The Fine Art of Communication
(expanded version)
By Brenda Miller
Copyright 2009
Keynote Address
Surprise Valley Writers’ Conference
September 18, 2009
Thank you for having me here today. When I thought about what I might be able
to say to you—writers gathered with eagerness, with passion, with commitment to an art
that can demand so much of us—I considered that it might be useful to share with you
my own journey toward that art myself. And that journey, for me (as it probably does for
you), must necessarily start with reading. For it is through reading the words of others
that I found my deepest yearnings, and my own words waiting to be released
When I was a child, about 8 years old, I often circled my house or my backyard,
looking for just the right place to read my book. I wanted to be alone, but I also wanted to
be in the company of my dog, or my mother, or just the Eucalyptus trees along the back
fence. So sometimes I read lying down on the living room carpet huddled next to my
Great Dane, Sheba, the curve of her belly like a cave; or sometimes I read perched on the
footstool in the kitchen as my mother made dinner, or sometimes I read while swaying on
the swing set, my feet lightly scraping the ground, the rocking motion lulling me into a
state of timelessness. But most often I found myself back in my bedroom, the room
hushed and dim, my eyes weary but persistent as I turned page after page.
My favorite book was Charlotte’s Web. I read it over and over, sometimes
starting the first page again immediately after finishing the last. When I knew I was
reaching the part that would make me cry, I ventured out of my bedroom, book in hand,
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and made my way to the footstool in my mother’s kitchen. I said nothing, but perched
there, hunched over my book, while my mother bustled about the counter and stove. With
my eyes on the page, I heard the whoosh of the refrigerator door opened and closed, the
precise clicks of the magnets catching on the cabinets, a discordant jostle of pots and
pans. Something began crackling in a fry pan; my mother ran water in the sink. I read
about Charlotte’s noble death, her baby spiders floating away on silk balloons, an earthly
reincarnation of all that is generous and fine. I began to sniffle, loudly enough so my
mother would notice, and by the time I came to the last lines, I was in full sobs, my
mother’s arms around me, her apron smelling of dinner.
Or sometimes, if I were alone, I closed the book and held it softly against my
chest. The gesture came naturally because it truly felt I had shared some intimacy with
this book, that we had been sitting together heart-to-heart. Of course, I didn’t realize at
the time that E.B. White would also be one of my favorite writers in later years, that this
same sense of intimacy would permeate his essays that I also read over and over, trying
to learn how to be both so vulnerable and so strong on the page.
Recently I went back to read Charlotte’s Web again—my same battered copy that
has somehow stayed with me all these years, with its soft corners, its torn cover—to try to
discern how and why this book affected me so much. And I saw something I had never
noticed before: that this story is really a Buddhist tale, a lesson in mindfulness. It’s about
being truly content with whatever and wherever you are. It’s a narrative of kindness and
compassion. Consider this passage that comes at the very end, after Charlotte has died
(yes, I did cry again!):
Life in the barn was very good—night and day, winter and summer, spring and
fall, dull days and bright days. It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this
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warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of
the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the
love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.
I love that paragraph, not only for the ebullient celebration of the senses, for the
incredible evocation of place, but for Wilbur’s Zen-like perception that the barn was the
“best place to be,” no matter what season. He is aware of all the creatures who share this
space with him, the way they abide together in the “glory of everything.”
The moral, for me, still emerges in the last lines of the book: “It is not often that
someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” I think
now that perhaps I’ve spent my whole life trying to live up to this message: to be a true
friend and a good writer. Not a bad way to spend the rest of one’s life.
I feel happy thinking about Charlotte’s Web and my child self curled in bed or in
the kitchen, nose to nose with the words that will be a kind of scripture for me. Reading
was holy back then, and I’d like to remember that, to bring a little blessedness into my
reading, my writing, my friendships. A true friend. A good writer. Could it really be so
hard?
Well, yes, as it turns out. Both writing and friendship demand that we truly
communicate, that we refine the art of the communication—not in the superficial ways
that are particularly encouraged in this modern technological culture we live in, but
deeply intimate communication, unfettered by ego, by fear, by deception. A kind of
communication that requires us to slow down, to hear our own voices, to be honest in
ways we might never have even considered before. The memoirist Lawrence Sutin has
said that: “The truth to writing is the discovery of one’s voice, a voice that is unimpeded
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by anger, fear, or the desire for praise. This is the voice that knows more than we do, that
discovers itself only in the act of writing.” He does not say that we ignore or try to ban
anger, fear or desire; such a thing would be impossible. He’s saying that in our best
writing, done with heart and integrity, we are able to be unimpeded by these things, that
we are able to transcend them and show our best, most authentic selves on the page. And
we don’t even know this self, this voice, until we are fully in the act of writing, when we
have given ourselves over to language, when we allow words to follow one on another,
bushwhacking a trail that leads to the truth.
This has become quite evident to me lately, as I’ve spent the last year writing a
book in letter form, a correspondence between my friend Holly and me, about the twin
arts of reading and writing. In the process I saw that letter writing, itself, forces me to
slow down and hone my senses so that I can express a moment fully to another person.
Something shifts when we feel ourselves not as solitary beings, existing in our solitary
ways, but in deep communion with another. And just by having Holly waiting there, on
the other side of the page, I felt a new ease come into my writing, a book that ended up
being written not from the head but from the heart.
After reading Charlotte’s Web—with my new-found urge to be a true friend and a
good writer—I begged my mother for a pen pal. Many children had them in those days;
my mom and I picked her out from the thin pages of a catalog from the World Wide Pen
Pal association, an organization probably dedicated to some lofty ideal of world peace
through interpersonal communication. I simply wanted to write. And I wanted to write to
someone far away, someone who didn’t already know me and all my foibles, my flaws,
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my deficits.
When I wrote to my pen pal, it wasn’t with any great material to communicate.
After all my life was dull and predictable, so my missives were filled with earnest
questions, to which I dutifully supplied my own answers: “Do you like dogs? I like dogs.
We have a great dane named Sheba. Do you have any brothers or sisters? I have two
brothers but I don’t like them very much. I wish I had a sister. Do you like ice cream? I
like mint chocolate chip at Baskin Robbins with my dad.”
I suppose, since I was writing to a stranger, that my inquiries really couldn’t go
much beyond these surface concerns, but underneath it all was a deeper urge, a yearning
as primal as any explorer’s in an undiscovered land: Helloooo out there, we cup our
hands over our mouths and shout, listening only to a diminishing echo in reply, Is
anybody out there? Our echoes subside and all that’s left is a rustling silence, in which
we wait to hear….Hello, hello, who’s there?
Who’s there? That is the question that fuels our communication, our communion.
We write, and we read, to find out who is really there, inside us and outside us. Who are
you, and you, and you? We wait, eager to be amazed by the answer.
Terry Tempest Williams, in her braided memoir Refuge: An Unnatural History of
Family and Place, speaks of letter writing this way: “Our correspondences show us
where our intimacies lie. There is something very sensual about a letter. The physical
contact of pen to paper, the time set aside to focus thoughts, the folding of the paper into
the envelope, licking it closed, addressing it, a chosen stamp, and then the release of the
letter to the mailbox—all are acts of tenderness.”
“And it doesn’t stop there,” she continues. “Our correspondences have
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wings—paper birds that fly from my house to yours—flocks of ideas crisscrossing the
country. Once opened, a connection is made. We are not alone in the world.”
I love the word “correspondent.” It implies that you work together in responding
to the world, you are “co-responding.” And it’s just the two of you, for a moment,
cordoned off from the busy-ness that swirls around outside. In a world where we can now
overhear—whether we want to or not—the most intimate conversations blathering on as
people talk on their cell phones, this moment of true intimate communication is a rare gift
indeed.
I recently had an experience I’m almost embarrassed to tell you about. I spent five
weeks this summer in southern Switzerland, working for a college there, and I took many
trips into Italy and the Swiss Alps. I thought I would write long letters to my friends
(especially since I’d just spent a year writing letters to Holly), and perhaps even do some
other writing of my own. But in truth, I didn’t write a word. Well, I wrote some words
but they were all on email or in the form of coy, witty updates on my Facebook page. I
talked to my parents and my best friends via Skype (a video internet phone so much like
the Jetsons it’s disconcerting) every week. When I posted pictures on my Facebook page
I got immediate responses—and by that I mean within seconds, literally, I had several
comments, thumbs up from people “liking” my post, asking for more, expressing joy or
jealousy, people I knew well and people I hardly knew at all. Instant message chat
screens popped up with a cheery blip, or if I chose not to answer the ringing skype phone,
little chat screens would pop up there as well, chatting away, giving me the disconcerting
feeling that I was being watched as I sat on my couch, eating my simple meal of fresh
pasta and tomatoes. Time zones meant very little, except that it meant I would wake up,
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start brushing my teeth and before I knew it I’d be sitting at my computer, toothpaste
foaming across my lips, as I clicked the now many and various places someone, anyone,
might have communicated with me. And once I did that, the Skype phone would start
ringing with its insistent bell, and before I’d even had my coffee I’d been in touch with a
dozen people, all eager to say hello, to say: how are you, where are you, who are you?
There was no lag time, something that is becoming increasingly rare and precious.
The word “immediate” means by its etymology, “without mediation,”, with no buffer in
between things, no bracket of absence, that very thing we’ve been told all our lives makes
the heart grow fonder. How can our hearts grow in any direction, without that little bit of
distance, that mediate space in between? I felt no urge to write, no pressing need for
communication, since a flurry of communication seemed to be happening every minute.
In an essay for the magazine Poetry Northwest in 2008, the poet Stanley Plumly
took on this muddle of internet-based prose and its possible effects on literary
communication. Not too crankily, he begins:
In the not-too-distant future those to whom it matters may look back at some point
in the 1990’s when the networking of the Internet really started to take off, and wonder if
at that moment the actual writing of thorough and styled and even personal letters, as a
medium of one reflective silence speaking to another reflective silence (roughly Rilke’s
definition of poetry) ended. The advent of email it may be seen, changed the very nature
of—let alone the impulse to write—personal prose. In fact, it may be seen to have
changed the nature of reflective time: The time, for instance, that it takes to think up and
compose letters by pen or typewriter, the time it takes for such letters to arrive; then, the
open relative time it takes for those letters to be thoughtfully answered, mailed, and
received.” Plumly concludes: “The Body—that is what a letter should contain, the how
and what of the body, the flesh of being, the senses, the implicit sounds and colors, the
pen moving, the fingers typing, the noise of writing. The mind alone in the machine is not
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enough.”
I don’t mean for this to be a rant against email, or the Internet, or Facebook. I love
all those things, with the love of an addict, but still I think of the letters of Emily
Dickinson, or John Keats, or Elizabeth Bishop, or Rainier Maria Rilke: letters that would
never have been written, I think, on Facebook. I think of the heart-stopping letter poems
of Richard Hugo, where we are allowed to witness two minds—two hearts—moving
together. Here’s a little bit from “Letter to Kathy from Wisdom”:
….Oh, my tenderest
raccoon, odd animal from nowhere scratching for a home,
please believe I want to plant whatever poem will grow
inside you like a decent life. And when the wheat you’ve known
forever sours in the wrong wind and you smell it
dying in those acres where you played, please know
old towns we loved in matter, lovers matter, playmates, toys,
and we take from our lives those days when everything moved,
tree, cloud, water, sun, blue between two clouds, and moon,
days that danced, vibrating days, chance poem. I want one
who’s wondrous and kind to you. I want him sensitive
to wheat and how wheat bends in cloud shade without wind.
Kathy, this is the worst time of day, nearing five, gloom
ubiquitous as harm, work shifts changing. And our lives
are on the line. Until we die our lives are on the mend.
These letter poems have a depth of emotion, a surging momentum, an authenticity
to them that I think might be impossible to achieve without both the correspondent and
the place from which this correspondence is born. Each of his poems is titled like this,
“Letter to ______ from _______,” the poet knowing that both the correspondent and the
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place are the foundations for these pieces that feel not so much like poems, but as urgent
communications. In this particular missive, the poet offers the gift of his attention, not
only to Kathy’s sorrow, but to the land that is her home, the land that shapes her. All
these things “matter,” including the small things the casual observer might not notice,
such as the way “wheat bends in cloud shade without wind.” The litany of physical
details leads us inexorably to the emotional heart of the poem, a proclamation not only to
Kathy but to the poet, and to us: “Until we die our lives are on the mend.” We’ve arrived
at this place together—our common humanity— line by line, moment by moment,
through the force of the poet’s attention.
Thinking about letter writing leads me back to the wonderful letters of Emily
Dickinson, where you can see the poet’s agile mind so clearly practicing what would later
become the distilled poems. In a letter to her sisters, she once proclaimed: “Spring is a
happiness so beautiful, so unique, so unexpected, that I don’t know what to do with my
heart. I dare not take it, I dare not leave it—what do you advise? Life is a spell so
exquisite that everything conspires to break it.” Much later, after the death of her mother
in 1882, she wrote to her cousins: “I hoped to write you before, but mother’s dying
almost stunned my spirit…she was scarcely the aunt you knew…There was no earthly
parting. She slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind, and is now part of
the drift called “the infinite.” We don’t know where she is, though so many tell us.” And
later in the letter, she goes on: “Mother was very beautiful when she died. Seraphs are
solemn artists. The illumination that comes but once paused upon her features, and it
seemed like hiding a picture to lay her in the grave….”
Months later, in a letter to James D. Clark in 1883, we are allowed a glimpse into
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both the persistence and progression of her grief: “I wish I could show you the hyacinths
that embarrass us by their loveliness, though to cower before a flower is perhaps unwise,
but beauty is often timidity—perhaps oftener pain. A soft “where is she?” is all that is left
of our loved mother, and thank you for all you told us of yours…” Faithfully, E.
Dickinson. Five years later, she recorded her own imminent death with this simple twoword letter: “Little Cousins,” she wrote, “Called Back.”
It’s difficult to imagine such a chronicle of grief, of intimacy, of loneliness and
joy—conveyed in some of the communication technologies of today: email, Facebook
updates, twitters and tweets. Though part of me also thinks Dickinson would have loved
the brevity of the tweet, the succinct and mysterious quality of the Facebook
update—lines thrown out of context, commented upon, each line creating its own
collaborative poem. I enjoy picturing her in her white dress in her upstairs sanctum,
typing with her thumbs and bent over a little screen as her Amherst world unfolded
before us.
But enough of that. In one of her poems she began “This is my letter to the world/
that never wrote to me.” Often I’ll sit down at my desk with that couplet whispering in
my ear, and so my writing seems to take on a greater urgency.
The novelist and essayist Judith Kitchen wrote: “Letters, I realized, were the
‘other ‘ side of writing. They served the art: in them we could test the waters of idea,
exchanging something more than gossip or news as we drank the wine of connection; in
them we found our counterparts, even as they found us.” “Who are we,” she continues,
“after we enter that disembodied two-way street? At once vulnerable and invincible, we
willingly peel back our defenses to reveal that interior we name the self.”
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As I’ve been thinking letter writing and its relationship to the fine art of
communication, I’ve seen that letters, for these great writers and for us lowly ones, can be
a wonderful form of practice. Practice as Judith Kitchen says, at “revealing that interior
we name the self,”, and practice simply in putting one word after another, following that
trail, without the pressure of producing something “successful” or finished. Practice is
also something that has seemed to fallen out of favor in this quick technological age (we
expect things to happen instantaneously), but I recently heard the guitarist Glenn Kurtz
articulate the beautiful art of practicing. He said: “My attention alone makes this a
performance. Attention changes everything…each instant is urgent. Practice lets us grow
in our own time. Every single day you fail; practice is the process of returning, trying
again. Practice is the inward turn that allows us to move forward.” We can practice
writing the way one might practice the guitar, attuning ourselves to our instruments.
As a kid, I always kind of envied the other children who had something to
practice: violin, piano, basketball, gymnastics. Though most of them claimed to hate it
and slunk into their practices with pouts and glares, they still seemed to have a sense of
purpose about them, carrying their sturdy black cases, or changing into their uniforms. I
had nothing, no special way of delineating the day. It’s not my parents’ fault; I probably
adamantly refused all lessons to the point of hysteria, afraid of failure, and so I wandered
rather aimlessly in my backyard, pretending to practice. Like Snoopy, I became “world
famous”: the world famous gymnast practicing her round off from the jungle gym; the
world famous basketball star, clumsily dribbling my brother’s basketball on the makeshift
court. I swam in the pool, around and around, pretending to practice synchronized
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swimming with an invisible team.
What did I yearn for so much, as I did my solitary, imaginary practices in the
backyard? I think it was the sense of growing better at something—a visible, tangible
manifestation of growth. I wanted to be shaped by practice, to have some kind of skill
infiltrating my very being. And I wanted to feel a part of something—either part of a
team that grew better together, or a servant to something beautiful, like music. As I grew
older and went away to college, I would see the serious musicians in their practice rooms,
the little windows in the doors allowing a glimpse of their bodies leaning into the music.
They stayed in there for hours at a time. There seemed something almost monkish about
them, in their devotions; they could put away their violins or cellos, knowing they had
already spent the day well.
The essayist Kim Stafford has likened the practice of writing to the practice of
playing the violin; he writes about how a violin, played every day, will keep the
vibrations of music in its body, even while lying still and silent on the wall. If it is not
played every day, the vibrations dissipate and the wood grows lifeless. “An instrument
dies if not played daily,” he writes. “A guitar, a violin, a lute chills the air for the first
fifteen minutes of fresh play…But the fiddle played every day hangs resonant on the
wall, quietly boisterous when first it is lifted down, already trembling, anxious to speak,
to cry out, to sing at the bow’s first strokes.”
Our own writing practice—perhaps through writing letters—can infuse our
bodies with the energy and vibrancy of music, keeping us always at the ready to unleash
a gorgeous song. The word “discipline” is an extension of the word “disciple,” and if we
consider ourselves disciples of writing, we might find the energy and devotion we need to
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keep going, even when it feels like the practice is arduous. Practice, as Glenn Kurtz said,
“is the process of returning, trying again.”
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success, he says that “it isn’t
how smart or even how talented you might be that will carry you to extraordinary heights
of success, fame or wealth; it’s how many hours you spend doing whatever it is you’ve
chosen as your path.” In the book, Gladwell articulates the “10,000 hour rule.” He writes:
“When we look at any kind of cognitively complex field—for example, playing chess,
writing fiction, or being a neurosurgeon—we find that you are unlikely to master it unless
you have practiced for 10,000 hours. That’s 20 hours a week for 10 years. The brain takes
that long to assimilate all it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”
Well, that may seem a little daunting. But we can plug away at those 10,000
hours, minute by minute. And we can do so with patience, without striving, seeing
practice itself as the point. We could write a letter every day to a ghostly correspondent,
our arms and minds and hearts in motion, warming up. There’s something kind, gentle,
and forgiving about seeing writing (and life itself!) as practice, while at the same time,
there’s something quite rigorous about it. We all need a coach; we need something urging
us on.
There’s a joke I told all the time as a kid: A tourist in New York stops a man
carrying a violin case to ask for directions. “How do you get to Carnegie Hall,” she asks,
holding out her crumpled map. The musician replies, “Practice, practice, practice.”
Practice, practice, practice. It’s all we can ever do.
And—fortunately or unfortunately—often this practice is done alone, in solitude.
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But letter writing—even using the letter form as a way to start your writing—can soften
that solitude a bit.
When I was a kid I played alone a lot of the time. I was probably lonely, but I
don’t remember it that way. I remember, instead, a kind of relief to be with only myself,
with no one to make fun of me or tell me what to do or pass judgment. I sat in my room
with my “Brenda the Nurse” doll, or I lay on my belly with the catalogue I’d ordered
from American Airlines that displayed all the wonderful accessories you could buy if you
became a stewardess (berets! sashes! little pins with wings!) Or sometimes I just sat on
my bed reading until it grew dark. Naturally my mother appeared periodically and said,
go find someone to play with, and I would dutifully wander outside, where my friends
awaited, a constant presence.
Now I live alone with my dog and my cat for company. Alone-ness has become a
natural way of life for me, and most of the time it’s fine. I enjoy my little routines, the
freedom to just be myself at all hours. But sometimes it’s not fine at all. Sometimes the
quiet contentment of solitude veers into loneliness and despair; the line between the two
is very thin indeed. As May Sarton put it: “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is
the richness of self.” Her Journal of a Solitude, published in 1973, was one of the first
books to honestly allow an intimate glimpse into the nature of being alone. I remember
reading it as a young woman with the avid, breathless attention one might give to a
thriller. She writes:
I am here alone for the first time in weeks to take up my 'real' life again at last.
That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life,
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unless there is time alone in which to explore what is happening or what has
happened….I hope to break through into the rough, rocky depths, to the matrix
itself. There is violence there and anger never resolved. My need to be alone is
balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge
empty silence if I cannot find support there.
Sarton, an accomplished poet, understood the necessity of being alone, but also
apprehended the need for support in this endeavor, knew the fear that can arise and choke
us. And it’s remarkably easy to go from content to miserable in an instant. When I’m
writing well, I feel the blessing of solitude—as one psychology journal puts it, “a state of
being alone where you provide yourself wonderful and sufficient company.” My writing
becomes my “wonderful and sufficient company” (especially when I’m writing a letter)
But when my attention falters, loneliness takes over and nothing seems right. At times
like these, I can understand why “solitary” is the worst punishment they can offer in
prison.
But eventually I get back into solitude mind, aware of loneliness but not ruled by
it, and often that happens when I’m reading a book—like Charlotte’s Web—that seems to
be corresponding directly with me, or when I simply sit down and start a piece of writing
with two words “Dear friend…” whoever that friend may be.
This makes me think of William Stafford, a great poet from Oregon who woke at
4 a.m. every morning to write a poem. He was alone for that hour, yes, but also in the
deep presence of the world. One of my favorite poems he wrote in his last days, on the
couch in his study, and it carries the qualities of both solitude and community. The reader
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is evoked in the very title, and so we seem to be in the room with him, breathing with him
in the quietude. It’s called:
You Reading This, Be Ready
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
In a beautiful essay called “My Father’s Place,” William Stafford’s son, Kim,
writes of sleeping at his father’s house a few days after the poet’s death and being woken
at his father’s customary hour. “The house wanted me to rise,” he writes. “There was a
soft tug. Nothing mystical, just a habit to the place. The air was sweet, life was good, it
was time.”
This “habit to the place” came from the years and years of practice that William
Stafford had done in that house. So Kim rises in the dark, makes instant coffee and toast
(his father’s customary repast), and goes to the coach, lies down, places his head in the
dent his father’s head had made in the silk pillow after years of mornings just like this
one. He is poised to write, but Kim does not write, not yet. Instead he allows himself to
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simply be in that room, with the spirit of his father, and to take in all the ordinary details:
the curtains, the sunflowers in a vase, the pollen that has dropped from those sunflowers
onto the table. He writes:
The pollen seemed to burn, so intense in color and purpose. But the house—the
house didn’t want me to write anything profound. The soft tug that had wakened
me, the tug I still felt, wanted me to be there with myself, awake, awake to
everything ordinary…I remembered how my father had said once that such a time
alone would allow anyone to go inward, in order to go outward. Paradoxically, he
said, you had to go into yourself in order to find the patterns that were bigger than
your own life….
It’s not about trying (Kim goes on to say). It’s not about writing poems. It’s not
about achievement, certainly not fame, importance. It’s about being there exactly
with the plain life of a time before first light, with breath, the worn silk, the
blanket, and that little dusting of pollen from the sunflowers…there was this
abundance in time and place and habit. And then I had a page, I closed my
notebook, and I rose for the day. There was much to do, but I had done the big
thing already.
This is what I wish for myself, and for you, as we begin this journey together in a
land called surprise valley, a place where surprises might welcome us at every turn,
where we could encounter our true voices that have something completely unexpected to
say. So, may we always be awake to ourselves. May we always find our way inward, in
order to return outward with the wisdom we have gained. May we find abundance in time
and place and habit, feeling our compatriots surrounding and supporting us. Let us a write
a letter to the world that never wrote to us, just to see what we might say. May we learn
to be true friends and good writers. May we learn, as Terry Tempest Williams tells us,
that we are not alone in the world. Thank you for taking this journey with me.