Home is any four walls that enclose the right person. ~ Helen Rowland

After about a month enjoying good company, good food, fresh air, sunshine, and excitement in Las Vegas I’m finally back home in the garret. Some say that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. And, that if you can’t enjoy yourself there you can’t enjoy yourself anywhere. All I know is that home is where the heart is.

Jack Collier

It is better to travel well than to arrive. ~ Buddha

There is a beauty about travel that should be appreciated in the moment, and not lost because we are really looking forward to enjoying our destination and all the joy that holds. However, I haven’t been feeling at my best for a little while, and it’s obvious to everyone that I need a little help. It has been easy for me to get stuck in a barely-coping rut in my own place ~ widening my horizons may be a needed step on the road to recovery and rehabilitation. And I can no longer carry the wight all alone. Ergo, tomorrow I am heading off to spend a little time with a close friend. Relaxation, sunshine, good food, and a feeling of safety and security should do me the world of good. That means that I am looking forward to my destination a little more than I am expecting to appreciate the 5,500 mile journey. Nonetheless, I need to be fully present to travel well, take care of myself, and arrive safely. Thank you all for the good wishes, love, and kind thoughts you have expressed to me.

Jack Collier

We are so deeply interconnected that we have no option but to understand all. ~ Amit Ray

Alone at the edge of the ocean I learned that there is a fundamental rightness and an interconnectedness in all things. The key and meaning to everything and everyone, of all friendships, relationships, and all love is right there before us if we only but open our eyes to it. Find that key, discover that one and only thing, the lever that moves the Cosmos, and it all begins to make sense. Suddenly we see, not the one meaningless piece of the jigsaw puzzle, but the whole and entire picture in all of its colours and meaning and beauty. This Easter Sunday I am no longer trapped in the raucous noise and clamour of bright flashing lights, the shouting voices, the misery of Purgatory. I know that I have come truly alive. I have a glimpse of the unknown unknowns.

Jack Collier

What remains in diseases after the crisis is apt to produce relapses. ~ Hippocrates

Something happened that brought back the bad way I was feeling a month or so ago. Perhaps once upon a yesterday I did something wrong and I am paying for it today, suffering the bitter fruits of my unknown and unknowing misdeeds. My soul is lost in a long dark tunnel to unhappiness. My body hurts all over, the headache is a little bit worse than it was, I am weak, weary, anxious, fearful, and depressed. It would seem that I am having a bad relapse back into the beginnings of my recovery and rehabilitation, when all was dark, gloomy, and endless. I know that I should not be brought down by a single day, I should not retreat back into the bottom of a bottle, and nor will I. Recovery is a long struggle endlessly moving forward, day-in and day-out. I believe that I will recover and get well from an illness that has been dragging me down for most of my life. The life-threatening accident I had was only the first step on the road less traveled, the first faltering steps out of the darkness. Things will be better, for every cloud has a silver lining and every storm has a bright rainbow.

Jack Collier

There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself. ~ Raymond Chandler

Every day I am just a little bit better than I was the day before, but that is no guarantee that my path will always be upward and onward. I need to avoid the traps and pitfalls that I have set for myself along the way, the missteps and wrong turnings that would lead me astray. Around about two months ago I had set a deadly trap for myself by drinking too much, and the injury I suffered would have killed most people who don’t have a thick a skull as I. The traps on the road ahead are different but more dangerous; avarice, envy, jealousy, lust, and unrealistic expectations of others, all of which would lead to resentment and anger. To stay out of trouble I need to find within myself a measure of self-awareness, self-control, and humility. I do not believe I can do this alone, but I will prevail with the help of my friends. I will also need luck ~ lots of luck.

Jack Collier

Love is like a butterfly, chase it and it will fly away. ~ Toni Sorenson

Surely only a good man, or a fool, can truly say that he loved not wisely, but too well. And a man hopelessly in love is certainly a fool, for unwise love is the truest love because it wants naught but to honour the beloved. Mayhap his love was always destined to be unrequited, for although he knew she did not love him, he adored her in spite of that. The hardest thing in life is to let her go, to relinquish what he thought was real, because to hold on will undoubtedly kill any breath of friendship between them, just as to grasp tight a butterfly will extinguish its delicate ephemeral beauty.

There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, to write another book or simply close it. ~ Shannon L. Alder

Jack Collier

Change is inevitable. Growth is optional. ~ John C. Maxwell

About six weeks ago the faeries came and spirited the old me away to leave someone else in my place. Or, someone cracked my skull and in the maul and bruising of my brain the delicate electrical circuits got scrambled and rearranged. Whatever happened I had no choice in the matter. It was not up to me to decide what kind of person I would be when I came to again. I am not the same man I used to be long ago in January. Some changes are probably good; I believe I’m kinder, more tolerant, more accepting and understanding, less judgmental. Some things I’m mostly indifferent about, such as being disinterested in manly pursuits like booze, gambling, sports, pornography, and appearing macho. And, some changes forced on me I see as downsides; being fragile, vulnerable, sensitive, empathetic, intuitive, and sociable. Then there’s the real crap stuff; constant headaches, struggling to put spoken sentences together, word blindness, paranoia, and disassociation. Or it could be that this is normality and all that went before is naught but a fevered dream.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new. ~ Socrates

Jack Collier

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary… ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Ever since I banged my skull and suffered an injury to my brain, I have been weak and weary. I’ve worked it out and that’s 40 days and 40 nights of suffering, and wouldn’t you think that I’ve wandered lost and alone in the wilderness for long enough. It seems not. As best as I can discover I could expect another couple of months of a slow and frustrating recovery and rehabilitation. And, as far as I can tell there are no short cuts, there’s no softer and easier way than working as hard as I can every day on my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health and well-being. The medical types don’t really know why there’s always a period of confusion, weakness, and weariness after a brain injury, and they don’t have any magic pills and potions to short cut the time it takes to get better. Of course there’s medication I can take for the constant headache, and I’m attending counselling to help me get to grips with reality, but it’s mostly all down to me, patience, and steadfastness. I need to believe I can do that.

Jack Collier

God’s church is not a stage for us to perform on. ~ Michael Horton

Here in this Sceptered Isle we have been blessed with the Church of England since Henry VIII fell out with the pope in 1534, although Christianity has been here since the 3rd century when we were still a Roman province. I was christened and confirmed into our Established Church, and for many years I attended divine service on a regular basis. I was nominally a High Church, Anglo Catholic, meaning I preferred the classical liturgy and the King James Bible, which in itself dates back to 1611. I fell out with God and The Church some years ago, but until recently I had huge respect for the institution and its clergy. However, because of the current church hierarchy’s obsession with the extreme edges of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion, any respect I once had for Christianity has gone. That the Church of England is now urging its parishioners to stump up a billion pounds, ($1,250,000,000), to atone for slavery is a almost perfect example of what is wrong with the modern church in Britain. Up with this virtue signalling, secular dross of Mammon, I will not put.

(Michael Horton is a theologian at Westminster Seminary in California)

Jack Collier

Thou canst not think worse of me than I do myself. ~ Robert Burton

Thinking back it’s hard for me to find a time that I liked myself. Often I would hate who and what I was, I would never believe that I was good enough, attractive enough, nor smart enough for anyone else to like me or for any decent woman to love me. And so I tried to find ways to cope with the animus of self-loathing. At times I turned the anger, aggression, and resentments around and inflicted them on a friend who’s only crime was to care about me. There were extreme mood swings, I became highly stressed, from time to time time I entered into very toxic relationships, I could be obsessive and narcissistic. I found that resorting to booze and drugs to take away the pain isn’t a good idea. In fact that last almost killed me when I got so drunk I collapsed and cracked my head open ~ concussion, buckets of blood, brain swelling are not usually beneficial. Except for me they were. First we must realise that self-loathing is not our fault. We have been treated so badly that in order to merely survive we started to believe and take on board all the bile that was spewed at us. We were hurt and damaged by others; parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, bullies, husbands and wives….. We lived in torment. Usually to recover and rehabilitate from the serious mental disorder of self-loathing would need months or years of therapy, counselling, psychiatry, with appropriate medication along the way, (Prozac for example). Luckily for me a sharp crack on the skull cured my mental problems. Luckily for me it didn’t kill me.

Jack Collier