Roots And Shoots

Welcome to my blog!  If you arrived here by accident then please try to think of it as a happy accident.  This is a digital place dedicated to human thought, to imagination, and to the higher ideals of our species.  Most importantly, it is dedicated to expression.  My whole life I have been an indefatigable pursuer of the arts.  Whether it concerned the traditional fine arts, the literary arts, the lingual arts, or the martial arts, I have relished the myriad insights offered into the human experience by the avenues of expression humans have developed over the eons.  Consequently, I have dabbled in many such forms of expression over the decades of my life.  I am a writer, illustrator, poet, and black belt in Chung Do Kwan Tae Kwon Do.  My interests have always been inclined toward the existential and the romantic, but I also revere the sciences and their important revelations on the human condition.  That said, religion and myth have intrigued me my whole life and I delight in drawing parallels between various belief systems and figures, ever marveling at the intersections of the variegated pantheons and their stories.  From the Algonquin tales of Glooskap and Malsum to the Greek stories of Heracles and Hera, the world is rich in wonderful myths that express our shared experiences as humans in poetic imagery and poignant juxtapositions.  And, of course, some tales do not need moralization to be engaging and entertaining; some are just invigorating to read and wonder about.  As a writer and illustrator I attempt to imbue my work with the magic of the old tales.  Yet, I also have an interest in a broad spectrum of literature and art beyond the “dusty tomes” of our ancestors, and so I take great pleasure in learning from the Victorians, the modernists, the post-modernists, and even the pulps.  Consequently, I dabble in a bit of everything, applying a critical mind and an open heart to whatever strikes my fancy, knowing there can be as much learned from dime-a-dozen thrillers as from door-stop epics.  Timeless topics appeal to me, such as mortality, human conflict, socioeconomic struggles, love, absurdity and hope.  I also appreciate a well-structured sentence with lyricism and flow, and lovely imagery and metaphor atop all that.  Thus, writers like Nabokov, Woolf, Bradbury, and Ovid enthrall my imagination.  Shakespeare, of course, presides most prominently in my hall of literary heroes, and beside his lofty personage stand the equally lofty genius of Tolstoy and Dickens.  For pure pleasure I read Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones, and admire that peerless Jester King, Mark Twain.  All of these authors, and more, inspire me.  Of poets, there are countless.  Sandburg, Poe, Byron, Lowell, Larkin, Yeats, Keats, Browning, Kipling, etc.  There is something to be learned from all of them, but more importantly there is something to feel from their elucidating words.