Five Tantalizing Pieces You Will Love on this Autumn Tuesday (Nov. 14)
Relationships with Silence, The Toll on Veterans Away from the Front Lines, Flocking to Abandoned Places, Memories in the Blink of an Eye, Capturing Past Stories, and the University of Virginia.
Friends, We have five great pieces today from here in beautiful, sunny Virginia. Please enjoy. — Ben
In a piece from Incola ego sum in terra (translation: Psalms 118:19 – “open to me the gates of righteousness: i will go into them, and i will praise the lord”),
describes his ongoing relationship with silence and takes us on a beautiful hike, replete with photographs, to put his goals into perspective.He writes:
If you've ever watched nuns walking into church you may notice they move more slowly than you or I. That's because for them, time is God's, not their own. There's no need to rush, it's more important to be recollected in God's presence. This is an attitude of mind which I am trying to cultivate.
A thoughtful piece.
It’s a pleasure to discover writers whom I haven’t yet read or only recently discovered on Substack.
In No Reasonable God (a veteran’s experience),
describes his time in the U.S. Navy when he left high school.What struck me about this piece is the manner in which Byrd describes the psychological toll on soldiers who were not on the front lines – an issue I had not considered.
He shares:
Survivors aren't always easy to get along with. Please remember that thick skin is scar tissue. We still want love, respect, and a good time. We want to know what we did was important. Mostly we tried to help people.
This is an eye-opening piece well worth reading.
Rebecca Gomez at
ponders our fascination with The Magical Mystery of Abandoned Places. She’s right – we love to dig into old barns and castles, decommissioned submarines in dock, diaries, stamp collections, court houses where one general surrendered to another, and so forth. Doing so transports us to a time and place we cannot access. Gomez has her own ideas about the subject. I recommend this highly.Note – I wrote a story about a fictional, abandoned barn that follows the protagonist in important ways throughout his life. You can read it here.
Justin Deming at
gives us Blink, a great piece about how our most important priorities can disappear in the blink of an eye. A great read.A touching piece by
at about capturing past stories to treasure them in the present and future. She writes about her father:We can guess, of course, or try to piece [the past] together from stories told to other people, from snatches of text in diaries or scribbles on that backs of photographs, but we can’t know the story in the way someone would tell it themselves unless we ask them.
A thought-provoking piece, and advice worth heeding.
TWO PHOTOS OF THE DAY
University of Virginia, 2022. A bench in Thomas Jefferson’s magnificent gardens behind each of the 10 pavillions adjacent to his Academic Village and Lawn, founded in 1819, a UNESCO World Heritage site. I spend a lot of time reading on this very bench during college.
Jefferson’s Lawn and Academical Village from above. You can see the gardens on the right and left behind the pavilions. Painting by Guy Crittenden.
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Thank you so much for sharing my story, Ben. Incredibly kind of you! 🙏
I think Alley and I are going to visit Monticello again some time soon. We've both been before, but not together. I'm pretty sure we'll both spend the most time gawking at Jefferson's book-reading thingy, and the kitchen.