Be More Sherlock

Dear friend,

I arrived back home in London from Hamburg early this afternoon. Chiara has gone on to Tuscany to teach. I had a window seat near the front with an unencumbered view of the plane’s shadow resembling the silhouette of a whale tracking us just below the ocean’s surface.

The land, stitched into tiny square patches, is a shaved forest.

From this height you can imagine how it must feel to be the one in the plane dropping explosives into the distant shapes below. How unreal it would be to inflict death—and worse —on the living - from far away.

I saw what looked like the shape of a phoenix in the clouds, but someone else may have seen an eagle or a griffin or a mother hen. Either way, the mythical bird could not hold its form for long. Unravelling, it morphed into a figure diving into the pool of the blue sky.

Now I’m fighting a delicious drowsiness that is pulling me to the comfort of bed.

I’ll start watching Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in an old Sherlock Holmes movie on YouTube.

Sherlock had a capacity to know when he’d reached the limits of his abilities to advance a case. Watson describes the way he’ll put a case to one side and totally absorb himself in music or art. Until he’s restored, and then he throws himself without reservation back into the case.

“Madame, I am all attention,” he says to a client coming to him for help with a particularly fascinating case.

I’m thinking.

Be more Sherlock.

Till tomorrow

Love

Mikey