antidotes to madness | pull up a chair

October 5, 2018

home alone — and hearing a cry

it’s just me and the basement crickets here. (i ought to name the whole herd of them since they so noisily, chirpily, send me love songs through the dawn — and the midday — and the late afternoon — and the twilight. deep into the darkness they keep up their chatter.)

the boys i love are faraway. i stayed home because i have a job at the high school, hosting 414 debaters from around the country. feeding each one, breakfast and lunch for the next two days (today we load in provisions). i’d thought i’d write a meditation on being alone. on the luxury of it when you don’t often have it. i know for some it’s a curse; alone bleeds often, bleeds quickly into loneliness. the first syllable — the a of alone — breaks off, and two new ones cling to the end — loneliness — and suddenly the gift of doing as you please, sleeping with windows open and shades up — because you love the light of night, love even more the dawn’s beginning — all those singular quirks, they can become the humdrum hollowed refrain of a life lived alone not wholly by choice. by grief. by happenstance. by necessity.

but i woke up this morning, and the cavernous cry of this nation — of the countless volumes of women putting breath to the screams they once muffled — it’s echoing inside, rising louder and louder. and i know there’s a vote just hours away. and i know that sitting here listening to the roll, hearing the single syllable rise up, yea or nay, one after another, it’s going to feel something like a gut punch. did you hear her? i will ask, over and over and over.

there will come — for some of us anyway — an unshakeable sense of being kicked aside. of “ramming this through,” as the senate majority leader himself so unpoetically put it.

there is, though, a gentle breeze of hope this morning. it comes from sweden, from the nobel committee which during our night (their midday) awarded the peace prize to two who’ve dedicated their lives to a fight against sexual violence. one, nadia murad, is a 25-year-old woman, captured, repeatedly raped and tortured by ISIS; she escaped and, ever since, travels the globe speaking out against the atrocities. her inexhaustible journey has left her exhausted, but she refuses to pause, insisting: “i will go back to my life when women in captivity go back to their lives, when my community has a place, when i see people accountable for their crimes.”

time magazine, in their annual centenary of “most influential people,” included nadia in 2016. eve ensler, the playwright and founder of V-Day, a movement to end violence against women, wrote this for the magazine’s roster:

A witness for war’s victims

Nadia Murad stands in a long, invisible history of fierce, indomitable women who rise from the scorched earth of rape during war to break the odious silence and demand justice and freedom for their sisters. At 19 she lost her home, her country, her culture, her mother to murder; witnessed male members of her family murdered in mass killings; and was kidnapped, sold and endlessly raped by members of ISIS. She now travels the world speaking out on the genocide being inflicted on her Yezidi people and demanding release for the more than 3,000 women still held in bondage.

As Europe closes its borders to terrorized refugees in Greece and the U.S. turns its back on the suffering, Nadia is a beacon of light and truth—a reminder that it was the American-led war in Iraq that laid the path for ISIS, that U.S. arms left behind on the battlefield fell into the hands of ISIS and that the U.S. waited too long to intervene in the mass killing and enslavement of the Yezidi people. At 23, Nadia Murad is risking everything to awaken us. I hope we are listening, because we too are responsible.

time-100-2016-nadia-murad

i leave you with nadia, with the faint waft of hope. i know, come time for the vote, we will all be standing shoulder-to-shoulder, heart-to-heart, promising we will do better for our daughters, our sisters, our sons, and our brothers.

(i do not for a minute want to overlook the second nobel peace prize winner, dr. denis mukwege, 63, a congolese gynecological surgeon, who campaigned relentlessly to shine a spotlight on the plight of congolese women, even after nearly being assassinated a few years ago. working from a bare hospital (often without electricity or enough anesthesia) in the hills of the eastern democratic republic of congo, he has emerged as a champion of the congolese people and a global advocate for gender equality and the elimination of rape in war, traveling to other war-ravaged parts of the world to help create programs for survivors.

“it’s not a women question; it’s a humanity question, and men have to take responsibility to end it,” dr. mukwege once said in an interview. “It’s not an africa problem. in bosnia, syria, liberia, colombia, you have the same thing.”)

may the persistence of justice rise up in all of us today. and tomorrow, and all the tomorrows thereafter. may the fiery determination of nadia and the unrelenting faith of dr. mukwege drive all of us through the fog of despair.

where might you try to carve out space for justice? where might you bring comfort today?

p.s. i’m leaving off a picture up top today, because silence and the sound of a cry are best left unseen….

3 Comments

September 28, 2018

the call to come together

the invitation was simple: come for coffee. the invite list was the neighbors who surround me, a few of whom have moved in within the year or last couple years, and who i barely or didn’t even know.

all i did was brew a vat or two of coffee. pull out favorite plates. tuck flowers in vases. vacuum cobwebs out of corners. dump clementines and figs into bowls — bowls given to me over the years by some of those very same neighbors. the things we stack in cupboards — many of them, anyway — tell stories all their own. nearly every single thing in my house tells a story. i collect stories, not things.

it all started because the air turned crisp, and light turned amber — or at least that’s the way it always looks to me. there is a light in september that sometimes feels to me as if the heavens open just a crack, and someone tosses down a holy shaft. a shaft that’s almost a stairway back to whence it came.

the date i picked on the calendar was the date that holds a quiet sort of holiness for me: it’s the day my friend ceci died, three years ago, and the birthdate of my friend mary ellen, who died not long after….

it turned out to be the date dr. christine blasey ford took her terrors and her fears and stepped before the senate judiciary committee to tell her awful story, to peel back the layers of the wound she’d tried so very hard to escape.

for a while there, i thought my timing couldn’t have been worse. i’ve long been something of a news junkie and i didn’t want to miss hearing her words, the tremor in her voice, in real time. it felt like we all, as a nation, needed to encircle her, stand behind her, to say emphatically, “we hear you, and we believe you.” and we are here, as literally as possible, reaching through the screen, with our palms pressed against your back, squeezing your hand, touching you softly on the arm, one last time before you take a breath and begin.

i’d decided that i’d leave the tv on — softly — over in the corner, where it’s tucked inside an old armoire. as it happened, one by one, a few of us circled close to listen. we ebbed and flowed from coffee to nibbles to capitol hill testimony. and then, christine blasey ford cleared her throat, pushed back that swatch of hair that insisted on covering her left eye, and a circle of us moved close. as if by instinct. we leaned in. we held our breath. i noticed that we all had wrapped our arms across our own chests, held ourselves tight. anchored ourselves. the looks on our collective faces was a portrait in pain and empathy i’ll not forget. i don’t know, because we didn’t talk about it, how many of us in that circle had our own version of a christine blasey ford story to tell. and that didn’t matter, because we were there — leaning in, listening — for her. to put the power of our hearts, our intellects, our faith, behind the courage it took for her to stand up to power and softly tell her truth.

if i’d been home alone, i would have been glued in front of that screen all day, all by myself. instead i found myself in the company of women, lovely women, women who’d shown up with scones they baked, and pumpkin dip they’d stirred and poured in antique bowls. we told our own stories — how we got here, who we were, what made our children stir. i watched as clusters leaned in and women whispered. or laughed aloud. i watched the company of women weave together those disparate threads that make a whole cloth out of mismatched parts.

instead of going through the day alone, instead of absorbing the nation’s pain all by ourselves, we gathered in a circle, stood — literally — shoulder to shoulder. as i studied the pain-wrought faces of the women watching, absorbing every word of someone else’s nightmare, another woman’s indelible pain and trauma, i saw — without words — how deeply tied we humans are. how much we suffer in the face of suffering.

in the company of strangers, we can find our deeper truer selves.

it made me wonder if we need to climb more often beyond the walls we build around ourselves and our stories. all it takes, sometimes, is vats of coffee. and the invitation: please come….i’ll not spend this day holed up inside my private woes and worries….

what parts of september 27, 2018, will you not forget? which words or images are etched now across your heart? do you find comfort in company? do you need to give yourself a little nudge to get out from behind the comforts of your solitude?

makes me think we might need the occasional occasion of pulling up chairs in real time, say at my house for those who live within chair-pulling distance?

13 Comments

June 29, 2018

trying to stay sane in the summer of 2018

front page NYT

well, there’s a bold proclamation, trying to stay sane in an unrelenting summer.

sanity, defined: teetering on that knife’s-blade edge between despair and shards of hope, listing away from full-on darkness, into the atmosphere where breath comes in full-enough cycles, where dreams have not lost all their air, where the few fine words you choose to speak are ones that rise up from the holier parts inside.

and how to get there, in a summer that each day brings onslaught of ugly news, the latest being the riddling of a newsroom with bullets, and yet another crop of americans now shattered for the rest of their days? that’s a question that animates so many of the soulful moments, soulful conversations i’ve been having.

what i ache to do is just plain fix it. that’s my auto-pilot. in some corners of my life, when things are broken, i leap into action. stay up all night till i get the glue to set just right, trace my way to the ends of the earth (or the internet) till i track down replacement for whatever object has gone missing.

in this particular instance the things i want to do — lock up the bullies, throw away the keys; turn back time to just before the bullets flew; wrap my arms around the little children, look them in the eye, and promise them i’ll find them their mamas and their papas and the ones who keep them safe — i can’t. my superpowers seem to have expired. they were never more than make-believe anyway.

am i fooling my sorry little self to think the most i can do is keep the circle within which i live a sphere where the light keeps burning, where the words stay gentle, where i check myself and aim to turn the other cheek, not spout the sharp retort, steer away from hornets’ nests of hate, or just plain grumbly folk? where i ought to try even harder to make this old house a respite, a hive of rooms where kids are free to romp, where i don’t nag about the silly things — the clothes in heaps, the stinky soccer bag, the chores undone? where my most important job might be to be the peace-filled center, the one who models “this is how we love”?

as i so often do when things need to get done — and here, the task is hewing toward some measure of sanity — i’m making a list. these few things have brought some semblance of serenity, some anchor in the roiling seas.

i’ve found a little chapel, a sacred space with a carved-wood door at the end of a stone walk that meanders through a shady garden. inside the vaulting rooms, at the foot of the gilded altar, i listen to the words of oxford-educated men and women — yes, women here are priests — and i am emboldened, reminded of what matters, and called to action, holy action. as a lifelong believer in a hundred roads to God, i pay no mind to what the signpost names the church, all i know is what’s inside is stirring me to tears, and, sunday after sunday, taking my whole breath away. better yet, it gives me words so delicious, so must-be-remembered, i’m wont to surreptitiously reach for and scribble in the blank little book i keep tucked in my backpack, and this holy, wholly animating place sends me home with thoughts to percolate all week.
i’ve somehow been pulled into the mists of history, my ancestral history. i can spend hours tracing family roots, poring over news pages from long long ago. i’ve read of a great uncle struck and killed by lightning, when he ran for cover in his tobacco barn during a summer storm of biblical proportion. i’ve read of my grandpa’s first wife (and the mother of their four young children) dying in childbirth on christmas day. and another uncle — the one who tried to resuscitate his lightning-struck brother — dying years later of cirrhosis of the liver. i’ve absorbed the truth that life is hard and, when we’re blessed, we survive — banged up, dented, hobbling along, but somehow we gather up just enough to watch the sun rise and sink again.
i spend a lot of time with my toes in the dirt, out in my garden fully armed with felcro pruners, and trowel, and twine. there is sustenance to be had in nursing limp leaves back to full salute, in chasing down a runaway clematis vine or a tomato plant that’s reaching for the clouds. it’s quiet out there, save for the chatter of the birds, and the occasional butterfly who flutters by me so unassuming he barely moves the breeze.
i read. and read some more. my job for work, as i’ve said here some dozen times, is to read for soulfulness. that’s my assignment: find books that stir the soul. and the occupational by-product is that my soul gets stirred before i pass along the revelation. this week, ol’ jimmy carter, 39th president and peanut farmer, did some stirring. before i go, i’ll leave you with this one passage that reminds me good will come again. it’s our job to seek out those few fine souls whose moral compass never wavers, whose goodness is so good our knees go weak just watching. here’s what our cardigan-wearing, energy-saving president spoke in a 1978 address to his fellow southern baptists:

“A country will have authority and influence because of moral factors, not its military strength; because it can be humble and not blatant and arrogant; because our people and our country want to serve others and not dominate others. And a nation without morality will soon lose its influence around the world.”

how do you strain to stay sane in this soul-testing summer?

8 Comments

June 22, 2018

and the heavens weep…(summer 2018 edition)

a little honduran girl whose name, we think, is Yanela, photo by John Moore/Getty Images

i woke to the sound of heavens weeping. the percussive ping of rain against the windowpanes. rain that will not stop. tears that won’t be quelled. the skies have wept, it seems, all week. fitting soundtrack to this stretch of time, this dark moment in our history, when all our hearts are cried out, our spirits flagged, the air all but sucked from our lungs.

how did we get here? how did we become a nation where children — children and toddlers and babies, suckling babies — are ripped from a mother’s breast, are scooped up and off of dusty paths. a nation where this image of a little girl, whose name we’ve learned in yanela, stood and watched in fear and horror as her mother was frisked — then taken away — by a stranger. the terror on her face is what haunts me. haunts me in the darkness as i sink into sleep. haunts me as i wake, imagining her alone, wondering where in the world her mama went. why she is waking up, perhaps, under a shiny mylar blanket, in a room where the lights never go out. where it’s refrigerator cold on purpose. on purpose.

all week i’ve wanted nothing more than to leap on a plane, get to the border, and cradle babies, toddlers, children, teens. i wanted my nursing license to not be long expired. i wanted to exercise that whole soul of me that cannot bear to sit and watch one more minute. i clicked on donations, at a legal defense fund in south texas, intent on helping parents find their children.

none of it, none of it, feels like i am doing one iota to make the hate, the evil, go away. i pray for this chapter in history to end. i pray that we might elect someone whose soul is guided by those fine few things we believe in, certainly all those who gather at this table: decency, gentility, kindness, compassion, love. love as spelled out in the bible, the qur’an, the torah: love as you would be loved.

love as if you could try to imagine the hell of living in a country run by assault-rifle-toting gangs. love as if you knew what it was to have the threat of rape and kidnapping ever trailing you. as if you’d heard screams of terror in the night. as if you’d witnessed the vestiges of awful deaths played out on the sidewalks and the village square, right before your eyes. love as if you knew what it was to perch your toddler on your hip and set out across a desert, unrelenting sun beating down on you, dehydrating every cell of you and the little ones you love.

the little girl in the soul-searing image above, the little girl named yanela, she and her mama crossed the rio grande on a raft. a raft made of what i don’t know. was it chunks of wood strapped together? was it inflatable till it hit the sharp edge of a river rock? does it matter?

call me a cockeyed bleeding-heart kook. i’m no policy wonk, and i’ve no idea how to fix the immigration question. but i do know this: there is nowhere in any bible, any holy text, that says turn away the stranger at the border. rip the child from the mother’s breast — and then handcuff the mother for resisting the taking of her child.

i try mightily to imagine myself when either one of my boys was one or two or three or 12 — or now. if, for one minute, someone reached for them, in a posture of pulling them or me away, i’d kick and scream bloody hell. i’d try to muster superpowers, powers i know full well i do not have. and then, in defeat, i’d collapse. i’d rather never breathe again than be torn from my children.

i am responding as nearly any mother would, because every pore in my body knows what it is to be slipped into that sacred space of living and breathing, being consumed in every waking and slumbering moment by the whole protection and shielding of my child from whatever threat dares to come his way.

we all suffer when one among us suffers the unimaginable. and day after day we are witnessing the unimaginable.

dear holy God, God of mercy, deliver them, deliver us, all of us. deliver us from this evil. amen.

here’s wendell berry’s response to hell on earth. to his grandchildren who walked the holocaust museum on the day yitzhak rabin, who had been assassinated, was buried…

To my granddaughters who visited the Holocaust
Museum on the day of the burial of Yitzhak Rabin

Now you know the worst
we humans have to know
about ourselves, and I am sorry,

for I know that you will be afraid.
To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know

there is no answer
but loving one another,
even our enemies, and this is hard.

But remember:
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he gives a light, divine

though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.

You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you will have the courage for love,
you may walk in light. It will be

the light of those who have suffered
for peace. It will be
your light.

~ Wendell Berry ~

(A Timbered Choir)

how do you find a way forward?

i’d be remiss if i didn’t whisper happy blessed birthday to my firstborn, who marks his first quarter century today. it is the enormity of my love for him that makes it so crushing to even imagine someone trying to take him away from me, at any moment in his existence. he is my most profound blessing, and my joy without end…..

12 Comments

February 23, 2018

soulful pages to be turned

books feb 18

in weeks like this, when what’s churned up on the national stage leaves you raw or hollowed or simply enraged, it’s not so easy to find solace. the balms for the soul are running thin. in weeks like this, i’m grateful for small measures of kindness. each and every one is magnified in the halo of now. last night i watched my sweet boy stir brownies for a friend with a broken heart. the night before, my dear friend from down the alley came by, offering the makings of dinner, clear down to dinner rolls. we will forge on, all of us who live and breathe on the lookout for mercy, all of us who shrivel at the shrill cry of evil and hate, we will forge on, fueled by the indefatigable goodness of those hearts and souls that surround us, the ones that won’t surrender. the ones that insist there is tender to be found, and gentle is the implement of choice, the one that unfurls the petals of the heart, and breaks open the world into some kind of beautiful.

and in the meantime, i’m grateful for pages to turn, and blessed thoughts and ideas and snippets of poetry to bury my nose in….

here, then, is the latest batch of books for the soul, brought to you courtesy of the chicago tribune. perhaps you’ll find balm in the pages…

To Hear the Forest Sing: Some Musings on the Divine
By Margaret Dulaney, Listen Well, 252 pages, $15

A fine way to encounter the musings in this first collection from Margaret Dulaney, a playwright who started the spiritual spoken-word website, Listen Well, back in 2010, would be to read them aloud. They are words meant to be heard, yes, but they’re words that work their magic whether absorbed by listening, or in the silence of reading.

“To Hear the Forest Sing,” is a gathering of essays from 25 years of Dulaney’s morning walks in the woods of Bucks County, Pa., with her frolicsome dogs. She trains her thoughts, her fine-grained poetic thoughts, on an “open faith,” a faith she alternately describes as “Christian-Buddhist-transcendentalist,” and “Everythingist”—“that is, one who is in love with all of the great faiths.”

A storyteller at heart, Dulaney writes with grace, and it doesn’t take many page-turnings to feel you’re in conversation with a true and honest friend, one who tells you she was long ago labeled “learning disabled,” and unflinchingly bares her stumbles. Nor does it take too many pages to discover you’re in the presence of a lively mind, one filled with the epiphanies of an awakening soul. She writes: “I have given up looking for the thunderous, and look only for those quiet, tiptoeing revelations that I have learned to recognize.”

Many essays later, she writes this about faith and doubt, and following some holy code: “We are dragging ourselves out of our sleep-drenched beds every morning in order to learn a little bit more about God. The fog will clear someday, the weather brighten. Trust this, and keep on showing up.”

My Friend Fear: Finding Magic in the Unknown
By Meera Lee Patel, Tarcher Perigee, 176 pages, $18

If your idea of church is plonking down in front of the big screen and tuning into SuperSoul Sunday, “My Friend Fear” might be your prayer card. A luminous, watercolor-splashed prayer card, it’s a meditation on fear, and a short-course tutorial on working your way to the other side. It’s the latest from Meera Lee Patel, a self-taught artist and author, whose bestselling “Start Where You Are,” an interactive journal of creativity, mindfulness, and self-motivation, earned an emphatic “must-read” from Oprah.com.

It begins with a deeply confessional exploration of fear, one Patel enters into by exposing the “irrational beasts” of her youth, her fear of being seen as odd because her immigrant parents kept to their old-country ways, the bodily shame she felt because of a 17-inch scar that runs up the back of her leg, one she says looks like a “poorly placed zipper.”

Because she dares to take head-on this subject that many dodge, and because she writes with a child-like open-heartedness, a porousness that unwittingly draws in the reader, she serves her subject well. If you’re willing to put down your own defenses, “My Friend Fear” has the power to move you.

Besides her insistence that your fears might illuminate your deepest vulnerabilities, make plain those things you so emphatically wish for, Patel offers this bold plea: Find the things that scare you, and do them anyway. Tackle your fears, one after one. Find yourself more alive than you’d ever imagined, penned inside the fear-filled cage.

“Like a constellation lit brightly beneath a foggy night sky, it didn’t stop shining just because you couldn’t see it,” she writes. “Acceptance is inside you. It’s been waiting for you to find it.”

Almost Entirely: Poems
By Jennifer Wallace, Paraclete, 128 pages, $18

When the names Scott Cairns, Mary Oliver, and Christian Wiman — great and soulful poets all — are drawn for point of comparison, are flags marking the perimeter of another poet’s domain, that is a poet whose work demands attention.

Jennifer Wallace’s poems, gathered here in “Almost Entirely” — a collection that toggles between the sacred and profane, faith and doubt, love and unrequited love — clearly earns the comparisons, and the claim to her own poetic country.

A poet, photographer, and teacher living in Baltimore and rural western Massachusetts, Wallace edits poetry for The Cortland Review, and her religious orientation is described thusly: “after decades of avoidance and experimentation, she decided in her 50’s to get serious about her spiritual practice and is now, mostly, happily settled within her Christian roots.”

What pulses through these prayer poems, besides an abiding knowledge of grief coupled with a palpable faith in the afterlife, is the residue of Catholic imagery, a childhood of nuns and priests and Latin prayer.

Any one of Wallace’s poems might be a morning’s meditation, or analeptic on a sleepless night.

Unlike most religious or spiritual writing that “tends to fall into the trap of being either willfully obscure, or too quickly cutting to ‘God’ as the general answer to all particular vexations,” observes Brother Joe Hoover, poetry editor of America Magazine, “Wallace strikes a lovely balance.”

Yet another critic, the poet David Rigsbee, lauds Wallace’s poems for “reclaiming the sacred in the steady rumor of its eclipse.”

As in this haunting stanza, from “Requiem,” her seven-part poem: “Perhaps we are here to make of earth a minor heaven / where birds will glider higher / in an air made more full / by the dead’s barely audible sigh.”

Barbara Mahany’s latest book, “Motherprayer: Lessons in Loving,” was published in 2017. Her new book, “The Blessings of Motherprayer: Sacred Whispers of Mothering,” will be published in April. Twitter: @BarbaraMahany

and since this is a morning of simple offerings, here’s one more lovely little something sent by a friend: words that seared me in a spine-tingling way.

fireproof

may you find solace in books and words and random acts of the beautiful….

what are the balms for the soul you bumped into this week?

4 Comments

February 16, 2018

we will not be numb…

i can’t imagine what it’s like to wake up the morning after. and the morning after that. and every morning thereafter.

but i know that i woke up — 1,300 miles away from the nightmare — on the morning after, and the one after that, and couldn’t help but try to slip into the faintest, chillingest of outlines: imagined that in that first blur of an instant, when you haven’t yet pulled yourself out from the depths of nighttime’s disorientation, you might have the barest instance of not yet being shrouded, and then, before even a blink, you would be sucked down into it, into that raw remembering: oh my god, it happened. she’s gone. he’s gone. and you would realize that the nightmare you couldn’t imagine was the one that was yours now. and you couldn’t go back. you could not, for the life of you, not ever again, go back to the moment in time where you weren’t racked, gutted beyond imagination, gasping for air.

or maybe you don’t even sleep. maybe, not even for an instant, do you slip out of consciousness into the anchor of sleep, of distance, that shore you can never again reach, the one where you aren’t skinned alive, the one where you breathe in and out without your chest hurting, the breathing’s so hard.

maybe you pray harder than you’ve ever prayed — to trade places, so you’d be the one who’s dead, and the someone you love is the one who goes on.

maybe you can never ever pray another prayer. maybe the line goes dead. and you spend the rest of your life a hollow shell.

or maybe resurrection comes in remembering. remembering the beauties, the animating stories that rise out of the ashes. maybe resurrection comes in wrapping yourself in the cloak of making a difference. making the death not be the end, but the spark of a blaze that will not be doused.

it’s all mostly impossible to imagine beyond the faintest of outlines. empathy can only carry us so far.

but i’ve found the most bizarre glimmer of hope here. it rises up out of the horrors of scenes caught on kids’ phones. i’ve watched video clips in the last day that i will never ever forget. if you’re brave, if you’re willing, here’s one, a montage from the new york times. it’s not the rawest one i’ve seen, but it’s awful beyond words.

so where’s the glimmer? the glimmer is in the documentation, it’s in this nightmare playing out in real time in front of kids who are digital natives, who instinctively pick up their phones and record, so for the first time, maybe, for a very long stretch of minutes, we — the faraway witnesses — we are drawn into the classrooms, we are watching the hands that are quaking in fear, we are hearing the whimpers, the wails. the children are witness, and thus so are we.

it’s a wholly different thing to be immersed in the minutes of blood bath in a high school classroom, to see the ragdoll-limp legs of a teen, and to see the red ring around her spread bigger and bigger. it’s impossible watching practically. it’s wholly different than watching the noiseless scenes from a helicopter looking down from above; even the frames of kids marching out of the school, hands up, stumbling in fear, those are sanitized, stripped of layers of horror, compared to the scenes that played out in real time inside the classrooms, the closets, the hallways.

and here’s the glimmer: maybe this time we won’t forget. maybe we won’t go numb. maybe this time the footage, caught on hundreds of cell phones, plus the voices of kids who are screaming that they were the ones huddled in closets, hearing the echo of assault-rifle carnage just beyond the classroom door, they were the ones sending texts home, “if i don’t make it….”

they are the ones who insist that we listen.

parkland text and those kids are screaming that this is all about guns. those kids are screaming that unless you were cowering in the coat closet, praying for your life, you have no right to tell anyone it’s not about guns. it’s all about guns, they are saying. and their videos are making that utterly, wrenchingly impossible to deny — or to ever forget.

maybe this will be the time that breaks the cycle of national amnesia. maybe this time we can all make a promise: we will not be numb. we will not forget the hell to which too many have entered.

maybe the voices of kids who prayed for their lives, maybe they won’t be quelled. maybe we’ll listen. and, lest we start to go numb, we can play back the scenes they caught on their phones, and not let those deaths be in vain.

may the memory of those 17 souls ever be a blessing. and the 26 in sandy hook. and the 49 at the pulse night club. and the 26 in the church in sutherland springs…..

8 Comments

January 26, 2018

opening doors…(life on the lookout for light)

always open door

any hour now, the house next door, a house where an old man of 92 has lived alone for a few years, a house the old man has been trying to sell for months and months (with not a single offer), a house where just a few weeks ago the old man told me he feels as if he’s gone before a judge and been sentenced to life in jail only the jail is his home, that house will have some bustle today.

two women will be pulling cans and boxes and thingamajigs from shelves in the cupboards. not because the old man is moving out finally. but because an old friend is moving in. an old friend of mine. a friend i knew to be needing a place to live. a rich and wonderful friend who for a host of reasons is in between houses. and desperately needing a place to call home, a place where she can breathe, and look out the windows at sunlight. or snowflakes. or dawn.

after a week or two of nearly comical round-about “talks,” the two of them have reached a deal that already hints of heart more than wallet. she will be renting what amounts to an upstairs suite, two roomy bedrooms, a bathroom, and closets. he will be gaining the comfort of footsteps up above, the rustling in the kitchen as she whips up one of her amazing effortless feasts.

and that’s not all: my friend drives a car, and the old man next door — his name is george, and i don’t think he’d mind my using it — he lost his old white oldsmobile last summer when it got crunched by another car. george escaped with bumps and bruises, but the lasting blow was the car got towed away, and taken away — for good. as part of “the deal,” my dear friend will be, among many things, george’s newfound wheels. she will drive to the market when he cobbles a list (long a fellow who marketed for himself on the fly, an ad-libber of marketing, he claims to be not so good at list-making and, at 92, is intent on teaching himself this new skill). she will drive him to the doctor. and, as seems to happen every once in a while, she’ll give him a lift to the emergency room.

but here’s the thing about that last point in particular: just a week or two ago, i was sitting with george on a day he’d woken up dizzy. i’d run over after he called, a scene that unfolds not infrequently, and was perched beside him in a hard metal folding chair (he’s cleared the house of nearly every piece of furniture, the saga of trying for months to sell a house that won’t budge), when he told me in something of a whisper that, really, he thought the chest pains and shortness of breath might just be from the stress of living alone, of not being able to sell this house that he loved, a house he built for his beloved late wife who for years and years struggled to breathe, a house he’d filled with countless “upgrades” to make her breathing easier, to make it easier for nurses to come and to go. a house he didn’t want to sell at a bargain-basement price. to george, that feels like an insult. an insult to himself, yes, but more so a slap at the memory of his most beloved wife (in the great room of his house, the only room still with furniture, there are exactly four items: a recliner chair, a metal tv tray table, a big screen tv, and a faded picture of his late wife hanging from the wall). it’s his unwillingness to settle for what he considers an unconscionable price that has shoved him into this jail-cell of a situation, and how he’s come to spend months and months alone in that house, and now months and months without a car, or a way to get around. and all the while the pains in his chest have gotten worse and worse. and the dizziness comes and goes.

and as i sat there listening, wishing like anything i could figure out how to lift his burden, it dawned on me that maybe there was an outside chance of a way.

my old friend had just moved out of her own longtime house into a rented room, a tight-squeezed room in a townhouse where a little dog (not hers) had free rein and hospital pads were scattered about the floors in case the wee dog hadn’t time to do his business outside. even though i knew she’d just unpacked boxes and boxes, even though i knew she’d just signed off on the first month’s rent, i could see the light in her eyes was dimming. i was haunted long after i drove away and left her to squeeze a few files onto her makeshift desk.

it dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, my two old friends — one a friend by accident of geography, the other a friend who’s been something of an auntie to my boys, and a lifesaver to me — could make a quirky equation, could be each other’s short-term solution. so i spoke up. i mentioned first to my friend my quirky idea. she paused and considered. then i brought it up to george’s daughter, the one who’s been slumped under the weight of her papa’s affairs, and driving countless miles from her house to his many times a week, and often at the drop of a dime. she too saw the possibility. so i wandered over and asked george myself.

and by the middle of next week the upstairs room with the light that has barely shone in all these years, it will be glowing above the garage. it will be glowing down onto the picket fence that runs between my house and george’s — and, for now, hers, too. my old friend will have a whole upstairs all to herself. she’ll have shelves and shelves for her books. and sunlight or moonlight pouring through the tall, tall windows.

george will have the comfort and joy of being not alone. already, i’ve been told, he pokes his head round the corner when my friend is there (figuring out what will go where), asks if she’d like him to make her a cocoa. (see what i mean about this being more heart than wallet?)

it’s a happy ending in the making, i’m certain. i feel it in my bones. and not because i will now have a dear friend next door, one with whom i can share old new yorkers, and whatever i’ve whipped up for dinner. but because in this old cold world there still exists the possibility of kooky solutions, and hearts can be pulled together tighter than any wallet or real-estate guide might suggest. fact is, the two of ’em — george and my friend — both happen to be among the dearest souls on the planet, and right now both are in tight pinches that neither one deserves.

it all reminds me that we live, all of us do, on the thin membrane of possibility day after day after day. our charge, if we take it, is to live and breathe the belief that 1 + 1 just might = 3, to know that love and light is just beneath the surface, aching for a soft spot, a place to break through.

despite what the naysayers insist, we do not dwell in a zero-sum world. my gain is not your loss, nor vice versa. if we decide to live a life of looking for doors that might be opened, dots connected, threads interwoven, if we believe in looking up and looking out for the other guy’s sweet victory and triumph, well, then isn’t the world one stitched by generosity and not stinginess? isn’t that the way we all win? and doesn’t that tip the globe in the direction of light not shadow?

it’s always boggled me, and heavied my heart, to know that this is not the way of the world. but we can make it be. we can spend our days on the lookout. on the lookout for love, for light. for the arithmetic of unlikely sums.

welcome to the neighborhood, sweet friend. xoxox

do you have a tale of doors being opened, and love rushing through?

30 Comments

January 19, 2018

when muttering under your breath isn’t enough…

“Leave safety behind. Put your body on the line. Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind–even if your voice shakes. When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. Well-aimed slingshots can topple giants.” —Maggie Kuhn, social justice activist, founder of the Gray Panthers

despite the fact that i came of age in the 1960s, can remember chillingly the assassinations of JFK, and bobby kennedy, and martin luther king jr., can remember being afraid when draft numbers were called and boys i knew were whispered to be leaving for canada. despite the fact that mahatma gandhi and mother theresa were the faces i cut from the pages of magazines and taped to the inside of my spiral notebooks, i’ve not spent much time with soles to pavement, marching with a picket sign.

so i turn to maggie kuhn, the gray-haired activist and founder of the gray panthers, whom the new york times once described as “a tiny woman who wore her hair in a prim bun that gave her the look of an ideal candidate to be helped across the street by a Boy Scout.” maggie fought it all, every discrimination, oppression, and injustice she ran into. and in her 89 years, dying in april 1995, a mere two weeks after joining a picket line for striking transit workers, she ran into plenty.

it’s been a year now, since the chill january morning when i awoke in prayer, and soon found myself writhing on the couch, listening to an inaugural address that steam-engined through “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” and “students deprived of knowledge,” and “crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives,” all rising toward the crescendo that “this american carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

i was aghast that morning. and at least a hundred other mornings since. i’ve felt hollowed and gutted and stripped of hope. i’ve cringed. and heard the thump of my heart pounding in my ears, as blood pressure rose and i watched in disbelief. how, i’ve wondered time and again, have we gotten to this low?

it’s all of it: the language, the lies, the schoolyard taunts. the bullying. the lack of backbone all around. the refusal of sycophants and hangers-on to call a spade an ugly spade. it’s so much more than politics that makes me boil, it’s the degradation, the shredding of decency, the depravity. it’s needing to turn off the tv if kids are in the room, because i don’t want them hearing the words spoken by the fellow in the oval office. i don’t want them reading of porn star affairs, while a wife is home cradling her newborn son. i don’t want pussy talk. the moral compass is seizing, is spinning without north star.

all year, i’ve muttered and mumbled, and all but thrown shoes at the tv screen. i’ve composed letters to the president in my head. i’ve imagined myself plonked on the steps outside the west wing, just beneath that portico where all the hotshots come and go. i’ve wondered if i implored loud enough, would he listen? could i tell him quite exquisitely enough just how vile i’ve found this year-long unraveling of those rare few things i believe to be essential?

in my day to day, i’ve employed those tools i’ve always counted on: i’ve typed, tried to gently whisper truth. i’ve upped the everyday acts of kindness. i’ve tried to be a heart-seeking missile of empathy, looked more folks in the eye, listened more intently to their stories. prayed and prayed some more. tried to untangle discord. turned the other cheek.

i’ve no idea if the scales of justice have moved one iota, if one voice, one pair of lungs, one heart, one imagination can make a dent in the ocean churning with each toxin.

so i’m tossing my lot toward compound interest, the magnifying power of multiples: toward clogged streets of voices, toward the impact of the aerial photo, and the fine-grain, on-the-ground collective of stories heard, faces watched closely.

i’m donning my triple layer long johns, shimmying on my walking shoes, spinning the turnstile and hopping on the “el,” chicago’s answer to a polyglot on rails. i’m headed downtown tomorrow to the hordes who will be taking to the streets for a hundred thousand reasons, all falling under the rubric, “enough is enough.” it’s time to put breath to our hopes and prayers and protests. it’s time to reclaim civility and justice. time to leave behind our couches and our clickers and bring our voices to the public square. it’s time to tell our children we did not sit silently while the national conversation crumbled, and what passed for fairness, for decency, for equal rights for all, was in shambles.

i am one voice, and mine might be shaking. but one plus one plus one just might bend the arc toward that justice, that fairness, the radiant light of pure and gentle love that i will not ever stop believing in. nor working toward.

so help me God.

who taught you to use your voice, and how will you use it?

23 Comments

January 12, 2018

dreams cannot be left to die…

a formal portrait of MLK, Jr., appeared many times in the new york times. it was shot during the summer of 1963, on the very day when protestors hurled eggs at dr. king as he arrived at a church in harlem. earlier that day, he had criticized black nationalists, arguing that their call for a separate black state was “wrong.” some believed those comments spurred the attack that night. allyn baum/the new york times

i was thinking of writing a little meditation on the return to rhythms, the ebb and flow of everyday routine (er, ritual) that holds some of us snugly in the confines of our lives. how the deepening grooves of particular habits and ways bring comfort in familiarity. i was going to write how we are creatures, some of us, of what’s known, practiced. i was thinking about how slip-sliding into deep cleaning, sorting files, tossing trash, reorients us at the head of the trail through the newborn year.

but then i stumbled onto this little known speech given by david dinkins, a friend of martin luther king, jr., in the days just after king’s assassination. dinkins, you might recall, went on to become mayor of new york city, the first–and, so far, only–black mayor. but before that, long before that, he walked stride-for-stride alongside MLK Jr., a man who lived and died for a dream. i decided that, on the eve of the national holiday that now begs us to pause and consider the power of nonviolence, the power of putting breath and muscle to a dream rooted in love, these few words held far more than mine could ever hold. in the wake of the travesty of a president referring to african countries and haiti as “sh**holes,” king’s dream and the dreams of those who follow him need–beg–oxygen and airtime.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a speech by David Dinkins (from April 1968)

Martin Luther King is dead now, and we, the mourners and losers, are left with his dreams—with decisions to make. He is dead now, and there are no words we can say for him, for he said his own. He is dead now, and any eulogy must be for us, the living.

Martin Luther King is dead now, so for him there is no tomorrow on this earth. But for us there are tomorrows and tomorrows. He painted a picture of what our tomorrows could be in his dream of America. This past weekend painted a picture of how that dream could become a nightmare should we lose sight of his principles.

Martin Luther King is dead now, but he left a legacy. He planted in all of us, black and white, the seeds of love of justice, of decency, of honor, and we must not fail to have these seeds bear fruit.

Martin Luther King is dead now, and there is only time for action. The time for debate, the time for blame, the time for accusation is over. Ours is a clear call to action. We must not only dedicate ourselves to great principles, but we must apply those principles to our lives.

Martin Luther King is dead now, and he is because he dared believe in nonviolence in a world of violence. Because he dared believe in peace in a world of conflict. He is dead now because he challenged all of us to believe in his dream.

Martin Luther King is dead now, and we cannot allow the substance of his dream to turn into the ashes of defeat. If we are to build a tribute to what he stood for, we must, each of us, stand for the same things.

Martin Luther King is dead now, and I ask each of you, the living, to join him and me, to go from this room and keep the dream alive. We must now commit ourselves, we must now work, we must now define what kind of America we are going to have—for unless we make his dream a reality we will not have an America about which to decide.

Martin Luther King is dead now—but he lives.

how are you keeping the dream of justice and love alive? tomorrow and tomorrow?

17 Comments

December 1, 2017

december’s whisper

red berry

the december i am drawn to, the one that most emphatically, insistently, invites me in, is the one that beckons in whisper.

the apex of my counterculturalism, perhaps, i take my month of longest night in slow sure sips. timpani belongs to someone else. my december—our december, perhaps, for there is evidence we’ve found each other, kindred spirits here—is one that calls for quiet.

long stretches of hours in which the simmering on the stove, the ticking of the clock, the occasional squawk of the jay at the feeder, those are the preludes, the quarter notes and half notes that i take in.

there will come, i’m certain—because year after year it comes—the one annual carol i play over and over, cranking the dial till the house shakes, and i worry the next-door neighbor might come running to see if all is well. (“mary, did you know?” a leading contender, third year running…)

gingerbabies and so i’ve spent the week preparing, whisking away autumnal vestige, ushering in soon-to-come winter. i’ve stockpiled seed in 20-pound sacks (several, so far), and vats of ice-melting pellets for the dawn when the ice comes. i’ve piled pumpkins and gourds in the old trough my squirrels and possums (and occasional uninvited skunk) depend on, the autumn’s feast now theirs for winter keeping. i’ve snipped boxwood and spruce, tucked branches of both into window boxes just below the ledges, where jack frost will soon anoint the panes. i’ve strung italian star-lights around and through the posts of my picket fence. when the sun drops down, i won’t be alone in the dark. there is twinkling at the edge of the yard, front and back. and a candle flickers atop the kitchen table.

it is all a part of the coiling in. the nautilus of deepening prayer.

the prayer that fills me most is the prayer that slowly and silently seeps to the tucked-away places, the ones that await the season of stillness, the places unlocked by the smells and the bells of december: pungent clove, star anise, hissing wick, crackling log, twilight’s first star and the night’s last ember at dawn.

it won’t be long till somehow i crank the oven, haul out the canisters, bang my grandma’s old maple rolling pin against the cutting board’s edge. my coterie of cookie cutters each play a role in their own sugarplum suite.

zoup one day this week i hauled a turkey carcass from the fridge, and plunked it in my deepest pot, the vessel for soup-making for a dear dear friend whose newborn is just home from the ICU, and for whom i’ve cooked up all the sustenance i could imagine: brown rice, pulled-from-the-earth plump knotty carrots and fennel and garlic, savory stock, handful of parsley.

i’ll deliver my brew well before sundown, and in return i’ll drink in the newness, the perfection, of a babe just birthed, cradled more tightly and tenderly than ever imagined because ICUs do a mighty fine job of reminding how blessed it is to be finally sent home, untethered from the web of too many tubes and the fright that shakes a new mama and papa—and all those who love them—down to their rickety bones.

(there is, of course, no ailment the balm of day-long simmering kettle won’t cure; even a newborn mama’s terrible tremble is certain to be chased away at the very first shlurp of that omnipotent zoup.)

indeed, these are my december liturgies, day after day. intercessions of prayer, punctuated by plain old worldly deadlines. i attend to my errands and chores and assignments—laundry is folded and ferried, empty shelves of the fridge re-stocked, sentences are typed and essays submitted.

but the work that’s most heavenly, certainly, is the quiet work of the soul come december. the making way, making room at the inn, in the heart.

the grace of december, the gift of december, is in the quieting, the hush of the sacred whisper. the vespers that hallow—make holy—the heart. make room in the heart this quiet december.

i’ve been saving this poem, “winter grace,” for the whispered beginnings of the season of stillness….

Winter Grace
By Patricia Fargnoli

If you have seen the snow
under the lamppost
piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table
or somewhere slowly falling
into the brook
to be swallowed by water,
then you have seen beauty
and know it for its transience.
And if you have gone out in the snow
for only the pleasure
of walking barely protected
from the galaxies,
the flakes settling on your parka
like the dust from just-born stars,
the cold waking you
as if from long sleeping,
then you can understand
how, more often than not,
truth is found in silence,
how the natural world comes to you
if you go out to meet it,
its icy ditches filled with dead weeds,
its vacant birdhouses, and dens
full of the sleeping.
But this is the slowed down season
held fast by darkness
and if no one comes to keep you company
then keep watch over your own solitude.
In that stillness, you will learn
with your whole body
the significance of cold
and the night,
which is otherwise always eluding you.

how do you make room in your heart, in your unspooling of the day, for the whisper come december?

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Category: antidotes to madness