What do poetry, autism, Dorothy Sayers, and the Indigo Girls have in common?
My neural pathways. Okay, don’t worry; I’ll leave the mechanisms of the mind to the experts. What I’m interested in are the stories and writers, poems and songs that lend a deeper meaning to life.
What else am I interested in? Several years ago, at age 45, I learned I am autistic. That revelation has turned a clarifying lens on my life in particular, and on meaning in general. In particular, I see the way I have honed in on obsessions—special interests as we call them in the world of neurodiversity—and the way these obsessions unfold beauty and truth that I want to share with you as you walk your own unique way through this stunning world.
Why are you here? Maybe you, also, are neurodivergent and don’t mind a deep dive into seemingly disconnected topics, or maybe you love someone who’s neurodivergent and want to catch of glimpse of what late-diagnosed autism looks like. Maybe you experience difference in another way, but it feels good to come alongside someone who knows what it feels like not to fit in.
Or maybe you simply stumbled through the door looking for weekly literary musings and poetry readings.
You’ll find all that here, and you are most welcome. Come in.
Why “Out for Stars”?
I am poetically glad you asked.
Back in high school, I was a singer. At age sixteen, I pitched my alto voice among our school’s women’s chorale, and I loved working to create beautiful sounds and augmented meaning within that group. I loved belonging to a group. One autumn, we performed a haunting arrangement of Robert Frost’s poem “Come In” at a regional competition:
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went—
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
The result was a crash-ending on a painfully out-of-tune chord (I can recall the look on our choir director’s cringing face), and our chorus did not progress to the next level. But you sing a poem, and it settles in your bones—maybe even more so when the delivery is imperfect, as all of us and all of life are.
I knock on a friend’s door even now, and when she says, “Come in!” I’m standing for a moment on the edge of Frost’s woods. Birdsong at the end of each day stirs me to quietly chant “the last of the light of the sun.” I stop alongside any woodland and listen. I do want to enter: nature, poetry, stories in books, the wide world with all its shimmering and shattering intersections of meaning.
Poetry guides me through so many important moments, and Frost’s verse reminds me that here we stand on the forest fringe, with our limited vision and blood beating through our veins. It isn’t yet time to enter that pillared dark (aka death—don’t freak out). We’re out for stars.
But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been.
This is where Frost and I think a little differently. His narrator thinks going into the dark for lament is opposed to being out for stars, but I disagree. If we’re honest, we are haunted in life by death’s tune in so many variations—personal tragedy, disability, pervasive injustice, emotional wounds that will not fully heal. Yes, I am out to find the best light to see by, but often the lighted places starken the shadows by which pain and sorrow become visible. I don’t shy away from them.
If that doesn’t scare you away, join me here for thought and conversation against a heavy dose of constellatory special interests that—I neurodiversely promise—really do connect with all the rest. Together, let’s dig deep for meanings both dark and bright. Let’s ride solar winds of shimmering thought, just unsafe enough to find ourselves changed for the better upon landing.