“Maybe this is what grief is…Maybe this is how loss feels. Like nothing. Like wind in a hollow…Grief and hate are close cousins.”
J.M. Miro, Ordinary Monsters
“The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist. Persisting isn’t always safe, but it’s often necessary.”
Octavia E. Butler, The Parable of the Sower
Hope and loss are lovers, swaying wordlessly with steady equanimity. Faith and doubt dance together, in an effortless elegance of give and take. The loneliness of a heart that feels different, no matter the reason, makes even the smallest of spaces feel as overwhelmingly wide and anxiously sprawling as the world itself. The horizon, if one can even be seen, is always out of reach.
And yet, there is a magic that happens in the heavy dark. Perhaps, that’s where all magic takes place, where it all comes from; someplace crepuscular and cavernous. Buried deep. Somewhere in the bones of things. After all, “magic”, Caldwell Turnbull says, “resists being known so intimately, resists even being detected.” In the juxtaposition of antitheses held in close proximity, we get a sense of it. We realize that “every light makes a shadow”, as J.M. Miro says, “and there can’t be one without the other.” When the texture of trust moves beneath the proof of all that we can neither see nor say. When the substance of something hoped for becomes the invisible evidence of a tangible belief. When we are navigating and negotiating negative space; a cartography of contrast mapping the craters and canyons left by all our varying collisions and calamities. In an exploration of absence there is an invitation into a seemingly empty place. We are present to what persists, heightened by the strength of what remains. And what remains, in the grievous dusk, in the twilight of idols turned to ash, after all the arbitrary cruelties and injustices have stolen the stablest parts of our world, the parts that we know and love the most? After windswept unfairness sounds across the expanse made fallow, what remains is us…always us.
