Michael O'Brien

“Accountability is very simple, three things: authenticity, action, and amends.”
― Brené Brown, The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connections and Courage

“Our boat travelled on, day after day, through an unknown and mysterious land. Our company were noisy, gay, quarrelsome, full of facile theories, with glib explanations of everything, persuaded that there is nothing they could not understand and no human destiny outside the purview of their system. One of us lay at death's door, fighting a grim battle with weakness and terror and the indifference of the strong, assailed day and night by the sounds of loud-voiced love-making and trivial laughter. And all around us lay a great silence, strong as death, unfathomable as the heavens. It seemed that none had leisure to hear the silence, yet it called to me so insistently that I grew deaf to the harangues of propagandists and the endless information of the well-informed.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China

“As the devoted wife of a man who worshipped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“We Close In Fifteen Minutes by Stewart Stafford

Found myself the only taker,
Of a minefield guided tour,
Through no man's land life,
Every exit is now invisible.

Stardom magnified my flaws,
A broken man lost in a maze,
A deadly structure's hostage,
A hermit in denial's labyrinth.

Glimpse dwindling fragments,
In the looking glass of hubris,
Flounder in glossy quicksand,
The solutions devoured whole.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford