Glenn,
This is vivid imagery you paint.
A long line of tangents, distractions, and centralities — we will not step through doors quite quick enough to prevent them closing on our retinue, I’m afraid. All the trappings, as you say. I have regular opportunity to spend time in uninterrupted thought — rare as comets, once — and this idea in particular returns to me.
For a moment in the midst, I felt a bit of concern for this notion of bringing, I hesitate to call them ‘complexities’ but it will do, with us when we return. Why not arrive with far fewer intentions instead, I wonder? And yet I determined that it costs nothing to speak one’s mind, that more often than not sound judgment emerges from an open dialogue. Something you and I need in droves, I think, as we continuously repair and relearn ourselves.
You prepare for the Kestrel — I am not familiar with the name and can only imagine, considering the need for militaristic metaphor as a form of preparation. Will you elaborate?
In this matter of service to country, you wrote, "Your time is your own up until the point betrayal and intrigue strikes once more? Hands may be capable but they are not your own." Here is a question you must ask me again in a week, a month, and a year. By the latter date I hope we will both be satisfied with the answer; in the present moment all I say is that you are right. I myself could not have articulated the personality of my occupation until now in two phrases — I commend you. They are capable hands but they are not my hands. For months, I considered this fact with an analytical concern, wherein I continually felt I had not imparted enough direction or information to those selected to replace me, that because of this they would rise against the same primordial difficulties I faced but fail. A lifetime could not impart to them the totality of my experiences, but to regard myself as the one individual who could guide that nation to prosperity would be hubris of a measure I deeply despise; it would make me no better than Farazh, whose self-concern caused the death of tens of thousands and the suffering of three times that number. Thus, I needed to weaken those well-worn paths between myself and that concern, accomplishing this through merely doing other things with my time, and discovered my Self can exist wholly without the other. Revolutionary and obvious truth, even, but when one is mired in the thick, one does not notice Obvious.
This is why we leave — to gain perspective. Like pausing to gulp air after flight, there is a need for it. And in the process of exploring other things, we find the clarity we need to begin forgiving ourselves, accepting the way things have been and how they are. Only then are we ready to return. It is not a wanting, this leaving; it is knowing that we must. It is necessity.
Choice is still ours in the face of unimaginable, often insensate forces. Choice versus obligation. The difference between them is infinite, as you say, and all the more reason to investigate that expanse further, no? I suspect a sensible path exists between them, a byway around their more imposing pitfalls. It is certain that betrayal and intrigue will arise again and again in Lanessian affairs, as they inevitably do in all societies. Letters will arrive, commissioners will visit, the question will be asked, “Will you help us?” Those are the moments when the response will be uniformly, “Yes and no.” Advice will be offered, a bit of direction perhaps because I cannot be callous, because they are my countrymen and there is unavoidable obligation in that fact — I do not make myself an ex-patriot, having family and interests there. But advice will be all I give them; it is all I have left to give them. More than this, I choose to give nothing more. Passion and conviction for those affairs is simply — gone. You must know what this is, to experience something like a wall rise up between yourself and the demands of your former life.
So you envision a Myrken Wood under female leadership. If this is true, it does qualify as something new, deviation from an old short-coming: a predominantly male ruling body and all that this entails. You must already have selections in mind — of course you do; you are Glenn Burnie, who maps routes in advance. You say I may be surprised and amused by the lengths you’ve gone to — you must know this is a curiosity I cannot overlook for want of answers.
Perhaps some renovation of policy will follow this "something different," regardless of whether or not the former is your intention; policy that allows for women to merit and acquire title, to inherit status and estate, to have voice and authority in council, and be otherwise subject to no law which limits opportunity, whether in the Meetinghouse or the marketplace.
As for the maps, I look forward to the journey needed to receive them first, before the jaunt itself ever occurs. You were right, I may have considered you and I less than you considered you and I. I regret having to write those words. Legendary strain does strange things to the mind. I would like never to return to that state of distraction, regardless of trial and circumstance; I intend not to. I would like you never to return to that state either. Stillness, then, in the aftermath of activity; this will be my hope.
On a separate note in closing, if in your travel you happen upon any worthy technical treatise on the subjects of constellations and their mythology, and equinoctial and solstitial alignments, these different subjects treated together or separately, I would be deeply grateful and would compensate as needed either before or after your return.
S. Duquesne