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

from “In the Waters,” by Jeri Ann Griffith, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Spring 2021: My Deep Love of Place

I was no longer a child when I began to dream I could play the violin without having had any study or training. In the dream, I pick up the instrument and bow my way through a classical passage or a waltz. In the dream world, this is as easy as opening my mouth to sing. I can’t play the violin, and I don’t know what the dream means. Maybe that’s the point. It’s not necessary to understand the dream in any literal way. It’s only important to feel the mystery of its potential.

—Jeri Ann Griffith, “In the Waters,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Spring 2021: My Deep Love of Place

from “Red Dust Suspended,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Spring 2021

The first time I saw New Mexico, before I owned a cell phone or computer, I wrote a story about a woman who walked through the desert as the wind peeled the flesh from her bones. Her bones turned to dust and blew away. I meant it as a story of transmutation, dust returning to dust. That story foretold my own, how once in my lifetime a place grabbed hold of my soul. But it was never my land to own. I could only borrow it for an infinitesimal speck of time.

—Suzanne Finney, “Red Dust Suspended,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Num. 41, Spring 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 

BABETTE’S FEAST 

One of the lessons I took from “Babette’s Feast,” a short story by Isak Dinesen, is the magical effect good food can have on the consumer. The twelve dinner guests that gather around the table to eat Babette’s sumptuous meal are elevated in thought and speech by the superb cuisine. Old wounds are healed, unrequited love is acknowledged, petty gossip is forgotten. Good food affects my psyche too—like a sunbreak after days of gray skies. A simple preparation of asparagus mimosa elevates my mood. A rich dish like osso buco satisfies my soul. A perfect risotto makes me incredibly happy. I don’t know why. I only know it is so.

—Susan Knox, “Sustenance A to Z,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Winter 2020, “Food and Memory”

from The Grammar of Untold Stories, by Lois Ruskai Melina

When I fell in love with my husband I fell in love with his grandmother and with their love as thick and rich as the tomato sauce she served at every family gathering. As a boy, my husband spent Saturdays with her, and together they tore advertising circulars and old magazines into bits, tossed the colorful paper fragments into the air like confetti, and then vacuumed them up. I sucked his stories into my narrative, using his family like caulk to fill in the empty spaces where the wind whistled through mine. When his grandmother, as short and round as my own, pulled me into her softness, I didn’t want to leave.

—Lois Ruskai Melina, The Grammar of Untold Stories

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 On the Arts, by Naomi Beth Wakan

Having ploughed through a thousand pages of adultery, I have now definitively selected de Maupassant as my role model for future short-story writing efforts, and I have three hundred of his stories to learn from. By the way, Guy de Maupassant penned his own epitaph: “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.” I won’t follow him in this respect, and I hope mine can read: “I have taken pleasure in everything and coveted nothing.”

—Naomi Beth Wakan, On the Arts

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, by Florence Hazrat

HGolaszewska WC CC

Nature is resilient and compensates. I need to be resilient, too, and bounce back. I need to be nature.


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

from Still Point Arts Quarterly, essay by Florence Hazrat

l.montanari, 2014. WC CC

That this is not quite true, that nature cares not one little bit about borders, and that it’s me, actually, who’d like to have a cleaner and neater reality, is something I am yet to learn.

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.

from Still Point Arts Quarterly, essay by Alistair Herbert

US Forest Service, 2009 WC PD

When you sign up to plant trees because you think this place is owed something more of your life, or because of flash floods, or for any other combination of reasons, sometimes you only get blisters and bee stings and a word of thanks. Sometimes you get a new friend. Sometimes you get butterflies, sometimes lukewarm soup. Sometimes you come home and, a day later, understand suddenly how you ought to live. Sometimes you only pull a deer guard into the sun and watch as ants scurry, water falls, spiders scatter, slugs slip, young moss tumbles over your knees. And sometimes, in the smallest of spaces, you get a new view of a new universe — seven thousand times. The transaction is impossibly uneven — it always was. And the dirt of it, because there is always dirt, will probably stick under your fingers for a long time to come.


— Alistair Herbert, "The Deer Guard: Planting Trees and Discovering New Worlds in the Upper Calder Valley," Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019.