HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN A REPRESSED FEAR HAS FULLY EMERGED?

Penned last summer, posted today:

At times when my processor feels disconnected from completing a simple task

Tis not a matter of 'finding time' but rather a matter of intuition alerting

My think tank to bide its time until a relaxed sense of mental readiness has been

Regained after a surging emergence of suppressed emotion has

Broken through my wall of denial, releasing a flash of insight, illuminating

A deeper truth that I’ve managed to hide from my conscious self until
My brain’s intuitive powers, sensing a growth spurt, which advances 

My current stage of mental development another step forward, alerts
My processor’s sense of readiness to identify, confront and

Resolve yet another inner conflict, which, being unidentified, disempowered
My processor’s conscious awareness from understanding its chaotic state of
Disarray so as to have rendered my think tank to confounded to confront
This specific, fear-based dilemma that proves in need of
Deeper contemplation than had been possible when anxiety had overwhelmed

My smart-hearted intelligence from peaceably accepting a reality that proves

Classic and universal to all people, everywhere, concerning the fact that

No matter how youthful the mind remains and the spirit feels

The human body continues to age, stage by stage, and with that

Reality weighing heavily on my conscious mind, due to
My advancement through this present stage of my life
No amount of Ohhmmm has been able to relax my processor to
Switch tracks from fear to optimism, concerning that which
Lies in wait dead ahead, and as long as those
Subconscious rumblings of what’s bound to come
Seep like silent joy killers into my semi-conscious mind
My heightened sense of self awareness feels unable to reclaim
Its mindful sense of balance, suggesting why the time is ripe for
Intuitive intelligence to stimulate my inner need to call forth
Creativity while penning this post in which
Today’s train of thought is about to conjure up
Anothet simple three step plan in hopes of calming anxiety by
Jumpstarting my processor’s proactive sense of optimism:

Step one—Offer my processor’s present state of anxiety
 the soothing patience that I'd graciously gift a friend.

Step two—Clearly choose to set this complex task of conflict resolution aside until natural waves of emerging emotion no longer threaten to overwhelm my conscious mind's peaceful connection to logic.

Step three—Repeat steps one and two until conscious thoughts of completing this complex task match my calmed sense of internal readiness to openly confront the frightful nature of this unrepressed, newly revealed deeper truth, which, having managed to slip out of subconscious storage, has startled my conscious sense of self awareness with need to muster the courage and humility necessary to disempower this fear of reality from scaring my think tank into inaction, overlong

And now that my intuitive powers have outlined my processor’s three-step proactive plan of inaction until readiness overcomes my fear of openly and fully confronting a reality that all people wrestle with whether our brains tend toward positivity or negativity concerning one's own death, we can see that today's organized train of thought suggests that my connection to logic is only disrupted when thoughts of the death of a loved one overwhelm my mind with subconscious awareness of the fact that I, too, as well as many of my loved ones have advanced into the fourth stage of life, suggesting tis not the simple task that remains undone, which has been in need of clear-headed contemplation, but rather the flood of complex emotions, which threaten to erupt like a rip tide pulling my conscious awareness ever so deeply into a turbulent ocean of fear, suggestive as to why my mind floods with resistance each time I ask myself if readiness to accomplish any simple task, peacefully, is mine, and now that intuitive intelligence hath spotlighted that last flash of insight illuminating my rebellious state of mind, tis plain to see why any thought that's not nearly as meaningful as this task, which threatens to tap into a deeper truth that my defense system feels need to stuff behind my wall of denial, suggests my need to confront this next fact as well:  If the mere thought of completing a simple task threatens to expose emotional reactions too potent for Ohhmmm to appease then my intuitive intelligence must beseech my sense of compassion to draw forth as much patience as proves necessary until my rebalanced sense of clarity has calmed my fear of calamity so as to steady my think tank’s readiness to reconnect with my spirit's healthy, heartfelt, natural sense of go-ahead ...

Ohhmmm ...

Ohhmmm ...

Hmmmm ...

No green light, as of yet ... so perhaps the primary (negatively focused) fear that's exacerbating my current sense of inner conflict, which stops me from reconnecting with my sense of inner peace, has not yet fully emerged ...

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

I'm thinking that the post above was written soon after my brother-in-law's death in August.

I'm thinking to know why this post was 'randomly' plucked from drafts, today ...

I'm thinking that my 74th birthday is exactly a month away

I'm thinking that time flies by so quickly as to offer me a birthday twice a year!

I'm thinking of how my body tires though my spirit thoroughly enjoys a playdate with Ravi

I'm thinking that my sense of reality can no longer deny that my body ages, every day ...

I'm thinking that each birthday sweeps me closer to ... OY VAY!
I'm thinking that reconciling with the reality of one's mortality is far from easy!

I'm thinking that my intuitive smarts have need to redirect my conscious awareness toward my good fortune on an every day basis, because there's no time like the present to appreciate every moment shared with loved ones, which at this stage of my life naturally comes my way due to the fact that what goes around comes around, and as long as my mind remains trained upon an intuitive line of reasoning as positively focused as this one proves to be, hopefully, insight, illuminating fear of what the future is bound to offer up, will be placed on a back burner freeing this light-hearted moment's sense of optimism to ignite my spirit's flagging energy level to lift to full mast for as long as my power of intuitive intelligent reminds the conscious portion of my mind to seize each day by concentrating most often on my personal sense of good fortune.

Seriously, I have good genes in that my dad, who lived to eighty-seven, and my mom who celebrated one hundred years with family and friends, both experienced good health much more often than not all the way to the very end of each one's life, suggesting my betting on the optimistic possibility of enjoying good health over this last fourth of my life span that lies straight ahead as long as my brain's intuitive intelligence continues to release flashes of insight spotlighting my inner need to identify future uprisings of repressed inner conflict so as to quell the emergence of subconscious anxiety in short order.  Whew!

This growth-in-self-awareness stuff is a tough job; however, when it comes to balancing my brain's emotional reaction with logical thought processing intact, I've learned that no one can achieve that knowledge-based feat for me but me!

During hard times when anxiety spikes, people are always saying:
Take good care of yourself
But very few tell you how best to accomplish that feat for this reason:
For the most part, those offering caring advice have no clue as to
How to accomplish that feat for themselves ...

COME OUT COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE

This post, penned last summer, was retrieved from drafts, today:

When considering need to switch tracks away from ineffectual (self-serving) leadership, intuitive thought suggests that nations throughout the world have been rudderless for so long as to call upon the universal spirit to sprinkle mankind with a rebalanced sense of objectivity in time to make haste, because we, who populate our planet, have not one precious moment left to lose, and though patience is a virtue, I respectfully challenge people the world over to empower your voices to choir up with mine as together we implore effective leadership to come out, come out, wherever you are, because the human condition has need to rally round a voice, empowered with astute intelligence that far outweighs the ego residing in The White House, which proves so braggadocios as to be more consumed with tweeting than leading the populous toward a safer tomorrow ... Ohhmmm

Being drawn toward anything relating to that which influenced the thought processes of my favorite authors, I recently read  MOCKINGBIRD SONGS by Flynt Wayne, whose narrative describes Harper Lee's family upon whom the characters in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD were patterned, and I quote:  “Decades earlier, during the civil rights movement, the mayor of Eufaula had asked Louise (Harper Lee’s sister) to serve on a ... committee ... called Community on the Move. This five-person group had been started by a black woman Louise knew who was concerned about education, racial divisions, and drug trafficking in their town. Louise, asking the committee founder what she could contribute to the effort, was told simply, 'You have a white face.' Some local folks would have been offended by such tokenism. Louise agreed to serve. She and the other committee members met twice weekly, ate together, discussed community problems, and tried to make the town better. Her black friend began stopping by for coffee, a small act of personal friendship in most places but a racial blurring of the color line in civil rights–era Eufaula.”

In another passage, Wayne goes on to say:  “Citing her father as inspiration, Louise explained to us that he had been ... a man of honor and personal decency, attuned to his duty as a community leader, one who treated all people fairly and with respect, though he was not liberal, self-righteous, or ostentatiously religious.  His Methodist upbringing had persuaded him ‘that the Kingdom of God was as much concerned with justice in Alabama as with heaven in the hereafter.’ Although he did not endorse the civil rights movement as early as Alice (another sister) and Nelle (Harper Lee’s nick name), he moved more rapidly than most white Alabamians.”

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

This description of effective leadership speaks of character traits missing, not only in our current president but in our self-serving Congress, as well ... and so I repeat:  Our nation has been stuck between a rock and a hard place, overlong, so wherever effective leadership may be hiding from public view, ‘tis time to come out and lead the free world toward safely leaving our homes with family and friends without fear of being blown up or gunned down ...

HELEN AND RAVI

Yet another postrecovered from last summer’s drafts:

"Helen Keller was an author, lecturer, and crusader for the handicapped. Born physically normal in Tuscumbia, Alabama, Keller lost her sight and hearing at the age of nineteen months to an illness now believed to have been scarlet fever. Five years later, on the advice of Alexander Graham Bell, her parents applied to the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston for a teacher, and from that school hired Anne Mansfield Sullivan. Through Sullivan’s extraordinary instruction, the little girl learned to understand and communicate with the world around her. She went on to acquire an excellent education and to become an important influence on the treatment of the blind and deaf."

While re-reading the paragraph copied from Wikipedia, above, can you spot which fact proves most enlightening when considering how insight serves to heighten a person's intuitive awareness?  (in sight)

I'd never have perceived of the hypothesis that has shaped up inside my head, overnight, had I not spent the past two years utterly mesmerized by everything Ravi's bright young mind soaks in, week by week, suggesting that by the age of 19 months, Ravi's mental awareness and sweetly inquisitive nature had actively absorbed a wealth of sights and meaningful sounds so as to have stimulated our sunshine child to parrot back more of our words, actions and behaviors than we, who make up her doting family, can believe as each of us marvels at the charming nature of this small child's eagerness to fill the mental capacity of her processor from morning to night by absorbing and storing everything she sees and hears within her memory bank (and if you ask how I know that which she understands at this fledgling stage of her mental development, I'd reply:  All one needs to do is to listen to her precocious questions, verbal responses and see how her fully animated, facial expressions and reactive body language mirrors our own.  Way before the age of two, Ravi’s facial expressions and body language naturally matched her emotional reactions each time she chose to say:  I happy!  I sad.  I berry mad!

Has your intuitive perceptiveness begun to catch my drift?
During Helen’s first nineteen months of life, her earliest interactive mental memories of sights and meaningful sounds had been recorded within this bright child’s brain, if not consciously, subconsciously ...

Below, let's consider several photos of Ravi (At least 1,500 have been stored within my computer's memory bank—uh—I mean hard drive, over these past two years), each of which shows us a toddler experiencing small slices of family life between the ages of one and two, starting with Papa's 74th birthday, last year and ending with Papa's 75th birthday, several months ago.  In addition to learning how to play hide and seek before she turned two, Ravi exhibited as much delight in hugging, kissing and tickling her adoring family as we adore hugging, kissing, tickling and interacting in any way with her.  Over this past year, this bright, lovable child, whose inquisitive intelligence has been readily absorbing a fledgling awareness of need to tether natural demonstrations of frustration by asking for help, has, without question, chosen to activate her membership in our family's mutual admiration society.

Imagine a small, happy, well-loved child seeing, hearing, participating in and thoroughly enjoying immeasurable demonstrations of love and countless aspects of daily life within the time frame of one year only to awaken, one day, from illness, that had stolen much more than her hearing and sight, leaving her confounded state of mind feeling utterly alone with no clue as to how everything and everyone could have disappeared without a trace or heartfelt explanation as darkness, silence, loneliness, frustration and confounding fear were Helen's only companions for five years—except, thank goodness, for the fact that the human brain automatically absorbs and stores everything that has been seen, heard, experienced and felt within subconscious memory, and here's where the importance of heartfelt, intuitive association comes into play, advancing Helen's stunted learning process by way of employing hindsight's illuminating flashes of insight:  Once the knowledgable, compassionate teacher appeared, Anne Sullivan's creative, interactive talents jumpstarted Helen's thwarted mental development, resulting in hot wiring her hungry, eager, young mind to adapt to 'seeing and hearing' and loving by way of 'touching and feeling' ...

• 150

MY PHONE AND I

This post was recovered from last summer’s drafts:

Several dear friends and extended family are struggling with serious illness.  And along with comforting them, I've had to soothe my own empathetic reactions by resetting my sense of optimism to focus on my personal sense of good fortune.  And that simple plan works until the phone rings, again, and my mind, absorbing distress in need of venting, responds with natural reactions so empathetic as to necessitate my initiating a repetitive plan in hopes of recharging my spirit right after replacing my landline in its charger, at which time I conscientiously push a reset button on my forehead, which recenters my processor’s focus upon the good health of my immediate family, and each time my spirit's sense of optimism plugs into today's personal sense of good fortune, my smile's wattage senses sound reason to sparkle up.  At my age it’s of value to note that this plan will only gain in importance as the future unfolds.  Gosh.  I'd not intended to pen more than the first two sentences, suggesting that coming up with proactive plans is my thing but brevity is not ...

DO YOU KNOW THAT YOUR SPIRIT HAS A CHARGER?

This post, penned last summer, was recovered from drafts, today:

What's a body to do when the spirit's charger plays hide and seek?

What's a body to do when expending the mental energy necessary to buoy the spirit's unexpected lethargy finds the processor wrestling anxiously with deeper truth that feels so scary as to have been defensively deleted from conscious memory during childhood?

What's a body to do when the spirit stages a sit-in until the processor, freed of yesteryear’s fear of worthlessness, calls forth a lion’s share of courage, thus empowering intuitive insight to flash through your conscious mind, revealing emotional reactions that a confounded child’s hold onto sanity had need to forget?

What's a body to do when all of the above (catching your conscious mind or mine within its grip ) proves true?  Well, if you're me, you listen to your body’s wired weariness alerting you to give your conscious think tank a rest by believing in your power of intuition’s ability to pull a simplistic plan (like the one that's currently emerging from my proactive intuition) out of a hat, and once the plan ripens to fruition then you direct the conscious portion of your adult processor to follow the bouncing ball, step by step:

Step one
Reconcile with your processor’s current inability to stabilize spiritual serenity

Step two
Direct the conscious portion of your processor to tolerate a build up of inner tension throughout your body until your brain, grown weary of struggling with the confounding nature of unresolved inner conflict, begins to coast, as though all on its own, toward a much needed rest station where your decision-maker will remain fallow until you can sense your growing belief in your intuitive powers readying the rest of your brain to take that positively focused, proverbial leap of faith toward jumpstarting the good health of your body’s main source of spiritual energy (OPTIMISM), which lights the flame that ignites intuitive insight to deliver inside information to your conscious awareness, so that, one day, you hear yourself exclaim:  OMG!  Here it comes!  That primitive memory of emotional turbulence that felt so traumatic as to have scared me half to death, believing myself such a bad child as to feel utterly unworthy of love (however, if an over-reactive adult tries to punish my self worth so severely, today, I know to sit my defense system in time out before opening my mouth so as to make sound use of my processor’s self assertive voice to call forth the emotional maturity necessary to calm down the fury of yesteryear’s authority figure, because fiery tempers and long, hard, icy stares are not as scary to the self respecting person whom I’ve grown to be, today, as had been true of yesteryear’s subservient child.

Ever since I learned that the defense system is programmed (before birth) to shut down the neocortex’s ability to think smart on the spot as soon as anxiety feels reason to spike (leaving only the survival instinct free to choose to fight, freeze in silence or flee for your life) I decided to make good use of my Line of Self-Control to tame my defensive reactions so as to strengthen my processor’s connection to logical solution seeking acuity whenever anxiety based in conflict erupts.  And ever since I’ve come to respect my hard working brain’s intuitive power of insight, the conscious portion of my brain remembers that loud voices are just loud noises, and icy looks aren’t daggers that can kill me.  Whew!

In summation of step two, the offending memory that makes us lose our cool does not need to be one that has been secreted from conscious awareness.  The offending memory can be one that has long been in need of objective reprocessing so as to stop your defense system from pumping an over-abundance of adrenaline into your bloodstream, thus decreasing your intake of oxygen, resulting in heightening your sense of anxiety as soon as any aspect of a current situation stimulates yesteryear’s mental connection to childhood fear to erupt.  In short, it’s wise to discern whether spiking anxiety is caused by a reflexive eruption of yeateryear’s unprocessed, subconscious fear rather than a near and present danger closing in, today.

Step three
Once this subconscious fear has been identified and objectively reprocessed, it’s highly likely that this change for the better will take place within you:  You may feel as surprised, as is true of me, every time your processor, releasing that offensive memory for further review, reacts like a well oiled machine, releasing a gum ball down the shute into your waiting hand as if eruptions of yesteryear’s inner tension are no longer empowered to scare your bright mind into retreating into silent submission as had been true when uprisings of anxiety, based in your  feeling guilty of human imperfection so horrific as to infuriate an over-reactive adult, who had shamed you so severely as to have shattered your fledgling sense of personal safety during your youth ... and with that intuitive train of thought clearly stated, let’s see if you too can heal yesteryear’s emotional wounds, still festering subconsciously, by choosing to believe that tolerating your anxious reactions is smart, smart, smart, because each time your brain wearies of inner conflict, mental exhaustion will alert the conscious portion of your processor to take a much needed rest, and once your processor feels relaxed, your intuition will power up, clueing you into your need to grow ever more aware of secreted guilt, trying to filter out of subconscious storage through a crack in your wall of defensive denial, which had blocked your conscious processor from switching tracks from solutions that are not feasible toward freeing up intuitive trains of thought, which, upon kicking in, offer your tuckered out conscious mind flashes of insight, which, strung together, act like a set of keys that unlock one door after another in your memory bank, suggesting that each flash of insight will spotlight a negatively focused aspect of the punitive nature of the inner conflict that has been prohibiting your flagging self worth from rising full mast, and as your undeserved sense of shame dissolves, one insight at a time, your mindful absorption of self respect continues to strengthen until you, like me, will come to place such a high value on your brain’s intuitive ability to guide the conscious portion of your mind toward solution seeking plans that prove so successful as to ready your healed sense of self esteem to voice your suppressed heart’s desire to your conscious self.

Saturday, November 4, 2017
Hmmm ... I can see that Step Three may be in need of simplifying ...

Once again, I can’t recommend Orhan’s Inheritance (a novel, penned by an author, whose fabricated characters emerged from the factual tapestry of her beloved grandmother’s personal history), highly enough.

WHY SO MANY BBBBBBBBBBBBBB’s?

This post, written sometime last summer, was retrieved from drafts, today:

If there's one thing life offers in

Abundance to one and all

It is puzzlements, left dangling, that make us

Scratch our heads as if scratching will reveal
Answers to riddles buried deeper than
Conscious memory can readily recall, and
With that intuitive insight swinging in the air like
A vine ripe with grapes enticing our minds to thirst for

Answers to riddles stored deep side your mind and mine

Let's consider the universal wisdom inherent in

Taking leaps of faith toward offering

Each other's quirkiness the benefit of

The doubt concerning that which intuition

Compels each of us to say or not say or do or

Not do that may not seem to make sense to
Anyone who thinks to know us well ...

You see, each time we consciously place our

Defensive reactions aside in favor of

Listening ever so closely as to identify
The underlying emotion that

Drives a person to say or do ‘this over that’

We’ll encourage the concept of cooperative teamwork to

Advance forward, one step at a time, and

Having clarified the fact that today's

Intuitive train of thought is meant to convey

The value of consciously and consistently

Redirecting our mental energies toward seeking

Something of value to land upon rather than

Freeing our defensive reactions to

Make much ado about nothing,  I must admit to

Feeling somewhat stymied as to what today's

Intuitive train of thought is guiding my conscious mind to
Grow aware of, next, suggesting that when in doubt about
One’s own or each other’s mental process

We may both do well to agree to follow this rule of thumb:

As soon as a sense of confusion confounds our

Conversations, we’ll choose to make good use of

Our time and mental acuity by employing positively focused
Emotional energy to direct our preprogrammed
Defensive reactions to si in time out so as to consciously reboot

Our brain’s good natured, objective sense of emotional equilibrium in
Hopes of strengthening our fledgling connection to

Solution-seeking serenity by reminding ourselves that
Life is short and time waits for no one to emotionally mature in regards to

Learning to acknowledge and accept the human brain’s personal

Foibles, and if we can learn to feel amused at how quickly a bright brain can
Get caught up in a web of emotional confusion then by laughing at
Ourselves, we who laugh together instead of trying to best each other will
Laugh best, and knowing that today’s post may have aroused your sense of

Confusion (which left unresolved may gve rise to an eruption of
Defensive frustration) let’s choose to switch tracks, right now and
Practice LOL followed by Ohhmmm ...

Thursday, November 2, 2017

If there are no coincidences then I find it of interest to note that yesterday’s post (also recovered from drafts), welcoming Turkmenistan, was retrieved and published the morning after I finished a gripping novel situated in Turkey.

I also find it of interest to note that today’s post (penned last summer) concerning setting defensive reactions to confounding situations aside, was retrieved from drafts two days after I finished this gripping novel in which emotional secrets are empowered to arouse defense systems on both sides to dam up open pathways of thought that would have freed three generations from remaining tethered to yesteryear’s narrow belief system, blocking one generation after another from dissolving spiritual loneliness by way of participating in conversations, resulting in unlocking every heart to embrace each other’s undying love, releasing lost souls from remaining stuck in a sad place, forever ...

It’s as if my intuitive powers knew exactly when to retrieve these two posts from drafts, which, having been written months before reading this novel, had naught to do with confounding eruptions of muscle tension that have been seeping out from subconscious storage, intermittently,  over these last three weeks (fortunately, I’ve learned that muscle memory precedes conscious awareness of emotional memory, which is still processing toward the surface of my mind ... suggestive of why we so often hear:  listen to your body.

Twas not until today that I had more than a clue or two as to why my body has been signaling my conscious awareness to remain alert to the fact that something has stimulated subconscious irritation to filter through a crack in yet a deeper layer in my wall of denial, suggesting that my present state of inner tension is due to intuitive energy on the move, meaning that Insight is readying me to disclose another self demeaning, self defeating, self conceived negative belief about myself to myself, and once insight shines its spotlight upon the fact that that belief was never true or is no longer true of the adult whom I’ve chosen to grow up to be, another negatively focused belief, which hath been in need of conscious reprocessing ever since childhood, will dissolve, and as the son of one of my best friends in the Midwest has recently brought charges of sexual abuse against a former high school teacher, I can’t help but wonder if his courageous public disclosure of three weeks ago (along with allegations of sexual abuse raging through Hollywood) has continued to stimulate the crack in this subconscious layer of my wall of denial to expand a bit more, day by day ... I mean, whereas third world nations may command their women to cover up from head to toe, here in the states, the powers of the high and mighty whip underlings in secreted, heavy handed ways ... seriously, recent Hollywood reveals will prove to be the tip of the iceberg, because we live in a nation where those in power moved pedaphile priests from parrish to parrish,  and a sexual predator sits on our Supreme Court,  and last year, we elected a known sexual predator to preside as president over all.  And so, though this inner tension is irritating my sense of inner peace, I embrace it as alerting me (rather than alarming me) to ready my strengths to accept a highly personal reveal, which, upon full disclosure, will free a portion of my self worth to heal from pain that I’ve hidden from conscious awareness, over long ... and the distinction between my feeling alerted rather than alarmed by the arousal of inner tension is the most elemental slice of knowledge, concerning emotional intelligence, that today’s intuitive train of thought has meant to convey to your conscious mind and mine, because though this info is not new to me, once again:  Repetition is not redundant when the goal of retrospective reflection is retention ... and on that positive note, I’ll relax my active sense of self awareness from processing in hopes of freeing my insight-driven, intuitive powers to entice my subconscious memory to acknowledge my conscious readiness to receive its next reveal ...

1468 LET'S BID A WARM WELCOME TO TURKMENISTAN!

(Recovered from posts left in drafts, last summer)
Hello, Turkmenistan!

And now, having warmly welcomed at least one Turkmenistanian to
Roam freely throughout the inner sanctum of my mind
I'd like to locate those of you who have
Recently connected, via the web, with the circle of friends who
Choose to hold hands with mine on the worldwide map:

According to Wikedia:
Turkmenistan is a country in Central Asia bordered by the Caspian Sea and largely covered by the Karakum Desert. It’s known for archaeological ruins including those at Nisa and Merv, major stops along the ancient trade route the Silk Road.  Ashgabat, the capital, was rebuilt in Soviet style in the mid-20th century and is filled with grand monuments honoring former president Saparmurat Niyazov.

Turkey–Turkmenistan relations are foreign relations between Turkey and Turkmenistan. Turkey was the first country in the world to recognize the independence of Turkmenistan during the period of dissolution of the Soviet Union and the first country that opened an embassy in the newly independent country.^[1] Turkmenistan has an embassy in Ankara and a consulate general in Istanbul.^[2] Both countries are full members of the Economic Cooperation Organization, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, International Organization of Turkic Culture and Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The two countries share close cultural connections. Both have a majority Sunni Muslim population, and both are predominantly inhabited by Turkic people; both the Turkish and Turkmen languages belonging to the Oghuz group of Turkic languages. Turkey is one of the 47 countries in the world that holders of a Turkmen passport can visit without visa.^[3][4]

(I think the addition of Turkmenistan brings the number of nations, which stats suggests has read my blog, to eighty ... I can’t tell for certain, because some where along way, I lost count.)

Monday, October 30, 2017
Yesterday, I finished a gripping novel written by Aline Ohanesian.  Her description of life in Turkey between 1915-1981 held me spell bound in the same way as proved true of The Kite Runner.  The author of this page turner, whose insights concerning human nature mirror my own, makes use of prose waxing so poetic as to illustrate classic reasons why our survival instinct keeps secrets from the conscious portion of our minds, and once we harbor secrets from ourselves, we can't help but keep secrets from others, especially those we love and hope to protect from harm.

The name of this novel, which I recommend highly, is ORHAN'S INHERITANCE.

Author’s acknowledgment:

“My gratitude and deepest respect to the survivors, including my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Aslanian, who taught me that though we are products of our past, we need not be prisoners of it. My sons, Alec and Vaughn, who will inherit this transgenerational grief, provided the need for such a book.  Boys, may your minds stay hungry and your hearts full.”