My father was a high-school dropout, a sign painter, a landscape artist, and a calligrapher who created diplomas with a metal-nibbed pen dipped in India ink. In his own quiet way, he encouraged education.

Coming to Terms with Death, Hunting Season, and Othona Retreat were published in "Urthona: A Journal of Buddhism and the Arts." Reading and writing poetry since early adolescence has given me a way to understand my emotional and spiritual life, a better ear for sound in language and a way to strengthen the attention I pay to the world.

When I was 18 years old, I went to Europe for four months on my own, although I had rarely spent a night away from home before that. Recently, I discovered letters I wrote to my parents during that trip. Those letters were the seeds for this essay.

I met my best friend, Roland Labrie, when I was a teenager and he was a teacher at my high school in Vermont. He was the first person I met who loved language, literature, and poetry as much as I did. We were friends for nearly 50 years. I delivered the eulogy at his 2018 funeral in York Maine.