I have recently had the opportunity to look at the past few years of my life in a retrospective way, and what I have found is a full circle of coincidence and synchronicity. Though, the skeptical part of me is aware of hindsight bias and the fact that an interest in a topic a few years ago could easily lend itself to a continued interest today, and that it isn’t a coincidence for that topic to return to my conscious.
In 2022, I was deeply interested in art. Specifically, I was interested in how art and poetry could coexist and strengthen each other. My poem, “Lately I’ve Been Talking Too Much,” was published by the wonderful Yellow Arrow Publishing in their Vignette series. You can read that poem here.
In this poem, I explored themes of nature and taxonomy juxtaposed with concepts of the Cubist art movement. The combination felt like I had unlocked some deep well of connection within myself. Art had been something I always appreciated, wished I could partake in, and ultimately admitted that I had no real skill in. Poetry was something I always appreciated, had joyfully partaken in for years before admitting that I had no real skill and it wasn’t worth doing if I couldn’t do it masterfully. My return to writing was unexpected and vital to my survival and growth from 2021 to today. My recent return to immersion in art feels just as necessary today.
With art still very much on my mind, I continued to write poetry that integrated that passion for art. Graphic Violence published another poem in 2023. You can read “In Which Cubists Are Obsessed With Musicians” here.
I eventually embraced my love of art and the history of it. I visited art museums for the first time in many years. I marveled at the artworks, I cried in front of a Georges Braque painting, and I sat in meditative silence in a recreation of an Eighteenth Century French Salon. I wrote about that experience, and it was published by Spillover Magazine. You can read that here.
In the summer of 2023, my family and I travelled to the Western part of North Carolina. On the return trip, I requested a detour on the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway. Nestled in the mountains, a small town called Little Switzerland is home to a used book store that is packed from basement to attic with books of all genres, from all time periods. It’s really like a scavenger hunt and the prize is the unexpected find on the bottom shelf in the back corner of the basement. No, really. My prize was a biography of Dutch painter Rembrandt Van Rijn, told through the diary entries of Rembrandt’s friend and physician. This book, published in the 1930’s, would come home with me, and sit untouched and forgotten on my bookshelf until February 2024.
In late 2023, I decided it was time to tie up loose ends in my life, which meant a final decision on my education and career path. At 35, I felt both the daunting nature of higher education before me, but also could perceive a window of opportunity closing rapidly on that same possibility. I had not been positioned in life to attend college for many years, after a disastrous first attempt after high school graduation in 2007. Now, many years and life lessons later, I finally had the opportunity and mental/emotional bandwidth to consider what I had been repressing since 2007. I suppose you could call it a midlife crisis, but it really felt like a delayed return to a once wasted potential.
I returned to college. A freshman again. In some ways I was more anxious than I had been in 2007. In other ways, I was much more steadfast and determined. Gone was the bravado and assumption of timelessness of my youth. Time has taken on new meanings, and mortality is an ever-present storm cloud on the horizon. There are times when you must leap. Today, I’m feeling much more confident in my capability and am on track to finish this first semester with a 4.0 GPA.
In this semester, I took a number of general education courses, and I had the privilege to take a course on Art History that really buoyed me through the semester. In February, the class entered discussion and material on Baroque Europe and I realized that I had a perfect educational supplement for the period. I finally pulled that Rembrandt biography off my shelf and dove into the thin, musty pages.
All of this to say, is it coincidence that I happened to pick up this book in a dark basement corner months before I needed it? Or did I simply pick it up because my interest was always leading me on a path to deepen my understanding of the topic? Are there no true coincidences or synchronicities in life? Or is the art in life the ability to suspend disbelief and, at least for a moment, imagine that fate has had a hand in direction we have taken?
L.M. Cole Poetry 