Go KU!

It is hard not to get caught up in the excitement of March Madness when you live near Lawrence, Kansas. Even though I seldom can hold still long enough to watch a KU basketball game, I am excited about the buzz in the air that settles over Lawrence every March. It is harder to focus on work this time of year. I want to start digging in the garden, I want to salute the hardworking men and women who make our St. Patrick's Day parade an incredible success that showers needed funding on local charities, and I want to watch basketball.

While trying to decide what to call my new blog, I was thinking about what traits I would want assocaited with me; What words embody my feelings about my life. I started humming the Kansas state song, "Home on the Range", one of the few state songs known by people from outside of the state that claimed it. I tell people I stink of Kansas, that I have it all over me. This is the kind of thing you can't wash off. It is part of who you are, and Kansas is a huge part of who I am, and how I function on this planet. The history of Kansas includes sordid tales of anti-slavery "free staters" and pro-slavery folks who lived just 10 miles down the road. Burnings of Lawrence, midnight raids to Missouri, the memory of which still feeds that particular college sports border war, and Lawrence rising from the ashes (our city seal has a phoenix rising from flames) to be rebuilt and remain the capital of liberalism in Kansas. Strong and brave pioneering men and women who brought so little with them to a prairie so vast. And a beautiful people - the people of the South wind - whose land they unwittingly took. Unitarian Univeralism was here through it all.

Fighting for the rights of African Americans while we helped trounce the culture of the American Indians who were already here. I know we meant well, and we helped keep Kansas a free state as it entered the union, but it just reminds me that we can't always see the big picture of our time on this planet. The first ever fortune I got from a fortune cookie was "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

In case you don't know my state's song, here it is:

Oh give me a home, where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play.
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.
Home. Home on the range. Where the deer and the antelope play.
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.

Learn more here: click for cool info on the state song

I hope your skies are not cloudy all day, and that you seldom hear a discouraging word. And that you find some nugget of usefulness in the time you spend here with me.

Be well.