at dawn

I am writing to you from these last painful days of summer. Days of letting go.

Since the summer solstice I have tried to make a habit out of writing every day. I struggled at first, and thought most days of Mary Oliver, of the need to have a meeting with your poem, a place and time.

For nearly three months now, I have been writing from dawn. I have been writing from that very hour where gray turns to color and color suddenly blinds you.

Dawn is as much a space as it is a time of day. It is defined by this gray color: Antigone was right. It is defined by just how uncertain everything seems to be, how in the grey everything blurs and that is closer to the truth. At dawn continuity is evident.

Since June all I have written (and read) seems to be about place and time. No matter what prompts I followed, no matter what I was trying to build: place and time. How we move through them, how we put down roots even in far-away unstable soil, even when the whole world seems to be crumbling down, how we manage. How we remember.

At first this repetition terrified me. It still does, a little. But slowly, from pages of notes and halfway-there poems, something seemed to be emerging. Something that made sense as a whole. Repetition after all not pointless, but a building-upon, a collecting of talismans, a surrounding. A ritual.

I hope this letter finds you well. I hope your own repetitions help you move through, be more at ease in the world, find some rest amidst it all. I am writing to you from my own restlessness, hoping we learn to trust the cycles, the rotations, the comings and goings of this world, at least in part. Every dawn builds upon the last one’s impression, if you are awake to see them. The tiny things you pay attention to end up amounting to beauty, to landscape, to a sense of home.

This summer will never be back, but all of these summers amount to something. This repetition, this near-sameness, is one of many ways of making a home of an inhospitable world. I find a peace in this as I struggle to let go.