I'm a little embarrassed by how long it's been between posts, but silence is a good thing. While I've never been particularly consistent about posting on here (After all, it is largely a poetry blog and when have poets ever been known for consistency?), in the past I could always use my Master's degree as an excuse—essays, theses, research, editing, and proofreading were always higher priorities that ate up my daily word quota.
Since leaving the academic world, there have been many other things conspiring to scatter my attention. A deluge of decisions and surprises pertaining to work, relationships, family, housing, and career have all taken the words out of my mouth month by month this year.
While I wasn't necessarily content with living the contradiction of being a poet, a writer, a theologian and teacher without words, I knew it was never time wasted. One of the Desert Fathers, Abba Arsenius, said, "I have often repented of having spoken, but never of having been silent." I was also strengthened by the curious image of Abba Agathon, who purportedly lived for three years with a stone in his mouth in order to find peace in silence.
It makes me think of St. John's Apocalypse, where it says "To him who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it" (Rev 2:17). I'm sure that after three years of conquering his passions, desires, and tongue that stone and the stillness that came with it gave Agathon both a sense of perpetual sustenance and identity—if only because it was a constant reminder to listen to God, who was constantly listening to him.
Another reason I have stayed away from blogging is a distaste for the oversaturation of media today. Whether you look at your Facebook news feed, your email inbox (or work inbox), Twitter exchanges, or Instagram feeds, it all seems like a losing game of Tetris. Information is rushing in, and you never have a chance to put it—or yourself—in order before another bit drops from on high.
If it doesn't come from an impersonal marketing machine trying to entice you toward some commodity, and if it doesn't come from celebrity or mainline news sources which are uniform on trivial matters but confused on important matters, it often comes across as some blogger narcissistically "working through things" with all of us as his or her anonymous therapist.
Needless to say, I didn't want to be known as that guy. Hopefully, I never have been. Hopefully, I never will be.
But thank God, words and thoughts have been flooding back to me lately, and I'd like to share some with you. Summer leisure, great books, being invited to speak and contribute to great conversations, letting go of what you can't fix and being open to that which fixes you, all with an abundance of encouraging blank pages in notebooks and sketchbooks tend to help with these things.
You see, I'm a creative soul, which means I measure my life not by what I receive but what I give away. Actually, I think we're all creative souls, and the reason I hate today's media is that it is designed for consumption and not creativity; it's designed to be stored away, like food that can only to be turned into fat and not muscle. Likewise, most of today's media is good for nothing else but being burned.
So enough of this apologia pro vita sua, I doubt my absence was noticed by anyone besides myself. And again, the absence was not me being on my blog, but the right words being by me. Though, the problem I found with finding the right words, is that you can never find the right words. Life is a work always in progress, and speaking is always an unfinished business. We speak, because we think someone is listening—and we not only want them to listen, but for them to speak, which means our words are not the end of the story but its beginning.
So let me get on with some of the things I find, and let me know what yours are. Let me share some words with you that were surprises to me, and hopefully they are to you as well. Then maybe we'll be like the Desert Fathers, hanging around in one of the most barren places one could find going around to each other, asking for a word.
