February 19th 2019
So someone I loved and respected has died, I've just heard. That phrase is only going to become more commonplace as time goes on. Deep into middle age now, life is going to take more things from me than it's going to give. The scarcity model again, thinking that way and knowing I shouldn't.
The proper response to this is to expand, to grow the garden, to widen interests and make them more impersonal to guard against the ruination of losing all investment in the world as reassures we conceive of as irreplaceable pass on and pass by. I'm not doing this, not yet, because what I think about when I think about Sparrow is the fecundity she shares so willingly, not my own miserliness. But she taught me the escape from that too: never ask someone to do something for you that you should be doing for yourself. In a way, what these compositions are is training for that, growing the habit of giving away in the faith that what's left is not an absence but a space to be filled.
And that Jack Gilbert thought that love lost, love however lost, is not love refuted.
So someone I loved and respected has died, I've just heard. That phrase is only going to become more commonplace as time goes on. Deep into middle age now, life is going to take more things from me than it's going to give. The scarcity model again, thinking that way and knowing I shouldn't.
The proper response to this is to expand, to grow the garden, to widen interests and make them more impersonal to guard against the ruination of losing all investment in the world as reassures we conceive of as irreplaceable pass on and pass by. I'm not doing this, not yet, because what I think about when I think about Sparrow is the fecundity she shares so willingly, not my own miserliness. But she taught me the escape from that too: never ask someone to do something for you that you should be doing for yourself. In a way, what these compositions are is training for that, growing the habit of giving away in the faith that what's left is not an absence but a space to be filled.
And that Jack Gilbert thought that love lost, love however lost, is not love refuted.
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