Good morning. 🕊️🕊️🕊️
6 November 2025
Above my desk hangs a landscape print—a gift from my last job, given for either five or ten years of service. I don’t recall which. By the time I reached fifteen years, they’d stopped doing that altogether. The company had changed hands by then, and the ritual of recognition faded with it.
The print doesn’t hold any sentimental weight for me. I’m thinking of giving it to Goodwill and replacing it with one of my own photographs—something with personal resonance, maybe a bird in flight or a quiet perch.
Back then, the gifting process involved a catalog. You’d flip through a book of options and make your selection. I checked to see if a new car was tucked in there somewhere—no car, not even a bicycle. Most of the offerings were trinkets, tokens of acknowledgment more than celebration. I didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but I did notice the relative insignificance of the gesture. It came with a certificate, which may or may not still be buried somewhere in my things.
I understand the impulse to honor longevity. In the Army, soldiers receive a medal for every three years of good conduct—essentially for staying out of trouble. They also wear hash marks on their uniforms, one for every three years of service. A visible ledger of time.
It feels like I should be making a point, doesn’t it? But I already did. I’m replacing the print above my desk with one of my bird photographs. The rest was just thoughts circling around.
I’ll need a ladder.
“Ritual is the passageway of the soul into the Infinite.” – Algernon Blackwood
“The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.” – Bill Copeland
“I realize there’s something incredibly honest about trees in winter—how they’re experts at letting things go.” — Jeffrey McDaniel
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