The tag-line for this site is taken from the last sentence of Voltaire’s Candide—and pretty much describes what I hope to be doing here. W.H. Auden in his “Voltaire at Ferney” (1938) wrote:

And still all over Europe stood the horrible nurses
Itching to boil their children. Only his verses
Perhaps could stop them: He must go on working. …

I’m not so deluded as to think what I say here is all that—but the point is that everyone needs to go on working, tending the garden that makes life possible. Both the garden and the tending is life. In a similar vein, Confucius is said to have said:

Things have roots and branches; affairs have scopes and beginnings. To know what precedes and what follows, is nearly as good as having a head and feet.

And that is also an answer to the question: What am I doing here? Simply trying to put my thoughts in order as the events of the day threaten to overwhelm me.