Some photos from Meghan last week. Jack’s fitting right in to Coastal Maine

Final approach home

Other worlds, other lives, even though so different from our own, have the power of arousing the sympathetic imagination, of awakening an intense and often creative resonance in others.

    ~Oliver Sacks ~

Headed back to the states from South Sudan and catching up on the news — ie, spending time behind the headlines. I posted a few things in September that seem all the more relevant given recent events.

• I’ve often quipped that I’m 95% pacifist. This essay from an old history class goes a little ways toward explaining both the 95 and the 5.

• These are a few quotes on how, regardless of “facts” — and maybe even because of them — truth and honesty are, and always have been, difficult to find.

• And also some thoughts on bombs and human “brilliance” after watching Oppenheimer.

With the news of war, of more bombs dropping, each and every one of us should take some long, hard time to empathically imagine ourselves and our own families — our kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews — as victims, as the ones displaced, starving, blown apart, or crushed, in any country, any city, any ethnicity or religion, in any act of violence or in any response to violence … Then act and speak accordingly!

Me: I need help setting up reminders on the phone.

Meghan: You don’t know how to set up reminders??

Me: It’s not very intuitive.

Meghan: How do you get by in life without reminders?

Me: Like dis …

… clack-clack, and something that never was before comes into being …

     F. Buechner

View of the White Nile out the window of the DC-3

A Three for a taxi • From yesterday’s ride-along in the 1945 Douglas DC-3 to pick up patients in Yambio. As an occasional passenger and frequent admirer, I can only confirm what each pilot has told me: This might be the best aircraft ever made. Never turn down a chance to fly in the Gooney Bird

Walking with