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In this summer pic, Dar and I are standing on the bluffs above our home in the mountains of Canmore. The front of my t-shirt reads, “You see bones.” The back reads, “I see an army.”

Five questions I am asking myself 24/7:

Do I embrace the friendly and open-handed invitation to rebuild our Calgary-based oil and gas company?

En route, and to secure the trust of future partners, investors and team members, do I apply for a one year, five module, Executive Master of Management in Energy in Oslo and Paris?

In another home, this sword might never leave the wall, expensive, in it’s place — don’t dent or chip the iconic historical reference. In our home, boys tear this sword from the wall to declare war on all their mortal and immortal enemies.

Over the past seven days, seven different boys have had this sword in their clutches, looking for a fight, and I’m right there saying, “Bring it on!” Glistening eyes nearly fall out of their sockets, “REALLY!?”

Like this old photo, am I willing to get a haircut and don a new tie to appear legitimate to whoever needs convincing? Am I willing to study hard to obtain a Masters of Management in Energy in co-op between BI Norwegian School of Management and IFP School in Paris? Yes, I  suppose I could do all that… I’d also be willing to get a PhD in Economics if I knew it was the right thing to do (like there’s not enough PhD’s mulling around the World Bank and Barclays).

I snapped a pic of this quote while visiting the UN.

Mikhail Bakhtin, in Speech Genres wrote, “Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness — and that’s how you get dialectics.”

I can’t comment on the new book by Rob Bell … If a copy of it was in my hands, I would spend a bit of time with it. In the meantime, my focus is on the escalation of global crisis and violence.

A sentry of memory at the UN in New York, Agnes of the Urakami Tenshudo cathedral in Nagasaki, Japan.

What you can’t see is the melted and scorched stone of her back caused  by the heat of the fat man atom bomb detonated 550 meters above Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Agnes was facing away from the blast.

Agnes  and her lamb still stand together for Japan.

What do we do? How do we help? Give to the Red Cross, sure. Pray, absolutely. Volunteer our hands and backs to disaster relief, but how to get through the mountain of international protocols!?

Often, the deeper the reconnaissance, the more one gets mistaken for the enemy.

At an important “Christian” gathering, I had an old acquaintance, tell me that her husband gets compared to a King all the time, and people compare me to Judas. Well, thank you very much. What was curious to me about her confession, is that I wasn’t there for her or to support the loud individuals at the front of the gathering she was obviously supporting. I was protecting and defending others. Neither she, nor her entourage, had any idea who I was, or what I was actually doing there. It’s enough that I was there praying for my friends, who had actually invited me to be there with them.

This is an ’08 picture of my desk at Woodthorpe Petrroleum Ltd. (energy prospectus alongside World Bank prospectus, company presentations, and photocopied lovemarks).

To expand on a few things I said last week on It’s A New Day TV, here are a few paragraphs from one of Clairvaux Manifesto‘s longer chapters entitled 10,000 Master Cadets (pages 177-178):

It is a city: keep it in peace and safety.
It is a bride: see to her adornment.
It is sheep: see that they are pastured.
Bernard of Clairvaux

Last Thursday evening, I had dinner with my old friend Marv. Five years ago, Marv gave me a book of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s teachings on the Sermon on the Mount, which I eventually gave to Stephen Harper on a flight between Calgary and Toronto (which I mention in Clairvaux Manifesto and during my recent interview on It’s A New Day TV).

Recently, my friend David and I took the train from central London to Gloucester. After dinner that first evening, David had a private meeting to attend, so I planned to go for a walk.

Since I’d never been to Gloucester before, and it was already well after dark, I asked a student of the college (where we were staying for the night) for directions to the center of town (I was trying to make sense of the large map of the town hanging on the wall in the hallway outside the dining room). The young Irish woman smiled,

From the bells of Gloucester Cathedral to the stone legacies of Rievaulx and Fountains abbeys to the significance of Constantine at York Minster;

from hunting down the Magna Carta at the British Library to stumbling upon the statue of Bishop John Henry Newman at Brompton Oratory to leaving the Museum of Freemason’s to exploring the Egyptian Book of the Dead at the British Museum;

from the classy feel of the IoD to the constant buzz of The Royal Commonwealth Society to the 7th floor Alliance breakfast club at the USB to the evening lecture at Cass Business School;