For over a decade I have used these editor’s notes to wonder with all of you, examining life through a lens shared by the artists and writers in each issue. It’s only fitting then, that this is where I share with you that this will be my last issue as editor-in-chief of Ruminate. The past thirteen years tending to Ruminate have been a gift, and as excited as I am to be pursuing new paths and focusing on my writing, I will deeply miss this magazine, its readers, and the people I’ve had the privilege of working alongside. Our exceptional staff will carry Ruminate’s good work into the new year and beyond. 

In the meantime, the theme for this issue is “Shelter,” and I’ve been thinking about the ways that art and writing return us to ourselves, to our internal home. As the poet and editor Christian Wiman writes: “Who knows what atomic energies are unleashed by a solitary man or woman quietly encountering some arrangement of language that gives their being—shunted aside by chores and fears and who knows what—back to them?” Yes, who knows. When we create, our work reveals reasons and rewards we could not know any other way.

Helping make this magazine has carved out a kind of shelter of creativity for me and has introduced me to our fellow poets and storytellers and mystics, people who remind us of the unknowable, of our longing toward that which is larger than ourselves, who speak and create in approximation, where wiggle room and story and metaphor tell the unsayable truths. “Although I see the stars, I no longer pretend to know them,” writes the monk Thomas Merton. More than fifty years later, the poet Joy Harjo has a reply: “Beneath a sky thrown open / to the need of stars / to know themselves against the dark.” 

Given the space to move, our creative acts become a waltz of flexibility and courage, of generosity and perseverance, of discipline and lightheartedness, of making a turn and being frightened, of making a turn and feeling yourself in synch with the universe. It’s serious work and it’s holy play. It matters desperately and it matters not at all. And sometimes it matters simply because where there was nothing now there is something. 

And making a magazine, like making a life, is no different. I once heard two women in a cafeteria talking, strangers fumbling over topics and silence like hikers searching for a riverbed to follow. And just when the food was finished and it looked like it was only dead ends, they found it. It was something about St. Louis and a question and the other exclaiming “Yes, I know the Smarts!” with such enthusiasm it was clear this was only a stand-in for “Yes, I know you and you know me!” or whatever that is called when strangers become kindred become rivers become one. Which is to say mutuality, which is to say these lives we’ve been given and the stories we tell about them are far more baffling and connected than we imagine. Art and poems and stories imagine it before us, and then we get to waltz forward together.  

Thank you for waltzing and walking with me; thank you for pointing out the mysterious stars along the way. I’m so very glad to be joining you as a subscriber myself and look forward to the thrill of Ruminate arriving in my mailbox each quarter, full of beauty and goodness. I’m grateful for the shelter these pages have provided, and I know Ruminate will continue to be a home for many in the years to come. 

Warmly, 
Brianna

From Ruminate’s Issue 53: Shelter