Funny how one or two (seemingly) random things—reading a quote from Chaucer (no less) at the same time a lyric from Five for Fighting is playing—can suddenly jar and drive your thinking in an unexpected direction: “The life so short, the craft so long to learn.” “I’m forty five for a moment. The sea is high and I’m heading into a crisis, chasing the years of my life.”

Penned this while I waited on the storm last night. Nothing special poetically, but a grand lesson.

I sat among my books last night
and marveled as I mused
at just how much was written there
and how little I’d infused—
of fact and figure, trope and truth,
of wisdom gained at crushing cost,
and as I sat among my books
I mourned my sorry loss.