On Meeting Here
Dear Reader,
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”
—Mary Oliver
Beyond you emailing me, as I hope you shall, my asking you how we might meet here (as I did yesterday) is akin to my asking what this newsletter is about. To be plain: What the hell am I going to write about on Substack? Today? To say nothing of the days like it.
Yes, Dustin, I will write about education. Of course, Amy, I will include Amsterdam. Sure, Camden, I will do what I can with politics. Those and thoughts on poems and music and whatever comes into my world from you, Dear Reader.
And what about what Oliver says?
Tell you about my despair? The faded glass of all I might have done? The cold hearth of life alone? The encroaching danger of a deaf and angry and fractious world?
Sure, I can write about my despair, though I hope to do so with enough restraint so as to befit decorum and foster you and I getting to know one another. Too much of anyone’s drama is a distraction.
And anyway, as Oliver says in the next line: “Meanwhile the world goes on.”
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
I’d give up morning coffee to have written that. Or to be able to live in its essence.
Any writer knows what they offer up includes those vistas a more skilled guide would reveal, images glimpsed in the eye of creation they could not deliver on the page.
So add that despair to the others and make it a subject too, the gap would-be artistry pries open and slams shut in each draft. If only, in other words, I could write for you as clear pebbles of rain.
If only.