New Beginnings

I retired from thirty-three years of practicing law on April 3, 2015. Among the many hopes for the gift of time now given to me is to use this space more as a true journal. When I wrote my first young adult book more than fifteen years ago, my then publisher suggested I create a website as a means of promoting the book (and my self). But I wonder if this space can also be a tool for more than just the selling of my books and my self. Is there a way to approximate here the simple sincerity and open exploration that takes place when I write in my own journal? Writing in a website can never be pure, true journal-writing because there is always the possibility (and expectation) that someone will read what you write and the whole business of wanting to impress and be seen as special seeps in through the written word no matter how hard you try to shut it out. Nevertheless, I would like to try to write as much as possible from my true self. My true self is who I am and not who I often present to others, not the false self that seeks to sell all that a false self seeks to sell in its communications and dealings with others. So my hope is to write here in this space more frequently out of my true self (as much as I can ). Who is my true self? The person I see when I’m alone and I look fully and honestly, the one I do my best to love and accept. My true self is the person for whom you are never a means to an end. I would like this journal to serve as a place where I explore the phase of life I am now entering. Explore what? T.S. Eliot writes in Four Quartets at the end of East Coker:

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.