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CIRQUE
Paul Haeder
A Sturdy Tree Brings Forth the Light of Creation (Art) The tree of life is growing where the spirit never dies, and the bright light of salvation shines in dark and empty skies âBob Dylan Oh, how a picture is worth a thousand words. Just that cover (âGroundedâ by Tami Phelps) of this collectionâroots and sturdy trunk of tree spreading out from base to topâspeaks of the rootedness of the journal. This is where we are in this next decadeâpeople of all ages seeking solace, some sense of shelter from the storm, some sense of home and permanency. Roots! A sheltering sky. Those roots and soil, the air and water, the sun and the electromagnetic waves, many times forgotten, disabused. Oh those trees, the masters of synergy, orchestration, and community building. This issue, emblazoned with that prominent piece of art on the cover, is the true taproot of what the writers in this volume are shooting for: A home, a community, transcendence from the mundane, and a forum for their form. Iâve read the proof of this issue, and there are weighty poems and deep essays fixed in time. The fiction is grounded in writersâ lives, as stories should be. Using the term, literature, broadly, I see this volume emblematic of what all writers work their magic and their wares intoâart. The work is an existential form of guiding reader into a process of how we live, how they live, how the world lives. Much work in literary rags do have an undergrowth of writers expressing in various literary forms how people emerge from distress. The poems, nonfiction and fiction herein generate ebb and flow of getting through trauma. Surviving⊠Or almost surviving. This synthesis of these works remits an overall engagement of reader, writer and editor like myself on many planes of consciousness. Yet, the total effort of getting through the volume brings delight. Yes, songs of lament can bring delight to a reader. These are lived, learned and celebrated experiences, caught in a Sargasso Sea of each writerâs mat, snag and swirl of words. That rootedness reflected prominently on the cover transforms into a synergy of works put together as a whole, and this is synergy of forces of good: art. A pile of submissions grows, and most of the pieces come from people who do not know each other. Blind submissions. A hope imbued in each work that it will find light under the tree of collective literary knowledge. Like a deciduous tree, or a perennial, the works shed their glory, add to the rootedness of literature, and bring a tree into dormancy above ground but so dynamically active below ground. Art shedding to create rich loamy topsoil from which to grow anew. Are we the microbes, the symphony players navigating between solar and photosynthesis and all the tricks and biowebbing of capillaries and roots with the harmonies of fungi, bacteria, mineral and liquid? Is it strange that this frontispiece is energized by botanical allusions? That I as editor see the work not as separate but part of the whole. We now call the action and dynamism of a tree, roots, leaves and transpiration, and all the actors below ground, as part of a wood-wide web. A literary journal, to me, is that web, and while a frontispiece is a façade, I do not play with decorative things much.