Epitaphs

One of my favorite weird hobbies is checking out old cemeteries. Some find this interest a little off, but to me it is an unappreciated footnote of history and Americana.

Headstones of modern times can be quite elaborate and artful, but stones of the past hold the greatest appeal for me. Such monuments were carved lovingly by experienced hands rather than churned out en mass by the cold plotting and casting of machines. And designs were as varied and unique as the lives they humbly represent forevermore.

My favorites of late resemble large weathered tree trunks. You don't see them too often and I imagine they were very expensive to commission. They are often taller than I, and several feet around, but astonishingly delicate in appearance. Each crack and crevice of the bark is as detailed as the next. Tentacles of ivy meander up the sides in a few different spots, often sprinkled with delicate flowers, resting dragonflies, pensive toads - preserved in the carved stone. Amputated branches often display the marks of the woodcutter's blade, and jagged fibers left behind by the break. Among it all will be a chronicle of the deceased life, names of family, possibly their profession, dates of birth and death and often their age down to the day. Perhaps a memorializing quote or biblical verse as an epitaph. The last one I ran across, in a damp corner of Mohican National Forest, had established delicate colonies of lichen and moss all over, causing it to look even more real than its artisan had probably planned. The effect standing in memoriam for this all but forgotten life spent was beautifully and fluidly serene.

I am especially touched as well by those monuments for children. Infant mortality was very high a few generations ago, and older graveyards are dotted with their tiny memorials. Crouching angels and lambs perch upon angelically white markers. Small chairs as if to offer rest to their briefly visiting souls before returning from whence they came. Many simply state 'Baby Smith', 'Son', 'Daughter'. Long dead parents undoubtedly grieved their entire lives for these lost little ones.

I once saw a cluster of headstones high on a hill in Colorado. The dates suggested those who rested there were pioneers. A family was laid to rest there. Mother, Father, and four children, all having died within a week of each other. What had happened? Inclement weather? Starvation? Cholera? The flu?

How long had it been since the last person thought upon this family?

I sometimes stand in front of such headstones, struggling to remember something I couldn't possibly know about the people resting below. Each had a life that at its core probably was not much different from my own. Each had duties, joys, concerns, and matters of importance occupying their every moment. As now only this finely crafted marque remains, I try to pay homage by, if nothing else, reading the name. A name that I no doubt will promptly forget. A name which now too is weathering away with the nondiscriminatory frictions of time.

ANGEL - A True Story

It had been another rotten day in a rotten week in a rotten relationship that was once good. In all my 23 years I’d never met a person more infuriating than he. My frayed nerves nagged for the numbing effects of a drink or two, and I left the apartment we shared to check out the new bar at the corner. Hopefully the bartender wasn’t chincy with his pouring hand.

The music suggested a fantastic experience was going on inside, but the place was virtually empty. A man with a face like a horse sat at the other end, seemingly sizing up what he considered to be the end of the road. Two men played darts on the far wall, conversing much more loudly than necessary.

I sat down and ordered a drink. Something with whiskey. I nursed it as I sucked down a few cigarettes and turned the conundrums of my relationship around in my head like peculiarly shaped stones.

I hadn’t noticed, but someone had appeared next to me at the bar, a respectable distance from my personal space. He ordered a Coke, and after receiving it mentioned that I looked like I could use a friend to talk to.

Snapping out of my own thoughts, I looked up and gave him the nanosecond size-up.

I don’t think I’m particularly beautiful, so either I look easy or men just take a shot at anything they can, hoping eventually they’ll strike oil – because I can’t even go out and sulk without some macho Cro-Magnon hitting on me. And I’m pretty critical about anyone that approaches me in a bar when I’m obviously brooding. But he didn’t fit the profile.

Dressed in a dull moss maintenance shirt washed several hundred times before sat a fifty-something black man. His eyes were deep and wide set in high freckled cheeks. His skin appeared weathered, creased with the footprints of many smiles and worries and deep, deep love for someone. Receipts and business cards hung in casually contained disarray in his breast pocket, and a pack of cigarettes with one or two missing. Above the pocket was a patch that said, “Terry”. His words were relaxed and tasted of somewhere southern … Southern Georgia? Southern Ohio? I couldn’t tell for sure.

Against my immediate instincts, I decided he was harmless and managed a thin smile in response. We began chatting easily there at the bar – I don’t recall the beginnings, but eventually we were talking about me and my stewings on that particular night. Not directly, though. Rather, he had this way of making idle comments, which applied to my thoughts in uncanny ways. After a few hours and an ashtray full of cigarette butts, Terry politely wrapped things up. He had to go, having a previous engagement that evening, but gave me his card. It simply said “Terry’s Janitorial”, and had a phone number. He told me to be happy, and he’d see me next time.

As my relationship spiraled downward, I frequented this certain bar more and more. On particularly sour days, I seemed to usually find myself there with Terry again. He’d ask me how things were going with my “gentleman friend” (as he would put it), but not in any fashion coming across as presumptuous. It was as if he were designed to ask these things, and you’d accept them the same as accepting a cup of coffee. He had a way of appearing at just the right times, and I came to enjoy the talks we had, as they helped me think more rationally about the chaos in my life in those days.

One day was especially bad. Things were beginning to dance on the edge of violence. I was thinking of leaving but had no place viable to go, really. I dug out Terry’s card and called the number. There was no answer. I went to the bar, hoping I’d catch him. He was there. “How are you doing, honey?”, he asked. “Okay,” I canned, unsure if I really wanted to get into it. He placed his hand on mine, gave me a don’t-bullshit-me smile, and said, “No you’re not, but we’ll get to that later.” We talked a while about nothing in particular, and then he told me a story about a lady friend of his who found herself in need of a place to stay. He let her stay with him for a spell (completely honorably) until she was able to continue her life on her own two feet. He said he got a lot of reward helping his friends who needed it. I offered no indicative response to that, but I remember Terry ending our talks that evening with, “Call me if I can help you with anything.”

We were an oddly matched duo, having little in common at first glance. A twenty-something white girl, heavy on eyeliner and hair dye and rocker swag, and a middle-aged black man in work duds. But we mixed well. We connected on some level unrecognized to a passerby. Our friendship continued for several months. I called his number several times and never got an answer, or even a machine. But infallibly he would appear in my life within a few hours. Sometimes at the bar, sometimes on the street as I walked to or from work. But somewhere.

As it were, my deceptively deep series of talks with Terry had helped me correct my path, and bring back into focus the long-clouded visions of my worth and life. I eventually took charge of my situation and straightened out my own mess by cutting my ties with said “gentleman friend”. I felt empowered and couldn’t wait to tell Terry. I went to the bar several evenings in a row, but he wasn’t there.

I called the phone number on the card. It was disconnected.

I never saw Terry again.

Lord Byron Syndrome

"If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad."
~ Lord Byron


I saw (rather heard) an ad on the tv this morning as I was preparing breakfast for my sleepy family. I hadn't seen the likes of it since the print ads commonly found in the teen magazines that floated around my junior high school.

"Take this simple art test. Draw 'Tippy', 'Cubby' or 'The Pirate' and send it to us. Our panel of experts will then determine if you possess the talent and desire needed to become a serious art student."

Below would be printed cute but generic looking cartoon head shots of a turtle, bear, and pirate, and a convenient large square for you to reproduce one of these characters. (If you call the number given on the tv commercial, they will be happy to send you the test at no obligation).

Um ~ (tapping gently and politely at the windowpane of the house of syntax) ~ excuse me ~ but this whole concept that this fine institution uses has always bugged me. Being able to reproduce someone else's drawing does not make you an artist. It makes you a Xerox machine.

Sometimes I have considered possessing the creative spirit to be more of an affliction than a gift. As Lord Byron so simply and perfectly described, it's as if you cannot function properly in everyday life if an outlet is not found and utilized for whatever creation needing to be let out. From the time I could hold a crayon till deep into my 20's, it was all that I cared to be. Purging the artistic energy forever generating inside was all I had constructive time for, as it was indeed an undeniable calling. The same went for writing. A daily outlet of poetry, prose, short story, or even simple rambling entries in a journal were as necessary as food and sleep for me then.

I married in wild abandon when I was 24. He was a lightning bolt in my life and we fed off of each other from the moment we met. It was passionate and addictive, this relationship we shared. Unfortunately, as with all addictions the give and take became so inbalanced that this succubus of a partner squeezed nearly all the life and energy out of me before I finally got away from him. Along with my self respect, self esteem and joy of living, he stripped the very muses out of me. Their songs within my molecules were silenced; I didn't create anything in any form for a long, long time.

Years passed and life and love renewed itself. In time my creative calling returned to me, but I had become involved in other pastimes and had forgotten how to make the time for them. I did pick up the hobby of scrapbooking, and became lost in the task of designing the canvas in that my precious photographed memories would now reside (complete with journaling, therefore also feeding my writing bug). I spent way too much time on each layout, but things must be just so and no rest will be found until it is - anyone who suffers the affliction will understand that.

Our giant handful of a puppy came, followed a year later by our dear son. Needless to say, time to myself became slim and none. My scrapbooking supplies sat untouched for months on end, just as the paints and pencils and inks of my first few decades. I have since progressively slipped into a nonidentifiable funk. Earlier this year I began to work my scrapbooking back in, but time spent there was still rare. There are many helpful hint books about creating speedy layouts, but I'm not interested in churning out generic pages where any number of photos could be dropped in and work all the same. My method of scrapbooking is exhaustive, each becoming unique as the photos they enhance, and if I only have 20 or 30 minutes to do it I'd just as soon not start.

I began a set of journals for my son when he was a few months old, chronicling his life and current events along the way from a first hand perspective, as well as recording dreams and hopes we have for him. I will give them to him someday. I don't know when - perhaps when he graduates high school, or college, when he gets married or has his own first child. I will know when the time is right. It's a fun and enriching project. But it doesn't exactly curb the pangs in my soul.

The other day, after reading about a blogger friend's experience in which he got up in the middle of the night to paint because the urge was keeping him awake, it finally clicked in my head. Lord Byron Syndrome, I have dubbed it. When you respond to the call of creativity, you will find peace from the purge. If you do not heed, the calls of sirens become the shrieks of banshees and given enough time unrequited will drive you mad. I need to learn how to not only listen, but respond. It is my condition, it is in the fiber of my being.

Since starting this blog I have been feeling much better. My foul mood has been diluted a bit and I'm feeling that some pressure has been relieved from whatever the abscess is inside of me. I'm relearning how to channel, or at least trying. Any creative soul will tell you though, it's not a calling that can be ignored.

Ships Adrift

There’s a boat on the line
Where the sea meets the sky
There’s another that rides far behind
And it seems you and I are like strangers
A wide ways apart as we drift on through time

-- "Ships" - Barry Manilow



I love this song. LOVE. This song. And to those who wander by and make fun of me for listening to Barry Manilow - to you I say, "Pththth."

I have just returned from a nice dinner party. T&M had L&A and us over for sushi, beer bread with spinach dip, and an assortment of wine and cheeses. We laughed, reminisced, and basked in the glow that is only given off by companionships cured with layer upon layer of joy and tears and milestones and memories. It doesnt get any better than that.

These are the people who have been the constants in my life these latest years. I love them. They are my family.

Earlier today I was listening to "Ships" and it got me thinking about those that have drifted in and out of my life. I thought upon my tight knit group of friends from my art class in high school. I can remember sitting in class a few days before graduation, thinking these people have been a huge part of my every day for so long. Now we are graduating, going on to respective jobs or distantly spaced colleges. What is my life going to be without these people in it? As thrilled as I was to get high school behind me and get on with the business of pursuing my dreams, in some odd way the Pomp and Circumstance played at our graduation almost carried the flavor of a requiem for the life I had known with this band of brothers.

In the years that followed, I missed them terribly. But there were new friends to be made.

I had an 18 year reunion with 4 of these people a few months ago. With the exception of one, whom I had reconnected with a few years ago, I hadn't really seen any of them since we walked out of graduation. Yet we all survived without each other. Happily, we are all still well matched as friends.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about what mysterious material this gossamer thread is which ties us to those we hold most dear. Of what powerful stuff is made this force which makes years and baggage dissolve and carries us back to the last time we once stood together.

Why it sticks with some and not others, when at one time all stood on equal ground in our hearts.

How is it that one proverbial moment someone is so interwoven in our lives that we can't imagine it without their presence, and next thing you know, they are far away ~ maybe even out of sight. And you wonder how you never noticed.

Whom in my life now, that I hold so valuable and dear, will fall into this category in the future?



We’re still here
It’s just that we’re out of sight
Like those ships that pass in the night ...

Fragments

I got another email from my childhood friend, and once again am completely stunned at how that even through months of no communication, we still swim in the same pool of musings and wander the same forests of complicated philosophical thoughts. As I read this first extensive communication from him in so long, I found myself more than once wanting to smack my hand on the table and yell, “YES! Exactly!” Isn’t it interesting that he has been turning the same thoughts and revelations over in his head lately as I?

I don’t particularly believe in reincarnation, but some bonds, few and far between, are so strong and timeless that I have to believe we knew each other before we were born – as our souls waited in Heaven to be distributed to their respective human bodies and paths on Earth. Occasionally you can recognize these souls, as a feeling that you’ve known someone forever that you may have only met a few days or even hours ago. If you are really lucky, you’ll find one early, and manage to hang on to them throughout the tempest that life becomes.

I have this rhetoric on my list of things I want to ask God about when I die.

My soul-brother’s comments were so poignant to all that I have lately struggled with placing into words both here and quietly to myself, that I am tempted to cut and paste damn near the entire email right here and now. But that wouldn’t be right. These were thoughts that I’m sure were meant to be shared only between us, and that way they will remain.

Thus, in lieu – since I can’t seem to construct anything to write about of value, detail, or particular interest – I offer a quote a la mode. (My new expression for quote of the day – since everything’s better with ice cream. Well, maybe not everything. Liver and onions with ice cream would be gross, but that is a submission for a post from a few weeks ago. But you get my point.)

This quote comes from a gentleman I met last night at the boat ramp. I was minding the boat as the Hub worked on the trailer, and this kindly fellow was fishing off the dock. He was an older man with a rather large but well-groomed white beard, wearing bib overalls, a t-shirt with a fishing cartoon on it, and a straw hat. Not a Huck Finn type hat, but a white straw hat with a bilious band – the kind you see on men that are hip deep in “new money”, upper crust yet not quite millionaire.

He looked a lot like Uncle Jesse.

Being in the same place at the same time, we got to chatting idly. In the course of our exchanges, my new acquaintance mentioned he’s retired and loving it. That led to a story about his friend, also retired, who has had trouble finding meaning in his new role. He’d been feeling rather useless, and called 911 the other night to tell them he didn’t feel his life was worth living anymore. To that I responded, my goodness, I hate to hear he thinks that way. And Uncle Jesse said, “Me too! Because … ~

“Well, I happen to think my life is worth quite a lot. Or else the Good Lord wouldn’t’ve made me.”

Well said.

Fin

All is quiet and still, so I'm not sure what woke me up on this morning. I get up from the same position I fell asleep in and cast a long gaze out the window. The sun is just beginning to tint the sky above the clouds lazing on the horizon line - the last remnants of some tropical storm or another, passing by the peninsula a few hundred miles to the east.

I watch the surf wander in and out, sliding over the shore. Bits of seaweed trace the contour of where high tide had stretched in earlier hours. The dunes have been smoothed by wind and sea during the night.

I had come here, thousands of miles from anything familiar, to try and forget you - though I knew that wasn't possible. Particularly when I take you everywhere with me. Not literally, of course. But you are nonetheless ever-present. Your memeory, and "memories" of what could have been and what will never be, a perpetual constriction on my heart. The hole left in my world by your absence ever gaping.

I get dressed, having as little interest in what I put on as I do with anything else in life right now. I pad downstairs, grab a cup of coffee and wander out on to the silky sand.

I spend a lot of time lost in my own thoughts these days. I gather with friends, try to drown out the deafening silence with deafening noise. It works for a while, sometimes. But it doesn't last long. My friends hate to see me so sad. Cheer up! they say, and offer some philosophical self-help quip about how holding on to something that will not return can only hinder your own progression. No one seems to understand that I simply can't act as if nothing happened, that you never existed. That I never really loved you because you were here too briefly. No one understands that just because I cannot hold you in my arms, that you cannot still hold my heart.

Seemingly now that you are gone more than ever before.

Everyone seems to know what's best for you when they have no idea what it's like to love someone so much, that you nearly forget how to breathe when they leave you.

The sand is different here than anywhere else. It feels as if I'm walking on tiny pearls, and clings to my feet in white slippers. The perpetual breeze coming in from the sea runs invisible fingers through my hair. The waves are bigger by the shore than they appeared to be from my window, but oddly slow of pace. They rumble in and massage the shore. I close my eyes and let the sound rinse my aching soul. I breathe deep the sweet salty air and feel all other thoughts fall away but the ones which never do - the thoughts of you.

The sun is rising, and it glints at me over the wandering clouds. I ponder the dawn of my new life, what its purpose and meaning is, to have lost so much and lived to tell. I wonder if I will ever be happy again. If I will ever laugh once more, and truly mean it.

I've been praying to God for a long time now, calling out to Him for help in managing my heartache. Sometimes I feel Him with me. Times like this morning. We communicate without words - more with feelings and impressions - and He soaks into me much as the sea vanishes below the surface of the sands as it draws back into itself. I know that the best thing I can do is lay my burdens in His hands. But I just haven't been ready.

I think of you always. I can almost feel your skin, and smell your scent. I imagine your hands in mine. I imagine that you are walking the water's edge with me rather than I alone on this peaceful morning. I wish I knew why you had to go.

The morning sky is bright with color now. Down the beach a man is combing up the seaweed. In the other direction, a couple is combing for treasures brought in from the waves sent by that distant storm. Seagulls scream overhead. The surf carries on its continuous song.

Though I could swear I just took a sip only a moment ago, my coffee is now cold and bitter in my cup.

I look at the large dollup of fucshia and indigo cloud that is cradling the morning sun. I suddenly feel the time is right.

And so, I let you go.

Warming whispers in the din of sorrow

My friend’s cancer has a 15% survival rating 2 years out. We all try to remain hopeful, but there comes a time when reality must be accepted for what it is.

Naturally, I am overwhelmingly sad about this.

God has a way of sprinkling a bit of glitter on my gloomy dance card at times when I really need it. After receiving this latest update, I checked my email before settling back into my day. What I received lifted my spirits twofold, and I’m so excited about both that I don’t know which to share first. When in doubt, chronology is always a logical choice, right?

I first got an e from JC, my friend who received the rainbow moment with me (ref. post "J’s Goodbye"). As I may or may not have mentioned before, following that stunning connection I received a letter from J in the mail, one month to the day after her death. She had been writing it at the time of her death (not literally, rather around that time) and R had run across it while going through her things. She mailed it to me, thinking I’d like to have it. The remarkable factor was that the letter bounced around in the mail system for about a week after it was postmarked, bringing it to me on the anniversary instead of some arbitrary day. The coincidence shook me to my foundation and strengthened my belief that somehow J was still reaching out to comfort those she cared about. I felt comforted and loved. I shared the experience with JC – she agreed it must be more than a coincidence and told me that she was even a little jealous (in a good way), wishing she could receive a sign.

Bear with me now – the following is relevant background merely disguised as a rambling tangent ;). Of all my near and far away friends, some of us still practice the ancient art of putting pen to paper and stamp to envelope in our keeping in touch rituals. In the snail-palling world, there are items of trade known as “slams” or “friendship books”. Basically they are circular-path swapping items, involving entering your name and address and various pieces of information about yourself. A friend sends it to you, you send it to another friend, and they send it to another. Once there is no more room, the slam is to be courteously mailed back either to the original person or to the person the slam has been made for. Slams can circulate for months, even years before returning home – and more often than not (in my experience anyway) they may never even make it back. But they are a good tool for getting to know new friends and having fun with old friends.

Back to my main thread. Monday was JC's birthday, and she excitedly told me of a special gift she received. The mail arrived, and mixed in the typical fare was a slam that was being returned to her. The slam had been made for her by J. She told me she couldn’t help but think that J was managing to send her a special birthday wish. My heart rejoiced that my new friend had gotten her sign from our pal whom I know loved her so much.

Upon finishing that e, I went on to the next. This one was from my childhood friend I dreamt about the other night. I sent him an e letting him know of the dream and expressing the pull to reconnect. He wrote back telling me that it was almost too strange to be coincidence. He had been in our hometown visiting his mother during that time. He was helping her go through some things in the basement, the area we most frequented in our rainy-day, mad scientist spells, and was subsequently spending a lot of time thinking about the “good old days”. He had wanted to contact me while he was home but didn’t have access to email and didn’t know my new address and phone number since we'd moved last summer. He found it remarkable that we were thinking similar thoughts at the same time, though we hadn’t really talked in months.

Did our thoughts have strength enough to somehow connect that night? I don’t know. But it’s good to be reminded that some friendships span all realms and passages of time.

A moral dilemma

A paradoxical report was on the noon news today. A story about bio bandages.

Bio bandages are on the cutting edge of open wound and burn management. They help the victim heal more quickly, with less scarring and with more acute sensation regained. This new technology is a coup for those with dermal conditions slow and stubborn to recover.

A dear friend of mine has suffered from the aftermath of necrotizing fasciitis for nearly 4 years. Her wounds were shockingly large, and in hindsight it's remarkable that they were survived. If bio bandages were readily available for her at the time, they probably would have greatly increased her healing and shortened her recovery time. But I know her well. I believe she would have refused these remarkable bandages and opted for the harder road, because her strong convictions would likely outweigh her desperate personal need for a medical miracle.

The bio bandages specifically cited in the news report were grown from skin cells harvested from an aborted fetus at 14 weeks gestation. Many, many bio bandages have been grown and used from just this one fetus.

On one side of the fence, there is the point that though this one life was terminated, it does it honor to use the tissue to enhance and improve, even possibly save the lives of others. On the other side, it could be considered an excuse to justify the termination of pregnancies, or even a catalyst for harvesting fetuses conceived for the sole purpose of termination in the name of science. Fetus factories if you will.

Some say it is the prudent, frugal, and sensible thing to do. Pregnancies will be terminated in this day and age regardless of what is ultimately done with the remains - it’s better than just throwing it out with the other medical waste. Others say it is wrong to utilize any technology gained from termination of human life and is a backhanded barbarism disguised as science.

I’m all about consistency. I’m all about medical morality. And the question is begged: Which is the proper path? I have chosen mine, but that’s not to say the other doesn’t persuade much thoughtfulness.

As the collapse of a civilization draws near, it is said that the distinction between right and wrong, moral and immoral blurs, then turns upside down. Vision can be easily blurred with such an advancement as bio bandages.

Painted Wings and Giant's Rings

I had a dream about a childhood friend of mine last night. In my dream we were kids again. The dream was unremarkable, in the sense that we were just hanging out and doing nothing in particular. In fact it seemed to be more of a rediscovered memory clip than a fabricated vision as dreams usually are.

This friend and I are still in touch, though we do not keep in touch very well. There is an entire country between us now, and we are each involved in our own tangle of events that make up our lives. But there was a time we were inseparable. We hung out every day, walking to and from school together during the year and playing from dawn till nightfall on breaks and weekends and through the summer.

I was never a girly-girl, and playing Barbies and Miss America and House with the other young ladies in the neighborhood was never quite my thing. Boys were much more fun to hang out with. Particularly him, pretty much the only kid around whose imagination was as bizarre and complex as my own.

Between the two of us, we had the world’s nerdiest toy collection. Microscopes, telescopes, electronics kits, chemistry sets, fluorescent paints and crayons. I had a little mono-speaker tape recorder, and we spent countless hours putting together little radio programs and interviews and skits and bits on tinny sounding cassette tapes. We were chased out of the house more than once for making incessantly annoying noises with an audile electronics project or smoking up the lower level of the house with an experiment gone awry. But outside was just as much fun. We would brave through the poisonous ozone layer at a certain points in the neighborhood, taking care not to breathe the noxious atmosphere therein. We would travel the hidden star systems of the suburban streets at warp 1, 2, or 10 by pedaling furiously on our bikes. Dandelion heads still pinched closed made fine space capsules for Dr. Who, and our bat kites were guided by the steady wisdom and foresight of Mission Control far below them on planet Earth.

We had a scrap piece of plywood on which we carefully inscribed a list of games we created. On rainy days or those too foul for outside play, we would refer to the board for ideas on how to occupy ourselves. There had to be about a hundred suggestions penned onto that board, games ranging from unruly pet aliens to inventing new snacks to exercises in testing telepathic skills. Sometimes we’d forget what we were thinking of when we wrote down some name, but that was a perfect opportunity to create a new game for such a title.

Yes, we were a wee bit precocious. But we had the best time, and there were few dull moments. It was in those days that we inadvertently learned of the power of creative imagination. That in every crevice of the world, there is something in which to find interest – and if not in your surroundings, than within yourself. There is neither a reason nor an excuse to ever be bored and have nothing to do.

These are lessons I am realizing I need to revisit and relearn. I am also thinking that I need to reconnect with my friend.

Many times I've wondered how much there is to know

I watched a tv show last night about a photography expedition to the bottom of the Amazon – a near-incomprehensibly massive river, larger than the Nile, Mississippi and Yangtzee combined, miles across and hundreds of feet deep in spots. The water is murky from decomposing vegetation and the constant introduction of mud and silt at the hands of the precipitous weather, and harbors some of the most deadly creatures known. Many of the dives were fruitless thanks to the soupiness of the waters, but others yielded fascinating life forms and discoveries, many previously believed to only live in salt water. Giant manta rays. Knifefish. Armored catfish. Large colonies of sponges.

I would never in my life imagine that there is a species of fish whose diet consists of wood. But there is. Only one species – and it lives in the Amazon. And a bizarrely prehistoric looking beast it is.

There is a small, slender parasitic fish that enters the gills of a host and feasts on its blood. They plague humans as well, entering their bodies through the urethra.

(Shudder).

I was struck with the thought of how easy it is to think you are familiar with your surroundings, and how quickly one can become arrogant and superior in attitude as we skim across the sheath of our world. Yet under running the surfaces are colonies of the unfamiliar. Some benign, while others are deceptively dangerous. To dip one’s toes in the water, one must first decide if the thrill and enrichment of new discovery is worth the risk of possible injury - and if so, how severe. How much is one really willing to risk in the face of that which we cannot imagine for simply lacking a point of reference?