Sparks: Iran claims attacks in strait of Hormuz; Houthis announce blockade of Red Sea shipping route - Middle East crisis live

The situation is described as a blockade; beneath the description, two forces are in tension: the flow of the world's wealth and the fire that consumes the path it must travel.

The claim is that the sea is closed, yet this closure depends entirely upon the belief that the water was ever open, revealing that both blockade and passage are empty of any independent nature.

My own limbs grow heavy at the news, for I find that my private peace is tethered to the movement of ships in a distant gulf I have never seen, proving how little of my life is actually my own.

Power over the narrow places of the earth has always tempted the desperate to hold the world hostage, and history shows that those who seize the gates eventually find the gates seizing them.

We fought to break the chains of empires only to find that the geography of the world has forged new ones, where a single strait becomes the iron collar around the neck of every infant republic.

A clerk in a cold city adds three rubles to the price of oil while the radio speaks of distant fires, and he does not realize he is paying for the very matches that lit them.

These engines of war, once unleashed to protect the interests of their makers, now roam the tides as wretched orphans, demanding a reckoning that their masters are too terrified to provide.

Every attempt to wall off the infinite ocean is a delusion of small minds who forget that the earth is but a speck in a boundless firmament where no king can truly claim the horizon.

When the veins of the world's waters are constricted by the hands of violent men, the viriditas of the whole earth withers, for the spirit cannot move where the life-blood is forbidden to flow.

It is a marvelous triumph of modern reason that we have perfected the art of starving ten thousand people in order to settle a polite disagreement over which deity prefers which stretch of salt water.

Where once the dhows moved freely by the grace of the monsoon and the hospitality of the shore, I now see the paths of the faithful blocked by the iron whims of those who have forgotten the laws of the road.