Dear Friends,

Damn. The pace, intensity, and heightened anxiety of the past few months has built up like flood waters bearing down on a beaver dam. (I regret to report that the beaver dam was breached and apparently abandoned several weeks ago.) Not much around me seems stable, although I valiantly try, through sheer creative will, to bring some certainty into being. I open my sketchbook, but quickly lose focus. My pen trails across the page, searches for words that aren’t there. I draw blanks. Or revert to mindless doodling, cross-hatching lines to see what densities emerge from the web of marks. I recently purchased a cheap fountain pen with a not-so-smooth nib, so I’m scratching the surface of the paper as much as laying ink down on it. Sometimes I scratch too hard and the ink bleeds through, like a wound through a bandage. It’s the best I can do. I’m waiting to catch my breath, to take a minute, to do nothing, and to let myself feel all the things that need to be felt.

I live – imperfectly! So, as I wait for breath to come, I offer a poem:

Meadow of Joy

find joy
in the frost dust
draped gently over remnant
green grass tufts
milkweed husks
skeletal ferns
between the barren path
winding right veering left
beside the river bearing
its mountain message
to this congregation of winter spirits
beneath the stalwart sticks
of willow and birch
below a grey clay sky
waiting to crack open with snow
like a christening
we walk stride to stride
hands nest heads holding high
in genuflection to follow
the crow and caw
to take breath in
like a delicate thing coddled
considered and turned round
and round stirring
this inner revolution
dizzy, we rest back to back
and steady to scan
the land which roots
this meadow of joy

***

The first line: find joy. It’s an invitation. I hope you will accept it, as much as I hope to find it.

:-) <3

Jeremy