Introducing Monday Mercies!

Exercises in brevity to keep us looking up...

Night reveals starlight — Luke Leisman

watch like wolves — Luis Alberto Urrea

Dear Readers,

Happy Monday! A couple of months ago I encountered an obscure writing form called “Three Word Mercies.” Developed by Ed Chaćon-Lontin during a debilitating illness that made him too weak to write even short poems, mercies are three word phrases — blurts, muses, impressions — that give a sense of uplift, of redemption. Three words that take us from one emotional place to another, that move us, perhaps, one step higher. Here’s an example, from author Luis Alberto Urrea, who taught me the form:

snow then flowers

And one of my own:

shadows reveal light

Most of the material I post is long form prose - wordy, drafty - a commitment. So I thought I’d also share some of the experiments I’ve been working on in extreme brevity. One of my goals with Galaxy Glasses is to reflect little bits of the light I see in the universe: to provide a little lift by looking up at the cosmos. So my hope is that these small droplets of text might be a little light in your week, like a single photon, detected.

Mondays are often a weekly low point - times when we’re inundated with new tasks to complete and new burdens to carry. So my idea is to send a very short post of 1-3 mercies each Monday. We’ll see how it works. Not that three words always do a lot. But sometimes maybe they’ll be worth pondering as little reminders of the vastness of the universe.

A couple other comments on three word mercies:

First, if you’d rather not have yet another email in your inbox, well, at least these are short, easily deleted. But you also can unsubscribe from just the Monday Mercies section of the substack and stay subscribed to Galaxy Glasses by going to your setting page (here are some instructions).

Second, mercies are conversations: something you can do too! To quote Luis: “Try it, you’ll like it.” I’d love to highlight mercies from as many people as possible in these weekly posts - not just mine. So send me your own mercies at lukeleisman@substack.com and I’ll include them in the email distributions.

Third, as a way of explaining my interest in this obscure, minimalist form: these phrases work both through their light and their shadows — what they say, and what they don’t. Which is part of the fun. It’s good practice for us to leave some things unsaid — to resonate in the harmonics.

I love when three words create some sort of, albeit small, shift in my vision. Like when someone says “I love you.” Or that incredibly short bible verse “Remember Lot’s wife.”

And my experience is that tiny shifts can add up. Part of the basis of the mathematics of calculus is the concept of an integral. The idea of an integral is that if I want to measure, say, how far I went along some complicated path, I break that path into many many (infinite) tiny steps, and then add them all together. Each step is what we call “infinitesimally small” – so small you can’t even see it, but the collective sum of all these infinitesimal pieces is the length of your path. Integrals are powerful, but often difficult – just ask my freshman students.

When I think about the calculus of my life, I’m still trying to work out the way the many infinitesimal pieces fit together. But I think they are interesting, worth noting, worth teasing out. My thinking is: Mercies create progress.

Luis, in introducing me to three word mercies, wrote the following: “Some of these feel like poems, some feel like blurts. Some feel like wannabe Zen koans. Some are notes to myself, or to the universe. They make patterns. Sometimes they seem to converse. They are all Understory. They are ridiculous. They are embarrassing… They are sacred. They are silly. They make big things grow… so they’re seeds casually fallen from the pelt of some shaggy beast ambling through a meadow. They’re just waiting for rain. There’s no way to hide. Three words are a spotlight.”