#Thanksfortyping In the Fifth Century

With the appearance of the hashtag ThanksForTyping on Twitter in 2017, the academic community began new conversations about the ways in which women’s contributions to the research and publications of their male family members have gone unacknowledged. Most of this activity has focused on academic work produced in the twentieth century, where there is a real pattern of male authors thanking their wives or female research assistants for typing their manuscripts. #ThanksForTyping has come to represent the ways in which activity described as 'typing' may in fact have encompassed more substantial editorial, authorial and research work, for which the male author received all of the credit. The movement has also sparked conversations about the extent to which academic productivity is supported by unacknowledged labour in the present day, not just in the past.

In 2021, a Thanks for Typing essay collection came out, which aims to shed light on--in the words of its blurb--'the wives, daughters, mothers, companions and female assistants who laboured in the shadows of famous men.' The earliest woman discussed is Monica, the mother of a fourth century North African bishop, Augustine; the latest are from the twentieth century, including women such as Eva Larkin (whose husband was the poet Phillip Larkin) and Edith Tolkien (whose husband's name you can probably guess).

 

You're welcome.

I thought of #ThanksforTyping when I came across the following passage in a set of letters I am currently reading for research. The author of the letters was a high-status Roman bureaucrat, Sidonius Apollinaris (c. 430 – 481/490 AD), who was born in Lyon and later became bishop of the city of Clermont.

The letters are fantastic reading for a late antique historian, not least because Sidonius lived through, and wrote about, a period of immense change, in which the governing structure of the Roman Empire permanently withdrew from what had been its western half, and was replaced by successor kingdoms ruled by barbarian groups, most of which had been part of the Roman world for decades as part of the Roman military. In letters, in particular, we can see men like Sidonius trying to negotiate the new political and social realities brought about by the end of imperial rule, while clinging to the cultural values of the imperial past.

For Sidonius, one of these values was the role of a wife in her husband's literary endeavours. As he writes to his friend Hesperius, who was about to get married:

...you must read constantly and without carelessness, and your thirst for reading must be without limit. You must not allow the thought that you will soon be happily married to turn you from this determination, ever remembering that in the old times of Marcia and Hortensius, Terentia and Tullius, Calpurnia and Pliny, Pudentilla and Apuleius, Rusticiana and Symmachus, the wives held candles and candlesticks for their husbands whilst they read or composed. And by all means, if you lament that in addition to your oratorical skill your poetical capacity and the keen edge of your tongue, which has been sharpened on the whetstone of industrious study, are blunted by the society of ladies, remember that Corinna often helped her Naso to complete a verse, and so it was with Lesbia and Catullus, Caesennia and Gaetulicus, Argentaria and Lucan, Cynthia and Propertius, Delia and Tibullus. So it is clear as daylight that literary workers find in marriage an opportunity for study and idlers an excuse for shirking it. To work, then, and do not let the cultivation of literature lose its value in your eyes because of the multitude of the ignorant; for it is a law of nature that in all the arts the splendour of attainment rises in value as it becomes rarer. (Letters, II.10, Sidonius, Poems. Letters: Books 1-2 trans. W. B. Anderson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 467-9)

I'm both frustrated and delighted to be encountering this passage for the first time. Frustrated because it seems to me to be a Very Big Deal and I can't believe I'd never come across it before. I'd like to think that this is a gap in my reading rather than a gap in the literature, but a quick scan of Eve McDonald's thesis on women in Sidonius' work turns up no discussion of this letter; and a search of the online research companion to Sidonius edited by Joop van Waarden, which maintains a comprehensive bibliography of publications, turns up limited results (a conference paper with an intriguing title and a forthcoming commentary among them; I should also check Emily Hemelrijk's Matrona Docta: Educated Women in the Roman Elite from Cornelia to Julia Domna and of course the new companion to Sidonius Apollinaris.)

Delighted because one of the most frequent complaints about the ancient women writers is that we know relatively few of their names--and look at all those names. Marcia, Terentia, Calpurnia, Pudentilla, Rusticiana, Lesbia, Caesennia, Argentaria, Cynthia, and Delia. Glorious! On a different note, one of the big questions that animates my work is how late antique people used the Classical literary past to cope with their violent, chaotic, and uncertain present--this passage is a wonderful illustration of that. Finally, the world of late Latin literature is often discussed and represented as exclusively masculine, so it is rare and wonderful to see a male author directly discussing the presence of women in it.

The latest among those named are Rusticiana and Symmachus (c. 345 – 402); Symmachus was one of the plutocrat senators of the fourth century, perhaps best known for his stalwart paganism in an era where more and more people were converting to Christianity; also known for his marvelous letter collection. While Sidonius is explicitly focused on examples from the glories of Classical literature, it is interesting to think of the couples he could have included had he chosen to include examples from his own day: one possibility would have been the poets Sabina and Ausonius. One can't help but wonder what Sidonius' wife Papianilla thought of the model of literary helpmeet her husband so enthusiastically extolled to Hesperius. Might she have been holding a candlestick as he wrote, reminding him of names to include?

Adding to the Odd Shelf

In her essay collection Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader Anne Fadiman writes:

It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner. - Anne Fadiman, 'My Odd Shelf'

I love the concept of the Odd Shelf, and have been known, when I visit other people's homes, to wander around their libraries trying to see if I can spot one.

My Odd Shelf consists of anthologies. From The Best Science Fiction Stories (a very seventies collection); to The Wild is Always There, an astonishingly beautiful collection of writings about Canada; to Tellers of Tales, W. Somerset Maugham's 1939 attempt to define what makes a good short story via idiosyncratically selected examples; to A Stash of One's Own, a book of essays about yarn collecting by knitters, anthologies appear in almost every section of my carefully organised bookshelf. (In another delightful essay, 'Marrying Libraries', Fadiman describes her and her husband's approach to organising books. Like her, I am a 'lumper', wanting to keep similar books together so I can find them more easily. My lumping occurs by subject rather than type of book, so A Stash of One's Own and The Best Science Fiction are several shelves away from one another.) 

My collection of anthologies introduces me to writers and writing that are new to me. I'm fascinated by the role that a good editor plays in curating an anthology, selecting and arranging poems or essays or stories around a central theme so that together they say something that a collection of work by one author could never say on its own.

On one of my latest trips to Lincoln Central Library, I was delighted to discover the anthology Queer: LGTBQ Writing from Ancient Times to the Present, edited by the Irish literary translator Frank Wynne.  

I love the design of this book.

When I brought it home, I discovered something odd. Let me share the first page of the table of contents with you:

Table of Contents of Queer, edited by Frank Wynne

The excerpts are organized by the approximate date of birth of the writer. In his introduction, Wynne explains that he wanted this to be an "own voices" anthology, so it focuses on the inclusion of writing about queer experiences written by queer people themselves. 

Have you spotted it? We go from Catullus (c. 84-c. 54 BCE) to Shakespeare (1564-1616 CE). This leaves a gap of over fifteen hundred years which is explained as follows:

The history of queer literature is filled with gaps, with silences. While the poems of Sappho were celebrated in her lifetime, while the great Arab poet Abu Nawas could openly write poems about same-sex desire, for much of recorded history, queer voices have been smothered and suppressed. Many of those who dared write did so in private. (pp. xii-xiii)

As you can see from the table of contents, poems by Abu Nawas (c. 756-c. 814 CE) aren't included in the anthology, leaving readers with the impression that the period from c. 50 BCE to the time of William Shakespeare was a dead zone for queer writing and experience worldwide. 

Was it, though? In a wonderful talk for the American Historical Association, "Premodern Pedagogies: Queer Medieval Materiality," (a recording is here), historian Hilary Rhodes discussed some of the difficulties of researching and teaching premodern queer histories. Dr Rhodes spoke about the idea of the "conspiracy of historians" that a lot of people bring to the study of queer history. The main argument of the conspiracy runs: people in the past didn't share our contemporary understanding of sexuality and didn't see themselves as queer, therefore we modern folk shouldn't say they were queer. In other words, historians' focus on understanding gender and sexuality in its historical context erases queer experience by claiming it didn't exist. 

Like any criticism of the way historians do their work, this one contains two truths and a lie. It is undeniable that historians have ignored, silenced, or even just backed away slowly from non-normative sexualities and genders in our texts. A second truth is that language and meaning are complicated things: the line between 'a medieval person might not have thought of herself as bisexual' and 'there were no bisexual people in the Middle Ages' is easy to elide, especially when a historian isn't sensitive to how a marginalized reader might react.

Here is the conspiracy's lie: premodern people did define, describe, and portray sexuality and gender in ways which were culturally and historically specific. This makes it challenging to determine whether premodern authors "qualify" (Wynne's word) as queer, given that the way an author from this time period would have defined their identity is sometimes hidden from history. And yet, if we take the writing themselves as evidence--in the sense that there was a whole chain of people, from the initial premodern author down to the chain of people who bothered to copy a text down the centuries, who must have cared for us to even have the text in the first place--perhaps we might start to see our way to a sort of answer, where we can both be sensitive to the enormous cultural gap between the modern and premodern, acknowledge the silences of history, and recognise that queer people have existed everywhere, always.

It seems to me that the gap in Wynne's collection inadvertently reinforces the idea that the period between 50 BCE and 1550 CE contained no writers or writing that can be recognized as queer. In effect, this serves to reinforce the "conspiracy of historians" by presenting these centuries as a time without queer voices. 

I want to stress my non-expert status here, refer you historians who know more than I do, and share recommendations for texts that you might enjoy reading to learn more about premodern approaches to gender and sexuality. Here are three to start out with.

1. The poetry of Shmuel haNagid (and other writers from Al-Andalus)

As an undergraduate student, I took a brilliant course on "Living Together: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Iberia". Covering beginning of Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) in the eighth century to the fall of the kingdom of Granada in the fifteenth, this class contained some of my favourite reading of my entire university career, especially the poetry of Shmuel Ben Yosef HaLevi HaNagid (993-1056 CE) as translated by Peter Cole. We also read Cola Franzen's Poems of Arab Andalusia.

 

Same-sex desire is a theme of many of these poems and any of them would have made wonderful candidates for inclusion in the anthology. The third of HaNagid's  three love poems, here, particularly stands out.

 

And for more medieval homoeroticism in verse, see here. 

2. Der Gürtel (the Belt) by Dietrich of the Glezze/Gletze (13th century)

I learned about this story from a twitter thread by historian Eric Wade, who cites the anthology of translations Erotic Tales of Medieval Germany ed by Albrecht Classen. Read the full thread for an amazingly bonkers tale of medieval gender and sexuality.

 

3. Le Roman de Silence by Heldris de Cornuälle (13th century)

I learned about this from the medievalist blog Jeanne de Mountbaston, written by Dr Lucy Allen. In her post 'A "Queer Medieval" Reading List", Dr Allen recommends her favourite primary and secondary literature for teaching about medieval gender and sexuality. Le Roman de Silence is one of several texts of her list that seem like they could have been added to Wynne's list.

 

Finally...

Will I add Queer to my Odd Shelf? At this point, halfway through reading it, I'm not sure. On the one hand, the anthology has introduced me to many authors and works that are totally new to me; I am grateful for this and excited to read more.

 

On the other, the false advertising of the subtitle 'from ancient times to yesterday' bugs me rather a lot. Fifteen hundred years is an enormous gap. On the other hand, the book reaches the twentieth century on page 42 (out of 601) so this may simply reflect the difficulties of applying the selection criteria--by a queer writer about queerness--to any pre-twentieth century writing, not just writing from the Middle Ages. Perhaps Queer has a place on my Odd Shelf after all.

On Joining Twitter, Part 2: Academic Twitter

I continue to consider creating a twitter profile but have not yet made a decision. The popularity of Twitter within academia means that a lot of people have written about how and why they do (or don't) participate. There are now whole books on the subject, including Mark Carrigan's Social Media for Academics and Jojo Scobie's Twitter for Academics (an outgrowth of her blogging project, The Online Academic, which includes a helpful guide to Twitter jargon). There are even businesses which help academics engage in online communication, such as Jennifer van Alstyne's The Academic Designer, which blends free content with paid training and consultation. 

Here are some of the reflections I have found helpful and thought-provoking.

Reasons to use Twitter	Reasons not to use Twitter
Can share research and create publicly engaged scholarship (A risk management strategy can be helpful for researchers who work on tricky topics)	Can get caught up in Twitter’s culture of criticism and in dealing with trolls   Can simply be irritating
Can join and contribute to multiple or overlapping communities  (this reflection was helpful)	Can be difficult to discuss controversial issues, especially early in one’s career
Can get more citations of a scholarly paper (though there are some interesting caveats)	Can do without it as a researcher
Can learn about publications, research, or events	Can have negative effects on learning by taking time away from other forms of reading and writing
Can network and interact with others in the field (there are many examples; here's one I liked)	Can be used by employers in their screening processes; demonstration of social media reach and engagement needs to be carefully handled

On Joining Twitter, Part 1: Reasons

I have a book needing final edits and major proofreading, an academic article to restructure for an editor who's interested in it, two conference papers to research and write for the summer conference season, neglected (more accurately, abandoned) duties as a book reviews editor for a local history journal, and my first ever paid-magazine writing to complete for a loose late summer deadline.

 

So, naturally, I am panic-procrastinating absolutely all of it. Ugh.

I am very sympathetic to students who procrastinate, in part because I feel that a lot of them are doing it for the exact same reasons I do: a desire to Do The Thing to an exceptionally high standard and a deep-seated fear that achieving that standard is impossible. And as the window for achieving that standard becomes smaller and smaller, panic and paralysis grow greater and greater...

Which explains why I have been finding distractions aplenty. Some of those are good--I've been doing a lot of reading, and tried a lot of new recipes. Some of them make me feel awful afterwards--I've been spending a lot of time reading political and medieval history Twitter feeds as a distraction, and have been thinking seriously about creating my own. In this series of posts, I want to evaluate the pros and cons of joining social media for professional purposes, in order to make a decision about it and hopefully recover some of the time I currently spend thinking about it.

 

"Why" by Ksayer1 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

At this moment in my career, there are three main reasons why being more active and visible online is particularly attractive: self-promotion, networking, and public writing. Let's take each in turn. 

 

1. To Hype My Writing

Not all research is equally visible, and the work of those outside of traditional academic career structures is often particularly hard to find. Credentialed scholars with publications and projects in progress but no permanent research/teaching position are often called 'independent' or 'alt-ac' scholars in writing about academia. Those of us who are pursuing part-time or non-permanent academic work might also be called 'precarious' or 'contingent' scholars. Because of our position within academia, information about our work tends to be very dispersed. While PhD students and early career academics will have a university page that lists their current and developing projects, information about an independent scholar's work might be scattered across LinkedIn, Academic.edu, Humanities Commons, their employer's webpage, Google scholar records of their publications, and more.

 

As someone who has a number of projects nearing completion, readers are on my mind. What if I put all this writing out into the world and nobody reads it?  An article I read recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education recommends creating an author platform. Professor Devoney Looser acknowledges academic discomfort with marketing at the very beginning of her article:

I realize I’ve already lost some academic readers by using the word “sell.” Many of us went into higher education to avoid selling ourselves, our souls, or some widget. We were going to be about the love of ideas, not filthy lucre. That also meant being above the business of plugging our own research findings. Perhaps we mistakenly thought our ideas would sink or swim on their own merits, or maybe we imagined that selling books would be our publisher’s problem.

I share some of this discomfort about self-promotion: especially as a female independent scholar, putting myself out there can feel uniquely fraught with questions about whether my work is 'good enough' given the limits on my time, attention, and research resources that come from fitting academic writing around my job and other responsibilities.

But Looser's definition of author platform is helpful for making me feel less weird about it.

Having an author platform means you are not only publicizing your next article or book, you are seeking the right readers for it. You are thinking long term to actively manage the ways you put yourself forward as an authority. You’re working to pop up in someone’s Google search for your area of expertise.

Yes, that's it! That's what I want! I want readers, and I know that as an independent scholar it might be harder for them to find me. Looser goes on to give some thoughtful and practical tips about using social media effectively, focusing on principles of connecting and amplifying not just your own work, but other people's too. An article by Dr Irina Dumitrescu (a fellow medievalist!) makes a nice complement to this: her piece, 'time to get over your discomfort with book marketing', is focused specifically on step-by-step suggestions for promoting an academic book. Looser argues that social media engagement for the purposes of building an author platform shouldn't just be ceaseless self-promotion but instead a demonstration of a willingness to join a community and participate in conversations; and Dumitrescu has sage advice on that score too:

Do your social-media promotion in the spirit of scholarly generosity, and it will be less irritating to friends and colleagues. If you make a habit of reading, sharing, reviewing, and celebrating your colleagues’ work, too, they will not mind when you shine the light on your own publications. (Of course, it’s best to start appreciating others’ books well before your own comes out.)

But will social media conversations actually lead to readers? Perhaps, says Dr Micah Allen, in a thoughtful post on whether Twitter is a useful way to get people to read a new publication. Dr Allen looked at 'conversion rates'--how likely people are to click on a link in a tweet, finding that internal engagement (for example, likes and retweets), is typically above external engagement (clicking on the link and reading the paper). In fact, as someone with a solid platform, most of his paper tweets have a conversion rate of 2-3%, which he then contextualises with a survey of his followers and concludes that paper tweets do a pretty good job of getting publications in front of interested readers.

"Spider Web" by mkreyness is licensed under CC BY 2.0

2. To Build a Network

When I was an MPhil and PhD student, I had the opportunity to participate in a series of conferences called 'Texts and Identities'. The project ran for over a decade, travelling between the universities of Vienna, Utrecht, Paris, Cambridge, and Leeds for an annual conference. Getting to meet European scholars of my generation and hear their work was one of the best experiences of my doctorate. Texts and Identities came to an end when the senior scholars who founded it retired, but in many ways it formed one of the foundations for what I see as my scholarly network--people whose work I admire and follow, trusted acquaintances whose advice and suggestions and I might ask for and reciprocate.

One of the worst parts of no longer being a doctoral student (as well as being a contingent scholar) is that the fact these networks are no longer an annual part of my life. While I might volunteer papers for sponsored sessions, and attend conference talks I'm interested in, there's something to be said for something a little more systematic. Linus Tan's essay on networking, in which he discusses how he makes networking work as an introvert by treating it as a research project, spoke to me both as a strategy for making networking a pleasant experience:

When I find myself wanting to know more [about the person from reading their ResearchGate profile, social media, etc] that signals to me a genuine interest in that person. But if I start thinking of possible projects, I stop. Why? Because I think networking needs to always be about the person first, not the opportunity.

In other words, I feel disconnected from communities--medieval studies in general, Late Antiquity, late Latin literature--that I used to feel quite connected to; and simultaneously, I have the potential to belong to new and different communities (published book authors, independent/alt-ac/contingent scholars, librarians and archivists), than I did when I was PhD student. Connecting with people on social media would be a way to give back to and become involved in both my old and new communities as well as potentially put my work in front of members of those communities who might be interested in it.

3. To Do Public Writing

I want to write for general audiences. I am inspired by writing that has appeared in places like Tropics of Meta, Public Books, Contingent Magazine, Public Domain Review, and Lady Science. At the same time, public writing is not something that was talked about--at all--at any point of my education, and I've found this piece by Dr Irina Dumitrescu 'how to cope with a fear of public writing' really helpful for thinking about the kinds of writing I'm most interested in doing as well as ways to get around common fear-based roadblocks.

 

Even if the heyday of blogging is over, blogs are still one of the principle forms through which academics share their work with scholarly and public audiences. There are many different types of academic blogs; my favourites focus on advice, thinking in public, and sharing experiences. Restarting this blog was intended as a way to get ready for producing publishable work by ensuring that I practice writing regularly. I wanted to combat my panic-procrastination of all forms of academic writing by giving myself a low-stakes, low-pressure opportunity to produce regular writing, regardless of what else was going on in my life. I deliberately didn't specify whether blogging had to be academic in order to avoid trapping myself in a further spiral of panic-procrastination. Plus, I'm fascinated by the personal side of history writing: what personal, social, and environmental factors shape this scholar's interest in this problem?  Like Dr Anuja Cabral, whose post on writing and fear really resonated with me, I write as a way to understand.

 

What role might social media play in this process of writing to developing my understanding? I am still thinking this through! I don't currently have this blog linked to any of my professional profile pages and I remain unsure as to whether, if I did create a Twitter profile, I would tweet about any of my posts. The next post in this series will discuss some of the reasons why.

A Triptych of Love Poems

Here's an embarrassing confession: in a country where people often sneer at the meaningless commercialism of the fourteenth of February, I love Valentine's Day. When I was in elementary school, we would always exchange little cards with everyone in our class and the teachers would decorate their classrooms. My mother delights and excels in small presents, so every Valentine's Day that I can remember, I have been given a card, a new pair of seasonally-themed socks, a box of chocolates, and sometimes a new pair of earrings or necklace.

This left me with the early impression that Valentine's Day was more about friendship and family than romantic love. The romantic aspect came to my attention in middle and high school, where participation was more geared towards couples and crushes: a few girls would carry balloons and teddy bears given to them by boyfriends, and student groups might sell flowers in the cafeteria as a fundraiser. But I kept my early impression: that romantic love is but one kind, and friendship and family and community were experiences of loving and being loved worth celebrating.

This outlook shapes the way I approach love poems: I usually find myself most drawn to the poems that speak to different types and experiences of love. Here are a few recent poems I read which aren't cookie-cutter romantic but still spoke to me as beautiful love poems.

"vintage portrait of old couple among foliage" by <def> is licensed underCC BY-NC 2.0

Seventh Sense

So you got married.

I'm happy for you.

But it's not only people--

wolves and she-wolves

join their fates,

in order

to avoid loneliness

and provide

lifelong support

to one another.

To marry like everyone does,

and produce a child,

doesn't require

great intelligence.

The question in all of this,

is how will the face that

now looks at you in the mirror

be judged tomorrow?

It is not surprising that,

from time immemorial,

people have often confused

their hot and stormy,

passing emotions'

with love,

since both can cause

the lightening to flash.

But not everyone

is capable of understanding

that in our human,

all-too-oblivious world,

love is the highest peak.

The ability to climb up

has been given to only a few happy people.

And possibly unfortunately,

of the ten thousand,

only two

manage to be successful,

on the sharp edge

of this amazing

imprisoning, stormy,

happy holiday.

This eternal holiday

of unceasing delight.

 

To get physically

but not spiritually close,

is the ultimate sadness.

That's why

there are so many

lonely people in the world--

the wingless tedium

of a single-sided coin.

 

For them no

one-off flights,

or holidays out of the blue.

Totally deprived

of a happy fate

they smile to your face

weeping bitterly in secret,

 

And at any crossroads

of life's path

you are always met

with the inexorable question--

Has your spouse become

a sensitive friend to your soul,

a friend of

your innermost desires,

one who feels 

your happiness and torment

with a seventh sense?

If not,

then all your striving

will be like trying to light a fire

on a windy day.

And it means that you end up

too far away from

the goals fate has assigned you,

too, too far...

That's just how inaccessible,

difficult,

and secret,

this multi-faceted,

willfully-choosy,

love is. 

~Muhktar Shakanov, translated in Contemporary Kazakh Literature: Poetry (National Bureau of Translations, 2019), pp. 106-108.

 

"Pacific Northwest" by Nick Kenrick is licensed underCC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Images of Salmon and You

Your absence has left me only fragments of a summer's run

on a night like this, fanning in August heat: a seaweed song.

Sweat glistens on my skin, wears me translucent, sharp as scales.

The sun wallowing its giant roe beats my eyes back red and dry.

Have you seen it above the highway ruling you like planets?

Behind you, evening is Columbian, slips dark arms

around the knot of distance that means nothing

to salmon or slim desiring. Sweet man of rivers,

the blood of fishermen and women will drive you back again,

appointed places set in motion like seasons. We are like salmon

    swimming against the mutation of current to find

our heartbroken way home again, weight of red eggs and need.

~Gloria Bird, in When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through ed. by Joy Harjo (New York, 2020), p. 221.

"Hybrid Tea Rose 'Winchester'" by Drew Avery is licensed underCC BY 2.0

The Gardener

Have I lived enough?

Have I loved enough?

Have I considered Right Action enough, have I

    come to any conclusion?

Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?

Have I endured loneliness with grace?

 

I say this, or perhaps I'm just thinking it.

    Actually, I probably think too much.

 

Then I step out into the garden

where the gardener, who is said to be a simple man

    is tending his children, the roses.

 

~Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings (New York, 2012), p. 7.