Editor’s Note

In this edition of Later Life,  our guiding creative quote is from W. H. Auden.

While we have been pretty successful tending our fields this year, as Wendell Berry might say, we have also been— to be honest— riddled with the why of it all.

If we had a die, and on each facet was a word, on any given day’s morning roll, it might come up as faith, belief, purpose, meaning, trust, or fear. And each word on every facet would be followed by an enormous question mark.

What we have come to this year is that most probably these words on this particular die are not especially useful. Engaging in the process of picture making or writing or making music, we connect with something altogether ascendant over these words. In doing the work, we reach a kind of suspension.

When Mary Oliver, in her poem, Wild Geese, instructs, “You do not have to be good,” we become untethered— floating in a transcendent sublimation. An ethereal field where doing our work is a release into the valley of its making.

Of course, it ain’t easy, as any creative will tell you. It’s often thankless, and damn if the materials don’t fight you every step of the way. But there is an inscrutable driving force for certain whose provenance remains obscure but propels us forward nonetheless. So when, in the essay Self Reliance, Emerson commands us to “Do your work,”. And later: “You shall have the suffrage of the world.” We are unbound.

In the coming year, let’s affirm to cast the die aside, let it tumble to the ground, and unshackled, do our work— faithfully, honestly, and with courage. We will, as our last poet of this note, John O’Donohue, says,“Awaken to the mystery of being here and enter the quiet immensity of your (our) own presence.”

In the end, at the bottom of the lake, at the top of the mountain, in our untethered sublimation, we bear witness to ourselves. And what can be more sublime, more profound, than honoring the gift of our life?

On to 2027!