There is an immense strangeness to the awareness that comes with that contrast — the contrast of knowing, with real certainty, that this world offers near-infinite possibilities for enchantment at the same time as it throws at us, time and time again, examples of near-constant diminishment. Moving through life today sometimes feels like being put on hold for an eternity in order to ask a question about an ambulance bill you received months after the fact of that ambulance while, at the same time, witnessing a hawk alight on the railing of the fire escape just outside your window. There is the automated music in your ear, tinny and generated by a computer, and there is the world on the other side of the glass. And you exist in all of it, wondering. Hoping, maybe. Smiling sometimes. Crying. Hoping again. Wondering still.
I find many of my answers in poetry, which is why I keep reading it. Padgett’s compassion. Berssenbrugge’s singing. Wang’s butterfly, her enchantment, her attention. I also find it in that hawk that really did land on my fire escape, years ago, not long after my shitty oven blew up while I was baking bread. I find it in the laughter that happened after the damage; the way I couldn’t help but find it hilarious, all of it, this life. I find it in friendship, and in music, in that chord change from the E to the F#m in The Band’s “I Shall Be Released.” I want to live a life in the space between those chords, between and among so many things, where enchantment dwells. – Devin Kelly
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As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still, we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides. Nature reminds us of this constantly. The world is often cast as a purely malignant place, but still, the joy of creation exerts itself, and as the sun rises upon the struggle of the day, the Great Crested Grebe dances upon the water. It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.
Love, Nick
