The articles below are just a few collected, and chronically arranged, ruminations on a wide range of topics, published here with occasional irregularity. This collection of ruminations is just getting started for now, but may hopefully become a more active personal trend, as might the appearance here of additional brief missives as well, from time to time.
Life is sometimes however filled with "interesting times", times that have the ability to generate all manner of distractions and diversions from one's primary aspirations, goals and even life purposes. Sometimes such distractions and diversions intrude to the extent that just trying to maintain course becomes an aspiration in and of itself. However, since beginning active content production for this website a while back, content production provides a sense of fulfillment that seems likely to become infectious.
After quite a period of time, it is surely notable that this website and its contents, here at www.marilynperry.com, has now been updated, with an entirely new theme, new styling, and hopefully, a fashionably refreshed appearance. This personal website update and refresh has actually been in the works for a significant period of time. However, for whatever reason, whether explicable or inexplicable surely, even from a personal perspective, the development copy of my Marilyn Perry personal website rebuild sat waiting, waiting for review, waiting to be checked to see that its features were working, waiting to be waited upon. Then, without any reasonably explicable basis, a day arrived, the day arrived, when it seemed like the day, that day just days ago, to run the automated script to publish the development version of my Marilyn Perry website to its public domain here at www.marilynperry.com, so that the global internet, colleagues, newcomers, friends, enemies, and strangers, all alike, might access and consume this website's contents anew.
Only yet more time, possibly even significant time, might determine, what and how much newly created content will appear here. But for the optimistic, including myself, such future days may be upcoming in the very near future, or so that would surely be a delightful happenstance indeed. There are of course these present days of worry here on our planet earth, during which it seems as though many people are hoping very much for the best upcoming days, for days that provide the best for everyone, the best for our entire planet, and the best for everyone and every living thing, entity, being, and life, that surely strives to thrive here on our spaceship earth, hurling around our giant fusion reactor in the sky, while orbiting our galaxy's central core, which, along with every other galaxy are all hurling themselves outward as our 'verse (likely just one 'verse within an infinitum of multiverses), marking the small increments of time, when compared with the measures of the lengths of time that comprise the largest of such measures, and the most significant milestones on that scale of existence, especially when compared with an event such as this website having been updated, however enjoyable and satiating that passage might be.
Thank you for visiting this website, my Marilyn Perry personal website, and enjoying the information and content shared here at www.marilynperry.com. Marilyn Perry
At a time when many Americans are arguing about the United States, as some Americans quibble about whether or not America is "great", or possibly even qualifies for some other adjective, it seems that something obvious has gone missing in the related controversies. The observation that seems missing from the controversy is that apparently people who currently live in other parts of the world still consider the United States to be a wonderful place, a fantastic place, a "great" place. Part of what can currently be observed at the southern U.S. border is that thousands of people from other countries have been willing to walk, yes to walk, thousands of miles, with the mere, and possibly vain, hope, of trying to get into the United States of America, to live in the United States.
The people at the border don't seem to be concerned about possibly disliking the current U.S. President. The people clamoring at the southern U.S. border, trying to get into the United States, don't seem to mind that they might be tear gassed by border police as they try desperately to scale the border fences and "walls" that already exist along the border between the United States and Mexico. While the fake news mass media seems concerned with all sorts of other details, it appears to be fact that the United States is a place that people from all over other parts of our planet earth find attractive enough to give up their existing lives entirely, to discard their lives elsewhere completely to try to come to the fabled country known as the United States of America, to try to start over and to try to create a new, hopefully, American, life, in these United State of America. Why has this clearly essentially important observation about how the rest of the world perceives the United States of America, a place once fabled to have "streets paved with gold", gone missing from the current controversies and debates about America's southern border?
Thank you for visiting this website, my Marilyn Perry personal website, and enjoying the information and content shared here at www.marilynperry.com.
As Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has taken up the 1968 song "America", by Simon & Garfunkel, as the slogan for his Presidential campaign • • •
That high taxation, heavy government regulation, administrative bureaucrats doling out "free stuff" paid for by a pixie dust magical wealthy "other", forced civilian disarmament, notion of the United States, is not the America I was thinking of when I first heard the song - America - by Simon & Garfunkel while I was still a child in 1968.
Hearing the lyrics, "to hitch-hike from Saginaw", while living not too far from Saginaw, and thinking about the lyric • • •
"They've all come to look for America"
was an America I thought I already had, and an America I dreamed back then was one that my childhood peers and I could and would nurture from the conceptions of fairness, equality, and most importantly of freedom, I thought we had in our visions of America's future.
In 1968's "Age of Aquarius", I was hoping that my brother wouldn't get drafted and sent to Vietnam to possibly die for - I don't know what - with an M16 machine-gun in his hand. In 1968, I was being acculturated to believe that we wanted government out of our lives. In 1968 we wore peace symbols around our necks, spent our weekends at rock music concerts listening to political anthem songs about our ideals, and discussing the related issues of the day on our way home. In 1968, just as I hope I can today, I quite seriously thought I didn't have to "look for America". In 1968, I thought of great importance for our future was the protection of an America we already stood for back then and hopefully still believe in and stand for today.
In response to the Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign ad, Art Garfunkel has expressed a much more dystopian view, but a view in line with my own long term perceptions of his song. In response to the Sanders campaign ad Garfunkel said recently that, “We never knew who we were. We’re still working out what Alexander Hamilton was working out. How do we fuse in becoming United States of America and not southern planters who want states’ rights? In the very Constitution, we’re working out the fusion of the nation. We’re still doing it.”
No matter who takes the oath of office as U.S. President on January 20, 2017, I'll be wondering whether the rest of us Americans will have to squint to "look for America" as the "America" seems to be getting squeezed out of what remains of the fabric of the once supposedly inalienable rights, comprised of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, among other things, I already thought was, and is supposed to be, America.
Thank you for visiting this website, my Marilyn Perry personal website, and enjoying the information and content shared here at www.marilynperry.com. Marilyn Perry
I saw a rainbow this afternoon.
It was a huge rainbow.
The rainbow I saw was bright and wide, and very nearby.
On one side of the afternoon sky, a dark and swiftly moving cloud was approaching from the east. At the same time, the afternoon sun shown brightly across the sky, out of the west, from beneath the clouds. The sunbeams radiated across the sky from the west, at an angle that brightly lit the dark cloud above and the sky below it. Although the afternoon was sunny where I stood, the large rain droplets falling from the approaching cloud were clearly visible. There may have even been bits of sleet among the early winter day's raindrops.
As the sunlight created a prism against the falling rain in the not too far away distance, the sun’s rays produced a large, intense, rainbow with a wide rainbow stripe. The rainbow had perfect colors and perfectly even stripes. The outer edges of the rainbow were a glowing purple, as though the rainbow was on fire with a purple gas flame halo. A little later a brief winter shower arrived, as heavy raindrops fell at an angle against a breeze, accompanied by a mixture of melting sleet. The rain, the sleet, the breeze, and the sharply brisk seaside air, were just as bracing and invigorating as the sun and rain in the distance that created the rainbow to the afternoon sky just a little while before them.
Although the science of rainbows is quite simple, and easily replicated; seeing a huge rainbow in the sky is an experience that seems almost like a form of magic when observed. Happiness sustaining wonders like this rainbow await, within the moments of every day of every human life, available for free to anyone who takes the time to notice them.
learning … revelation … altruism … enlightenment
Thank you for visiting this website, my Marilyn Perry personal website, and enjoying the information and content shared here at www.marilynperry.com.
More often that one might expect, as life's gears grind against each other, the age old adage, “the best laid plans …” applies quite directly to trying to live life as a human being on our planet earth, and more importantly to trying to make progress with work on one’s primary life aspirations. It often seems as though one’s very life plans must include provisions for the seemingly inevitable intrusions that nearly invariably arise to lead one’s plans astray. One can only hope as well that such distractions and diversions don’t also lead such aspirations asunder. There comes a threshold however, beyond which it becomes clear that life, and one’s associated time left to live this wonderful human life that we each have, are limited resources that must be marshaled expediently, before one’s passing decades expire.
Recently though, just when it seemed like the resources were in place for me to focus efforts on a major project, a set of immense, unexpected, diversions arose. Despite my every effort to minimize the extent of their impositions, these recent distractions have intruded formidably on my time and my attention. One of the few saving graces is that it has been possible, although at considerable expenditure of time and effort, to obtain reasonably beneficial outcomes with regard to disposing of at least some of these recent intrusions, at least thus far. However, as much as wishing otherwise would be wonderful, these distractions don’t appear as yet to have concluded their disconcerting intrusions. Thankfully, time will tell though, and with hoping for the best of hard won fortunes, the moments will arrive when all these recent distractions and diversions will have finally subsided. What these various recent diversions and distractions have brought forth as well, are reminders of the level of fortitude that is required: to refocus, to redouble, to constantly re-energize; and remain steadfast, no matter how tempestuous or torrential external disturbances might be or might become.
One source of strength though, are my many valued memories of times when it has been possible to focus on a major project with gratifying results. It is a joy to have times in life when life’s minuscule tasks can be completed without interfering with one primary aspirations, whether immediate aspirations or longer term aspirations. Sometimes though, constructing that sort of scaffolding to bolster day to day living requires an ethereal form of intangible wealth in and of itself.
With well crafted plans, with daily rhythms that encompass both the seeming mundane aspects of human life, task by task, and the loftiest of activities as well, it will hopefully be possible for milestones of accomplishment to approach at some soon to arrive juncture. Meanwhile, forging ahead daily has been an important watchword, helping me to raise the level of life’s music above the level of life’s background noises.
Thank you for visiting this website, my Marilyn Perry personal website, and enjoying the information and content shared here at www.marilynperry.com.
