This place has given me words to use as anchors
THIS IS A LETTER FROM ONE OF OUR READERS
21 September 2013
2:49 PM
Hello.
I began this email in May and didn’t get farther than that first word. I wasn’t sure how to begin expressing my gratitude or my love of what you do and what you’ve gathered. I didn’t know how I was supposed to describe what your blog feels like to me. Now, though, I’ve decided to do what I do best, tell a story.
I was watching a movie, a beautiful, simple, love story in which a Frank O’Hara poem was mentioned. Intrigued, I searched.
Not only did I find the poem in its entirety, I also found a refuge, another place where emotion existed and wasn’t mocked or judged. I found a place where I might find balm for my depressing thoughts. I found records of other people feeling the same way I did and do. I found e.e. Cummings, Charles Bukowski, Mary Oliver, and Pablo Neruda.
I began to picture the blog, with its wonderful dark colors, like a cave. It’s dark and none of us can see each other, but we share these words. And we’re always, all of us, aware that there are others in the cave with us. Along with this awareness, though, I feel blessedly secluded. And that’s wonderful. I’m comforted in the fact that I’m not totally alone, but I still have the feeling that I’m by myself, able to experience things with the wonder that one can only feel when alone.
I don’t really feel like I belong anywhere outside of the pages of books or the windows of the Internet. I don’t really have any friends. I’m an introvert, but I love the idea of community. Your blog, with all of its beautiful words, has given me a community that also gives me space to experience wonderful things and ideas by myself. It’s given me words to use as anchors and to memorize so I can always carry their assurances with me.
Your blog has taught me to love poetry. It’s inspired me to copy down names of poems from books that I glance through so I might read them later and have them written so I can look them up again and again.
It’s introduced me to another source from which I can draw courage and hope. And I thank you for that.
-N
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