It's all about meeeeeee!!! (considering "The Army I Knew")

So just curious.

For a long time I ran a series of posts I called "The Army I Knew". It was a frankly personal recollection of my Army days, from the Regulars of the Eighties, to - I think - the Army Reserve of the late Eighties/early Nineties. IIRC I stopped when I'd gotten off active duty and had been assigned to a USAR hospital unit.

(Just looked it up - yep, the final post in the series is this one, about the technical side of that particular hospital, a "MUST" gimmick that was very Sixties but still around in the USAR like a lot of other antiquated hardware...)

Anyway.

Is there any interest in following this path? Specifically, I would have posts about:

1. A USAR heavy engineer unit outside North Philadelphia. I wrote about one of the adventures of the GIs-vs-turkey-hunters here back in 2015.
2. From there to the old 104th Division (Training) here in the Pacific Northwest, and spending a couple of years under the hat. It was an interesting look at the whole idea of "Reserve drill sergeants".
3. From THERE to the Oregon Army Guard - as a hat I was involuntarily reclassified as an 11C - mortarman - and would have been expected to go to war as a mortar section sergeant of FDC, and at that time I knew about mortar operations what a cow knows about church, so a lateral transfer to a Guard infantry unit. From there to...
4. A Guard artillery unit. For the simple reason that I was too old and to cunning to walk around with a goddamn mortar on my back, and when the ORARNG went fully to the light MTO&E I wanted to ride to battle. and then my final duty station,
5. The Oregon Guard west-side training post, Camp Rilea, where I retired.

I have no idea if there is any sort of readership for this stuff. I don't really have stories about me as much as about the time and places I lived through. 

That Army - the Reserve and Guard of the Nineties and early Oughts - is as vanished as Ninevah and Tyre. The War on Terror destroyed them as throughly as it did Fallujah and Ramadi. 

The reality of deploying very eighteen months to three years meant that the old-school-post-Vietnam guardsmen, the "two-days-a-month/two-weeks-a-year" guys like me, couldn't hang on to both a real civilian job and a USAR/ARNG slot. Despite the law, your civilian employer couldn't keep you if you were constantly vanishing to go play whack-a-muj every year and a half...so the reserve component units (so far as I can tell) largely became a mix of students and young guys without a career and more-or-less-professional-soldiers who picked up odd jobs between deployments.

But...it IS also truly ancient and minor history. There's nothing important or of social value there. It's just a reminiscence of a time that now seems long ago and far away. I time that, all in all, I enjoyed living through. But not one that I'm sure has any entertainment value to anyone who hadn't.

So.

Thoughts?

Some things I liked about 2022

This is a blatant rip-off of the post John Scalzi did over at Whatever.

If you're gonna steal, steal from people who you know do good work.

Right?

Anyway, I've never done one of these "year-in-review" sorts of posts before. Mostly because I've been looking forward rather than back; work-life tends to make you do that. You're pushing to stay ahead of the bill-collectors and corporate reviews and colonoscopies (okay, well, maybe not colonoscopies; those, like the occasional sudden sneeze, just sort of catch you) and all the other trouble in the world.

But this last year was different.

For one thing, I finally stopped being a wage-slave and having to strain to look forward.

Being a geologist-for-hire was a huge part of who I am - who I was - for thirty years. I did science for a living and put in a lot of long, hard days outside doing it. Shit, if you go to this website my front-page bio even says that: "...analytical by training and doggedly hard-working by necessity..." That was me.

Now?

Well...I'm still who I was then. Still analytical, still liberal, still...well, actually more judgemental, but that may have to do with the appalling tidal wave of reactionary shitheels that you can't swing a cat without smacking or so it seems.

But I've already gone into that. This is supposed to be about things I LIKED in 2022.

So. 

Retirement. 

I've liked being retired. At least so far.

I liked the lab work, soils testing, the sort of bench-chemistry-index-testing science we learn in school.

I liked the analysis, the puzzle-solving, the looking at the ground and the soil and the landforms and trying to figure out what was going on.

But because the bulk of my work was dirt-nanny stuff? Nagging asshole contractors to do what they low-bid and are trying to slime out of? That's the daily bread of most of earthwork engineers, and sweet baby Jesus how it sucks. Sucks the fun right out of all the other stuff.

So. NOT having to do that? I like that. And it makes up some for no longer having the disasters and lab and analysis to do.

So retirement? I liked that.

The Portland Japanese Garden

As you can probably tell from the photo essays, I love the Garden; the peaceful order, the quietly tended "nature". The colors, the light, the shape and the weight of it.

Membership in the Garden lets me get in early, when the City around it is still and the pathways are empty. I get to stroll and think, watch and reflect, and I like that a lot.

And speaking of Japan...

Anime and Manga

For some reason this past year I've been sinking deeper into the world of Japanese graphic art, whether in written form as manga - 漫画 - or animeアニメ . 

The Girl shares my enjoyment of the animated form; over the last year together we've enjoyed the big-screen versions of a couple of Studio Ghibli classics - The Cat Returns and Howl's Moving Castle - along with perhaps the most visually gorgeous film I've ever seen, Belle.

The story? Oh, just the old "beauty and the beast" chestnut. Fun enough, and the story of Suzu, the "belle" of the title, her friends and family, is genuinely sweet and moving. But that's not the main reason to watch.

It's the graphics.

Amazing.

My taste in the dead-tree forms runs all over the place, from dystopian futurism like Ghost In The Shell to sweetly adorable yuri romances. I think I've mentioned my fondness for the goofy adventure/military/fantasy Gate: Where The JSDF Fought. 

Rory Mercury?

Yow.

My favorite from 2022, though?

Sweat and Soap.

It's a weird, weird, deeply weird premise; the female lead, Asako, has "hyperhidrosis" - meaning she sweats more than she thinks is "normal" - while the male lead, Koutarou, has an incredible sense of smell which he normally uses in his job as soap designer but which leads him to Asako...who smells delicious! At least to him.

I picked it up purely out of curiosity; the storyline seemed odd but the artist (Yamada Kintetsu) has a nice clean style and I'm a sucker for that.

But that didn't catch me. 

What caught me was how it turns out to be a true, sweet, and moving love story.

True in the sense that these fictional people are deeply flawed, as are we all, and that they meet and become a couple in a very weird way...but one that finds goodness and joy even in their own and each others' flaws.

It's just gentle and kind and very, very romantic.

And speaking of romance...

First Night With The Duke

I follow a shockingly large number of comics at the "Webtoon" site, but this was far and away the most delightful; a goofy, funny, exciting, bizarre little story about an ordinary Korean girl who wakes up inside the romance novel she's reading but not (as is the usual form of these "isekai" (異世界) stories) as the heroine or the villainess.

She's just "Ripley", a minor character at the party scene where Zeronis - the titular Duke and a classic manga "dark and dangerous" hero - is supposed to meet the heroine and fall for her.

Instead Ripley gets plowed and ends up in bed with the Duke, who becomes obsessed with her instead of the woman he's supposed to fall for.

Oh, it's waaaayyyy more complex than that. There's fake deaths, and mad suitors and actual love and it was just big crazy fun. I'm sorry it's over, and I'm hoping that maybe the author will release an English language version, because I'd love to re-read it; it was my Top Romance Story of 2022.

And speaking of even more romance...

Everything Everywhere All At Once

I've been a Michelle Yeoh fanboi ever since her Hong Kong action days. But she, and this wildly inventive film, were perhaps the best thing I've seen at the movies not just in 2022 but for many years.

She's, well, everything all at once; mom, wife, diva, artist, businesswoman, savior of the world...while all the time being the same struggling everyday person just trying to get through one more day that we all are.

It's action and adventure and comedy but y'know what?

It's really a love story.

Yeoh is a woman who is tired. She's tired of herself, her husband, her daughter, her dumpy little laundromat that is her whole life. She's tired of struggling through every day just to find another just like it. And she is terrified to find that there's worse; the actual no-shit end of the world - worlds! - that only she - tired and beat up and struggling - can save.

And she does. Because deep down, she loves herself, her husband, her daughter...she loves the whole world enough to fight to save them all.

It's an epic performance in a terrific flick. 

It won't win Best Picture and she won't win Best Actress. 

It's too weird, and she's not diva enough.

But they should.

The Portland Thorns

God but this was a fun season. Winning the title was pretty awesome; I liked that, duh. But getting to write and think about the team and the league and the game was a hell of a lot of fun, too.

And we might just be getting a new owner and a new front office, after a pretty rugged couple of years from the old regime, and I'm liking that.

Oh, and I love this photo; it's from the post-match celebration. The player in the circle is Olivia Moultrie, who's still in high school and 1) can't drink, and 2) is clearly embarrassed at the grownups. Yeah, Livvy, grups can be pretty cringe-y.

Mary Bennett

One of the most fun things I've read - as a no-pictures-just-words book - this year has been the three volumes of the "Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennett" series, beginning with the first Pride and Prejudice-based story of the middle Bennett sister finding work as a spy for the Regency government and continuing with the next two.

The fun part about these is that the author doesn't try to heroine-up her protagonist by making her more witty or clever or smart or attractive. Yes, she's the "heroine"...but she's also the same socially awkward, pedantic, prosy middle Bennett sister we meet in Jane Austin's novel.

Cowley makes that plausible; being drab, plodding, and detail-oriented might make you a crashing bore at an afternoon tea but a damn good undercover agent.

Mary is more than just that, though. Crowley shows us how her exposure to the bigger world outside of Longbourne helps Mary grow. She learns that she has actual skills, that she doesn't have to push herself forward to show them to others. Indeed, as a confidential agent she has to learn to conceal what she knows and does!

By the third book - where she has to "learn" to kiss to sweeten up a possible source or beguile an enemy agent - she's become genuinely thoughtful and even a bit wise. Does she still manage to find a way to work a moralizing quote into a romantic moment?

She's Mary Bennett! Of course she does!

But this Mary can have a romantic moment, and even enjoy it fully and intelligently.

There's supposed to be two more of these coming; I can't wait.

What else?

I still like this furry butthead. He's a good cat. Or, as my Bride describes him, he's "good at being a cat".

And I still love my family, my home, and my hometown.

So all in all, it was a pretty decent year. There were a lot of things I liked.

Tomorrow I want to talk about the next year, though.

Wait, wait..!

I can't go on without recommending...

 Lore Olympus

Rachel Smythe's post-modern take on the ancient Hades-Persephone tale.

It's funny, clever, sexy, all with the wonderful graphics that pulled me in the first time.

Plus it's an absolutely heartwarming love story.

(Can you tell I'm a sucker for a love story?)

Anyway...go, read it. It's tons of fun.

Upon the waters

Four years ago my father, the man I always called "The Master Chief" in this place, died.

My mother, his wife, lingered on another three years until she, too, died in the spring of the year, just a little over a year ago.

I sat beside them both in their final days, as their bodies followed where their...souls? Spirits? Minds? The part of them that made them who they were, the person that they had been, had already gone.

Both passed from that which I called "...the "sleep" of the hinterlands of life, that gray taiga where the living world meets the dead." to unlife full of years and - although no more ready for that passage than any of us is, or will ever be - full of lives well-lived.

Today a small group of their family - son and daughter, cousins, niece and nephew - and those relatives' beloveds gathered in a nondescript little rented room in a small town on the east end of Fourth Lake, the largest of the "Fulton Chain of Lakes" in the Adirondak Mountains of New York state.

The remnants of Jack and Carol - father and mother, aunt and uncle - stood as they had in life beside one another, only just as small rectangular boxes set on a table scattered with books of photographs and memories of the lives of the ashes within.

It was the sort of barely-comfortable gathering you'd find anywhere a group of virtual strangers met to spend one last time with dead people.

Hardly anyone knew what to say, and only my sister had the courage to openly weep for the loss of our father and mother. Several of us told stories of Carol McMillan and Jack Lawes as we remembered them, or through memories of our times with them.

My cousin's (and her wife's) happy little Westie helped lighten the mood by being, well, a happy small dog. I had a flight to catch tomorrow morning so I left early, with the others still talking amongst themselves in the rustic room lit with the filtered sun of early afternoon.

I wandered down to the shore of the lake, the clear water bright with wavelets.

This place was particular to my father, who was born and grew up not far away and whose relatives had owned one of the many "summer resorts" along the north shore, although much more modest than the luxurious Gilded Age hotel my sister had booked for our parents' memorial.

I sat and drank a draft to their memory, to the place that my father had loved and had brought his bride to and she had, in turn, come to love.

When I wrote about my father's death four years ago I spoke of how adrift I felt that he was gone:

"As his living remainder I still feel as if I'm floating, weightlessly untethered, beside him. As if our conversation simply halted, forever unfinished, as he stood up and left without a word. He is no longer and yet will always be my father, the man who raised me, whose manhood was my measure as I grew to manhood myself. I find myself turning to talk of some daily commonplace with him only to find emptiness there, and the understanding that the emptiness will be there until I find myself where he has gone."

I won't pretend that I was gracious or cheerful about traveling cross-continent to stand beside the silent ashes of my father and mother. I won't be polite and say it was a pleasure, or that I wanted to make the journey. I was a right bastard, sis, and I made a difficult time more difficult for you. I'm sorry, that's the damnedest part of who I am.

But for all my bitching and moaning in the end I'm glad I came over those mountains and seas and spoke, in vain, to their silent ashes.

For, as I've mentioned before in this place; as children and parents we make an unspoken bargain.

As parents we will see our children into the world.

We will help them grow straight and strong, honest and truthful, kind and loving. We will set the path before them, the path into the world and through it, as best we can.

And then we, as children, will see our parents out of the world.

Love and care for them, listen to and treasure them, and, finally, see them laid down in death as peaceful and beloved as we can make them.

As they set us forth upon the waters we fulfill the promise that will see them home safe to harbor. And then be the quay where they came to rest; to bear witness of their voyage and the doings thereof, great and small, fine and coarse, large and little. That, in us, their memory will live as long as we do.

And so we have. So I have. I am no longer adrift, no longer bereft. I am without them, the people who helped make me who I am, but I will never be without them. I am their logbook, their testament, their living memory. I, my sister, those we love and tell of our parents and their lives.

It is ours now to take forward from here; mine, and all of us who knew them and loved them.

So I stand, at rest, by the waters of the deep cold lake where my father and mother have themselves come to rest. Their journey together, and their journey together with me and all their beloveds, is ended, and their great works, the works of their lives, are done.

Now they are ours to carry on.

The Transfiguration of St. Nittnatheus

Well, in the end, I think she went pretty well.

Remember how Nitty Kitty seemed determined to make her last days a sort of middle finger to "death with dignity"? Yeah, well, that was a thing, for a while.

But we took her to the vet, got her some medicine to help with the nausea and constipation, we made her get out of her litterbox and sleep on the nest of soft towels and a rice bag, combed the litter out of her fur, and otherwise tried to make her comfortable and happy.

She continued her round of alternating sleep with frantic begging for food, and climbing into unoccupied laps, and seemed to recover, a bit. She was still desperately stiff and creaky - the cat was about ninety-eight in people years, for Heaven's sake - but she got around as well as she ever had.

The weather let up a little, so she could enjoy her outside-time, something she very much loved. But, slowly, every day, she got a bit slower and weaker.

Last Friday was my company's "winter holiday" thing. Mojo and I went and had a very good evening, but we returned to find a distraught daughter and a very, very weak Nitty on our bed where the Girl had lifted her, having found her curled, nearly motionless, on a pile of laundry in the bathroom. Once on the bed the Nit was too weak to get up, and she had pissed herself and our bedlinens.

My Bride changed the sheets while I made up a soft towel-bed for Nitty, intending to move her out to the living room to the couch where she had been sleeping. I gently moved her, frail and as light as a memory, just fur over sharp bones, onto the towel, carried her out, and put her down.

And the Nit, true to her crotchety self, immediately go up, struggled up onto the television stand and laid down, ignoring my attempts to herd her onto the towel.

Even that wasn't right, because she flopped down to the floor, tottered over to my wife's sewing table, squatted down and pissed on a bolt of fabric that the Bride had left on the floor, and then shuffled under the table and laid down to die.

The whisper-thin remnant of her lasted through the night. Unmoving, barely breathing. I got up several times; she was still barely living at four, but, as so many others do, she fled before the light.

By Saturday dawn she was cold.

The Girl was inconsolable, wet-eyed and grieving all through the day. We went to the local stone seller and bought a flat marker and a little cup-shaped headstone. I dug a shallow grave in the sunny spot near the front fence that Nitty had always slept in when she was outside and the weather was fine enough, and we petted her goodbye, folded her in her cloth shroud, and laid her down. I gently put the cold spring soil back over her, and then her stone one top. We spend a few moments there, and then I had to go about my business.

I returned to find this:

Between them my Bride and the Girl had created this little shrine, complete with saints and flowers and offerings. I simply warned them that if the miracles occurred that they would have to figure out what to do with the pilgrims.

You were a funny little soul. Whether you were Cypress - the name they gave you at the shelter - or Francesca, the ridiculous name my Bride hung on you but that we never used - or Fat Nitty, from your early days as a glutton of all things cat-food - or just Nitty; morning crier, lap-cat, patient companion, quiet, gentle, and affectionate...you were a good cat. You died as well as anyone can; full of years, peaceful, surrounded by your home and those people who loved you.

You were not just a good cat, you were good company, dammit, and I'll miss you.

The Last Night of the Year

The Boy is the only one of us to honor tradition this year. He's off with his pals playing "Dance Dance Revolution" and awaiting midnight as part of a New Year's sleepover.

The Girl is watching ponies with her little budgie under her hair, my Bride is reading the latest installment of the "Gentlemen Bastards" series.

I'm right here.

Tonight is supposed to be the night that we look back over the past year. And make promises for the coming one.

I don't make New Year's resolutions anymore; making pledges on my honor tends to end up with either breaking the pledge or the honor. And I have little enough honor left as it is. So that leaves looking back.

2013 wasn't an awful year for me (other than the slow painful deconstruction of my right hip, which would have happened regardless of what year it was).

I did some good.

Some good parenting, first. The Bride and I topped off our visits with Jean the Kid Counselor with the agreement that I would stop using my Drill Sergeant voice on The Boy. Jean said that although it worked - it stopped the Boy's behaviors that summoned the Drill Sergeant from the black depths of R'yleh - it had built up a pretty massive pile of anger and resentment in the Boy. So I stopped getting angry, at least on the outside where it showed, and since August the Boy has gotten much less angry and rough with his mother.

So, there's that.

The Girl? She's easy; just give her love and she turns to you like a flower seeks the sun. She loves her ponies and her soccer and her little budgie and her parents and her friend Lilah because Lilah likes what the Queen likes and it is important that you like what the Queen likes.

I've done some good marriage, too. My Bride and I have lived and loved in the way that good married couples live and love; sometime we've leaned on each other, sometimes we've pounded on each other, sometimes we've just leaned together against the winds of children and work and worry that never stop blowing.

Sometimes we fought, although usually fairly.

Sometimes were agreed to let each other go to hell each in our own way.

Mojo has done a terrific job working as a reading instructor at the kid's elementary school this year. She's also developed a sudden utter fascination with the news from North Korea (my Bride, the woman hitherto devoid of current events. Huh.)

Her sewing has grown apace. She is more accomplished, wiser, and more graceful than she was a year ago.

I've done some good work, more of the same I've been doing now for...21 years.

Damn, that's a long time.

Looking back I realize that there's a hell of a lot of awful crap littering the Portland area that I'm responsible for; fast food joints, quickie marts, cell towers, subdivisions. Think of any sort of horrible eyesore and I've been responsible for helping it get built.

But I've also worked for some good projects, too. Landslide fixes, road and embankment repairs, bridges...although if I never have to hike in two miles to another wilderness bridge project it'll be too soon.

Good citizen? Well, as always, the world outside my city and state seems to be going do hell in a handbasket, largely because of the toxic combination of a greedy elite that has learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the lessons taught the French aristocracy in 1789 and an intractably moronic Teabagging tribe of adult-sized four-year-olds on the political Right that is completely fooled by the former.

The pair of them are doing their level best to return my country to the Gilded Age, a time that was exceptionally awful for people like me. And for people like the Teabaggers, too, had they the wit to understand anything but their spastic grasp for guns and God. Which they do not, more's the pity.

So what has become a weary sort of year-end political ritual I look backward without fondness and ahead without hope. The chances for a renewed social contract that will benefit I and mine in any sort of reasonable way seem dimmer and dimmer. I do not look for a new New Deal in my lifetime.

As always, I stop at year's end to wonder what my purpose here at this blog is.

I can read the numbers, and the average supermarket flier probably gets a wider readership. I cannot pretend that I am doing any political good here, or any social good. It does seem that my essays on military history draw readers, but my own interests there are growing slender.

For those who take interest in this sort of thing, I have roughly eleven more "Battles" posts over the next two years.

Nothing at all for January and February. Glorieta Pass in March, nothing in April, two posts - the 1453 Fall of Constantinople and Crete 1941 - in May. Two more for June: Chalons in 451 and the Battle of the Philippine Sea. After that Bosworth Field in August along with a sort of extended rumination on the Stalingrad campaign. Marathon in September, The 1813 Battle of the Thames in October, and the Battle of Baquoba in November.

That's it.

Much of what I write here I write to amuse or entertain myself. But I could do that on a sheet of foolscap that I would put into a box, so clearly I must want someone else to read what I write. And though I am foolishly fond of some of what I write I won't pretend that I am better at it than many other writers out there in the Aether.

This past year I've found some of those writers to enjoy and refreshed my delight in some familiar companions.

Lisa Jakub is doing a fine job over at her joint; she's simple and fresh and intelligent, a good woman learning the strength and depth of her own goodness and finding her voice as a writer.

And Paul Bibeau is always reliably wonderful; acerbic as a splash of lemon in the eye, unsparing of fools and with a gift for the fine language that I wish I could summon as deftly as he can. An unfailing dispenser of delights.

And so to the end; I have no more tonight.

I wish I had something of exceptional matter, some crafty comment about the passing of the old year to end this post with.

I don't; my own life had no great joys or sorrows, no subject of great weight for me to jot down here. I and mine passed through the year with the small passing days, the pattering succession that marked our way from darkness to darkness, us holding up our lights as best we could.

But perhaps the simple steady passing of the days and the year is matter enough.

We choose this night to mark a boundary between the years, making the sunset one and the sunrise another.

But at the same time we know that tonight is not really different from every other night, that it is just one more pass in the the endless passing of the terminator, that boundary between day and night, that every night of every year passes over us as we move with the turning earth and wakes us with the light of a new day.

And a New Year.

6/6/44

Early this morning sixty-three years ago thousands of airborne soldiers jumped into the dark skies over northern France. They were the first wave of what would be the liberation of Europe: D-Day.

In a time of "phony war", when our "leaders" have to keep reminding us of how we're fighting for "freedom" - note all the quotation marks in the preceding sentence - it might be well to recall a time when were really were fighting against a deadly enemy, one which, had they won, would have initiated a new Dark Age.

Soldiers have always been a double-edged weapon: we do things that no decent, civilized person would or should do. And yet, sometimes, because we do those things those we fight for will never have to. This was certainly true for the citizen-soldiers of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, who landed in the hedgerows around St. Mere Eglise early this morning those many years ago. Their example, and the memory and honor of their service, lives on in the motto of the "Panthers" of the 82nd Airborne - "H-Minus"! I was and always will be proud to have worn that crest, and the red beret that has come to symbolize all those who ride to battle on others' wings.

Those men, those who lived through that terrible night of fighting in the streets of the little town, who lived through the fight across France, the Low Countries and into Germany, are old now, and falling away faster than June wheat under a Norman's scythe.

And it is because of this that I wanted to stop and remember them. Not the "heroism" of their war, because - in our debased time when merely being in the same grid square that a hostile round lands in is "heroic" - for most soldiers being a "hero" is about as voluntary as being caught the wrong way on a moving escalator. Not to celebrate the "Greatest Generation", which, like all people in all times, were not so much born to greatness as had it thrust upon them.

Rather, it is just to try and put into words my love for those men I have never met, who, like me and my friends and brothers and comrades, had to face their fears and doubts and step out that door into space. But unlike us, knowing that whatever waited for them it would be bad and worse before it got better.

So now you shuffle toward's death's darkened jump door, guys. It's black, and you're being shoved and shuddered by forces you can't see or control. The fear is as much of the unknown as of the pain and fright you know await you after you pass through that opening. The shadowed face of the jumpmaster at the door holds no enlightenment, no warnings or cautions to help you out into the night.

No matter who and how, we all have to pass our static line to that jumpmaster and jump out that door. It is never easy and it is never simple, just as in war the simplest things are hard. Thing is, you did it once. And because you did, all of our lives are better and brighter.

So here's to you, guys. May you exit clean. May your 'chute deploy perfectly. May you drift down through the clear night sky, free, this time, of tracer fire and the merciless flares. To find your home, the heart of rest, whatever and wherever that may be to each one of you.

Thank you.