About this site

The reason for this site!

The path not taken

I created this site because of a very bad experience. I was a victim of a heinous crime that literally changed my life and I will never be the same. Because the perpetrator had powerful friends, he was never prosecuted. As if that was not bad enough, there are, unfortunately, lawyers who make their living by suing crime victims. They know that crime victims often do not have the resources to fight them. They also know that crime victims are often traumatized by their experience and cannot defend themselves. Furthermore, these vicious lawyers find that threatening to harm family members is an effective tactic in their evil pursuit. In my case they threatened my 80+ year old parents causing them great pain. I found that I was loosing my identity, my sense of self. I saw myself as a victim and nothing else.

Many years ago, I read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Tolstoy had great insight and many scenes stand out in my mind to this day. There is one paragraph that seems so very significant to me. It is one of the reasons that I created this site. This is from the Ann Dunnigan translation.

…."No, life is not over at thirty-one!" Prince Andrei decided impulsively, finally, and irrevocably. "It is not enough for me to know all that I have in me—everyone must know: Pierre, and that young girl who wanted to fly away into the sky—everyone must know me so that my life may not be lived for myself alone, while others, like that girl, live so apart from it: it must be lived so that it may be reflected in all of them, so that they may share my life with me!"

Posting my thoughts and photographs is my way of sharing so that “my life may not be lived for myself alone.” I have posted pictures and stories that shows my view of the world. The pictures and my writings tell who I am and what is important to me. I hope that something that I write or a photograph will inspire, or at the very least, bring some pleasure into somebody's life.

It is how I have tried to recover my identity, my sense of self.

On each page, I have a banner that say "The path not taken." After having been a victim, I have reviewed my life. Being a victim makes me ask, "What did I do to deserve this?" I have concentrated more upon my mistakes than my achievements (which are many, but from my distorted perspective, they seem to lack significance). A few years ago, I saw where I might have been had I taken a different course in my life. I was shocked and had a strange sense of helplessness.

I likened my life experience to my many excursions through the forests. Sometimes, as I wander, I reach a fork and have to select a path. After travelling for a while, I sometimes realize that I took the wrong path. Sometimes I go back and take the other, better path. But in life, sometimes we can look across the abyss and see where we might have been had we taken the other path. But we cannot go back. We cannot change our past. Once we embark upon a path, we have to follow it to the end. The end of the path is the end of our life. We can only wonder about the path not taken.

I still have a chance to make the path upon which I travel worthy of my talent and skills. I hope that my writing will be my legacy and I hope that I can write something that will have a positive effect upon my readers. Although I can only wish that I had taken the other path, I can only wonder about the path not taken. Perhaps, it too, would have been fraught with disappointments. One can only wonder!

I hope that you enjoy this site. Please send your comments to j1rzk@comcast.net

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