from “The Art of Isolation: Amsterdam in Corona Times,” SPAQ, by Kimmen Sjölander

But is there a silver lining for the world in this Covid pandemic? Or, to put it differently, in the language of logotherapy, what is the meaning of this time?

At any moment in time, all sorts of futures are possible—an uncountably infinite number of possible futures. Which future happens is only partly outside our control. To a great extent, it’s up to us.

And just as in research, when certain ideas are so ripe that multiple groups can simultaneously invent a novel approach (often leading to battles over patents and Nobel Prizes), the meaning of certain points in history is not only what ends up happening, but what could have happened. It’s the choice, the branch-point, the fork in the road, and the decision made. It’s not just the inn you find by accident after many hours on the road and the person you meet there who becomes the mother or the father of your children, and the stories you tell for years later about how lucky you were that you didn’t turn left instead of right; or the person next to you at the bar who puts something in your drink when your back is turned so that you wake up hours later in a room, alone, with your wallet and your dignity gone, and the stories you will tell then. When all of that is in the future, the meaning of a moment is in all the possible paths forward. Some lead to justice and a healthier planet, but some do not.

The meaning of this moment in time, of these Corona times, is in what path we choose to take. That is the meaning of this time . . .

Wisdom and the will to change: this would be the greatest silver lining.

—Kimmen Sjölander, “The Art of Isolation: Amsterdam in Corona Times,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2021

Now, in our own global pandemic, I consider how easily our familiar institutions can be disrupted and our sense of continuity shaken to the core. Yet everything on the Outer Cape is in a state of perpetual and reassuring impermanence; nothing ever stays quite the same. All you can do is be vividly awake to the living continuum.

—William Bless, “Outer Shores,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Num. 41, Spring 2021

image credit: m01229, Cape Cod National Seashore, 2014. Wikimedia Commons 

from “Last Words,” by Douglas Cole

JD Mason on unsplash.com

“When my grandfather was dying in the hospital, his body almost done with, he struggled mostly to breathe. He had been good and strong his whole life, never went into the hospital that I knew. Then something happened with his stomach. I was never sure what. He vomited and aspirated some of the vomit and developed a lung infection and that was it. Another doctor said it was emphysema. What difference does the name make at that point? I went to see him in the hospital, the last time I would ever see him, and like in a movie, when he saw me he took hold of my wrist and through his oxygen mask said, ‘Think good thoughts!’ . . .

“I’ve been mumbling it for years. Think good thoughts. As simple as pipe smoke. Think good thoughts. As beautiful and graceful as his garden. Think good thoughts — in the forest when there’s nobody to hear, as enigmatic as his life, his character, but elegant and clear as well — think good thoughts. It’s almost a kind of Zen koan. A pragmatic American pioneer law: think good thoughts. That’s all I know. And so I think, okay, I’ll try to think good thoughts.”

—Douglas Cole, “Last Words,” Still Point Arts Quarterly Spring 2020

from To Everything a Season, by Janet Sunderland

BlueCanoe, White Wild Indigo, 2011. WC CC

When did I fall in love with the road? I wonder. It seems most of my life has been lived watching a double yellow line. When I was less than a year old, my mother, my sister, and I moved from San Francisco to Kansas while my father went to sea; a year or so later we moved back to California; then to Arkansas; then to Barnes, Kansas—all before I reached five. I remember a roadside neon sign on the highway going to Grandma and Grandpa Sunderland’s—maybe in Marysville since that’s the only town between Barnes and where they lived. EAT GAS it said—the red neon EAT in vertical letters while the horizontal red neon GAS met at the middle A. And I remember a winter’s night drive from Grandma and Grandpa’s, snow billowing from every direction as it does so well in a Kansas blizzard. My father hit a patch of ice and the truck flipped over to land on four wheels in a snow bank. At least that’s what I remember. We might have just spun off the road. There had to be at least five of us in the cab since three sisters and two parents had moved from Arkansas, but I don’t remember anyone hurt. And I don’t remember a baby, so I don’t think Julia had been born yet. And Jack wasn’t born until five days after my father died. And then, a year after my father died, Mother married Dad and we moved to the farm. At seventeen, I married a soldier and went off to see the world. When I divorced, I kept on moving: Kansas, Texas, California, Louisiana, New York, Old Mexico, Washington, D.C., Hawaii, Georgia, New Mexico, and back to Kansas. I’m still traveling—following the yellow line on the three-hour stretch to visit my mother in the small-town nursing home where she now lives.

—Janet Sunderland, “To Everything a Season,” Still Point Arts Quarterly Spring 2020

from Can Love and Manners Get Us Through? by Angela Wright

Levi Clancy, Holding My Grandmother’s Hand When
She Was 87 and I Was 26, 2017. WC CC

I didn’t become the good southern girl my grandmother wanted me to be. Instead, I became an activist for social justice and a pastor—roles she found unbecoming, especially for a woman, and more especially for one of her granddaughters. I marched, lobbied, and advocated for all kinds of things she didn’t agree with: labor rights, voting rights, immigrant rights, civil rights. As smart and independent as she was, she didn’t even agree with the notion of women’s rights. When I asked her to help me pay for seminary, she said, “No one wants to hear a woman preacher. They want a man’s voice because it sounds like God.” All this she said while writing me a check.

After seminary, I strayed even further from my roots. I started an alternative church in downtown Birmingham where Black, Brown, and White people worshipped, worked, and gathered at the table together. And I fell in love with a Black man.

Regardless of our disagreements, every time I turned into my grandmother’s driveway, I found her standing with the screen door wide open, a huge smile on her face as she called out, “Hey, Sugah!,” and walked toward me to gather me up in her arms.

—Angela Wright, “Can Love and Manners Get Us Through?,” Still Point Arts Quarterly Spring 2020

from “Home-Canned Magic,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Spring 2020, by Anna Leigh Morrow

Catherine Scott, 2008. WC CC

My Nana’s house is magic to me. Of course, it’s really Nana and Papa’s house, but Nana is so completely the queen of her domestic domain that I often use only her name when I talk about their home. It’s nothing fancy — just a little white Kentucky farmhouse, two stories and a basement. The closets smell like mothballs, the linoleum floors smell like Lysol in the brown bottle, and the kitchen smells like homemade cinnamon rolls hot out of the oven. I have twenty-three years of memories made in that house, a lifetime of living next door to my grandparents, of humid summers spent drinking milkshakes and climbing trees in the front yard, of frosty winters spent eating piping-hot buckwheat cakes after the men of the family came in from deer hunting with cold fingers and hearty appetites.

Nana’s house is a map of my childhood. Memories linger with a faint glow in the corners, on the kitchen counter where I used to sit and eat cookies and chatter ceaselessly while Nana baked, in the spare bedroom with the lace curtains where I slept when I spent the night, in the wood-paneled basement where all the Morrow kids played dress-up and Legos and board games. This is the magic: how memories accumulate like snowflakes over the years, drifting through time, settling lightly on the windowsills, covering a plain white farmhouse in layers of moments, giving it texture and meaning and power beyond its four walls and shingled roof. It is the magic of how a house becomes a home.

—Anna Leigh Morrow, “Home-Canned Magic,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Spring 2020

from Still Point Arts Quarterly, essay by Florence Hazrat

Krzysztof Golik WC CC

With every stroke of my arms, the clamor drains out of my mind into the lake. The rest is silence and thoughts in all the lake’s greens. As I reach the bobbing buoy, I cling to it, relaxing my legs and breathing in the scenery. But I want to go further. I want to lose all touch with the land. I want to be the smallest, most insignificant dot in the vastness of the lake. Swallow me. Make me your own. One day, my hair will be flowing algae, my feet luminous stones, my tongue little blue fish, and my eyes the heart of the lake. I will be the lake and the lake will be me. I am water. I am wave. Green.

Florence Hazrat
“All the Names of Green: Days at Lake Geneva”  
Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019

from Still Point Arts Quarterly, essay by Brent Martin

Rick Shu, 2015. WC CC

To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic. To seek for some lasting security is futile. Believing in a solid, separate self, continuing to seek pleasure and avoid pain, thinking that someone “out there” is to blame for our pain — one has to abandon these ways of thinking. Hopelessness means that we no longer have the spirit for holding our trip together. It’s all suffering, it’s all despair, and the sooner I can accept this the more beautiful and sad it all becomes. I know I have to let go; I can’t keep going on at this age with such feelings of rage and emptiness. I love the world and the temporality of it all. And despite my long visit to the dark side, I see the light. I can emerge and find a new path. The world has always been this way.

— Brent Martin, "Pushing Through," Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019.