Hello and welcome to the December and January Holiday issue of Aphelion.
Soon, the Predictors and Editors website will start their annual
readers
poll. As you can see by the image on the right side of this page,
Aphelion has been lucky enough to get into the top ten e-zines category
last year. So start gearing up for nominating and voting your favorite
stories and publications. It would be nice to get up into the top five
category--hint hint.
Autumn is ending here in the Northern hemisphere, and Winter is less
than 20 days away. The leaves are cascading off the trees after giving
us a brief glimpse of their multicolored glories. Walking in
the yard is a noisy, crunch-crunch of dried leaves shattering beneath
our feet. Geese glide overhead as they perform their aireal migrations,
honking to one another with the "are we THERE YET?" frequency of
children on a road trip. We've had the first frost of the season a few
weeks ago. Deer are in rut, hunters hide themselves away in their
stands and blinds looking for that perfect moment to prove that luck
and skill can still be counted upon to stock their freezers for next
Summer's cookouts. Farmers are harvesting their Fall crops and
prepairing their fields for Winter's wheat and other grain to grow in
their favored season. People of many faiths prepare for a myriad of
Holidays they celebrate, families plan their seasonal gatherings, and
the television programming is packed with hundreds of versions of
classic tales of the season.
Elsewhere, there are those who do none of these things. Some by choice,
some because of circumstances beyond their control. Let us not forget
those who are less fortunate than we. Nor those whose beliefs differ
from our own. Respect is due them--not just now, but in all seasons of
the year. In this Holiday Season, charity is most pronounced in its
efforts toward they who need it year-round. This is both good and bad
because a holiday should never be the sole motivator towards charitable
acts. Nor should respect for differing beliefs be a seasonal affair.
But this time of reflection and fellowship and celebration drives a
greater impulse toward charitable acts. And each year, people ask where
this charity vanishes to in other times of the year. And each year, it
does indeed fade away like mist in morning sunlight, as the holidays
pass and things return to the concerns of the everyday affairs of
living.
I have a friend who has made it a habit to help those in need, but he
doesn't wait for a holiday to arrive. For several years now he has made
time to help the needy, to feed them, to help whomever he can. He is
not a wealthy man, yet he is able to spare a bit of time and effort and
income to make some kind of difference. He does this all year long. He
never asks for thanks. He couldn't care less about recognition or
praise. He never expects to change the world. He doesn't care if anyone
else knows what he does. He only wants to do something to help people
in need. He helps to the limit of his ability. And he does this all
year long--not just during a holiday season. What he does is prepare
bagged lunches of foods that don't need a can opener or a place to cook
them, or a fridge to store them. He'll go out to stores that sell
canned goods in bulk, buys what he can afford to spare, makes up a
dozen of these bagged lunches at a time, puts them in his car when he
goes about his normal day-to-day affairs, and hands them out to anyone
he sees that needs a helping hand that day. Some days he gives out one
or two meals. Some days he wishes he'd had more to give out. He has it
down to what is practically a science. Each meal costs him a dollar or
so to put together: bottled water, vienna sausages, a pack of crackers,
some kind of vegetables in a sealed plastic cup, for example. It
depends on what he finds when shopping for these bagged meals. It
varies. He also adds in one of those sealed packets of plastic flatware
that come with a paper packet of salt and pepper and a napkin. He said
once that the dignity of having a knife and fork and spoon and a napkin
means more to the people he helps than the food itself. I think he's
right.
Now, the point of the above is not to shame anyone into following my
friend's example. My aim is to relate one man's charitable acts in
order to demonstrate that need isn't seasonal. And that making a small
difference in someone's life shouldn't require a holiday or a faith to
drive the desire to do so. Changing the world one person at a time, one
day at a time, is a noble act. If you have the means and the will and
the desire, you too can change the world.
Oh, before someone comments about what faith my friend follows, he's
never said and I've never asked. As far as I know, he's a viking. In
any case, he certainly is a hero.
You don't have to change
the whole world all at once
To make a change in your own little corner of it.
Sometimes, if you're willing to take a chance,
You can BE the difference you want to see happen.
If the world needs changing
Sometimes the best place to start
Is changing yourself
To be true to your heart.
If you feel the call,
Then answer it true.
The best you can do
Is for you to be you.
Dan
BOILERPLATE:
This is a little something I made early in the year. It's a little
advert for Aphelion. I wrote the music and added a slideshow of past
cover art. It's short, and showcases a lot of the changes we've made
over the past two decades. Feel free to share it around.
Feel free to share this on Facebook, G+, blog posts, and other
webpages. But only with the permission of the page or group owners! Be
polite and considerate, always. You'll have to look up the embed code
for the ad on You Tube, sorry about that, but the code won't display
correctly here. But the Share Code for Facebook and G+ is:
https://youtu.be/23qfziyt9Jo
If you do the Facebook thing, feel free to join us
on the Aphelion page there. The link is Aphelion
Webzine.
As an aside, the Editorial Mafia and I have found Facebook to be very
useful. Given our different
locations and schedules, it's come in handy as a way to discuss
production details of new issues. Sometimes there are several of us
using Facebook at the same time, so it's almost like the old chat room
days back in the 1990s.
My first collection of Mare Inebrium spaceport bar short
stories was
published in February of 2015 by Dark Oak Press. It is available in
both Kindle
an Nook e-book formats, paperback, and hardback. I also have three
albums of instrumental music out through the Create Space
self-publishing website. If you like, you can click on the photo or the
link below to
find all the info you would need to purchase my book in your preferred
format, or an e-book of Flash of Aphelion, buy a CD of my music, or
listen to tracks off of the albums on my Bandcamp website. Enjoy!
