pull up a chair

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?

6 Comments

May 29, 2026

etch-a-sketch days

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.'”

10 Comments

May 22, 2026

the balm in gilead

the balm of gilead: in ancient, Biblical times, a resin derived from the buds of *Pistacia lentiscus*, or pistachio trees, found along the Jordan River

gulps of coffee fuel me this morning, groggy as i am from a near-crippling concoction of cough, cold, inhaling too much pollen, and the foolishness of staying up far too late to honor the last gasp of late night’s saving grace these past unfathomable years. i felt downright patriotic and duty-bound to stay awake and bid the nearly-midnight crew adieu.

after all, that late-night slot has all but saved me. over these long, long, oft-unbearable years, there’ve been so, so many days when the horrors and antics of washington have found me groping for the tonic of someone who might all but croon me a lullaby and tuck me tautly between the sheets—maybe, just maybe, chase away the monsters. someone who could bore into the core of the madness, call it out for what it is, and find a way to soothe our jangled, jagged nerves. or make us laugh before and as we wept about it.

first, they took away our brian williams, a gentle giant of old-school newscasting who, in the thick of years that straight off hit the skids with doomsday portraits of american carnage, then railroaded right along to ivermectin and bleach-in-our-veins prescriptions from the presidential podium, becalmed me at the 10 p.m. central-time slot. and now, they’ve snatched stephen right out from under us. the man could make me howl with glee at the mere cocking of his wicked eyebrow. and make me feel less a sinner for the dyspepsia the spewed inside me. “thou shalt not hate,” i repeat and repeat, trying oh-so-hard not to cross that God-drawn line.

so i stayed up. which my raggedy body says was stupid.

but, heck, i’d hoped my hero of the year—leo the fourteenth, Il Papa—might pop in, at least via vatican-city zoom. or some other heavenly-ordained teleportation.

all of which is to say, i should be curled asleep still. but the chair, the clarion call in my every friday morning for the last 1,018 fridays, stirred me from my slumber.

and all of which is to back boldly and clunkily into my preoccupation of the week: a book i can’t put down.

which is where we clear our throats, shake the sleep from our eyes, and dive in: this week’s musing . . .

in my backwards, upside-down, and oft off-kilter life’s syllabus, my self-guided and plenty-potholed quest to figure out a thing or two before signing off from this lifetime, my list of texts to absorb is (as you might surmise if you eyeballed the death-defying book stack beside my bed) dangerously, dauntingly, beyond measure.

pathetically, my ratio of books begun to books read through to the end is woefully skewed—conservatively hovering at roughly 1,000:1.

avid starter am i. resolutely failed finisher—guilty as charged.

rare is the book that holds me page after page, so enfolded in imagination or intellect i dare not distract myself with some other tome lazing around in one of the many, many stacks that punctuate this old house. thinking back across the last decade, annie dillard’s pilgrim at tinker creek was one. niall williams’ this is happiness, might have been the only other. a third is soon to be added to the triumphant short roster.

gilead, gosh darn it, has me held captive.

marilynne robinson’s 2004 pulitzer prize-winning “hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence” of a congregationalist minister, the reverend john ames, a late-in-life father who loves the quiet country life “from which he will soon part,” has me running up to my book-reading nook every chance i can snatch, and ferrying the dog-eared paperback hither and yon.

john ames is 76 when we meet him, long rooted in gilead, iowa, dwelling in the very parsonage in which he’s spent most of his many years, having grown up in that drafty, dreary house as his father—and grandfather—had both been ministers there in the “dogged little outpost” that is fictional gilead. straight off, we learn that ames, our protagonist, suffers from a failing heart, and believes his death is imminent. thus, he’s compelled to write a letter to his seven-year-old, late-born son (“the fruit,” as the new york times once put it, of ames’ recent marriage to a much younger woman).

ames’ first wife and baby daughter have died in childbirth, we learn, and so this son from a wholly unexpected late-in-life redemptive marriage is the singular focus of a father desperate to pack a lifetime of wisdom and lore into jottings and passages that stretch to 247 pages. written in episodic, diary-like entries, nearly stream of consciousness, unspooling generations of wisdoms and family stories, lest the son (whose name we never learn) be left with nothing of his father, it’s a book that leaves me gasping for its sublime beauties—both the literary and the theological.

it’s not every day i run across a tome of which it’s been said these things: “Robinson has composed a novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred). “One feels touched with grace just to read it.” (Washington Post). Mark O’Connell in The New Yorker wrote: “I have read and loved a lot of literature about religion and religious experience—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, the Bible—but it’s only with Robinson that I have actually felt what it must be like to live with a sense of the divine.”

no wonder i’ve slipped right in, and can’t bear to pull away. i too yearn to live that way, with a palpable sense of the divine, a God who brushes up against me—here, there, and anywhere.

in the very same way i’m drawn most deeply to poetry that comes at God not head-on but through the slant, the side window, so too with prose. what takes my breath away most, in just about any writing—fiction or non—is not when i’m klonked on the head but suddenly swept by a wind i feel but cannot see. “God-haunted,” the times put it. “bothered by God,” is how my friend joe the jesuit priest puts it. john ames’ “bothered” is my enlightenment.

truth is, i finally decided i had to read gilead because father joe (whose theology class, THEO 4300, “the question of God in a secular age,” i recently visited) admits when prodded that he has memorized nearly every word of it, can recite practically any passage from it. quite frankly, i was intrigued. flat-out curious. and i trust joe implicitly.

father joe, who wrote his doctoral dissertation at oxford on the theology and literature of robinson and virginia wolff, says robinson’s writing “reveals a deeply sacramental imagination.” in one of many essays he’s written about her, father joe argues that “robinson trains her readers in the discipline of spiritual attention. where is God’s grace operating in nature and in the ordinary ways humans love, disappoint and forgive one other?” father joe goes on to point out that “in her essay ‘Psalm 8,’ she writes, ‘i have spent my life watching not to see beyond the world,’ but ‘merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes… with all due respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.’ the miracle we await in Advent is not distant, but meets us in the messiness of our human relationships: Emmanu-el, God with us.”

spiritual attention, i suppose, is my core curriculum. urgently so. especially now, when the godless world works so very hard to pull me—pull us all—under its light-blocking curtain. (and when i so desperately need my late-night tonic, now pulled off the shelf.)

a deep dive into gilead, into robinson, was the surest balm i could find this week.

here’s just some of what i’ve pulled from my latest excursion into this well-upholstered rabbit hole. . .

here’s where we begin, the book’s first passage, john ames addresses his sweet little son:

and while plenty of lines have left me reaching for a vat of highlighter yellow, here’s but one:

describing his love for iowa’s landscape, ames writes: “I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.”

or the snippets of poetry posing as passing descriptions…

in one of ames’ passages, he sees his grandfather as “a wild-haired, one-eyed, scrawny old fellow with a crooked beard, like a paintbrush left to dry with lacquer in it.” or, describing him further, the old man seemed “stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn’t actually sleeping.”

when i step back and wonder why i spend so, so many hours of my life with my nose proverbially and literally stuck in a book, it’s to stumble across a line like this next one, one that just might set the mortar of the bricks that herringbone my path

ames recalls that “Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. ‘He will wipe the tears from all faces.’ It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.”

and there is good company in the gilead fan club:

barack obama, who awarded robinson a 2012 national humanities medal, counts gilead as one of his favorites. in september, 2015, in what’s been noted as “a reversal of journalistic convention,” the 44th president of these united states interviewed robinson on a stage in des moines, for the new york review of books, and told her:

I first picked up Gilead, one of your most wonderful books, here in Iowa. Because I was campaigning at the time, and there’s a lot of downtime when you’re driving between towns and when you get home late from campaigning. … And I’ve told you this—one of my favorite characters in fiction is a pastor in Gilead, Iowa, named John Ames, who is gracious and courtly and a little bit confused about how to reconcile his faith with all the various travails that his family goes through. And I was just—I just fell in love with the character, fell in love with the book …

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.” — Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

an excerpt, john ames (via robinson’s pen) writing of his church at dawn (pages 70-71):

It’s a plain old church and it could use a coat of paint. But in the dark times I used to walk over before sunrise just to sit there and watch the light come into that room. I don’t know how beautiful it might seem to anyone else. I felt much at peace those mornings, praying over very dreadful things sometimes — the Depression, the wars. There was a lot of misery for people around here, decades of it. But prayer brings peace, as I trust you know.

In those days, as I have said, I might spend most of a night reading. Then, if I woke up still in my armchair, and if the clock said four or five, I’d think how pleasant it was to walk through the streets in the dark and let myself into the church and watch dawn come in the sanctuary. I loved the sound of the latch lifting. The building has settled into itself so that when you walk down the aisle, you can hear it yielding to the burden of your weight. It’s a pleasanter sound than an echo would be, an obliging, accommodating sound. You have to be there alone to hear it. Maybe it can’t feel the weight of a child. But if it is still standing when you read this, and if you are not half a world away, sometime you might go there alone, just to see what I mean. After a while I did begin to wonder if I liked the church better with no people in it. . . .

In the old days I could walk down every single street, past every house, in about an hour. I’d try to remember the people who lived in each one, and whatever I knew about them, which was often quite a lot. . . . And I’d pray for them. And I’d imagine peace they didn’t expect and couldn’t account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams. Then I’d go into the church and pray some more and wait for daylight. I’ve often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.

Trees sound different at night, and they smell different too.

and here, robinson reading robinson…

where did you find balm this week?

11 Comments

May 15, 2026

the question of happiness

jane got me started. jane kenyon, the poet. she’s the one who got me thinking here.

but before i bring jane into this conversation, a conversation sparked by one of her poems, this one titled simply “happiness,” i feel compelled to consider the case of happiness, the subject dragged squarely into our attention.

happiness, i fear, has been shoved to the back of the pursuit shelf (it was a founding pursuit, after all) as it seems to have taken on hallmarkian gauze. it’s blurred at the edges. and if it were a color, it might be some sort of bubblegum pink. it’s joy lite, watered down, saccharine—or so it seems, in this dark historical moment.

it might seem an out-of-reach luxury. what with bombs dropping from skies, drones the latest iteration of lethal birds. who has room for bubble-generator happiness when dread is the common denominator?

i’m going out on a ledge here: i’ll guess i’m not alone in claiming it essential, life-sustaining, worthy of our attention. it’s the active-dry yeast in our days that just might keep us from collapse. rains down out of nowhere, quite oft; dissolves just as quickly.

at simple glance, i’ll concede, it might seem, well, silly.

joy, its elder sister, worthier of pursuit, perhaps. a bit more dignity there. never mind ebullience—a whole other rainbow, happy on steroids, so happy your toes start to wiggle.

we’re talking happiness, pure and simple here.

and that’s where jane comes in. jane, the poet laureate of new hampshire when she died in 1995, at 47 of leukemia, seized that ephemeral quiver, and did the hard work that poets do: she aimed to put words to it. reached for moments that just might capture it. opened her voluminous soul to allow you, too, to peek in. to understand what she was talking about. to grasp, even for a moment, that happiness—especially in the darkest of times—will always be wafting just beyond the margins, out of sight, seemingly out of reach. and then, kaboom! in it will ride on the breeze. tickle us deep down in that joy-registering station. the one where suddenly we realize we are not alone, and not in the dark.

happiness, she makes us think, just might be mightier and more imperative than we imagine. than we’ve cheapened it to seem.

if you’re of the God-believing ilk (and i’ve made it rather clear here that i am), i wonder if that fleeting stirring of the heart or soul, that sense that for a minute there someone cranked the burner and the chemistry inside has suddenly changed, i wonder if it’s a mistake to call it merely happiness. maybe, more aptly, it’s a moment of God. maybe the God we try and try to define, to understand, to see in living color, maybe God comes sometimes in the cloak of a tickling joy, another name for plain old, pedestrian, under-sold happiness.

i wonder if, sometimes, the ineffable, ephemeral, mysterious God drops in, out of the blue, draws us into the swift-running river of radiant light, gives us a dunk, before dropping us back on the sandy bank, uncertain of what’s just happened. and all we know to call it is happiness. but really it’s more. so, so much more.

i’ll let jane take her crack at this; see if you see what she means. maybe she will convince you.

Happiness

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon,
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.

It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

+ Jane Kenyon

happiness, she makes clear (rather than argues), is one of life’s glues. it’s on its own clock, plays by its own rules. it might lie in wait: ready to leap out from the geranium pot you found on the bargain shelf; lurk in the email that arrives out of the blue, the long lost college friend you’d thought had forgotten you. happiness, i know, comes in rooms filled with cancer. and just as surely drifts into the grocery store checkout line. it doesn’t seek invitation (and just as blithely ignores our most ardent invites, the times we’re down on our knees begging and pleading). happiness, often, is one short splice from the ever-after reel. extended play is not in its repertoire.

maybe its beauty, its levity comes from its uncharted choreography. it comes and it goes, all of its own accord. and it surely never stays long. but it peeks from just around the corner every once in a while. while enough to make us sense it might be out there; lurking. worthy of pursuit, after all.

happiness—fleeting, sometimes forgotten—is what keep us from crumbling. a pinch of it here, a dab there. its work is beyond proportion. not unlike salt, another life-sustaining grain, happiness, no matter how sparse, just might save us. and, surely, it’s worthy of our keenest attention.

that faint quiver of heart: be on the lookout.

it just might be God, in yet another disguise.

where do you find happiness? can you describe it?

jane kenyon dwells among my innermost circle of poets. i sat in her house once, the white clapboard house at eagle pond farm in new hampshire; swapped letters with her late great husband, the poet donald hall. her poems, pouring from the pen of a daughter of the heartland, rattle me in their stripped-bare simplicities, their unadorned arrows. she takes my breath away with lines so clear they settle forever in my vernacular: “otherwise,” “let evening come”. . .

in case you’re still here, and willing to ride along for a bit of a binge, a few things:

this marvelous short film from friends at the SALT Project, where we hear jane reading her poem, “otherwise” . . .

this link to a short bit of consideration of her most well-known poems.

and this fascinating article from Reformed Journal (self-described as “meaning open, curious, progressive, more interested in building bridges than walls, while still standing in the historical line of Christian orthodoxy”) exploring Jane’s work, where i found these few grafs worth a copy and paste:

Finding God

Jane Kenyon was born (23 May 1947) and raised in rural Ann Arbor, across the road from a working farm, attending a one-room schoolhouse for the elementary grades. She enjoyed the rural upbringing; her imagination flourished in the pastoral setting. Especially, then, her stays at Grandmother Kenyon’s large boarding house in downtown Ann Arbor posed a strange and dangerous world. At Grandmother’s boarding house, young Jane’s imagination took an unexpected turn. One day, after Jane helped Grandmother collect trash from the University of Michigan students’ rooms, they marched down to the basement incinerator. Recollecting the scene in an unfinished essay, “Childhood, When You Are in It,” Kenyon wrote, “As we worked, Grandmother talked about hell, a lake of fire, burning endlessly, or about the Second Coming of Christ, which would put an end to the world as I knew it.” Fearful thoughts for an eight-year-old child.These thoughts didn’t leave her. In her poem “Staying at Grandma’s,” Kenyon wrote:

“You know,” she’d say, turning
her straight and handsome back to me,
“that the body is the temple
of the Holy Ghost.”

The Holy Ghost, the oh, oh. . .the uh
oh, I thought, studying the toe of my new shoe
and glad she wasn’t looking at me.

Religion at Grandmother’s house was comprised of rooms full of theological horrors and restrictive rules.

Partly rebellious by nature, and partly aware of her own capacity for wrongdoing, young Jane simply went home and announced that she was done with religion forever. Her adamancy persisted while she was a student at the University of Michigan during the 1960s, but since it was a trait of that era to test all things, for good or bad, Kenyon decided to give religion one more try. She attended a Unitarian church one Sunday morning, and left convinced of the correctness of her youthful choice.

Having married poet Donald Hall in 1972, Kenyon moved in 1975 with her husband to his ancestral farm in New Hampshire. The enterprise was not without risk. Hall gave up his position and benefits as a literature professor at the University of Michigan; Kenyon gave up a lifetime tied to Ann Arbor for a new culture. Just how quickly that culture encroached upon them became evident one Sunday morning when Hall suggested they attend South Danbury Christian Church. One might call it a social obligation–friends and family would expect to see them there. Nonetheless, by Kenyon’s recollection, minister Jack Jensen, referred to Rilke, and something stirred in her. She sought advice from Jensen, and he pointed her first to the early mystics–Julian of Norwich, St. Therese, and others–then to the gospels. Soon she and Hall were involved in Bible studies. The “little rebel” as she once called herself, bowed down at the altar of the Christian Trinity.

Faith and Art

Kenyon’s Christian belief, however, would be sorely tried in the remaining years before her death on 22 April 1995 of leukemia. Bouts of acute bipolar depressive disorder that had hounded her since her youth, and then the physical toll of fighting off cancers, first of her salivary gland and then of leukemia, exacted their physical, psychological, and spiritual toll. How can one begin to understand the remarkable interplay of both the joys and trials of her life and also the crisp honesty of her art? Two things help us.

From her earliest lines, Kenyon devoted herself to the lyric poem, searching for what she called “the luminous particular.” The aim of the lyric poem is to take an event or experience of particularly impressive quality upon the poet, but to craft it with such telling detail, crisp language, and physicality of imagery that the reader feels this is his or her poem. The reader enters and owns it, rather than the poet simply declaring. The poem thus requires absolute honesty and exacting care by the poet.

the article goes on, but this is the gist i wanted to leave here, at the ol’ maple table…..

blessings on you this week….

love, bam

4 Comments

May 8, 2026

the comings-and-goings house: a mother’s prayer come tumbling true

the census at this old house shifts daily of late. a sliding scale of up to four, oft measured in half-drained glasses on the counter, beds unmade and sorta made. pantry shelves are raided in the middle night. and late-night laughter rises, swirls, up the stairs and round the bend, certain as the steam from a pasta pot. that laughter lands, every time, right where it belongs: tap-tapping on the chambers of my heart—no matter how deep i am in my very own dreamland. no dream comes sweeter than the bellow of boys, brotherly boys, from down below.

this old house is playing out its second act in way-station ways. boys come, boys go. one gets a fever and the aches; we scoop him up and bring him here: gingerale and saltines are best doled out by good ol’ mama. the other boy, the professorial one, is in the thick of putting down midwestern roots, back in the heartland after so, so many years away. and this old house is just the place to plop your duffle down whilst you re-acclimate to the city of your birth (and shop for your own places to call home).

in real-time, i hear just how the date unfolded, how the phone call went, and who makes whom laugh aloud. and i am there to wake someone with a kiss instead of a phone call when i’ve been asked to be sure that someone is awake by 9 a.m.

just this week, with my bespectacled fellow off and faraway, i’d thought i just might find myself amid a stretch of days where i alone dwelled here. where i might slather my face with goo, and not feel the urge to hide. or serve a mixing bowl of lettuce leaves and call it “dinner.” or plug in the vacuum at dawn cuz that’s when the spirit stirred me. but then one boy got sick, and the other snared a date. so the arithmetic this week never equalled one, and now is back to three. with four soon on his way.

i couldn’t wish it any other way.

random glasses, messy rooms, be damned!

two januaries ago, when i was feeling especially afraid, and on the brink of highly fragile ice, i prayed with all my heart for one more birthday candle to extinguish with my semi-feeble lungs. and what i really meant, and what i really wished, was the deepest prayer i know: dear God, let me be around to catch a few more episodes of Growing Boys: The Sequels.

in a rapids-rush the likes of which would make the colorado river run green with envy, that wish (plus one more candle since) has come oh-so-surely true. i get dizzy thinking all that’s come and gone since that cold, cold winter’s day. the fear of losing me, truth be told, prompted boy one (the professor) to pick up the phone and plot his way back chicago way. (think not that it was anything short of soul-testing and against plenty odds to earn a full-time tenure track slot as a law professor at a pretty darn-good law school within a two-hour drive of home sweet home.) and boy two has more or less called on me to join him in the journalism trenches, as he plies his gift for seeing to the pulsing heart of every story but finds himself in need of chief copy editor and fixer of misplaced commas.

not a day, not a phone call, not a late-night dash downtown, passes by without me praising the holy heavens, dumb luck, or pure fat chance for bequeathing me these moments to slip like precious beads on the rosary string i call my life.

if we’re here on earth to learn to love, to love in the holiest, humblest way possible, the way that makes our life just one little tool trying to turn the crank toward a universe of radiance, then for me there’s no tougher school, no steeper curriculum than to be in the very trenches of life with the lives i’ve labored through and birthed. they demand more of me than i ever knew was in me. they look to me to put my hoity-toi teachings into real-life practice. and should i slip up, should i prove to be a preacher of empty aspirations and hypocrisies, they’d be the first to know. and i’d be rightly crumpled.

my boys keep me honest. my boys keep me true. my boys, my boys . . .

i fall to my knees in eternal forever thanks. i know full well the due, the bliss, the wonder—the flat-out miracle—of the two who call me mama. and with all my soul, i know: the gift this mothering day is mine.

my mama, bless her, is very much here. and, truth be told, yearning to go “home.” when i miss her, which is often, i motor over to where she lives (a mere nine minutes away), and—truth again—i often don’t find her there. she is off “at programs,” the curiosities and delights that animate her day. or populate it anyway. she might be listening to a book, or sunning herself in the adirondack chairs out front, or out on one of her circumnavigations around the acreage. if i can’t track her down, i leave her notes. i leave her ice creams in her freezer, and the short litany of things she hungers for: cheese and crackers, clementines, the tall bottle she keeps under the kitchen sink.

but so many i know miss their mamas. and lucille clifton, a poet i hold close to my heart (in keeping with the lines below, i should say i hold her close to my bosom, but i don’t have much of that, so the term is rather lost on me; it’s aspirational at best. and once upon a time i must have wished for a bosom, the sort my grandma had, though those days now are long gone and far away). i love that God here is “antic.” i love that the mama lucille yearns for is the one from half her life ago. i love the whole sensual tableau into which lucille invites us. her song, her scent, the scratch of her wild hair. it’s a moment still in reach. how wild, the human mind, the capacity to reach deep into the long-ago, to bring it near to life. no AI robot will ever ever do that for us. score one for humanity. in all its messy glories.

here is lucille clifton for all of us, but especially for the ones who miss their mama on this mother’s day upon us…..

“oh antic God”

oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties
leaned across the front porch
the huge pillow of her breasts
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.

I am almost the dead woman’s age times two.

I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams
at night. return to me, oh Lord of then
and now, my mother’s calling,
her young voice humming my name.
—Lucille Clifton

inspired by lucille, here’s my mama from long-ago and not so long-ago. as my mama adds numbers to her years, her strength, her immutable strength is what looms at the fore. i love how deeply deeply present she has always been for me and my boys. my boys who love her so….

love you, mama. xoxo

p.s. i got a peek just yesterday at what will be the cover of my next book, a book whose title is Broken Open. i wish i could show you the two choices, but they’re under wraps till one makes the final cut. it all makes the book very, very real feeling. and i was duly blown away by the two choices. one made me cry. i am guessing that will be the one we pick.

who are the blessed mothers in your life, and what indelible lessons or stories are you remembering this mama day….??

12 Comments

May 1, 2026

dr. blanche’s blessed-be challah

the dentist’s chair is the last place in the world i’d think to find enlightenment (especially since i’m not of the Whitening School). but then dr. blanche walked in.

dr. blanche is orthodox. and the first such dentist who’s tended to my teeth while fully decked out in tzniut, the traditional, modest garb of orthodox women, clothing that covers collarbone, elbows, knees, and hair, a Talmudic instruction derived from the biblical injunction to “go discreetly with God,” (Micah 6:8) a line itself worthy of deep pondering in this age of bombastic self-amplification.

but back to dr. blanche. we got to talking (not easy when instruments and hands are inside your mouth.) and in that effortless way that often unfolds, our conversation soon swirled from talk of office management (which dentist worked which days) to how she’s out of office every friday, to Shabbat itself. that’s when i asked if she spent the day cooking, getting ready for the most blessed of holy days, the one that comes at sundown every friday. and that’s when she effused.

“i love cooking,” she said, sparks of joy nearly splashing me and my eye-protecting goggles. “and i love baking. i bake all my bread and challah.”

and that’s when we stood at the edge of the enlightenment to come.

she told me how she makes five pounds of challah dough on fridays. and she told me how making challah—the bread to be blessed at the start of the Sabbath meal, along with the lighting of the candles, and the blessings for the light and the cup of wine—is, in her kitchen, and in every orthodox kitchen, a prayer.

prayer upon prayer, actually. a prayer for every step, and every simple foodstuff, in the making of the blessed bread.

the holiness of sustenance; the sustenance of holiness.

she began to explain: for every ingredient, the flour, the sugar, the salt, the yeast, the egg, the oil, the water, there is a blessing. a sacred pause, and an intertwining of earthly and divine.

each ingredient imbued with sacred purpose.

while sifting flour, she prays for her own soul, to sift out the stumbling blocks that distance her from the radiance she is meant to be, and to amplify the positive, the beauties breathed into all of Creation at our beginnings.

as she measures out the sugar, she prays, not surprisingly, for a sweetness to infuse her being. “to always be able to love.”

as she adds two tablespoons of salt, she asks God to help her know how to set limits in her life, to find balance, between her own needs, her work, and the needs of her family. (she has four kidlets—so far. . .)

and so it goes: dry yeast (happiness, protection, joy); oil (strength, grace on all the world); water (faith, unity); eggs (fertility, and blessing in all she does).

the prayers themselves are beautifully unfolded, and by the time she’d recited the prayer for salt i was in tears, and nearly elevating from the cushy dental chair.

in a world that each morning shatters me with its headlines, its vitriol and violence, its toxic spew of hate, of lies, false idols, i lay (mouth wide open) beneath a prayerful soul who found the very stuff of bread and life a sacred ground for prayer.

i couldn’t stop the tears. nor the sense of awe at how the sacred so caught me by surprise, how it’s ever pulsing in the places where we’d least expect it. how it comes just when we think we might have whirled forever away from the penumbra of its light.

in the kosher kitchen of a woman bent in prayer and kneading.

oh, holy God, You astound me.

can you imagine what it means to bite into that sweet soften golden braid, one so infused with so much goodness? have you imagined, ever, sifting prayer into that which you knead, allow to rise, and put to the heat of the oven?

it is in the simple kitchen rhythms, a geometry of circles and parabolas, in the chemistry and physics of yeast + sugar + water = rise, that a whole league of women round the globe infuse with simple prayers.

i found it nothing less than stirring, i found it deeply ennobling. and i might borrow those very measures for my own ministrations at the cookstove.

the world we know is all but begging for our prayers in whatever nooks and crannies we might stir them. even in the whole-grain slice i’ll soon be popping in the toaster.

here is dr. blanche’s recipe and prayers:

a note: Hashem is the name for God in more conversational terms; it simply means “The Name,” as utterance of God’s most sacred name is reserved for the most sacred time and prayer.

she begins, per the recipe she printed out for me: When you make Challah you are partners with Hashem!!

Pray:

Thank you Hashem for all the blessings you have given me and my family. Thank-you for always protecting us and doing what is best for us.

Please Hashem help me …..It is an “Et Rratzon” (an opportune time) to connect with Hashem.

5lbs. of lbs. flour: While sifting the flour, pray; Please Hashem help me to separate the good from the bad ,help me to get rid of my negative character traits and my Yetzer Hara, help me to focus on the positive and incorporate positive character traits just like I am doing with sifting the flour.

14tbs. of sugar: As you add the sugar, pray; Please Hashem, help me to have a sweet din(judgement) help me to have Ayin Tova ( a good eye) help me and my family to have a sweet life, to always be able to love. Help me to help others and to do chesed (acts of loving kindness).

2 Tbs. of salt: As you add the salt around the flour, pray; please Hashem help me to know how to set limits in my life, how to balance my own needs, my work and my family life. Just like you made our bodies rely on salt for existence allow me to work for purposes of our existence as well. Yet just as overdoing salt is detrimental to us, so too allow me to know when my work is sufficient and to take proper rest and rejuvenate.

3 or 4 packages of dry yeast: Create a hole in the center of the flour in the bowl that you have all the above ingredients in. Then in a separate bowl, add the packages of yeast, 2 more tablespoons of sugar and 1 cup of warm water. When it begins to bubble, add the yeast mixture to the larger bowl with the hole in the center of the flour. Pray: help me to have simcha (happiness) in my home, in my life. Grant us your protection (as yeast in Hebrew is called shimarim which translates to protection) now and always. Please Hashem, allow me to feel joy for others as well. Bless me with tranquility, inner peace so I can continue doing mitzvot.

1/2 cup of oil (I prefer olive oil): Bless us in with good health always. Help us to recognize that everything comes from your hands. All our blessings come from you as well as our hardships. Help us to grow stronger from the hardships and appreciate all that you have blessed us with. Let us be zoche (merit) to see the geula (redemption) and the anointment of Mashiach with oil (shemen hamishcha) speedily in our days amen!

4 and 1/2 cups of water (add more if you need to for the dough to be elastic): as you add the water and knead by folding the dough over and over, pray: Please Hashem help me to connect to you, strengthen my emunah (faith) in you. Help me to connect to the Torah which you blessed us with. Help me to connect to your children and to everyone around me. Help us to have unity among one another and thereby connect to you as you stand for unity. (water, is a connector, it is a key ingredient to life sustenance).

Making challah, or any bread for that matter allows us the women to make tikun on the sin of Chava. By completing the process of challah (bread) baking, we are in essence allowing our neshamot( souls) to feel complete and whole again.

3 eggs (optional): if you add the eggs continue to mix it into the bowl and pray: Please Hashem as this egg represents fertility, so too help me and my children to be blessed with fertility. Help everything I do with my hands to have beracha and remain fertile always.

Most importantly thank you for the life you blessed me with. I realize that this egg is a reminder of my humble beginnings, thereby help me to feel this humility always.

After completing the process of kneading, cover the dough with a large paper towel and a regular towel over that. Allow it to rest for an hour or more to rise.

It is tremendous mitzva for anyone to separate or “take” the challah. Many have the tendency to allow: a woman who is not married yet, to do this mitzvah, so she may find her spouse with ease. You can allow a woman who did not have children yet to separate the challah so she can have children in this merit. Some separate the challah in the merit of certain individual/individuals for refuah shelema (complete healing). Whatever the reason now is a great time to pray for any personal needs you may have as well as anyone else’s needs.

“Taking challah”—pinching off a ball of dough, roughly the size of a ping pong ball, a re-enactment of the temple sacrifice, and a burning in the oven—tells us that whatever we are given is not for our use alone. If we have wisdom, money or good health, our first step is to put them towards a Divine purpose.

Now you are ready to complete the mitzvah of challah. Married women, please cover your hair and make this beracha (blessing):

“May it be Your Will, Eternal, our G-d, that the commandment of separating challah be considered as if I had performed it with all its details and ramifications. May my elevation of the challah be comparable to the sacrifice that was offered on the altar, which was acceptable and pleasing. Just as giving the challah to the Kohein in former times served to atone for sins, so may it atone for mine, and make me like a person reborn without sins. May it enable me to observe the holy Sabbath (or Festival of…) with my husband (and our children) and to become imbued with its holiness. May the spiritual influence of the mitzvah of challah enable our children to be constantly sustained by the hands of the Holy One, blessed is He, with His abundant mercy, loving-kindness, and love. Consider the mitzvah of challah as if I have given the tithe. And just as I am fulfilling this mitzvah with all my heart, so may Your compassion be aroused to keep me from sorrow and pain, always. Amen.”

how do you weave prayer into your everyday?

16 Comments

April 24, 2026

paean to the poets, and to those who planted poetry’s seeds in us

*woodland* *bouquet: bluebell, viburnum, brunnera*, *flowering crab*

in the house where i grew up, poetry was never far away. poetry was my mother’s native language. she awoke us with it. and recited it when we were sick in bed. she spoke of emily and hopkins as if both were neighbors down the lane who’d saunter by for tea and verse. amid especially harried afternoons, when the quintet of us were driving her mad, she’d tuck herself away in the living room and declare it off limits as she lit her rare cigarette, and cracked open a tome of poem after poem. indeterminate time later, she emerged resuscitated—by rhyme scheme or distance away from us, we never did discern (nor did it matter to us dare-not-trespass peepers who kept close and curious watch through the crack of the kitchen door).

most memorable of all perhaps (at least to my wee mind), was the occasional sunday morning recitation of lines i’ve long since etched into my heart’s smooth fibers. while missing sunday mass was never an option, the renegade in my mother was known to let loose sotto voce emily D’s rebellious defense of liturgical absence: “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – / I keep it, staying at Home – / With a Bobolink for a Chorister – / And an Orchard, for a Dome —”

so much of who my mother is is captured in those twenty-five words. therein lies the supernatural capacity of any poem that echoes across the landscape of our lives.

and yet, never did i imagine that grown-up me would so embrace my mother’s poetic passion. in a house where words and wit were play things, and my father’s witticisms kept us on our toes, it seems my mother’s way with words is the one that snuck in sideways. and stuck firmly to my ribs. to this day, it shakes me to my rafters.

i am drawn to the ineffable, the liminal, the say-it-slant; i am drawn to the knowing that fills in the silence, the epiphany barely glimpsed in passing. i ache to grasp the depths and heights that crowd the wordless void.

or, as my muse maria popova once wrote: “language is not the content of thought but the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking, afloat on the current of feeling and time. when the vessel becomes too small to hold what we pour into it, language spills into poetry. in this respect, poetry serves the same function as prayer: to give shape and voice to our unspoken and often unspeakable hopes, fears, and inner tremblings — the tenderest substance of our lives, to be held between the palms and passed from hand to compassionate hand.”

as the hallmarkian labeling of april as poetry month* (see below) is all but wrapped for the year, i thought i’d plop a few poetic musings here on the make-believe maple table, all snipped from my commonplace source, as a way of holding poets, poetry, and poetics up to the flickering light.

this, then, is my ode to the awe and wonder that propels each and every line of poetry, and its power to catapult us into that which cannot be contained in any string of prose. herewith, a litany of poets (and a rare scholar) on the great work and mystery of poetry:

jane hirshfield: “Poetry's work  is the clarification  and magnification  of being.”

billy collins: “all babies are born with knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. then, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us.”

robert ultimo, a classics scholar who has taught the art and science of writing for the last quarter century, and now twice weekly sends brilliant missives via his Writing Smartly blog, put it pithily: “Prose wants to describe the husk, but poetry wants the seed.”

ralph waldo emerson: “For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.”

marie howe: “poetry holds . . . what can’t be said. It can’t be paraphrased. It can’t be translated. The great poetry I love holds the mystery of on being alive. It holds it in a kind of basket of words that feels inevitable. There’s great, great, great prose, gorgeous prose. You and I could probably quote some right now. Poetry has a kind of trancelike quality still. It has the quality of a spell still.

“I mean, maybe the first poem was a lullaby a woman sang to her child, the incantatory, “Everything is OK, everything is OK, everything is OK. I’m here, go to sleep.” Or we prayed for rain, or we thanked the Gods for the corn, or we sang to the deer we were going to catch. But it’s interrelational. It’s incantatory. It feels as if its roots can never wholly be pulled out from sacred ground.”

t.s. eliot: “the great poet . . . should perceive vibrations beyond the range of ordinary men [and women], and be able to make [them] see and hear more at each end than they could ever see without [the poet’s] help. … It is therefore a constant reminder to the poet, of the obligation to explore, to find words for the inarticulate, to capture those feelings which people can hardly even feel, because they have no words for them; and at the same time, a reminder that the explorer beyond the frontiers of ordinary consciousness will only be able to return and report to his fellow-citizens, if he has all the time a firm grasp upon the realities with which they are already acquainted…

“The task of the poet, in making people comprehend the incomprehensible, demands immense resources of language; and in developing the language, enriching the meaning of words and showing how much words can do, he is making possible a range of emotion and perception for other men, because he gives them the speech in which more can be expressed.”

eavan boland, the great Irish poet, once said: “Poetry begins where certitude leaves off.”

and let us close with christian wiman, who gets the last but not final word: “Let us remember … that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.”

i brought the woodland to my mama, who over the decades has brought so, so much to me….not least, poetry. . .

are you inclined to poetry, or are you more cozy inside prose? either way, who sparked the earliest such seeds in you, and when do you first remember them sprouting?

*about that poetic designation: should you be even a tad curious about how it is that the fourth month of the gregorian calendar found itself with the appellation national poetry month, the chair comes lurching to the rescue: twas the decision in 1996 of the academy of american poets who chose it for a host of reasons, not least being a poetic bit of playful towel-snapping contra to t.s. eliot’s claim that “april is the cruellest month.” pragmatically, the pedagogues among the poets decided the penultimate month of the school year was the perfect period to pack in piles and piles of poems. and should you be even remotely curious about which poem snares the title as most-read (at least in modern times), it’s claimed to be the ode to daffodils from ol’ will wordsworth, who, out wandering “lonely as a cloud” with his little sister dorothy in april of 1802, came upon a belt of yellow-bellied bloomers. exclaimed, he did:

“I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils.”

perhaps you have another that you’d consider your very own personal most-read poem . . . (all contenders welcome!)

6 Comments

April 17, 2026

besotted and struck: a springtime emphatically poignant

i am besotted by the world. and i do not mean the world of humans. i speak, rather, of the song that fills the air, the perfume that wafts on breeze, and the lush lush green that spreads with a river’s insistence.

as the human inhabitants bombard, shatter, poison, crush, and bulldoze, the earth in her infinite wisdoms, her endless generosities, and incomprehensible beauties, repeats and repeats. tracing its choreography as old as time, minute by minute, our little orb turns toward the light of the great star. there it basks. and deep underground the stirring surges, evident in the leaf tips bulging by the hour, by the shocks and brushstrokes of color—of fuchsia and daffodil gold, of snow white and, my favorite, the dashes of cobalt blue—where before the world had been colorless, had been drab, a pastiche of dull brown and sooty and gray.

have you heard the intertwining parabolas of song saturating the start-of-day soundtrack? the high-pitched white-throated sparrow piercing the dawn, the cardinal awaiting his turn. northern house wren chattering, red-winged blackbird lurching to get a note in edgewise?

more than besotted though, i am struck. struck by the profundity with which creation speaks. the way it all but shakes us by the shoulders, calls out, pay heed. this is the endosperm of it all, this way of being, of unfolding, of filling the air and the lens with beauty abundant. with grace. offering bough for the bird’s nest, pushing up an earthly apothecary. it is a masterclass in profligate goodness, “love as you would be loved” spelled out in birdsong and bloom.

you need a short course in how to be generous? look to the viburnum who soon will be perfusing perfumes, catching you by the nose each time you waft by. perhaps a lesson in loving attention? train your eye on the nestlings and the mama robin who spends her every waking minute in search of the juiciest worm, flittering back and forth every two to three minutes, for a day’s-end tally of roughly 500 feedings.

this year, the contrast is starker than ever. the headlines and news reels are filled with rubble and gore. with vitriol and braggadocio. with ugly and uglier, day after day.

but still springtime unfolds. it’s as if this ancient, ancient text understands how thick-headed we earthly inhabitants are. we need the lectures, the lessons, again and again: herein is the paradigm. here are the beauties. here, the graces. you could inhabit the garden of earthly diversities, the narcissus alongside the spring beauty, the red bird sharing the branch with the sparrow.

“i will make it as plain and as clear as is possibly possible,” says the earth to the inattentive. “i will burst forth in such vibrancy you won’t look away. i will dial up the decibels, drown you in song that rises up from winged choristers. you needn’t break each other down, needn’t crush and pillage. needn’t spew hate. you are drowning the planet in the antithesis of Original Intent.”

Creation, i firmly contend, is the unabashed effusion of Godly delight. of a world we are meant to romp in, to love and love each other. that needn’t mean that we need to relish each and every one of us. but it does mean that maybe, just maybe, we look for and find the holy spark that animates us, each and every one of us. and we can make room for each other, not only in spite of but because of our differences, in this unruly paradisiacal garden that springs into joy, into improbable possibility, every quarter turn of the globe.

may peace and beauty be with you, may tender mercies abound. so says the whisper of earth spring after spring….

we’d be wise to listen, to heed.

what whispers did you hear in Creation this week? what lessons unfolded before your eyes or ears?

13 Comments

April 10, 2026

a world torn by two voices . . .

Earth rising over the lunar surface, *NASA image taken from the far side of the moon*

we live in surreal times. in a moment when we can look upon the planet from afar and all appears serene and blue and unscarred by borders and bombs, we know that here on the surface of that living, breathing orb it is anything but serene, unscarred.

we scroll through the daily census of dead and wounded. the numbers nearly always contain commas, for the suffering extends far beyond the hundreds columns. it’s bomb after bomb after targeted assassination. it’s little girls’ backpacks strewn, bloodied. it’s cries from tehran, from beirut, from kyiv.

the voices that bellow are of two ilk: those who threaten to blow a civilization into a confetti of death and destruction. to “end” it. alternatively, to blast it back to the stone age. call them the vipers. and then there is leo of chicago who will not relent, who calls a spade a deadly spade. who sees those spades for the lances of death that they are. who bores through the hypocrisy, who dares to preach that the God to whom he — and we, most of us — pray is a God who does not hear the prayers of those beseeching violence, who speak in the language of hatred.

this is a serious moment. as sobering as any i might have known, having been born not too, too long after the holocaust’s pall still cast its shadow. this is a conflagration on the planet. how surreal that as the world is on fire, the faraway space travelers cannot make out the strife. all they see is a blue orb floating amid the heavens. as it was meant to be by the one who imagined it into creation.

we humans are not new to evil. it has long streamed through our veins. the very purpose of religion, from the beginning, might have been to curb it. to dilute it. to turn the mothership in a new direction. away from a natural pull, the pull of destruction, of petty jealousies and sordid acts.

were i not a believer in a God of mercy, a God who preaches the beatitudes—be merciful, be humble, comfort the afflicted, seek and see the divinity in the outcast, the leper, the prostitute, yes even the tax collector—maybe i too would seek vengeance.

coming after decades of watching religions go awry, balloon into megachurches that preach the prosperity gospel, after decades of witnessing the horrors of priests who abused their flocks, of imagining a God weeping over all of it, here comes a moment, where the world stripped of the divine, a world ruled by avarice and gilded toilets is caving in on itself, i am not alone in hearing one brave voice rising over the din.

it is the collective voice of those who will not succumb to the demonic. who call for putting down guns, turning swords into plowshares.

those voices have ever been. across the timeline of history, there is a chain unbroken of pacifists. their volumes rise and fall. we need listen. tune our ears to their cry.

this all came rushing to me when i stumbled this week on a lament written some time in the first three centuries of the Common Era. it is a lament found in the writings of the platonic philosopher apuleius as a dialogue between teacher and student, between the ancient greek hermes trismegistus (a hellenistic figure drawn from the wisdom gods of the greek hermes and the egyptian thoth) and asclepius (the greco-roman god of medicine and the healing arts), illuminating a lament for what had become of egypt, a “land, which once was holy, a land which loved the gods, and wherein alone, in reward for her devotion, the gods deigned to sojourn upon earth, a land which was the teacher of mankind in holiness and piety, this land will go beyond all in cruel deeds.”

listen for the resonance with our own broken moment in time…as trismegistus cries out to his student, asclepius: “do you weep at this?”

O Egypt, Egypt, of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tale, which thine own children in time to come will not believe; nothing will be left but graven words, and only the stones will tell of thy piety. And in that day men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and of worship. And so religion, the greatest of all blessings, for there is nothing, nor has been, nor ever shall be, that can be deemed a greater boon, will be threatened with destruction; men will think it a burden, and will come to scorn it. They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure which he has built, this sum of good made up of things of many diverse forms, this instrument whereby the will of God operates in that which be has made, ungrudgingly favouring man’s welfare, this combination and accumulation of all the manifold things that can call forth the veneration, praise, and love of the beholder.

Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven ; the pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise; the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good. As to the soul, and the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain to immortality, as I have taught you, all this they will mock at, and will even persuade themselves that it is false. No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven and of the gods of heaven, will be heard or believed.

heed the ancient and timeless prophecy. our moment is now to bring our voices—shaky, sodden, hoarse from all our trying to be heard—to the cry of those who line up on the side of love, of mercy, of sowing the seeds of all that is good.

or else, weep without end.

what voices have called to you this week? and what’s made you weep?

9 Comments

April 3, 2026

the hours that draw us into mystery, into empathy, into mercy . . .

i grew up in a house where a shadow was cast over good friday. a deep and mysterious shadow. one sodden with sorrows.

i imagined a presence, imagined the whole globe bowing to the sorrows of the long ago day, the crucifixion of the jew who preached love and more love. who turned the other cheek. upturned the money tables. chastened the holier than thou. sought the solace and silence of the desert. healed the lepers. embraced the prostitute. allowed holy oils to be poured and dried with the tresses of one of the outcast.

i grew up in a house where silence was kept from noon to three in the afternoon on the shadowed friday of crucifixion. i learned to look out the window as the clock struck three, as the heavens darkened and thunder shook the sky, somewhere off in the distance. the distance being golgotha, the place of the skulls, an abandoned quarry outside the walls of jerusalem. in the realm of mystery, no distance is too far to hear the rumble of the skies being torn into two.

of all the somber days of the year, this is the most somber—for me, anyway.

i find it a telling i can sink deeply into. can imagine the pain, the humiliation, the weight of the cross. can even feel the coarse rub of the olive wood, the cedar, or cypress, can imagine the splinters digging into my shoulder. my arms giving way under the lumbering tonnage.

i wince and writhe and cry every time. i beg forgiveness for our sins. collectively. globally. and mine alone.

it is a singularly compelling bracket of time, the hours from gethsemane to golgotha.

it begins for me on the night before the cross, the night in the garden when jesus—the radical, countercultural rabbi (for rabbi means “teacher”)—went alone into the murky darkness to pray. when he begged his father God to spare him the torture to come.

i can imagine the night sky, the stars bright against the black cloth of cavernous space. can imagine the weightedness of one man’s chest as he felt the mounting climax, as the cock crowed and the hour was upon him. as the footfalls of soldiers and the one who betrayed came closer and closer.

have we not all felt ourselves in such a hollow of time? felt ourselves moving closer and closer to that which we dread?

have we not all carried some cross, the weight of it crushing?

we all have stories—stories from our families, from our religions or our histories—that draw us into their folds. that transfix us every time.

these anointed hours, these holy holy sorrowful hours, are among the ones that hold me. it is a blessed thing to be drawn deep into the marrow of the stories we are told, the ones that carry us across the generations, and the millennia.

wednesday, the night before i found myself deep in the folds of thursday’s gethsemane, i found myself around a table re-telling the ancient story of the exodus. the story of slavery and liberation. the story of becoming God’s chosen people. of plagues and the killing of firstborns. of the improbable crossing of the sea, and the inexplicable parting of waters. the line of the story that night that leapt out the most to me was the one where it was written: “when the people of Israel left Egypt, they became God’s people.”

“. . . they became God’s people.”

that line struck me because it made me think of a God who not only hovers over but harbors his people, especially a people alone, and afraid, and lost in the wilderness. a God who seeks out the suffering and the shuddering. a God of the frayed and tattered margins. of the outsider. the same God who heard the prayers of the one in the garden. the same God whom i believe heard the cry of the one on the Cross. the same one who hears all the cries of this world. the cries from Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, the cries from Gaza and Iran. from Ukraine and Lebanon. from Somalia, Sudan, and, long ago, from Biafra. the cries of mothers who bury their children. the cries of those who suffer unimaginable torturings.

count me with the pope who preached last sunday, palm sunday, that the prayers of those who call for violence, and killing, and the bombing of children are prayers not heard by the God of Love, of Peace, the God who preaches the blessedness of the meek and the merciful.

i close with the words of that holy, holy soul we know as Pope Leo of Chicago, a righteous pilgrim not afraid to speak out, to condemn the ways of the warmongers among us :

Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood” (Is 1:15).

As we set our gaze upon him who was crucified for us, we can see a crucified humanity. In his wounds, we see the hurts of so many women and men today. In his last cry to the Father, we hear the weeping of those who are crushed, who have no hope, who are sick and who are alone. Above all, we hear the painful groans of all those who are oppressed by violence and are victims of war.

and in the spirit of that final climb up the mount of golgotha, a climb long broken into fourteen scenes, known in the Christian Church as “stations,” i leave you with this quiet and spare meditation of the stations of the cross from pádraig ó tuama. and finally a poem from the late great irish poet, seamus heaney.

may your holy days, whichever stories stir you, draw you into a deeper sense of being alive and in service to the miseries of this most broken world.

what are some of the stories told, and the hours into which you surrender, year over year, that most embracingly, certainly, undeniably hold you?

Chorus from “The Cure at Troy”
by Seamus Heaney

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another.
They get hurt and get hard,
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that the farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and birth-cry
Or new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

my favorite, favorite telling of good friday’s stations…

and a sobering note to close out this holy week: the global conflict tracker from the council on foreign relations

	Russia	Russo-Ukrainian War
	Ukraine	Russo-Ukrainian War
	Israel	Israel-Palestine War
	Palestine	Israel-Palestine War
	South Sudan	Ethnic violence
	Mexico	Drug War
	Afghanistan	Civil War/Terrorist Insurgency
	Haiti	Civil War/Gang War
	Colombia	Civil War/Drug War
	Ecuador	Civil War/Drug War
	Ethiopia	Civil War
	Myanmar	Civil War
	Sudan	Civil War
	Yemen	Civil War
	Mozambique	Civil War
	Somalia	Civil War
	Central African Republic	Civil War
	Pakistan	Afghanistan-Pakistan Border Conflict