Saturday morning, and the neighborhood is quiet, the house is quiet, I sit in my couch corner and I am quiet.

Mid-August now, and the zinnias are at their zenith: crisp and thick and bright along the sidewalk. Cherry tomatoes are beginning to ripen; chard is a small forest. In this windless morning the garden is a portrait, a still-life, alive.

I'm nearly finished with Roth's Sabbath's Theater. I'm reading Rilke and Donne. I'm drinking black coffee and thinking about harvesting greens for the freezer, thinking about a poem draft, thinking about Aretha and Otis and Curtis, soul singers of my blood, thinking about the odd silence of the air. My mind trickles among its thoughts; my brain is a creek filled with stones.

Flat white daylight dapples the shadowed maples. The white cat stalks across the grass; he is the only movement in the landscape. Where are the jays, the gulls, the crows this morning, with their comforting raucous clatter?

Last night, for dinner, I sautéed lamb patties with fresh jalapeños and oregano; I warmed up homemade baguettes and made tzatziki with yogurt, cucumber, red onion, and dill. I made a salad of roasted zucchini and eggplant, cherry tomatoes, green beans, chanterelles, and lettuce. Nearly every ingredient was grown by me, or foraged, or the fruits of a neighbor's garden gift (squash on the doorstep: a summer tradition!). Even the lamb was homegrown by a friend. Only the yogurt, a few of the tomatoes, the bread flour and yeast, and the olive oil and vinegar and salt and pepper were store-bought. Such meals amaze me. The horn of plenty in a city lot, even after months of rain.

And yet:

Paris

February 17, 1903

Dear Sir:

. . . You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you—no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet