Shocks and Aftershocks

At 6:58 p.m. on April 16, as thousands of people were doing what they normally do on a Saturday night and as tourists ready for dinner filled restaurants in towns along Ecuador’s Pacific coast, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck, changing thousands of lives forever.

In Pursuit of Big Pain

James Baldwin, the great African-American novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet, once reflected on the pain the artist has to face, and wrote these words:

“And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain…”*

A Turn of Events

I got my first set of golf clubs at age 11 after my dad had given up fishing and started taking me to the course. I fell in love with the game. It has now been 19 years since I have been able to play, but I still love watching on a day like Sunday when the pros were hitting their shots with the dogwoods and azaleas of Augusta National in the background.