Meditations

Susan Schultz has written a masterful set of meditations on life and thought upended and made strange by the events of 2020. Poet, university professor, baseball fan, wife, mother, dog lover and Buddhist, Schultz is attuned to "bird song clarity in cold air" and the cataclysm of George Floyd's murder and Donald Trump's presidency. The resulting pieces are meditations in the tradition of Marcus Aurelius as well as something like closed captions for actual meditations in the Buddhist sense. "I like the dailiness of this work," Schultz writes. "The struggle to get inside the moment that hangs like water droplets on a brown railing after hard rain, to hear the petal's hinge as it opens, or the cat that scratches to get in, this is a poetics." Schultz provokes us with observations on love, death, family, neighborliness, social violence, racial reckoning. Ultimately, we are guided to read these poems of memory and presence, of vision and wakefulness, through the practices of surrendering and witnessing, and in doing so, discover that being present is a powerful form of compassion.