compass grass

[note #38]

Friends,

This is the story of compass grass. It lives in the dunes, rising up from the million million grains of sand like a tiny tree. Its roots reach down farther than it rises, enough to anchor it to the earth. Then the wind comes and knocks it over, but still it holds on, the fronds now carving grooves into the sand, circling around the central stem. The grooves are concentric, one inside the other, like Dante’s vision of hell. Or like a record album made of sand. It spins with the wind, making a circle we call a compass, though it might not help you know where you are or where you should be going. I seek it out whenever I wander the dunes—it’s everywhere, once you know to look. I stand over it, take it in, then scan the distance for the next one, and move toward it. This the only way I know to get through each day.

I think of this the day after the largest mass protest in world history. My family and I marched through the streets of New York, alongside hundreds of thousands of others. Compass grass keeps doing what it’s doing, it holds on through the storm, it makes something simple and beautiful where before there was nothing.

UPCOMING EVENTS

3 nov / Writeability / online workshop / worldwide (via zoom) SOLD OUT

19 nov / Regatta Bar / Earful / reading / Cambridge, MA

20 nov / Cathedral of Saint John the Divine / Poets’ Corner / reading / New York, NY