Murmuration--Sarah Porter

It's quiet, at least by New York standards: the velvety mutter of the computer, a bass guitar softly grinding in the next apartment, a distant thump of construction. If I listen, nothing alludes mermaids or publication or writing--or to me. We finished watching Game of Thrones last night. It was enchanting and appalling, beautiful and utterly persuasive. I started reading The Magicians. There was a video circulating of a murmuration: the sinuous involute dance sometimes performed by a flock of starlings, which I've seen in real life but never knew the name for.

I'm grateful, of course, that I have an actual career as a writer now. For so, so long I didn't have one; it's a nice change of pace. I'm grateful that I'm close to finishing my trilogy, though it's still a bit of a struggle. But thinking about those things is like quicksand. It's much too easy to get sucked in by ego and triviality.

So I am most grateful today for everything in the world that forgets me and renders my efforts irrelevant: the thumps and starlings, the worlds imagined by others, the words that are the same no matter who speaks them, and the light quaking on the trees that is the same no matter who sees it.