Welcome to Murphy’s Log.
The word blog originated in the term “web log” and quickly got shortened to just “blog.” So this is Brian Murphy’s log: the reflections and observations of a wayfarer, a sojourner, passing through.
I am a lifelong activist and internationalist, an organiser, educator, and writer (see link to publications below), who has now slipped into the septuagenarian ranks but doesn’t intend to go too quietly into that dark night, or in any case, not yet.
Murphy’s Log will be a personal place, but I hope one with an edge—looking at the world ‘slantwise’, as an old poem I quite love expresses it (The Victorian House, by Philip Child).
As I begin, I hope to write to the clearing in the woods, breathing in, and breathing out, noting what moves the stillness, and takes flight into the light. Murphy’s Log also contains an element of retrospective, a journal of sorts, the content I have been jotting in notebooks for years and have posted here, and which I will update as the occasion occurs.
I have been conducting an informal email list serve for many years, something I started in 2001 when I was still with Inter Pares, where I spent thirty special years working as programmer and policy analyst. I have maintained the list on a personal basis since leaving Inter Pares at the end of 2006, and it has grown considerably.
The circulation—several hundred people—includes folks I built relationships with in various places during my years working and traveling the low roads and high plains, and many other folks referred to the list by colleagues and friends. That service may gradually shift here to Murphy’s Log, but in any case I foresee a resource page here to post on a periodic basis, perhaps weekly, some of the links and articles that I circulate through the email list serve.
So, Murphy’s Log is a work in progress. As I hope is its author, still.
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See: On retirement