There have been so many things of late for me, challenges for lack of a better word. I have work. I have this website not wanting to cooperate. Indeed, the website’s maladies are symbolic, really, symbolic of the entirety of this phase of my life. I’ve had other such phases too. And I start those times in which I have to devote serious time to the endeavors of getting things done thinking it’s not going to be fun. As I continue on though, I realize I should have been keeping up a better pace. Every time I find something better in me. Most times, I find how much I love to write, how much I love music. Every time I realize those difficult roads are most difficult at the beginning.

Today, as I checked the mundane, the emails on every system, I was, inside, hoping this beginning is the beginning of all I want to become, that things will become easier, and while multitasking with the emails, I opened a magazine. Featured was a poem of the late-great photographer Richard Avedon. The feature included a short paragraph on him, omitting the obvious — that he is one of the greats of fashion photography, and noting only that his start, in 1941, was by photographing his fellow Merchant Marines for their identification cards, and of his win of a Scholastic Art and Writing Award for a poem he wrote then as a 18-year-young man. As I am so often reminded, so much of art is a cross-over. So many greats have many talents in many areas and did many things, showing it is possible that the fact of being busy in ones mind and in one’s activities spurs all else, and that all else includes a great many things. More importantly this poem… reminds me of the value of appreciating the difficult, of appreciating the beginning of that difficult, of appreciating a lack of security is only temporary assuming one keeps up the pace, of appreciating all the side-ways looks  of others not belying their concern, because it might be the difficult at that beginning that is necessary if one wants to leave behind … moss.

You must not think my glance is quick

To shift from this to that, from here to there,

Because I am most usually where

The way is strangest and the wonders thick,

Because when wind is wildest and the bay

Swoops madly upward and the gulls are few

And I am doing as I want to do,

Leaving the town to go my aimless way;

You must not think because I am the kind

Who always shunned security and such

As bother the responsible of mind

That I shall never amount to much;

I know my drifting will not prove a loss,

For mine is a rolling stone that has gathered moss.

Poem, Richard Avedon, 1941 (as excerpted from Harper’s Bazaar, July 2014 issue); photograph Avedon of Bob Dylan, New York City, February 10, 1965.