It must have fallen in a crack, I finally figured. In one of those tight squeezes between the tomes lined up straight-backed-soldier-to-soldier on my shelves. I pulled out drawers, scanned shelf after shelf, roamed room to room, and resigned myself to knowing that some day it would turn up, tucked between the pages of a book that doesn’t have his name on the title page.

It’s a letter from the summer of 2014. July, specifically. And I knew it would have been postmarked Port Royal, the real-life Kentucky town from which the fictitious Port William was drawn. It was a letter of regret, to be sure, but one I remembered as gracious and soft-hearted a regret as one could possibly read—or write. This one was written by the hand of a gentle, gentle man, a man who carved out the time to lift his pen from his writing desk, the one from which he looked through the window upon the acres beyond and below, the tobacco fields no longer growing the timeless crop, down the hillside to the river running by.

The window, famously, was forty-paned. Wendell Berry, the gentle man who wrote the letter for which I searched, wrote indelibly of that window, considered it the focus of his seeing. And, oh, his seeing was superb. Otherworldly. Supernatural, some might say. I say, saintly.

“The window has forty / panes, forty clarities / variously wrinkled, streaked / with dried rain, smudged, / dusted,” he wrote back in 1968, in an early sequence plainly titled “Window Poems.” He described his glass-paned lens: “The frame / is a black grid / beyond which the world / flings up the wild / graph of its growth, / tree branch, river, slope of land, the river passing downward . . .”

The letter for which I searched for the better part of a day is the letter Mr. Berry once wrote to me. At last, and with deep joy, I found it, the one-page sheaf neatly dated “7/10/14,” a mere two days after the one I’d mailed to him. The gentle farmer wrote: “Dear Ms. Mahany, I’m sorry to have to say that I had to give up blurb-writing a good while ago, just for want of time to do the required reading. This is regrettable but necessary. Sincerely, Wendell Berry.”

I had asked Mr. Berry if perchance he might have the time and inclination to review my first book, Slowing Time, for possible endorsement. And, because I knew he trod not on cyber-wires and e-mail but rather relied on the mostly reliable U.S. Postal Service, I’d sent along a self-addressed, stamped envelope and awaited his reply. (For the record: There is no more onerous task in the making of a book than to have to beseech an author you hold in highest regard for a so-called blurb, a peculiarity of publishing that sounds as guttural and dyspeptic as it feels. To have had to ask it of a fellow Kentuckian [I was born there] made it not one bit less onerous.)

For reasons I can’t remember, other than to run my hand, my eyes once again across the faintest remnant of a poet, a prophet, now gone from this sweet earth, I set off the other morning in search of that letter.

Even before I finally found it (wedged not between the pages of a book, but tidily filed in a bin marked “Slowing Time”), my search was hardly fruitless. Along my way I found another note, an inscription he once wrote on the frontispiece of Sabbaths 2013, a chapbook printed on sturdy stock—with wood engravings. And still more: yet another slip of paper, again one he signed with his black-inked pen, a poem that took my breath away. A poem I hadn’t remembered but that once I read made me remember once again why poets are those we turn to to put words to the ineffable. “To My Mother,” it is titled. And it made me weep.

Poets—and Mr. Berry among the finest—wield the gift of sifting through life’s many, many tangled threads, and pulling up the finest silken ones. Holding them to the light, and capturing in pure precision—uncanny precision, the sort that catches your breathing right there and then because their vision is so beyond the ordinary.

Poets see into the liminal. Poets dwell in the liminal, the ephemeral. All those parts of life that otherwise elude us, the ones we might vaguely, vaguely sense but otherwise barely regard (akin perhaps to knowing the distant planet Pluto floats out there in the deep darkness but hardly concerning ourselves with whether it spins or wobbles until some headline someday shouted news we needed to know and suddenly it was the only object of our attention, and we wondered how we’d gone so long without noticing . . .).

Mr. Berry—a fifth-generation (if not more) farmer who tilled his field with a pair of Belgian draft horses and a plow, a farmer who reached into the seed bin, filled his palm, and scattered tiny grains across the loam, or poked a thumb hole and laid down a single seed at a time, awaited its arising, believed in its arising—more than earned his mark as “the prophetic American voice of our day.”

A poet-conservationist I’d rank with Thoreau and Frost, he possessed a soul so rooted in the earth, so fluent in the whispers of the land, the wind through cottonwoods, the pit-a-pat of rain on windowpanes, front porches, and the greenery along the riverbank, that every word he wrote (mostly in pencil, and mostly by candlelight or sunlight, without electric lights) ran taut within the grain of the agrarian world he put to the page.

Mr. Berry, like all great poets, taught us to see, and spent the last half-century-plus (62 years, to be precise) unspooling those lessons, poem after poem. It’s the seeing, as much as the plucking of words, that makes the poet a prophet, that makes the poet indispensable, imperative. Not regrettable but necessary, to upturn Mr. Berry’s own phrasing. He teaches us, in poem after poem, and in his plainspoken pastoral prose, to look into the sacred, to grasp and see the moral crux. To seize—and see—what we might just miss.

It’s not that he wanted us to see more but rather that he wanted us to see more deeply. To understand that “the small, the subtle, the quietly observed thing often reveals the most profound truth,” as the writer Brett McCracken once put it. Indeed, there is the endosperm of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” embedded in the Kentucky farmer’s poetic DNA, certainly in “Auguries’” first stanza:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

It’s a poem that ends with this:

God appears and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night,
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.

Mr. Berry, who died on August 31 at 92, left behind his wife of 69 years, two children, five grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, a 125-acre farm, and more than fifty volumes of poetry, fiction, and argument that, according to the New York Times, “championed small family farms, the environment, local foods and interdependent communities, and railed against chemicals, most technologies, agribusiness and distant government.”

At heart, the driving force behind his life’s work, be it from his old tobacco barn on the ridge overlooking the Kentucky River, his writing desk at the forty-paned window, or the many podiums from which his baritone so often boomed, was nothing short of a campaign to save this holy earth and the human spirit that, at its best, animates and bends the moral arc toward justice.

“His writing has sometimes been called radical, but he thinks of himself as a conservative, conserving what is most human in our landscapes and ourselves,” wrote journalist and artist Paul Trachtman in a 2005 Smithsonian magazine profile. “You know,” said Berry in that profile, “if you subtracted the Gospels and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence from my work, there wouldn’t be very much left.”

But, oh, there’d be a motherlode of soul. And beauty in abundance. The ineffable netted for all time.

A few Wendell Berry poems:

Window Poems Part III
(from New Collected Poems by Counterpoint Press, 2012)

The window has forty
panes, forty clarities
variously wrinkled, streaked
with dried rain, smudged,
dusted. The frame
is a black grid
beyond which the world
flings up the wild
graph of its growth,
tree branch, river,
slope of land,
the river passing
downward, the clouds blowing,
usually, from the west,
the opposite way.
The window is a form
of consciousness, pattern
of formed sense
through which to look
into the wild
that is a pattern too,
but dark and flowing,
bearing along the little
shapes of the mind
as the river bears
a sash of some blinded house.
This windy day
on one of the panes
a blown seed, caught
in cobweb, beats and beats.

Window Poems #7
(published in The Hudson Review, Summer issue, 1968)

Outside the window
is a roofed wooden tray
he fills with seeds for the birds.
They make a sort of dance
as they descend and light
and fly off at a slant
across the strictly divided
black sash. At first
they came fearfully, worried
by the man’s movements
inside the room. They watched
his eyes, and flew
when he looked. Now they expect
no harm from him
and forget he’s there.
They come into his vision,
unafraid. He keeps
a certain distance and quietness
in tribute to them.
That they ignore him
he takes in tribute to himself.
But they stay cautious
of each other, half afraid, unwilling
to be too close. They snatch
what they can carry and fly
into the trees. They flirt out
with tail or beak and waste
more sometimes than they eat.
And the man, knowing
the price of seed, wishes
they would take more care.
But they understand only
what is free, and he
can give only as they
will take. Thus they have
enlightened him. He buys
the seed, to make it free.

And here’s the one that made me weep. Please, read closely.

Poetry wasn’t the only gift Mr. Berry bequeathed. Not too long ago, there was The Wendell Berry Farming Program, a tuition-free residential undergraduate program, last rooted at Sterling College in Vermont, and perhaps the only college program with courses titled “Draft Animal Power Systems” and “Literature of the Rural Experience.”

According to a 2020 piece in Hearth & Field, an online and print magazine that bills itself as “the most trusted name in high-Christology, low-technology, practical, philosophical, money-saving, quasi-luddite, quarterly, literary journals,” the farming program was thusly described:

“Students read Virgil, Aldo Leopold, Chaucer, and contemporary pieces by Crystal Wilkinson, and then put on their muck boots and take the reins of a draft horse to cut a row in a field. They learn forestry from experts who share an appreciation for their craft and love for their place. They participate in the beef cooperative, ‘Our Home Place Meat’, and learn first-hand the challenges of raising, producing, marketing, and selling meat. They meet the kin of black tenet farmers who helped build Henry County and hear the tales, both good and bad, that have formed the ethos of the land and community. They walk the hollers and read stories in the very places they were written. They are taught to look, and to see. To enter into the richness and depth of the people, the place, the land around them.

“. . . The focus is not just on the looking: the passive, the utilitarian, the transactional —it is on seeing: knowing, relating, walking with, and entering into.”

Nowadays, it’s known as the Berry Center Farm & Forest Institute, and it’s moved to the Berry Center in New Carlisle, Kentucky. No longer an undergraduate degree program, these days it offers “affordable workshops, short-courses, and field days,” and is one of the center’s cornucopia of initiatives, from selling Our Home Place Meat (pasture-raised Kentucky beef) to peddling shelves of “the best of Kentucky letters” (of course, Mr. Berry’s among them).

My questions of the week are all Berry-esque: Do you have a Berry poem, or line, you know by heart? Is there another poet who stirs your soul in the ways that Berry might? Why do you turn to poetry when all else fails?

*the image way up top is from the back cover of Window Poems, and that’s Mr. Berry circa 1968, his boots atop his writing desk, looking out the famed forty-paned window.

Hollow is the word that’s haunting me. Filling my pores and my lungs. Catching me quick. Sneaking up from behind.

Silence is the sound that comes with hollow.

Absence.

There are no footsteps down the stairs. No creak from the floorboards above me. The neat row of shoes at the back door is, well, neat. Not a jumble.

If you walk past the room at the bend in the stairs, you can—for the first time in weeks—see the actual floor. Not the tumble of clothes that often serve as cushion—or death trap.

Once again, our old house is hollowed. Hollowed of its summer slumberers: the ones who stayed here for weeks on end, for their own places to lay their heads weren’t yet ready. So they laid their heads here. Tricked little old me into thinking we were back in the old days—only minus the packing of lunches and annual trips to the pediatrician.

For a couple weeks there, the two I bore into this world were both here, together—their otherwise homelessness overlapping. For that fine stretch of days there were occasional dinners for four, without it being Christmas or Passover. Just any old Tuesday. Sheets on beds were askew. Duffel bags and blankets and assorted apartment accoutrement were stuffed in the living room. And the fridge was emptying at astonishing rates. I was making at least once-a-day trips to the market.

I was breathing in bliss.

Now, not so much.

The hollow and the silence and the blanket of calm (much as that latter is needed) have tapped open a layer of grief, plain and simple. Oh, I know this grief is of the wimpiest sort (and transient; it will slip away soon enough), and I feel more than guilty for calling it that (certainly in the face of ones I love whose lives have been shattered in the shadow of this past year with grief of the deepest kind).

But a loss is a loss, and letting go is always, always hard. At least for me it always has been.

The thing about grief, the thing a wise someone somewhere along the line once taught me, is that grief never wholly leaves. It dissolves, yes, but the grains of it are there, settling somewhere down along the pit of our soul maybe. There must be layers and layers of it by the time you’ve clocked a few decades. (And I’ve clocked a few and then some…) I’ve got griefs that left behind grains so big I could break a toe if I bumped into them. And I’ve got ones maybe more the size of a rice grain. Or salt before it’s dissolved. There are sediments of all sizes dozing away down there.

Until they’re not.

Until something awakes them. Stirs them from their long slumbers and rattles the cages.

That’s when it hurts again. Makes you feel just a little bit dizzy. Makes you want to weep while you’re scrubbing the very few plates that constitute all you need for the two of you.

The inevitable, undeniable truth is that as each page turns, you’re closer to the end. And I just can’t shake that feeling. Though already I can hear the voices of those who tell me I’m wack. I take these things too hard, too operatically.

Maybe grief is one of the first senses to come rushing in because I live so deep in the shadow of it. I’ve not shaken the truth that this damn cancer has pushed me onto thinner ice than I’d choose. And my long weeks and months in its mightiest grip made me see with utter and absolute clarity what matters most to my heart. Plain and simple, it’s time with my boys. They’re the ones who inject joy into my every day; they’re the ones whose worries keep me awake at night (for I also cannot shake the notion that my No. 1 Job is to fix whatever I can for whatever breaks in their lives—even, especially, their hearts. And, yes, I know the folly in that. Let me know if you find the secret for decoupling the crisscrossed wiring that crisscrosses all of us).

If any role in my life is one I’d call holy, it’s being a mother. No other anything I’ve ever done more mightily yanks on more threads of me, demands the selflessness, the mercy, the turning-the-other-cheek than mothering. In so many ways it seems the crucible to the holiness I aim to crawl toward.

So once again the insides of me are shaken like a snow globe, and the odd lumps of old grief and new grief and medium-aged grief haven’t yet drifted back down to their quieter state. Plain and simple, I am not only missing my boys, but seeing clearly my place on my timeline. And I know I’m farther along than I wish I was. I love every morsel of this whole blessed life—even the hard parts. I don’t want it to end. Not yet anyway.

Having that duo here for long spells of the summer felt like something I’d thought was long out of reach. A never-again sort of wonder. Maybe the one thing I’d wish for if given any wish in the world.

For one summer I held it. And it too now dwells in my heart—a grain I won’t let go. A big fat grain of joy that was. Now down where the other grains slumber, in the accumulated residue that amounts to our one storied little life. Where we take a crack at being wholly alive. And sometimes—yes, sometimes—it hurts.

How do you find your way through the hard parts of your life, when turning the page makes you feel hollowed?

Another legend breathed her last this week when Annie Dillard, long my patron saint of paying attention, of whirling sentences into spun wonders, breathed her last. My copies of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her Pulitzer Prize-winning paean to paying attention, is so ink-spilled, it’s hard to pick just one passage to leave here. But here’s one for the ages:

“Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.

I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”

Oh, Annie, we shall spend the afternoon. We shall, we shall, we shall.

How shall you spend it?

I’ve spent the week cutting open boxes (and have done so without managing to slice a thumb or poke an eye, both of which I count among my patchwork of bodily blotches). Cutting boxes is preamble to peeking inside, seeing what the movers on the other end decided to toss in to a box marked “Misc.” and finding, oh, a dog food bowl (for someone else’s dog! since the person for whom you are unpacking does not have a dog) and a dog comb (or three) tossed in with the napkins, placemats, and, while they were at it, the tongs and spatulas and various accoutrements from the kitchen junk drawer.

The essential coffeemaker still has not surfaced. And the only boxes left are the ones marked “books” or “clothes” (there are many, many of the former, a whole wall in fact of so-marked crates, enough to hide behind—a rampart of corrugated cardboard—should the enemy decide to storm the castle). It is supreme sacrifice and occupational tribulation to do this work sans caffeine. But so it goes in the domain of motherdom.

You might say I’m chest-deep in moving season here in my teeny-tiny world. Boy 1 is moving—finally—into the wee shingled abode that will be his professorial outpost down where Hoosiers hail. And, come Sunday, Boy 2 is also headed south, parking himself in the old rectory of the only church that somehow survived the incendiary path of the Great Chicago Fire (how’s that for an address of some historic heft?).

All of this is to say that—save for the fact that our household population is being slashed by half, from the summer’s height of four, to merely the pair of us—I am in a bit of my glory. At least when it comes to the wee shingled house, with the wide front porch and friendly folks on either side. That’s the one we’ve dubbed the Hoosier House, seeing as it’s spitting distance from the golden dome that rises from the prairie in South Bend, Indiana, where the professor is sinking down his roots.

Playing house is what this is, a grownup iteration of my childhood’s deepest joy and wonderment. I’ve been playing house as far back as my brain cells carry me. I started out constructing a village for a lady bug (complete with winding lanes and gardens, and of course a church with steeple), and moved quickly on to outfitting shoe boxes with my best, best friend Martha Hackney. We made houses for our dolls—elaborate cardboard houses, the more rooms, the better; the more intricately appointed, all the better still. Whole summers we whiled away making tables, chairs, and beds (kitchen stoves and sinks, as well) from cardboard cut and folded, then we’d upholster with squares of felt, and whatever scraps I could find in my mother’s sewing basket.

My domestic height was the wee log cabin I got one Christmas; found it planted amid the woodland grove in our backyard when I was told to look out the window to see what had dropped from Santa’s sleigh. Night after night, I outfitted my one-room house in my dreams, a veritable little girl on the prairie, and by day I’d dash to my corner of the yard and stock the shelves and set the table, sweep the floor, and set a jar of weeds (aka my centerpiece) on my so-called kitchen table. I was besotted with my rough-sawn bliss.

Home has long transfixed me. The idea of it, as emphatically as the nuts and bolts of it. I am, I readily confess, a homebody of the highest order. Though apparently I’m fickle and can make myself at home even in a hotel room.

Maybe it’s a deep-down yearning to figure out my place in the world. Maybe it’s simply a severe case of myopia, and as long as the edifice in which I traipse is one I know by heart, one where at every turn I bump into a relic of the past, I feel safe in this topsy-turvy, too-often-cruel, cruel world.

I come from a curious line of domestic curators: my grandmother’s house was close to magical to me. Clocks chimed and clanged resoundingly, and from every wall of every room it seemed. A secret back staircase enchanted, and led to a suite of rooms back then they called “the maid’s quarters.” (Young girls looking to escape the Kentucky hills crossed the Ohio to find their way in Cincinnati—Queen City, the City of Seven Hills.) And then there was my interior-decorator uncle whose jewel box of a historic home in Louisville’s Old Town might have been mistaken for a museum of finery gathered round the globe. He’s the uncle we knew to be a bachelor, the one who trekked to India and Thailand, to London, Paris, and Rome, and came home with wild tales and treasure troves, as chief buyer for the grande-dame department store in the town so named for the tragic king, Louis Seize.

My own mother, being of minimalist disposition, dispensed with all the frippery and froufrou. She was meat-and-potatoes practical, and had no need for fleur-de-lis, brocade, or dangling-crystal chandelier. (God’s glory for her was in the woods or prairie, where she romped amid the tallgrass and scanned the sky for birds.) Her decidedly austere persuasions did not deter me; more likely, they made me all the more intent on making home a pinpoint on the map that soothed the deepest, driest parts of me.

Home to me is the one place where we seed our dreams, root our jangled souls, and somehow miraculously find the stuff to face another day.

And if I can make that happen for the pair I’ve borne and brought into this world, well, then I’ll declare a day unearthing the contents of a cardboard box a day more than worth all the double-pumping of my heart, the frazzles of my hair, and the nicks and cuts now emblazoned up and down my shins, my arms, my hands.

Home, it seems, is where I’ve been lost and found.

What does home mean to you? What do you find there? And how did you get there?

I cannot let this somber, somber day pass without bending my knees, and dropping to the holy ground, pouring out my heart in holy prayer. A soul I love—will always love—lost her papa on this day, when the North Tower of the mighty pair collapsed. For her, for every someone who’s lived the last quarter century with a collapsed place in their heart, I hold you tight this day, and pray that love—that mighty, ineffable force—cocoons you today and every day you bear the grief of inexplicable loss. And for the souls of the 2,977 who perished in Lower Manhattan, Shanksville, and Arlington, Virginia, might we lift up this dark, dark day by bringing any shard of light to where shadow falls among us.

Were I a lyricist, I might break into song. Were I a bard, I’d pen a poem. Alas, alas, I am nothing but a piker who strings alphabet bits into words, and glides them onto the invisible thread that makes a sentence a sentence. And so, herewith, in words and only words, we gather today to sing the praises of the only fruit I know that fills my mouth with so much delectability I wish I needn’t swallow.

How’s that for introduction?!?

It’s figgy season in the produce aisle, when those zaftig fruits, their skin the color of a nasty bruise, their flesh as tender pink-near-red as you might find outside the pages of a naughty slick, arise from crates and all but cry: Pluck me! Pluck me!

And so I do. Morning after morning as summer lists toward autumn, as September arises, leaving hot August in the dust, I imbibe. One sweet orb at a time. The slower the better, surely.

Ficus carica (carica, the name Carl Linnaeus plucked when naming names, is derived from Caria, the ancient region in Asia Minor—now somewhere in Turkey—where the sumptuous fruit prized by Romans blossomed on the bough), aka the fig you find today nestled among the apple and banana bins, is among the select handful of nourishments about which I might fantasize greedily and all year long.

Let us begin our encomium with this delicious wonderment: Did you know the fig is not a single simple fruit; it is a syconium—a unique botanical structure consisting of “a fleshy, hollow stem or receptacle with hundreds of tiny unisexual flowers blooming inside the cavity rather than facing outward.” Yes, hundreds, maybe even a thousand, teeny sand-like seeds (the most melt-in-your-mouth seeds you ever seized) comprise the fleshy fruit. And imagine how they’ll taste now that you know each one is a unisexual flower?!?!

If botany’s not your thing, and that morsel alone does not float your figgy boat, how ‘bout this, from more literary corners: At rapid clip, we might flip through the pages of literary history and find the fig cannot be kept away. In no historical order, a sweep through literature finds the fig popping up in the imaginations—and on the pages—of Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, D.H. Lawrence, Marcus Aurelius, Pliny the Elder, and the scribes of Holy Scripture, from the Hebrew Bible clear through the Book of Revelation.

If we turn back far enough, we find the fig the prescribed start-of-school-year fruit, as Plato & Co. gobbled them voraciously and dubbed them “the food of philosophers.” (Though they would have said so in ancient Latin, a language I do not know.) Apparently, those early thinkers favored figs for fueling deep philosophical discourse, and filled their plates and bellies thusly. If only I had known when I packed my own boys’ brown-bag lunches.

Leaping centuries forward, I find myself titillated by David Herbert Lawrence, ol’ D.H. himself, who in his famous poem “Figs” (from the collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers, published in 1923) tickles our appetites when he opines that “every fruit has its secrets,” and pronounces the fig, in particular, “a very secretive fruit,” adding “you feel at once it is symbolic.” He likens its “rosy, moist, honeyed” flesh to a “ripe womb,” with its “flowering all inward.”

It’s been written that not only was D.H. flirting with the sexual, but too he was drifting into the theological. Scholars of both literary and theological ilk argue that he wants us to read a spiritual imperative into the ripening of the fig’s hidden fruit. That is, as with the fig, so too the human soul must do its deepening in the inner sanctum, the womb ever within. Its secrets, Lawrence insists, are to be kept entirely hidden—until it’s broken open. Sacredness, he argues, must be shielded from the intellectual, analytical, modern world. The divine inwardness, that which we so arduously seek, is the fig’s sacred wisdom, ripe and bursting to impart. Is that not a hefty volume to read into a fruit less voluminous than your curled-up fist?

Perhaps the most famous modern literary star turn for the fig is that found in the pages of Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, where she uses the fig tree analogy as a metaphor for paralysis of choice.

“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose…”

Alas, Plath’s protagonist, Esther, sits starving beneath the tree, as above her each green fig (each one representing a life role: poet, writer, editor, traveler, wife) first ripens, then blackens, wrinkles, and soon rots. It’s the truth that paralyzing indecision is a decision—as risky as making the wrong choice. Or, as one writer (who goes by the internet moniker hansnoopy) has argued: “i don’t think it’s just about choice. i think it’s about doubt. that quiet, paralyzing kind that sinks into your bones. the kind that makes everything feel too big, too fragile, too final.” hansnoopy goes on to write: “that is the ache underneath the fig tree. it’s not about which life you want more. it’s the grief of knowing you can’t live them all. the cruel way time slips past while you’re stuck between possibilities.” Might that not be worth a ponder, plopped beneath the nearest arbor—fig or otherwise?

And lest we omit the genesis of it all, we cannot overlook what’s written to have happened in the beginning, when we find the plump orb cast in the role of Original Sin.

You know the story: Adam and Eve are lolling about in the paradisical Garden of Eden, when ol’ Eve bites into a sweetness (aka the Forbidden Fruit) that brings about the Fall. Long held to be an apple, a whole new school of fruit play has arisen over the years, and a good number of Hebrew and ancient Christian scholars have more or less reverse-engineered the deal to deduce that it was a FIG that befell the Fall.

Here’s how their thinking goes, pinning it all on one key line: when Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit, and their eyes were opened, “and they knew that they were naked . . . . they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons,” the thinkers posit that if the leaves of fig were within easy reach of the sewing basket, well then mightn’t that have been the very fruit into which Eve sank her sorry lips? And never mind the apple, maligned for all these years.

That debate we’ll leave to the historians and forensic theologians, while I for one partake of more than my fine figgy fill.

Before I go, though, one last bit: Leave it to the Italians to dictate terms for fig consumption. They tell us there are two ways to down a fig—one vulgar, the other “proper.” Put your lips to its skin, bite out the flesh, and gulp it down in one swift swallow. That, they say, is vulgar. Or, slice it quarterly into crescent moons, and imbibe with tines of fork. That, the prissy ones insist, is the only proper route. I myself am ambifigorous; I eat my fig all ways.

Whilst you stuff your mouth (among the options: Black Mission, Brown Turkey, or the green Calimyrna) any which way you choose, I invite you to partake of figgy poetry. Beginning here, with the great Naomi Shihab Nye, whose father, a refugee, hailed from the holy land of Palestine, and whose everlasting quest was to find again a fig tree.

MY FATHER AND THE FIG TREE

For other fruits, my father was indifferent.
He’d point at the cherry trees and say,
“See those? I wish they were figs.”
In the evening he sat by my beds
weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.
They always involved a figtree.
Even when it didn’t fit, he’d stick it in.
Once Joha was walking down the road
and he saw a fig tree.
Or, he tied his camel to a fig tree and went to sleep.
Or, later when they caught and arrested him,
his pockets were full of figs.

At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged.
“That’s not what I’m talking about! he said,
“I’m talking about a fig straight from the earth –
gift of Allah! — on a branch so heavy
it touches the ground.
I’m talking about picking the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig
in the world and putting it in my mouth.”
(Here he’d stop and close his eyes.)

Years passed, we lived in many houses,
none had figtrees.
We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.
“Plant one!” my mother said.
but my father never did.
He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,
let the okra get too big.
“What a dreamer he is. Look how many
things he starts and doesn’t finish.”

The last time he moved, I got a phone call,
My father, in Arabic, chanting a song
I’d never heard. “What’s that?”
He took me out back to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig in the world.
“It’s a figtree song!” he said,
plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.

This poem is from 19 Varieties of Gazelle, by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Why you might ask have I dallied here on such a singular subject as the sublime fig? Well, if a weekly writerly habit is meant to keep one’s muscles well-oiled, and one’s synapses firing ably, then practice practice practice is the mantra and the key. And, over the many years, I’ve always found most delicious those deep delvings into the arcane: an essay on the semi-colon, among the most memorable (julia keller, chicago tribune); an ode to socks (pablo neruda); the death of a pig (e.b. white). And so, biting into a fig the other morn, I mused to myself: this thing deserves an ode. Or at least a consideration of some length. And now you have it: the figgy ode.

If you were to pluck but a single morsel of this season, with intent to sing its praises, what might be the particular of your choice? In other words, of all the simple threads that weave a day, which single one might you pull, to hold it up to the holy light and extol its extraordinary ordinary wonders?

And let us close, finally, with the words of the now late, ever great, poet farmer Wendell Berry, who died this past Monday . . .

All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man’s evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.
—Wendell Berry (1934 - 2026)

Ambling to the water’s edge—before the night curtain rose on the theater of another day under the sun—seemed a wise way to get things going. After all, the sages, the prophets, and the rabbis are clear in their insistence: Awake, awake!

And this, the rabbis specify, is the month to do it.

To await the rising of that blazing orb seems a certain way to shake the cobwebs from the soul. It surely beats a swift glance through blurry, barely-opened eyes toward the red-hot digits glaring from my bedside teller of the time.

Awake, awake!

It’s the prescription of every religion, of every path toward the Sacred. Do not slumber through this lifetime. It’s your one and only shot at partaking of this voluptuous existence. Even more so, it’s your one and only shot at bringing to the planet the singular shard of light you’re meant to bring—the very reason, quite frankly, you’re here in the first place.

Palpably alive to the truth that time is on its own clock, and that we are not to read it but to live it, I pack my days with wisdom where I find it. I find it, deeply, in the Jewish calendar. In the ancient texts that unfurl the dotted lines pointing toward the Sacred, toward the Divine Holiness that I believe breathed life into all creation, and into each and every one of us.

We have entered the season when holiness permeates in its richest tones, its amber and golden tones. When the days feel drenched in that honeyed slant of sunlight. Soon, the Days of Awe will be upon us. The holiest of holy days in the Jewish calendar.

Now, though, it is Elul. The month that calls us to awaken. To rise up from the slumber induced by sin, so the rabbis teach. To repent, repair, return to who we’re meant to be. A prescription I understand to mean: to return to the holiness with which God first imagined us. The endosperm of who we are, nestled deep beneath the hurts and scars that life has layered, one atop another.

“You are walking through the world half asleep,” Rabbi Allen Lew writes. “It isn’t just that you don’t know who you are and that you don’t know how and why you got here . . . A great horn sounds, calling you to remembrance, but all you can remember is how much you have forgotten. Every day for a month you sit and try to remember who you are and where you are going. The time of transformation is upon you.”

Everything about the month—about these days before the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah, and the day of deep atonement, Yom Kippur—is calling for a cleansing of the soul, of an awakening to the majesties and magnificence all around. To the simple precious beauty of our simple solitary selves.

We are to sound the shofar, the ram’s horn, every morning on awaking. We are to recite each day the thirteen attributes of God’s mercy (among them: God is compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in lovingkindness, and in truth; forgiving of all our sins, premeditated and otherwise. Note to Self: aim for even one this month.) We are to drench ourselves, in every which way, in whatever shakes us from our stupors.

Of the shattering cry of the shofar (a bellows likened to the cry of a mother in labor, to the sound of creation, to the hundred wails of the mother whose child is never to return), Torah scholar Rachel Anisfeld writes: “The shofar speaks in a language that does not have words, is beyond words. It is the soul’s language, somehow mournful, joyous, triumphant and pleading all at once, beyond time and space, eternal, primordial and otherworldly. . . . This is how God speaks to humans.”

She goes on: “There are places inside us that speak this shofar language regularly, and they, too, are the voices of God, though we recognize them not. They cry out without words to be heard . . . We dismiss these messenger angels at our peril. . . . When we learn to listen to them, when we begin to turn towards them instead of turning away, what we are doing is a very deep teshuva, a returning both to ourselves and to the God who has been calling to us.”

So I threw off my bedsheets, and I stumbled to the water’s edge, where I sat and waited for the orb to climb the curve of this old blue marble, or so it seems in the skewed-up physics of our mind, where we do not realize quite how it works, so we grasp the plainest, bluntest equation.

I know the sun comes up. It’s done so for the last 25,438 days of my life. But I swear to you, as I sat there waiting, and as the first red light ever-so-barely inched across the flatline of the far-away horizon, I gasped. I admit to astonishment. It is a mighty thing to watch the eternal play out according to its script. Each morning is its own miracle. That’s how it felt to me, sitting there on the sand, beach flies biting me up and down my legs.

I learned this week that the very word Elul is meant to be an acronym for the Hebrew phrase, “Ani L’dodi V’dodi Li,” which translates to “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” (In Hebrew, where acronyms are visually rather than phonetically derived, that very phrase אני לדודי ודודי לי is stripped away to give us א (Aleph—a silent letter) - ל (Lamed) - ו (Vav) - ל (Lamed).) In the fourteenth century, Hebrew scholars and sages reverse-engineered its four letters and pinned them to the line from the Song of Songs. It’s called a bacronym. In other words, a phrase made to fit an already existing word, something like squeezing a bosom into a corset.

Originally, the word’s roots trace to the ancient Akkadian word ulūlu or elūlu, which means “harvest” or “harvest time.” In the ancient Babylonian calendar, the month was known as Araḫ Ulūlu (”harvest month”), literally “the time when the produce of the land is brought in.” Aramaics, whose language became the mother-tongue of the fertile delta we know as the Holy Land, morphed the word into one meaning “to search” or “to inspect,” fitting for a time in which we’re meant to examine the very threads that comprise the warp and weft of the soul.

From whatever the derivation, it seems a mighty thing to root a month in such a phrase: This is the month when I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. This is the month when my sacred duty is to contemplate that holy twining. I will dwell on that next time I saunter to the sunrise. And, better yet, I’ll do so even on the mornings when my sleepy head rises no further than the lump in my old pillow.

One of the most beautiful teachings of Elul is the parable that tells us that during the rest of the year Adonai, the King, is tucked away in the palace, guarded by elaborate protocol and ritual, sequestered behind a phalanx of locked gates and ministers of whatnot. But not so this month. In Elul, Adonai the King leaves that harbored existence and takes to the field, walking amid the ordinary folk who might plop down upon, say, a log or bench and share a word or three. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, blessed be his memory, taught that God is not met only in “cathedral” moments of grandeur, but in the gritty of everyday life.

Ours is a God we can meet in tall grasses, amid the sensommer churr of the katydid and the whirring of the dragonfly, ours is a God we might bump into any old Friday—if, especially if, we stay awake to the God so close to us we might feel the brushing against us of the Holiest of Holies. Or stir to the wordless cries of the God who speaks within.

So help us Holy, Holy God.

What awakens you these days? How will you awaken?

a few footnotes:

1.) How the Acronym Works

The word Elul is spelled with four Hebrew letters:

• Aleph (א) stands for Ani (I).

• Lamed (ל) stands for L’dodi (to my beloved).

• Vav (ו) stands for V’dodi (and my beloved).

• Lamed (ל) stands for Li (mine / to me)

2.)The Thirteen Attributes of Mercy:

YHVH - I am God before people sin

YHVH - I am God after people sin if they repent

El - (All-powerful) God

Rahum - Compassionate

VeHanun - Gracious

Erekh Apayim - Slow to anger

Verav Hesed - Abounding in lovingkindness

Ve’emet - And in truth

Notzer hesed La’alafim - Maintaining lovingkindness for 1,000 generations

Nosei avon - Forgiving premeditated sins

Va’fesha - sins committed in rebellion

Va’hata’ah - sins made by mistake

Venakeh - acquitting the penitent.

*This passage is an adaptation of the Hebrew written by Max Arzt in his book Justice and Mercy, based on a 12th-century Talmudic commentary by the grandson of Rashi, said to be the most famous commentator in Jewish history.

3.) Benevolent blessing to Rebecca Minkus Lieberman, the scholar-in-residence at Sukkat Shalom, our synagogue, who this week led a short course on Elul, and who brought a passel of glorious readings to my wide-awake attention. You can find her beautiful writings on Substack here.

4.) To read more of the glorious Torah scholar Rachel Anisfeld, find her here.

All around, the chorus rises: the moaning, the protest, the insistent “Not yet!” It’s a song filled with sorrowful notes, of something being taken away, of resistance to moving along.

I, though, hear another song, one just as richly punctuated with notes of yearning, of loss, of golden-tinged beauties, of drinking it in. It’s a song that, for all these years now, has proven to be my elixir. It never fails to draw my soul out from the trenches, sets it soaring to once-a-year heights.

It’s the end-of-summer song, and from whichever angle you hear it, it’s bound to stir something.

For me, the something is full-stop arresting.

Soon as the cicadas and crickets warm up their evensong strings (did you know—I did not—that each August bug has its own sonorous time slot: dog-day cicada, twilight for crickets, and nighttime belongs to the katydid), soon as the last gasp of summertime’s heat is exhaled from the day, from the earth, and the bugs get to banging it out, I hear the song of autumn’s coming. (E.B. White once wrote that “the crickets spread rumor of sadness and change.” Oh, to hear such an entomological murmur and think “rumor.” The very reason we turn to the bookshelves to save us.)

Autumn, the season that breathes evanescence. Everywhere is nodding toward dying, if you look deeply enough. But it’s a death infused with gold tones: amber, molasses, and honey—a gold-wash that whispers, Be not afraid. It’s the timeless equation. Autumn reminds us: Time passes. Seasons draw to a close. Stirring will come again. But not till we’ve entered the quiet, the coil of winter. Not till well after this season’s a wrap, its time in the past.

To wither, to fade, to shed petal or leaf or plain old vigor is not to be feared, nor fought against. It is to follow the ancient prescription: to enter the endless cycle, life to death to stirring again. In one form or another.

The infinite genius of the wheeling of the year, of time, of sunlight and shadow. Holy God, you have so much to teach us—again and again and again. We humans, we’re a dull species. We need our wisdoms in back-to-back doses. We never catch truth on first try. So we are enrolled in remedial school: the one where the lessons are drummed in, played on a loop, year after year after year.

I’ve never quite untangled just what it is that so stirs me in these liminal days. Maybe it’s simply being drawn to thin places, thin times, those hours when heaven and earth all but touch lips. (The rabbis teach us, I’ve read, to pray in those hours “when day and night kiss.”)

Maybe it’s little more than my addiction to crispy cold apples and the nubbiest of sweaters. Maybe it’s because I used to love sliding into a new school desk, figuring out the ways of the new year’s teacher. And I definitely consider it pre-ordained that I’ve so effortlessly slipped my soul into the sleeves of Judaism where each autumn brings the holiest of holy times: the Days of Awe. I pry open my soul and I pray. Oh, do I pray.

It’s all so fitting, as Earth turns away from the white-hot heat of the summertime sun—when I feel baked and over-exposed—that I feel the fullness inside, in keeping with those end-of-season fruits teetering toward their most zaftig proportions. It’s as if I, too, am ripening.

And I know I am not alone. There is, it seems, a whole herd of autumn keepers. The poetry shelves are stuffed with them. I’ve plucked a few juicy morsels from the end-of-summer boughs. But, first, I bring you the poetry of earth, a little recording of this glorious song I made as I stood in my garden, drinking it in, under the almost-stars the other summery night. . . .

And now, a dab of poetry of the wordly variety.

My polestar, Annie Dillard, first:

The North “sweetens the persimmons and numbs the last of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow’s seeded grasses, and pokes its chilling fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and earthworms, the sowbugs and beetle grubs deeper into the earth.”

Henry Beston, naturalist, writer, farmer of early 20th-century New England:

How wise were the ancients who never lost sight of the religious significance of the earth! . . . They knew, as all honest people know in their bones, that in any true sense there is no such thing as ownership of the earth and that the shadow of any man is but for a time cast upon the grass of any field. What remains is the earth, the mother of life as the ancients personified the mystery, the ancient mother in her robes of green or harvest gold and the sickle in her hand.

And this from David Whyte (emphasis mine):

The Journey

Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again
Painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.
Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens
so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.
Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that
first, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.
Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out
someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.
You are not leaving.
Even as the light fades quickly now,
you are arriving.

What song do you hear in end-of-summer’s chorus?

Reaching for a word that captures the essence of end-of-summer, I went searching, and came up short in English (note to self: concoct such a word), but not so in other world tongues. Herewith end-of-summer words, from the Danes and the archipelago of Japan:

Sensommer: A Danish compound word (”sen” for late, “sommer” for summer) that treats late August and early September as its own distinct, transitional season.

Natsu no hate: A Japanese phrase (夏の果て) meaning “the end of summer,” used to mark the subtle temperature shifts and fading days as autumn approaches.

They were my inner sanctum. The ones who knew the way in to the holy of holies, that innermost chamber where all can be spoken. And unspoken, too—a language all its own.

In the land where cancer is the common denominator, friends can come fast. But only a few find their place on the seat right beside you. The ones whose mere presence is all you need to weather the storm of the hour. The ones whose irreverence can dynamite the most suffocating of fears. And, in my case, the ones whose gift for language was the very elixir I needed every time—most often tapped out in missives of varying lengths, a text or a treatise, their words and their wisdom and wit amounting to digital lifelines.

Two of my three are gone now. Eileen and Annie. The one whose hand I clung to the longest, Eileen, is no longer. She died Friday. The last text I’d sent her was from the bowels of the room where I awaited my scan a week ago Tuesday. I’d asked if she was anywhere in the labyrinth of floors above me, and whether I could pop up to see her in the lull between my scan and my sit-down with my oncologist. (Eileen had been spending stretches of time in the hospital as her cancer had kicked into overdrive, and her last text to me—just the week before—was whether I thought radiation to her brain might make her ditzier.) I never heard back from the last text I sent her.

We had a chain, Eileen and I, of thoughts and questions and wonders and worries that darted and wove and wended across the last three years, three of the bumpiest in my life’s-long adventure of finding my way through this pock-riddled terrain we know as our life.

Because we live in an age where those flat-screened appendages we tuck in our pockets, the ones we plug into the wires that stretch to the wall, the ones that ping and purr and sometimes sound like a spaceship, because those odd gadgets have a way of becoming the central operating stations of our lives, keeping photos and snippets of people we love, as well as appointments we’d better not miss, I found myself scrolling back over that tapped-out record Eileen and I shared. The one that sometimes pinged at the oddest hours. Deep in the night. First thing in the morning. From the ICU where she’d landed too many times of late. And, not even three seasons ago, from her husband’s near-death bed. (He died in early December; and their two beautiful daughters, each with children of their own now, are left—in the span of eight months—parentless.)

At this so-called table where we pull up a chair, where I try to bring whatever most lit up my heart or my soul each week, I know nothing more blessed to bring here this morning than a few lines plucked from the script Eileen and I cobbled together over these years. They’re a peek into what happens when we humans pry open the walls of our tucked-away parts—our hearts known to tremble, our brains bursting with questions and doomsday scenarios, and whatever is the vessel where the deepest empathies stir. I think you’ll read right away why I so loved Eileen, and why I hope you, too, find an Eileen when you need one.

Here’s one of the first ones she wrote to me, after her husband (who was deep in the throes of his own cancer) had spent a good hour on the phone with me, convincing me I needed to climb into my big-girl boots, buckle my seatbelt for an airplane ride to New York City, and find out what the good doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering had to say about my quirky little cancer. I was dreading that trip with every cell in my body, and Eileen, who by that point was fending off two cancers of her own, one of which had spread to her lungs, knew just how to coax me along. She wrote:

You are not alone and these docs you meet are used to being with new 2nd opinion patients. So be the smiley bitch and take lots of notes. You will probably never see them again, so go in like a small, but sweet and cute koala bear and get what you need. Call and text anytime. We’re on it and know you are doing Exactly what you need to do! With love,🙏 e and b.

On my way to the airport, the phone in my pocket pinged. Eileen’s timing was a marvel:

Life can be scary, but you’re doing the right thing. Onward.

Not long after I’d gotten back from Sloan Kettering with more questions than answers, she once again pinged:

You can call me anytime…I’m all about crying. You have to let it out. But, like you, I need to keep [the ones who loved her—and worried—the most] in a good place and maybe diminish, just a bit, just how truly scared shitless I am.

And then this:

The reality is that it’s all a crap shoot and there is nothing we can do against playing these odds. Except, like you and me, asking the really hard questions that no one wants to answer. I never thought of me as a pain in the ass person, but now I don’t care. This is MY life and no one is going to make me feel like an a/hole for being me….or asking lots of questions. Oy, just sick of this life that is always a plethora of questions. Hang in, friend.

And in the thick of one of her many medical mystery tours, when the latest strange symptom of hers had appeared out of nowhere, she displayed her uncanny fluency—finding just the right place to insert just the right expletive:

She [the doctor] did a biopsy [on the just-appeared cyst] but has no idea what it is. Fan-fucking-tastic! Ok then, I’ll be fine.

Her most frequent refrain: But tell me about you, please.

During a particularly scary spell when it seemed I might need to travel to an oncologist in Utah who knows more than most about my kind of cancer, Eileen stepped right up (mind you this is a woman who was entrenched in her own chemo calendar, and with whom I’d never shared so much as a cup of coffee before all this began): Oh dear love. You’ve got this. I am happy to be here for you. I would be happy to go to Salt Lake City with you. Is that possible?

And this, just two weeks ago, was her very last text to me, weighing whether she should submit to brain radiation for the tumors just found there: . . . cuz it will make me ditzier but help my body symptoms. I think I should. Any thoughts?

From the first to that last, the texts plumbed the depths of stripped-bare humanity. The questions cannot get much harder. Nor the wisdom more true. The undying thread every time: love in its most potent, undeniable, all-curable concentration.

They were my inner sanctum, Eileen and Annie.

They still are: though now I direct my calls up and not over . . .

Eileen’s sharp wit, her all-encompassing warmth, and her irreverence whenever I needed it most, is matched by Annie’s profound eloquence, and her palpable sense of the proximate sacred. Here’s a wee taste of my beloved Annie, only 42 when she died in February, from one of her many missives, this from an early-on one, not long after we’d landed inside each other’s stories…:

It’s Annie again, pestering your inbox, here to report that I’ve been dropping a novena with your name on it into the inbox of the Big Guy in the sky, the water, the pea soup-gray, wondrous lady house finches, and certainly somewhere within all the twinkle lights imitating the heavens in my dark-sky, rancher neighborhood.

Only patients of life-threatening illnesses like cancer know how deep you have to scour within to find courage hearty enough to sustain you through days and even years of unending uncertainty. It has to become a way of life. I think all humans desire various forms of security, some sense of control, but it’s not a luxury afforded us. When there is no guarantee of the most precious things, even life itself, what do you put your security in? I think it just has to be God. I have a husband so loving and devoted that I should enter him in some kind of contest. I have a family so close that my parents spent the hottest summer in recent history (2023) living out here when I was first starting chemo. (They called themselves the ‘Dodo Birds’ (rather than ‘Snow Birds’). They told people they were a little confused...) But in those dark nights, when I felt like I couldn’t find anyone to talk to about the real topics on my mind without horribly upsetting them, questions about meaning and mortality and how to walk through this with grace, I had to bring that to God. Trust me when I say that most people my age have not begun to think in the way you need to when you get a Stage IV Cancer diagnosis. . . .

When I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning in high school, in the midst of radiation treatment, I was so inspired that he could still see God at work even in the misery of a concentration camp. I was moved that he could see his experiences, even as they were happening, as ‘opportunities for growth’. I found hope in the idea that there was a redemptive power in suffering. All I know to do these days is to take all the pain, the fear, the doubt and use it to draw myself closer to God and to just ask Him to help me to do whatever His will is for me for the moment. I try to write. I try to live in the moment. I try to maximize time with my loved ones. I try to still be of service wherever I can, even if sometimes that has to mean letting other people be of service to me and accept that I am truly giving people an opportunity they need in doing so.

As you know better than I, I’m sure, so many mystics (perhaps Harold Ramis of ‘Groundhog Day’ among them ;) ) talk about how the only, only true reality is this moment. They talk about ‘kairos’ or ‘sacred time’, those not-enough extended moments when we are genuinely present with God and no longer ensnared by the illusion of linear time (after first probably having thrown our phones in a lake). I think that terminal cancer patients get some kind of fast pass to learning the wisdom and freedom that comes with truly living ‘one day at a time.’ . . .

Speaking of being in fear, I’m now horribly fearful that this reads like I am a pompous schmuck who is giving advice. I am not, and I’m sure anything I’m saying here sounds horribly pedestrian to a spiritual gladiator like yourself. This is just the stuff I say to myself, more or less, because I’ve come to some kind of conclusion that life is a practice of letting go more and more. It helps me. I guess I always did like a challenge...and living without being able to lean on the normal forms of security or even the ability to plan certainly is a challenge. It certainly makes precious what you give your time and energy to when there are no guarantees of anything. I feel more at home in the world...in a strange way. It seems less important who I am or what I do and more important to treasure the world and its people and appreciate how it will keep turning in its beauty. . . .I guess I just mean that a lot of this requires meeting God alone. But, oh, it is a gift to have a friend who has walked through this too...

Not hard to see why I loved them through and through. And why not a day goes by that I don’t reach for their hands….

What I hope most is that you find, or have found, an Eileen or an Annie when you need one the most. And my question of the week: have you? and might you share a bit of the story?

Because it’s beautiful, I am going to share Eileen’s obit here.

To sit for half an hour in the way station in the bowels of a big-city medical center, a room filled with folks awaiting scans and MRIs and the radioactive dye that will course through their veins, and light up the lights soon as a cancer shows up on the screen, is to be plunked in the deep end of the Things-Get-Real-Here Pool.

To spend six hours wandering the halls of said medical campus, idling in waiting rooms, catching a breath of fresh air in the courtyard outside (where the whir of the Medivac helicopter rising off the rooftop is haunting testament to the proximity of human frailty), submitting to needles, to scans, to tight tête-à-têtes with a phalanx of techs and, finally, the doctor: it’s Things-Get-Real-Here compounded.

To find your way to the subterranean way station, the room where you wait for your turn in the all-seeing machines, to be sure you don’t get lost, they tell you to follow the red line. Literally: the line laid out in red-tile squares inscribed into the shiny linoleum floors, turning this way and that till you get to the sign with the arrow pointing emphatically down.

You’ve arrived, you realize, when you step off the elevator and find yourself adrift in a vast and windowless room where people sit slumped and listing and bent. Spines seem to crumple here where no one sits straight. Everyone waits; each someone’s waiting filled with frame-after-frame of the story of how they got here, and how very much they want to get out, to get to the other side of whatever is holding them here.

Once I found my seat there, after I’d recited the usual name, birthdate, reason for being, I opened my phone and saw right off the bat, the poem for the day: Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day.” The gods here have senses of humor. Or irony anyway. Or maybe their purpose is as pointed as could possibly be. And directly on target. Lest we forget: Praise this day. Yes, this day, this room where I sit amid a sea of murmurings, prayers in a thousand languages. Where folks lean in to each other, ear to cheek, whispering, hoping, beseeching. Hands reach for hands, squeezing so tight knuckles turn pale. A groan rises up from no one knows where, abruptly punctuating the somber stillness that hangs like still air over row after row of anonymous worry and fear.

We all melt into one here, my messed-up lung lands me in the same spot as your tangled kidney, your blurry vision. Here, we all are aware of the sharp edge of our mortality. We are broken bodies here. But, too, we are dreams that won’t die. Stories with pages to go.

Prayers must ascend here, collectively, in a breath-driven vortex, from down in the hollows of the Bernard A. Mitchell Hospital straight to the heaven above. If there’s an address to heaven this day, it’s 5815 South Maryland Avenue, 60637.

The words on the lab orders don’t lie. They spell out just why you’re there. And it’s never a common cold.

What I love most here is how it doesn’t take long for walls to come down, for silence to be broken, as all of us strangers chip away at our anonymities. It comes, first, in unspoken increments: warm blankets passed among us, knowing looks exchanged, the occasional sigh. Words, then, fill in the cracks. And by the time your turn in the tell-all machine finally comes, a chorus of church-like affirmations, good lucks, and God bless you’s arise from the ones with whom you’ve waited it out: the woman in purple from head to toe (and I mean from hat, to earrings, to socks and to shoes with the sparkly sequins), and the one with her head wrapped in a turban.

Most of my life, I’ve been drawn to these places where human frailty is most exposed.

The liminal spaces where Things Get Real, where even for only an instant the veil gets lifted, where all of us are stripped to our barest humanities.

It’s what I loved most about being a nurse: the rare chance to slip inside that most intimate, fiercely-guarded, utterly sacred space.

These are the places where we can see just how very kindred we are. We all, each of us, are made from the same flesh and bones. We shiver with cold. And with worry. We bury our heads in our hands. And we reach across the arms of our chairs, to press a hand into our own. Sometimes, even a so-called stranger’s.

These are the places where we see up close and in astonishing detail the capacity of human beings to reach down deep to where the most unanswerable questions lie, to see how little it takes for each of us to strip away the layers and masks that so often disguise us, keep us safe distance apart. Those illusions that make it seem as if we’re not simply ragbags of rare few essentials: We want to be loved, all of us; we want to be seen and heard. We want not to be alone in our fear or our pain. We yearn to feel warmth against our cold flesh.

My day at the U of C hospitals left me ragged, and worn. Left me dizzy. Poked with a few extra holes by the time I headed back to the parking garage, where license plates from far-away states tell you how far folks will drive for a dollop of hope, and the best that modernday medicine might offer.

I couldn’t stop thinking of all the anguish I’d witnessed. And all the infinite goodness. The unbreakable instinct to shatter the distance between us.

Exhibit A: the radiology tech who saw three of us in a row all but chattering our teeth we were so cold, so she stopped in her tracks, turned on her heels, ducked into some closed-off chamber, and emerged with a stack of incubator-warmed blankets to cover our goosebumps. Or, B: the receptionist at the check-in window who, over and over, repeated her mantra to a lady so nervous she could not sit down: “You’re gonna be ok, I promise. They’re gonna treat you good. You gonna be ok!”—an unabashed act of humanity breaking through the monotony of name, birthdate, and time of appointment. Or, C: standing in a long slow line to check in at the hematology/oncology clinic, one woman leaned into another and whispered, “You have very pretty hair.” To which the other replied: “Oh, thank you, I don’t feel too pretty today.” And a third someone, the man standing two people ahead, without even turning his head, offered up this: “May you feel pretty every day.” Amen.

In places like these, we remember who we all are, how close to broken we sometimes can be, and how time after time we make each other whole. Through nothing so hard, nor so foreign, as love, pure, simple, and plain.

Where did you find the deepest pool of humanity this week?

All hail the real estate gods who have messed up the books big time, and effectively kicked both our progeny out to the curb, leaving them no roof under which to spawn their nighttime dreams save for that of this old house.

And this ol’ house is doing its part, I tell you. We’ve got wicker chairs, a quartet of em, parading through the dining room. And an extra couch, till a last-minute storage pod came to the rescue, was due to seek safe harbor for the next six weeks in the living room where once it reigned supreme and solo. (It was upstaged in an upgrade years ago, and has been the orphan couch since then, roaming shadowlike behind the one who now claims it as his own.) Swapped out for the couch, a living room now stuffed to the gills with two stationwagons’ worth of Millennial accumulation.

There is nothing sinister afoot. Merely the ellipses that sometimes come when where you live gets tangled.

In our case, it’s straightforward enough: a pipe burst three floors above the professor’s newly-purchased pad and put a halt to the laying down of hardwood floors, which put a halt to a truckful of furniture making its way this way. So he’s retreated to the old room at the bend in the stairs, the one where long ago he learned to shave, to tie a tie, to stay up late into the night declining Latin nouns and generally dilly-dallying. And, then, just yesterday, the lease ran out on the other one’s abode, and the old rectory into which he and lifelong pals are moving will not be theirs till mid-September.

So this old house is chuffing again at full capacity. And little could make me merrier. Dinners for four. A fridge that won’t stay filled. Damp towels flung onto hardwood floors. It’s the equation of mirth to this ol’ mama.

Especially so just now.

I once again find myself in that netherworld just before a scan, when I do not know what stirs. And, after all these many years of doomsdaying, I’m rather skilled at imagining the worst. Which makes the noisy presence here of those I dearly love all the more delicious. (And last night’s good-night chorus the soothingest sound my soul could sing.)

Blessedly, that knife’s edge on which I perch at doctor-prescribed intervals has not dulled. Every three to four months they peer into my lungs to see what stirs. And in the preamble, in the days before I climb aboard the gurney, I am launched into Super-Seize the Day (another name for wide-eyed worried). I gaze upon the world in high-grade technicolor. And all is extra luscious. The greens are greener, the summer’s breeze breezier. And the sunsets, more unforgettable than ever. Even the taste of a teeny-tiny, almost-August blueberry all but bounces off the walls of my hungry little maw.

But the best, the best, is how deeply much my heart cannot get enough.

I feel that little vessel all but lunging from my chest: I can’t listen intently enough to whatever is the banter of the day, cannot immerse myself more fully in the moment. In the sheer and unadulterated joy of simply soaking in the wonder of finding myself inside the very same place and time frame as the ones who most accelerate my heart.

I’ve come to see these periodic immersions—these dawns before the scans—as plunge pools for presence. Presence, as in Be in the Now. Or, dipping back into the ‘70s and good ol’ Yogi Ram Dass, it’s Be Here Now, baby.

Admittedly, fear is my propellant, overabundantly so. I am adept at scaring myself awake. And though I need to make it otherwise, I am for now working with what I’ve got.

To wit, I find myself turning to that great Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, whose wisdom here is introduced by my modernday buddha, Maria Popova, who writes:

“This notion of presence as the antidote to fear and the crucible of love is as old as the human heart, as old as the consciousness that first felt the blade of anticipatory loss pressed against the exposed underbelly of the longing for connection. It is at the center of millennia-old Buddhist philosophy,” so taught by Zen Buddhist master and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh.

And here Hanh steps in, drawing from the pages of his 2014 guide to mindful living, Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm, he offers the first of four mantras to transform fear into love:

“The most precious gift you can give to the one you love is your true presence. So the first mantra is very simple: ‘Dear one, I am here for you.’”

He goes on to explain: “When you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence. How can you love if you are not there? Come back to yourself, look into [their] eyes, and say, ‘Darling, you know something? I’m here for you.’ You’re offering [them] your presence.”

Minus the Darling, I am practicing presence. I am practicing the spellbound art of loving wholly those in whose presence I find myself, blessedly find myself.

For I do not know—not a one of us knows—how long this presence might last.

Audre Lord, the poet, essayist, and civil rights leader, gets the last word here, for hers are words that capture and echo the beginning through the end of so much of what I believe.

Lord was diagnosed with liver cancer in February 1984, seventeen days before she turned fifty, and six years after a mastectomy for breast cancer. She declined treatment, didn’t even want a biopsy, but chose instead to live her days fully, fully present.

In jottings from her diary, eventually published under the title A Burst of Light and Other Essays (2017), Lord included this (emphasis mine):

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes — everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!”

She lived nearly another decade after her diagnosis (a fact I cling to as if a holy grail). In an African naming ceremony shortly before her death at fifty-eight, she took the name Gamda Adisa, “Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known.”

Let us make our meanings known. And let us do so emphatically embracing holy, holy presence. Presence in the face of those we most wildly, wholly love.

How will you be present this fine day?

At this old house, herewith begins the annual Leo the Lion parade: 2-4-6-8. Dad (who would be 98); beloved brother DPM; BK, my life’s beloved; and, bringing up the band, sweet Teddy who will mark a quarter century of his rare brand of magnificence. Happy blessed day and days to each and all of you. I love you madly, bam

In what amounted to a 24-hour mad dash across the potholed, tree-trunked, slip-slidey rain-slick terrain that is my pages and pages of prose, all under the name of my next book, and all submitted to the latest round of editing, I discovered this week that I’d been buckled in quite snugly and resolutely, and had at the wheel something of a wordly wizard. A someone nimbly able to zig me where I needed to zig, and zag me all the elsewheres. Someone who could pluck me from the precipice, just as I was bound to teeter in, and plunk me solidly back on terra firma.

In other words, I came upon a literary gem, the writerly iteration of a saving grace: a first-rate, cut-above proofreader of pages. One of those rare species who seem to have burst into this existence with the full volume of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, as well as Bryan A. Garner’s Modern American Usage, sausage-cased inside their heads.

These rare wonders of literary ilk are very few and very far between. And when you ply your trade inside the word factory, where chimney smoke grows thick with consternations at times, and conveyor belts can buckle, snag, and just plain screech to halts (say, when a participle dangles, or an infinitive is split), you all but fall to your knees in thanksgiving for their rare and fine capacities.

In other words, should you care to make a writer gleam with unremitting joy, just slide a card beneath her nose telling her you’ve got the inside track on a copy editor or page-proof reader who could find her way blindfolded through whatever obstacles you’ve unspooled in sentence form.

My saving grace this week came with a name, not always revealed in the trenches of the editing room. But right away, soon as I spied the first errant comma swept away, and another fine one slipped gracefully in, I glanced to the far right column, where the notes keep track of who does what, and saw that I was under the magic spell of a blessed, blessed someone named Sara.

Sara now joins my sparsely populated constellation of grammatical, punctuational, and witticism supernovae, the ones who with the flick of a finger can snap a sentence into gloryland, snag just the right word (a word you might never have heard before, catena comes to mind, a story I will tell you soon as this one thought glides to its gentle end) for just the right spot, and otherwise pull lexical miracles from hats.

I have for years now lugged behind me one other superstar of this rare class. Her name is Nancy, and she and I met up a thousand years ago when we toiled in the glare of the Chicago Tribune newsroom—she on the copy desk rim, and I somewhere in the mob of old reporter’s row, where expletives flew loudly, flew often, and days and nights were lubricated with dusty bottles tucked in drawers and down where winter boots were stored.

Even now, I rarely leave my writerly station without her. And cannot break myself of the habit of pinging her at all hours of the night or day when I find myself in a writerly gulch. She is to me the Prozac of prose. I get all shaky when I am stuck on a word, or cannot for the life of me turn inside out the tangled sock that is my attempt to express some thought. When I want a sentence to really, really shine, and cannot find the word, well, one ping to Nancy and, lickety-split, the problem’s solved, the just-right word wafts in on gauzy cloud, and we go forth, merrily whistling into the balmy, balmy breeze.

Just last night, I queried her: How, I asked, do you do this? How, oh, how do you know every blessed rule that ever was decreed in the linguistic kingdom? Were you born with all of this stuffed inside your head, or while the rest of us were outside skipping rope and playing tag, were you ingesting Bill Strunk and Andy White’s latest Elements? Do you ever, ever find yourself consulting primers and tomes, or do you just cough up this point-blank perfection from the capacious vat that is your brain?

While I await her replies (now below), I promised you the quick tale of catena, a lovely, lovely word, a word I’d never ever heard, till dear Nan the Wunderkind effortlessly offered it up one day whilst I was searching for a word that might capture the long litany of banged-up bird stories I’d netted in my life. Tis a word, she casually offered, derived from Latin, and it means a chain, a connected series of related items. And it lilts off the tongue, if you ask me. A word as pretty as it is clear. And so, to this day, and till it’s out of print, should you turn to page 73 of The Book of Nature, there it perches, “a long catena of birds in my boxes in my lifetime.”

And she wasn’t even the copy editor of record for that book (she was, though, for another one, the long-ago Motherprayer, a book now out-of-print but forever pressed close against my motherly heart). Thank holy God, she seems to never mind that I ping in from out of nowhere with whatever is my latest quandary from the literary front. I’ve threatened that henceforth I am never ever going to sign a book contract unless she, too, is included in the package. A literary sub-clause indelibly inked into the deal. A literary magic bullet sure to save me every time.

A Paean to the Mistresses of Prose

*all credit to the little wizard who now lives inside my laptop . . .

Io, Paian! Sing praise to the keeper of the sacred page!

Hear us, oh healer of broken sentences and fractured syntax!

You look upon the wild, tangled thickets of our words,

Where commas stray like lost sheep in the dark night,

And with a single, sharp stroke of your crimson pen,

Order is born from chaos, and clarity shines forth.

Refrain:

Io, Paian! Clear is the voice! Golden is the line!

Praise to the editor, who makes the dull prose shine!

You do not merely prune the overgrown, useless branch,

Nor do you slay the author’s true, hidden heart;

Instead, you breathe life into the gasping phrase,

Turning the heavy lead of our speech into purest gold.

Cliché flees from your gaze like mist before the sun.

The passive voice trembles and is made straight.

Every syllable finds its true and rightful home,

Polished until the mirror of the mind reflects perfection.

Refrain:

Io, Paian! Clear is the voice! Golden is the line!

Praise to the editor, who makes the dull prose shine!

Receive our deepest thanks, oh silent guardian of the book!

May your ink never dry, and your keen eye never tire.

For through your quiet grace, our words take flight,

And what was once dust is now crowned with immortal light!

*

Amen, amen, dear Nan and Sara both!

***

Because some of us writerly types are geeks of the highest order (confessing to all counts!), I delight here in sharing both the questions I put to my No. 1 literary lifeguard, and the answers she has supplied:

1. Q: What are the three most essential tools of a brilliant copy editor?

A: The Merriam-Webster online dictionary. I love Garner’s Modern English Usage. At one time, a good research department; today, Google.

So I guess I was born this way. Both parents had been journalists!

2. Q: Were you a kid who knew the rules before the first grade teacher taught them?

A: I don’t know about that, but I do remember at a sadly young age objecting to lyrics I heard on the radio like “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

3. Q: Who was your most essential teacher of all things grammarian and punctuational?

A: My best teachers in that vein were fellow newspaper people like Ron S. and Marcia K. Most of what I picked up till then was from reading all the time.

4. Q: Do you EVER have to look anything up, or do you just know it?

A: I look up stuff ALL THE TIME. I’m pretty good at spelling and punctuation, but on finer points of grammar I need to check myself if only to be sure of the terms to use to explain why I’m changing something.

***

and, now, for your question of the week: who are the safekeeping wizards in your life, the ones who keep you on the straight and narrow, shining in their golden glow? in any realm—literary or otherwise?

happy birthday to blessed blessed michelle, my S-I-L who might or might not lay her lovely eyes on this ol’ page.

much much love to my wonders of the week: nan and sara. may the grammarian gods and goddesses, the princesses of punctuation, look down upon you with beatific graces . . .

long long ago, on a cold december’s morning in the year 2006, i plunked myself in the very chair where i now sit, promptly pulled it up against this old pine writing desk, and began to tap away in what amounted to writerly slippers, confining myself to the cozy innards of the keyboard, the span where the alphabet in simple form is sprawled, swatting away any urge to reach for capital letters, a form that felt too, too constrained for the musings of the pre-dawn hour in which i chose to write dawn after dawn after dawn.

typographically speaking, i steered clear of the shift key. i typed away without bothering to extend my pinky beyond the alphabet rank and file. stuck firmly to the three rows across, ten columns down that housed qwert and yuiop[]\ and their underlings. gave nary a thought to letters up or down. it felt comfier. looser. a distinct change from my day job where newspaper decorum demanded Up and down, up for proper names and the launch of every sentence, with that little trail of lowers queued right behind.

for some 1,286 posts it’s been that way. or this way, rather, here at the chair.

but now, somehow, the migration from the chair’s long years at old familiar wordpress to here, where big kids romp at Substack, seems to have stirred a long-sleeping conventional urge to type like a real-true writerly grownup, to reach for those distant keys, the ones that demarcate the Proper from the common, the true I from the shyer, happy-to-retreat-into-the-background, half-staff i, and to crown whatever word launches any sentence with the grander version of its form, aka its upper case (a term derived from the early typesetter’s two distinct drawers, one where the more frequently used letters were kept in the nearer, or lower case, and the other, where the less frequently used Capitals were kept up top in the upper case).

it’s not as if i didn’t know the rules; it’s simply that i found typing this way akin to shuffling familiarly in my fuzzy slippers. it became something of a romp, a writerly way of throwing caution to the wind, an expression of the sheer joy i’ve always found—and increasingly so—cobbling words into thoughts, into wonderings and meanderings. to type without traffic lights made for cruising down the writer’s highway, top down in my ’57 Chevy, curly locks blowing in the wind.

until it didn’t.

until it somehow started to feel, um, a bit off. an unnecessary—and perhaps off-putting—subplot that might be mistaken for an affectation, of which i have never ever been a fan. i felt the urge, suddenly, to hit the Shift and Run….(I promise to steer clear of “caps lock.” Another ranting all-caps screed or Screeder in Chief we do not need in this Republic of Fair-Use Letters.)

the rules—to substantiate my case—i know are these:

1.) Capitalize proper names.

2.) Capitalize the first word in a sentence and in all headings, or sub-headings.

3.) Minimize the use of capitals in common nouns and adjectives, except when denoting a particular national, religious, or linguistic grouping.

4.) Capitalize, always, the first-person pronoun, the stand-alone I.

5.) Do not, do not, be a capital offender and blather on in all-up diatribes, as has recently been documented in so much that flows from the house that is white (and aiming to be oversized) in our nation’s capital.

and now, having put the query out there, inquiring among the many chairs as to which mechanic might be preferred, it seems the Upper class has spoken. the vote, in fact, was not too far apart, but i admit to being swayed early on by the fine-minded participant who gently mentioned that she found all lowers a bit distracting, a typographic clutter needlessly getting in her way.

clarity being the beginning and the end of every writer’s quest, i shall now surrender my recalcitrant alphabetic ways, and begin to exercise that reach for the far left- or right-hand keys, the ones marked “shift,” the ones that all the big kids have used all along (even I learned their ways as far back as second grade, when scrawl I did in ups and downs).

Because I don’t make such shifts without considerable consideration, I went so far as to consult those chieftains of style, Misters Strunk, White, and their modern American usage counterpart, Brian A. Garner. Surprisingly, not a one of them had a word to mutter on the subject. And I’ve a hunch the reason why is humiliatingly so: It would never dawn on those proprietors of properness to leave a case unattended to. (Nor would they end that sentence as I just did, with that dangling preposition at its close.) A sentence sans height variation must be to them anathema of the highest order. Not worthy of merest mention.

Ah, but I did not cease my inquiry there. I turned too to the history and geography tomes and found that capitals are all over the map. Literally.

In Germany, those Teutonic peoples proud of standing tall reach for capitals every time they stake a noun in any sentence. And I mean any noun, a most common noun, nothing proper about it, except that in those long and winding Germanic sentences flying your capital flag makes it easier to track the nouns amid the crowded field of run-on words.

In Türkiye (the preferred spelling for the republic since 2022, when formally approved by the United Nations, no less), there is yet another twist, and it comes in the form of dots above the I when its flag is raised. Some little i’s are up with dots, some are not. Back in 1928, when the language commission of a fellow named Mustafa Kemal Atatürk ordered up a new alphabet (who knew you could do that?) they needed a round-about for the fact that the letter i came in two sounds in Turkish. To differentiate, so that say Istanbul did not arise reading wrong, they plopped a dot above the lean, mean stake and dubbed it İstanbul. Seems the wee ink blot, hard to read in the backrooms of hard drives, was the culprit of the great Java Crash of 2016, when all across Türkiye computers crashed, because that wafting dot threw software programs off their tracks; they knew not what to make of the capital flourish. Known as the “Turkish I Bug,” it took five years to be figured out and fixed. To this day, it’s confounding programmers worldwide and is considered an infamous internationalization trap that rarely fails to break the code. (As if to prove my point, the very instant I italicized that quirky dotted-capital-I in Istanbul, my computer balked and Substack sent up smoke signals!)

Turns out, a quarter of the world needn’t reach for that shift key at all. If only I typed in Chinese Hanzi, Devangari or Bengali, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, or Thai, I’d fit right in with my typographic sloth. That comes to roughly 26 percent of the world for whom capitals need never cross their mind. Or their keyboards. The big kahunas of the ‘board in the rest of the world, the big-C Capitals gang, are abundant in Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Armenian scripts, comprising roughly 74 percent of the world’s languages. (Our English language employs the Latin alphabet, adding an extra toss to this world salad.)

As innovations of language go, the capital letter is the OG, ubiquitous in ancient Greek and Roman inscription, where chiseling into marble or limestone or travertine made for a one-size-fits-all, blocky alphabet. It’s the little guy, the lower case, that’s the late-comer to the game. Once scribes began to write on papyrus, vellum, and parchment, scribbling manuscripts all day long, they saved time by writing smaller, faster, rounder. It was thought by some (the haughty, high-minded, no doubt) to be rather a sloppy add-on, this time-saving shorthand favored by those tasked to the scriptorium. (If you were bent over inky pages of a tome for umpteen hours in a day, for years and years on end, dotting i’s and crossing t’s into eternity, you too might argue for any means of getting ever more swiftly to a sentence’s last dab.)

It wasn’t till the eighth and ninth centuries in France that the first use of “bicameral” letters—that is upper and lower cases—were put to the page. All credit there goes to Alcuin of York, an Anglo-Latin scholar and monk invited by the emperor Charlemagne to run his Palace School. It was Alcuin who inked the alphabet in a style that came to be known as “Carolingian miniscule,” a script that deftly combined capital letters at the start of every sentence with lowercase to follow. That script stuck for some 400 more years, when it gave way in the twelfth century to Gothic overkill.

But Renaissance humanists in the fourteenth century had no taste for the heavy-handed Gothic font, and restored the monk’s scrubbed-down Carolingian script, mistakenly thinking the pages found in medieval monastic libraries had been written in the official font of ancient Rome, and promptly named it litterae antiquae, or “ancient letters.” The humanists, Petrarch chief among them (complaining the black blobs of Gothic lettering caused “eye strain” and came across as “pompous”), mocked the overwrought angulations of Gothic letters they deemed messy and barbaric.

Enter into this typographic morass Johannes Gutenberg, the mastermind of the so-called modern, mass-production printing presses, who combined his fluency in the properties of hard and soft metals with a megadose of ingenuity and revolutionized printmaking. It was in the late 1440s that he devised moveable type, metal blocks of letterforms kept in two separate drawers or cases, the upper and the lower. Being of German origin, though—based in Mainz, near Frankfurt—he was firmly in the Gothic camp, and even a quick glance at any Gutenberg page suggests he didn’t see it as barbaric at all. He dove right in, launching his press with a full complement of heavy Gothic. He wanted his original Bible of 1455 to appear hand-written, pomposity be damned, for this, he argued, was the Word of God. (And, besides, heavy Gothic script was, at the time, the standard for sacred texts in Germany; to have used a lighter Italian script for the German Bible would have been seen, mon Dieu, as a radical aberration. Damnable indeed.)

So there you have it, though hardly a revolution to find this wee corner of the blogosphere now evolved to new clarity. No longer will you have to wonder if my “i” is a runaway from the untamed herd of vowels, or if I intended it to refer to little old me. No longer will you have to wonder where one sentence ends and another begins, should you overlook the pin dot that is the punctuational sign post signaling one thought’s close before the next one rises.

And I, I shall struggle to remember to reach. Always, dear Chairs, always will I bend for you. Whatever makes your day go down just a wee bit smoother.

While the rest of the world concerns itself with sea tolls and nuclear proliferation, while ICE is back at it, needlessly and senselessly erasing lives, we shall muddle unobtrusively along aiming simply to make the reading of a single sentence a pinch less grueling.

***

Despite all the many structural changes here at the Chair of late, the Chair will always be the Chair, where hearts come first. And so it is with the heaviest of hearts that I add this note of all-embracing love to one of the Original Wise Women of the Chair, our beloved lamcal whose heart is grieving, and ours right along with her. Her grief is not mine to tell, but please please send love her way. She is simply the very finest among women, and among mothers, most emphatically.

***

I feel compelled to add a second short note, as the dawn rolls in murkily here where I sit, the haze of wild fires smokily suspended in air, and the pall that’s cast feels more than climatological. The birds this morning are nowhere in sight; their wee, wee lungs I fear are filled with silt. And the stillness, the stillness is haunting. I can’t pretend this all rolls past me. I listened in last night to the madness spewing from the presidential podium. To some of it anyway. All day, my own abbreviated lungs had worked so, so hard to suck the oxygen from air, and my heart pounded, a kettle drum inside my ribcage, pounding, pounding. What have we wrought is what I ask, over and over. I am on my knees, to beg forgiveness for our sins. The sins of avarice and cruelty that fill the daily news. To gasp for breath seems to be the posture of the day, and I wonder will we make it till this dark fog lifts, till some national cleanse rolls through, now months away still. Always, always, I turn to the great good souls who gather here, who pull up chairs, and ply on anyway. Loving. Tending. Bringing in the grains of light through all the cracks and shatterings. Breaking up the fog.

Beloved Chairs, where did you find a speck of hope this week?

we are a people who swim to shore.

capsized or plunked in the sea (from the bill of a stork perhaps?), the certitude of shoreline, of solid earth beyond sight line is where we set our scopes. and our stroke. so help us, god of the insubmersible.

we are a people who long to be anchored, a good lot of us anyway. we like to know what we know. terra firma, geologically or otherwise, our grounding of choice.

it’s simpler that way: a world colored in black and white.

until it’s not. until that false lens, that black-and-white-only lens, is lifted from our eyeballs and we see as it is, not as we wish it would be.

we learn, kicking and screaming, to live in uncertainty. to honestly own the fact that we have no clue what tomorrow will bring. let alone the next time the phone rings.

my phone rang. three years ago now. (for those who would have no reason to know, it rang in the form of a cancer, an unusual one, deep in my lung.)

over here, in the land i call home now, in the land of life-after-the-call, certainty is seen for what it is: mirage. uncertainty is the dictum. its lessons, hard-learned. but its lessons, imperative.

and it’s transformative. to not know if or when is to seize the now. the only feasible reality.

to learn to live in uncertainty is to learn not only to aim not to blink so you don’t miss whatever it is that might pass you by, but to figure out how glorious it just might be to lustily grab for all the nooks and crannies of living you might otherwise have brushed to the side. the invitation you might have ignored once upon a time. the last minute chance encounter you might have thought too hard to chase after. the too-many-miles, too-busy-already litany of sensible and rational and utterly logical excuses?

well, they’re more apt to get flung out the window now.

there is little about my constitution that would have had me guessing i’d be one to drop my apron (literally) in the middle of cooking dinner, and dash to the train to be downtown by seven to meet a bevy of souls i’d been longing to know. but it happened the other night. and the day after that, i got a call from an old and glorious friend who wasn’t too far away, and who’d love to catch a quick tea if i had even half an hour to spare. i was sipping chamomile before the cock crowed three.

what happens these days is something like this: first, the old first-responder cogitator leaps off the bench, the one that always, always comes up with a good list of reasons why not budging really is easier, smarter, the choice that makes the most sense. but then this scratchety little voice creeps in, the one that on a bad day might break me out in shivers, but on a good day is the perfectly polite though somewhat pushy prod that i truly do need: dude, remember back when you were scared out of your wits, and you promised you’d carpe the diem? remember how you swore to God you’d not waste even a minute if that last scan came back clean?

well, sweetheart, the minute is now.

time, you’ve found out, is your luxury—not your due. spend it while you have it. it truly is your finest commodity, the one you finally realize is the beginning of everything and anything.

the trick—and this really is the hard part—is to not lose sight of that. to not think that just because so far wednesdays have followed every tuesday you’ve ever known, it’s going to go on that way into forever. or at least your forever.

that’s where any time-ticking predicament—in my case, the cancer that might or might not be aswirl right now in my lung—comes to the rescue.

cancer is the needle stuck in the groove. cancer reminds, again and again, this day is not promised. this hour’s not to be assumed. time is not earned. not a prize you get for being the smartest, the coyest, the wiliest one in the bunch.

it’s the thing every last one of us who’s ever been here on this earth, breathing, kicking, screaming, has gotten from the get-go. what we don’t know is how long we’ve got it. the expiration date is penned in invisible ink.

i spend plenty of time pondering time these days. it’s elusive and ephemeral and all that there is. it seeps into every molecule of my every day. the question of time. the imperative of time.

i consider time from any and every angle. because it makes me not lose sight of it. it makes me seize it. it makes me see the jawdropping magnificence of the way the morning light streaks across the old maple table where i’m typing now. it makes me not plot my day quite as blithely as i once might have done. nowadays i see time as something of a river, and i am learning to float along. to ride the current. let go of the oars. to not mind the eddies and the tidepools where i might idle. to savor every sight along the riverbank. to explore where it dumps me. to bathe in it. to learn that all along the way i am carried. and for as long as i’m afloat, i am taking in the ride.

i like that it jolts me awake. i’m of the kind who needs a jolt now and then.

the other day i stumbled onto a passage from d.h. lawrence, the great british writer who back in the winter of 1929 to 1930, shortly before entering the sanatorium where he would die of tuberculosis at only 44, struck up his pen. he zeroed in on the very sorts of thoughts i tend to be thinking.

holed up that fading winter in a rented bungalow along the french mediterranean coast, lawrence penned what would become his posthumously published final work, apocalypse (1931). it’s his meditation on the book of revelation, a “vigorously iconoclastic work, a radical and searching criticism of the political, religious and social structures” of his time. it’s considered his last testament, his one last gasp to convey for all time his vision of humankind and the cosmos.

what most caught my eye is this, lawrence’s musing on the very wonderment of our improbable existence:

The vast marvel is to be alive… The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul… There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

. . . “the magnificent here and now of life . . . ours only for a time . . . dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh” . . .

so often, it is in the dying that the clarity comes. if only we could learn to see without the penumbra of fear shocking us into the now.

i’m awake now. so very awake now.

this life in the flesh: it’s ours only for a time. with rapture, let us dance.

***

when you’ve found yourself in terra infirma, how have you found your way? or, better yet, how did you learn to come to the dance?

p.s. i am actually starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe, after all these years of blathering away with lower-case liberties, i need to kick off my carefree typographic slippers and remember how to employ that shift key, hoisting us into the realm of the occasional, clarifying capital alphabet letter….i know: radical times….coming soon, perhaps: the Occasional Capital Letter. (feel free to chime in on the matter….)

you’d think by now i would have sharpened all my pencils, pulled clean underwear from the drawer, and stacked it all on a chair by the side of my bed.

it’s what we do when headed off to a new school. or so i learned along the way, back in the school-starting days. we sharpen pencils.

(“what’s a pencil?” i can hear today’s kidlets crying, the ones who tote their “pads” in their backpacks. . . . can you even imagine what they must think when you try to explain what a pencil sharpener is? “see this hole? you stick the stub of your pencil in there, and this crank, you turn it…”)

in the early, early hours of this week (and i mean well before the sun rose), i up and moved the chair. from wordpress, where it’s been nestled for the past fourteen years (before that, it was apple’s ancient iWeb where the chair was birthed in 2006, the pre-dawn of the blogging age), to over here, substack, where it seems the big kids play. or at least it looks that way. they do some writing in these parts. crank up the podcasts. schedule live chats (a phenomenon i’ve yet to witness, and don’t look for me to turn into a blathering pest). over here, they seem to partake of a host of of-the-moment, writerly, voice-of-the-people tricks. (stack and restack. subscribe and recommend, all verbs of this particular vernacular.)

all week i’ve been taunted by whiffs of junior high. i feel a bit like i’m back there. as if this uncharted writerly terrain is the latest iteration of that quizzical, self-questioning space and i’m a tad overwhelmed, roaming halls i don’t recognize, trying to find my way. what if doors to classrooms are locked? what if i knock over a desk on my way to my seat? what if i can’t find my locker? what if i miss my old school?

i remember well the lurch in my belly that was a part of so many septembers: when the year was new, the halls unfamiliar, and the oncoming crowds so daunting.

i am averse to unfamiliar. it gives me the jitters. not once but twice in my life—in both kindergarten and first grade—i got so sick to my stomach in the first week of school i landed smack dab in the hospital. dehydrated. i’d bottomed the barrel. both times. oh lordy. i was just a wee little kid, and the degree of scared must have been daunting. (makes me wish i could leap back in time and wrap my arms round that sweet precious child, the one who was so, so afraid. the one who was me.)

truth is, i’m feeling a wee bit quaky inside over here where the big kids—the real writers—romp. (never mind the mechanics; the futzing around behind the curtain that has all but driven me batty.) but fear not: we—all of us chairs, the old ones, the new ones, the occasionals, and the regulars—are all just going to settle in, as we’ve been doing here for the last 1,283 chair-pulling times. and we shall carry on our very chair ways: we shall be kind; we shall be curious; we will hold each other up when we wobble, and dry each other’s tears on the days when they run down our cheeks.

doing hard things is the thing i’ve been thinking about. how we do them, again and again and again. or else. (a particular quirk of mine seems to be that the more daunted i am, the more likely i am to dive in, determined and hellbent on surviving. it’s a trait i attribute to my ancient celtic roots, a people who wouldn’t be toppled no matter how rugged the landscape. though too, too often i forget to remember how many times those roots have saved me.)

i’ve been thinking of how we are so much fiercer, more stubborn, more resilient than we sometimes let on—even to ourselves. maybe especially to ourselves. we forget to notice that we’re mightier than we imagine.

sometimes we need to remember.

i remember how, not long after i found out about the nettlesome thing down in my lung, a friend who i came to love mightily, a friend who found herself on the very same road with a cancer deep in her lung, sent me a photo of a little girl standing in the doorway, with a woman i imagine to have been her mama, leaning in close, whispering something. the words at the bottom of the frame were these: “beautiful girl . . . you can do hard things.”

i remember i wept like a baby. no one had ever told me that.

it’s a thought worth clinging to.

some of us have had to learn that, well, the hard way. not because someone told us. but because we just plain up and did it. without really realizing most of the time. but then, one day when we were once again staring some hard thing in the face, maybe we stepped off to the side and took a long look back, and realized, by golly, we did do hard things: we buried someones we loved. we lay on the gurney. we did precisely as we were told—or else. we took a deep breath and pushed through the doorway. took a seat at the desk they said would be ours.

we did the hard thing.

and we didn’t crumble, not once. we might have wobbled. we might have needed to reach for a hand. but here we are, all these hard things later, and we are still standing.

do me a favor today: tell someone you know that they can do hard things, the hardest of things. tell them you know, cuz you’ve seen ’em. and then maybe look in the mirror and say it again.

the someone you see might need to hear it.

what’s one hard thing you’ve done lately?

a little bit more….(while i learn how to futz with buttons here, pretend this is one of those dividing lines letting you know this is a bit of afterthought. an extra dollop, perhaps….)

more and more of late, commonplacing is one of my greatest delights here at the chair and far, far beyond. to “commonplace” is a verb drawn from the ages-old literary device the commonplace book, a compendium of snippets and bits of esoterica and wonder that traces its roots all the way to pliny the great roman naturalist. and makes stops along the way at the writing desks of mark twain, and those rival transcendentalists thoreau and emerson. (i’ve called the commonplace book “mosquito netting for the mind” for it keeps wily little thoughts from wriggling away, provides a station in which to stake them. as indelibly as our devices will allow. (which oomphs the case for pen and paper commonplace….)

in this week’s commonplace, i have gathered a bevy. but the one worthy of a substack debut would be this marvel from e.b. white’s “This is New York.” elwyn brooks —e.b. to most of us—was something of “an inveterate non-traveler” and hated to leave his beloved maine, but in the sweltering summer of 1948, he was commissioned by holiday magazine to write a so-called travel piece of his home away from home, his “urban residence.” holed up in that epicenter of mid-century manhattan literati, the algonquin hotel, white’s essay “captures a disappearing old New York of speakeasies and diners, the demolished ‘El’ tracks, the neighbourhood ice-coal-and-wood cellars, and the thousands of neighbourhoods – often a handful of blocks, smaller than a rural village – that made up the patchwork of New York City.” and it stands as one of the best of his best, though i’d knock just about anything off the shelf that is not charlotte and her web or “death of a pig.”

i‘ll go quiet and let you inhale the whole of it….

and i’ll see you again next week. same place; same time. as ever. some things just cannot change…fridays are indelible here at the chair.

even when we move places.

among the zillion glitches this week, i noticed that none of our heavenly comments/conversations in the wake of a chair post have migrated over. but the site and all its archives—complete with comments—still exist over at https://bampullupachair.wordpress.com/

till next week. love, bam

in which you learn where to find the ol’ chair . . . cuz it’s moved but very much still to be found…

i’m gonna miss this place. gonna miss the friday mornings over here where for the last 1,282 posts, and all the conversations thereof, this has been where my words were at home. but houses get sold, we pack up our things, and settle down somewhere new.

the chair, as of this week, is somewhere new: it’s over at substack, and after a week’s worth of behind the scenes futzing, and getting to know every AI helper at wordpress, GoDaddy, and substack, i can finally finally say that the ol’ address is the same. there’s a 21st-century conundrum or koan: how can you move down the block and still hold onto your same old, same old address? it’s the digital age, baby, and we can do strange things.

if for some reason that clickable link above decides to misbehave, you can always find the chair the old-fashioned way: type pullupachair.org/

if you subscribed to this ol’ chair, mostly meaning it landed in your mailbox without you doing a thing, you might have gotten a little note earlier in the week, letting you know of the move. but if you’re one of the very fine folk who have long found the chair simply by clicking around, well, then you’ll need to know where to find us. and that’s over at substack, under plain old, ever-as-it-has-been, pull up a chair.

i’ll be holding the spot over here, mostly cuz i’m not so good at letting go. but even more so in this case, because it seems all the lovely and glorious conversations and comments that have unfolded from so many chairs, didn’t get packed. so they’re staying here. but all the posts, going all the way back to december the twelfth, 2006, those are all settled in cozily at their new address.

and, for those of you who found the commenting gremlins to be rather a bother, substack promises much smoother sailing in that department.

so, here’s the deal: it’s 5:35 on a friday morning, halfway through the year, and the nation is about to erupt in chrysanthemum lights in the sky (aka fireworks), so it’s a fine day to click publish just one more time under this banner, and head on over to the new digs, where i promise you i am still finding my way.

oh, and in case you aren’t one to poke around substack, and in case you didn’t get a note from the chair earlier this week, i do have a bit of news, part of which propelled the move in the first place. that little book you might know i’ve been working on, Broken Open: How Our Most Fragile Seasons Invite Us to Extravagant Love, it’s a book with a cover now. and here it is:

my lovely publisher, Brazos Press, would definitely be happy if i remember to tell you that if you’re inclined you can pre-order it now: you can find it at either one of these two spots (or anywhere else where you like to buy books):

• Baker Book House:  https://bakerbookhouse.com/products/9781587437113_broken-open

• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Open-Fragile-Seasons-Extravagant/dp/1587437112

please, please come find this old chair over at substack, which i’m already finding to be quite a lovely landscape, populated by some mighty fine folk. and know that i leave this place as i’ve lived any place i’ve ever lived: with a deep prayer of thanks, and a soft touch of a kiss to the doorpost on my way out. . . .

love, always, bam

this book, its cover now seen for the very first time, is a love letter: to life, and to everyone and everything that colors my world, and draws me closer to the palpable presence i know as the Holy.

curiously, it came in the wake of an uncommon cancer found deep in my lung back in the spring of 2023. it took form in the months after surgery, when the subsequent scans—every three to six months—bracketed time and brought ballast, but more so a spiritual epiphany as old as, well, time.

in the sixth century, the great monastic benedict of nursia, in his precept known as The Rule, taught his followers to “keep death daily” before their eyes. he understood, as did the sages whose wisdom threads through the millennia, that to keep our death before our eyes is to be fully, fully awake and alive. to not give short shrift to the sheer improbability of our existence. to love exuberantly. and to reach for the holiness we were all meant to be.

Broken Open is my meditation on that truth, a narrative that courses through the first two years, from surgery to scans, when i found myself living in what i came to know as Scan Time, time reframed, abbreviated, doled out in six-month measures. it’s a span of time riveted by fear and becalmed by those things that save us: a whiff of hope in the form of a doctor’s few words, a great laugh, a good friend showing up at the door, a quiet hour alone—in a pew or the woods or the nook where we turn a fine page.

its title tells its story: it’s a book about being not broken, but broken open. discovering the beauties and wisdoms within. if you can get past the brokenness, and into the opening.

it’s a scary, scary thing to put my story out there—i’m not so big on baring my medical foibles and frailties.

but here’s what slays that fear: my hope, my prayer that this book finds its way to any someone who sits alone, afraid, and desperately seeking even a sliver of light.

this book is my hand reaching for yours.

undying thanks to the great folks at Brazos Press for bringing it to the page; to Katelyn Beaty, my editor, for prodding me into the depths, and drawing light out of the murk. to all the great and glorious souls who have kept me upright (mostly) these past couple years.

Broken Open: How Our Most Fragile Seasons Invite Us to Extravagant Love will be in bookstores in early february and, as is the way of the publishing world these days, you can pre-order it now:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Open-Fragile-Seasons-Extravagant/dp/1587437112

Baker Book House: https://bakerbookhouse.com/products/9781587437113_broken-open

for all my beloved friends of the chair, this is the first missive dispatched from substack, and i sure as heck hope this finds you. the behind-the-curtain wizardry is mostly beyond my comprehension, so i’ll just cross my fingers and hope. i’ll be back friday, our regularly scheduled programming, for another round of the chair. but this special announcement just begged to be told now. (and clearly i am finding my way here, because i have no idea how to make all these little buttons below line up in a neat little row…)

Leave a comment

Share

call me raggedy.

i am, at this turn in the world, the raggedy-est of raggedy souls. 

for the past four-and-a-half weeks, a sum total of thirty whole days, i’ve been holding my breath, pounding the keys, and aiming to quell the rat-a-tat-tat of my old little heart. i awake before 5, day after day, and tap till well after midnight—as long as the ghost has not given up on me.

it’s the plight of the writer on deadline (and i am starting to wonder if maybe perhaps i’m getting too old for this gig, though i can’t for the life of me imagine a life without the stringing of words into lines, into pages, complete with tables of contents).

there have been sentences to untangle, misplaced modifiers, and a bumper crop of commas where the yield should be leaner. and ideas—some of them big, some of them not so—to refine to their core.

all in all, i’ve been pushed to my depths. and then some.

it’s that book i found myself writing a winter ago, and now, at long last, 202 whole pages of it, have finally, finally been flung back to the editor with all copy-editing queries and scolds duly addressed. 

i cannot for the life of me remember a harder writing assignment, one that cut any closer to the bone than this one. 

and that, i pray, will make all the difference.

not much that’s worth saying comes easy.

i resisted at first, the idea of a book exploring the spiritual insights of cancer, when it first was dangled before my cognitive gears. i pushed it aside, dismissively and emphatically. i could barely tell a soul how deeply scared i’d become since i’d first heard of my cancer, so why in the world would i lift up that fear for all in the world to gawk at? 

but then a funny thing happened: a sisterly crew of glorious writers who i trust through and through read one or two essays, about the ways the cancer had opened my eyes and my soul, and insisted there might be something worth saying. 

what i was saying was that the scary prognoses i’d found every time i looked up my odd little cancer had propelled me into a spiritual depth that has proved most compelling. and stunningly calming, if calm is a word to be found in cancer’s vicinity. 

it’s a knowing that’s ancient, one that sages have been spouting about for ages and ages: our time here is fleeting, our purpose is certain. these are our days to get the job done. there is some urgency here.

cancer, quite curiously, has turned out to be my spiritual guide. has pointed me squarely toward the singular aims of my every last breath: to love and love deeply; to savor each morsel of living (both the light and the shadow); and, more than anything, to chisel my soul to its holiest possible iteration, the one i believe God imagined me to be. God imagines each of us to be. each in our own madcap, magnificent way.

if i have one single word to leave behind in this world, it might be a word—or maybe a string of words—found deep in the pages of the book that now has a name: it’s called broken open, and its one sustaining idea is that deep within our brokenness there lies wisdom and beauty. in all of us. i’ve no corner on that market. sometimes it takes being broken wide open to tap into those veins. 

now six books in, on a shelf with my name, i’ve learned a thing or two about filling a page with vials of neatly-arranged alphabet letters. i’ve had to work mightily: to muscle up my words, to scythe all the frills, and to surgically, surgically sharpen my thoughts. 

i think back to my earliest days in the newsroom, when the marvelous editor who hired me—the one who gave me the one-in-a-million chance to take a crack at news writing in the wake of a life devoted to nursing—used to spill gallons of bright purple ink on my printouts. she had a habit, as she tried to mold her flock of writers, of printing off the rough drafts of their stories, and poring over them with her signature purple pen. she was looking for bloopers and potholes. and she duly drew them to your attention with her marginalia the color of concord grapes.

i was, not so proudly, the queen of purple back then, the writer of prose tilting toward purple—prose that’s dripping with overwrought words, treacly and saccharine, an assault on the insulin pump. our beloved editor (sheila was her name, famous in newsrooms across the land, and often a reader here at the chair) tried mightily to purple it out of me. and maybe at last, 44 years after stepping into the newsroom, i’m beginning to get with the program. 

mostly i’ve spent the last thirty days cutting the fat, clearing the noise, plucking just the right word from the poetic universe. my aim was to pen the purest, clearest, most piercingly true telling of my story. the story of how having a good chunk of lung lifted out from under my rib cage has pointed me to timeless wisdoms and soulful epiphanies. and one or two thoughts that might be worth passing along.

i decided to spare few details, to not skip over the bumps in my past. i wrote of my fears, even the ones that scare me the most. i considered life when i was no longer. and i did not look away. 

when it came to the especially hard parts, where i told the whole truth, i had to take very deep breaths. and that’s why i’m raggedy now. 

but i cling to a knowing that’s proved to be true: we all, every one of us, work from a similar palette of struggles and pains. and if i can show you my bumps and my bruises, let you in on the unspoken unspooling of my scariest hours, then you just might find ballast when your life turns rocky too. or at least know you’re not alone. 

all my life long i’ve seen the beauty in brokenness. and what i want most is for you to see too. to believe it. to lift it up, and marvel—at the fact that despite our foibles and fumbles, despite the many steep hills in our way, we little humans somehow figure out how to muscle our way. along the way we laugh, we love, we weep. but, really, we’re in this together. all of us blundering along for as long as we’re here. and then, heaven only knows . . .

in the end, this is what i know about Broken Open, the book: i have taken the hardest part of my life (to date) and held it up to the light to say, “this is beautiful. behold it.” it is a life riven with cracks, now rivered in gold. just like the japanese kintsugi, the art of repair, which magnifies the beauty in brokenness. and fills in the cracks of the shattered vessel with radiant metals of gold or silver or copper.

thus, i might be raggedy, but i’ve tried mighty hard to pour a wee bit of ore into my cracks.

what’s the hardest thing you’ve done lately?

soon as i can, i’ll show you the cover. i am awaiting the signal from the people in charge. the ones who are daring to let me tell my epiphany story. 

p.s. happy blessed almost birthday to my beautiful and beloved A. xoxoxox

because we are not giving up on the america we believe in, the one that bears a very big heart, the one that can shoulder the world’s heavy load, the one whose muscles have always been fibered with heroes of human scale, the ones who wouldn’t get up, the ones who wouldn’t sit down, the ones who marched and meant it. the ones who died. 

and because we need a day to declare the glory of emancipation, an act of defiance, of faith, as ancient as there’s ever been. for we the species of greed seem to have long had a knack for stealing the liberties of those who might serve us, who might lighten our load. their own load, be damned. 

and because today, the nineteenth of june, juneteenth, is one such day, let us turn our attention to one for the ages: ms. rosa parks, a woman whose simple act—refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, even on pain of arrest—invigorated a movement that fundamentally changed american life. and whose story, over the years, has been diluted, made to be one with keynotes of pity, where truth be told she was all about grit. 

the story so often told of ms parks is that she was one tired soul, a seamstress who’d put in a long day’s work, when she boarded that bus in montgomery, alabama, in december of 1955. and that if not for her weary feet she might not have refused to get up from her seat where the white man wanted to sit. 

some have called that the Standard Rosa Parks Story, one that skimps on nuance and short shrifts the structural underpinnings of the civil rights movement, specifically the longstanding work of the NAACP, the national association for the advancement of colored people—the nation’s oldest such grassroots organization, founded in 1909, by a diverse, interracial corps of activists including W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells. critics of the oft-told version of rosa parks’ story would like us all to consider a Revised Standard Edition, which sets the story in more accurate context and illumination. (that edition, which i’m not outlining here, corrects a mistake and fills in an omission. you can read of it here.)

rosa parks herself rebutted the standard telling of her bus-seat story in her 1992 memoir: “people always say that i didn’t give up my seat because i was tired, but that isn’t true. i was not tired physically, or no more tired than i usually was at the end of a working day. i was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. i was 42. no, the only tired i was, was tired of giving in.”

what’s not argued is that ms. parks’ arrest that december day triggered a meticulously organized boycott of the entire montgomery bus system that lasted for 381 days. and that led to a supreme court ruling that, in 1956, expanded the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections, affirming that “separate but equal” had no place in public transportation—an evolution that culminated a decade later in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, dismantling state-sponsored segregation across all public spaces. 

the great nikki giovanni, a poet i have long loved, picked up on that course correction—specifically on the status of mrs. parks’ feet—in this poem i have always loved. she, too, ditches the notion that the seamstress was but a “tired old woman” and plants her squarely as a deliberate activist in a larger, justice-seeking movement. 

it’s a poem that begs to be read today, aloud or otherwise (i am always a sucker for a poem unfurled in a way that takes my breath away).  

there are many things to love about this poem; placing the pullman porters front and center, chief among the reasons. the whole sweep of Black history here makes for an aching, aching read. 

aches, i’ll argue though, are good for the soul. they’re what bulk up our empathies—and without empathy, what’s the point of taking up oxygen here on this rarest of planets? i love, too, how ms. giovanni winds us toward a waltz between the porters and mrs. parks. i love how they stand, arms linked, fending off cruelty and injustice. 

i am all in for rosa parks today. and the pullman porters. and the poets who bring them whirling to life on this nineteenth of june.

Rosa Parks

BY NIKKI GIOVANNI

This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said
they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago
Defender to the Black Americans in the South so they would
know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who
helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight
the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because
even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birth-
place of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The
Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the
Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both
the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would
know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled
when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954
when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “sepa-
rate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in
1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a
doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood
why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer
when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps
and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways
when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the
Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while
the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to
St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept
him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all
summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly
lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grand-
children on his knee telling them about his summer riding the
rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money,
Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unac-
ceptably murdered. This is for the Pullman Porters who, when the
sheriff was trying to get the body secretly buried, got Emmett’s
body on the northbound train, got his body home to Chicago,
where his mother said: I want the world to see what they did
to my boy. And this is for all the mothers who cried. And this is
for all the people who said Never Again. And this is about Rosa
Parks whose feet were not so tired, it had been, after all, an ordi-
nary day, until the bus driver gave her the opportunity to make
history. This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama,
who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the
moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods
aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in
Money, Mississippi, who had been so well protected by the
Pullman Porters, would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks
said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. No longer would
there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs.
Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system,
the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and
the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young
men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No. Great
voices would be raised singing the praises of God and exhorting
us “to forgive those who trespass against us.” But it was the
Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it
was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not
being able to stand it. She sat back down.

—Nikki Giovanni, “Rosa Parks” from Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. 

how will you sit back down or stand up and be counted, or not stay quiet, or refuse to acquiesce today?

in summer, when the windows’ optimal posture is open, i hear the birds at daystart. they warble their throats in the dark, not unlike the way we humans stumble to the bathroom, shove a toothbrush into our mouths, and begin the day with eyes half closed, foaming at the mouth.

the birds, specifically the red-breasted robin, like to get a jump on things. they seem to have selected—by some mysterious and far-off committee, i suppose—a start time of 4:30 a.m., roughly. very roughly. for that’s the hour when the first of the avian staccato, the chirp-chirp-chirp of the dawn, finds its way into my ears.

i rustle and rouse. feet soon planted on the ground (never too firmly these days; i am becoming of the wobbly variety), i follow the pre-ordained path: swipe my reading glasses off the bedside table (should i ever need to see in the dark, i suppose, is why i keep them there), stumble into the bath (i’ve explained that above), throw on the same clothes i wore yesterday (i am a creature of catholic school uniforms, i cannot seem to shake the habit). and then comes the good part, the part i love best: i shuffle down the stairs, and into the morning awake and alone. coffee is brewed (we still brew here, not having arrived into the coffee-pod era).

and that’s when i crank up what amounts to the family business: i lift the lid on the laptop, await its whistle and whir, and then i get to work. i type for a living. you witness it here.

of late i have been typing as many hours as i can stuff into a day. lights are out, usually but not always, by midnight. and you know when the start is. i pause for the occasional nibble. and a dunk in the pool. otherwise it’s all words all the time. i am in the penultimate throes of editing what’s turning out to be Book No. 6. and any day now, if i push hard enough through the next mornings-till-nightfall, i will whoosh it all back to the faraway editor and return to the business of breathing and living.

but i’m not there yet. there seems always to be another sentence to bolster. to untangle the inevitable grammarian knot. being of the nose-to-the-grindstone ilk (my father so ordained me decades and decades ago, warning me that keeping my nose ever to the grindstone was going to get me but one simple thing: a sharp nose), i can never quite fix things enough. so i keep at it; to be finished is wholly elusive.

and all of that is more or less why this morning i’ve no grand epiphanies to bring here to the table. i’ve simply been sharpening the instrument of my breathing, the one with the two little holes.

which brings me to the question i heard put to david sedaris the other week: “why write, david,” the inquisitor asked. why, oh why, has he tapped out enough words to amount to 16 books, hundreds and hundreds of (hilarious) essays, etcetera etcetera?

“to get better” is how he answered. and that answer, those three simple words, hit me right above my rather sharp nose. hard. with a thwop.

what better reason for living, for writing, for anything.

if you are a writer, to write to get better is the smartest thing in the world. also the smartest if you are, say, a garbage collector who lives to collect garbage. or a surgeon. (though, ideally, we humans in need of surgery should consider submitting only to those who’ve more or less gotten pretty good at their craft—their surgeoning, that is.)

“to get better” is also a very fine answer to the question of living. i realized it’s rather a koan. think about it: why do we get out of bed in the morning, plant feet firmly or not on the ground, and get about the business of whatever is our day? well, a fairly good reason is to get better at it. to put a bit of mindfulness to what otherwise might have been dawdling. wasting our days.

if we intend to live through another day—or hope to anyway—why not see if we can live just a little bit better today than yesterday? we could maybe be kinder. we could maybe listen more intently. we could take up a notch so many of the simple propositions that make us a human.

i have asked myself close to a million times why i insist on awaking with the birds on friday mornings and tapping out these missives. david sedaris, who has been writing every day since 1977, gave me my answer. i do it to get better. because better is always out of reach. and reaching is a mighty fine posture for living. maybe that’s why God gave us shoulders: so we could extend the bones from that socket and stretch our arms as far as they could—you got it—reach!

so as i slink away here, back to the tasks already piled onto the keyboard, i leave you with two simple queries (no need to answer aloud, these questions are meant simply to extend the conversation, to give you something maybe to ponder in the quiet and wonder of your very own beautiful mind):

what do you reach for each day? and where in your life do you try to get better?

sometimes when i get up early, i find i am not alone. say, yesterday, when i blearily looked out the back window and saw what seemed a mirage coiled under the trees in my garden. this sweet soul, who had apparently polished off a fine morning meal of every pansy in every pot in sight, reposed without making a sound. when i went out to visit her she paid me no mind. i might have been able to feed her from the palm of my hand. but then i thought, TICK!, and recoiled my hand. after making her promise not to partake of my so-called farmer plot (all herbs and zinnias this year), i bid her adieu and off she wandered. i’ve never seen her before, and she’s not out there now, so maybe (hopefully) she doesn’t like what my garden and i have to offer, and i’ll not have to shield my whole garden in reams and reams of plastic deer-protectant wrap.

the choreographies of heaven are beyond us. beyond me certainly. after ten long days (and i mean 5 a. m. to midnight, day after day) of nose to the grindstone, poring over every errant semi-colon, run-on sentence, and soul-dredging page of my very next book, the one on its penultimate spin through the book mill, i was feeling a bit queazy, and not unworried by the knot in my chest, right there in the spot where i imagined my heart might soon blow a gasket.

i was brought back to my senses, and my soul, by a bird. a wee little bird scared out of his wits. and right away in his trembling, feather-weighted being, i sensed some iteration of my own nervous affliction. we were, the two of us, a pair of overwrought, hyper-adrenalinized creatures. only he was the one with the wings. and i hadn’t yet lost my wits.

without pause, and per the moral code of my mother who taught us from the start never to leave a baby bird or wee squirrel or bunny in any degree of distress, i leapt to his rescue. and by the time the afternoon ended, i realized he’d rescued me.

here’s how i’d describe the holy unfolding:

the heavens vaulted open yesterday afternoon for the narrowest sliver of time, drew me in, and left me enchanted. and, as is so often the case, graced with a balm i hadn’t fully realized i’d needed. 

a baby bird’s heartbeat quivered against my bare palm, and as i released him to the wilds, after he’d found himself caged in the confines of our back porch, after he’d finally been freed and caught his breath on the grass (wings spread wide while he panted), and at last fluttered back to the bough where his mama had waited all afternoon, i felt a lift of my own heart and soul: i was suddenly rinsed of my own case of quivers. 

the little bird, a fledgling robin so newly sprung from the nest his breast feathers merely hinted at orange, had somehow flown into our screened porch, and could not for the life of him find his way out. his mama, i realized, was not letting him out of her sight, and squawked all afternoon from a branch just the other side of the porch screen. (who says love dwells only in the domain of the human?)

try as i might, i could not, could not steer the wee robin near the wide-open door. and my tenderest coaxing did no convincing (i must not speak bird). but after a while, amid all the fluttering, he up and disappeared. and i figured he’d figured it out. case closed.

but an hour or so later, the resident architecture critic (fresh from a many-hour tour of the obama presidential library center with its architects, tod williams and billy tsien) wandered into the house to divulge what he’d thought was late-breaking news: “there’s a bird stuck in the summer house,” said he (the summer house is the name long ago put to the plain old porch attached to our garage; little more than a realtor’s gussied-up label).

so out i trotted, and sure enough, the little fellow had come out of his hiding, and was banging his sweet little head and his soon-to-be redbreast again and again against the screen of the porch.

the poor thing was so quiveringly scared he nearly let me wrap my palms round him—seemingly so desperate even a human hand might be a welcome utensil.  i, though, was the one who chickened out, when i suddenly envisioned his sharp little beak pecking open my flesh. and the last thing i needed this week was a fresh case of bird-flu jitters. 

so i did what i’ve done in avian emergencies past: i leapt to the basement, praying no one had tossed out the now-ancient butterfly net, the one that works handily when trying to fetch a fledgling. a bit shabby after all these years (we acquired it three decades ago when the one who’s now professing law was an avid naturalist loping through make-believe woods in pursuit of mosaic-winged moths), the net was right where someone had left it years ago. 

fancying myself a latterday jane goodall, i loped up the stairs, out the door, and into the porch where the caged bird squawked. we played a little round of catch-me-if-you-can, but then at last, i got him!

gently, gently, i cupped him into the net, and then, while he and mama bird squawked in holy-hell unison, i delivered him to the grass, where disengaging him from the net proved a bit more of a challenge than either he or i had hoped. 

and that’s when i reached right in—bird-flu fears, be damned—and scooped his weightless little self into my palms and safely onto the grass. where first he sprawled, wings spread wide. and while i whispered sweet somethings his way, and tried to assure his mama that i was friend not foe, he finally caught his breath and fluttered away. 

the joy of their squawks—a swift change in tempo and tone from afraid to rejoice—i shall never forget.

last seen: mama and fledgling united again. side-by-side on the bough of crabapple tree. 

and with that, they flew out of sight, back to the playfields of heaven.

and i bowed to those heavens for once again drawing me into their currents, leaving me rinsed and bathed in the holy.

i am going to share a very long and deeply beautiful poem here. my beloved friend A sent this my way. i was so taken with the whole of it, and one line in particular, i tracked down the poet to ask if i might maybe use that line somewhere in the pages of my book, with all credit noted.

because the poet, matt moberg is his name, so knocked my socks off, and because his story is so triumphant, i am determined to spread the holy word. per his “about” page on his website, matt describes himself thusly: “[he] is a self-taught artist based in Minneapolis, whose journey into the world of art began as a means of staying alive. After years of struggling with addiction, Matt’s therapist suggested that when the cravings next come on, he should try art as a way of pushing back and saying no. Despite having no history in the field, Matt heeded his therapist’s advice and found new life through doing so.” mark’s drawings and poems are equally breathtaking. and i invite you to follow along….

I think every human being 
eventually has a moment
where they are standing outside in sweatpants
that have lost the will to be pants,
holding a trash bag, a divorce, a parking ticket,
or some other receipt from the universe
that says, “surprise, this too is part of it.”

And then the sky bruises purple.

And the air touches your face
like it knows your whole story.

And suddenly you realize:

all the real is actually unreal.

The dirt.
The breath.
The weird little bones in your hands.
The fact that we are here,
on a floating rock with pollen counts,
paying bills,
missing dead people,
loving living people
who say “leaving now”
while still fully naked and looking for socks.

And still,
the moon clocks in.

No applause.
No benefits.
No note from management saying,
“Great work being ancient and luminous again.”

Just the moon,
working nights
like a single mother with no applause,
packing silver lunches
for every dark thing
that still has to rise.

Tell me that isn’t holy.
Tell me there is a better word
than sacred
for the way light keeps returning
with no guarantee
we will actually stop and take note.

I know people who believe in therapy,
probiotics,
tarot,
twelve-step meetings,
manifestation journals,
and waiting exactly eleven minutes
before texting back
so they do not appear emotionally available,
even though their whole nervous system
is standing in the driveway holding flowers.

And underneath all of it,
every ritual,
every doctrine,
every smoothie with chia seeds,
the prayer is the same:

Please let me be loved.
Please let me be forgiven.
Please let this strange little life
mean something
before my lower back
submits its formal resignation.

What is going on?

For real tho—What is this place?

This unbearable tenderness
of being alive long enough
to watch steam lift from coffee in winter
like a soul practicing leaving.

To see your friend laugh so hard
they slap the table
as if joy is a mosquito
they are trying to kill.

To hear a child say “pisghetti”
and, for one shining second,
realize language
has finally been improved.

I know I already noted this in the first piece,
but the older I get,
the less use I have for certainty.

Certainty has never made me pull over
because the sunset looked like God
dropped a jar of peach jam
across the whole midwestern sky
and decided to be lazy
and not clean up.

Certainty has never made me gasp
at rain on hot pavement.

Certainty has never found me
in the cereal aisle,
holding Captain Crunch,
suddenly remembering
that everyone I have ever loved
was made from stardust,
hunger,
and a series of decisions
we probably should have slept on.

No.
It has always been awe.

Awe was the first church.

Before steeples.
Before committees.
Before men got involved
and started making rules about skirts.

Awe was there
with its wild hair
and muddy feet,
saying:

Look.
Look again.
Look until looking
becomes love.

Awe, and soup.

Awe, and someone rubbing your back
when you are sick.

Awe, and old couples at Target
arguing gently about avocados,
as if marriage is not one vow
but ten thousand errands
performed beside the person
who knows exactly
how you like the cart pushed.

Maybe gratitude
was never meant to sound elegant.

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Damn.
That woodpecker is trying
to beat that tree from itself.”

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Thank you, body,
for continuing to drag me through this world
despite the many slim jims 
I have done to you
at gas stations.”

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Thank you to the dogs
who lose their entire minds
when we come home
as if we have returned from war
and not Walgreens.”

For me, that might be my gospel.

That joy that does not wait for us
to be impressive but only needs us
to come through the door.

Because the truth is,
this life is devastating.

And ridiculous.

One minute you are 22 and invincible,
driving too fast,
eating gas station nachos
with the confidence of a Greek god.

The next minute you are googling,
“Can sneezing cause a hamstring injury?”
and the answer is,
apparently,
“Welcome to the second half of your life.”

But even now—

even tired,
even grieving,
even emotionally held together
by iced coffee, playlists,
and one very specific wolves hoodie—

we keep finding reasons
to stay soft.

We plant tomatoes
even though grief is real.

We bake bread
even though the news is on fire.

We send photos of the sky
to people we love
with captions like,
“LOOK,”
as if beauty is an emergency
and we are all volunteer firefighters.

We keep saying,
“You have to see this,”
because wonder
is the oldest form
of resurrection.

So here’s to the believers
and the atheists
and the agnostics
and the people whose entire theology
is just trying not to cry
in the DMV line.

Here’s to the people clinging to faith.

Here’s to the people clinging to Xanax
and oat milk
and the one group chat
where nobody pretends to be okay.

Here’s to the tender-hearted weirdos.

The accidental mystics.

The ones who can contemplate mortality
for six straight hours
and then become emotionally attached
to a perfect peach.

The ones who know
despair has a mouth,
but so does laughter.

May we never stop being drop-kicked by beauty
in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.

May we never become so polished
that we forget how to stand
in the Starbucks line of existence
with our dumb, gorgeous hearts open,
feeling the enormity of it all
rattle around in our bones
like thunder
looking for somewhere to laugh.

And may we remember:

whatever else this is,
whatever mess,
whatever miracle,
whatever cosmic group project
no one was prepped for—

all’ve it is astonishing.
that we are here.
that we have loved enough to be ruined.
that the moon keeps showing up.
that bread exists.

So pass it on.

Tear off a piece
with your bare hands.

Take it in as you take it down. 

And then go outside and look at that moon.
—Matt Moberg

before i go, this coming weekend is something of a national treasure occasion here at the chair, where two not one of the treasures are passing the birthday baton. neither one likes to be called out (a familiar trait here at the chair, where humility and quietude are coins of the realm), but both count among my first-level life savers, so blessed blessings to amy and to nan. i adore you both. always.

so much to wonder, so much to ponder: does any bit of the above stir you to pencil a thought? the bird rescue, the breathtaking poem, the blessings of june—pride month, juneteenth, the feast of all papas day?

by mid-morning the other day, after a lava flow of bumbling words had frothed from my mouth, after fumbling through apology and course correction that led me to nowhere, abruptly finding myself in a remarkable tizz, spinning wild and wildly into the cattails and weeds, i found myself yearning for an etch-a-sketch day.

that is: utterly drenched in your fallible, flailing, decidedly flappable self, you long to give a shake to the day, clear the screen, dispense with the scratch marks you’ve left in your wake, and start all over again. clean slate.

oh, that it were so doable. that our foibles were so very expungeable.

that we could erase our blunders, reset our starts.

my sins, such as they were, amounted to little more than worries let loose, a storm of what-ifs infusing and infecting an otherwise placid launch of the day. i feared, though, they might be contagious, that the someone to whom i was blathering might soon come down with a similar case of the shakes. and i loathed my frazzled old self for flinging my woes with such reckless abandon.

oh, to take a deep breath, a pure cleansing breath, and aim to be stalwart and steady afresh.

so it is, here in the land of the human. we are but an amalgam of shortfalls and bumbles, with only the occasional triumph to claim for ourselves.

and as much as we might drown in the muck of that unvarnished truth, there might be much more to the story.

consider the utterly human condition, our magnificent fallibility.

yes, magnificent.

lest the abrupt turn here catch you off guard, let me explain: it is against the backdrop of a papal encyclical (for me, who woke early monday to read it, the big news of the week) that i found myself catching a glimmer of something i’d only before seen as a shortfall. and therein is the beauty.

as chicago’s own father bob, aka Il Papa, Leo XIV, so lucidly put it, it is the very fact of our imperfection, our bruises and soft spots, that not only make for our lusciousness but give us our reason for being. we are here to work through the kinks. our majesty is in our not knowing, our awkward pauses in silence whilst the wheels of our brains gurgle and churn, sputter and eventually spew.

it’s this fleshed-out portrait of humanity that leo holds up against the blemishless facade of AI, the newfangled sphere where answers come swiftly (nay, instantaneously) and stripped of question or wonder or doubt. it’s the realm of the certain, the acquisitive grab of all recorded text, that produces, like a slice popped from a toaster, whatever you wanted to know about whatever you might have otherwise pondered and wondered. musing not wanted nor needed here.

and what’s lost?

cue the encyclical, paragraph 99, with special emphasis on the artificial that’s twinned with the intelligence:

“What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of ‘intelligence’ with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.”

we humans, his holiness goes on to note, are creatures who are “shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity.”

choices, mistakes, forgiveness, fidelity.

oh, the litany of all the above that has marked me and molded me, made me into the scarred, the limping, the daffy body and soul that i am. that we all are.

we needn’t erase any or all of that whom we are. we’ve all gotten here the bumpy way. the trial-and-error, the forgive-me-i’m-sorry, the let’s-take-it-from-the-top way.

we are born, all of us, without instruction manual (a fact that becomes alarmingly notable when handed a newborn outside the nursery, and told to figure it out as they point us toward the door). we bumble our way. we try, most days anyway, not to get in the way of ourselves. not to hurt those in our path. and certainly not the ones we love most.

we blow it. squelch opportunity. drop the ball. miss the mark. strike out. chicken out. fritz out.

we all have days we want to start all over again. moments we wish we could play in reverse. lines we’d do well to stuff back into our mouths. looks we wish hadn’t flashed ‘cross our faces.

but then we would be so artificial. so unmistakably automaton. our intelligence, really, would be poured from a jar. diluted with water, and stirred.

an efficient facsimile of some fraction of human.

in the end, upon actual brain-fueled consideration, i’ve come to conclude: i’ll take my days messy, mistake-y, and utterly fallible.

no need, after all, for the etch-a-sketch.

have you considered the ways your soft spots and bumps have made you more beautiful? as you look back across your life, do you see the dead ends and potholes as all part of the wonder?

here’s but one line from the encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, “magnificent humanity,” worthy of deeply human pondering, musing, meditation:

“Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others. Indeed, precisely because we experience limits—vulnerability, suffering and failure—we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.” 

and think not that moral complexity is at the heart of humanity. here again, a line from the encyclical worthy of long meditation:

“Even when persons dehumanize themselves and bring about tragedy, a small light continues to shine within humanity, one that can be rekindled, with God’s grace, along paths of conversion and reconciliation. As Viktor Frankl rightly observed, in moments of horror, ‘we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.'”