Thoughts of Saturday morning, January 22, 2005

N,

Read this quote today "And I heard the voice of the Lord say "Who shall I send and who will go for us? and I answered, "Here I am, send me."

...I was quite moved by reading this and immediately related it to all who fight for us on foreign soil. Some go so willingly as Larry Freedman did, (written about in The Book Of Honor, Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA, by Ted Gulp, 2000)their whole lives bent on risk and perpetual motion, yet others serve and give so unselfishly but are not warriors at heart but persons who find themselves in struggles that determine the very meanings of others' lives (whether it be here at home or for those who live on the lands of war).

It is frightening to think that often one's life as a soldier comes to a sharp pin point in a flash, that can prick a whole existance into death or be a cataclysmic event of one's continued life.

...
In thinking about the various war monuments and memorials, the Korean and Vietnam in Washington D.C.)...I was moved to tears by both. I am so glad that there are artists still who are able to conceive and sculpt creations of dilemmas, movement and feeling. Work that touches us, that we can can identify something within us that speaks between our being and that of the form we can perceive with our senses, our humaness.

... If nothing else, I think that one of my purposes in life is to be moved and ponder, to write what comes from the heart a truth that has long been buried in years of man's survival on the earth, on which he has struggled in so many ways. Isn't it amazing that a "thought" (an elusive impulse of energy?) can take form.

It bothers me that many times we humans end that form, that all forms of life are not allowed to live until it they are beyond old, to pass on to the next whatever. All passings should not be painful...