Thanks for joining me!
Here is a shop of wonderment. From every land has come a prize; Rich spices from the Orient, and fruit that knew Italian skies, and figs that ripened by the sea in Smyrna, nuts from hot Brazil, strange pungent meat from Germany, and currants from a Grecian hill. – from Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Delicatessen” (circa 1914)
This tiny watercolor painting of the Atlantic Ocean from the shore of which you are always, essentially looking east. The aging men who “re-enact” soliders’ lives long before their own. The lines re-arranged into a paragraph from – I believe – the best poem of a century’s-dead soldier-poet. These three are the continuation of a journey much longer than even myself. Art, history, philosophy, the lives of veterans, the cultures we inhabit, the societies we love or hate, the lives we try to live as fully as we can. I’m an analog human; I was not born into the world that allows me to write here as though it has always been so. I shall add what I am able, and hope it is good.