A long and Winding Road

A Most Consequential Meeting The main theme of Milan Kundera’s book, Life is Elsewhere, is the notion that the grass is always greener on the other side of the street. That is, that we might be happier someplace else instead of the place we actually are. I live in İstanbul but the circumstances around how I came to…

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The Mainstream Media

The Problem In the past few years, news media outlets of all sorts have come under increased attack concerning their reliability. Viewers and readers of the news on both the left and the right accuse the other side of presenting “fake news” which increases our suspicion of what is actually real or not. Of course, a lot of…

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FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND CANCEL CULTURE

A Case of Poor Judgement It seems like not a day passes lately that we don’t hear a new example of how cancel culture is inhibiting the free exchange of ideas. Most recently, I learned of how Whoopi Goldberg had been censured by The View due to some misinformed statements she made regarding the Nazis’ view of race….

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Happy New Year?

  Overwhelmed by Bad News I am generally a positive person; that is, I choose to be positive because it seems much healthier than the alternative of negativism. Nevertheless, I am not a Pollyanna and my positive outlook is tempered by a great respect for science and realism. So at the beginning of 2022, after enduring the past…

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THE SECRET LIVES OF THINGS

BEING THANKFUL I am a big believer in expressing gratitude and appreciation for the blessings in my life and feel this sentiment should also include being thankful for mundane things. I don’t have a lot of them but I appreciate everything I have. I am thankful for my bed, pillows, and blankets, for instance, as well as the…

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THE BLAHS

LIFE IS ELSEWHERE One definition of existentialism is that it’s a loathing of repetition. This has stuck with me over the years, as I’ve tried over and over again to prove that the grass IS actually greener on the other side of the fence. Thus, I started out on one path in university before taking a four-year break…

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Letter To My Son

Love Child I read once that a child born of lust has an undeveloped soul. So at the moment of your conception, I focused the full intention of my love into the act that brought you into being. It’s interesting because your mom and I had been trying to conceive for many months before that one, fateful, late…

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THINKING ABOUT FOUNDATION

A Rush of Traffic I was on the balcony listening to the not too distant sound of Istanbul’s rush hour traffic going by, and started thinking about  the multitudes of people being carried along, the energy of the vehicles themselves, and the many branches and interchanges of the highway. The traffic racing down the E5 was making an…

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MY DREAM JOURNAL

Dream Power When I first came to Turkey back in 1994, my life was in a bit of a confused state. Around that time, my roommate lent me a copy of the book, Dream Power, by Dr. Ann Farady. It describes a way of looking at dreams devoid of all the symbology of conventional dream books, where instead…

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Podcast Interview

Check out my interview with Lisa Tucker on The Borderline. Just click the link.  https://theborderline.ca/michael-wray/

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