A wise gentleman friend I am just getting to know visited me last night to gather around my table to share in a comfort meal of meatloaf made from local beef and potatoes and lettuce from the local mercantile shop. He brought me gifts in many forms: hot cereal made in small batches by his friend who is a local seed scientist, a small bag of oat flour milled nearby, a DVD he said I must watch and a CD he said I must listen to, two newspaper articles (one was an op ed he wrote about rural collaboration) and a tattered brochure he carried while visiting and hitchhiking in Belize last week.

He counts 76 years that he has lived on this earth, 45 of them at his ranch near my cabin. Prior to arriving here as a young man, he taught film-making classes in Boston. We chatted about many things, with all threads trailing back toward observations of the world around us and creating art from it.

For some reason, when has asked to see some of my photos, he was shaken by this portrait which has been buried in my image folder from an assignment in Tanzania. He asked me to enlarge it on my screen over and over again. He demanded that I look at it, close the file, and look at it again.

I understand what he is saying to me, without the use of any nomenclature. With the last display, he excused himself and went into a side room and kept murmuring something I could not hear. And I didn’t need to.