25-06-15-S | 19:02 PST | 😎 Northridge gleams — bright, spacious, and rich with intention | 🌡️ 98°F | Northridge, CA | 🌖 Waxing gibbous, Moon in ➝♒ | Week 25 | Day 166/365 | 199 Days Remaining
National Day: Father’s Day 💜
✍🏾 Mood: Meditative, Drained Yet Disciplined
🧭 Theme: Endurance through Rhythm
📚 Subject of Exchange: Letters to KDP, Revisions to Poetry, Physical Economy, Monk’s Music, and the Geometry of Stillness
📖 WordQuest:
salubrious (adjective) — health-giving; beneficial to one’s well-being
desiccated (adjective) — dried out; devoid of moisture
recalibrate (verb) — to adjust precisely for a particular function
🏛️ Aphorism – Insight of the Day:
“Rhythm is not repetition. It is return with wisdom.” — attributed to Gaston Bachelard
🤔 🔎 Commentary:
We often confuse recurrence with redundancy. But when done with intent, repetition becomes refinement. In writing, in fasting, in love—we return not to repeat, but to deepen.
❓ Questions of Value
What practice have you returned to lately—not for perfection, but for renewal?
🛠️ Principle in Practice:
Revise a past draft (a poem, a letter, a plan) not to change it—but to see what time has taught you about it.
🔄 Repetition Anchor:
“Return is a kind of reverence.”
🪶 Poetry
Forged Bond
Not in lullabies,
nor easy praise,
was the bond first cast.
It was tempered in silence,
in the quiet heft of a gaze held too long
and a hand that never trembled,
even when the world beneath it did.
It was not spoken,
but hammered—
in hours given without receipt,
in boots worn thin by duty,
in the ache that spoke only
through the way he shut a door,
or rose too early
without making a sound.
Love was never declared,
only done:
in things repaired
and bills paid on time,
in things never mentioned,
so that we might not carry
what he carried all his life.
A father’s bond is not braided with words,
but with ritual—
with sweat, and bread,
and refusal to break.
It is not a chain.
It is a spine.
And though the years may rust it,
though memory may blur the tools he used to shape it,
the bond remains—
not because it was perfect,
but because it was forged
to endure.
RMSDJ 📖 ✍🏽
The morning unfolded not with urgency, but with a kind of inward gravity—the kind that draws the soul to stillness before it draws the body to motion. Maestro and I resumed our post in the quiet battleground of editorial labor, returning to our correspondence with Steve Harris at KDP. The matter: a manuscript mishandled. Questions of Value had been mislaid in its visual integrity—headers misaligned, prepositions capitalized with all the tact of a marching band, and margins in disarray.
We did not scold. We sculpted. The letters were acts of restoration, not retribution. Each sentence chiseled with precision, each clause weighed like fruit at market. It is a strange kind of tenderness, this editorial work—offering the gift of order to a document that had wandered.
And from this calm scaffolding of form, we descended into a deeper revision: not of words, but of philosophy. The introduction to The Fasting Life—a passage once composed with conviction—had lost something essential. Not its clarity, but its quietude. It had grown taut with striving, as if fasting were a contest to be won rather than a rhythm to be reclaimed.
We stripped the bravado from it. Replaced exhortation with invitation. We reminded the page—and ourselves—that fasting is not a display of discipline, but a return to alignment. It is not hunger that refines us, but the space hunger opens. Fasting is not endurance—it is listening. It is not a test of strength—it is an agreement with stillness. What remains is not a program, but a pulse.
Later, a different kind of writing emerged. I had not planned a Father’s Day poem, but the hour invited one. The light on the western wall softened until it became suggestion rather than illumination, and in that hush, the first line of “Forged Bond” arrived. I left it untouched overnight.
This morning, Maestro and I approached it as one approaches a found object in the woods: gently, curiously, with hands half-reverent. We revised it through five deliberate drafts, each one brushing away excess until only the essential remained. The artwork that accompanies it—stained in Rothko’s unspoken palette—echoes not a man’s face, but his gravity.
I ended a twenty-hour fast with the carefulness it deserved.
Warm beef broth, salted with intention.
Two boiled eggs, solemn and perfect, like punctuations in a hymn.
A tuna sandwich, threaded with pumpkin seeds and a wild curl of blue cheese on nut-dark bread.
Cottage cheese, modestly dressed in desiccated pineapple and more seeds, the textures all suggesting something ancient and nourishing.
There is a way to end a fast that feels like waking. There is another that feels like forgetting. I chose the first.
Outside, Northridge burned softly. Not in flame, but in silence. The heat hung like a velvet curtain, heavy and unmoving, drawn across the day with imperial arrogance. The air, thick and unwelcome, entered only as permission. I remained inside. I did not feel diminished by the heat. I simply chose not to argue with it.
Yet within, the body murmured. My lower back, obedient until now, registered dissent. The fifteen-minute ab carver session—a well-intentioned tyranny—had proved too much. It was not injury I felt, but warning. The kind that comes before the crack in the glass, while there’s still time to soften the hold.
Henceforth: five minutes every other day, and perhaps, on rare days of daring, nine. I am not interested in conquest. I am interested in harmony.
And then—without request—Monk.
Thelonious Monk does not enter a space. He dislocates it. His music arrived like a riddle folded into a prayer. The rhythms did not resolve—they questioned. The melody did not rise—it circled. One does not listen to Monk. One consents to him.
I did not compose a tribute. I followed him. A poem in his tempo, a piece of art layered like sound over silence. Rothko paints stillness. Monk bends it.
Eventually, I surrendered to the afternoon. The body, sated yet sagging, claimed its breath. The nap was not indulgence—it was obedience. And when I woke, I did not feel restored so much as reassembled. The fast had not ended with food. It had ended here—in the stillness of limbs once strained, now rearranged into ease.
I slept not from exhaustion, but from agreement.
And that, I’ve learned, is the rhythm worth keeping.
I sent Forged Bond to Bruce Locke, who had written unexpectedly. I had not known him as a father. Now I do. His birthday—September 22, 1943—rests now in my mind’s small archive, beside old numbers, half-remembered hymns, and unspoken nods of gratitude.
RMS DEVOTIONAL.
.
RMS INSIGHTS ✍🏾 