My Grateful Epistle

Dear Friends on Vocal,

(addressed most especially, but CERTAINLY not only to: D.K., John, Cathy, D.J., Paul, Rachel, Lamar, Novel, Dharrsheena, JBaz, Emos, Sonia, Shirley, Hope, Joe, Cindy, Em, Ava, Kayleigh, and Babs)

First off, it's been far, far too long! I'm so sorry I've been away for so many days, and without warning. It's strange how different facets of life will expand and force others out of the limelight of our minds, attention, and time. Posting and reading on Vocal had been a wonderful and fairly consistent rhythm for me for a number of months; more recently, however, I have found this wonderful dimension of life shunted into the corner by various demands of work, relationships, and so on.

This format is a little tough for me, to be honest! My usual writing process involves having a half-baked idea, letting it marinate in the back of my mind for a few weeks, and then eventually buckling down and forcing myself (with much anguish) to translate abstract creativity into concrete words. But that's no way to write a real letter! So I am going to do my best to write this from the heart, in one go, eschewing any machinations to craft a more grandiose but less genuine epistle.

(Please forgive the overabundance of high school vocab words- my pretentious vernacular has been diagnosed as terminal. It only gets worse when I have to write an unedited draft, and in the first person.)

In short, I am hopping on this challenge as a vessel to help me accomplish three things that I already needed to do:

(1) explain and apologize for my disappearance,

(2) unceremoniously mark a renewal of my presence here on Vocal, and

(3) share some gratitude and reflections born from my experience on this wonderful site.

In the introduction to this letter, I already made reference to various life things drawing my time away from this community. At risk of sharing more details than readers are interested in, I will briefly divulge the nature of these things. Feel free to skip if details of my life story are not of great interest to you, I will not be offended! But it has occurred to me that a number of us share works of poetry and literature which pertain to deep themes running through our hearts and common humanity. Having shared such windows into our souls in this virtual space, I don't think it too inappropriate to share just a glimpse of the concrete realities which make up my day-to-day. :)

The first and very joyful change is that I have been engaged to my wonderful fiancée for several months now! We are so, so excited to be planning for a lifelong future together - I have to pinch myself every so often just to confirm that this is reality. Plans for a wedding and the marriage beyond it do, quite rightly, take up quite a lot of time and headspace though - so this is the first of two primary factors that has pulled me away from Vocal of late.

The second major factor is a shift in role at my workplace; I work at a non-profit which serves some of the refugee population in my city, and have recently transitioned from a general community engagement position to the more immediate, relational, and demanding job of case management. Don't get me wrong, I am deeply grateful for this change! I pursued it, in fact. Case management involves a lot more face-to-face communication and direct problem solving than was present in my previous role, and I am very glad to get to lean into these dimensions of work (which come to me a lot more naturally than the event-planning and email herding which took up most of my days before). This shift has meant that I have had to invest a lot more time and energy into my work, which has left me less capacity than I would prefer for participation here on Vocal.

Now that I am a couple of months into these transitions, however, I find myself gradually tilting back towards an equilibrium whose balance should (hopefully) allow some time and energy to flow back into this creative space. I am very excited to be jumping back in, and look forward to catching up on so many of your works on here!

Now before I overshoot the word count, I want to address a message of gratitude to a few of the wonderful characters who have most supported and encouraged me since my genesis on this site. Each of you deserve personalized notes of gratitude - but in the meantime please accept this note and read as though it is addressed to you individually.

To all of the folks mentioned at the start of this piece, and anyone else who has connected with me here:

You deserve the highest of awards. You are an encourager of not only me but so many other souls on this site, reading so many of my poems and stories and providing wonderfully affirming words in response. Just so, you are yourself a source of genuine inspiration and boundless creativity,

It long ago became evident to me that the greatest treasure to be acquired on this site was not monetary (though that's always an exciting motivator for creativity!!) but relational. I can say with complete honesty that the community to be found here is of infinitely more value than the competition. And while I will not argue that they are opposed - celebrating the wins of your friends and receiving encouragement upon a personal victory are wonderful experiences, after all - I will defend the former as far richer and more longer lasting a prize than the latter. So my final note of gratitude here is directed to the Vocal Team, for creating and sustaining this space for artistry and human connection.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Until we next cross creative paths - cheers!

Yours most verbosely,

Gabriel Huizenga