December | 2025 | pull up a chair

December 26, 2025

the holy hush of the morning after

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

it’s my own hushed holy day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

amen.

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

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

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

first, the blessing….

A Christmas Blessing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the story begins thusly….

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

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

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December 19, 2025

greening: another word for bringing the holy within

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a little bit of bingen to stir the greening….

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December 12, 2025

oh, the places we’ve come . . .

winter, i’ve always sensed, is the curling-in time, the season of unseen stirring, and in an octave of dawns, dusks, and nightfalls, winter will be upon us.

but even now, it’s a season for quieting, for simmering thoughts as well as saucepots of cinnamon stick, star anise, and clove. my simmering for the last nineteen years picks up the pace as the page turns on another year of pulling up chairs to this imaginary old maple table, one where the indentations of long-ago math homework are pressed into the grain, where so many coffees and juices have been poured and sipped and spilled and sopped up with sponges. over the course of these nearly two decades, it seems i’ve developed a knack for simmering while tapping away at the rows of alphabet keys—some 1,255 simmers and counting, all under the name “pull up a chair,” now tapped, posted, and filed away.

only a handful of the very first chairs—bless them, those stalwart humans—still pull up a chair, at least every once in a while. but along the way, so many chairs have been added, and multiplied. and our polestar has never shifted: to carve out a sacred space where questions are asked, and stories are told, where hearts are bared, and above all where gentle, gentle kindness is the metronome by which we set all our rhythms. once in a while, over all the bumps and bruises encountered along the way, we’ve been known to bow our heads and pour out our hearts in holy, holy please God, pray for us.

on the twelfth of december, 2006, our firstborn had just been bar mitzvahed, and our then so-called “little one” was but a kindergartener, not yet reading or writing but melting my heart by the minute and filling our notebooks with his stories and antics and an encyclopedia of unforgettable “teddyisms.” (some kept alive to this day; for the sheer pure joy of it). the firstborn, now law professor, insisted at the dawn of the self-published blogging age that i, his little old mother, could figure out how to “blog,” a verb that’s always sounded to me like a crude guttural effusion, a burp perhaps. and back in the day, he gave me his hand-me-down laptop to do it. to prove i could blog, that is. (as has so often been the case, he even then was wiser than me…)

back then, the question that had captured my attention was the simplest of notions: i believed, after a few years of keenly observing, tagging along with, and writing long newspaper stories of families in the thick of life transitions as a reporter for the chicago tribune, that life’s biggest questions aren’t reserved for colloquia and global summits, nor do they wait for podiums and percussive applause. they are the stuff of the everyday. and if we watch closely, pay keen attention, we can lift those universal, deeply-human questions and struggles from the quotidian stream, hold them to the light for closer consideration, and reap their wisdoms and epiphanies in real time. now, before the moments pass us by and we come to the saddest realization of all: that it’s too late, and our chance at most wakeful living has slipped into the distance.

all these years later, life certainly has galloped along here at the table. this ol’ chair has seen the growings up of two boys, buried parents beloved, moved another from her home of sixty years. taken a tour of cambridge, mass., and a second helping of college. trekked across the pond, set our sights on war zones, and been rolled into surgical suites and recovery rooms. we’ve feared for our country, for humanity, for civility, and plain old decency. and we’ve refused to surrender to the crude and cruel ways wielded by those who seize power. we’ve kept our minds opened, and tried—oh, we’ve tried—to emphasize the imperative of objective, double-sourced truth, and the slaying of hearsay and heresy. we’ve laid out worries here, and plenty of joys; we’ve marveled and wondered and been gobsmacked aplenty. i’ve pondered cancer and the physics of time, and the holy shimmering presence i know as God.

lately i seem to have taken to gathering up wisdoms far greater than mine will ever be. i am, as a beloved friend of the chair once put it, something of a magpie. a magpie mostly attuned to seeking the sacred amid the plainstuff of living. the idea of the commonplace book is one i heartily embrace: bring on the poets and sages and prophets, and let me invite you into their brilliant notebooks and minds and unfurl for you their passages and poetics that take away our collective breath and find a way of percolating for hours to come.

this ol’ chair has given me a place to keep on tapping away at the keys. i realized long ago that i untangle the knots of my life by stringing out sentences. and trying on thoughts. thank you for indulging me, those of you who choose to read along. thank you for pondering the questions at the end of each post, in the quiet of your own soul, or by leaving a note at the table.

you are, collectively and individually, humans who restore and buck up my faith in the inherent majesty and wonder of the shimmering undying spirit that populates this earth with more than a modicum of heaven’s best offerings.

bless you, bless you, a thousand times thousand, bless you.

this week i am bringing a little birthday bouquet of beauties that struck me across the week, all of them tied together by the beautiful idea that the birthing of holiness is a sacramental act of which we must partake. it’s one that entails unlocking our hearts, making room in the manger within, and allowing the Holy and Sacred to form within, and to birth it with our words and our love in the act. it’s quite the trinity here: a benedictine monk who practices and teaches meditation in the french countryside at a monastery known as bonnevaux; st. john of the cross, the great mystic, as translated by the poet daniel ladinsky; and the late, great luci shaw, a beloved british-american poet and essayist who died at 96 on december first.

first up, the idea of birthing God within us from the benedictine monk, laurence freeman, whom i’ve been learning from for years…

In the 14th century, Meister Eckhart enjoyed waking people up in his sermons by expounding some uncomfortably new perspectives about their standardised faith. He must have stirred a few dozy parishioners when he asked: “What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, that it should take place within myself, is really what matters.”

Actually, the great Augustine had asked the same question a thousand years before and added that if we are the children of God, we must become God’s mother as well. If, he said, this birth of the eternal word as Christ in the soul is to happen, our heart – the deepest centre of our being – must become the sacred manger. If we are filled with egocentric distraction there is ‘no room at the inn’ and so the heart must become that empty and open space where the birth takes place and through which he is welcomed into our world.

In today’s gospel, John the Baptist is usually and badly translated as saying ‘repent, for the reign of God is close at hand’. Basileia, the Greek word we think of as ‘kingdom’, is feminine and so could equally well translate it as ‘queendom’. It doesn’t mean a juridical area but the space in which the presence and grace of God is acknowledged and welcomed. The gospel word, badly translated as ‘repent’, is ‘metanoia’: a change of mind and heart. It is not about feeling sorry for past mistakes. It means spinning round 180 degrees and entirely changing your perspective on and approach to reality.

Living in the desert, wearing a garment of camel hair and eating locusts and wild honey, John seems to us a bit extremist. People who reduce waste and get back to essentials are often called crazy. But because of his spiritual sanity he drew the crowds who asked him ‘what shall we do?’ because, like us, they lived in confused, divided and dangerous times. He told them simply to live honestly and justly but that this lifestyle would prepare them for the imminent – and immanent – coming of the great transformer of all things.

Meditation is the great simplifier. It reduces the way we waste both time and life’s opportunities. In daily life it is the catalyst for ongoing metanoia. The medicine that loosens the grip of illusion. Usually, we start enthusiastically but before we get to the full 180 degrees we slow down and say, ‘this is quite good, let’s stop here’. Fortunately, if the birth process has already started, it will not allow us to arrest or deny it. We have to see it through until it breaks through into our world and we are happy and lucky if we do.

—Laurence Freeman

and from the sixteenth-century mystic St. John of the Cross there comes this interpretation/translation of what daniel ladinsky calls one of his “love poems”…

IF YOU WANT

If
you want
the Virgin will come walking down the road
pregnant with the holy,
and say,
“I need shelter for the night, please take me inside your heart,
my time is so close.”

Then, under the roof of your soul, you will witness the sublime
intimacy, the divine, the Christ
taking birth
forever,

as she grasps your hand for help, for each of us
is the midwife of God, each of us.

Yet there, under the dome of your being does creation
come into existence eternally, through your womb, dear pilgrim–
the sacred womb in your soul,

as God grasps our arms for help; for each of us is
His beloved servant
never far.

If you want, the Virgin will come walking
down the street pregnant
with Light and sing …

—St. John of the Cross, “If You Want” in Daniel Ladinsky, Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West (New York: Penguin Group, 2002), 306-307.

and, in closing, here’s a classic from blessed, blessed luci, whose great contribution to the canon of Christian poetry would be her capacity for drawing big truths about God and human experience from viscerally pulsing fine-grained images and objects. she is the perfect voice to close out this nineteenth year of the chair….

Kenosis
By Luci Shaw

In sleep his infant mouth works in and out.
He is so new, his silk skin has not yet
been roughed by plane and wooden beam
nor, so far, has he had to deal with human doubt.
He is in a dream of nipple found,
of blue-white milk, of curving skin
and, pulsing in his ear, the inner throb
of a warm heart’s repeated sound.
His only memories float from fluid space.
So new he has not pounded nails, hung a door,
broken bread, felt rebuff, bent to the lash,
wept for the sad heart of the human race.

amen.

may this blessed week bring softening to the walls of your heart, and a widening within those chambers so that Holiness, however you name it, might be birthed there….love, b.

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December 5, 2025

so close to the bone

uncharted is pretty much the most fitting descriptor for the cartography of cancer. undiscovered nooks hide in the shadows. though not all of it is somber. sometimes, with no warning, you find yourself among an unexplored parcel for the very first time.

i’m covered with goosebumps this week, not because my latest scan was ominous (it wasn’t) but because i am reminded again this week, viscerally so, how very damn thin this ice is—the ice that is any cancer, and mine in particular. i sat down with my oncologist the other day, and she spelled out so many truths about the merciless ways of cancer—how so many hit-or-miss variables make up each individual constellation, how some of mine fall in the you-don’t-wish-this column, and one or two don’t, how some cancers are “undruggable” (mine is) yet some of the drugs are so toxic you’re mostly relieved you don’t have to have them coursing through your veins—and it all becomes stunningly clear that there really is not much certainty or sense to the prognostication at play here. sometimes you make it through the labyrinth, sometimes you don’t. who’s to say what flicks the switch that plays out your story.

but that wasn’t the only reason for goosebumps.

a curious thing happens almost instantaneously and mysteriously when you find out you’ve been highjacked into cancer camp: you make fast friends. with the ones you find strolling around the campground, the ones who know the indignities of needle pokes and incision tattoos that now crosshatch your flesh; the ones who spout the most off-color jokes, and know all the words to the worries that keep you awake in the night; the ones who strip truth to the bone and don’t shy away from words that others dare not utter.

one of those friends died this week. bruce was his name, and not too many months ago, he was the one who all but talked me onto the airplane to new york to get a second opinion, when i—the one who never has had a taste for ruffling feathers, nor for appearing to second-guess authority—was so afraid to face the cold hard reality of a cancer center whose very name registers the seriousness with which cancer is to be taken. bruce told me all about his trek to mayo clinic, and insisted i get on that plane to sloan kettering. and when i got home, he checked in to make sure i’d stayed in one piece. his wife, eileen, also my close cancer buddy (and also with ratchety-vocal-cord voice), has been one of the ones who until now has made me laugh the hardest; lately, her texts have been tearing me apart, especially when she told me she’s mostly been crying herself to sleep these last couple months.

and just yesterday i was scrolling across the internet and bumped into the news that one of the fiercest patient advocates in the world of lung cancer, a woman whose cancer (diagnosed when she was 39, and recurred multiple times) has defied all odds for 16 years, has just started another round of radiation for two metastatic nodules on her chest wall.

when one of us goes down, the thud is felt by all.

and so, as if never before, i am looking out at the snow-caked garden, at the beefeater-sized snow caps atop all my birdhouses and feeders, and i am whispering, whispering, inaudible prayers of pure and profound thanks. for the miracle of another winter. for the quotidian phone call from one of my boys. for the chance to sit in a near-freezing kitchen to work side-by-side my second born. for the husband who leaves his car in the snow, so i can pull into the snowless garage. and who waits till i get home late one night to eat his bowl of cereal, while i slurp my soup.

and tough as it is to swallow, and bracing and sad as it all sometimes is, i am, in the end, more than a little grateful to be so fully awake to the whole of it: the friend whose courage i’ll carry; the blessing of a doctor who minces no words and delivers each one so bountifully, and with such tender, all-absorbing care; the miracle of any old friday or thursday or tuesday; the lungs that still work as mightily as they can; this place that lets me write it all down, because sometimes you just need a way to make sense of the blur, and this was one of those weeks.

not because i’m dying; because i’m alive.

and with that, a poem that so deeply echoes the essence of all that pulses through me these days, and is, in many ways, the core message of book No. 6 now in the pipeline….

Praise What Comes
surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven’t deserved
of days and solitude, your body’s immoderate good health
that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise

talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books
that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks
before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps

you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs
you never intended. At the end there may be no answers
and only a few very simple questions: did I love,

finish my task in the world? Learn at least one
of the many names of God? At the intersections,
the boundaries where one life began and another

ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?

~ Jeanne Lohmann ~
(The Light of Invisible Bodies)

Jeanne Lohmann was a Quaker poet, and one of the very favorites of the great Parker Palmer. as a wee bonus i am adding here the last stanza of another one of her beauties, “what the day gives.” she is a poet in whose work i shall be poking around. here’s the stanza:

Stunned by the astonishing mix in this uneasy world
that plunges in a single day from despair
to hope and back again, I commend my life
to Ruskin’s difficult duty of delight,
and to that most beautiful form of courage,
to be happy.

and finally a poem from one of my favorite irish poets, eavan boland, passed along to me by one of my favorite humans. simply because it’s so perfectly, perfectly glorious…..and the very definition of love in its highest order….

Quarantine
by Eavan Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

From New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland. Copyright © 2008 by Eavan Boland.

what brought you this week the deepest sense of how very blessed you are, to be alive and able to exercise love in whatever form fills you the most?

p.s. i hope all of you who still find a seat here (after all these years; 19 next week!), or who are here perhaps for the very first time, know how very very deeply this space, and your presence here, has become one of the polestars of my life. my calendar is set by writing the chairs (every friday morning without fail); six books now have first been seeded here; and the kindness circle we’ve all built together is rare and precious in the fullest sense of that word. as the world around us has grown harsher, and the rules of engagement seem to be shifting at rapid and dizzying pace, we have rooted ourselves more and more deeply in the gentle art of caring gently for each other, offering up wisdom by the ladleful (and i mean the wisdom you offer me, offer all of us), and lifting our kindness off the page (aka screen) and into the real living, breathing world. among the things for which i am so deeply grateful, all of you dwell at the core of my heart. bless you.

24 Comments

Month: December, 2025