Breathing Spaces

"This book is the fruit of a strange vocation: perhaps this vocation could simply be called 'living', yet to see living as a vocation may seem out of place. After all, we all live. A vocation is something we do, usually something we choose to do. Yet, the words in this book were not chosen so freely, rather they are words that found me as I was living at a particular place and time and were gracious enough to allow me to pick them up and place them on these pages. It is only in looking back over my life that I have come to feel these words as truly my words, in a way that nothing else I have written or said does. If a vocation is where you have been called to put your life's deepest energies, then fashioning the words in this book has been my vocation." William Meroney, 2025



William Meroney grew up in Milford Mills, Pennsylvania during the 1950s, then a dairy farming community in Chester County. He later earned a Mathematics degree from Haverford College (1966) and a Doctorate in Philosophy from Temple University (1978).

A more than 50-year career in systems analysis and computer applications led him to apply mathematics in many areas of his work, including military operations, energy and electric power systems, and the economic analysis of social and environmental policy.

In his work in philosophy, he initially concentrated in the Philosophy of Science, later developing an interest in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He participated in a series of regional Wittgenstein workshops, begun in 2005 by James Klagge of Virginia Tech University. In 2010 and 2024, he hosted these workshops in Floyd, Virginia.

He has written poems throughout his life and sometimes organized them into short collections. After retiring, he sorted through these collections and began to see them as connecting otherwise disconnected parts of his experiences and bringing them together as a living, breathing whole. This sense of poems as living and breathing came to him when recalling an old conversation with his father, to whom this book is dedicated.

William Meroney now lives with his wife, Frances in the Meadows of Dan community of Floyd County, Virginia, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway.