Introducing Adam's Curse

What’s in a title?

“Adam’s Curse” is the title of a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. I’ll leave it to you to read it at your leisure — it is well worth your time. The title refers to our first ancestor in Genesis and his fall from paradise into the world we all know: one in which every good thing seems to take unbelievable amounts of work to realize.

Yeats’ poem captures the weariness of life in the workaday world but also the call of the beautiful and the great that persist through the difficulty.

What you’ll find here are efforts at speech that acknowledge both the weariness of the world and its beauty. These are essays, information, and arts relating to the questions that would keep us up at night if Netflix wasn’t doing that already: How to live? What to do?

What’s my angle?

I served over ten years in the Marine Corps with a couple deployments — then a mad dash through grad school and out to the Kansas plains where I co-founded and ran for its first several years a farm-based boarding high school for boys called St. Martin’s Academy. I live now in southern Michigan where I work at a liberal arts college, run my coffee business, Ad Astra Roasters, and operate Iliad Athletics, a coaching and consulting outfit helping folks with integrated approaches to education and leadership.

I write for the Dallas Morning News and a handful of other outfits (sometimes publishing poetry when I forget that Marines aren’t supposed to do that). I do very small-scale regenerative farming and lead camps teaching outdoorsmanship and leadership that could be described as equal parts Beowulf, The Road, and Robert Frost.

So that’s the angle. It’s formed by some hard-earned experience on the one hand and some unremarkably comfortable study on the other.

What to expect?

I write about our culture, especially education and its discontents, but sometimes about the arts, or leadership, or friendship, or farming. I’d be glad to have you subscribe if you find value in these takes. If you know of others who would like a share of Adam’s Curse, you know what to do.