So I was dancing around the kitchen this morning, too early. The little college radio station was playing such soulful tunes. I sat down and resumed folding a new chapbook, the first I’ve released in a couple of years. 

I’m lucky to have good work waiting for me. It has been waiting patiently as I found my way through several years of illness. I’m not out of the woods yet, but I’m skirting the edge. Life flows more surely through these hands, at the moment. So to have good work, hard work, joyful work waiting for me is a blessing. 

I’m taking another news fast today. The tiny bit I read this morning lurched me into a bad state. Music, today. Some friends have been only meditating, walking, swimming, making art since the election this past week. Some pore over anything that looks like trenchant analysis to try to wrap their minds around this moment. I’ve swayed from one pole to the other and back. 

I began with a deep grief, for what we are risking as a nation, and more specifically, for the lost opportunity of being helmed for the next four years by the deeply human and brilliant and doggedly joyful Kamala Harris. That dream was hard for me to release. 

That grief led me to reach out to people, just checking in, how are you holding this, how are you doing. Trying to listen, to be present, to offer resources if I had them. I have learned of some political work I was not familiar with. I have seen some creative work being born. I remain alert to all the amazing, faithful, electric work undertaken by so very many people around us. And I am feeling to the bone the peril of so many people in this hour.

It seems, on a personal note, both a wonderful time to be returning a bit more to press work, and a ridiculous one, the latter for purely personal reasons, as we are on the liminal edge of a whirlwind of household shifting as well. Nothing like the inner mirroring the outer. All good in this case, but unsettling in both a literal physical sense and of course, the corollary inner turmoil. I was standing at the kitchen sink this morning doing my usual morning things when I registered that the feeling rising in me was a little edge of panic. That was when I took to dancing, and then to work. The print run we did just before and during the election was laid out on a table nearby, as I’d given the production work a little time yesterday. It was easy to walk over and take up the bone folder. 

It’s been a long time since I had the bandwidth to put up a new post here, though I often think-write one, or half of one, in my head. This moment seems to call for a reconnection, on so many levels. For a reconsideration of what we hold most dear, and how we wish to show up for it. 

For me that’s always been the ones I love (human and otherwise); and art. All of my politics sprout from that same place. It has to come from love. When I am afraid, and I am afraid a lot, especially these days, I have to find my way back to love. To breathe. Remember to feel my roots. Remember to lift up what can be lifted. Sometimes the fervent intention is all I can muster, and that has to be enough sometimes, while we turn to loved ones, to art, to the woods and the beach and the kitchen and all the places, people and things that nurture us, and replenish the strength for what we must do moving forward.

Wishing you all the comfort and inspiration you need in this moment, 

With love,

sammy

p.s. The transom remains closed, but it’s possible I’ll open to submissions sometime in 2025, if I am fortunate and my health continues to recover. For now we are taking invited submissions only. 

Image courtesy of Daniel Schwen