Sunday July 16, 2023

It's Sunday Morning

The great joy of traveling is to see how other communities show their pride and tell their stories. That was on my mind last week as I visited Beaufort, N.C., which is home to one of the finest maritime museums in the Southeast, beautiful homes along the waterfront, and new efforts to tell Beaufort’s full history, which includes the difficult stories of the city as a port where slave ships landed.

The collision of the aesthetically beautiful, and the ugly brutality of slavery and its ongoing impact on all of us, don’t stand in opposition in Beaufort. The work together, in a way that recognizes fully what the human experience is, and how the past defines it.

Just some thoughts for this Sunday morning …

Memory

One had a pretty face,
and two or three had charm,
but charm and face were in vain,

because the mountain grass
cannot but keep the form
where the mountain hare has lain.
-by William Butler Yates