And so my foray into the blogosphere commences! I am thrilled to finally establish a foothold on the interwebs (may it never be the same!).
The best place to begin is probably to explain the title of my blog. It’s a reference to a poem that recurs often in my thoughts, Robert Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something.” In the poem, the speaker is kneeling at a well-curb, gazing into the depths of the water. At first, he sees only his reflection, but one time the speaker peers “beyond the picture” to catch a glimpse of “something white, uncertain, something more of the depths.” But then he loses it. The poem concludes with the speaker pondering what that whiteness was: “Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.”
I have always loved that line for the sheer magnitude of it, for its incomparable breadth. In it the pendulum swings from the most abstract, Truth, to the most concrete, a pebble of quartz. I love, too, that the speaker finds that even the pebble of quartz, in the long absence of graspable meaning, would be something.
Perhaps, too, in our daily lives we might come across a pebble of quartz if we would only watch for it. If we looked and listened, we might even come to find something deeper.
I hope you’ll join me as I chronicle my own journey.