'The Magpie Mason 2.0'

     
Happy New Year!

Among my New Year's Resolutions is to renew The Magpie Mason and to post more frequently than in the year past. The focus will shift, as I expect to share messages worth your contemplation, while toning down the journalistic coverage of events. (I think I have done a disservice to some of the Masons I have inadvertently made famous on these pages. My goal has been only to extol the good people, places, and happenings in Freemasonry that I enjoy in my travels, but I failed to "expect the unexpected" in some respects, which is inexcusable for this former newspaper editor. I should have known better.)

© The New Yorker

This is part of a more broad renewal of myself. I retired from most of my Masonic labors in 2011 while I struggled to get a handle on other things in life. That struggle continues, but I now realize that cutting myself off from the people and activities that provide much needed pleasure and balance does not make any sense, and it certainly did not help me manage my problems in life anyway.

I owe massive apologies to good friends and brethren in The Masonic Society, The American Lodge of Research, and elsewhere, and I need to get back to work and make up for lost time.

Funny. I really didn't mean to say that. One cannot make up lost time. If there is ONE lesson of the Craft lodge, it is you cannot make up for lost time. I'll make up lost effort instead.

So I'm working on changes and improvements. Hope you are too. I'm throwing myself headlong back into Masonic activity, with five or six speaking engagements between January 10 and February 16, hopefully spreading messages of Light.

By the close of 2012, I hope to find a home in a new Craft lodge. My mother lodge here in New Jersey is a great lodge. I can recommend it without hesitation, mental reservation, etc., for many, many valid, vital reasons, but it lacks specifically what I am looking for in Freemasonry. Next January 1, I hope to tell you about my new lodge.

Time to make things happen! Even if the bloody Mayans were right about their calendar.

Cheers! Happy New Year!