pull up a chair

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….

4 Comments

February 13, 2026

love is . . .

i am sitting on a velvet couch, by a great stone hearth, looking out onto a city still cloaked in darkness. dawn comes late on the western edge of the eastern time zone, and that’s where i am. not a mirrored sliver of light is yet igniting the river that flows just beyond, where yesterday swans glided by.

i seem to have landed in a stanza of poetry here in a professor’s house on the banks of the st. joe river. upstairs sleeps another professor, the one who is renting this house for a semester. and what a thing it is to step into a home appointed by someone you’ve never met, someone you suddenly wish more than anything you could sit down beside, curled on this velveteen couch with steaming mugs of darjeeling, unreeling a bounty of stories.

this house is that of a professor from mauritius, a professor who has lived all around the world. it is filled with tropical, faraway touches, remnants of home on the island nation in the indian sea. draperies are silk; paint colors, rose and persimmon and a blue as blue as a tidal pool. the hoosier wood floors, covered with rugs so persian you can almost hear the cacophonies of the shuk where they might have been traded.

i’m here, instead of home where on the fourteenth of february long, long ago construction-paper hearts would be sprinkled from bedside to breakfast table, and where today my beloved is there all alone, because here is where love drew me.

love is what draws you to places you hadn’t intended to be. because love is the something that comes when it’s called. love sits in silence. love is the sound of footfalls in another room, the simple reminder that love is nearby, is filling the spaces between you. and nothing need be spoken.

love is the ineffable force that lies at the heart of that vessel within, that one we call “the heart” for we’ve no other word, really, for that rising tide inside us, the one that washes through us sometimes, the one that breaks us out in tingles. the one that makes our knees go weak. the one that makes us weep.

i don’t think love lives in the heart, actually. i think it lives in the whole of who we are. i know it lives in our fingertips because i’ve felt my fingertips melt when entwined with anyone i love. it certainly takes up occupancy in our knees because they’re the first to wobble whenever we’re overcome—by joy, by heartbreak, by grief. and i know it lives in our eyes, because i’ve seen it. and once you’ve seen it, you know it.

i’ll concede that that place mid-chest and slightly off to the left, the one that thumps and races and slows, love shares a room in there too, but it surely isn’t confined. can’t be. though we seem to have pinned it onto the heart in our flimsy imaginations.

i’m thinking much about love this week—how it shapes and colors our hours, and how it pulls us beyond ourselves—because this is a week where it’s made itself so vividly known.

love is the arrow that plunges the bayonet into your heart when someone you love has died. because the heart, schooled by life, knows the measure.

this week a someone i loved beyond measure breathed her last, and i, along with legions of others, am stricken. i only knew her for maybe a year and a half, but oh we loved deep right away. she was a fellow traveler on cancer’s road, and in that way that cancer works, she was more alive than just about anyone i’ve ever bumped into. once you know you have cancer, time is condensed. you can trek miles in minutes. so we did, she and i, mostly in letters.

her mind was brilliant, was curious; her writing took my breath away. my laptop is filled with her shimmering letters. she asked the most profound questions of life, of God, of whatever comes next. she found joy just about anywhere. quite certainly in books. during the months as she grew sicker and sicker, she was deadset on one final task: filling the shelves of the library her magnificent husband had just built for her, a whole room, wall to wall to wall. heaven on earth for my friend.

in the best of us, these are the trademarks of living with cancer, wringing every last droplet of life, with little room for regret. urgency underscores all of it. and filters are all stripped away. her name was annie, a name i’ve always adored, a name that makes me think ragdoll but in the most beloved way. i wasn’t going to write about her because her mama—one of the loveliest, funniest, fiercest someones i’ve ever met (this apple didn’t fall far from its tree)—often pulls up a chair, and i didn’t want to tread on her pain, or speak out of turn. but here i am saying simply that annie was love, was incandescent, and inextinguishable. and i will never ever let go of her spark. and i will carry her with me forever. i love her.

love defies death. it refuses to go. carries on into the all-that’s-to-come. shifts form, and does not grow thin.

that’s not all that broke my heart this week. i am keeping vigil as another someone i’ve loved is breathing her last. she’s in montana now, living with her brother who is at her bedside as i type this. he squeezes syringes of morphine between her lips, and sends me updates by text.

for years, she was a constant here in our leafy little neighborhood. she’d moved back to the big family house to care for her aging mama and papa, both of whom have since died, and the house was sold, and the money ran dry. and it was a heartache, all of it.

but she, like every other someone i’ve ever loved, taught me so very much on the subject. sarah is her name, and she made us her tight-knit family, all of us who live along the alley that runs behind our houses: she baked by the hour, tended a tomato garden, filled baskets with juicy peaches at the farmer’s market, and delivered her goods door-to-door in bulging bags she’d hang on the doorknobs. she sent kids off to college with care packages filled with just about anything under the sun (first aid kits, mini blenders, packets of pedialyte). and, most of all, she adopted feral cats, cats so afraid of humans it took her months to get them to curl up beside her. but night after night she sat out there in the alley with her still-warm roasted chicken, and her cans of albacore tuna, and piles of blankets (all for the cats who knew where to find her, every evening at 7). some nights, she’d sit there till midnight, sarah and one or two of her cats. maybe they counted the stars.

the sun is up now. and i hear footsteps above. another day to learn about love. and mostly to live it as deeply as i am able.

here’s a beauty found this week….

This world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through. Some people learn love, kindness. Others… abuse and brutality. But the best students are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty. The ones who choose not to inflict their suffering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave.

—Elif Shafak, Turkish novelist

what did you learn about love this week?

9 Comments

February 6, 2026

february’s challenge: in need of miracles, giggles, and the wisdom of an elder

lupercalia: purification rite of ancient rome

i am, in most any year, a serious proponent of the purification month, the one you know as february (from the latin, februum, “to purify”) when in ancient times the romans gathered in a cave above the city, tucked into the palatine hill, intent on purifying the city during what, at the time, had been the last month of the year. the name, curiously enough, is attached to the instruments of purification known as the februa, or thongs cut from the flayed skin of a sacrificial wolf, which, even more curiously, were donned by a certain flock of priests (the luperci, named for this brotherly cult of the wolves) who, after a blood sacrifice at the lupercal altar, then ran counterclockwise around the palatine hill. as if all this isn’t curious enough, outside the cave where all this purification and fertility was underway, there stood a statue of rumina, goddess of breastfeeding (who knew?!), and the wild fig tree thought to have somehow saved romulus and remus, the twins raised by wolves.

did i mention that as the mostly naked wolfly priests ran their reverse-circle routes, an array of bare-armed. bare-backed women darted into their paths, hoping to be flogged with leather straps. all in the name of a.) fertility for the barren, or b.) ease of childbirth for those “with child”?

no less than plutarch, the esteemed greek philosopher and biographer of the time, described the scene thusly:

…many of the noble youths and of the magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs. And many women of rank also purposely get in their way, and like children at school present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy.

as i was saying: in most any year, i welcome the second month. say bring it on, short string of days when groundhogs, lincoln logs, and construction-paper hearts punctuate the month.

but this, alas, is not any year, and this february finds us dragging. or i am anyway. the world has gone kerpluey. and things at home bump along. whereas the festival of hearts, the mid-month apogee, comes just in time to fill the empty tank, this year the nearly empty is already upon us. and we’re not yet one week in.

i need hope. and joy. and a good dose of self-inflicted wisdom.

and, indeed, as it so often does, the universe came to the rescue. this week, in the form of walt whitman, the idiosyncratic, oft-long-winded bard; a close laboratory look at the evolution of the human giggle; and not least, the wisdom of one abigail thomas, an octogenarian and memoirist who brings us still life at eighty.

in keeping with the counterclockwise spirit of the wolf priests, let us take on this trio in reverse order, beginning with ms. thomas, the daughter of the late great lewis thomas, the physician, scientist, and essayist who gave us a masterpiece of the twentieth century, lives of a cell: notes of a biology watcher, the collection of 29 mindbogglingly beautiful essays originally published in the new england journal of medicine.

i’d not known of lewis’ daughter abigail until last weekend, sitting in a writerly circle in a big old manse at the edge of lake michigan’s icy shoreline, when one of the writerly women expressed shock and pure dismay that i’d not yet read her, miss abigail that is. she’s a “brilliant memoirist” i was told. “you must read her,” i was told.

i needed no further prompting.

now, six days later, i’ve got abigail clutched between my fists, and i can attest that she is, at eighty-four now, as hilarious and wise an essayist as i’ve read in a good long while. and she is precisely what the good doctor order.

for instance:

she goes on this way, randomly throwing in the unexpected F-word, or the sh** word, whisking wisdom in among the curiosities and musings, for 191 pages.

next up: giggles.

i doubledare you to click on any one of these glorious giggles, and not break out in joy like no other. took me straight back to the kitchen island where, back in 1993, the glorious human strapped into his baby seat took one look at me and burst into a full-on gale of giggles. oh, my beloved firstborn, how you slayed me to the core. all these many many gray matters and synapses later, and the sound of that first belly laugh i still can hear looping and re-looping in my mind’s ear.

a close look at life’s first laughs:

and, at last, we come to mr. whitman, who brings us to his short course in miracles. and ticks us through the litany of everyday wonders. that some days just might save us.

even on the dreariest of february days in the twenty-sixth year after the second millennium….

MIRACLES

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

+ Walt Whitman

don’t mind me if from now on i think of february as the month of the thong. the counterclockwise dash aimed at purity and fertility.

where did you find light or levity this week?

8 Comments

January 30, 2026

end notes

for weeks now, i’ve been toiling on the latest iteration of the manuscript for a book in gestation*. and this week, i came to the writerly part known as the “end notes,” as in dotting every i, and crossing every t, to be certain all is as clean as clean could possibly be.

and, most of all, should anyone someday reading said book become curious about the source of this or that line, the author (that would be me in this case) must leave a perfectly followable trail of breadcrumbs through the woods, so that the curious someone can find exactly the spot where i, the author, once found those very words.

in other words, fastidiousness is not negotiable. it is a must. (and i might as well sleep with the chicago manual of style, 18th edition, under my pillow, for i consult it every other breath, at a minimum.)

per than manual’s strict instruction, and to be sure that every last page i cite is the exact page in the exact edition of each and every book in my notes, i have been skittering hither and yon to those temples of bookshelves known as public libraries.

i gather up books by the armload, and haul them off to a library table, where i dutifully record (in image and scribble) all pertinent info.

of all the books i’ve scooped up and returned to the shelves, there was one—and only one—that i chose to haul home once again. it called me to do what i’m not so adept at doing these days: to dilly and dally inside its pages. to read for the holy essence of it, not merely to cross off the last of the end notes (currently numbering 103).

the book i brought home was the gift: poems by hafiz the great sufi master, translated by daniel ladinsky. and it is exactly what it purports to be: a gift.

its poems, quite often, are short, not too taxing on the eyes or the brain. and yet, and yet, they do pack a wallop. concentratedly so.

in this era of emotional saturation, when every day seems to bring reams and volumes of terrible news, a droplet of wallop is just about all i can swallow.

but even before i got to the poems, it was the backstory of the sufi master that held me. (sufiism, in the west, is regarded as a form of islamic mysticism; its name is derived from the farsi word meaning “wisdom,” “purity,” or, curiously, “wool,” so drawn from the coarse woolen garments of wandering dervishes.)

hafiz, a persian poet of the 14th century, has been called “a poet for poets” by emerson, who wrote “he fears nothing. he sees too far; he sees throughout. . .” goethe enthused that hafiz “has inscribed undeniable truth indelibly,” and called him “mystically pure.”

such superlatives can get you in trouble, it seems. it’s estimated that 90 percent of his work was destroyed over the centuries by clerics and rulers who disapproved of what he wrote in his poems.

“hafiz was viewed as a great threat, a spiritual rebel, whose insights emancipate his readers from the clutches of those in power—those who exploit the innocent with insane religious propaganda. for hafiz reveals a God with a billion I.Q.—a God that would never cripple us with guilt or control us with fear.” so writes ladinsky in his preface.

it’s said that hafiz’s poetry can be read “as a record of a human being’s journey to perfect joy, perfect learning, and perfect love.”

that’s a journey for which i’ll buy a ticket.

here are a few stops (poems) you might find along the way:

the lessons from 14th-century persia: hold tight to each other, for that is love; allow the light to unfurl your beauty; every cell in all of us, in all creation, yearns for God—or however you name the Holy Being, the Author of Us All.

sustenance in small sips: more than plenty for this day.

what inspired you to hold on this week?

*the book in gestation, you might have read here earlier, though i’ve yet to officially unveil it, is for now titled When Evening Comes: An Urgent Call to Love (Brazos Books, Spring 2027), and it’s a book about being broken open (by whatever the cause) and discovering that in between the brokenness, amid the puzzle of shards, a light finds its way in. i’m currently on the third round of edits with the main editor, and soon will be moving to copy editing, and then production, when the boxes of books will land plop on my stoop. call me crazy (a redundant suggestion perhaps) but i tend to find the imperative fastidiousness of end notes an exercise as delightful, engrossing, and challenging as a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle. in this case, 103 pieces.

11 Comments

January 23, 2026

apologia to the world

“polioplus” (1991), bronze sculpture by glenna goodacre

dear world,

i fear we must be seeming pretty ugly these days, those of us of huddled here in this nation built on what we’d deemed monumental pillars that would not, could not, be crumbled.

but for all the world, and certainly from the wobbly chair where i sit, the granite, the marble, the impenetrable ore looks to be crumbling into fine, chalky bits.

i am—we are—so, so sorry.

mortified is more like it.

in the last 48 hours, i’ve heard the titular head of the land once home of the free labeled a.) “a national embarrassment,” b.) “unhinged,” c.) and the right-wing belgian prime minister put it this way: “it’s up to him to decide if he wants to be a monster, yes or no.”

of our american president’s words from the podium in ski spa switzerland, even the conservative bret stephens of the new york times wrote that it “sounded, in places, as if it had been ghostwritten by mario puzo [author of epic crime-family novel, the godfather]. wrapped in self-aggrandizing boasts and exaggerations, along with ugly jibes, meandering asides and shopworn grievances, lay a premeditated threat worthy of a padrino [mob boss]: ‘you can say ‘yes’ and we will be very appreciative,’ the president said, in reference to his demand for greenland. ‘or you can say ‘no’ and we will remember.’”

the so-called “board of peace,” convened by our very own national embarrassment, has been populated by “three ex-soviet apparatchiks, two military-backed regimes, and a leader [wanted for] war crimes,” according to the financial times. with an entry fee of one billion per pop. peace needn’t be so exclusive a club.

let me put this plainly (and plaintively): we are not, most of us, bullies. we are not always crude. we do not lie awake at night imaging the gilding of our toilet bowl, our hearth, the chairs upon which we perch.

the people i know here—plenty of them anyways—will race you to the ER on a second’s notice, ferry in casseroles of steaming hot chicken and dumplings, and should someone without a home need a warm shower, clean clothes, and a sandwich, well, my street number is 522.

my distaste for bullies is not new. i’ve had a lifelong aversion. could sniff out a skunk in disguise as far back as first grade.

in the house where i grew up we made shoebox hospitals for dinged baby birds, and cardboard villages (complete with a church and a steeple) for ladybugs who’d shimmied in through open windows. oh, and early on we were taught the tenth commandment: “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.” so i went to confession to divulge to the priest my longing for my next-door-neighbor’s rainbow-colored toothpicks. yes, toothpicks. (a counting device in first grade, so mandated by the nuns.)

and believe you me, toothpicks pale in comparison to coveting the island nation of the arctic north, where threats have been made and the stomping of combat boots could be heard in the distance.

all i’m trying to say, dear world, is that we too are shuddering, and shaking our heads, and seeking any possible exit from this existential yet very real nightmare. and we are not, most of us, in any way, shape, or form seeing any bit of ourselves, our souls, reflected in this national madness.

we’re clanging the five-alarm fire bells. some days, weeping into our palms.

we yearn to return to the U.S. of Compassion, the flotillas and flanks that race to the rescue whenever, wherever, there’s rupture—earthly or otherwise.

there’s a statue i pass on the way to church (or trader joe’s) of a kindhearted doctor, (you can sense the kindness even in passing by; i’d imagined it to be dr. jonas salk, developer of the polio vaccine, though turns out it’s just your basic good doctor) with wee ones clambering onto his lap, as he plunges a dose of vaccine into the mouth of one of the babes, part of a worldwide effort to eradicate the godawful scourge. it makes me weep when i pass it now. as it’s the antithesis of our national policy and our re-ordered global health agenda, and i cannot believe that in my lifetime i am watching this obsolescence.

i fear you’ll shove us from your sidewalks, should we dare to set foot in your lands. i fear you’ll see hate when you look at my weathering face.

and i’ll understand. though it will crush me.

all i want you to know is that we are, mostly and deeply, a rather good people. and if there’s anything you ever need, please knock at my door. i promise gentle, warm welcome. and chicken and dumplings to go.

speaking of scandinavian environs, it just so happens that i found a breathtakingly beautiful poem from a reclusive norwegian poet, emil boyson, as i was reading one of my favorite new thinkers recently. my poet friend kathleen hirsch pointed me to norwegian bishop erik varden a while back, and ever since, his wisdom illuminates my days. this poem was found in varden’s 2023 book, Chastity).

i love that it speaks to that delicate beauty inside all of us, a beauty that we ourselves often shy away from, demur. but in truth we yearn to be seen, and maybe most important to see for ourselves our tender, unbreakable beauties. it sounds to me as if some celestial wisdom, maybe God, is speaking in whisper to a precious child who is blind to her own beauties.

here tis:

To the Body
by Emil Boyson

Life is made bearable because, in this world, you exist.
You are the hidden songbird.
You are the new moon’s beauty.
You are the white cloud of yearning.
You are the tornado that pulls us out of ourselves and lets our sweet pain know that all will be changed like a garment and that one day when fate’s measure is full the face of this world must pass.

Who would have thought that YOU, who hold in your hand ultimate secrets known otherwise to God alone,
should be a shy young girl whom thousands pass in the street,
about whom nought is known except that you like crosswords,
do housework for your mother, speak sense about the weather,
and knit little vests for the child your sister expects in March.

Are you never fearful, in the quiet of the night, of your being’s enigma?
Is it your unfurrowed brow that obliges us to brood?
What do you know of questions and answers?
You smile as you pass on your way to reality’s frontier, strangely united with your fate;
while our hearts quiver you are again transformed,
finding, lost in a freedom you have never sought to fathom,
the rigorous paradigm of grace made one with your body,
then collapsing as if dead at the end of your last dance.

what brought any droplet of anti-madness to your world this week?

27 Comments

January 16, 2026

undocumented deficiency: medical thesaurian urgently needed

in which we duck out from the horrors of this tinderbox world—for just a moment’s pause—to unfurrow our overworked brows, breathe out the voluminous tensions, and inject a brief interlude of jocularity into the day. in other words, to laugh a bit when we might otherwise weep, because even in—especially in—these times that try the soul, we must exercise the human capacity for humor. science now tells us (with tape recordings to prove it) that even baboons giggle and guffaw. though we might still be the only species who knows just how to tell a joke.

and sometimes life just makes you laugh…

thus, and herewith, i benevolently offer my linguistic services to those in the medical world whose lexicon is so severely lacking and ill-equipped in the adjectival realm. i beg consideration for my application to a most necessary, and clearly overlooked post: that of human medical thesaurus, aka thesaurian.

for your adjectives, dear doctor world, are limpid, frail, and just plain rude.

it’s come to my attention (abruptly so) that those who peer into our every sinew and synapse might well be adept at pinpointing our deficiencies and odd bits, but the lack of gentility in affixing descriptors to those diagnoses is so sub-par that we’re left gasping, listing toward the cold hard floor.

case in point: just yesterday morning, when word arrived that my latest bone scan report (after a year of monthly pokes in both arms, in hopes of building up my chalky bones into something more substantial), had been filed by the radiologist, and was ready for viewing, i opened said report and nearly toppled.

there, in black and white, the impolite and overwrought label they’d pinned to my condition: not only was i osteoporotic in the extreme, they went one descriptor further, dipping deep into their shallow pool and dubbed my affliction, senile osteoporosis.

senile? really? how ‘bout just plain forgetful (as if a bone, the ossification of calcium and protein, contained capacity for confusion)? i looked it up just now, and see that the term is applied to “a long-standing imbalance.” (it gets worse the deeper i dig….)

now, i might be daffy, and i might lose track of why i’ve walked to the pantry, or climbed down the basement stairs, but i’ve otherwise no hard evidence that i’ve been pushed into the realm of the senile. i can recite my name, birthdate, and at least four times out of seven i’m likely to know which day of the week it is. i’m older than i was (aren’t we all, all of us who can read these words), but am i now old enough to be objectively labeled senile in any way, shape, or bone form?

apparently so.

my bones, no longer merely osteoporotic; they’re now flimsy with a side of senility.

and, mind you, this is not my first go-round with doctors’ adjectival idiocy.

a quarter-century ago, when i found myself miraculously (though not immaculately) “with child” at 44, after eight years of futility, infertility, and heartbreak, the good obstetrician looked hard at the ghostly image from inside my womb, and confirmed my condition. but, no, she didn’t just proclaim me pregnant, plain and simple. oh no. she couldn’t leave well enough alone—this ebullient news that me and my last little egg had defied ALL odds and were forging ahead gestationally.

no, she and the medical world in all its lexicographic obsolescence tethered yet another adjective to my case. i was, forthwith and from that day on, the proud custodian of my very own “geriatric pregnancy.”

perhaps realizing the arthritic creak in those words, my beloved OB-gyne coined yet another way to phrase it, and every time she burst into the wee exam room, my belly bulging by the month, she greeted me as if borrowing from a swashbuckler’s or a swindler’s saltiest address: “you old mother!!” the words she swung my way.

in the journalism biz, the one in which i traded for some three roller-coaster decades, there’s a faulty maxim that if you can find two points and a draw a line between, you’ve got what’s called “a trend.” so let’s say we’ve got one here, one worthy of consideration and at least a dash of commentary.

the common tie between the two aforementioned adjectival assaults seems to be age, as in old age. as in a prejudicial slant not favoring those of us who’ve accumulated years.

as opposed to theologians and philosophers who seem at least cognizant of the wisdoms so acquired, the medical among us seem hellbent on shoving us into the aged cage. my futzy bones aren’t just futzy, they’re senile futzy. my pregnancy at 44 wasn’t purely gift from on high, its medical moniker inspired images of bent and wrinkled me shuffling into delivery, unable to hoist myself upon the bed, let alone shimmy into birthing hardware (aka those unforgiving cold metal stirrups).

i’d like to remind those in the naming department of medicine’s world headquarters that sometimes the assaults on our little old selves are plenty enough, without them playing pin-the-nasty-name-on-the-doddering-old-soul.

a bit of dignity is all we ask. slight consideration for how it might read to those of us who don’t fling such hard-edged modifiers willy-nilly and with abandon. discovering that all those shots did not one thing to make me stronger, nor lessen at all the chance that should i slip i’ll shatter, that alone was plenty sobering.

did you really need to top it off with a good fat dollop of senility?

next thing i know you’ll tell me i’m a geriatric mother. oh, wait, you told me that. . . twenty-five short years ago.

have you ever been pinned with a medical moniker that might do well with a spin through the softening machine? or, more broadly, did anything find you giggling this week, or simply, plainly amused?

14 Comments

January 9, 2026

keening.

the winds have been howling all night, a rushing, a roaring of air on amphetamines. sometimes the sound rises in pitch, almost a keening, the sound of a soul in mourning.

keening, a word that draws me half around the world to the banshees of that faraway island from which my people came (a good half of my people, actually, but it seems the half i’m rooted in). it’s a word that places me in a dark and damp room where a fire roars, and the people are circled in sorrow, cloaked in black woolen wraps. swaying and rocking, the sound that rises up is the sound that lives at the pit of us, the sound that rises when our heart or our soul is shattered. cracked wide open. it’s the ooze of anguish that comes without volition. keening sometimes comes without knowing. it just is. it’s primal. a reservoir so deep inside us it takes velocities of sorrow to tap into it, to draw from its well.

i might have keened once or twice, but i barely remember. both times someone had died, and it felt like part of me did as well. i remember the sound, remember i barely knew where it rose from, or that i’d had it inside.

the God who imagined us imagined so far beyond the imaginable. the God who imagined us gave us a sound, buried it deep, deep inside, where it awaits necessity. there are in our lives times when only that keening will do. that high pitched guttural whoosh that captures the unspeakable, a whoosh that rises and falls, traces the scale from basso, the animal roar, to mezzo soprano, up high where it’s piercing.

and why would the wind be keening?

look around.

listen.

don’t let us dull to the litany.

waking up to find we live in a pariah nation is one. but that’s almost too big for my head. i tend to operate in the finer grain. and the closest i came to keening this week was the news that the poet had been shot through the head.

what poet, you might ask?

the one in minnesota. the one whose first description i read was “37-year-old, mother of a six-year-old, award-winning poet.”

who shoots a poet? how often does the descriptor of a violent death include the word poet?

poets are porous. poets live in the world permeable to the little-noticed. poets process what’s breathtaking and put it, miraculously, to words. poets, the ones i love, the ones whose words put form and frame to unutterable parts of me, they’re among the most gentle-souled humans i’ve known.

renée good was a poet. a mother. and she died at 37, in the front seat of her maroon van we’ve all now watched over and over.

renée good, back when she went by the name renée nicole macklin, won the 2020 academy of american poets prize. that’s not a prize for a piker. that’s a real-deal prize, a trophy worth tucking on the highest shelf in your house. she won it for a poem curiously titled “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.” now, that might not be the first thing that stirs me to want to write a poem. but poets begin in curious places sometimes and take us into terrain where wisdom or epiphany comes.

when we become a nation where a poet is shot through the windshield, just minutes after dropping her six-year-old off at school, we need to ask who in the world we’ve become. it only becomes more twisted when we can see for ourselves how the scene unfolded, and the people in charge, the ones holding the guns, the ones not letting a doctor rush to the scene, tell us that we didn’t see what we saw.

i wonder how apt this headline would be: good is dead.

that would be the headline atop the poet’s obituary. rachel good, award-winning poet and mother of three, was shot through the head. by federal agents. who then refused to let a doctor rush to the front seat of her bloodied, bloodied minivan. and waited too many fading heartbeats before giving the okay to call 9-1-1.

no wonder the wind is keening.

no wonder the world is tapping into its most guttural cries.

not long before i’d found myself tripping over the violent death of rachel good, i’d been thinking deeply about poets. thinking about a breed of poets i’d likened to “a tribe of saintesses.” that’s a feminization of saint, an intentional genderizing, if you will, because the poets i’m most drawn to might technically, and in an old-time world, be coined poetesses, and because the ones to which i am most deeply drawn are ones who weave the sacred, even the liturgical, into the vernacular from which they write. because the saintesses to whom i am most drawn are the ones whose verse scans the divine, shimmers at the edge of the ineffable, catches me unaware, but grounds me in a certainty more certain than many a gospel, i turn to them for edification and plain old uplift of my weary soul.

i keep them in close reach.

sitting just beside me here at this old maple table are two such poet saints, the ones whose lines leave me gasping, my spine tingling as if something holy has just wafted by and through me. because it has.

here’s one. her name is kathleen hirsch, and this is from her mending prayer rugs (finishing line press, 2025). it’s the last stanza of her poem “prayer rugs” (emphasis mine):

I bend in blessing toward all that breathes
May each hour enlarge the pattern—
rose dawn, wind song, tender shoots of faith—
that I may see the weft of the hidden weaver.

or, also sitting right by my elbow, jan richardson’s how the stars get in your bones: a book of blessings (wanton gospeller press, 2025), i flip through pages and pluck just one, titled “the midwife’s prayer.” it begins:

Keep screaming, little baby girl.
Keep practicing using those lungs
and do not stop,
because hollering will help
to ease the shock
every time you go through
another birth.

the saintesses, i swear, speak from a godly vernacular. they see deeper than the rest of us, dwell deeper too. their gift is the gift taken away at Babel. while all the rest of us were stripped of the powers of universal understanding, the saintesses kept on. they speak words that speak to all of us—if we listen closely. if we trace our fingers across the lines they offer, sacramental lines, lines that lift off the page, lift us off the page and into the transcendent, where for just a moment we get to reside.

i don’t know the rest of rachel good’s poems. but i know she was a poet. and the silence where once she spun the words of the unspoken, the little-heard voice, that silence now is cacophonous.

and even the winds are keening.

you can read the whole of rachel good’s prize-winning fetal-pig poem here.

and here are the first few lines…

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
by Renée Nicole Macklin

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,
& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores
(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—
the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

keening in minnesota on the block where rachel good was killed

what shall we do to quell the need for keening? and what poets draw you into the depths of the Holy?

16 Comments

January 2, 2026

when you greet the new year, your very own, with a whisper not a bang. . .

fresh is the year, fresh as the newly-fallen tableau of snow. fresh as a bedsheet unwrinkled by the toss and turn of night. fresh, fresh, fresh.

as with any wintry panorama, the horizonless plane is punctuated with little-noticed hideaways, nooks and crannies for peeking out unseen, for safe harbor within. one of those nooks of the new year, tucked in the shadows of the timpani of christmas, of hanukkah, of new year’s, is a nook all my own. i curl inside it, pulling taut the woolen spans within which i wrap myself. i am a child of the fresh new year. my begin-again in sync with that of time’s eternal ticking.

i mark it devotedly, and by long-ago acquired habit, in some degree of solitude and silence.

it is my pianissimo of blessing. and it needs no accompaniment.

it’s one of a kind, yet not unlike any other.

i will never not celebrate the dawning of each new day. not ever. i live now in the land of gratitude and grace, where every day given is a welcomed bead of prayer answered, an unearned gift, on the abacus of joy. a whole new year is possibility, is joy, is grace, compounded and multiplied. it’s beyond measure, truly. i intend to spend it wisely.

nearly three years ago, in the wake of a surgery that had me calculating five-year-survival odds, sixty-nine seemed far beyond my reach. it was a sum i dared not count. though i wished mightily. prayed heartily.

and now that it’s come, on the third of this new year, i welcome it between my double daily doses of tamiflu, the magic capsule meant to avenge the virus coursing through my achy hollows and my knotty sinew.

instead of gathering tomorrow night round a table at a place hand-picked by my very own aficionado of chicago kitchens, it seems we’ll be gathered here at home (or at least the three-fourths of us now sharing iterations of influenza A). the yuletide tree still standing, still blinking like a night sky stitched with twinkling stars, it’s as cozy a place as i could ever dream. and i’m more than blessed to call it home.

looking back across the years, and all the january thirds, i count more than a handful spent under covers, a thermometer poking from my pucker. it seems the time of year when bugs catch up to me. knock me off my stride.

the lesson here is elementary, and not profound: what matters is not the way you spend a certain day, but how you enter into each and every one.

and i am entering full of bliss.

i know, and won’t forget, how priceless is each day; how not a one of these is to be assumed, presumed, taken for granted.

my birthday gift, once again, is the gift i open every given day: this day, these beauties, these people i so dearly love; the sky that shifts from pink to peach to blue to gray to indigo; the stirrings of the critters who imprint their nighttime rustlings in the snow, or the birds who animate the winter boughs; and especially the quietude, the wintry quietude, that underscores it all—these are the wrappings of the shimmering at my deepest core, the against-all-odds chance to be alive here and now, to love and love some more, to bring some faint grain of blessedness to each and every day.

for all of this, in any form, in every form, i bend my knees and bow: thank you, O Holy, Holy One, for the breath that animates and infuses, the breath that fills my heart and lungs with the inextinguishable, ineffable trace of You.

epiphany is the light shining in the not-so distance. may it cast its glow on our uncharted paths and illuminate our way….and may this new year bless all of us. deeply, contentedly, quietly.

what lights do you see in the not-so distance?

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December 26, 2025

the holy hush of the morning after

sometimes, in the holy hollows of the morning after, the wonder of Christmas drifts deeper into my soul than in the rush of days before. it’s as if snowflakes, the sorts that tumble laconically from above, come down, down, down. quietly. contentedly.

it’s my own hushed holy day.

as is this morning. the old clock is ticking, the fridge is humming as it churns to keep the leftover bits of beast and yorkshire pudding from curdling (or worse), the furnace has just kicked on. and, best of all, the beds upstairs are full. there is no more sumptuous bounty to me than the fullness of beds with lumps under the covers, lumps that rise and fall in respiration. it’s knowing that the dreams of those i love most dearly are all whirling under the one same roof, drafty as it is.

if prayer is practicing the presence of God, as little brother lawrence, the patron saint of pots and pans, long ago taught, then this morning is a prayer. and i am doing the dear little french monk one better: i am not practicing, i am believing. as surely as i fill my lungs with breath, i am sure the presence of something holy, the alpha and omega of Love, is here in this old house.

i’ve been watching it play out, as last night the one i used to call “my little one” all but pulled me away from the sink and plopped me firmly on the couch, so he could take up the last of the dishes, scraping away the bits of feast left behind, as he sensed, from across the Christmasy room, that i was on my last gasp, and could do with a superhero to swoop in to my rescue. that boy (who’d already cooked the beast to perfection, and zhoozhed up the horseradish sauce to picture-perfect perfection) is living, breathing empathy, and benevolence should be his middle name.

i’ve been listening to it, as the sounds of two boys, brothers born with eight years between, plotted late into the night, and their whispers climbed the stairs, rounded the bend, and slithered under the bedroom door to my ears. i know, from the rise and fall of their voices, and the unchecked bursts of laughter, that the distance between their years is slowly, slowly, melting away. and in the deepest, deepest chamber of my heart, i know they will always have each other.

i’ve sensed it, as my mama nestled her head onto my shoulder as she hugged me goodnight, a tenderness that blooms between us these days as never before.

i was wrapped in it, the presence of God, as i sat at my end of the table, watching the postures and gestures of family feasting: heads leaning in to share a retort or rejoinder; arms reaching for bottles or bowls, and serving another; everyone at once shaking with laughter, or knowing the punch lines to stories told again and again over the years.

and so this morning, still alone in the silence, i will sit inside this prayer, and pull it tight round my shoulders, and whisper a holy amen, a declaration proclaiming “it is true” or “so be it,” a hebrew word shared by all the abrahamic religions, derived from the hebrew for faith, emunah (אמונה).

faith, indeed. faith felt real, spelled out in quotidian stuff of one old house, filled this morning with four blessed souls who live and breathe and laugh out loud and sometimes share secrets and dry each others’ tears and make mistakes and say i’m sorry and reach across the table, every time, and squeeze the hand and share the look that says “i love you now, i have loved you always, and ours is a love without end, a love that will vault into eternity.”

amen.

and thank you, holy holy God, born anew each day in each of our most blessed hearts. may it be so….

how and when have you felt the Holy Presence in this whirl of wild days?

i am leaving you two little Christmasy gifts, a beautiful blessing from christine valters paintner, the dancing monk of the abbey of the arts….and a breathtaking tale from an herbalist, eco-therapist, and author named brigit anna mcNeill….

first, the blessing….

A Christmas Blessing

This blessing dances at the doorway
of light and dark, knows both as sacred:
fertile womb space, miracle of blooming.

This blessing breathes
through those moments of labor
when you too birth the holy
into this fragile, luminous, hurting world

as Mary did two thousand years ago,
eyes wide, hands gripping,
waters breaking like crashing waves
of the primordial sea
sending a prayer through time
that echoes still,
pulsing like starlight
in an enormous sky.

This blessing rests a hand
on the back of the lonely
  disoriented
    lost
      hungry
        despairing
          persecuted
to say your humanity is not an obstacle
but a threshold, to remind you
that the wound is a portal
through which your gifts pour forth,
that raw ache you feel
is the terrible wonder of being alive
calling you into a communion
of veil-lifters, catching glimpses
of a world where the greeds
and horrors are turned upside down.

This blessing comes as an Annunciation:
the world needs *you* wild edge-dweller
where the wind cries out,
where the stone endures,

your hands a bowl,
your heart a cave,
your eyes a mirror,
bringing a drink of water,
an ancient song,
a shimmering light
reflecting all that we miss
in days of rushing.

This blessing creates a resting place
to gather your strength
between the diastole and systole
of the heart,
to learn to trust
in roses and pomegranate,
in sparrows and dragonflies,
in the electricity of the storm.

This blessing says:
know this birthing is not
once and for all
but again and again,
erupting like moonlight between
bare branches,
like a hearth fire lit for
all who have been exiled.
This blessing calls you home.

~ Christine Valters Paintner from the forthcoming A Book of Everyday Blessings: 100 Prayers for Dancing Monks, Artists, and Pilgrims

and this, a link to the story “The Wild Teacher in the Night,” by Brigit Anna McNeill

the story begins thusly….

There are lessons you can only learn when the world goes dark enough to hear your own bones. In recent evenings, as heartbreak presses its tremors against my ribs and illness narrows the space inside my body, I step out of the granite cottage and into the night. Not searching for signs or answers, just stepping into a different kind of knowing.

merry blessed morning after. may you find a Holy Presence settling in like snowflakes from heaven this day….

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December 19, 2025

greening: another word for bringing the holy within

it came over me like a wind from the north. suddenly, my little wagon was steering straight toward the tree lot. too early to be opened, i climbed a snow mound (as if i were far more agile than i am) peered through the cyclone fence to get a peek at the price tag, let out a gasp, and climbed back down from the mound.

the little wagon wasn’t finished. it steered toward yet another tree lot, where a clump of three last trees lay cast off in a heap. these were not the sort of firs that stand proud in rows, showing off their verdancy. these were orphans, literally tossed aside. one, i decided, was mine. so i marched in and paid, and looped the tree atop the wagon. then we drove home, the little tree and me. and all by myself i hauled it from car to back door, and into the house, where it lay, awaiting another pair of hands for the vertical lift.

this urge to green, this life force that would not be slowed, as i merried my way into the season, looping garlands, dangling wreaths, lacing strands of lights and cranberries through the boughs of the little lost tree, all of it was as if a whirl had swept through the house—and through me.

“seasonal affliction,” you might think. belatedly getting with the program, another way to put it (for i’d waited far too long for the fresh young trees, and the Christmas countdown was now in single digits). merely catching up, the motivating force that drove this fa-la-la-ing.

until the next morning, when suddenly it made sense—immense sense—in a way i’d not seen it nor felt it before.

there i was, sitting off to the side of the little chapel where i sometimes go to pray, when a holy fellow stepped to the pulpit and began to talk about hildegard of bingen, the great twelfth-century german benedictine abbess and mystic, whose whole theology (a cosmology, really) was centered on the idea of viriditas, a latin term she coined from the words for “greening” and “truth.” it was her notion that all of life has ever been, and will be, imbued with a Godly force, a greening aliveness surging toward wholeness, holiness, and healing. it’s another vision for the breath of God filling our every corpuscle with the oxygen of the Divine. yet hildegard, a polymath and herbalist whose notebooks were filled with writings and doodles of birds and trees and stones and stars, centered her vision on “the greening,” fueled by a sacred sap coursing through and pervading all of creation, and the animating force in each of our souls.

in other words: there is in us, and in every atom and ion of creation, a current, a holy river, propelling us and all creation toward the ultimate whole, the holiness God has ordained and which we mere mortals can only imagine.

hildegard came to this as she studied the greening of plants in the monastery’s garden, paying close attention as stem and bud absorbed the sunlight, and—long before photosynthesis was understood by botanists—she grasped that the sun’s offerings (light and warmth) were the forces that brought the fronds’ unfurling and the peeling open of the blossom. if the garden worked thusly, then why oh why wouldn’t humanity, wouldn’t all of creation, so too? mightn’t we too absorb a holy surge, a Divine light, one that would enable us to bring forth the healing, the wholeness, this world on both a micro and macro level so deeply needs?

and so she set about preaching her twelfth-century truth, imploring and prodding in equal measure, needling those who’d masquerade as mighty, rattling those half-asleep in their pews.

as the theologian matthew fox once put it: “hildegard is not only mystic; she is also prophet. . . . she disturbs the complacent, deliberately provoking the privileged, be they emperors or popes, abbots or archbishops, monks or princes to greater justice and deeper sensitivity to the oppressed. . . .”

no shrinking violet in the churchly world, the mystic-prophet minced no words:

“If . . . we give up the green vitality of [our] virtues and surrender to the drought of our indolence, so that we do not have the sap of life and the greening power of good deeds, then the power of our very soul will begin to fade and dry up.“

suddenly, my greening of the house, the catapulting of the tree into vertical stance, the looping of my mother’s garland at the windows, the hanging of the wreaths, was not simply Christmas festooning but rather a task with heavenly purpose: ushering in a holy force, filling the house, the rooms, with Godly presence.

it’s an anointing i’d not imagined before but now my little orphan tree reminds me, as it sparkles in the corner, what hildegard once knew: in all of us there is a holy surge. and the time is now to infuse our world with it.

this old house is not just greener than it used to be, but resonant with God’s permeating presence.

on the eve of the longest night, when shadow cloaks the planet’s northern half, may you find greening—holy greening—deep within, and may you bring it vibrantly into this desiccating world.

merry blessed countdown. may your days find quiet. and in the depth of these dark nights may the kindling come and cast its light upon your way….

a little bit of bingen to stir the greening….

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