Since 1999 I have written a short, mostly-weekly piece of about 500 words. It started as a newspaper column in the Buenos Aires Herald and went through various incarnations and names.
During the flash of my first love affair with Buenos Aires it was called “Around Buenos Aires.” When this seemed too limiting and a sort of false advertising, it became “The Sunday Muse” since my mind and topics often wandered but the piece came out on Sundays at least. When I was touring a lot with my band (“Blue Tango Project”) and spent most of the year on the road, I called it “The Road Diaries.” A few years ago I began calling these pieces “Little Epiphanies” since that seemed the one defining and unifying characteristic: each one is, for me, a little epiphany, some small moment that makes me cherish this life all the more.
They are not perfect. They can be self-indulgent, even repetitive. But in their defense I can attest to their honesty: their limitations are precisely my own.
As are their moments of sublime beauty and truth. I own the best and the worst of these little writerly conceits.
If you read them you will find me.
Which in the end is the whole point, isn’t it? To connect. We are born. We go through life seeking connection, as complicated and fraught as that may be. And then we die which, I suspect, is a sort of dissolving into the universe. In the meantime it is all about connection.
These pieces are an open window into my obsessions and my striving and my unfinishedness. Since I have been at them over two decades now, they are also a sort of testament, for better or worse, to my way of living and seeing the world. I don’t aspire to perfection; I do aspire to truth.
There is not a single topic or nor for that matter much useful information shared — unless you believe that reigniting one’s love of life and wonder is a practical effect. That’s the effect they have on me. I understood long ago that the purpose of art is to celebrate life. Nothing more. And nothing less.
And so I seek in each Little Epiphany to celebrate this life we share.