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- [00:01]
Major
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Micah Kielbaun
Today's episode is hosted by our very own Micah Kielbaun. Hang tight and I'll be back on November 25th.
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I'm Micah Kielbaun, and this is the Slow 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 like wind playing the chimes, just like those forces did then and do today and will tomorrow. Shadow Play by Jessica Fisher Autumn Light under what sun were you born? Did you grow under? What king, what tyrant, what window, what door? The Four Horsemen, the Seven Sisters at rest, whether a thousand years, five thousand is a long time. Still, a stone held in the hand will warm. The same goes for bone. Who fed you a hand extending the spoon? What fed you music, art, or light? Was there an empty room, shadows cast upon the floor, the boards liquid with sunshine? And was that how you imagined the soul, open, ready, very still, even if the day itself was windy? Or was it for you, like the wind, tempestuous, infiltrative, lifting the fallen leaves? Did you think about it at all? Many lights cast many shadows, so that the hand on the paper is reflected time and again, the knuckles like the mountains, one range after the next, and each a fainter version of the same color, so that our sense of the faraway is brought close, the brush dipped again into the water, a little less paint for the next stroke, the path curving away to the right, around the hillock, into the copse. A little gate breaks the view beyond, the beyond given as a stripe of blue. This is how I came to know you, as a smudge or trace thumbprint on the potsherd, residue in the flask. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. This project is also supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. On the web@arts.gov to get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter and find us on Instagram lowdownshow.
- [06:06]
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