On the writing of this newsletter

New Moon of October

“This is What You Shall Do” by Walt Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass. Parker J.Palmer suggests we should each take the time to write our own “This is what you shall do…”

Take me as I am.

A voice ribboned into my writing room. Thin and haunting. It was unmistakably my mother pleading to me from an empty room. A single line and then, gone.

I paused in the following silence. I was home alone, writing, now just the second hand of my grandmother’s birdsong clock on the wall clicking through the seconds. Feeling a tightness at my throat. What was I hearing? I had been writing about why I write. And the voice coming from the empty house was so familiar. A voice I hadn’t heard for such a long time and one I shouldn’t be able to hear now. It was beautiful. The tendril trailing into my ear. Why was she here, speaking to me, right now?

Then I realized it was Joni Mitchell’s line from the song, “California,” coming from, I assumed, the living room speakers.

It had been the last song that played on the Sonos the night before. A song I had heard my mother sing many times, about her beloved California, and the song is always accompanied by visions of her with her head tossed back, mouth wide as she held the notes. There she was, as intimate as could be, in my ear and mind’s eye, no explanation for why Sonos was playing right then, or even why Spotify had chosen to play the song the night before.