January 24

Put my application in adjunct pools today. Ran in the waning cold, Willa stubborn against her leash. Spent the better part of the afternoon simply deliberating, weighing pros & cons, digging for perspective. & here I am, this new custom, packing before I’ve fully unpacked. Checked on submissions for creative works & found no updates, in some cases after four months of waiting, which I suppose is better than hearing nay within four weeks. Wrote Morning Star to prospect the option of staying in the goat shed or any other outlying building, if only for a brief time. This will all seem very little, I’m sure, once it is behind me, but for the time being every silence is pregnant with the clamor I ought to be making, every still moment an admonition against working towards change. The work of finding work, again, & so it goes. In the end, I’ve much yet to celebrate, much to look upon proudly.

Silence & stillness the hardest precepts to put to course right now, though the most necessary, I think. When I was thirteen, we moved from Iowa to Minnesota. My art teacher at Johnston, kindred & careful, no doubt, because of my brother before me, sent me along with a small list of encouragements. First upon it, scrawled in his boxy script in charcoal, “Quietness & commitment create.” I’ve hung that sheet upon my office wall every place I’ve lived. It is the yoking of the two together, I think, that is most difficult & most crucial—cleanly & wholly understanding their distinct objectives. Silence always generative, or the near-quiet, the filtered world inside or out, the muted click of a second hand, the air-ducts, the sighing of the dogs—or else the wind sung through leaves that you hear & don’t hear at once, the tail-end of the finches in their excitations, or the distant thudding of the pileated woodpecker upon the bough. Silence never silent, always a panoply of unregistered noise. & commitment the same, the leaf held up to the blue beyond, through which you see the sun. You believe it into a gestalt unity, allow your faith to patch the interstices, the network of small tears in the veinwork & the stem, to letter it out l-e-a-f & call it so & not some other thing, not some mere insinuation of the thing itself. & so quiet & commitment are the obscure endeavors of a faith that you are--& are capable of—a working-towards. Chin up, I’m told, eyes on the horizon, that figured distance which in its focus lets the foreground blur. & so it does, no matter how careful our tending. But that, too, is a faith & a forging. My chin is up.

Comments

Bree said…
I love you guys. It WILL work out, there, here or elsewhere:)
ap said…
thank you very sincerely Bree-- all in time, I suppose. & we love you three too--
matty lite said…
Move to St. Louis. Ghost write my diss. I will pay you four dollars and a half a bottle of ten high.

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