It’s been a wild spring. One day you strip down to a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops and wander down the sidewalks in a daze of heat-inspired delight; the next, you’re zipping the flannel lining back in your jacket and crouching through the freezing rain on your dash from the car to work. It’s a little bewildering sometimes, these abrupt changes, and they can wreak havoc on your mood if you let them. But if you go with it—if you see the mutability of the weather as a way to practice equanimity in the face of change—you start to feel a little thrill of anticipation: What next? you hum to yourself. What next?

One of the constants in my life these past few years has been my study of the ancient art of Ikebana, a form of Japanese flower arranging. In traditional Ikebana compositions, you pay as much attention to the empty space as to the surrounding lines; it’s all about a “conversation with the flowers” as my teacher, Charles, puts it. In this art so allied with the seasons, you must train yourself to a high degree of receptivity to whatever materials present themselves, whether they be delicate flowering cherry branches, or the rough whiptails of Scottish broom. Just yesterday, we worked with the branches of the camellia bush, with its shiny heart-shaped leaves, and variegated tulips fresh from the fields of the Skagit River plain. As I created a simple, slanting composition that highlighted the unopened buds, Charles stood behind me, with his hand to his chin, in his classic posture of contemplation. I thought the arrangement was done—I was pleased with the way the blush-colored tulips echoed the incipient red of the camellia blossom—but Charles murmured, “What would happen if you clipped just one leaf off your main branch, like so.” I took the leaf he pointed out, snipped, and with that small alteration my Ikebana came alive: space opened up and the arrangement became not so much about a pleasing symmetry and closure, but a true conversation, with its meandering byways, its give-and-take, an openness to whatever might arise in the next moment, and the next, and the next.

I like to think of the Bellingham Review as just such a conversation, a literary Ikebana, a “world of encounters,” as Teshigahara Sofu, one of the founders of modern-day Ikebana, puts it. And each of the pieces in this remarkable edition of the Review has that same quality of attention to the smallest detail, a pruning away of all that is unnecessary, all that might be mere ornament in the way of a greater exchange. In these pages, you may notice that many of our writers have found a locus for this conversation rooted in the body, for where else but the body do the deepest truths reside? Where else are we so keenly aware of the changes that hurtle us through the world? These writers instinctively turn to the body as a way to engage with those changes, and they do so with care, precision, and what I can only characterize as compassion for how we succeed in weathering those transformations, how we fail, and all the beautiful variations in between.

And you, dear reader: your presence is the flint that sparks this conversation again and again. May you find in these pages at least a few encounters that change you, that perhaps will sustain you a little while in all the mutable seasons to come.