Welcome, my goal is to make this site be of value to you and other men.
Good news is coming soon............Will you be here?
'GO SAINTS'In order to obtain self awareness one has to enter a process of change. One must look within for answers to life adjusting questions. For we as humans need to recognize and embrace the voice of awareness that is built into all human consciousness.
Dan finds Optimism...
Before the phone call came the morning of March 14, 1982 Dan was a young brazen 23 years old. He had always been a forward looking dreamer that felt that the future looked bright and uncertain he wouldn’t have it any other way. You see Dan had not long returned to the Deep South where he had spent his youth growing up in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Pascagoula is located at the southern most tip of the state of Mississippi along the Gulf of Mexico nested between Biloxi to the west and Mobile, Alabama to the east.
Dan was a restless kid for the first 12 years of his life had lived and was educated in the segregated south. Integration wasn’t something that he spent his time neither thinking nor worrying about but integration intruded his life as he completed the sixth grade and was prepared to enter the seventh. He left his beloved Fair Elementary which was an all black elementary school and was sent to school with white kids for the first time in his life to Coleman Junior High. Coleman Junior High was at lease five mile from Dan’s neighborhood where he lived with his mother and two sibilants, Dan had to travel this distant daily usually by foot. These types of experiences shaped Dan’s personality and outlook of the world he lived with all the negatives and positives. He was an average student at best not because he could not do the course work that his teachers demanded of him but because at an early age he had a wild imagination always dreaming about possibilities far removed from his reality even at night as he slept he would dream of himself flying through the air looking down on the people he know, flying up and up and away from the place he called home. During that first year at Coleman Junior High he couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble always getting into fights and been sent to detention, until finally he was expelled from school for the year for bring a knife to school and stabbing another child, he could not explain his action to his mother but for many years as a child he felt less than, felt unloved, his mother unintentionally scared his young mind with her constant belittling and than there was a certain group of kids from his neighborhood that he had a running battle with, they would call him names and make fun of him and when he would defend himself by fighting they would run and tell his mother who would than punish him. Dan felt all along. Before completing the eleven grade he had enough he wanted to find away out, because he had to repeat a grade he turned eighteen during the school year and decided it was time to make a move so he drop out of school and joined the army without letting anyone know what he was doing. The day before he was to report he finally told his mother. The day he left home and joined the military he gave his mother a big hug, as he turned towards the waiting taxi he remember thinking that that was the first time he could recall hugging his mother. Dan had learned at an early age that if he wanted to accomplish something he would have to keep his goals to himself until after the thing was done. With cold feet and tons of excitement he was off for adventure and hopes for a new beginning. He never had a male role model that he could draw strength from that would give him the confidence in situation that required machismo, so on the first day of basic training he was so nerves and fearful of the drill sergeants, that was yelling and screaming profanity, that while standing in formation he fainted and failed flat on his face. It required three stitches to close the gash over his eye. That was the first and only time during this period that he allowed his fears to get the best of him the remainder of the time spent at Fort Polk, Louisiana lead Dan to become a confident and controlled young man, the discipline of military life was beneficial, he began to form bonds with people he met, something he was not able to do before. Dan started to feel alive to feel that all the possibilities he had dream about could come true he felt the weight of despair lift from his shoulders there was a sense of renewal, as a child he suffered with childhood asthma but he did not have a single asthmatic attack since he left home. Basic training is the place that Dan made the transition from childhood to manhood.
On this morning he was told of his father’s death. The problem is that Dan had been lead to believe that his father had died when he was an infant. Dan could not feel a since of lost of someone he had not known. He had not known the father-son bond to any man and did not know how to respond to this news. It was an important day for Dan for another reason; this is when he decided to stripe away the bonds of pessimism to embrace self. He felt the negative give way to optimism. As the Mind Turns.....