Writings and Reflections from a Life in Words

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David L Heaney

  • Literary
  • Politics & Culture
  • Theology & Religion

FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN

A Dying Marine from the hill country of West Virginia and the old time music that inspired him.

The Comforts of Ritual

Our best and most creative thinking comes not through disengagement but through engaging with the familiar- doing the dance we choreographed and have done for years...

Hidden Among Us

Hidden within all that is, exists a secret that longs to be discovered snd shared.

Autumn’s Brevity

Nature’s displays in both autumn and Spring are brief, if spectacular, and perhaps thankfully so. We can only bear so much beauty, it seems, before the sublime becomes mundane.

1969

...we have learned, hindsight is laden with intense grief because we cannot fully understand the present. Therefore our judgements of right and wrong are so often flawed. Beliefs about the rightness and wrongness of things evolve as we broaden our base of understanding regarding the complexities of any given circumstance.

BECOMING HOME

We have shed much to accommodate the demands of this move. And, to settle, we intend to create something unique and new…a work of art, if only in our eyes, that reflects the relationship between who we are and where we live.

The Choice of a Direction is Never Wasted

My aspirations have never come equipped with a GPS system. I zig and zag, maybe go in circles for a time. But ultimately, I choose a direction and I have come to believe that a direction chosen will never be wasted unless I have grown so arrogant, I ignore what it offers.

Why I Write

I write for an audience of unknown quantity, but one about which I harbor no illusions- it is small. I have wondered from time to time why I write if not to share my thoughts for others to read; if not to stimulate, provoke, or entertain an audience greater than one. Both those who read […]

Resolutions in the Gray

A week or so ago, I stood in my front yard watching a butterfly circling under a tree in front of the house. Over and over, it fluttered in one direction then seemed to circle back. It appeared, regardless of how hard it labored, it it ended up in the same place. When I stepped […]

The Protections of Childhood

I don’t remember how I got the knife, only that I had it and wanted to keep it. I do recall either unconsciously or as an act of defiance walking into the kitchen where my mother immediately spotted it and demanded I relinquish it to her. I wouldn’t. We lived in turn of the century […]