Mastery Comes in Many Forms
Mary Davis makes quite the Bay Weekly cover girl.
In one way, you may find her appearance surprising. Yet she’s just Bay Weekly’s kind of story.
We’re inspired by people who have figured out what matters to them. Swan calling or oyster gardening, community organizing or organic farming, bee keeping or ballroom dancing, body building or poetry proselytizing, opening a new restaurant or keeping up a family gallery, somebody is sure to do it.
As curiosity is the force that drives journalism, we want to know who and why.
Diversity is a virtue we admire in human endeavor as much as we do in animal specialization, where it gives us a world big enough to hold giraffes, Luna moths and cow-nosed rays (just put under state protection by the General Assembly). Obviously, specialization may verge into the odd, at least by some reckonings. But who’s to judge?
“There’s no accounting for taste,” my grandmother taught me. “That’s what the lady said when she kissed the cow.”
Cows may not be your kissing partners, but somebody loves them. Grace Cavalieri for one, who put them to work in a poem you’ll read in Giving Poetry a Voice, which we run this week in honor of National Poetry Month.
Don’t Undersell Yourself
Consider the brown cow
Eating green grass
Giving white milk
Typically, we channel our curiosity to the Annapolis Capital Region of Chesapeake Country, broadly Anne Arundel and Calvert counties between the Bay and the Patuxent River. That’s where Bay Weekly is distributed and where most of our advertisers do business. Much as we love the rest — and tempted as I am to extend my curiosity to the new white rhino, Jaharo, who’s just moved into the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore — we’d be spreading ourselves too thin to try to cover much more.
Theme as well as geography keeps us focused. We’re a quality-of-life paper, focused on culture, lore, good times and our relationship to the Chesapeake, the great Bay that gives our region its identity and obligations. Put all that in a word, and you have sustainability: using all the resources we inherit in the best way we can for today and a long tomorrow.
Sustain can be a demanding verb; making it into the noun sustainability takes dedication. People like Davis and Cavalieri show that dedication. It wouldn’t be going to far to say that Davis embodies it.
We’re awed by the lengths to which inspiration drives people. Week by week, we see the truth of the 10,000-hour rule described by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers: Mastery takes about that much “deliberate practice.”
Put it into your body, as Davis is doing, and you’ve got a masterpiece worth looking it.
Sandra Olivetti Martin
Editor and publisher
email [email protected], www.sandraolivettimartin.com