Hey, it's Major.

Today's episode is hosted by our very own Micah Keelbaum.

Hang tight, and I'll be back on November 25th.

I'm Micah Kilban, and this is the Slowdown.

Thank you. And this is the slowdown. A couple of years ago, my mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday.

I said a wind chime.

I wish I could remember why. It must have been a pure kind of desire.

She bought me one with a turquoise pendant dangling from the center. She told me that she'd read

the boxes of every wind chime the plant nursery was selling and that this one was supposed to summon good luck

for the strength of your voice. A few weeks later, I moved into a house with two singers and hung it

on the porch. It's traveled with me everywhere I've lived since, from sublet to sublet to sublet,

and finally to my current balcony. When I'm in my hometown, I now

stop by the same plant nursery to get another wind chime to give to someone I love. I like going

to their homes and hearing a little bit of this elemental music. I like knowing I've left

something to keep playing it when I'm gone.

The wind chimes remind me to be perceptive to what passes through, to set prisms to

refract the beauty that moves all about us. There are mysteries of the earth, and within the

body, and even within the soul, that we cannot simply excavate an

inventory. There are questions not to be answered, but explored. This is an ethos to art making, I guess,

but it is also an ethos to just getting dressed in the morning, to the little acts we do to exist in our environments

with care and purpose. Today's poem speaks to someone who left marks on this earth

hundreds of years ago. It asks what elemental and metaphysical forces moved through them,

...