Issue 22: Up in the Air

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Editor’s Note : Up in the Air

Welcome to Ruminate’s Issue 22: Up in the Air! This playful title was inspired by the work in these pages and their varied renderings of the in-between, limbo, and up-in-the-air moments in life. You know, those seconds or seasons spent on the threshold, when you’ve moved toward a door but have yet to pass through.

I like this idiom, “up in the air.” I picture things floating around, throwing my hands up—letting go. This sounds nice. But “up in the air” also means a kind of metaphorical pause, which can be uncomfortable or worrisome, even terrifying to those of us who like to have our feet on the ground, like to keep moving, like to have control . . . myself certainly included. And as many of our contributors point out, this pause or uncertainty can happen because of large life changes—pregnancy, an unexpected illness, a lost love, marriage, a new vocation, death—but it can also happen because of small things—the glimpse of a blue heron flying low at dusk, the weather, an airplane trip, or reading an Emily Dickinson poem. In “April Snow” Amanda Leigh Rogers describes the effect of simply watching snow fall, the “wet flakes rush[ing] to earth,” and she says “I lost my feel for gravity / and almost drifted up.”

And, of course, we were inspired by Micah Bloom’s winning art from our first ever Ruminate Visual Art Prize. Bloom’s work explores the charged moment before tragedy, when a life’s existence is up in the air, and it asks questions about when and how the divine intercedes. We were thrilled to have award-winning artist Sandra Bowden serve as the finalist judge for the Visual Art Prize, and she writes: “First Prize goes to Micah Bloom for the delightful and interesting paintings on interventions. There is something so contemporary and youthful about these works that makes them very intriguing.”

Like Bloom’s work, periods of ambiguity are intriguing (even if they’re uncomfortable) because they are ripe with possibility. They offer us the chance to grapple with the unknown, to encounter our finiteness. And when this happens, when it’s clear that things are no longer in our control, we come to the end of ourselves. And if we’re lucky, we are hushed—we must wait and see. Deja Earley’s short memoir “Virgin” shares her story of being a twenty- five-year-old Mormon and virgin who struggles with feeling like she has yet to start her real life. Her experience is ultimately one of waiting, of living in the in-between, of holding onto a covenant while she pilgrims an interim season of life.

Waiting, it would seem, also lends itself to new insights, new lessons. James Silas Rogers describes the untethered feeling of flying on an airplane and the realization he experiences: “. . . on this flight headed back from New York I grasp, in a way that I never did before, that . . . the past remains utterly irretrievable.” And in “April Snow” Amanda Leigh Rogers goes on to tell us that after she lost her feel for gravity, she then looked “downward to relearn myself.” I find myself wondering about this, wondering if we have to first lose our balance, become unsure, in order to receive these chances to relearn.

Let me be clear—I love control, and I hate losing it. But I am drawn to the beauty and relief of being hushed and made to wait, of being taught something anew. That’s the gift that the in-between offers. And, it is my hope that it’s what this issue offers to you, dear readers. Whether the blue heron flying low at dusk presents itself, or you discover it, when it happens, may we all remember the gift that accompanies the terror of being up in the air. And may we sometimes have the courage to let go.

Trying to loosen my grip,

Brianna Van Dyke

Editor-in-Chief