| Issue 12 Editor's Note |
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I am the door, says Christ. And I am stilled, completely taken by this image of God as an entrance. It’s because our second child, a baby girl, was born last month and she has me thinking, thinking about arrivals, births, and entrances, and about the beauty surrounding them. This is her story: I was attending a local writers conference and after a very busy day—writing workshops, surviving an hour of public speaking (I led a session on literary magazines), and a poetry reading from Denver’s poet laureate Chris Ransick—I drove home through the beginnings of a very wet spring storm and went into labor. She was born the next morning: our beautiful IlaJane Van Dyke. 6 pounds, 15 ounces, and 7 inches of new snow. I can’t help but ponder that stimulatingly literary day and question whether the hum and buzz of all those writing-minded souls was the impetus for her arrival. Maybe she heard Chris Ransick reading those lines about the river’s water and “mornings when magpies squawk the world awake” and just decided she couldn’t wait any longer—that ours was a world worth meeting. It makes sense. For nine months she has heard me mumbling aloud over three issues of RUMINATE—speaking the poems, my favorite lines from an essay, and testing out the wording for the cover: Windblown wild carrots or wild carrots, windblown? And most of me thinks she has not just heard, but also felt me working on RUMINATE—definitely the belly-heaving sobs as I read Tony Woodlief’s “The Glass Child” but also the internal hmms and ahhs, the deep exhale after pouring over Tyrus Clutter’s altarpieces. How could she not have felt these? After all, we were connected in inexplicable ways. As Debra Rienstra points out in her book Great with Child, my body grew a new organ for heaven’s sake! So why wouldn’t she, in return, grow a fondness for words, a tenderness for beauty? Yes. I think she would, and has. She has it written all over her little face—scattered across her cheeks and over her parted lips, words like wild carrots and magpies. When I was pregnant with my son, RUMINATE wasn’t yet conceived, and as you can imagine I had more spare time. I remember spending many evenings faithfully playing the piano for the baby—especially Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata. I played this piece again and again because I thought it had such a strong voice that the baby couldn’t help but listen, couldn’t help but be moved. For him, labor began at the movie theater in the middle of the Johnny Cash movie Walk the Line. When the contractions began it felt like the entire theater was shaking, that each person in the audience was tapping their foot with every downbeat. It was like he couldn’t help but join in. Perhaps music was already pulling on his little heart, preparing him for his entrance. And then he heard Johnny Cash and it was all over—he was awakened. Even more than speculation about my children’s taste in music or literature, all of this has made me wonder if art isn’t one of the strongest stimulants in our world—if it isn’t inducing life all around us. Forget all the old wives’ tales: the raspberry tea, spicy curry, or my favorite one—jumping up and down (as if this really would bring a child into the world!). Instead, what one needs for the birth of a child—or for that matter, the birth of a poem or a painting—is a good line about the river’s water or a great rendition of “Ring of Fire.” What I really love is that we all seem to have this capacity for beauty to beget birth. In a sense, we are all “expecting,” just waiting for a moment of beauty to induce new life, new words, new saints—even new door openings. Perhaps this issue of RUMINATE will provide that moment. Welcome and enjoy, Brianna Van Dyke |
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