Love and Brotherhood

Within our lives, it is clearly most important to have love and to be loved. Love can exist in so many different ways..... spouse to spouse, parent to child, child to parent, sibling to sibling, friend to friend. Each type of love is a true and very spiritual.

Sometimes I am envious about the passion and the ease at which my oldest brother (Frumpy Professor) lives life. He is able to weather storms and day-to-day worries with an ease and humor that I sorely lack.

A case in point that he has been chiding me about much of the last 10 years is pipe smoking. My brother is a consummate, proud, and vocal pipe smoker. He has a deep passion for the activity and is happy and content in his life that includes pipes. For me, it is a much different story. I do not usually talk about this subject, but I too am a pipe smoker, although I am not comfortable with that designation. For me, smoking a pipe is a beautifully spiritual event and yet, I have looming fears about smoking a pipe (health reasons), and I am exceedingly uncomfortable being labeled by society as a pipe smoker. Unlike my brother, I smoke only perhaps 2 - 3 times a day. Also, I never smoke inside my home or my family's vehicles. I also do not smoke in the presence of my children. There is a part of me that is ashamed, I believe. Ashamed to smoke, ashamed to smoke but be furtive about it, ashamed that I do not have the backbone or stamina to live life as "large" as others seem to do with ease. I believe that my discomfort stems a) from being from a different generational mindset from my brother (he is significantly older than I am), and b) from a general meekness I have had in my personality my whole life.

I am not sure why I am writing this today, but it is as I have written, and it has always been this way.

Konrad

TMJ

TMJ which stands for temporomandibular jaw syndrome causes pain and discomfort to occur through grinding of the teeth and misalignment of the jaw.

I have had TMJ since I was a teen, and I have used bite splints to help prevent me from grinding my teeth while I sleep at night. These splints have greatly reduced the pain, but the underlying condition remains and very little can be done to treat it.

I have chewed through four different bite splints over the years. I think that stress has a large component in whether people grind their teeth or not. I wish I did not feel so much stress, and I am not sure why I feel such stress whereas other people do not. I am very much a stress ball and feel stressed most waking hours. Yet, I have many relatives and friends who are similar to me in terms of day-to-day activities and responsibilities, yet they do not feel as much stress as I do.

I wonder if there is some sort of inner, perhaps genetic, component to being stressed.

Konrad

St. Francis of Assisi

A poor man who inspired the Roman Catholic Church by literally working towards LIVING the Gospel. He did not not in the way of the typical fundimentalist Christian but instead through following the whole of the teachings of Jesus and living a live of service to others.

He is the patron saint of animals and the environment, and I consider him an inspiration along the same vein as Rachel Carson.

I hope in my daily life that I more towards more closely resembling him.

Konrad

Who Will Read This?

I am still getting started here and trying to find a "voice" for this site. Just getting ready for the start of the school year. I did find a very interesting vegetarian cookbook today for my wife. It is perhaps 800 pages but each page is about the size of an index card. There are photographs of each item. They all look good.

Konrad

Interesting Reading

I have recently began to re-read William Least-Heat Moon's novel "Blue Highways". It is a semi-autobiographical fictionalized but close to reality book about the author's travels through small towns and burgs in the United States. I read this book first when I was 23 years old (That is 17 years ago! 40 seems so old!) and it inspired me to travel. It is bringing up similar feelings as I re-read it.

Konrad