This morning I went outside, onto the back parking deck where the view of the sky is most unobstructed. I took library books to the car, but my real reason for venturing out was to see if I could observe the eclipse. It's been cloudy and raining, so I knew that I would likely not see the moon.
I scanned the sky to the west, where I knew the moon should be setting. Was that glow behind the building the moon or light pollution? Then the clouds shifted, and I saw part of the moon. Was it the eclipse shrouding it or clouds or both? If I hadn't known an eclipse was happening, I'd have just assumed the clouds were acting as shadow.
Tears welled up, a curious reaction in some ways, although in other ways not so strange. It's been a tough week, in a tough season, in a tough twenty-two months in a century that's beginning to seem like a rewind of all the human progress that happened in the last century. I'm old enough now that when tears come, I don't try to suppress them (although I might try to find an unobtrusive way to cry, if I'm at work).
I got the library books to the car, and the rain pattered a bit more insistently. The clouds covered the moon, and I went back inside to finish my poetry submission. I haven't submitted much since I started seminary. In part it's because I have other work to do, seminary work, which consumes much of the time I used to have available to make poetry submissions.
But in part, it's because submitting is suddenly expensive. When it was the cost of 2 stamps, 2 envelopes, some paper, and some ink, I didn't mind. I have trouble paying $3 to submit a poetry packet electronically, but that price is cheap these days. It's hard for me to want to pay $4 and up to submit to a journal that has been rejecting my work for years, if not decades.
And I know that the odds are ever longer. When I first started submitting, back in the 1990's, there wasn't the explosion of MFA programs that we see today. In the past, I'd have done a big batch of submissions each fall and hoped that the odds might tip in my favor. This year, I just didn't have the energy or the time.
But it's hard to give up the dream, the variety of dreams that circle around my poems: the dream of becoming a better poet, the dream of my poems finding a wider audience, the dream of a book with a spine, the dream of inspiring the next generation, the dream of finding a way of having more time to do creative stuff and the hope that poem publications might lead to that.
So this morning when I saw a tweet that said that a poetry journal was still looking for poems, and when I realized I hadn't submitted there before, and when I liked the work that I saw there, and when I saw that they accept submissions via e-mail, I decided to come out from the shadows and submit.
And because the possibility of publication still makes me happy, I resolve not to let this part of myself be eclipsed by the other aspects of myself right now: the administrator who has to get certain tasks done because we're short on people to do them, the seminarian with papers to write, the woman who is trying to sell a house.
The elusive dream: integration of all of these selves. Let me continue onward.
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