Hello there! 👋

On the first day of school we take a photo of the kids at the front door with their new backpacks and smiles. The front door has changed many times… the deck in wine country, in front of the house 30 meters from the sea, on the stoop just steps from my brother’s house, the Kyoto apartment breezeway where we would watch Daimonjiyaki… and most recently in the back garden of the house we bought a year ago. The kids change too of course. In a little over a week the older one will be taking her final first day of school photo. She is going into grade 12, the last year before going off to college.

But that is the future. This August was about the past. Not just the mythic stories of Circe or Arthur’s The Bright Sword (two excellent books I read this month), but connecting with friends and family by travelling to the smoky Okanagan (comparison photos | video of driving through the smoke), or having long distance calls with friends I have known for 25 or 40 years. We squeezed in a day trip to Fort Langley which will celebrate its bicentennial next year, and took a walking tour of the old Japanese community in downtown Vancouver (pics).

August has been a month of thinking about communities, the stories that bind them, and the stories that live on even when the people are gone: the ancient poems of Greek heroes, the bardic tales of the Round Table, revolutionary Irish songs, the reports of families forced to pack all their belongings in a single suitcase before being shipped off to a concentration camp.

In my daily life I spend a lot of time thinking about my various communities and making a future better than the past. A movement consists of a story that everyone can see themselves in. How do you weave such a narrative? How can you make directions for diverse people and have them all arrive at a single location at the same point in time? And once they arrive they smile at one another with knowing looks, a hand gripping a weary shoulder in hearty greetings: “We did it!”

… and that is just the first telling, as their story flows into the future and the past.

It is a powerful thing that I need to ponder more.

In the meantime, here is to your story. I hope it is heading in a healthy and peaceful direction.

/ck

PS. Apologizing for the lack-of-sleep-induced maudlin missive this month.

🖋 From the Blog

"Find the others"
Post description

🧭 Elsewhere

Very excellent reading through the Bayeaux Tapestry Video →

A simple question, a Werner Herzog answer Video →

A poem about history Link →

Date advice from moi Link →

Indieweb is PUNK! manifesto Link →

Fav song of the month MV →

And was that not the point of a marriage? To love a person more than they can love themselves?

From The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

📖 What I’m Reading

2666 by Roberto Bolaño (7% Complete)

Roberto Bolaño loves himself a comma. Maybe this is the reason people stopped doing Oxford commas? Comma supply shortage?

2026 is the year I leave GoodReads. Since January I have been using 📘 Hardcover which has been a delight. Connect with me there https://hardcover.app/@chadkoh