Month: August 2025

I love to tell the stories

The stories of the women I loved as a younger man are variations on an ancient theme: I came, I saw, and — I conquered? I wouldn’t put it that crassly, but that was the approximate theme. It was not a formula for lasting relationships for a variety of reasons, or maybe really one main reason.

The way I met Carol Jean, and now Mary, did not begin with physical attraction, although they were both very pleasant to look at. Those stories begin supernaturally.

In the case of Cj, I even had an opportunity to sample the old formula, because a local TV station visited her lab the day before as part of a story — she and her colleagues were in the B-roll, and, wondering which of the various women she was, “old me” only noticed the exotic-looking brunette and not the cute redhead.

That turned out to be God telling me the love of my life would be the person I could live with and be partners with, not necessarily the one who got my hormones hopping first.

I love to tell the story of how Cj and I met — she wanted to get rid of her two boxes of LPs, looked up “Green Bay Area vinyl collectors” on America Online, found me, we loved talking on the phone, and she ended up with 27 boxes of LPs but also someone willing to move them when necessary. God answered a prayer neither of us knew we had uttered.

I love to tell the story of how Mary and I met — she prayed for a nice man to keep her company after nearly five years as a widow, but I wasn’t looking after losing Cj 19 months earlier. After mustering courage from an Ella Langley song, she struck up a conversation after church and asked, “Do you mind if I give you a hug? Everyone says I’m a hugger.” It was a hug that changed the trajectory of our lives.

Both stories are variations on another old theme, and a healthier one: God answers prayer, and not always in the way we expect. We sang it in church the other day — “I love to tell the story, ’twill be my theme in glory to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love.”

The Living Stream

“Constantly changing, ever going forward, never repeating, each tree, each flower, each seed, each person, reflects a living, loving Creator.” 

Jens Jensen, “The Unfoldment” essay in The Clearing

It is infinite, after all, this creation of the Creator — every tiny bit of it an individual creation connecting, collaborating and contributing to the immense whole of it, in infinite combinations ever growing even greater.

The universe cannot be collapsing into entropy, because each living piece of it is “constantly changing, ever going forward,” as Jensen says. We are not competing for a finite scarcity because every day we are creating our own contribution to the All.

Love is the fuel and the catalyst.

Without Love, none of this happens, but Love is present and so everything does happen.

And make no mistake who and what Love is, the Source of All.

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The Clearing is one of the most amazing little books I’ve ever read. I’m so glad I revisited it now, in this fourth act of my life, as I embark on the rest of my mortal journey.

In the style of AI

Ai Author © Eduard Goricev | Dreamstime.com (AI generated)

In my morning surf I came across an article about how AI developers are concerned they’d be bankrupted if a class action suit moves forward, filed by authors unhappy that that artificial intelligence was trained using their copyrighted work.

I found myself thinking: Isn’t that how natural intelligence works? Wasn’t I trained using copyrighted materials? I’m pretty sure every textbook I ever absorbed had a copyright notice.

You can ask AI to, say, “Write a story in the style of Ray Bradbury.” That’s exactly what I sometimes do, consciously or unconsciously. We write stories imitating great authors until we develop our own voice. The thousands of news stories I wrote over my career mimicked the style of all the other news stories I ever read or heard or saw. The result may be “in the style of” that great author, but it’s in no way a violation of the author unless someone claims that author was the actual writer. 

Unless AI copies an author word-for-word and by doing so commits plagiarism, all it is doing is what humans have done since the beginning of time — only faster. This lawsuit is as if all the hand-crafted auto manufacturers sued Henry Ford for inventing the assembly line.