January | 2025 | pull up a chair

with planes crashing into helicopters, and bodies falling into the potomac, and DEI blame being cast with no evidence in sight, i am in no mood to add more noise to the prattle. why tragedy needed to take a sharp turn into retribution, why our skies feel suddenly shaky, is only adding to the despondency i struggle to keep at bay.

i heard stories this week of kids i love, one in far off thailand teaching english in remote villages for the peace corps, terrified that the freezing of federal funds would shatter their dreams in the making. i’ve heard stories of dish washers and cooks in chicago’s little village, a mostly mexican corner of the city, afraid to show their face on the streets, forgoing paychecks in lieu of being handcuffed and torn from the families they love.

we live in a rippling circle of fear and confusion, a darkness is shrouding day after day.

in my teeny-tiny circle of life closer to home, some of that darkness is countered by flickering light. i find good reason for joy. feel wishes come blessedly true. i’ve lived to see a day i had prayed and prayed for, for one of my boys. and i am witness to the fire burning in the dreams of another.

just days ago, i was holed up in a rambling old house on the shore of one great lake with four glorious women whose lives have been marred and scarred by tragedy, and yet, they’ve risen. they’ve written their way through darkness toward light. and they are magnificent. and so so brave. (one wrote the searing memoir while you were out; two others are soon coming with masterpieces all their own. a fourth, i hope, will someday publish her stories that cut to the bone.)

i hobbled home, after an otherwise uneventful walk on a stone-sprinkled beach, with an unhappy ankle.and a quick trip to the foot doc had me strapped into what feels like a leaden boot, and has curtailed my daily constitutionals for the next few weeks. but that’s not all: before week’s end, the resident triathlete in this old hovel had his knees poked and prodded and subjected to space-age medicine, and thus we’ve declared this the hobbledy house. indeed, we are a hobbling, most humbled pair, trading ice packs and heating pads, advil and tylenol, as prescribed by our duet of doctors.

and so my offerings this week rest on the shoulders of others far wiser, less wobbly, than me. cumulatively, they compound the point that we are the solution to the miasma that abounds.

this is our time, of all the times in our lives, to dig down deep as we can, and pull out the fiercest, finest truths we believe in. we must make true the life that ought to be. take it from this collection of seers and sages: clifton, mandelstam, rilke, and trommer, poets all.

In the bigger scheme of things the universe is not asking us to do something,
the universe is asking us to be something.
And that’s a whole different thing.

— Lucille Clifton

“What tense would you choose to live in?” the poet Osip Mandelstam once asked his journal, before answering his own question. “I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle—in the ‘what ought to be.’”

Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell.
As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

BECAUSE
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

So I can’t save the world—
can’t save even myself,
can’t wrap my arms around
every frightened child, can’t
foster peace among nations,
can’t bring love to all who
feel unlovable.
So I practice opening my heart
right here in this room and being gentle
with my insufficiency. I practice
walking down the street heart first.
And if it is insufficient to share love,
I will practice loving anyway.
I want to converse about truth,
about trust. I want to invite compassion
into every interaction.
One willing heart can’t stop a war.
One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry.
And sometimes, daunted by a task too big,
I tell myself what’s the use of trying?
But today, the invitation is clear:
to be ridiculously courageous in love.
To open the heart like a lilac in May,
knowing freeze is possible
and opening anyway.
To take love seriously.
To give love wildly.
To race up to the world
as if I were a puppy,
adoring and unjaded,
stumbling on my own exuberance.
To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.

how might you begin to try — not to save the world, nor even your own sweet self — to practice opening your heart, to be gentle with your insufficiencies, to take love seriously, give wildly, and live in the imperative of the future passive participle, in what “ought to be”?

9 Comments

January 24, 2025

a short course in courage

i’ve been mulling these past few months how to move forward in a world where values that shatter me seem to be in ascendency: revenge, retribution, greed, humiliation, belittlement, and so much of it based on a metastasis of mistruth.

i’d been thinking that keeping my head down and plowing along in a spirit of turn-the-other-cheek, love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself might be a place to begin. might go a long distance.

but i don’t think that anymore.

i don’t think it’s nearly enough.

i think something much harder is called for. i think we’re called upon to reach deep in our souls, and pull up something called courage.

courage, when you’ve been taught to demur, to not make too many waves, courage when your father forbid you to use your real name in a basically-tame high school underground paper, courage when you don’t want to hurt those whom you love, can be an awkward suit to slip on.

i stumble sometimes trying to get my arms through its sleeves.

but i’m thinking it might be a fire built from these sticks: first, root yourself in verifiable truths (check, check, and triple check your sources); second, inhale grace; be clear; be compassionate; be compassionate. keep the most vulnerable keenly in your crosshairs.

and here’s the hard part: put voice to what you believe. correct mistruths when you hear them. amplify the voice of the voiceless. whether it’s in kitchen table conversations, or what serves as the modernday public square (my preference is those sites where fact-checking and vetting are part of the constitution). whether it’s spoken or scribbled or typed.

because conflict aversion lies deep in my DNA, and all but breaks me into hives, i find i’m less afraid when i remind myself that to hold a differing opinion is not to discount or disdain the one who holds it. without discourse, we all stay stuck. without courage, we’re cowards, wasting our time and our breath on our one short ride on this planet.

i’ve been keeping close watch all week on various lists of how to meet these times, how to keep on keeping on, and not a one of the lists suggests keeping mum. speak up. speak truth.

my own code of ethics is one that insists on gentleness, on a voice imbued with humility.

i heard such a voice this week, one that broke through the cacophonies that otherwise abounded, all wrapped in shimmering glitz. you won’t be surprised, perhaps, to know that it was an ordained woman of God, a bishop in washington DC, who took a deep breath, who acknowledged being afraid, but spoke up anyway, asking for mercy, one of the essential beatitudes outlined at the sermon on the mount. and she did so looking straight into the eyes of the newly-inaugurated president, who scowled and looked away, and later deemed her a “so-called Bishop” (reminds me of how, on national TV, he called my husband a “third-rate architecture critic,” adding that “most people thought he got fired,” back in the summer of 2014 on the Today Show, when they––along with Chicago’s mayor at the time––got into an architectural scuffle over the 20-foot-tall letters of the Trump sign on the real estate mogul’s eponymous Chicago skyscraper). And then in this week’s prayer service the President went on to add that the bishop was a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater.”

her name is mariann edgar budde, and she is the episcopal bishop of washington, DC. and the full 14:56 minutes of her sermon are worth a listen (or two.) my prayer is that in my one short swift and very small life, i might find such a voice in my own, and put breath to it when and where it most matters.

bishop budde, it turns out, wrote a book on how we learn to be brave. and i’ve peeked inside while awaiting my copy. worth reading is this:

and this:

and before signing off, inspiration on courage from kentucky bard and old-fashioned farmer wendell berry:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

― Wendell Berry

and the incomparable maya angelou:

INSPIRATION

We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love’s light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

— Maya Angelou

where have you found courage of late? did it feel awkward? did it make a discernible difference?

16 Comments

January 17, 2025

hope diamond, all right

i’m not too keen on wearing my medical woes on my sleeve, and in fact i wish i could keep them locked tight in a jar at the back of the cellar. but because sometimes i can’t hide how afraid i get, and because profound wisdoms are here to be unearthed in riding the hills and vales of cancerland, i’ve thought hard about when to say what. or whether to ever say anything at all. and today, i have a story to tell that might make you smile, and might bring you hope — for whatever your own scary tale is. (and it wouldn’t seem fair to leave you thinking that happy twists are never somewhere off in the distance.)

it’s a chapter that began back in early october when my every-six-months scan came back not the way anyone wanted, and the surgeon who called to give the bad news spent less than three minutes on the phone spelling it out, including the seconds it took for him to tell me that if in fact it was a recurrence (an especially bad thing, a mere 18 months from first diagnosis) they’d consider taking out the rest of my lung. that’s a lot for a girl to swallow in less than the time it takes to peel the skin off an apple.

he wound up telling me he wanted to push up my next scan to just after the new year, a date that seemed a grand canyon away, the far side of thanksgiving, christmas, new years, and my birthday.

so i did what any scared person with a bolt of bad news might do: i stopped breathing, started to cry, and because i was home alone i dialed a brother i love, a brother i’ve leaned on more than once when life’s at its thickest. (it was too scary to tell my own boys or practically anyone else for that matter, not when there were so many questions and no answers in sight. my number one instinct, no matter the script, seems to always be to protect my boys from unneeded worries. so i waited till i could give them more than a basket of runaway fears.)

tears dried that ominous october morn, i got on the horn, or in this case the keyboard whose little black keys allow me to reach far and wide to my wee brigade of self-assembled experts who understand the ins and outs of my wily little cancer, a cancer that doesn’t like to play by anyone’s rules. my No. 1 expert, a fellow with nose to the microscope who studies this rare iteration as well as lovingly caring for people who have it, wanted me to board a plane and fly to salt lake city to go under anesthesia and have a little chunk of lung snipped out for biopsy: the surest way to get to the bottom of things. but he also decided in the end that it might be just as reasonable, and a whole lot less stress, to wait for the next scan in chicago, a mere four weeks difference between the two options.

it would not be understatement to say that i was pretty much as scared as i’ve ever been for a good bunch of that time. went so far as to type up housekeeping instructions, made sure my passwords were all up to date, and even thought hard about a few other things too dark to type here. it’s what happens when you know there’s a cancer lurking inside and you’ve no idea what it’s up to, but the indications aren’t good.

i admit to a panic attack or two before things settled down. but then i started breathing again, and the day before my birthday (the one i’d once worried would never come) i swam a mile in my little warm bath of a swimming pool (i swim with the seniors these days, and by seniors i mean the ladies who glide out of wheelchairs and into the pool where they take laps walking edge to edge of the pool.) and the day before the scan i did it again. a mile, that is. my dear mama, looked at me in that way that she can, and asked, “what are you trying to prove?” to which the answer would be, that cancer can’t catch me. as if.

well, it took a good week for the radiologists at my big fancy medical center to get a close look at the scan and when they did they finally sent word: looks good, they agreed. and even tossed in a cherry on top when they wrote “mild improvement” in one particularly concerning spot.

it took a minute or two for the truth to sink in, but the image that came soonest to mind was a big shimmering diamond. a blob of diamond the likes of which i’d not before pictured in such shimmering shards of luminous light.

i felt like someone had just handed me the hope diamond, the gift of six whole months before they need to go in there and peek around again. i felt the full sweep of six months in which every sentence my boys speak isn’t backwashed by my own private fear that i won’t be around for the end of the story.

to be told that your worries, the ones that all but froze you in fear, are lifted, are zapped, are momentarily wiped off the map, is to be catapulted into a landscape you’d thought was a no-trespassing zone.

it’s pretty much like getting your life handed back to you on a plate. a gold-rimmed one.

you get to imagine the very few ways you wish to cherish this breathtaking time. you consider buying a pair of plane tickets and telling each of your boys to pack a bag and fly away with you for a weekend. to take long walks, and sit over candlelit dinners. to hold hands on the sands of a beach. or a bustling city sidewalk. to tell the deepest truths. and to say as many times as you possibly possibly can that you will love them till beyond the end of all time.

you think of the moments you might be around to absorb now that you’re not being shoved toward the exit. and the peals of pure joy sure to rise up when wee dreams come true. and maybe a big one or two.

you think of how blessed you’ll feel, day in and day out, when not an hour nor minute is taken for granted. when staring up into a starry night, or tiptoeing into the dawn will each be a moment you’d feared would not come. will be a moment of beauty you all but bathe in, every drop of it sacred and whole.

simply because you’re alive, you’re awake, and you’re drinking it in.

you take a deep breath once again, and you all but fall on your knees: life is giving you one more run at making it count. and you’ll not waste it. you utterly, totally, certainly promise.

here, some of the holiest words i read this week, while working my way through a good old-fashioned case of influenza, the kind with fever and cough that send you under the blankets….

May you grow still enough to hear the small noises earth makes in preparing for the long sleep of winter, so that you yourself may grow calm and grounded deep within.

May you grow still enough to hear the trickling of water seeping into the ground, so that your soul may be softened and healed, and guided in its flow.

May you grow still enough to hear the splintering of starlight in the winter sky and the roar at earth’s fiery core.

May you grow still enough to hear the stir of a single snowflake in the air, so that your inner silence may turn into hushed expectation.

–David Steindl Rast, May You Grow Still Enough To Hear

and lastly, when you’re lying around under blankets, poking around the internet is the most fun you might find, so here’s what i found when i got curious about the hope diamond this week:

the Hope Diamond, which happens to be blue as the sky in july, weighs in at a walloping 45.52 carats, and thus has been heralded round the world since the 18th century, though its story traces back to when it was dug from an indian mine a century earlier.

according to the mind hive that is wikipedia, its recorded history begins in 1666, when the French gem merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier purchased it in India in uncut form. After cutting it and renaming it “the French Blue” (Le bleu de France), Tavernier sold it to King Louis XIV of France in 1668. It was stolen in 1792 and re-cut, with the largest section of the diamond appearing under the Hope name in an 1839 gem catalogue from the Hope banking family, from whom the diamond’s name derives.

did any happy twists in a tale come upon you this week?

36 Comments

January 10, 2025

hellfire

i’m at a loss and not inclined this week to take up too much oxygen on this earth that is thirsting for rain. or snow. or even a dense fog to begin to smolder the flames that have made for apocalyptic infernos in the land of the backyard grapefruit and avocado, the storybook land where palm trees might be outnumbered only by show runners and gaffers and star-studded trailers.

the west coast is burning like hell and, among too many tragedies to count, one beloved friend has lost his whole classroom filled with 20 years of teaching, and others whom i don’t know have lost everything that constitutes the villages they call home: from the immigrant dry cleaners where they’re known by their shirts and their preference for starch, to the grocery stores where checkers are friends who ask about the kids and how quickly they’ve grown, to the churches and temples and mosques where knees are bent and prayers are sent up, to street after street of somebody’s home, once brimming with ballast and trinkets and treasures saved a whole life long––now embers at best.

it’s the unspoken threads, the immaterial, the irreplaceable human-to-human bonds that feel forever lost. and therein is the crushingest blow.

i often am inclined to keep the big, bad world at bay here. to set the table and let us live our pensive lives in sacred quietude, paying attention to the little noticed. but over the years, the outside has rushed in when the horrors and heartache are too much to ignore. when the grieving belongs to us all.

so it is with the incineration of the city of angels.

i can’t fathom it. can’t imagine the roar of a wall of flame barreling toward the windows, walls, and roofs where Christmas trees might have still been twinkling, where menorahs were just tucked back into cupboards. can’t imagine trying to not breathe in the toxins that are sure to leave scars in too many lungs (lungs are of prime consideration in my anatomy book these days).

my best friend, a long-time california girl, texts whenever she has even a percentage of power in her phone. and begs to talk so she can be soothed by the voice of someone not looking into the distance for the billowing smoke, or the closer-coming wall of red, orange, and blue flame.

she counts herself among the lucky unlucky, she says, for her husband indeed lost his meticulously cataloged classroom bookshelves, and his reams and reams of term papers saved (from before the digital age), and index card notes, and god knows what else a superstar english lit teacher saves. tragic irony is that he spent the summer finally clearing their garage of his files, and methodically transferring all to his bungalow classroom at Palisades Charter High, where beloved colleagues have lost classrooms and every bit of their homes. so suddenly the loss of only a classroom and a lifetime of teaching accoutrements stirs my best and longest friend to place herself in the lucky-unlucky column.

one of my brothers, one i adore for a million and ten reasons, not least of which is because he takes his care for the earth so deeply seriously, walking miles instead of driving, living with the sparest of necessities, always opting for a tent and starry night over any five-star hotel, hit the nail on the head when he captured the debacle thusly:

“Long past time for blame. It’s not politicians, it’s humankind. Most avoid living as if nature matters, yet many are surprised when nature reminds us that she matters. While sad, these fires and losses are not unimaginable.”

we need to do better. we need to remember: this earth is the heart of a sacred equation. it’s ours to romp in, to delight in, to “awe” in. it bountifully feeds us and clothes us and warms us and shelters us. and brings us infinite timeless wisdoms. but it’s begging we till it and keep it. as in the beginning, and ever after. amen.

i’m turning for wisdom again to my friend and fellow pilgrim suleika jaouad, in which she further outlines her antidotes for worry and fear, two conditions that quite prominently rear their heads in CancerLand….(here, prompted by the first bird she saw this year, a little caribbean bird called bananaquit, with a common name “the sugar bird,” suleika went for sweetness as her quest for 2025…funny how intent the searching for essence becomes when life-altering diagnosis is the propellant….

Looking for the sweetness seems like a perfect antidote to the worry and fear. By looking for the sweetness, I mean seeking beauty, presence, and peace in every circumstance, letting go of my fears of suffering and death and what binds us to the material world, being nourished by what’s already inside of us—the nectar of bliss, as its called in Bhagavad Gita. It’s an ongoing practice—to stay nimble, to accept the constant flux, to find contentment wherever I am.

a simple question answered by a modernday mystic:

What do I mean by contemplation? And why does meditation lead us into this state of contemplation? Well, Thomas Aquinas defined contemplation very simply as ‘the simple enjoyment of the truth.’ The simple enjoyment of the truth. You couldn’t get anything more simple than that. It is simply finding joy in what is.
—Brother Lawrence Freeman OSB, World Community for Christian Meditation

seek joy, dear friends. and thank heaven for the peace and calm and freedom from fear that allows you to sit pensively at your kitchen table, or to look out a window, mug of hot something in hand, and dream of a kinder, gentler, more just world of our making….

arguing that loving is not some passive happenstance that wafts in like fairy dust, but rather a human art that insists we practice as a painter would daub day after day at her paints, or a sculptor with her forms and clay, the great german social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher erich fromm in his 1956 masterwork The Art of Loving makes the case: love is a skill to be honed the way artists apprentice themselves to the work on the way to mastery, demanding of its practitioner both knowledge and effort.

The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering. What are the necessary steps in learning any art? The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one — my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art — the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for music, for medicine, for carpentry — and for love. And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power — almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving. —Erich Fromm

and finally, simply because i love the language and the imagery, a bit of eliot to usher us into the week to come…

Chorus X from “The Rock” by T.S. Eliot

O Light Invisible, we praise Thee!
Too bright for mortal vision.
О Greater Light, we praise Thee for the less;
The eastern light our spires touch at morning,
The light that slants upon our western doors at evening.
The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight,
Moon light and star light, owl and moth light,
Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade.
О Light Invisible, we worship Thee!

We thank Thee for the lights that we have kindled,
The light of altar and of sanctuary;
Small lights of those who meditate at midnight
And lights directed through the coloured panes of windows
And light reflected from the polished stone,
The gilded carven wood, the coloured fresco.
Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward
And see the light that fractures through unquiet water.
We see the light but see not whence it comes.
О Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!

In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light.
We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too
much pain.
We are children quickly tired: children who are up in the night
and fall asleep as the rocket is fired; and the day is long for work or play.
We tire of distraction or concentration, we sleep and are glad to sleep,
Controlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the seasons.
And we must extinguish the candle, put out the light and relight it;
Forever must quench, forever relight the flame.
Therefore we thank Thee for our little light, that is dappled with shadow.
We thank Thee who hast moved us to building, to finding, to forming at the ends of our fingers and beams of our eyes.
And when we have built an altar to the Invisible Light, we may set thereon the little lights for which our bodily vision is made.
And we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of light.
O Light Invisible, we give Thee thanks for Thine great glory!

“The Rock” was Eliot’s play written and performed in 1934, to raise money for the building of new churches. it speaks to humankind’s relation to God, and the implications of a world lived without religion. makes me wonder what Eliot might write today, in a world where religions have wandered so far from their holy essence. the “choruses” in this 21-page play are spoken by the workers, the bands of laborers who build the churches, and is thought to be strongly pro-religion with anti-communist overtones in reaction to the “looming shadow of totalitarian regimes building in Europe and the rumblings of the coming Second World War.” apt.

as i write this, snow in fat flakes is tumbling down, birds are traffic jammed at the feeder, and all is silent save for the ticking of an old, old arthritic clock and the whoosh of a furnace. i am so deeply conscious of how blessed we are that we take our physical safety for granted here in the middle lands this morning. instead of a question, this is a morning for simple reflection, counting the blessings we so often forget to notice….

top photo above by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images

7 Comments

January 3, 2025

one wish . . .

when i take a deep breath in tonight, and close my eyes to make a wish, there is only one wish i’m wishing this year: i wish for a birthday next year.

that’s everything, really.

i’ll be wishing so hard.

it’s a wish that feels so far away. and so very big. like i’m asking for the moon.

it’s a wish that carries a secret. one the sages and prophets and poets have known for a very long time.

it’s a paradox wish. it’s a koan. it’s a wish that makes you think. perk up and pay attention. root around for the wisdom, the immutable truth.

truth is, it’s even bigger than it seems. it’s a russian doll of a wish. one of those ones with umpteen tiny-grained wishes within. grain by grain by grain we make it across a year, and year by year a lifetime.

a birthday next year.

doesn’t sound like too much. but, oh, it’s infinite really.

the blessing of cancer––and yes there are blessings, ones the sages and prophets all seem to have known without needing the verdict, without the scalawag cells lurking in shadows, cells that can’t wait to divide and multiply and muck up the works––is that it rejiggers your seeing. it’s the psychophysics of vision: when range is narrowed, acuity’s heightened. you learn to look not too far into the offing; you learn to look more closely than ever at whatever it is that’s right there before you. and, thus, you see all the more clearly the finest of grains all along the way.

the fine grains are where the wonder, the magic, the awe, are kerneled inside, awaiting their turn to burst forth, to be seen, savored, not left by the wayside.

life in the up-close, life when we’re listening for whispers not waiting for timpani, is how we come to know the most sacred grain therein.

in wishing for one more birthday––please God, just one is all i’m wishing this year (if wishes come true, i’ll wish it again and again and again as long as i can)––what i’m really wishing for are those tiny, tiny moments that strung onto a cord make for one holy rosary.

within my one moon-size, more-than-anything wish, here are some of the grains nestled inside:

i wish for the holy, holy sound of one or both of my boys calling me at some unlikely hour to tell me one of their dreams has come tumbling true. or at least the latest chapter therein. and before they’ve uttered a word, i’ll know from the sound of their breathing that the news that’s coming is good. and, dear God, i don’t wanna be stingy but i’d sure love one or two more of those sweet, sweet jubilant sounds.

and while i’m wishing, i sure wish i get to hear the rough draft versions of those dreams, as they’re in the making, as my boys try them on for size and dare to let me in on the beta versions.

i wish for their soft, big hands to wrap around my now-more-wrinkled littler one––to hold me steady, be it a cobblestone walk or life’s herky-jerky jolts tipping me over.

i wish for one of those early mornings where no one is stirring but me, and the dawn hasn’t yet rosied the sky, and the biggest decision i’m called to make is which mug should i pull from the shelf.

i wish to sink my teeth into the sweetest strawberry of the season. ditto the crispest apple of fall. and the juiciest of august’s tomato.

i wish to run down the airport corridor one more time and into the arms of my faraway boy, all while loudly belting out, “it’s been five years!” (even when it hasn’t been), only because all the good souls slumped in their hard plastic seats deserve a little airport sentimentality. even if it’s improv, and utterly fiction. and because there’s nothing i love so much as the arms of my boys wrapped round my shoulders.

i wish to come to the last page of a book with tears rolling down my cheeks, not yet wanting to say goodbye to characters i’ve come to love.

i wish to sit down to dinner with only the one i love, or to a table filled with nearly a dozen i adore.

i wish to exhale that one cleansing breath when the last of the dishes are done, and all that’s left is a long evening of laughter and stories and loving.

i wish for the sound of the crackling logs on the fire.

i wish to wake up one morning and remember there is not a single worry weighing me down.

i wish i could gather all the people i love—or just a good handful––and plonk down at a table where no one tries to corner the conversation and everyone takes a generous turn. and by the time i’m getting up from the table, i am marveling once again at the goodness, the depth, the hilarity of the vast human character.

i wish i could stand under the stars and behold the star-salted sky.

i wish i could pray so deeply that i felt the shoulder of God brushing against me. or catch myself walking alone in the woods and feeling a shaft of light break through the boughs, and sense that i wasn’t one bit alone, but that the God who i love was leading me forward.

i wish for those beautiful blessed souls who populate hospitals in the unlikeliest spots, the ones who radiate the gift of making you feel so deeply seen. and safe. and cocooned.

i wish for a sermon so stirring it breaks me into tears.

i wish to hear the soul-stirring sound of the deepest laughter there is from the people i love who laugh the heartiest laugh, the sort of laughter that runs tears down your cheeks. and makes you gasp for a breath.

i wish i could answer the knock at the door and be just the person that someone needs, the shoulder to cry on, the arms to hold them steady, the one to dry the tears.

i wish i could wake up one morning and read a headline that makes me believe the good guys will finally, finally win. and that plain old gentle kindness and the raw courage to speak up for what’s fair and right and just will bend the arc toward justice once again….

that’s enough wishes for one russian doll of a wish, though the truth is i’m only beginning…

i found a few nuggets to launch this holy new year, all worthy of contemplation. the first is from the writer suleika jaouad, a comrade on the cancer road (and wife of the brilliant musician jon batiste). she’s suffering godawful setbacks these days and i’m holding her in my every day’s prayers…:

This year, we’re contemplating and reveling in the idea of magic. It’s based on a theme I’ve found myself returning to: the need to let go of the fear of the unknown and instead to open ourselves up to the mysteries and the magic of the unknown. That’s my constant work—and in this time when our world feels more uncertain than ever before, I’d venture to say that it’s all of our work.

from the inimitable mystic and theologian henri nouwen who guides my every day:

Born to Reconcile

If you dare to believe that you are beloved before you are born, you may suddenly realize that your life is very, very special. You become conscious that you were sent here just for a short time, for twenty, forty, or eighty years, to discover and believe that you are a beloved child of God. The length of time doesn’t matter. You are sent into this world to believe in yourself as God’s chosen one and then to help your brothers and sisters know that they are also Beloved Sons and Daughters of God who belong together. You’re sent into this world to be a people of reconciliation. You are sent to heal, to break down the walls between you and your neighbors, locally, nationally, and globally. Before all distinctions, the separations, and the walls built on foundations of fear, there was a unity in the mind and heart of God. Out of that unity, you are sent into this world for a little while to claim that you and every other human being belongs to the same God of Love who lives from eternity to eternity.

and, not least, my favorite, favorite after-Christmas prayer-poem from howard thurman, a prophet of his time. . .

The Work of Christmas

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among others,
To make music in the heart.

— Howard Thurman

what one wish will you make this year? (you needn’t reveal here, of course!)

bless you, each and every one for making this year more blessed than you might ever imagine. you have been there for me at every turn. even when you did not know it. and i am forever blessed by you.

p.s. photo above is from a few years back, but it captures the depth of a wish being cast to the stars and the heavens above….

38 Comments

pull up a chair

Month: January, 2025

January 31, 2025

harumph.