March | 2023 | pull up a chair

March 31, 2023

the itch that comes in not-yet-spring

in which, once again, i bring you a wee bouquet, this time an assemblage from the springtime garden. . .

it creeps in unawares, something like a mosquito circling your pillow deep in the night. barely there at the edge of your consciousness, then suddenly smack dab and nettlesome straight in your face.

it’s the itch that comes in the chill of not-yet-real-spring. in the the days when drab is the only real color you see out your window. when the world seems to be broadcasting its thousand ways to be brown. or gray. or washed-out leftover green. at least that’s how it is in my humble neck of the woods.

a week or so ago i finally managed to heave the bundles of pine that had all but petrified over the winter. and all that was left in the pot by the door was left-behind scraps of last autumn’s sheddings. and then suddenly, smack dab like the pesky mosquito, i could stand it no longer.

the drab had taken its toll, the drab stirred me to action: to pick up my keys, lope to the wagon, and drive into the distance. i passed garden store numero one, where the guys were heaving large satchels of loam, with nary a pansy in sight. i motored on, further south, and a wee bit west, into the lot of the big box store, where an old man shivered inside the cash register shack, and the very bare shelves carried only one thing: the bright yellow fluttering faces i’d suddenly craved.

i snatched up three little flats, and carried them home, where the itch of not really spring has been quelled for the moment. it’s too cold for the trowel, so i’ll leave them perched where they are. but my morning’s botanic adventure, the first of the season, is giving me reason to hope. and hope is the thing that animates the first blush of spring.

once the snowflakes recede, and the thermostat warms, once march turns to april, and brings on the palette of exuberant spring, we might actually, actually turn the page on old winter.

don’t hold your breath. . . . or put away your mittens. . .

it seems my mailbox in the middles of the week finds itself with flag up, and something luscious tucked inside. this poem from joyful, wise, and wonderful lamcal, who has been a font of wonder for me for all the years she’s been pulling up a chair.

this is actually anne sexton’s poem, the 20th-century american poet known for her highly confessional works, though this confession radiates with joy.

if i was ever pushed to pick the one sub-genre of poetry that most speaks to me, it’d surely be domestic poetries. those quotidian hours and ordinary nooks and crannies of our everyday lives that are made sacramental through the simple holy practice of paying attention. perhaps you’ll consider joy the next time you towel off in your cannon bath towel, or make a chapel of your eggs. oh, anne sexton, thank you. and, even more so, lamcal. xoxo

Welcome Morning

There is joy
In all:
In the hair I brush each morning,
In the Cannon towel, newly washed,
That I rub my body with each morning,
In the chapel of eggs I cook
Each morning,
In the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
Each morning,
In the spoon and the chair
That cry “hello there, Anne”
Each morning,
In the godhead of the table
That I set my silver, plate, cup upon
Each morning.

All this is God,
Right here in my pea-green house
Each morning
And I mean,
Though often forget,
To give thanks,
To faint down by the kitchen table
In a prayer of rejoicing
As the holy birds at the kitchen window
Peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
Let me paint a thank-you on my palm
For this God, this laughter of the morning,
Lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard,
dies young.

—Anne Sexton

and since april (on the morrow) is poetry month, why not one more, from one of my patron saints of poetry, mary oliver? the line i’ve emphasized in bold is the one i know by heart. i live for holiness visible, entirely. i’m guessing you do, too.

Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way

If you’re John Muir you want trees to
live among. If you’re Emily, a garden
will do.
Try to find the right place for yourself.
If you can’t find it, at least dream of it.

When one is alone and lonely, the body
gladly lingers in the wind or the rain,
or splashes into the cold river, or
pushes through the ice-crusted snow.

Anything that touches.

**God, or the gods, are invisible, quite
understandable. But holiness is visible,
entirely.

Some words will never leave God’s mouth,
no matter how hard you listen.

In all the works of Beethoven, you will
not find a single lie.

All important ideas must include the trees,
the mountains, and the rivers.

To understand many things you must reach out
of your own condition.

For how many years did I wander slowly
through the forest. What wonder and
glory I would have missed had I ever been
in a hurry!

Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still

it explains nothing.

The point is, you’re you, and that’s for keeps.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(Felicity)

and, finally, because this took my breath away in that way that only the Inklings could and can, here’s c.s. lewis trying to put language to the ineffable, talking about “the inconsolable longing for we know not what.”

he’d felt this longing his whole life – it came to him during moments of almost unbearable beauty: “[t]hat unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of ‘Kubla Khan’, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.”

have you ever heard a lovelier expression for a searching for the sacred, no matter what name you put to it? i call it Holy God. and in my heart, i genuflect each time i utter those blessed words.

what visible holiness did you stumble upon this week, and might the itch to bring on springtime have buzzed by your nose this week? how’d you satisfy the itch?

8 Comments

March 24, 2023

out in the wilds (another name for birthing a book to the world)

the very definition of oxymoron: girl recording into phone in the midst of sheer wonder

field notes from out on the front (the book-birthing front). . .

well, it’s friday, friday morning to be precise, and none of the heart attacks i was certain i would have or was having seem to have felled me. despite my genetically-certified DNA from a fellow who loved a microphone, and the chance to trumpet his wonder and wit into the world, i’m fairly certain mine has gone dormant. i seem to have found a sweet spot in the quiet of a typing room where thoughts meander and flow, wriggle onto the page (or the screen), and i do my best talking from there. or even better: across an old maple table, a formica slab, or even the console of any old car, where talk is heart to heart, face to face, where you can see the gleam or the tears in the eyes. where you gauge every flinch of the jaw or the cheeks or the itty bitty muscles that lift up the eyebrows, punctuation in facial expression––the very best kind.

if you were one of the glorious flock who popped onto the zoom the other night, when we all lined up in our on-screen window panes, you were there for the glorious highlight of the week. of the eighty who pulled up a virtual chair (80?!?!), some 22 of you were signed on as “iPad,” which made it a little hard to know who was quite whom. but i knew that for the first time since this ol’ chair started gathering round the make-believe old kitchen table, we were as one, unblindfolded, and we could finally see who we were. and hear our real live voices. at least some of us. we might need more zooms. especially ones where my heart isn’t pounding like the kettle drum in the marching brigade.

lily-of-the-valley dorset button from amy

twas a week full of flurry. twas a week filled with moments i’ll never forget. (a hand-stitched dorset button i now wear by my heart, marsha from low country blessing us with her front-porch benediction, a river of people i love flowing down the stairs of an ever-enchanted bookstore last night, and the little pings of love notes and reminders to breathe from the blessed old friends who know how trembly i get when dispatched beyond the walls of my hermitage…)

i’ve been thinking hard of late of how the writing of a book is a time-lapse conversation––and conversation, to me, is the holy marrow of life. i spent months and weeks reading and writing, pouring my heart and my soul into each page; quite truly, laying it all on the line. and then, as the book made its way down the book-making assembly line, through the chutes and the gears and the binding machines, it all went silent. but now, as the little book lands with its plops on door stoops hither and yon, the conversation picks up again. and that, my friends, is the very, very best part of writing a book.

it’s when i find out which sentence or thought might catch on your heart or your soul. it’s where the interplay of our minds begins a back and forth, often a dance. where i get to find out what cumulus clouds of wonder or wisdom rise up from your reading, where your thoughts leap off of mine and gather their muscle and take on their own magnificent form. that leaves me jaw-dropped.

last night, at the very first in-person book launch, in the lower room of the enchanted bookstore where four of my five books have been officially birthed (the pandemic got in the way of one of the birthings), a beautiful, beautiful woman (one i’d never before met) came up to me, took me firmly by the shoulders, and told me she’d read the book cover to cover, and had figured out its message: “the Holy Spirit will find you,” is what she said over and over. “that’s the message.”

she had tears in her eyes when she said it. and tears i find are contagious, so i had them in mine too. after all those months of reading and writing, i hadn’t quite landed on precisely those words. but i realized that no matter how you define “Holy Spirit” (and i might define it quite broadly), she’d nailed it. in six words, she summed up what it took me 56,000 words to quite get at.

there are comical moments too, as in many a delivery room. (remind me which parts of labor and delivery made me chuckle…) the photo above, a rare inclusion of any image of me here at the chair, captures me following orders. the marketing gurus at broadleaf books, my lovely twin-cities-based publisher, sent me a note and told me to get out and record video befitting my book. not wanting to be on screen myself, i decided to film at the glorious water’s edge of which i write in the book, the grasses where i nestle like quail in the rush. and i decided i’d insert myself by reading aloud, sight unseen. and my beloved blair, who assigned himself to the role of “editorial assistant” this week, decided he’d do the driving and, when i wasn’t looking, he snapped the somewhat hilarious photo above: crazy lady reading aloud a book on earthly wonder into hidden microphone of little glass slab.

the other half of that marketing assignment instructed me to consider making a “reel,” a concept as foreign to me as reading a novel in russian. i had literally no idea how to do this, so i called one of my brothers, whose mastery of reels is legendary among his circles. he reels with abandon, he reels for any occasion. so i knew i was going to the master. as he talked me through, step-by-arduous-step, i followed along. i sat in a chair, and i read a few lines. and then, i must have hit the wrong button, for the darn thing “posted”––aka somehow landed on instagram where any and all could follow along. egad. it had been my first dry run, but i decided to leave it. because life unfiltered, unedited, un-pre-plotted, is where the spice finds its way in.

here’s what life unfiltered might look like:

and with that overdose of moi, i shall leave you in peace for the day and the week.

but do tell: if you’ve found yourself turning the pages of my conversation in paper and ink, what are some of the thoughts that have wriggled up for you? lines that sprung your own epiphany? stories that made you think of your own? tell me what you’ve read from the Book of Nature (the real one, not my little old book)? and tell me the glories and wonders you’ve found. . .

bless you and thank you for being the circle that holds me. the love here is real, even if all the rest is somewhat virtual.

10 Comments

March 17, 2023

of thin places and the deep soul of my ancient peoples

i remember perfectly the first time i heard mention of a “thin place.” i was on holy ground, a farm smack dab in the middle of abe lincoln’s homeland. beau’s farm was the name of the farm, an organic farm, an organic farm that rose from an almost impenetrable shadow of grief. deep grief. beau was a marine, a strapping handsome fellow, who died down the road from the farm, home on leave from iraq, when he drowned. his mother, a woman i’ve come to love dearly, once told me that losing beau was “just like being hung, that moment when they pull that thing out from under you,” when the sheriff comes to the door, rings the bell at just past dawn to break the news.

beau’s mama was lost to grief for two long years. but then, she told me, she started to notice little beauties. she’d toss an old dried plant to the ground; and it’d grow.

“it dawned on me, after all those months, i was noticing beauty,” she once told me as we walked the gravel drive to where the peacocks pecked and strutted in their pen. and as i once wrote in the pages of the chicago tribune, “that’s when she realized. realized maybe the one place where she could plant her sorrow, turn it into something beautiful, something lasting, was the almost seven acres that surrounded her old white resurrected farmhouse. . .”

terry starks is beau’s mama’s name; she lives up in maine now, where she still turns earth and life into something beautiful, something lasting.

terry starks was the first to tell me of thin places. she told me the hay loft in her barn was where she went to cry when the tears seemed to have no end. she told me she was drawn there because the loft was surely a thin place, a place where the veil between heaven and earth is lifted. where you can all but feel the arms of God reaching out toward you.

it’s the celts who see the world that way, who know that ours is a topography of the sacred. who live attuned to soulful rhythms most others miss.

i remember sitting on the porch swing at beau’s farm, as beau’s mama poured her hard-won wisdoms as if a pitcher without bottom. i absorbed more gospel that day on beau’s and beau’s mama’s farm than i’ve absorbed most days of my holy blessed life.

ever since, i’ve been drawn deeper and deeper into the wisdoms of the celts, a holy people who traipse the hills and vales and rocky shorelines of my ancient roots.

because today happens to be a day when plenty of folk haul out green beer and soda bread, i decided to haul out just one of many passages from The Book of Nature, my little book due to be birthed just the other side of the weekend, on the vernal equinox, day of equal light and shadow, when all of us might look upon each other’s faces for the very first time, reason to rejoice if you ask me. it’s a passage from a chapter on the dawn. and i picked the photo way up above because i took it on the day i drove to beau’s farm, and it fits blessedly with how the celts see the sun. and because i was thinking of thin places, i decided to tell terry’s tale as the long way in to how the celts have taught me so very many things. thin places, among the litany.

here tis. . . a passage from The Book of Nature…

God was considered “the Sun behind all suns,” as the author George MacLeod once wrote. The whole of creation was dappled with the light of the sun as it journeyed across the sky. Wherever its light fell, there was God filtering through, an earthly translation of the divine infusion. And the perpetual Celtic praise song rose up with the dawn. Celtic gentlemen—farmers and herders and fishermen, set off to work in the predawn darkness—doffed their hat at the first light of the sun, and bowed in blessing. The Carmina Gadelica, a collection of Gaelic prayers and chants, is filled with start-of-day blessings, as the Celts were wont to offer up benediction for every chore and implement and God-given element of every day, from milking to weaving to shearing the sheep, from fire to wind to sprinkling of water. And certainly for the miraculous return of the morning’s first light. Mystic and teacher Alexander Scott, who grew up in the west of Scotland and kept Celtic ways alive in his nineteenth-century books, wrote that his were a people “listening for God in all things, ‘in the growth of the tree, in the rising of the morning sun, in the stars at night, and in the moon.’”

–Barbara Mahany, The Book of Nature

of the many, many stories i wrote over the almost 30 years, the story of beau’s farm was one of the ones i hold closest to my heart. here’s a link, should you care to read it. with love, from terry’s scribe. (apologies if you need a subscription to open the link.)

thanks to a friend i love with my whole heart, i stumbled on another wise soul with buckets of beauty to grace the world. a poet-activist-performer named andrea gibson, now a cancer survivor whose words might take your breath away. andrea identifies as queer, and uses the pronoun “they;” and they are known for their trademark honesty and bare-naked vulnerability, traits i find irresistible and blessed beyond words. here are just a few lines i couldn’t keep from scribbling down:

when it comes to hearts i want always to be size queen…

i love you because we both showed up to kindness tryouts with notes from the school nurse that said we were too hurt to participate….

when your heart is broken, you plant seeds in the cracks and pray for rain.

before i die, i want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain i will keep it safe. i will keep it safe.
andrea gibson

one more morsel for this blessed day, a poem from billy collins, once poet laureate of the united states, and a poet with plenty o’ irish roots . . .

Questions About Angels
by Billy Collins

Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Do they fly through God’s body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?

If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?

No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

nothing would delight me more than to see some of you, or all of you, come tuesday night, when i am shoving aside my worries about stepping up to speak in front of a crowd any bigger than the one or two who might share this old maple table on any given morning. we’ll gather to mostly rejoice in what’s become a holy sacred bond, one woven over time, through shared wisdoms, devoted kindness, good grace and humor. and i promise to read one or two passages from The Book of Nature, and even talk a little bit about how it came to be. it’s the first of my five books that wasn’t first birthed here, but its pages are filled with wisdoms learned here, steeped here, refined here. so you all have a thread in the whole cloth it became. and i can imagine no finer benediction than to begin the book with you. so see you tuesday, march 21, the vernal equinox at 7 p.m. chicago time.

now, what celtic wisdoms fuel your every day? and where are the thin places in your life where the veil between heaven and earth is at its thinnest, and you too feel it lifted for a blessed glance of the sacred beyond?

when it comes to hearts, i always want to be known as size queen…

14 Comments

March 10, 2023

the vicissitudes of spring. . .

in the dark, i tiptoed down the stairs just now. saw the shimmer of white splattered across the front stoop, reflecting the light of the now shrinking Worm Moon, the moon who takes its name from the squirmers arising from winter’s slumber. any worms out there now might consider zippered jackets. same too for all the dear little green things now courageously, audaciously, sticking their necks out, inching their way up and out from deep earth’s underbelly, where they too have been whiling away the winter doing what green things do in their off-months.

to be a springtime bulb here in the middlelands of the continent, where windswept plains and lake-effect snows are part and parcel of the choreography well into april, is to be of hearty mettle. is to be one who tempts the fates. might as well whisper, “dare you to snow on me.” and yet, the heavens do, springtime after springtime, disgorge their fluffy crystals, dump an icy load. as if a test to see who survives, who withers. it’s lord of the flies, garden variety.

there are those of us who’ve been known to awake to such horrors––our tenderlings adorned in icy crystals––who race out the door, a rescue squad in rubber boots, shaking off the snow, applying blankets to the wounded.

i marvel every time at the ones who bounce back. who shake off the mounds of snow, and go right on punctuating march and april with their crayola-crayon-box colors.

and i think of them as parables, consider the wisdoms they suggest. it’s not too hard to draw a straight line from their vernal trials to the ones we humans face. the waning weeks of this winter have dumped a few harsh snows my way, snows that left me just a little bit knocked back. i’ve stared into the abyss of fear, and found that just like those rescue squads who race outside with brooms and blankets to clear away the snow, life drops down its own brigade of heroes, the ones who steady us in our deepest wobbles, the ones who dry our tears. have you ever noticed how much kindness comes in our darkest hours?

i find the gospel of the season, these liminal weeks when the last gasps of winter blow our way, and the full-on percolations of spring aren’t yet arrived, is one of holding onto hope. the leitmotif––don’t be felled by that which falls upon you––is played out, over and over, just beyond my windowpanes. yes, it snows and crushingly so. but then the melt comes. the stems and stalks and itty-bitty buds, undaunted.

i find a hint of fortitude in glancing out the door in the wake of melt, once the day warms up enough to chase away the fluffy stuff, in seeing the green things shake off their trials, sticking their necks out just a wee bit further. i dig deep and decide i, too, will do as the daffodils. i’ll be brave, and set my sights on bursting forth in fullest color. and along the way, i’ll trust in all of those who come running with broom, blanket, and the curative powers of simple kindness.

on the subject of march, i turn to henry david thoreau and his journals, to see what he had to say on the matter.

here, we dip into The Journal: 1837–1861, with entries from March 21, 1853. thoreau was thirty-five and pondering a different kind of thaw.

March. 21. Morning along the river.

Might not my Journal be called “Field notes?”

I see a honeybee about my boat, apparently attracted by the beeswax (if there is any) in the grafting-wax with which I have luted it. There are many; one is caught and killed in it.

P.M.—To Kibbe Place.

It is a genial and reassuring day; the mere warmth of the west wind amounts almost to balminess. The softness of the air mollifies our own dry and congealed substance. I sit down by a wall to see if I can muse again. We are affected like the earth, and yield to the elemental tenderness; winter breaks up within us; the frost is coming out of me, and I am heaved like the road; accumulated masses of ice and snow dissolve, and thoughts like a freshet pour down unwonted channels. Roads lead elsewhither than to Carlisle and Sudbury. Our experience does not wear upon us. It is seen to be fabulous or symbolical, and the future is worth expecting. In all my walking I have not reached the top of the earth yet.

and, finally, i snipped a few lines from a poem of george herbert, the seventeenth-century poet-priest, on the subject of prayer. i love his litany of metaphors for what prayer is, and find that i might meditate on any one of his multiple choices, the last line here most especially, “the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage”:

George Herbert, “Prayer (I).”

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage . . .

may the prayers that rise from you this month be ones of resilience, of shaking off the snows that fall. and may our hearts always be in pilgrimage. where do you find wisdom in the stirrings of this cusp of hallelujah’s spring?

17 Comments

March 3, 2023

a mother’s heart finds its place in a canyon of moving boxes

dispatch from 20009: in which canyons of boxes in every room are ours to conquer, moi and the one i birthed first. . .

i write to you this dawn from the singular place on the planet i wanted to be this week, a point on the map now highlighted in illuminating shades of radiant. a kid i love is a professor now, and i am here where, in my book, a mother belongs: by his side, tearing open his boxes, tallying the lost and found, turning a blueprint of rooms into a place called home.

i’ve planted the kid in five points on the map since the day he left home for college, and each one for its season became a place i peered in on, checking the weather, counting the miles, watching police reports. his dot became mine by extension.

i’ve spent years now considering places called amherst and new haven, portland, manhattan, and now the nation’s capital, specifically adams morgan, a neighborhood where RBG graces the banners that waft from the light poles, with the words “live your truth.”

the kid has decidedly hopscotched across the country over the course of the last decade. but his itinerant days might be over, as a tenure-track post prompts me to think i’d better get used to the latest in zip codes. and, anyway, unpacking boxes, finding places on shelves, has become my sub-specialty. it’s a task i take on with all the love in the world. i don’t think i’ll ever extinguish the place in my heart that tells me my number one job on the planet is to soften the blows, trod the circuitous path, keep stretching my arms clear across the landscape, and always, always find space and time for side-splitting giggles and tears when they spill from both of our eyes.

the kid is 29 but nowhere in the manual i was handed in the delivery room can i find a line telling me there’s a time when the mothering stops. mothering over the decades is a three-dimensional wonder: it deepens and widens, is layered with strata of life’s most wrenching and glorious moments. just last night as we were giggling and whispering our way to sleep––me on un-sheeted bed (we’re working our way from kitchen to bedroom), him on inflatable mattress––i told him how even though i see the professorial glasses he wears these days and feel the heft of his six-foot-three pillar of flesh and bone when he wraps his arms around me, i also see plenty often a flashing picture show of his life at various points along his continuum: i see––clear as clear could be––the wet and squirmy little thing placed in my outstretched arms the very first time; i see the six-month-old who let out a belly laugh for the very first time; i see the toddler who looked up from the kitchen table one breakfast and asked, as if it was the most ordinary of questions for a three- or four-year-old, “mommy, what is facetious?” meaning what does it mean, this very long word not normally found in preschool vocabulary. and, yes, i see the kindergartener who set up a lecture hall in our living room, with a circle of stuffed-animal pupils, a chalkboard and easel, and 26 spongy alphabet letters. the professor wore suspenders and tie and bare feet, and instructed his class on the fine points of D, O, and Q.

it’s a curious thing, this mothering the grown human being. there are those, i’ve been told, who believe a mother’s role is to step into the distant background, loosen the grip on the ups and the downs of those you’ve loved every day of their lives. i’m not among them, though i can go––and i have––whole weeks without more than a short burst of texting. i find it only gets richer and richer, the closest i know to “love as you would be loved.” mothering to me is a spectacular testing ground: day after day, i re-define and refine the extraordinary intricacies of loving, of where to position myself in the tableau of his life, how much of the weight to bear, and when to stand silent and when to come running.

what i know, after a lifetime of fumbles, of occasional hits and plenty of misses, is this: the width of my brain has only grown wider over the years, as each of my boys carry me into realms i’d otherwise never explore. and my heart and my soul, they’ve at once defied the laws of physics, both deepening and rising to depths and heights i’d never ever imagined. and so, as long as i’m needed and able, i shall tear away the endless strips of packing tape till my fingers are raw and my boy has a place to call home, his very own faraway home. six hundred miles from mine.

since i’ve been busy unpacking this week, i’ve not had much chance to gather up a commonplace-y bouquet. but i did find this, from the late great bard, leonard cohen, on sainthood:

“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men*, such balancing monsters of love.”
Leonard Cohen

“achieved a remote human possibility. . . ” contemplate that for a while….

in book news: it seems hard copies of The Book of Nature have been plopping onto front stoops all over these united states, and heavenly folk, especially friends of the chair, have been sending along snaps, each of which makes my heart do a little bit of a gallop. it’s still a couple weeks till the official pub date––the vernal equinox, march 21; bring on the springtime, bring on the book!––so these early sneak-peek arrivals are both surprise and delight. and i am hoping to set that book soaring with a grand circle of chairs, as night falls on that first day of spring. see here for more details, should you be so inclined. (we’re gathering on march 21 at 7 p.m. central time, via zoom, one of the rare silver linings to emerge from our years in pandemic––or at least i count it as a silver lining, bringing me poets and thinkers from all across the globe.)

before i get back to uprooting books from their boxes, here’s the question (to ponder or drop us your thoughts): of all the mothers you’ve known or watched from some distance or close proximity, what are/were the defining qualities that allowed you to see and see clearly just what it means to love in the deepest mothering way? (and, remember, mothering for me is a verb not tied to any particular gender or state of procreativity, but rather to any and all who love with a tender loving attention and care, and the undying prayer that in some way they might both lighten another’s load and magnify the wonder of being alive…)

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Month: March, 2023