Time to Embark

by Caroline Langston

We’re delighted to welcome you to the Autumn 2021 Vita Poetica Journal. This edition of Vita Poetica is our fourth, the final quarter marking the end of our first full year. 

We’re kind of amazed ourselves that we’ve gotten this far. This journal was born of longtime friendships and fleeting connections alike—all united in our desire to see the Spirit captured in our creative work, whether we have creedal affiliations, or none. 

It’s also hard to separate the emergence of Vita Poetica from the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic. We saw these themes magnified in Vita Poetica—a focus on contemplative stillness, and grappling with the uncertainty of change. All of us were stuck in our houses for a year, trying to find new ways to see.

Well, no more.

If there’s one singular, striking message that the selections in this edition speak to, it is this: It is time to embark. Images of motion and action trace through just about every work you’ll read here, and we invite you to trace them. If you scan through the table of contents, you’ll see one of the highlights of the edition, our conversation with dancer Emily Wright and the invitation to participate with your own Moving Meditation.

But there are a host of other examples: The protagonists in Fabrice Poussin’s “Rulers of the Ruins” now must “roam in the heart of this world.” Even the unexpected surprise of the chinook in Ed Meek’s “In the Forest,” which would seem to frame a still contemplation, is bursting with movement from the trees’ music. Even the blue orchids “shout out” in Fiona Vigo Marshall’s poem.

But it’s not just mere motion that’s being called for—here before your eyes are so many calls for purposeful motion. That’s the choice for Naaman in Jacqueline Wallen'’s “Naaman Hits Bottom.” 

And in making moves, there are moral choices, and costs. The narrator in Chad Holley’s poignant story “The Children of the Sun Begin to Wake” has to decide on his own stance toward—and implication in—his friend’s imprecations about the city, and the culture, he is leaving behind. 

In her nonfiction essay “Wood Heat,” Basira Harpster undertakes a dramatic renovation of her own life, one that spurs her to generate all kinds of abundance, but which, she learns, has a risk at its heart that she is forced to confront. 

We’d like to give you the charge that Jeremy Szuder captures so exactly in “Easter Fools”:

And as I take down this second plate 

of God’s daily bread on a sunny Sunday afternoon, 

I am reminded of one thing;

That everyday should be the day 

to stride right out into the world 

from endless resurrections . . .

The spirals of change continue, and whatever your tradition, we want you to set forth in strength to meet them.