William R. Summerhill, Jr.
Thank you for accepting my invitation to overhear what’s running through my mind that I am sharing with you on this website. It is my hope and intention to add at least one essay, poem or yet undetermined literary musing each week. I trust you may find my efforts in thinking out loud to be worth a few minutes of your time and attention.
These reflections of heart and mind have been inspired by the people, places, occupations and preoccupations of a life that has spanned more than six decades. I am blessed to say that I have been able to experience living as a child, a brother, an American teenager, a husband, father and now grandfather. Sixty-four of my years found me in learning environments, twenty-seven of them as a student from elementary through graduate schools and thirty-seven as an educator working in classrooms, dormitories, gyms and softball fields, auditoriums and headmaster’s offices. Along the way I have tried to be faithful to the calling I sensed was leading me to seek and serve God, launching me on a journey into pastoral, nursing home and prep school ministries.
Retirement is providing me the time and opportunity to look backward, inward and forward as I head into the twilight years of my life. Having made over seventy trips around the sun on this spaceship we call earth I have witnessed both mind-boggling change and heart-warming constancy. And through it all my faith in a higher meaning to life, just like my faith in self and neighbor, has been tested, challenged, stretched, and, in those sacred moments when truth and beauty made themselves irresistibly real, confirmed.
Using the medium of this BLOG I am setting out to to share my impressions, opinions, questions and other mental and spiritual ruminations about living at my age in this age of so much change and uncertainty. And since learning is always dialogical in nature, I invite any of my readers to use the CONTACT link on this BLOG to join me in soul searching by sharing your questions, comments, reactions, or suggestions to which I will do my very best to respond.
Bill Summerhill
January 2021