psychology dector

A thousand lifetimes ago, I believed with all my heart that I would be a musician. The impulse began in childhood with the accordion, and later, the piano and percussion. It took me halfway through college as a music major to realize the music life was not for me, but I was left with some indelible memories. One such memory occurred when I was nearing the end of my freshman year in high school. The year was successful, and I felt as if I had found my niche in the difficult hierarchy of secondary education—not an athlete, but I had a front row seat at all the football games, and I was part of the percussion section, the coolest subgroup within the band. In April, the band traveled to San Antonio, Texas for the annual Battle of the Flowers Festival , an event that commemorated the much-mythologized siege of the Alamo during the Texas War of Independence in the 1830s. We arrived in San Antonio for some sightseeing leading up to our performance on a Thursday evening at an open air stadium ...

It is a city on the edge of forever. Endless desert, empty and dead, even on the holiday to resurrection. My family has lived here for generations. My great-grandfather and grandfather built a cabin in Bouquet Canyon in the early 1900s, and we used to go there for long weekends when I was a child. This is where we would go deer hunting and fishing . Here in the sands among the Joshua trees are my roots. Joshua tree: Yucca brevifolia , a monocotyledonous tree given its more Biblical name by Mormons who crossed the Mojave in the mid-1800s. Whenever I travel to Mojave, I am reminded of Jesus’ forty days and nights in the desert, tempted by Satan. It is Easter and we are driving out Highway 14. The temperature is still mild, even for late April, and heavy dark clouds hover in the sky with only patches of blue and thin, wispy strands of white. All of this skyscape indicates a low pressure system moving out to make way for a high pressure system later in the week, where the winds will kick...

“The tide rises, the tide falls, The twilight darkens, the curlew calls; Along the sea-sands damp and brown The traveler hastens toward the town, And the tide rises, the tide falls.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Longfellow was writing about the east coast, but he just as easily could have been talking about Carpinteria, California. Eighty miles up the left coast of the United States along Highway 101 sits the hamlet of Carpinteria. Incorporated in 1965, Carp, as some of the locals call it, is named for the Spanish word for carpentry, mainly because of the Chumash Indians . They had a thriving canoe-building business in the area long before the white man arrived. The Indians used the natural tar vents bubbling to the surface in the area to seal the canoes they built. The area is a sleepy small town, perfect for a getaway, for the weekend or the day. Carp is home to the fiftieth largest oil field in California, the Carpinteria Offshore Oilfield , and I cannot help but think of the possible...