February | 2026 | pull up a chair

ashes to ashes…

it is among the most profound teachings of any religion. and its point is found at the root of every sage, seer, and saint.

remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.

some years, to be truthful, those words washed over me. not this year. no longer. it is the teaching at the core of my scan time epiphany, pressed onto my heart as i emerged from the months-long fog that followed the words from my surgeon, “it was cancer; i was surprised.”

we don’t have forever. our days are numbered. our time here is fleeting. we’re wise not to whittle away the hours. wiser still to work toward the nub, the holy nub, that i believe lies at the heart of why we’re among the blessed who got to draw a first breath in the first place.

the odds of being born are stacked mightily against us; biology lays it all out at roughly 1 in 400 trillion (that’s 400 million million, or a 4 followed by 14 zeroes; i’m guessing that might be more than all the stars in the heavens. but what do i know?). we’re the ones who were allotted X number of days, who were given a holy task that’s ours and ours alone. and our slot to get it done, to reach toward holiness, to exude the light this world so desperately needs, is not without end.

so knew moses in the wilderness, imploring God: “teach us to number our days, so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

come the seventh century, a pope named gregory I pulled out the ashes to press against flesh, to remind the believers, to begin the 46 days then counted as Lent, a season of penitence before the coming of Easter. in judaism, the days of awe, from rosh hashanah, the new year, to yom kippur, the day of atonement, attention is turned to the mortal imperative: we will die. and we’d best make the most of our days. in islam, the inevitability of death is a core tenet, and muslims are taught to pray “as if this is your last ṣalāh (prayer).”

i live now with those teachings pressed hard against my flesh, whether you can see the smudge on my forehead or not. just so happens this week i walked around for a few hours looking as if i’d smudged a thumbful of dirt just above my eyebrows. and this week, a week in which i’ve spent so many hours trying to reach across to the other side, in search of a wink or a nod or a squeeze from two beloveds new to the other side, i found myself transfixed by the wisdom i wore for all the world to see.

i find it imperative. it’s the truth that fuels my every day, and all the hours within.

i live now with the palpable knowing that any minute the something stirring in my lungs (a something i likened to “a couch potato of a cancer” when my surgeon first described it as indolent, or lazy) could, in that surgeon’s inimitable words, “decide to leap off the couch and start running around the house smashing things.” the analogy here refers to the cancer detonating all throughout my lungs, a demonic pinball boinging wall to wall to any old air sac, the wee little bellows that allow you to draw in oxygen, blow out the junk that remains, the carbon dioxide we need to get rid of, lest we die of suffocation.

in my latest adventure in book writing, the book now awaiting yet another round of editing, a book whose working title is when evening comes: an urgent call to love (drawn from the great teaching of saint john of the cross who once wrote, “when the evening of this life comes, you will be judged on love,” and to which the mystic evelyn underhill then adds: “the only question asked of your soul: ‘have you loved well?'”), it’s the very point of the ashes—to dust you shall return—that animates every inkling, question, and meditation in the pages soon to be bound between covers.

in the year since i started writing that book, and in the almost three years since half my lung was snipped out of me, the choice to love well is one that rises over and over, a tide that won’t be quelled. it’s the most clarifying truth i’ve ever clung to. and it expands the walls of my heart, pushes me plenty beyond my comfort zone because i know my chances are dwindling. the next scan could come with the words that something is stirring. has made itself known. and i know those words will crumple me. knock the wind right out of me. at least for awhile. till i find my bearings again.

and so i live just ahead of those words, as if they’re always on the chase, running up from the rear.

the people i love who died last week, who crossed to the other side, were beautiful souls who loved so majestically, so magnificently, and both of whose lungs were filled with the damn cancer that would not relent. each loved till the very last breath. each didn’t want to die. each one was brave—mostly—till the end. and each one finally let go.

in so many ways, their holy nub did not die. their spirit, their joy, their infinite giving, it’s as alive as ever. maybe more so. i feel each of them. i hear their words, their laughter, the very lilt in the way they spoke every word. and their invisible presence stirs me robustly. maybe it’s that we were all in the cancer gulch together, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder. maybe it’s that we spoke a language so little known outside the republic of cancer; a language into which we’d been swept, a language where shadows are looming, a language propelled by unfiltered truth and urgency.

maybe i feel like it’s up to me to carry on their brilliant-beyond-description ways of being in the world. but that would be wrong. their work, their nub, lives on in the ways it will forever animate and rub up against ours. but my work is mine. and my days to do it are now. and your work is yours. and your days are now.

the God i believe in breathed into us a constellation of wonders, and set us on our way. as rilke once wrote in a poem i’ve long pressed to my heart, imagining God speaking to each of us as God makes us, before we are born, before we leave the womb of darkness, God “walks with us silently out of the night.” and as we near the precipice of the womb, the place where the daylight seeps in, God whispers: “Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.”

and so this work that is ours to do, in this time that will end, we are here for holy purpose. and our God is at hand.

ashes to ashes. dust to dust.

the time in between is our one holy chance.

how will we use it?

in the tiny chapel where i go to pray, and where this week the ashes were smudged on my head, i found these words from psalm 103 breathtakingly beautiful. . .

for [God] himself knows whereof we are made;
he remembers that we are but dust.
Our days are like the grass; we flourish like a flower of the field;
When the wind goes over it, it is gone, and its place shall know it no more.

may our time in the field be fruitful, may our petals unfurl fully as we drink in the sunlight. before the wind blows over us, and our time here is no more….

love, bam

sending special special love to the beautiful mama of one of the beauties who has crossed to the other side….i know that all of us here reach across the table in hopes of steadying your trembling hand, tissue at the ready to dry your flow of tears….

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February 13, 2026

love is . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

here’s a beauty found this week….

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

—Elif Shafak, Turkish novelist

what did you learn about love this week?

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February 6, 2026

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

lupercalia: purification rite of ancient rome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i needed no further prompting.

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

for instance:

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

next up: giggles.

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

a close look at life’s first laughs:

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

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

MIRACLES

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

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

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

+ Walt Whitman

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

where did you find light or levity this week?

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Month: February, 2026

February 20, 2026