August | 2023 | pull up a chair

when you happen to tiptoe outside into the dewy sop of dawn, just after the light breaks through, you might hear a noise, at that liminal hour when noise is one thing there’s not. not much of, anyway.

i was standing there with my mug and my prayers, when all of a sudden i heard it. the sound of a mosquito buzzing your ear, only amplitudes louder. it’s not as loud as the nighttime’s cicada, nowhere near it. it’s the buzzsaw of dawn, when the bees are up early and nose-deep in work.

i followed a pair, fat, fuzzy, all full of themselves. full of unctuous beads of gold-dazzled pollen. looked like they’d rolled in a can of it. which they more or less did, dive bombing into the gold-dusted pincushions that rise from the swirl of anemone petals.

because i tend to read nature in a scriptural way, meaning i stand there in the face of a question, connecting the dots, unpuzzling the parable, i wondered what lesson i might extract from the bee, while the bee was drowsily, drunkenly, extracting its pollen-y porridge.

what i came up with was unrelenting. unrelenting as in the bee, morning after morning, rises up from the hive, zigzags out the door, and plows ahead with his one holy task: he gathers up gold dust, the baseline of honey. it’s the task he was born to, a task he can’t shirk. a task he dives into with unrelenting enthusiasms.

i stood there for a while marveling at all there is in the tableau of dawn. the breeze already stirring. the moon now off the clock, back under the covers. or maybe just hiding back behind clouds. one or two birds were up and starting to chirp. but centerstage, in my attentions at least, was that fine pair of harvesting bees.

i thought about the perfect harmony of this early hour. how all of creation plays its own part.

i thought about my own holy task and not being daunted. i don’t really know yet what exactly i’m up against — none of us do. but, i took a note from the bees: head down, nose first, gather up gold dust wherever you can.

be unrelenting. don’t be distracted. or daunted. even on days when it’s harder than hard: nuzzle your way into the gold dust, suck up what you can.

it’s the reason you’re here on this holy earth.

maybe the bee understands: his days in the hive, they’re numbered. just like yours and like mine. so he gets down to business. gathering all that he can.

i let that sink in, while i kept up my watch, mesmerized by the bee who would not be dissuaded, distracted, or daunted.

bee season brings lessons. but you need to perk up your ears.

among the gold-dusted pollens i gathered this week was one heavenly spoken-word poet, podcaster, and author: amena brown. “a breathtaking blend of poet, prophet and pioneer,” one reviewer wrote. “her life and words will bless your soul.” no less than richard rohr, the modern-day mystic, and his center for contemplation and action pointed me in her direction. and what a direction it is. have a listen:

amena brown: “She Said How Do You Know When You’re Hearing From God”

i ran out and bought the book from which it came, so knocked off my socks by it was i. and i was only going to share the first verse. or two. but i can’t bear to leave out a one. it’s a bit long. and worth every drop. thank you, amena, for sharing your wonder…

She said, “How do you know when you are hearing from God?”
I didn’t know how to explain
It is to explain the butter grit of
cornbread to a mouth that just
discovered it has a tongue
The sound of jazz to ears that only ever
thought they’d be lobes of flesh
The sight of sunsets to blinded eyes
that in an instant can see
To fail at the ability to give words to
how the scent of baked bread can
make the mind recall a memory
Every detail
Of a house, a room, a kitchen, a
conversation
Like explaining to a newborn baby this
is what it feels like to be held
My words never felt so small, so
useless, so incapable

I wanted to say
Put your hand in the middle of your chest
Feel the rhythm there
I wanted to say you will find the holy
text in so many places
On crinkly pages of scripture
In dusty hymnals
In the creases of a grandmother’s smile
The way she clasps her hands
The way she prays familiar, with
reverence as if to a dignitary and friend
The way she sings a simple song from
her spirit and porches turn to cathedrals

I learned from my great-grandmother
how to pray
How to talk to God
How to listen
Watching her and the other silver-
haired church mothers gather in her
living room
Worn wrinkled hands on top of leather
bibles well traveled

They prayed living room prayers
because you don’t have to be inside
the four walls of a church to cry out to
the God who made you
Because no matter where you sing or
scream or whisper God’s ears can
hear you

And despite what the laws say or what
our human flaws say
God’s ears don’t play favourites
God’s ears don’t assess bank accounts
or social status before they attune
themselves to the story your tears or
your fears are telling

God’s ears are here for the babies
For the immigrant, for the refugee
For the depressed, for the lonely
For the dreamers
The widow, the orphan
The oppressed and the helpless
Those about to make a mess or caught
in the middle of cleaning one up
Dirt don’t scare God’s ears
God is a gardener
God knows things can’t grow without
sun, rain and soil

I want to tell her to hear God
You have to be willing to experience
what’s holy in places many people
don’t deem to be sacred
That sometimes God sits next to you
on a barstool
Spilling truth to you like too many beers
That God knows very well the dance
we’ll do
When we love ourselves so little that
just about anyone will do

That God cares about the moments we
find ourselves
On the edge of a cliff
On the edge of sanity
On the edge of society
Even when we have less than an inch
left of the thread that’s been holding
us together

I want to tell her God is always waiting
Lingering after the doors close
And the phone doesn’t ring
And we are finally alone
God is always saying
I love you
I am here
Don’t go, stay
Please

I try to explain how God is pleading with us
To trust
To love
To listen
That God’s voice is melody and bass
lines and whisper and thunder and
grace

Sometimes when I pray, I think of her
How the voice of God was lingering in
her very question
How so many of us just like her
Just like me
Just like you
Are still searching
Still questioning, still doubting
I know I don’t have all the answers
I know I never will
That sometimes the best thing we can
do is put our hands in the middle of
our chest
Feel the rhythm there
Turn down the noise in our minds, in
our lives
And whisper,
God
Whatever you want to say
I’m here
I’m listening

– Amena Brown

and one last wonder, sent my way this week, from rebecca solnit’s 2004 Hope in the Dark, her counterpoint to a world in despair, an exploration of hope as “an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable.”.

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal…

To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
Rebecca Solnit

finally, finally, but maybe sweetest for last: 32 years ago i married the love of my life. my tall sequoia of a sweet and steady soul. he has been my ballast all these holy blessed years, and never more than now, so one big giant i love you from me.

how were you unrelenting this week? and did you gather up gold dust?

20 Comments

August 18, 2023

they call it grounding for a reason . . .

mistletoe (now studied for its tumor-shrinking capacities) fights “convulsion fits, the apoplexy, palsy, and vertigo.” (elizabeth blackwell, 1737)

there’ve been days of late when i feel dizzy, dizzy with a lightheadedness that comes from being afraid, from not knowing, from wondering if i’m standing on a very thin edge, and worrying about what might swallow me.

dizzy from trying to figure things out on my own, because doctors don’t always tell you all you need to know. so you piece it together the smartest ways you know.

on those dizzying days, the days that come because it seems my cancer is more complicated than i was first told, i all but plant myself –– ground myself –– in this holy earth. i listen for the cardinal’s aubade at the hour of first light, as the inky molecules of night dissolve into the tissue-paper pink of dawn. i pluck flowers with whimsy and abandon, and tuck them willy-nilly into wee tiny bottles that line my sink and my windowsill, and make me dizzy with short breaths of joy. i stare into the depths of the starry night. i all but beg all the heavens and earth to enfold me.

if creation is holy, and i believe it is, if holy God is the spark that animates the whisperings of the cottonwood’s quaking and the duet of the butterfly couplet, and i believe that God is, then this holy earth is here for more than just astonishment and wonder.

this holy earth is here for healing.

for healing what’s broken inside. deep inside. and broken in ways where you barely recognize the pieces, and can’t quite find the way to piece them together.

holy earth has offered its healing since the beginning. the very beginning.

sometimes, it’s straight-up medicinal. the foxglove, a magnificent stalk dangling with deep-throated bells, is the font for digitalis, the cure for a galloping heart. coneflower is where we pluck echinacea, the compound that chases away a cold. even morphine, the pain killer to which i’m allergic, comes to us from the fields of poppies that sway in the mountains of turkey and burma. and it was madagascar periwinkle, described as a “carefree annual,” that gave its leaves to heal the kids with leukemia i cared for so long ago. (how gobsmacking miraculous is each of these earth-given cures?)

sometimes, it heals in ways that infuse without compound or molecule. sometimes, pharmacology is not in the equation. but the healing is as certain, as deep, as true, as that from any pill or tonic i’ve ever swallowed or slurped from a spoon.

i was drawn back to the groundedness that comes from this earth, to the veritable apothecary of cures upon which we dwell –– both the medicinal and the ethereal (the ones that most often infuse me) –– when i stumbled upon a poem-slash-essay in orion magazine the other day. it was titled “11 interventions in the 10 days of your dying,” and, one by one, it ticks through the litany of earth’s holy graces that saved its writer as she watched her husband die. it ends in this coda:

XI.
Katydids

I have kissed you goodbye, made the calls, packed our things. I step out into a hot summer midnight to the paeans of katydids ringing the trees. The only conceivable response is to set down our bags and bow.
trebbe johnson

i read that its author, a blessed woman named trebbe johnson, is a writer, wilderness leader, and founder of a global community that goes by the name “radical joy for hard times,” a community that describes itself as “devoted to finding and making beauty in wounded places.” sign me up, say i!

because poking around is my default mode, i poked around long enough to peek into trebbe’s newest book, fierce consciousness: surviving the sorrows of earth and self, a book i’m ordering up from my friends at the library. here’s one paragraph that just might pull me out of the cold, dark well where i’ve been splashing about:

so joy is what i’m seizing. joy with its amazing, even if only momentary, loft. startling joy. joy that comes up and grabs you at the heart, and taps on your chest long enough for you to notice. joy is the thing that carries us forward when our feet might feel stuck in the muck.

joy comes in so many colors, and sounds, and serendipities. joy comes when someone breaks into a particular smile, and zings straight to your heart. joy comes when i sit here typing (another source of deep grounding i’ve noticed) and a word or three pop out in a particular order, one i’d not realized would happen, nor even imagined.

joy, to me, is when an old friend i love as dearly as life calls me out of the blue, and out of the decades. just after i’ve walked in the door from a harrowing too many hours in the ultrasound chamber. joy is the sound of his voice when he tells me something he was reading felt like “a theological poem from the heart of God.” joy is remembering how deeply i loved him, my dear friend the priest who’s as joy-filled and funny and holy as just about anyone i’ve ever known.

and joy, nearly every day, is what pours from the throat of the cardinal, and the wing of the butterfly whirling. and the way the sunlight darts and illuminates.

and joy, strung like beads on a string, just might save us. no matter the darkness.

what radical joy is saving you these summery days?

p.s. i should probably listen to the old roman, seneca, who has this to say about groundless fears:

“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

and i should probably pay heed to his follow-up advice:

“What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.

“Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.”

and here’s his kicker, quoting epicurus, an old greek philosopher:

“The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.”

we should heed the ancients, is the moral here…

p.s.s. dearest chairs, i want to be sure you know that there is no need to worry about me. i am finding my way, and have chosen to be truly honest with you in the wake of my medical mystery tour (though sparing any medical details, as this is not the place for that). i don’t intend to write too often on the subject, but when it interlaces with whatever leaps out from my emotional landscape for a chosen pondering, i won’t skirt around it, and i will always write true. so when i write of being afraid, it’s because that is how this is, this thing that has boggled me and thrown me into territory i never would choose to enter. there are days that leave me gasping for breath and hope. and there are days where i can be utterly swept into joy upon joy. mostly, it’s just that this is all new, and uncharted. and i didn’t see it coming. i have always taken life and its emotional obstacles head-on. my knees might buckle, but my spine stays strong. and the only way i know is the truth way. we are all humans who find ourselves afraid. and i’m not afraid to say so. because in our vulnerabilities, we discover our strengths. especially when there are glorious hands to hold all along the way….

26 Comments

August 11, 2023

praise song for black-eyed susan

should you poke through the lore-and-legend files of the black-eyed susan, that luminescent exclamation of the august meadow, you’d find it’s long been treasured for its curative charms. the keetoowah peoples (formerly known by the name cherokee, which translated to “people who speak a different language,” which begs the question who’s the different one?) squeezed juice from the roots to cure an earache. a tea made from dried leaves served as a mild diuretic; in other words, it made the bloat go away. and the native peoples of my neck of the woods, the neshnabék (formerly known as the potawatomi) chased away a cold with the ooze they squeezed from black-eyed susan roots. the anishinaabe (a name that means “the good humans”) used it as a poultice against snake bites or open wounds.

i’d like to amend the apothecary: rudbeckia hirta, it turns out, is the perfect balm for rinsing away whatever hurts you deep inside. and i mean the sort of hurt that won’t show up on x-ray, nor splotch a purply bruise on flank or limb or bum. in other words, the black-eyed susan just might be the original pick-me-upper. especially when those nodding heads embroider the banks of a ripple-less pond, especially when their cheery saffron heads stick their necks out as far as the eye can see.

i stumbled onto such a swath this week, after days and days of poring over medical journals that must have been quick-sinking me into summer’s gloom. i’d not known quite how much i needed a spoonful of black-eyed whimsy till it unfurled before me, and far, far beyond me. but once i crouched down low, once i spied the bumbly bees doing their doh-si-doh and la-dee-da, poking their probisci into pollen pouch upon pollen pouch, i found myself entranced. and might have plopped myself permanently amid said swath, except for the fact that chicago’s finest would have given me a chase come the closing hour of the grand old park.

i can’t quite put my finger on whether it’s the hoop skirt of golden petals or the way the fuzzy black-eyed dome periscopes up the middle, or the way the flock of them insistently interrupt the summer fade to jolt us back to joy, but there is a certain je ne sait-something that stands tall and wafts my way, and ever makes me break into a jolly when i come upon a black-eyed susie.

maybe the other day it was the unendingness of it all, the exuberance of earth, rising up and rolling out the golden carpet, one french-knotted with those black-eyed buttons. it was as if the earth was daring me to laugh, to set aside my worries and my dread, to roll with what it offered: it offered stubborn testament to holy hope. it all but rubbed joy in my face, plucked the weight right off my soul, shouted in its earthly way: ”be not afraid; this here’s a world where skies turn pink at dawn, and posies rise in paint-box colors.”

the black-eyed susans got it done. and thus i poked around, to see what else i just might learn while traipsing by their beds.

with one of the more curious common names among the prairie inhabitants, i exercised my curiosities and found out that the name traces back to an old english ballad, one penned near the dawn of the eighteenth century (in 1720, to be precise) by a fellow named john gay. it tells the sad, sad tale of a lovelorn lass (aka susan) who leaps aboard a fleet of moored ships soon to set sail for battle. she’s desperate to find her lover (a sweet fellow by the name of wiliam, the tale so goes) before he shoves off to sea. with tears spilling from her dark, dark eyes (here we find the black-ey’d bit), she cries out his name, he hears her from high above the ship’s yardarms, and, don’t you know, he scrambles down to bid his susan one last farewell. and so it goes in “sweet william’s farewell to black-eyed susan,” the first stanza of which rolls out like this:

All in the Downs the fleet was moor’d,
The streamers waving in the wind,
When black-ey’d Susan came on board:
Oh! where shall I my true love find?
Tell me, ye jovial Sailors, tell me true,
If my sweet William sails among your crew!

never mind that love language of the seventeen hundreds all but drips with sticky treacle.

and here’s a gardener’s tip to go with it (cuz we never stop pouring it on here at the chair!): it’s said that if you seed wild Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus) with Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), the pair will bloom at precisely the exact the same time. forever twinned, the star-crossed, black-eyed lovers.

so goes the etiology of the common name, and now for a bit about the latinate, the rudbeckia hirta, so named by the great father of taxonomy, carl linnaeus, who tidily ordered the world of nature, dividing and naming every which thing according to genus and species.

as these things go, there’s always a backstory. and it’s all in who you know. in this case, before hitting it big in the taxonomy department (binomial nomenclature, his claim to fame), it seems mr. linnaeus needed a little side job. a professor at uppsala university, a school founded in sweden in 1477, a professor by the name of olof rudbeck, was in need of a tutor for his three children, and, in 1730, he hired linnaeus to do the job. linnaeus returned the kindness years later when he conferred immortality on his boss, the good prof, by pinning his name to the black-eyed beauty. as andrea wulf explains in The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession: “For his old teacher Olof Rudbeck, Linnaeus chose the popular Rudbeckia. The tall flower reflected Rudbeck’s stature, Linnaeus explained, and the ray-like petals bore ‘witness that you shone among savants like the sun among stars.’”

its second name, hirta, is latin for “rough and hairy,” which if you rub your nose up against the black-eyed dome is pretty much what you’ll bump into.

but from here on in, i’m going to think of the rudbeckia hirta as the bloom that makes the hurt go ‘way…

…and there’s pretty black-eyed Susan,

perfect as the night is blue…
George Elliott Clarke, from “King Bee Blues”

where’d you find your joy this week?

should you need your own dose of rudbeckia hirta, i beg you waste no time and point yourself in the direction of the brilliantly restored north pond in chicago’s lincoln park. it’s breathtaking in the extreme. and will cure whatever ails you.

p.s.s. the perseid meteor showers — summertime’s biggest celestial splash — hit the skies this weekend. without a full moon this year, the good folk at NASA promise A+ viewing. just find yourself a cozy spot to plop (i’d vote for black-eyed susan proximities), align your spine with the curve of earth and look straight up. they’ll be hard to miss.

8 Comments

August 4, 2023

early morning

Forest in the Morning Light, 1855 (Oil on Canvas), by Asher Brown Durand

early morning is when the veil is thinnest, my soul most porous. i sometimes imagine the air i breathe then, the soft air, the air a recipe of oxygen and dew, is dispatched directly from the heavens. it’s why i slide out from under the bedsheet, to begin the percolating thoughts that rise while the coffee brews. i step outside, and there, as always, is my old friend ancient moon. all but winks at me, that moon, lets me know i’m not alone. there’s watchkeeping at work. from up where angels roam.

my thoughts feel less alone then. in bed they sometimes wrestle me, won’t let me sleep. but once i’m upright, once there’s mug in hand, and moon above, they settle down, fall in some semblance of a line. i find sense then. i feel infused then. infused in a Godly way. as if my gliding out of bed when the clock strikes five gives me just a wee little jump on what God might want me to consider. as if that might be the hour when the clarity comes.

this morning was one of those mornings, after a long, long week that took every ounce of courage my little self contained. i flew hundreds of miles away to talk to a doctor who knows a thing or two about the cancer in my lung. i walked into a shiny tower with expanse of glass, where as much light could shine in as the heavens had to spare. the place is infused with light, as if to tip the balance of all the darkness you can feel in every hallway, in every bent over human body, bodies leaning on canes, on walkers, in wheelchairs, on whomever walks beside them. where every body seemed to have an extra limb in the form of plastic tubes and tiny pumps, all attached, sometimes trailing, peeking out from under pant legs or flapping-open gowns, or tethered to misbehaving poles. all chasing out the demon cells that know not when to stop.

to sit in those waiting rooms is to witness human compassion at its most majestic. hands rubbing shoulders, rubbing backs. hands trying to knead the ache out of someone else’s flesh and bone. foreheads pressed against foreheads. words whispered. holy words. the most emphatic prayers i might ever have witnessed from across a room.

the prayers prayed there are the ones that gush up from untapped places in the soul. those places not known till life excavates to its deepest depths. till prognoses are spelled out, and sentences put forth — and i don’t mean the sentences with verb and nouns.

my visit was not so dire, but it was a visit that’s left me plenty to sift through, as i work hard — so hard — at absorbing all that’s been, and deciding how to seize my holy, holy days.

so i’m up early. where me and God are most likely to bump into each other. where sometimes when i plant my bum on the stoop just beyond the kitchen door, i almost feel another shoulder rubbing up against mine.

little gems just kept floating my way this week, in that way that sometimes blessings know to come. r.s. thomas, an anglican priest poet who kept watch on the rocky edge of wales, is one of my most favorite holy poets. i discovered him when i went to poetry school at yale divinity school a few blessed summers back. reading him always carries me back to the sunlit seminar room where i first met him.

THE BRIGHT FIELD

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
— R. S. Thomas

this one came from a gentle tender soul who breathes poetry. i thought as i started to read it, that she had written it, but then i glanced down and saw “david whyte,” another in my pantheon of saintly poets, the ones who capture threads of my very own heart and weave them into stanzas…

AT HOME

At home amidst
the bees
wandering
the garden
in the summer
light
the sky
a broad roof
for the house
of contentment
where I wish
to
live forever
in the eternity
of my own
fleeting
and momentary
happiness.

I walk toward
the kitchen
door as if walking
toward the
door of a recognized
heaven

and see the
simplicity
of shelves and
the blue dishes
and the
vapouring
steam rising
from the kettle
that called me in.

Not just this
aromatic cup
from which to drink
but the flavour
of a life made whole
and lovely
through the
imagination
seeking its way.

Not just this
house around me
but the arms
of a fierce
but healing world.

Not just this line
I write
but the
innocence
of an earned
forgiveness
flowing again
through hands
made new with
writing.

And a man
with no company
but his house,
his garden,
and his own
well peopled solitude,

entering
the silences
and chambers
of the heart
to start again.

-from The House of Belonging
David Whyte

this one, from pablo neruda, needs no introduction. simply behold it.

Night,
night of mine,
night of the entire world,
you have something inside you, round
like a child
about to be born, like
a bursting
seed,
it is the miracle,
it is the day.
You are more beautiful
because with your darker blood
you feed the poppy being born,
because you work with eyes closed
so eyes can open,
so water can sing,
so our lives
might resuscitate.

—Ode to Night by Pablo Neruda (translated by Ilan Stavans)

and here, if you’ve read all the way down to here, is one last succulence. again, sent by a friend, a blessed friend, of this old chair.

Life is amazing. And then it’s awful. And then it’s amazing again. And in between the amazing and awful it’s ordinary and mundane and routine. Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary. That’s just living heartbreaking, soul-healing, amazing, awful, ordinary life. And it’s breathtakingly beautiful.
L.R. Knost

what time of day is thinnest for you? and did any gems flutter from the heavens for you this week?

i swear there must be more babies born in august than any other month (it’s not the case; i’ve checked) and some of my favorites are in the parade: my beloved brother david (today); my beloved blair (sunday, in which he will find himself among those competing in the triathlon world’s big national swim, bike, run along milwaukee’s lakefront); and my teddy (who is camping under the stars out in the rocky mountains for the next two weeks, and whose big day is tuesday). happy birthday to each of you whom i love with every chamber of my heart and then some! xoxoxox

17 Comments

pull up a chair

Month: August, 2023

August 25, 2023

bee season