Edification – Dust motes
Edification – Newsletter #87 – September 12, 2021
Dear Reader,
Happy Sunday!
This week was a punt for me, how about you? Fall turned a corner and decided to make our mornings chilly and evenings short, and it makes me desperate to get this house clean enough to huddle in with the kids for a winter without losing my mind. We mowed the yard. Swept and vacuumed. I cleaned the oven. Chased laundry and dishes, and toys that magically spilled themselves back out behind me.
Then I started condensing boxes in the “storage room,” a.k.a the room that was supposed to be my office/studio but became the catch-all for our attic boxes when the roof started to leak last year. And, you know, that’s a metaphor.
So I’m in there setting things at right angles, wiping down book shelves.
Husband observes: “Your idea of cleaning seems to be moving things around.”
Yes, that is cleaning, as well as all of life: moving things around.
Or is it only things moving around? Perhaps in cleaning I ride that line of all philosophy which defines the relationship of thought to matter, or of activity to the universe. Or free will to fate. Am I moving things or am I one more thing moving among the things? Dust in the wind.
No, really, though. Cleaning. All this matter in motion, quarks and cells and molecules and strange dark things hurtling through space; I rearrange objects into more pleasing formations. I make stacks out of jumbles like the planet compressing and crystallizing its layers. I collect dust into dustpans until more of it falls onto us from space.
I clean this nebula then think about how lame a poem about cleaning sounds. (But it’s fated anyway.)
Husband observes: “It looks a lot better in here.”
I’ve been getting a lot of form rejections rolling in from months’ old submissions – and I like the closure, at least – but, yeah. Sheesh. Other than taking my literary punches, I’m focused on putting together some poetry chapbooks. I guess I’m “moving things around” in the writing realm, too.
There are a lot of literary journals open for submission right now, which feeds this tiny, industrious panic in my heart. I’m going to miss an important window of opportunity! To which the rest of me says, “Pump your brakes, lady.” It’s okay not to be submitting pieces. It’s important to edit, revisit, reformulate work.
Part of the issue is I need to respect my process more, and acknowledge that revision is part of it. Taking time to think about things is part of it. Sleeping is part of it, too. Slow and steady.
I need a bit of a creative lullaby to get me through the “fear of missing out.”
Somewhere quiet right now, great writers are writing.
Good writers are writing,
and just okay ones are getting better at it, too,
listening on other frequencies, angling the dish deeper
toward the static and the dust.
Artists are quietly making art.
Spinners are spinning, quietly, quietly
without ever checking their emails,
and frogs are singing, but deafeningly, laying down
good ground for all that quiet
and the dust from space and the dust from the goldenrod
blankets the world in snowy quiet
and bugs are bopping in the breeze never knowing
a computer screen is anything more than a light.
Talk soon,
Edie
Connect with me.