Letter from the Editor

The Waiting.Those moments of nothing’s happening, what the hell am I doing, when will this pass?

You never truly realize it until you’re no longer in The Waiting, but those moments are filled with unseen work. When you feel like nothing’s happening, roots are growing.

This time last year, I wrote about where I would be now:

“Hopefully, a year from now, at almost 27 and working on a 16th issue, I can look back on this stretch of the trail with that same lump-in-yourthroat feeling that I have now. I can take the time I need to see how far I’ve gone but feel all the more ready for what’s to come.”

In this last year, I have cracked and split and tumbled out of the murk of the year before. And now, I see that The Waitings were passages of time that created space for inner work, for rest, for planning. You don’t place a bow on an arrow and expect it to launch— you have to pull it back. That liminal space of back but not yet forward is The Waiting.

Impatient, uncomfortable, anxious, unknown— imbued with magic. Spontaneous. When the arrow launches and where it lands can come as a surprise. Maybe it feels like somewhere you were always meant to be (but that wouldn’t happen without The Waiting). And, often, you don’t even realize that you’ve already been sent flying. Maybe it hits you all at once, or maybe you slowly see the work coming together. Maybe it’s both.

If you hike like I do, most of your view is your feet. Otherwise you’d catch a root, slip on a rock, miss a divot. You see things every now and then, but it’s not really until the end that you stop and take everything in, consider how far you’ve gone, spend time not looking at your feet. The fact that you looked at your feet on the way up doesn’t negate the journey. Taking breaks doesn’t negate the journey. Every step on the trail, every breath of the arrow being pulled back— these moments are how you get to the overlook.

Without them, there would be no vista. We wouldn’t learn along the way— both about ourselves and the trail.

Revel in these moments— the in-betweens, the greys, the sliver of blue hour after sunset but before twilight, quiet mornings before dawn spills over and scatters the fog. The moment, a blink, before you release the arrow.