Prelude
Amuse bouche for what's to come
I used to think everyone had the same emotional responses to certain people, places, or art. I presumed that, if they didn’t outwardly react, neither should I. The unstated became deep-buried ache.

Only we know what calls us. Our lives are made in the moments of deciding how to respond.
Per Annie Dillard: “We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience — even of silence — by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse.”
Like Dillard, perhaps you have experienced a similar wrenching of the soul. A portal revealing your true life beyond.
Once the portal opens, I must consider it. I stalk my calling through sustained observation; enough time to ensure it won’t flit away. I examine it and (try to) remove external thoughts.
I spend a while in the sacred pause between impulse and action. Questioning why I would leave something that’s brought me so far. For a door, however much it connotes expansion, does the same for loss. To enter a new place is to leave somewhere else.
The threshold demands privacy. A moment in which to look all directions at once. I hover and see a thousand lives descending like branches. Our past and future selves, many of which are gone. How beautiful to imagine we get even one.

Recently, I…
Donated to a Minnesota Immigrants Rapid Response Fund (for added incentive, check out the latest by goth here); read a Palestinian account of our global moral failure; took a late-night sauna then gazed at the full moon. Life!





Always a treat to see your newsletter pop in. Beautiful words, beautiful video.
Love the Annie Dillard quote, I'll copy it out into my commonplace book and will ponder it in my journal...
Thank you.