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My back yard wild life

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By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Salt Lake City is nestled along the Wasatch Front, on the sunset side of a 160-mile long mountain range extending north into Idaho. Because of this…

The Whispering Signs

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By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Signs led my troubled family and me to a life-changing event—our first visit to the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah. I don’t mean miraculous messages…

Nickeled and Dimed

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By Michael Patrick O’Brien– In September 1988, singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith performed “Love at the Five and Dime” at a Salt Lake City concert. I’d never heard of either her or…

Genetic Blarney in my DNA

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By Michael Patrick O’Brien– I realized early on that I loved writing. This explains the many volumes of childhood “books” and “newspapers” that I “published” and foisted on family, friends,…

The neighborhood monastery

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By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Newspapers loved writing about the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah. They normally reported some version of the same basic story—Holy Trinity Abbey was an odd…

Death and Resurrection: Two Lakes

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By Gary Topping– To me, the thing that most makes Utah a great place to live is the fact that it lies at the intersection of three major geophysical provinces:…

I can’t see the waterfall

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By Michael Patrick O’Brien– When summer draws to a close each year, I recall how—nearly four decades ago—a seven-year-old boy with impaired vision gave me some lasting insight about the…

Monastery Magic

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By Gary Topping– Almost any bucolic setting will have a calming effect on our too-busy, too-complicated lives.  Even a cow pasture does it for me, and I’ll go so far…

“Cistercians believe that people can change”

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By Michael Patrick O’Brien– The Trappist monks at the old Huntsville, Utah monastery made various promises to God and each other when they joined the abbey. Some of the most…

The right kind of envy

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By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Can envy ever be good? It is one of the seven deadly sins. The Ten Commandments tell us not to covet. And in Othello, Shakespeare’s Iago called…