I’ve begun 2025 by arranging some new projects that inspire me personally, and which I hope others will enjoy. Attempting to keep a solitary focus in 2024 may have felt virtuous, but it sure didn’t feel like living. I’m deep in engaging client work this week, after which follows a big ellipses followed by a question mark. So I’m making plans for the winter, looking to make some things worth believing in.
There is a sublime quality about winter in the places where we have seasons. It eludes my skill to evoke in words, but I can say that has something to do with quiet. With dun-colored prairie grass decorated with white snow. Frozen ponds in patches of wilderness, near which footsteps crunch through the crust of ice atop the snow, footfalls resounding in the emptiness of a dim, overcast afternoon. Black crows breaking the silence with their coarse calls, one, two three… one, two, three… but not breaking the spell, for they are part of it. Little, brindled sparrows and curious wrens hopping unseen through the brush.
I saw some of these very grasses by the lake this week, on a cold day when the torpid waters waved in slow motion up, down, up. A gyre of gulls whirling up into a dark blue sky striated with clouds. It’s too cold to walk outside with my camera, but my phone made do in a pinch.
This reminds me of a poem I encountered one day on a break from substitute teaching in fall 2001. I discovered a book of Gary Soto poems in the classroom and, in the last light of an age before cell phones, social media, streaming, and fast, useful, widespread internet, and possibly even a few days before 9/11, I picked up the book and started to read it because what else was there to do? One of the poems went like this.
“Looking Around, Believing”
How strange that we can begin at any time.
Gary Soto
With two feet we get down the street.
With a hand we undo the rose.
With an eye we lift up the peach tree
And hold it up to the wind — white blossoms
At our feet. Like today. I started
In the yard with my daughter,
With my wife poking at a potted geranium,
And now I am walking down the street,
Amazed that the sun is only so high,
Just over the roof, and a child
Is singing through a rolled newspaper
And a terrier is leaping like a flea
And at the bakery I pass, a palm,
Like a suctioning starfish, is pressed
To the window. We’re keeping busy —
This way, that way, we’re making shadows
Where sunlight was, making words
Where there was only noise in the trees.
That one has stuck with me over the years. Interesting that even when Gary Soto wrote the poem, how easy it was to be distracted and unaware, stuck in our own heads then, rather than our phones; perhaps our phones just externalized our propensity for distraction.
“How strange that we can begin at any time,” he says. How strange indeed.
And so this weekend, after kicking an extended two-week illness, I tried to engage with what was in front of me. We ran some errands. Played a board game. Made tea. Watched two films. Went to a friend’s show. Walked a few miles along the lake to the cafe. Wrote some fiction purely for practice.
I did some client work too, but not all weekend. I’ll be excited to share these projects in the coming weeks for those of you who still believe.
