Hi Team!
I’m on vacation, and that means that I have down time, but that also means that as soon as I let my brain sit it floods with stuff to do, think about, reconsider, meander through, and also clean up. I think that I’ve finally gotten good at chanting at myself, “dump that junk” when I know that something no longer serves me. (And not in the “I’m drawing a boundary” or “protecting my peace” avoidant talk that does not take conflict and tension seriously). I just wanted to share one of my favorite poems with you, but I also have a little bit of thoughts to go along with it (of course…).
I watched the sunset last night and was thinking about this line that I recently wrote, “chasing infinity to know how the sun lives and dies.” It made me think about an excerpt from the memoir Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz. She navigates the complicated relationship that our culture has to losing things, finding things, and the way that we conjoin them with “and.” In the memoir, she has an entire chapter dedicated to the idea of “and” (&) as she chronicles the complex process of joining her life with her now wife. In the late 19th century, the alphabet was taught, not with “Z” as the final character, but “&.” Kinda wild, right? If we believe in connotations, then learning this broke any emotional association that I have with “Z”: its finality, the symmetry, the poetic elegance of its rare use in the English language. How fitting for it to be the final letter. To add “&” is to add possibility to something final because it prepares us for connection. It is to show that things are never really done and how fitting for our consciousness, as our brains are infinite “and” machines (see the previous paragraph as an example). Any time that we attempt to fix our attention on one thing, we’re making connections between it and everything else (thanks, David Hume and William James!).
So, back to me.
Last night, I’m sitting on a rock looking at the sunset thinking about how many times I’ve done it and how many times I’ll probably do it in my lifetime and the way that it always fascinates me like I’ve found some private miracle that isn’t private at all in the way that it is so cliché to participate in this activity. And then I think about what it feels like to witness something and then watch it pass, to lose it. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “One Art” popped into my head and reminded me that whenever I do lose something, I’m separating myself from the thing, but I’m also participating in the “&” in that I’m moving towards whatever next connection there is left to make. Both can exist and how lucky am I?
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