Witt's End

Spoken word is strange. Without a way to catch it, record it, what happens? It disappears. Forever.  Airwaves and vibrations dissipating as quickly as they appear.  For centuries, millennia we only had one way to record thoughts. Words. Language. We had to write it down.  We say we can hear the voice of those long past. But we can't. As much as I love the written word it misses so much. Inflection and tone. Breath. Accent. Vowels and consonants.  If only we could have a way to lift that from the written pages of yore. To hear their voice.  The closest is probably music right. Staff paper, notes and lyrics. Maybe that's what's makes it so magical.  I don't know.  I just wonder. What the voices of the past really sounded like. And how we can be sure.  To catch the fleeting thing. The thoughts, the feelings, the moments.  --- There's a reason Shakespeare has had more staying power in the public conscious than Thomas Wyatt or Edmund Spenser. Chri...

Too often us humans tell ourselves that religious participation will solve all of our problems. That all of the resources we need are in one place. But are they? Is church truly the place that fix all of our temporal and physical needs as well as the spiritual? Does it have the resources required to do so. I'm not sure.  This may be the ultimate expression of "I need prayer and my medication" I've ever written. Because I am seeing more and more how different aspects of my life need different helps and attention.  There was a time where I tied my mental health to my spirituality. But that has changed. Mostly through experience. Now I view them separately but impacted by each other. Both because I've needed to address my mental health. And because I channeled it into a career.  I love my current role in my career. I'm passionate about it. Being able to help people on recovery is a massive aid to my own recovery. I love being able to have access to literature and...

 I've been looking into violence, domestic terror, mass shootings, suicide, and murder rates and all that since about 2014. And started looking into it a little earnestly in 2020. A couple college papers helped focus that. Working in suicide management also kept that focus alive.  I'm not an expert. This isn't a primary research topic. I just have done a lot of research, and I think it's important we look at data at times like these. And also expand our scope of what we are looking at beyond the past week. Or even 12 weeks.  First we need to note that political violence is part of our historical and modern fabric.   https://www.thebulwark.com/p/a-history-of-violence-17a?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true Second political violence while common and consistent in our history is still rare.  https://www.cato.org/blog/politically-motivated-violence-rare-united-states But it is rising. It is becoming more common over the last decade https://www.csis...