Anno Domini
Letter from Co-Editor Caroline Langston
It has been the toughest of seasons for building community.
That’s true for all of us, of course. As I write, we’ve just marked the one-year anniversary of the grim week when the announcement of the global pandemic sent us all scurrying to amass provisions and lock ourselves indoors.
After that, most of us experienced a spring that was curiously fractured. For the most part, we were alone inside our houses. Yet unlike, say, a freak blizzard where being inside would underscore the pleasures of the secure and haimish, last spring was all the more fracturing because the abundance of green leaves and flowering plants and warm sky had no problem going on without us—an effect that made our own days seem all the more lonely and haphazard. Whereas we long for unity, we experience isolation in fragmentation.
We’ve had our year of fragmentation, second-guessing, and unexpected surprises among the Vita Poetica Journal editorial team, as well. I said I was going to avoid the “we’re building the plane as we fly it” cliché, but as we’ve brought this issue together, we’ve had to envision what the governing principles for what we want to do are, and how we can shape out an artistic vision while inviting in new voices of all kinds.
We’ve had some stumbles, we confess, as we’ve sought to figure this out—and we’re still working it out. It’s not yet manifest what we shall be (lol). But we’ve been blown away by your good cheer and companionship along the way as we’ve gotten the journal together. And, as you’ll see from this issue’s selections, we’re honored by the quality and heart of the submissions we’ve received. Thank you.
As I read the issue’s selections in concert, I thought back to that old notion from Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, about our innate human tendency to experience an “oceanic feeling” of oneness with the universe. Freud sets that feeling as a developmental one, and a possible origin (he says) of religion. But for most of us, believers and nonbelievers alike, I think we feel that oceanic feeling because everything really is connected. All of us really do derive from one origin.
That longing for connection permeates all this edition’s selections, from literary to visual arts, to reviews and our distinct feature on the modalities of Contemplative Practice. Each piece herein, it seems to me, demonstrates a quality of aspiration. From the quest assumed in Lynn Domina’s “White Deer” to the mother’s actions in “Peasant Woman” to the quality of observation in Katy Carl’s story “Fragile Objects”—to name just a few—that yearning evidences itself chiefly in the small precisions of their language—or for our visual artists, their composition. It’s only in the specific, and minute, that we’re able to appeal to the whole, and to the One.
Or to steal the title from Carolyn Marshall Wright’s suite of paintings: Sanctification in Process.
That’s the case for all of us, indeed.
