David Kirkpatrick Meets David Kirkpatrick and David Kirkpatrick

October 17, 2015

The web of existence is dense – filled with energy, memory and phantoms. For all its sorrows, the web in which we all are caught and can not fully explain or escape also contains the simple joy of being alive.

The Captain was born in Iona, Scotland and has been the Captain of the ship, the Iolaire all his life. We share the same name. By experience, the Captain knows the sea as both beautiful and violent. Neither in its loveliness nor its terror, does the ocean take prisoners. The arms of the sea brought short the lives of the Captain’s son at the age of twenty three and his four friends of the same age when the sea drowned them in a winter storm while the lads crossed the Iona Sound. He and I share the same name as his son.

David Kirkpatrick at the Cemetery in Iona

David Kirkpatrick at the Cemetery in Iona

Despite the sorrows, the Captain maintains a puckish exhilaration. He knelt in the long grass to allow me to discover a Puffin nest dug in the soil. He unfurled his pointer finger to introduce me to two new seal pups on the wet blue rocks. I realized the vastness of the web the day I met the Captain in his sorrows and joys. While I am not the Captain, I am him as sure as I am not the ghost of his son and as sure as I am. For as sure as we are the many, we are also the one.

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The Charles Kirkpatricks and the Alec McCormicks in Iona, Scotland around 1920

The Charles Kirkpatricks and the Alec McCormicks in Iona, Scotland around 1920

Note: David Kirkpatrick, the author of this blog, is known  as David Paul Kirkpatrick. To avoid confusion with David Kirkpatrick, the author of The Facebook Effect, the two Davids agreed that  the one David would add “Paul” to his name.

The Thistle Flower in Iona, Scotland

The Thistle Flower in Iona, Scotland