“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.
This has been quite a week. Even if you don’t pay attention to the news or the markets or any of the other crazy happening over the past few days, you may have noticed the stress on the faces of those who do.
So. Today seems like a fine day to take a little walk on a beach and try to relax:)
There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.
Global trade is very much in the news these days. While many of the current moves from the US seem designed to take the country back to a time when every country stood on its own, those times have, arguably, been much exaggerated. There are many historical examples of interconnectivity, from the Egyptians to the Greeks to the Romans to the Silk Road and many more, but I recently saw a very cool map that brought this idea home.
Even before the modern era, the Afro-Eurasian world was deeply interconnected through trade.
I found this map to be a fascinating look into a network of world trade during an era many might assume was very insular. The only thing I wish it included is travel times. How long, for example, would it have taken for cardamom to get from India to Venice to Oslo and into a loaf of braided bread?
Here’s the map from Martin Jan Månsson, part of his website, The Age of Trade:
“Let’s put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.”
A recent poem, the result of the dumpster fire that is currently the news and a memory of a bully with a magnifying glass on a hot summer day:
It’s so easy, yes
to break things.
Careless cruelties
Narrowed to a single focus
of concentrated power.
One ant crushed, one sneer revealed, one push over the edge…
But one and one and one divides into two
and regret comes all too soon.
I also thought it might be interesting to show my work. Here’s what a typical poem draft looks like for me. The indented lines are the alternatives tested as I wrote my way through.
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