Some lovely news--and my letter from Copenhagen

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This is my harvest season, in my 70th year of tending the little garden of my Self.

A small, beautifully printed book of my poems,”This Dark Soil,” will be brought out in 2025 by Blue Moose Publishing, the brain-child of Crystal Sands, founder and editor of the gorgeous literary journal Farmer-ish. “I live in a world where farming, nature, and the arts go hand in hand,” says Crystal. “I want to share this world with others.”

“This Dark Soil” will be one of the two debut titles for Blue Moose. These poems are at the very heart of who I am both as a writer and a creature living on our beautiful, precious Planet Earth.

Meanwhile, my fifth novel is wending its way through the secret underground passages of the publishing world, championed by my newly acquired, amazingly well-connected New York literary agent, Anne-Lise Spitzer, president of the agency founded by her late father, Philip G. Spitzer.

The story is set in Hungary in the late 1980s, a place I observed closely over the course of nearly a year, interacting with members of the mostly Jewish dissident political underground and political refugees from the Romanian police state of Nicolae Ceaușescu. My novel is a modern retelling of an ancient Greek myth about unbearable grief and, ultimately, redemption. I’ve infused the story with everything I’ve ever learned about family, friendship, and love. And it’s also—suddenly, horribly—of tremendous relevance in a world once again besieged by anti-democratic political strongmen.

All of us have a special duty now to try to help save the world in whatever way we can—to bring love, to bring truth. To bring healing.

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

Gratitude

I’ve just returned from six days in Copenhagen, there to visit my son in situ where he has been living and working for over two years, at first as a post-doc and now as a globe-trotting researcher in the wind energy sector under the sponsorship of the Risø campus of Danish Technical University.

There is no substitute for in-person time with those we love most in this world. There are nuances that can’t begin to be conveyed in a phone call. Sitting close to my son, who is as brilliant and multifaceted as a rare and wonderful gem, I’m witness to his noble struggle to convey a concept in the truest way possible. His eyes, in the process, sometimes fill with tears.

In a phone call, this would only be a silence that I’d struggle not to try to fill, a silence that I wouldn’t understand. A silence that would make me anxious. That would make me want to fix it somehow. A silence that is actually perfect and right.

Looking out from the tall windows of my AirB&B in Copenhagen, perched high above the serene and sparkling comings and goings of the canal, I can—shyly now—take Julian’s hand (or he can take mine). I can take in the fullness of this precious moment in time that’s been vouchsafed to us. With that same miraculous power possessed by all of us who experience the power of love born of kinship (genetic or otherwise), I have gone to the well again with this gentle and visionary mathematician who is also, I’m so proud to say, my beloved son.

We have provisioned ourselves for the next part of our separate but always deeply connected journeys.

A section of lights on the digital clock has gone out,
so that 9:04 could as easily be seen as
5:04. That little leg of illumination,
between the nine's waist
and the top of its head on the right-hand side,
has given up the ghost.

It glimmered just now, as I stared at it,
as if flashing a signal across the chasm of time.
Four hours means nothing in a world in which
change occurs over millions of years.

Comforting to realize
the relative unimportance
of my own little life,
with its glimmers of brightness,
my hopes and fears and growing sense
of my own time running out.

From the windows of my AirBnB, such an unexpected treat on a Friday night! I left part of my heart behind in Copenhagen.