I've got a book on repeat, the pages turn cover to cover and back again. Sometimes I have read the entire thing aloud. I can't stop it, the reading. I am reading it because it seems to more closely approach something fundamental than anything else I have read, even great ones; it is only a tendril, but if purity exists it could only be in this form. The story is a mentor in groundedness and elegance, against mounting superficiality and decadence, which to a practical person of any era seems only to gain the upper hand in some irretrievable way that surpasses the last reckoning of the same sort.

Here I am, the pages turning, and I'm at home in my heart, singing the essence, soaking in the essence.

I want to lay back and think no thoughts at all—a perfectly valid state of being, one that I think builds every bit as much as the appearance of building. I am small and that opposite momentum insurmountable. I feel like I am always in retreat.