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Hey, it's major.

Over the past few years, I've had the great privilege of sharing poetry with you and offering a daily moment to pause and slow down. Today, we're revisiting one of my favorite episodes from my time on the show. I hope you enjoy this selection.

I'm Major Jackson, and this is the slowdown. While slicing mozzarella for a meal we were to share, my friend Eva made a remarkable statement, one I've lived with for years.

She said, it is a miracle given our peculiarity, our strangeness, that we are able to connect with anyone at all.

Give it to Eva to say the thing that sounds humorous, compelling, and gloomy.

I mostly float in a fog of fragmentary thoughts.

How is it possible, she went on, that we communicate and make sense to each other.

Somehow we coexist in a tenuous space of shared understanding and joy.

She and I laugh a lot.

I joked, my fog meld frequently with her fog. We are one big fog. She laid white hockey pucks of cheese on a bed of marinarra. Somehow, people can be both idiosyncratic and capable of communicating across the chasm of personal differences.

It is both one of life's wonders and one of its tragedies.

Poetry negotiates that space between our inner life and the relational world we share with others.

Magically, we make plain what we feel and observe to convey what some might call a soul.

I often describe poetry as a mirror that reflects back our interiority.

But today's poem wonders if such perspective is even possible, given that we barely know who we are,

making the enterprise of connection through art deeply indeterminate and delicate.

From the Crystal Text by Clark Coolidge

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