Rigid Swimmer

Announcements / On what I want to see

Hello, fellow flaneurs! Peace be with you.

What follows is my final post on Substack. In the spirit of what I believe is truer to how we might best conduct ourselves online and certainly nearer to my values, I am moving things to my own website at davidmetta.xyz. It’s been a pleasure to host my writing here, but in the long term I want to own my production in an environment I can better control.

Thank you to those who have joined me on my journey thus far. This winter I’ve been busy in ways that throttled the output I had during summer-into-fall. Choice reading rekindled a dormant interest in fossil fauna that soon zeroed in on marine reptiles, ichthyosaurs, and amid all the poetry I was inspired to attempt a longer narrative work, the sort I took to before having an online presence ever entered my mind. The passion project that became “Sundance” gripped me for months, and after simultaneous adventures in crypto’s digital art world led me to participate, ichthyosaurs didn’t quit my head across media either (more examples below). I leaned hard into these dives and away from other material, and regrettably I felt myself in a little too deep, too scattered to report back. Since, I’ve emerged from this bout of soul-searching, and I can safely say I had fun. Now, I want to return to fundamentals and channel the best of what I’ve learned.

My objective is to make, dive deep, and have fun doing it, hopefully growing in the process, and I hope to bring you more good things going forward. Stories, poems, essays—who knows but the muse that strikes?

Marine reptiles haven’t left me, hardly, but now I turn my eyes to the world, and I know a little better what I want to see.

In addition to writings, current subscribers have been ported over to the new website as well. You’re welcome to sign in and check it out, but there’s no need to subscribe again.

Future emails will come from @davidmetta.xyz; be sure to check your spam folder, just in case!

And last, may I gift you a poem for the occasion, on what exciting things lie ahead.

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Rigid Swimmer

Soaring
I’ve had twenty-something months to dwell on what that means
To me
And my approximation of it comes both inverse and in parallel

Like the squid-hunting ichthyosaurs, Jurassic dolphins
I am a deep diver
And delving the dark unlighted in search of life
Is a flying high

What Tom says is true
This decade can rhyme with that uproar of a century past
Start with a descent
And soar back to surface with bounties, deserved gasps of air

Ichthyosaurs, surface-dwelling once, dove to adjust and thrive
Avoid predators
And find forms of sustenance away from the messy feed
Of the public eye

What transpires
Underneath is the product of covert ecosystems, new niches
And I am here
To participate in these self-selecting patches of fertile deep

This becomes the creative mission of The Metta Verse
From curiosity
With love for the minds and hearts hard at work
In discovery’s dark

To new inquiries
To brave adventures of the self-directed, nourishing sort
To production
Of tomes and tales unfathomed and full with honest art

I present as illustration an ichthyosaurid
Acamptonectes
A “rigid swimmer” in that I know what I want to see
I want; to sea

I wish the best
To all experimenting in these their chosen depths
Curious how
Two endeavors might not align, by design, and good

The Soaring Twenties will not select nor distinguish by creed
Merely mark the times
We discover ourselves in the onward trend; the dive is made for us
And so we make the dive

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Godspeed, and thanks again for your support.