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To Live or To Expiate

Expiate — To extinguish guilt or to atone In his essay, Self Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson says “I don not wish to expiate, but to live.  My life is not an apology, but a life.” Let’s live today.  Let’s pause and recognize this moment is different from the previous one and different still from the one yet-to-come.  From our bones and from our Soul, let us express this moment as who we are without apology.  Let’s decide to be ourselves fully.  Let’s speak what is ours to give voice to and be quiet where it doesn’t matter to us. Let us do what is ours to do and let others make their contribution with equal conviction. I often speak to the “how” one lives their life and the “what” one does through their life’s actions when officiating a memorial service.  These are two different ways to examine a life.  For example, I can Google my father’s name and pull up a portfolio of his work left behind.  This is the “what” is done in life.  And then there...

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My Dad

My dad, my three-day old sister and me at age three Happy Father’s Day to all you dads out there!!  Today’s blog is to pay homage to my father. Babe Ruth hit his 700th home run the year my father and his twin brother arrived.  His family lived in a dirt-floored home complete with outhouse in rural Oregon. A wood stove would attempt to keep his family warm in the winter, although the cold would often win.  The only plenty in his family was love.  Poverty and Eagle Scouts principles would become my dad’s greatest teachers. By the time I was born, my grandparents had built a comfortable living for themselves, literally.  My grandfather was a carpenter and built the beautiful home they lived in on the outskirts of vast farmland in  Beaverton, Oregon.  This is where I ate my first lemon cucumber picked ripe from my grandmother’s side-of-the-house raised garden bed and where I learned to ride horses. This land would be sold off a little at time with streets...

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