Something the World Could Use a Whole Lot More of

Almost every day I intend to break my silence here (break my silence, hear? Heh. Aren’t words fun?), but I seem incapable of diverting my attention from the world beyond my office for long enough to write anything substantive. I’m rolling with it for now, though struggling a bit with a sense of obligation, both to my readers but also to the practice of writing itself. I tell myself I should feel obliged to neither, but like most folks, I don’t always listen to my own best advice. This might explain why I am at this very moment listening to a classic live Maiden concert, puffing on a cigarillo, and enjoying the the mild disorientation of my second post-breakfast whisky.

Oh, well: One out of three ain’t bad.

It is remarkable how fluidly the days pass and how good it feels to be spending so much time out-of-doors, exerting myself in one manner or another. It is a reminder to me that all the blathering I do about the value of honest labor and a connection to the land and a sense of agency over one’s own well-being and blah, blah, freakin’ blah is a poor substitute for the work itself, and I am reminded of one of my favorite lines from Hayden Carruth’s poem Marshall Washer:

Unconsciously I had taken friendship’s measure 

from artists elsewhere who had been close to me,

people living for the minutest public dissection

of emotion and belief. But more warmth was,

and is, in Marshall’s quiet “hello” than in all 

those others and their wordiest protestations,

more warmth and far less vanity.

I’m sure I’ve quoted this before, though hopefully it was sufficiently long ago that you’ve all forgotten and therefore won’t hardly notice the repetition. But even if you do, perhaps you will (like me) appreciate the reminder that good work done in relative silence and anonymity is something the world could probably use a whole lot more of.