Polish surname, but I am not very Polish. I don’t speak any of the language beyond a couple words, or know any of the folk dances and many of the traditions. I have for years maintained that everything I know about being Polish could be contained in a small essay. Here is an attempt at the essay. For starters, in my mind, there is no color in Poland, or in the early days of the Polish-American experience. That’s because all the pictures I have of my grandparents and their parents are in black and white. I think most people readily admit that their memories and imagination are affected by media, especially the media of photography and film. This has had both a lamented and lauded effect on the way we think. Lamented, because we cannot help wedding an image to our thoughts impacted as much as or more than the magazines, movies and television we have seen, to the point where we can even wonder if what we remember actually happened or was something we saw in
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The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancey

This book was very provocative and moving for me. Truthfully, I'd like to re-read it, but I want to get some thoughts "on paper" while it's fresh in my mind. The Jesus I Never Knew is Yancey's ruminations on the life, personhood, teachings, and, most of all, I think, the context of Jesus. In particular, Yancey wants to push back on the assumptions he and other Christians at large make about Jesus as we continue to try to study him and, importantly, follow him. It's not a deconstruction, it's a challenge to our conventional ways of thinking about him. I was struck in the book by how Yancey encourages his readers to contrast the Jesus we have come to know two centuries after his death and Resurrection as the wise, sage-like and revered religious leader and how he was more likely encountered in his own time: unless I'm misreading, more accurately in his day a backwoods hillbilly not taken entirely seriously, at least at first, by the people to whom he mi
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Gin Season

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  It first occurred to me there are more than four seasons when I worked in advertising. Part of my job was to plan the digital and social content for our clients, figuring out what those brands should say to its target audiences throughout the year on Facebook, Instagram, in blogs. Sitting at my desk in my office after 5:00, sipping bourbon on ice, I realized that, for me, the year didn’t really begin on January 1. It began on September 5, when my kids went back to school. To me, that was a more significant manifestation of a new year. Sometime after that I learned the traditional Chinese calendar , shared by other Asian nations, has 24 seasons called solar terms, two a month, and that each recognizes a shift in nature, usually related to agriculture. For example, early March is the Awakening of Insects, when those creatures, alerted by spring rains, come out of hibernation. In September, the first transition from summer to autumn is called White Dew, a change in the color and ple
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As a writer, I have three minds, and one of them I don't like.

Before I explain what I mean, a little background. I've been a writer all my literate life. I'm 51 now, and for the last 20 years, I have not been writing as consistently as I could, because I've been so distracted by a rewarding but often turbulent career in PR and advertising and caring for a beloved, profoundly autistic child with a high degree of needs. During that time, I was still writing and, blessedly, having pieces published in Kendo World magazine, but I was not practicing writing as I think it can or should be: writing consistently with some kind of daily or weekly regularity, and submitting stories, my focus, to online and print publications. That's what I am getting back to and the past two years have been fruitful, disciplined and productive. I have in large part my employer to thank for that , and I do so every day. It's been somewhat surprising for me to realize how much of your intellectual and emotional energy can be absorbed by your job. But that
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