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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!)

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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?

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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?

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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

*source: World Population Review, “Countries Currently at War, 2026”

Holy One of Peace, infuse us…

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March 27, 2026

peacemaking in a time of war—of endless, endless war. . .

Robert Spence, *George Fox on the Hay-stack*, circa 1911. Etching on paper. Courtesy of *Friends Journal* archives.

i am late to history. whilst the rest of my college compatriots were piled into an old theatre, inhaling the histories of the war-torn globe, dissecting allegiances and alliances, double crossings and shots fired in the night, i and the rest of the pre-STEM nurses were across four lanes of traffic in yet another old building taking in the particulars of microbiology. or anatomy and physiology. or pharmacology.

little, really, did those lectures teach me about the ways of the world outside the hospital ward. for that the jesuits poured us volumes and volumes of theology. i drank thirstily.

but still i didn’t learn much of a thinker—don’t remember a single mention—who made me think this week. made me stop in my tracks and think hard about the evil impulses that abound, the ones that have not been tamed over the many, many millennia. the ones that make me wonder just how, oh how, can we make a dent in their oncoming velocities, those of us who consider ourselves, in this thinker’s words, “the hidden [] of the heart and the meek and quiet spirit.” those of us, in my words, who aim to bring light, to turn the other cheek (yes, i still believe in it, despite the many many times i’ve been told that’s a fool’s game), to be in our own tiny, tiny way “instruments of peace, sowers of love, of pardon,” and maybe a droplet of hope.

perhaps the jesuits weren’t steeped in the ways of the quakers. or perhaps i’d signed up for the classes that left george fox off the syllabus.

george fox, you might know, is the 17th-century founder of the quakers, those peaceful peoples who’ve not let the war-torn centuries tear at their steadfast conviction that peace, not war, is the way. and while i don’t know much about their volumes of wisdom or tradition, i do know that reading this passage from the journals of george fox, a passage written in 1650 while he was imprisoned in derby, england, for blasphemy, i was stirred by its echoes in this godawful moment where iran and the u.s., iran and israel, israel and lebanon, israel and gaza, russia and ukraine, grow uglier and crueler with their seemingly bottomless arsenals of war.

this is the plea of george fox, words that arose as he sat in a silence he’d carved in his prison cell:

What a world is this: they have lost the hidden man of the heart and the meek and quiet spirit, which is of the Lord, of great price. I saw how the powers were plucking each other to pieces. And I saw how many men were destroying the simplicity and betraying the truth. And a great deal of hypocrisy, deceit and strife was got uppermost in people that they were ready to sheath their swords in one another’s bowels. Therefore be still a while from thy own thoughts, searching seeking, desires and imaginations and be stayed in the power of God in thee, to stay thy mind upon God, up to God, and you will find strength from Him and find him to be a present help in time of trouble, in need, and to be a God at hand.

“be stayed in the power of God in thee,” an instructive to plumb the holy well within, the one i too am convinced is at the core of us, all of us, if we work to tap into it, if we allow it to infuse the whole of us, to be just one tiny, 5-foot-3, 100-some-pound, vessel of all that is, by any definition, Godly. it’s an instruction not unexpected from a man whose most quoted line is his assertion that “there is that of God in everyone.”

amen, amen i say to that.

but what of those who seem hellbent on squelching it? those who crisscross the country—and the globe—preaching that empathy is for fools, claim it “a fundamental weakness of western civilization”? who puff their chests and bellow their war plan: “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” and go on to explain, to whom i cannot fathom, “this was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. we are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” and who claim, “we negotiate with bombs,” and claim as their motto: “maximum lethality not tepid legality.” those ready to “sheath their swords in one another’s bowels.”

might we resurrect saint francis and put him in charge? pair him with george fox? send the warmongers off to mars, long known as “the war planet” anyway, drenched as it is in the color of blood (the residue of iron oxide, actually), named after the roman god of war, though he represented honorable conflict, a notion lost on those currently dropping the bombs, launching the deadliest of drones.

so how, amidst all the horrors, do i find hope, even a speck of it? i align myself with the millennia-long lineage of this who turn their backs on the bomb-droppers, who fix in my crosshairs the likes of history’s peacemakers and keepers, the jesuses and george foxes, the francis of assisis and the solomons, the gandhis and thích nhất hạnhs.

i know we’re but one. but one + one + one eventually equals a counterforce.

our time is short. our mission steep. and the half-life of love is as long as the quiet turning of the cheek, the unheralded random act of goodness, of mercy, of tender loving care, and unbroken attention to the brokenness that leaves us in pieces.

Therefore be still a while from thy own thoughts, searching seeking, desires and imaginations and be stayed in the power of God in thee, to stay thy mind upon God, up to God, and you will find strength from Him and find him to be a present help in time of trouble, in need, and to be a God at hand.

“to be a God at hand”….

amen.

who or what guides you in the countercultural ways of peace, the ways where empathy is among the highest holiest of graces?

i love this last weekend of march, for two of my most deeply beloveds will blow out their birthday candles on back-to-back bday cakes. sweet p today, and tomorrow it’s auntie mullane, the one who taught me how it feels to be loved, deeply, tenderly loved, a whole half century ago. if either of them was in charge, ours would be a world where every blessed day was as gentle on the heart, and as glowingly radiant as any of us could ever, ever imagine…..

sweet P and auntie M, my alphabet of beloveds…..

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March 20, 2026

home: a paler shade of gray

there are no palms out my window. no kitschy drive-ins in sunset shades of bubblegum pink and peach and aqua. no deco movie-house spires piercing the clouds, lit up in the night, ablaze with neon beacons.

instead, there is drab. limbs without leaves. birdhouses atilt thanks to gale-force winds in recent days. patches of snow still dot the brick walk back to the sodden alley, where a potage of wet leaves and muck and the detritus of winter all signal: these are the middlelands, where exotic is distant, and gray the predominant shade.

i’m home. and decidedly taking note of the vast gap—chromatic and otherwise— between LA and chicago. LA and my leafy little village. yes, there is a grand grand lake. but the waves are nowhere near pacific. and the water’s edge not so dramatic.

we live here in the middlelands. in more ways than geography. and it made me wonder. it made me think.

this old house is more than familiar. i know it by heart. it’s held me for decades now. i know its creaks, and which doors stubbornly refuse to close. i know which light switch is finicky. and just how to light the front middle burner.

we hold each other’s whispers.

this old house has heard me cry. and felt that rapid clip of my footfall when racing toward the door, because someone i love is knocking.

this old house knows my ways. how, pretty much, day after day, i awake before dawn, sit my bum on this bench, this bench where the cushion conforms and the wide-plank maple below is scuffed from all the years of my soles rubbing against the grain.

we humans make home where we are. where we land. but, now home from the land of abundant abundance—abundant color, abundant whim and whimsy, abundant greenscape and vertiginous terrain—i wonder how the drab infuses me. are we a less colorful people for the monochrome we’re up against?

or is home, in the end, the comfort that’s closest to the skin? the factor that completes the equation?

it’s something of a koan: might we be more colorful souls if we lived amid color? or do we make up for the lack thereof by sparking our very own rainbows?

is it the familiar, the cozy comfort of our surrounds, that’s the deeper, truer source of what fuels us?

how best to eke what we can out of this one shot of life?

to step into the unfamiliar is to open the lid on the sorts of queries we’d otherwise miss. which might be the wisest reason of all to pack up a suitcase and head—for a spell—for the hills—hollywood’s or beyond.

i know i’ll adjust, because that’s what we do. we could live in a box if we had to.

the bright hues of the city of angels will fade. i’ll forget the neon of the nimoy lighting the night.

snowdrops: harbinger of spring on the rise

any day now, the snowdrops will rise, and the redbud will break out in a string of little red knots strewn along each branch. the pace of home will pick up, will sweep me into the current, and once again i’ll find myself sated.

but for now, in the interlude, in the space between there and here, i am wondering just how much it affects us deep down in the soul. and if, in our time here, we’d be wise to consider the backdrop in which we settle our lives.

it might account for the fact that day after day, here in the drab land, i slip my old arms into the nubbiest sweater of gray you ever did see: my uniform in winter, here where gray is a hue of many colors.

have you a place you’ve visited that made you wonder why you didn’t call it home? and what might your life be like if you up and transplanted your very sweet self? (mistake not the questions stirred for any serious thought of transplant; for one, i could never afford SoCal; for two, i’ve no intention of pulling up stakes, no matter how sumptuous someplace else might be…)

time and again, i find myself drawn into the orbit of pablo neruda, the late great chilean poet-diplomat and nobel laureate. time, in particular, is a subject at the core of my many contemplations. in Elemental Odes, neruda’s collection of odes to everyday objects—tomatoes, artichokes, soap—he laid out his most explicit instruction for how to hold time:

Listen and learn.
Time
is divided
into two rivers:
one
flows backward, devouring
life already lived;
the other
moves forward with you
exposing
your life.
For a single second
they may be joined.
Now.
This is that moment,
the drop of an instant
that washes away the past.
It is the present.
It is in your hands.
Racing, slipping,
tumbling like a waterfall.
But it is yours.
Help it grow
with love, with firmness,
with stone and flight,
with resounding
rectitude,
with purest grains,
the most brilliant metal
from your heart,
walking
in the full light of day
without fear
of truth, goodness, justice,
companions of song,
time that flows
will have the shape
and sound
of a guitar,
and when you want
to bow to the past,
the singing spring of
transparent time
will reveal your wholeness.
Time is joy.
—Pablo Neruda

photo credit above: will kamin, 2011. AP photography senior portfolio, new trier high school.

18 Comments

March 13, 2026

postcard from l.a.

in which we lolligag about palms and pools, stalk might-be movie stars, and otherwise romp amid the landscape that gave us avocado toast…

greetings from l.a., where we’ve dipped out of march’s chicago madness (the town that turns the river shamrock green, a hue that’s always struck me as just this side of toxic waste), and traded it for the antics of Oscar countdown in a town where film is king. (let us ignore the rising fear that Iranian drones will be flung this way from just offshore this weekend.)

because in our old house we seem not to have a script for travels that comes without some twist or turn, i kicked off this adventure the day before our flight by suddenly being unable to put an ounce of weight on my left leg, so off they swooped me to the place for urgent remedy, which outfitted me with a walker that’s a complete replica of the one my mama pushes.

advantage to traveling with orthopedic appendage: early boarding; kindly sympathetic smiles all along the way.

disadvantages: slows down every trip from point A to point B; all but erases your husband’s plot to hike halfway up what we midwesterners consider a mountain to pose beside the Hollywood sign.

but we push on, and do not let our two-wheeled crutch get in our way.

no coat, the only difference between home and here, ala walker

if i’ve absorbed any truth these past few years it’s do not, do not let life’s curves knock you back (not too hard anyway). it’s seize the day, baby! grab that bovine by the horns. and i am here to tell you: l.a. by walker is quite an anomaly. (pewter hair, though, might be the thing that makes me most stand out here where nearly every body is lithe, lean, and tv ready.

parked the appendage on the side of the trail for this action shot

for the Queen of homebodies, i might finally be starting to catch the travel bug, as i find myself slipping effortlessly into the role of urban anthropologist-slash-unadulterated marveler at the infinite ways humans express their genius, their innate goodness, and their knack for invention. (helps to travel with a guy who has a sixth sense for sniffing out one-of-a-kind quirky inns that fuel my every ampule of delight.)

before i amble into the sunrise, let’s riffle through the photo album and leave you with a few….

(in odd particular order: our westwood home away from home; driverless cars intersecting with other driverless cars (the lanes abound with driverlessness here); UCLA’s botanical garden where hummingbirds abound (and a walker walk away); ruins of pacific palisades wildfire; and a string of Hollywood legends—the sign, the apple pan, dodger stadium (my mate poked through every nook and cranny in a three-hour walk-through with the stadium architect); Getty villa; and somewhere in there the most sumptuous whole roasted cauliflower this side of Eden….)

and with that, sweet loves, i’ll save deep thoughts and poetries for next week when home sweet home.

what stirs you most when you board a plane and step beyond your comfort zone?

note to those who might think we’re clocking in late here at the chair: we’ve risen well before sunrise here in the city of angels, but given that the sun must muscle its way across some distance before casting shadow on the pacific, what appears “late” to all you right-coasters and midlanders (who’ve been frolicking in sunlight for hours now), is in fact in sync with the rising of the California sun….

my number one reason for not letting a little walker keep me from coming to cali: my lifelong best best friend, now nearing 50 years of pure pure love…

23 Comments

March 6, 2026

lung by lung

it is a strange sisterhood. it comes in out-of-the-blue phone calls that, within a sentence, pull us both into perhaps the darkest corner of our lives. “do you have time to talk?” is sometimes the precede. sometimes not even that. yesterday i got the precede. the time before i did not. (yes, that’s two such calls within the space of a month.)

i dialed the number attached to the text, and the woman who answered, a woman i barely know, suddenly inhabited the very same place i know too well, will never forget. she’d found out, the day before, that she had stage 4 lung cancer. she said it so fast — and so plainly — i had to ask her to say that again. i wasn’t quite sure i had heard what she said, couldn’t possibly have heard what it seemed like she said. she sounded so matter-of-fact when she said it.

she said it again. the day before, she’d gone in for biopsies, two of them, both in her lungs, and woke up to the surgeon telling her it was cancer, and it was stage 4, a number that scythes like a death knell.

not even a whole day later, she was working the phones, searching for doctors who would dole out what amounts to the only possible hope: chemo that just might stave off the spread, just might dial down the madness of cancerous cells that divide and multiply dervishly, devilishly, and finally deathly.

she’d heard that i too know what it is to find out cancer’s been lurking without any warning. lurking in the lungs, specifically. lurking in the very bellows of where and how you breathe.

when cancer, any cancer, is the subject at hand, you don’t need to know much about the someone you’re calling. you just call. because inside the very dark chamber in which you are finding yourself, you reach for any semblance of light seeping in. and someone who might know a doctor is all the light you might need.

so she called. and in curious ways, she sounded quite numb. as if gathering the names of oncologists, and deciding where she’d go for her daily infusions of chemo, was not too different from shopping for just the right shoes. but then the hand-grenade sentences came. when she said, “surgery isn’t an option for me. it’s all over my lungs.” and, when the subject of five-year-survival rates came up, she said plainly: “i won’t live that long.” and in between those sentences she mentioned how much she loves her life, how much she’s loved her thirty years being married to the love of her life, how her girls are her everything. it’s the whole gamut, from gut-wrenching realism to the first seeds of mourning, all in one fell swoop. and she spoke all of it without shedding a tear.

i gave her the name of the doctor i love, the doctor who pulls her stool close whenever she talks to you, presses her knees against yours, all but cups your face in her hands. i opened the door to a chamber in my heart that seems to have moulded itself into a space for those who know, for those swept into a club no one wants to belong to. but once there, we are sealed as tightly and fiercely as humans are able to be. we muster our “fight.” we pray fiercely for each other. we ride each other’s highs and lows and the muddies all in between. we laugh with the darkest of humors. we sometimes speak in a shorthand. i don’t need you to tell me how desperately you don’t want to die, to leave the luscious life you call your own; i already know. me, neither.

we speak each other’s most foreign language.

these phone calls remind me how human we are. how, within mere breaths of beginning to talk, to tell our worst imaginable stories, we can sidle so close to each other, we can almost finish each other’s sentences. at the core, there is so very much about us that isn’t so one-of-a-kind.

we humans get scared. we humans sometimes get dealt the worst possible news, news that wants to shatter us. but then, pressed against the warmth of someone else’s breath, someone’s skin, someone’s voice, we remember we’re not wholly alone.

there is someone out there who travels a similar road. someone else has heard the death-knell sentences and picked up the pieces and carried on. because that’s what humans do—till the end.

and in that associative property (the back and forth of courage and fear, of questions and answers, of hope maybe just maybe flashing off in the distance) we find the pulse beat to carry us forward. not alone. but tucked tight in a cocoon that no one wants to inhabit.

i will always, always answer those calls, make those calls, chase down the answer to questions that come in those calls. inscribe those someones on the close-to-my-heart rolls. check in just often enough, or sometimes out of the blue. because that’s what sisterhoods do. and there’s a mysterious beauty here in the chamber where no one wants to be: the truth-telling is as clear and unfettered as any i know. we might be our very most human in the space and the time when we realize time is short — so short — and all the distraction is stripped away, and we are living as close to the holy nub as we can possibly be.

i am still grieving—that raw early stage when it’s never far from mind—two of those sisterly souls who dwelled in that most sacred space, right alongside me, right till the end. their end. barely a month ago. and i can all but feel them just the other side of this worldly existence. they live in me now. i think we are sealed in the holiest union. and it all begins with the worst story we might have ever been told: you have cancer.

what’s beyond that story, that door, though, is breathtakingly, beautifully rare: the human spirit in all its magnificence; a muddling of courage and truth, of seeing through a luminous lens, asking the most eternal of questions, and sometimes just plain finding the hilarity in the ridiculous twists and turns on cancer’s godawful road.

in uncanny, indescribable ways, i am so blessed to find myself in this rarest of rooms. a room where all is magnified, and illumined, and little goes without notice. most emphatically, the marvel of every last drop of being alive.

before i go, i found a poem this week, and another poet who will someday soon be the subject of the next installment of adopt-a-poet. i found her through anglican poet, priest, singer, songwriter, and hobbit lookalike, malcolm guite, who included this poem in his anthology for lent, titled word in the wilderness: a poem a day for lent and easter. the poet, kelly belmonte, who hails from upstate new york, is the creator and founder of All Nine, a creative collaborative. she explains the “nine” as “a reference to the nine sister muses of Greek mythology. These inspirational sisters represent multiple domains of creativity and intelligence, from epic poetry to science. For any vision to move from the inside of one person’s eyelids to the physical world where it can make a positive impact, it takes a collaborative effort across multiple disciplines and an openness to many sources of inspiration. Hence, all nine.”

her latest work, the mother of all words, came out last year, and is on my library list. belmonte claims as her poetic influences an eclectic list including Kobayashi Issa, R.M. Rilke, Mary Oliver, and Frank X. Gaspar.

i found myself stunned by the interplay of the quotidian here, and the easy reach within which we find God….

How I Talk to God

Coffee in one hand
leaning in to share, listen:
How I talk to God.

“Momma, you’re special.”
Three-year-old touches my cheek.
How God talks to me.

While driving I make
lists: done, do, hope, love, hate, try.
How I talk to God.

Above the highway
hawk: high, alone, free, focused.
How God talks to me.

Rash, impetuous
chatter, followed by silence:
How I talk to God.

First, second, third, fourth
chance to hear, then another:
How God talks to me.

Fetal position
under flannel sheets, weeping
How I talk to God.

Moonlight on pillow
tending to my open wounds
How God talks to me.

Pulling from my heap
of words, the ones that mean yes:
How I talk to God.

Infinite connects
with finite, without words:
How God talks to me.

how do you talk to God?

15 Comments

February 27, 2026

adopt-a-poet: lynette roberts—silenced, forgotten, deserving of her due

most of us might do well, or we think so anyway, to live our lives in reverse.

or maybe it’s as it should be that the richest chapters come now, at the far end of our sprint, when we know just a shade more about where our hungers lie, and what sates us.

maybe there’s some common thread between the long-ago me drawn to be a nurse, and the me now drawn to—can’t keep myself away from—the world of poets and poetics, where words are the fine implements that probe the soul, elicit what stirs there, often from the realm of the unspoken.

in my best stints as a nurse, caring for kids who often were dying of terrible cancers, i prayed for the not-often-enough chances to plunk down at their bedsides, in between the passing of meds, and the chasing down of doctors’ orders, to unspool whatever was tight-wound in their souls. to listen for the words that painted the stories inside: what it felt like to be 15 and so sick from the chemo you locked yourself in the bathroom, stuffed towels under the door, and lit up the joint your mother bought for you off some street corner somewhere—because it was the only thing that quelled the endless heaving. or what it felt like to be 12 and unable to wiggle your toes cuz the tumor that tentacled your spine had cut off the nerves from your waist on down.

it’s the soul—and its uncharted interior—that’s always drawn my attention. once as a nurse where unfathomable questions loomed in rooms where children lay dying, lay suffering, and, nowadays, it’s poetry that brings me to that sharp edge.

it’s struck me of late that this old table might be a fine place for the occasional poet to drop in, to squeeze in among the circle of chairs, to be heralded as the subject of the day. where i might tell a bit of their story, unfurl a snippet of poem and praise.

thus begins the occasional episode of adopt-a-poet here at the chair.

this morning, i bring you one lynette roberts (1909-1995), a hauntingly original welsh poet, argentine-born, whose two books of poetry—collected poems (1944) and Gods with stainless ears: a heroic poem (1951)—have been described as “as dramatic, varied, dense, elliptical and inset with verbal novelty as any experimental poetry in the twentieth century.”

t.s eliot was her friend and editor, and offered the highest of eliotic compliments, writing that her poetry “communicated before it made sense.” (ah, both the magic and miracle of poetry; and a line worth pondering.)

dylan thomas was best man at her wedding. robert graves—he of i, claudius—was her pen pal. (graves wrote that in her fruitful years, the 1940s, during world war II, when she was living in a small welsh village, she was “one of the few true poets,” and added that “her best is the best” among a milieu that included the likes of eliot, thomas, and, yes, graves himself.)

most endearing of all to a ragtag magpie like me, roberts and her poetry were long considered eccentric. even at her height, she was an outsider, dwelling at the outskirts of london’s bohemian literary scene. then and now, literary critics describe her as “a poet’s poet,” and one of those critics defines that epithet as one “by which we designate writers we know are important but who don’t have the readership or reputation to prove it.” (long live the poet’s poets.)

that was all it took for me to decide to do my feeble best to haul her out of the shadows. to nudge her back toward the literary glow i believe is her due (or at least offer her a chair to this old table). and to read her, everywhere i could find her.

when i read that she was committed to a mental institution after a particularly rough breakdown, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and in and out of such quarters at least four times in her remaining years, her pen going silent until her death, i grew all the more determined.

her poetry, until its resurrection in 2005 in the tome simply titled collected poems, had been out of print for half a century. her prose, including a war diary, an autobiography, and unpublished articles and memoirs, long had been forgotten. i’d never heard of her till a week ago when i heard the american scholar‘s amanda holmes read one of her poems.

roberts’ best work, though, is considered to stand alongside that of her near-contemporaries, the anglo-welsh poets david jones, r.s. thomas (an anglican priest and poet i count among my favorites), and dylan thomas. but even in wales, her ancestral homeland and the country to which she returned and finally settled, she found herself on the margins.

in the poets’ academy, roberts is considered a war poet, a modernist, especially focused on a woman’s life in wartime. her poetry during the second world war plumbed bereavement, brokenness, and fracturing both for those sent to the front lines and for those left at home. she’s also been called “a love poet,” and “a poet of the hearth,” though not one to idealize the domestic. she captured it in all its extremes, the heartbreaking, and the cruel.

it’s bits of her biography beyond the poetic that might charm me as emphatically as her poems stir me.

before ever dipping her pen in the inkwell, roberts who’d come to london to study art in the 1930s, decided she and her roommate, the writer and painter celia buckmaster, needed a holiday. perusing an atlas, she decided—on the basis of it being the only place where the Bristle Footed Worm remained—to venture off to madeira, a portuguese archipelago, and traveled there in cargo. it was in madeira, in a house high on a hill, that she settled on her life’s work as a poet. “have found my voice at last,” she announced in a telegram sent back to london.

for reasons i’d love to know, once back in london, roberts trained to be a florist, and opened a flower arranging business before marrying, birthing two children, and later divorcing the welsh writer and editor keidrych rhys about whom she had once written that he “was charming and spoke like a prince.”

her daughter, angharad (welsh for “beloved”), describes roberts as nomadic (crisscrossing the seas and continents from buenos aires to london to madeira to wales to london and back to wales), someone who longed for nothing so fancy as a simple home, a place defined by the sparest necessities: a fire, a table, a place to look after friends in need.

for a good bit of her life, as a single mother with a daughter and son, roberts took to living in a caravan, with an address as plain as could be: The Caravan, The Graveyard, Laugharne, on the coast of south west wales (and literally parked in the village graveyard). angharad remembers: “we spent a whole summer catching butterflies and dragonflies, draping muslin round the caravan to keep them captive so we could draw them.” roberts drew as charmingly as she penned poetry, the pages of her diary filled with both.

and she grew roses, but not just any roses. she deciding which to grow by smelling. and she had two criteria for planting in her garden: scent + history. a proper story need be attached. oh, to plant a garden led by nose and narrative.

and so, my library this week has grown by two: i’ve added collected poems, and diaries, letters. and recollections to my shelf. and i intend to read, underline, asterisk, and dog-ear many a page, clear to the end, as i absorb the quirky wonders of one lynette roberts, and carry her forth (at least in my own little mind) into this time, the ever-so-rocky twenty-first century.

here is the first of roberts’ poems found in collected poems, “poem from llanybri,” a welcome-poem to a soldier and fellow poet. the oxford literary critic patrick mcguiness writes of it as “a portal to the book,” one that “imagines the poetic encounter as a hospitality extended and hospitality repaid. this is poetry as dialogue, poetry as rooted tradition: a celebration of community, both in the village, here described for its uniqueness, and within the circle of poets. it takes pleasure in the welsh words and phrases—‘cawl’, ‘savori fach’, and place names such as ‘cwmcelyn’—but also in the welsh speech-patterns that make their way into english: if you come my way that is…”

what i love is nothing so much as the way she brings a wee welsh village, and its innate kindness in war time, to life. i can see the pair sitting by the fire, absorbed in the silence best shared by those who know each other so fully. “No talk. Just a stare at ‘Time’ gathering” . . .

at the end of his introduction to her collected poems, mcguinness, editor of both her republished volumes (poems in 2005; diaries, 2008) concludes that hers is a poetry “bristling with contexts, alive to its time and place even as it dazzlingly dramatizes and reimagines them—a poetry open to influence and example while perfecting its own distinct voice and vision.”

whether it be her poems, her quirky tellings of village life, or her inspiration to plant a garden led by my nose, i intend to keep ms. roberts close and alive, in that way that poets and poetries live on long after their one last breath.

what is the medium that holds deepest allure for you? that leads you into depths so deep you lose sense of the world around, and burrow into the place beyond answers to questions?

9 Comments

February 20, 2026

ashes to ashes…

it is among the most profound teachings of any religion. and its point is found at the root of every sage, seer, and saint.

remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.

some years, to be truthful, those words washed over me. not this year. no longer. it is the teaching at the core of my scan time epiphany, pressed onto my heart as i emerged from the months-long fog that followed the words from my surgeon, “it was cancer; i was surprised.”

we don’t have forever. our days are numbered. our time here is fleeting. we’re wise not to whittle away the hours. wiser still to work toward the nub, the holy nub, that i believe lies at the heart of why we’re among the blessed who got to draw a first breath in the first place.

the odds of being born are stacked mightily against us; biology lays it all out at roughly 1 in 400 trillion (that’s 400 million million, or a 4 followed by 14 zeroes; i’m guessing that might be more than all the stars in the heavens. but what do i know?). we’re the ones who were allotted X number of days, who were given a holy task that’s ours and ours alone. and our slot to get it done, to reach toward holiness, to exude the light this world so desperately needs, is not without end.

so knew moses in the wilderness, imploring God: “teach us to number our days, so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

come the seventh century, a pope named gregory I pulled out the ashes to press against flesh, to remind the believers, to begin the 46 days then counted as Lent, a season of penitence before the coming of Easter. in judaism, the days of awe, from rosh hashanah, the new year, to yom kippur, the day of atonement, attention is turned to the mortal imperative: we will die. and we’d best make the most of our days. in islam, the inevitability of death is a core tenet, and muslims are taught to pray “as if this is your last ṣalāh (prayer).”

i live now with those teachings pressed hard against my flesh, whether you can see the smudge on my forehead or not. just so happens this week i walked around for a few hours looking as if i’d smudged a thumbful of dirt just above my eyebrows. and this week, a week in which i’ve spent so many hours trying to reach across to the other side, in search of a wink or a nod or a squeeze from two beloveds new to the other side, i found myself transfixed by the wisdom i wore for all the world to see.

i find it imperative. it’s the truth that fuels my every day, and all the hours within.

i live now with the palpable knowing that any minute the something stirring in my lungs (a something i likened to “a couch potato of a cancer” when my surgeon first described it as indolent, or lazy) could, in that surgeon’s inimitable words, “decide to leap off the couch and start running around the house smashing things.” the analogy here refers to the cancer detonating all throughout my lungs, a demonic pinball boinging wall to wall to any old air sac, the wee little bellows that allow you to draw in oxygen, blow out the junk that remains, the carbon dioxide we need to get rid of, lest we die of suffocation.

in my latest adventure in book writing, the book now awaiting yet another round of editing, a book whose working title is when evening comes: an urgent call to love (drawn from the great teaching of saint john of the cross who once wrote, “when the evening of this life comes, you will be judged on love,” and to which the mystic evelyn underhill then adds: “the only question asked of your soul: ‘have you loved well?'”), it’s the very point of the ashes—to dust you shall return—that animates every inkling, question, and meditation in the pages soon to be bound between covers.

in the year since i started writing that book, and in the almost three years since half my lung was snipped out of me, the choice to love well is one that rises over and over, a tide that won’t be quelled. it’s the most clarifying truth i’ve ever clung to. and it expands the walls of my heart, pushes me plenty beyond my comfort zone because i know my chances are dwindling. the next scan could come with the words that something is stirring. has made itself known. and i know those words will crumple me. knock the wind right out of me. at least for awhile. till i find my bearings again.

and so i live just ahead of those words, as if they’re always on the chase, running up from the rear.

the people i love who died last week, who crossed to the other side, were beautiful souls who loved so majestically, so magnificently, and both of whose lungs were filled with the damn cancer that would not relent. each loved till the very last breath. each didn’t want to die. each one was brave—mostly—till the end. and each one finally let go.

in so many ways, their holy nub did not die. their spirit, their joy, their infinite giving, it’s as alive as ever. maybe more so. i feel each of them. i hear their words, their laughter, the very lilt in the way they spoke every word. and their invisible presence stirs me robustly. maybe it’s that we were all in the cancer gulch together, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder. maybe it’s that we spoke a language so little known outside the republic of cancer; a language into which we’d been swept, a language where shadows are looming, a language propelled by unfiltered truth and urgency.

maybe i feel like it’s up to me to carry on their brilliant-beyond-description ways of being in the world. but that would be wrong. their work, their nub, lives on in the ways it will forever animate and rub up against ours. but my work is mine. and my days to do it are now. and your work is yours. and your days are now.

the God i believe in breathed into us a constellation of wonders, and set us on our way. as rilke once wrote in a poem i’ve long pressed to my heart, imagining God speaking to each of us as God makes us, before we are born, before we leave the womb of darkness, God “walks with us silently out of the night.” and as we near the precipice of the womb, the place where the daylight seeps in, God whispers: “Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.”

and so this work that is ours to do, in this time that will end, we are here for holy purpose. and our God is at hand.

ashes to ashes. dust to dust.

the time in between is our one holy chance.

how will we use it?

in the tiny chapel where i go to pray, and where this week the ashes were smudged on my head, i found these words from psalm 103 breathtakingly beautiful. . .

for [God] himself knows whereof we are made;
he remembers that we are but dust.
Our days are like the grass; we flourish like a flower of the field;
When the wind goes over it, it is gone, and its place shall know it no more.

may our time in the field be fruitful, may our petals unfurl fully as we drink in the sunlight. before the wind blows over us, and our time here is no more….

love, bam

sending special special love to the beautiful mama of one of the beauties who has crossed to the other side….i know that all of us here reach across the table in hopes of steadying your trembling hand, tissue at the ready to dry your flow of tears….

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