Are you building bridges?
July 9, 2021
Dear Friends,
There are bridge components that are, without question, vital. One is the caissons that are deep in the ground - a shared earth between both ends, no matter how different the places that are being connected. That foundation must be deep, deeper, deepest. Then anchorages are built on each end for security. Another is a slight, or exaggerated, arc, that tension of the arch we see in architecture starting in the second millennium. A rising and a falling provide the necessary tension to hold the bridge together.
Just after my book, Life is a Verb, was published, I received an email from a man I didn’t know named Sven Cahling. In it was a brief video of a bicycle, filmed from his perspective as he rode the bike across a bridge in Sweden, then the camera pans out to the water below and then down to the simple silver clip on the back of the bike, a clip holding my book on the flat metal shelf above the rear tire. Music swells, the video ends. No words, just a silent tribute from Sweden that touched my heart so, so deeply. He now sends me photos of that same bridge in every season, spanning a river in a small town in Sweden, a bridge I must cross one day with Sven on bikes.
Bridges sometimes are the only way to get from one side to the other, but we too often tear them down, build them cheaply, miscalculate their meeting in the middle, or leave them unfinished. There are unfinished bridges in my life, ones I deemed too difficult to build, ones I gave up on building, ones I decided weren’t worth my efforts because the other village refused to help with the building. Is there anything more desolate than an unfinished bridge, its potential cut short? Or cars that drive across a bridge, not knowing about its jagged, unfinished edge, and fall?
What bridges are you willing to build, and which can you abandon now?
CLASSES AND EVENTS
If you want to write, I invite you to my next virtual writing retreat for women in July (July 22-25). It is an investment into your own writing, whether you are a beginning writer or an experienced one. Together, we will build a community of writers that will continue long after our retreat is done. I promise you support, witness, deep questions, and fun. I would love to welcome you to this circle. For all levels of writers.
LINKS TO LINGER OVER
I think you need this for the summer heat. The color! The color!
On depression, from a writer I follow on Twitter: “I used to think I was the pain. I didn’t always think of depression as an experience. I thought of it as something I was.” He learns this isn’t true: “We are always bigger than the pain we feel. Always. The pain is not total. When you say ‘I am in pain,’ there is the pain and there is the I but the I is always bigger than the pain. Because the I is there even without the pain, while the pain is only there as a product of that I. And that I will survive and go on to feel other things.”
If you need or want to up your game on Zoom, here are some ways to do that.
Feliks loved this cold summer dish.
I’ll see you next Friday from my orange desk. Keep masking. The Delta variant of COVID-19 is here and it is not playing.
With love,
Patti
Patti Digh LLC
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