In the picture above, I emerge from one of  Greenwood, Maine's Ice Caves.  These geological curiosities supposedly owe their existence to glaciers that passed over this area.  As they ground their way south, they fractured the southern crest of this hill, ripping it apart.  The glacier would have carted the rocks and boulders off to the south, and surely intended to.  But an episode of decidedly non-anthropogenic global warming intervened.  Forward movement halted; rapid melt and retreat ensued.  The broken rock and loosened boulders fell in a heap, settling unevenly back onto their original site. The resulting ill-fitting jumble of building-sized rock presents the visitor with deep, serpentine channels and crevices to explore.  Well into full summer, remnants of the previous winter's load of ice lie in cool, dark pockets among phosphorescent mosses.

I find that, at 63, my life resembles this pile of broken rock.  The jagged peaks of youth can weather and wear in a variety of patterns.  My pattern finds its nearest parallel in this jumble of large rocks, ice and phosphorescent mosses.  Life has not so much worn and weathered me smooth; it has not ground me down.  Rather, life went and fractured my youth’s rock-hard certainty of mind and selfishness of heart.  The resulting cracks and gaps have collected a hodge-podge of ideas, memories and experiences.  In those deep crevices, rare mosses of perspective, point-of-view and opinion wait for some visitor's flashlight to call their graces and eccentricities to attention.

Newly retired, I find myself poking around in my own long forgotten cranial cracks and mental recesses.  What you see here represents my efforts to catalog, index and cross reference some of the more interesting bits of ideas that collected there.  I invite you to wander at your leisure.

So, turn your hat round backwards (cause the bill, extended frontwards, obscures your view of painful rock outcrops lurking just above your head), take hold of your flashlight and come on in! 

A well-cracked mind waits exploration.

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