User:Thirdrockdc

Hello. I am a new-ish editor at Wikipedia, joined years ago during a sponsored collaborative edit, and only just recently picked up again. I am still learning to edit, and mostly a reader. I've loved Wikipedia for a long time.

I am a communications professional with interests in writing, civic design, history, natural sciences, fine arts, and geography.

Some things I care for

Two things I am abysmal at also sustain me, purely as an admirer: poetry and pottery. I collect the former and have not got the beans for the latter, except as I have been lucky over the years and been given beautiful things. I love bowls, with and without things in them.

In 2020 my version of sourdough baking was learning to be a naturalist and training to remove invasive plants from public land. My own garden is now about 70% native plants, just at the threshold that one recent study found to be optimal for native birds in suburban settings.

I often have the opening lines of Marvin Bell's To Dorothy in my head:

"You are not beautiful, exactly.

You are beautiful, inexactly."

Here is a frequent visitor to my yard in the Mid-Atlantic: A Tiger Swallowtail, perched on a Purple Coneflower. This photo is not my yard as yet; WP doesn't like my uploads. This one is a proxy photo from the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Notes on current work

Currently filling out biographical and career detail for Richard McCann, poet and memoirist. It has been suggested to build a separate page for public speaker and trauma survivor Richard McCann and disambiguate the two. I don't know if the latter McCann is yet prominent enough for this to be necessary, but as soon as I am confident about creating a page, I may try it. The latter McCann is an author and a compelling advocate for people who've survived unspeakable traumas. https://www.theforgivenessproject.com/stories-library/richard-mccann/

Here are a few lines from a poem by the American Richard McCann, "Sunday Morning, Cape Cod:"

And when I woke the sun was abrupt and fortunate

rising in the room like water ... white ceiling . . .white walls

and through an open window .. . forsythia

what had I dreamed ...those years

someone whispering in the dark ..not me .. not me .. not me

[Quoted in the spirit of fair use, via Beltway Quarterly. To me, this poem evokes Cavafy's "The Afternoon Sun"]