All day I work
with the linen of words
and the pins of punctuation
all day I hang out
over the desk
grinding my teeth
staring.
Then I sleep.
— Mary Oliver, Work
Life is change, and our why pivots with it. We may channel this into creative work and find out something about ourselves in the process. One more day blessed with the opportunity to dance with our why to produce a what before we sleep.
I track the journey from here to there and publish it free for all to see. Some days our journey takes us to faraway, sometimes the journey has us turning inward from a familiar place. We have the luxury of time some days, and the urgency of just a few minutes to spare other days. They all add up to the catalog of work published—our contribution to the Great Conversation.
This blog post feels incomplete to me, like there’s far more to wrestle with before it’s fully fleshed out. And yet I’m about to publish it anyway. In a way that’s a good metaphor for our lives. We’re all just incomplete souls trying to reach some conclusion that makes sense before we reach ship this work and move on to the next.
The work will end one day, but [apparently] not today. This linen of words is strung together in a streak of days; breadcrumbs of a life. Words are the glue that holds our collective history together, binding you and I together just as surely as it binds the generations before and after us. That feels more salient than just another blog post.
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