By Wayne Allensworth The ghosts of Christmases past are still very much with us. I’m quite thankful they are, for those “ghosts” remind us of a time that was less sterile and less fragmented. So, it’s no surprise that the proponents of “progress” have made war on those ghosts and on that particular holiday. Tom Piatak has done great service in his efforts to note and counter what...
By Wayne Allensworth I had to be careful. The ornaments were wrapped, each one in tissue paper and some of them were very old. I had dropped a couple of them and they shattered. As brittle as dried leaves. Their skins had grown thin as they had grown old. Christmas ornaments collected by my mother over time. So many Santa Claus ornaments, old St. Nick in his jolliest attire, thick beard and...
By Wayne Allensworth A light in the night sky on a prairie horizon. A falling star passing through a deep blue firmament that phases ever so subtly to lighter shades of blue bordered by a wisp of cottony clouds. The red orange hues of the setting sun. Stark tree limbs seem to reach for the star on a smoky autumn evening. Let your eyes stay riveted on the star as long as you can see its proud...
By Wayne Allensworth I was taking a walk on a cool morning. Fall had finally arrived after a blistering summer. Live oak limbs made a canopy over the path, and their long shadows trailed across me, with little breaks between the limbs where the smoky autumn sun shined through. And then out of the corner of my eye, I saw a butterfly’s shadow tracing its way through the limbs, and I looked up and...
By Wayne Allensworth I was strolling around the campus of a major state university not so many years ago. Along the way, I committed what has become a cardinal sin in our brave new globalized world—I noticed something that stood out like a man in a three-piece suit in a 21st century supermarket. What I noticed was that the student body didn’t look very American. I saw lots of representatives of...
By Wayne Allensworth In Act 3, Scene 2 of King Henry IV, part II, Shakespeare’s grand comic knave, Falstaff, reminisces about old times with his friend Justice Shallow, particularly a memorable night more than 50 years in the past. They recall a woman, Jane Nightwork, who, like Falstaff and Shallow, has fallen victim to advancing age, as time flows on, and the chimes will eventually toll for the...
By Wayne Allensworth I can’t remember exactly when AIDS became a big media scare back in the 1980’s, but as noted earlier, 24/7 cable news needed material to crank up what became a constant festival of horrors. CNN had to have something to talk about, and the emerging globalist managerial elite needed crises to justify the extension of its power over us. Anthony Fauci was auditioning for his...
By Wayne Allensworth In his magisterial books The Master and His Emissary and the two volume The Matter with Things, the brilliant polymath Iain McGilchrist argues for a world that comes into being via an interactive process between embodied consciousness and the Other—what’s out there, or, as the case may be, others, other people. He believes that relationships precede the relata. I’ll be...
By Wayne Allensworth Over the Rainbow…Everybody remembers Judy Garland singing that lovely song in The Wizard of Oz. The song was written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg specifically for Judy to sing in the movie. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. After Toto snaps at Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton), Judy as Dorothy wonders if there is any place where there is no trouble. There must...
By Wayne Allensworth Gretchen Peters is another fine musician you may not have heard of. Born in New York City in 1957, Gretchen Peters found her way to Nashville in 1988 after living in Boulder Colorado in the 1970s, where she had played in local clubs. She has written songs that became hits for country stars such as Martina McBride, Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless, and George Strait, as...
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