Subject: A poem for the first ordinary Tuesdays of retirement

You may find something unexpectedly useful in Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” It begins with coffee, oranges, and sunlight—but lets the old pressure of spiritual obligation enter the room. Its central question is whether living abundance should be surrendered to a remote promise, or cherished as something like heaven.

The poem never offers a tidy answer. It argues that divinity may live within changing passions, weather, loneliness, flowering forests, and remembered seasons. More provocatively, it suggests that death is “the mother of beauty”: impermanence may be what makes an ordinary morning matter rather than making it meaningless.

Would you be open to reading it one quiet morning—not as another project, but as company for the unsettled space between achievement and fulfillment?