#1. On Thresholds, Writing as Act of Faith, and Words Like Small, Purple Flowers Laid on a Shining, Wet Rock...

Friends,

It’s so good to know that you are on the other side of this letter.

You might have seen and wondered about the image that I began using lately to announce this newsletter. Well, I live by a river with a nice flat trail that runs alongside it for miles, and there is a place where you can go off the path, down a steep little trail of rocks and dirt right to the edge of the water, and get a good view of the river as panoramic where it crosses from one town into the next. Before the pandemic I used to return to this place again and again, each time awed by my luck that this gorgeous, amazing place was one I could go to any time. I was much less interested in walking or jogging by the river as so many people there tend to do and much more interested in going there to stop and stand still and really look. The experience of stopping and standing in the spot I just described was mostly the same each time with the exception maybe of a different kind of bird flying by from one day to the next or more or less clouds overhead than the last time I’d stood there, until one day I showed up and saw that someone had left a few dried purple flowers on the very large rock that I would stand on each time I was there (far enough out in the water that I could feel part of the river in order to get the best view, but not so far that I couldn’t hop on to it from the bank without getting wet). I felt like the flowers had been left there for me even though I knew that this wasn’t really true. Not in a literal sense anyway. And then sometime later, when I made my way down the trail again, sliding a bit over the sand and small gravel as I wondered if I should keep doing this, I was greeted by an abundance of brightly colored flowers—mostly carnations and mums and daisies—that had been strewn all along the edge of the river along with their disembodied stems covering a very large section of my “secret” spot.

I think that writing can be a lot like this. You return to the same spot over and over again and you keep your eyes open even if it feels like not much has come of it, that not much is happening. It can be slippery and even a little bit troublesome getting there, but you do it because you want to and because you can’t not stand there at that spot, and then one day maybe you are surprised by a spark of something—something strange or beautiful or big or unexpected—or, more precisely, something you couldn’t have expected to find but knew would come. You did know, didn’t you? After all, you stood there. You waited. You kept coming back.

There are many varieties of faith, and this is one that always speaks to me.  

I had no plans to write—or to write yet—about my experiences of the past year during the pandemic, but then I was given some advice by (one of my favorite authors) Yiyun Li, and it was like little purple flowers laid on a rock—laid for me on my rock—and I started to write. I’m trying to find the right home for that piece now and hope to be able to share it with you soon.

After one year not going inside any building other than my home because of the chronic illness I live with, I was thinking about thresholds—thresholds as both “the points or levels at which a physical or mental effect begins to be produced” and as physical places of crossing. Or, it is more accurate to say, I was thinking about the memory or those physical places of crossing.

Around the time that you are reading this, I will have crossed another threshold, having finally stepped inside a building other than my own home—stepping along with all of you into some new and unknown place—and I wonder: What strange and beautiful and big and unexpected things will we find there? What thoughts, what language will arrive to be placed on the page like small, purple flowers laid on a shining, wet rock? Stand with me here for a while, and let’s find out.

Je