antidotes to madness | pull up a chair

April 26, 2024

bibliotherapy: of fictional nature

i tend to ground myself in the world in all its nitty-gritty. that mattered (critically) when i was a nurse (don’t you dare inverse a systolic for a diastolic, when it comes to blood pressure reading), and in all my decades of chasing after news, the truth—and every grimy detail—was what we sought. thus, when i peruse the bookshelves of my local free library (the world’s most generous invention, to be sure), i am nearly always in the down-low where no windows are, where the endless rows of fact not fiction reside.

i’m decidedly non-fictionally inclined.

but this week i was lulled into the rooms upstairs, the rooms where sunshine streams through sky-high windows, and where make-believe is the order of the room. in other words, i crept up to where the fiction is. and in the writings of one irish novelist, a fellow i’d give anything to sit with in any irish pub, or better yet to stroll the rocky coastline of the continent from which half my peoples come, i found the surest cure for running from the blues.

niall williams is his name, an irishman, who is but a year younger than me, and who has gathered wisdom as an old stone takes on a mossy coat. i can almost see the glint in his eye, as from some quiet post in the corner of a dimly-lit, crossbeamed room, he’s kept closest watch on the quirks and comedies of human nature. and on the heartbreak too. as the tenderness he kneads into his prose and paragraphs has left me gasping more than once (and i am only eight chapters in).

the book is this is happiness, as prescriptive a title as a girl in search of antidote might want.

the irishman had me at chapter 1: “It had stopped raining.” (that’s the chapter in its entirety.)

chapter 2 picked up where 1 left off: “Nobody in Faha” (the fictional irish town that just happens to be a spot on the map not far from where my non-fictional peoples hailed) “could remember when it started.” by the third sentence of that second chapter, i was ready to shove up my shirtsleeves and not move an inch till i’d turned the last page. it went like this: “[Rain] came straight down and sideways, frontwards, backwards, and any other wards God could think of. It came in sweeps, in waves, sometimes in veils. It came dressed as drizzle, as mizzle, as mist, as showers, frequent and widespread, as a wet fog, as a damp day, a dreeping, an out-and-out downpour.”

and on it goes, plip-plopping along, this incantatory passage that soon enough tells us that the unrelenting rain came “like a blessing God had forgotten he had left on.”

this is nothing less than bliss in garamond font (a literary typographic detail nearly always spelled out at the back end of any book); and most certainly for a girl who penned a paragraph of her own, in her most recent book, that unfurled in uncannily kindred ways. c’est moi:

“Rain, like most of us, has its moods. In its more laconic hours, it comes on unsuspectingly, without folderol, timpani, or cymbal crashing, the barest slip of a presence and suddenly you’re bespattered. On the days when rain is tempestuous, furious, raging, it rattles the heavens, cleaves the night, pummels the trees, and sends all the world—even the puddle-paddling robins—running for cover. Betwixt and between, it’s the master of a thousand voices, from the salubrious plopp—the drop with a splatter—to the militaristic rat-a-tat-tat, when the rain tries to pretend it’s a handful of pebbles thrashing your windows, and on to the audible gulp when a downpour is frothing your gulleys. The Brits, reliably saturated in the subject, offer a lengthy lexicon for precipitation’s multiple personalities: there’s a basking (drenching in heavy shower); a drisk (misty drizzle); a fox’s wedding (sudden drops out of clear blue sky); a hurly-burly (thunder and lightning); a stotting (rain so hard it bounces up off the ground); and, for closers, thunner-pash (heavy shower with thunder). Because it’s so elemental, the life stuff of our very existence, the celestial surge that fills our rivers and waters our crops, rinses away the detritus, bathes all the woods, and the sidewalks as well, it’s been the subject of intense preoccupation and prognostication for a long, long time. time. Since ever ago.”
(p. 85, The Book of Nature)

is there not a hint here of shared joy in precipitatory romps? can you not feel the two of us––niall et moi––luxuriating in the many, many wondrous ways to say “the rain is unrelenting”?

i am hardly alone in my enamorment of mr. williams. my best best friend, a longtime children’s librarian in the los angeles public schools, couldn’t stop texting me pictures of its pages this week, and, soon after, when i mentioned to a beloved literary friend (a sister chair, who might reveal herself below) that i’d fallen into novel love, she reminded me that she’d told me so a few years back. as always, i am late to my own party.

in any case, here’s what the new yorker had to say back at the dawn of 2020, in the year of our covid, when happiness whirled onto the world stage.

This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury). This elegiac novel is as unhurried as its setting: Faha, a village in western Ireland, “unchanged since creation” until, in the late fifties, electricity arrives. The narrator, now elderly, reminisces about that time; having come from Dublin as a teen-ager, to live with his grandparents after the death of his mother, he conceived a hopeless passion for three sisters. “We spend most of our lives guarding against washes of feeling, I’m guarding no more,” he promises. The novel’s description of a lost rural life style, and the gaps between a young man’s romantic expectations and the inescapable letdown of reality, is comic and poignant in equal measure.

all of which is to say that bibliotherapy is one of the world’s great cures for whate’er ails you. and even more so when it ferries you off to a wee irish village “where story was a kind of human binding,” where church pews were filled as if by unwritten order, where front doors were never closed in daytime nor backdoors locked at night, and where, we’re told, “religion lasted longer … because we were an imaginative people, and so could most vividly picture the fires of Hell.”

and wherein the self-described antiquarian narrator notes in passing, “i know it seems unlikely that Faha then might have been the place to learn how to live, but in my experience the likely is not in God’s lexicon.”

the world these days is wearying. and worrying, too. my week began with a funeral, a breathtakingly beautiful one that wove buddhist and roman catholic threads but was tragic nonetheless, and was followed by a seder where the weight of gaza and jerusalem bore down on every heart. by week’s end, i’d heard tell that my kid was nearly carjacked, and a dear friend who lives alone (and has borne already more than too much suffering) is on the cusp of twelve rounds of godawful, pray-to-God-it-works chemo for the newly-diagnosed cancer in her lungs.

the blooms outside my kitchen door were doing all they could to boost the perfumed quota in the vernal air, and the robins busied themselves constructing scrappy nests in my window box along the alley. (do not ask me to tell you the tragic tale of the mama robin who was tangled in a dessicated grapevine, nor of the nest no longer in the works.) all the earth’s wonderment––glorious as it is as winter erupts into spring––is ephemeral, is here, then, poof, it’s gone.

but what i find on the page is lasting. can be read and read again. can be indelibly inked into the files of our mind.

and so, this week, a newfound balm and friend was found. and i’ll be tucked away in faha, on the fictional irish coast, for as long as the pages will carry me. bibliotherapy rarely fails me.

what carried you away this week?

here’s a jolt of joy that took my breath away this week: the great christian mystic richard rohr, a franciscan friar and ecumenical teacher, and his new mexico-based Center for Action and Contemplation saw fit to surprise me by clipping an excerpt from The Book of Nature in his daily meditations on wednedsay. that he chose a favorite passage, the story of brother lawrence, the barefoot monk who saw God in the pots and pans of his parisian monastery kitchen, and was struck by the innate holiness of a nuck-naked little tree, only charmed me all the more. here’s a peek at the preaching of the trees.

and from this week’s commonplacing. this morsel from DH Lawrence:

The vast marvel is to be alive… The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul… There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

this, from mary oliver…

Morning Light

by MARY OLIVER

Every morning
the good news
pours
through the field

touching
every blossom
every stem
and each of them,

on the instant
offers to be part of it—
offers to lift and hold, willingly
the vast burden of light

all day.
In my life
I have never seen it to fail—
flower after flower

leaf after pearly leaf,
to the acre,
to the massy many,
is silvered, is flooded;

and such voices
spangle among it—
larks and sparrows—
all those small souls—

are everywhere
tossing the quick wheels of pleasure
from their red throats
as they hang on—

as though on little masts
of golden ships,
to the tops of the weeds—
and that’s when I come—

that’s when I come, crying out to the world:
oh give me a corner of it
to lift also, to sing about, to touch
with my wild hands—and they do.

and this from annie dillard‘s the writing life, prose laid out as a poem by my friends at SALT Project:

One of the few things I know
about writing is this:
spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it,
all, right away, every time.

Do not hoard what seems good
for a later place in the book,
or for another book;
give it, give it all, give it now.

The impulse to save
something good
for a better place later
is the signal to spend it now.

Something more will arise
for later, something better.
These things fill from behind,
from beneath, like well water.

Similarly, the impulse to keep
to yourself what you have learned
is not only shameful, it is destructive.

Anything you do not give
freely and abundantly
becomes lost to you.

You open your safe
and find ashes.

and finally, this goodbye to “poetry’s colossus,” helen vendler, whom i was blessed to call my teacher in our year of sumptuous thinking…

and blessings to you, and thanks for whirling by….

p.s. the other two books in my bibliotherapy stack (above) are william’s history of the rain, which had me at the title, and letters from max: a book of friendship, an epistolary collection between a poet and a playwright: sarah ruhl, the twice pulitzer-finalist playwright who was once teacher to poet max ritvo and quickly became dear friends, and as max’s cancer grew worse, their connection deepened. suleika jauoad ran an excerpt the other day in her isolation journals, and i ran to the library to grab a copy.

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March 29, 2024

in the silence . . .

in the long tradition of seekers and sages, silence is a constant. a leitmotif maybe. a rhythm that ebbs and flows. it is into the silence that we surrender to enter the depths of our soul, the unencumbered spaces where whispers are heard, where the stirring comes.

in silence, the earthly noise is muffled. we tune our inner ear, the one that’s tied to the soul. the one that allows the sacred to find its way in.

and so, on this day, this good friday, a day long held in silence for me, i will make room for that long quenching that comes when i am alone in the depths, in the stillness.

this is the first holy week in a very long time where the braiding of the two traditions that animate this old house — jewish passover and christian easter — are not entwined. easter i only recently learned falls on the first sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. passover, though, always begins on a full moon, the 15th day of the month of nisan on the hebrew calendar, and because the lunar and solar calendars are marching to their own separate tunes, every once in a while there is a good bit of moon between the two holidays.

so this year, i will be deep in good friday all day, as i was deep in holy thursday last night, the breathtakingly spare hour when, in a nod to jesus’ last supper, a seder in which he knew he would be betrayed by one of his closest twelve, and retreated to the garden of gethsemane to weep and to pray, the whole church was stripped of ornament and color. the altar was washed, the vestments of priest and deacon and choir were removed. every candle was snuffed. we left the church in thick silence.

my own blessed mother held this day, this good friday, in a reverence that seeped early on into the depths of me. silence was kept from noon till the hour of jesus’ death on the cross, which we somehow had determined was three in the afternoon. and so, all these years later, i keep that silence.

most often i take to my window seat, the perch looking out into the trees. i will pick up my caryll houselander, the 20th-century mystic whose words penetrate me like no other, her meditations on the stations of the cross, the dusty desolate path of jesus’ walk to the hill of golgotha, the hill where he would die.

there is much to pray on and for this year. the brokenness, the darkness, is plenty. and all we’ve got to begin to mend the brokenness, to kindle a flickering light in the darkness, is the small but inextinguishable capacity of whatever antidotes we can muster: the smallest kindness; the rare attention to someone else’s suffering; the unexpected delivery of joy.

we can, in our pointillist way, drop dot upon dot of goodness onto the canvas that is our moment in time on this planet. hope stirs as long as we can stand in the face of darkness, and muscle our few and feeble yet insuppressible defiances: we will not surrender to those forces we know to be counter to the sacred; we will not let all the light be extinguished. we are our own last best hopes for the world we imagine. and i will enter into the silence and the depths of the sorrow today to chart my way toward whatever light i can muster.

so help me God.

because it is increasingly my way to bring you the voices of souls far wiser and deeper than i might ever be, i have gathered up a few who stirred me this week.

first up, henri nouwen, restless seeker, priest and theologian, comes along, as antidote to so much suffering, reminding us–in one of his most indelible passages–to be surprised by joy:

Learn the discipline of being surprised not by suffering but by joy. As we grow old . . . there is suffering ahead of us, immense suffering, a suffering that will continue to tempt us to think that we have chosen the wrong road. . . . But don’t be surprised by pain. Be surprised by joy, be surprised by the little flower that shows its beauty in the midst of a barren desert, and be surprised by the immense healing power that keeps bursting forth like springs of fresh water from the depth of our pain.
henri nouwen

and praying this isn’t too dark, this epiphany from louise erdrich‘s the painted drum:

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
louise erdrich

and, bon mot for all who love poetry and find it endlessly a wonder, this from david hinton, chinese literature scholar:

Poetry is the cosmos awakened to itself. Narrative, reportage, explanation, idea: language is the medium of self-identity, and we normally live within that clutch of identity, identity that seems to look out at and think about the Cosmos as if from some outside space. But poetry pares language down to a bare minimum, thereby opening it to silence. And it is there in the margins of silence that poetry finds its deepest possibilities — for there it can render dimensions of consciousness that are much more expansive than that identity-center, primal dimensions of consciousness as the Cosmos awakened to itself. At least this is true for classical Chinese poetry, shaped as it is by Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist thought into a form of spiritual practice. In its deepest possibilities, its inner wilds, poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself — and the history of that awakening begins where the Cosmos begins.

where were you surprised by joy this week? and — only to ask yourself — what might you bring to this world today to turn back the darkness, to begin to mend the brokenness?

this is the little hyacinth that surprised me this week. a bulb tossed aside at the end of last spring, she decided to bloom amid an otherwise forgotten patch along the alley

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February 9, 2024

hungry for color

it hits this time of year, at this point in the turning of globe when we’re deep in shadow, and the world out our window is endlessly, endlessly, drainingly gray. even i, a self-proclaimed fangirl of the cloudiest day, a girl who thrills at billows of fog, those days when the sunlight can’t find its way in — even i get a bit itchy for hues beyond pigeon and charcoal and smoke, all close kin in the family of gray.

which is precisely why that shock of scarlet and pink boldly inserts itself in the february calendar. we need a little color. and the heart-shaped holiday brings it on. coils and coils of red, beribboned with oyster pink or flamingo. maybe even dashes of fuchsia.

i detected this color deficiency (more of a self-diagnosis) when i realized that all through the week i was clicking and clicking on dizzying droplets of anything resembling “other-than-gray.” and when i caught myself daydreaming, once again, of a riotous, bouquet-gathering, summery cutting garden — zinnias and cosmos and blue bachelor’s buttons all rising up like a botanical box of jazzy crayolas (preferably the 64-pack in which those waxy rainbow-hued sticks stand shoulder-to-shoulder as if choir-robed darlings marched into their multi-row loft).

and so, in hopes of sating your own chromatic hungers, i bring you a compendium of colors from a painter, a cook, a maven of tulips, and a poet.

first up: the painter, whose style of garden i aim to emulate, mostly because it’s been said that her “rambling garden was unkempt to imperfection.” jean cooke is her name, and she was considered one of britain’s greatest woman painters of the twentieth century. described, too, as a remarkable, bird-like woman, the london gallery that shows her work, goes on to describe her “ungardening” thusly:

Cooke’s neglect of her garden—she sometimes called it ‘ungardening’—was partly a reflection of her priorities: her painting and the care of her children. Beyond these demands there was little energy to give less pressing concerns. Grass went unmown, fences unmended and trees unpruned. But the messy garden was not entirely accidental. The disarray was cultivated over an extended period of time and helped Cooke to create a new subgenre in works such as The Wild Plum Tree, which drew upon aspects of both landscape and garden painting traditions. Whereas Claude Monet’s waterlily pond was scrupulously tended, Jean Cooke’s rambling garden was unkempt to imperfection just as her painting required. Whereas earlier paintings such as Grassland had used the Sussex coastline to create landscape-scale wilderness, by the mid-eighties when she began painting spring blossom in earnest her own garden had achieved a similarly expansive quality.
piano-nobile gallery

jean cooke at work in her unkempt imperfection

and in a nod to cupid’s holiday cusping on the near horizon, here’s a tad of insight, should tulips be the thing you choose to send your true love:

“As far as I’m concerned, …[tulips] are the best, indeed the only flowers to send or receive on Valentine’s Day. Wild, irrepressible, wayward, unpredictable, strange, subtle, generous, elegant, tulips are everything you would wish for in a lover. Best of all are the crazy parrot tulips such as ‘Rococo’ with red and pink petals feathered and flamed in crinkly lime-green. ‘When a young man presents a tulip to his mistress,’ wrote Sir John Chardin (Travels in Persia, 1686), ‘he gives her to understand by the general red color of the flower that he is on fire with her beauty, and by the black base that his heart is burned to coal.’ That’s the way to do it.”
– Anna Pavord, wonderful British garden writer and bulb lover, in The Curious Gardener: A Year in the Garden, 2010

on the subject of wild women who tend toward the vivid end of the paint pot, there is the utterly marvelous and delicious emily nunn, formerly of the new yorker and the chicago tribune. she is a food writer like no other, and in recent years she has devoted her not-inconsiderable genius to the subject of salads. her newsletter often has me giggling straight off my chair. and her salads are beyond delicious more often than not. it delights me to introduce you to the one and only emily nunn’s department of salads, along with a peek at but one of emily’s many-hued produce concoctions….

and finally, let’s wrap this up with a wonder from mary O that i had never seen before, from a slim little volume i’d not known of till just last week when a wonder of a woman hosted a candlemas gathering and asked us all to bring a.) a candle, and b.) a poem about light. and thus i discovered house of light, mary oliver’s 1990 collection of poems. since the subject of this one is van gogh, it seems perfectly suited as a prescriptive for those who find themselves suffering a little color deprivation.

EVERYTHING by Mary Oliver

No doubt in Holland,
when van Gogh was a boy,
there were swans drifting
over the green sea
of the meadows, and no doubt
on some warm afternoon
he lay down and watched them,
and almost thought: this is everything.
What drove him
to get up and look further
is what saves this world,
even as it breaks
the hearts of men.
In the mines where he preached,
where he studied tenderness,
there were only men, all of them
streaked with dust.
For years he would reach
toward the darkness.
But no doubt, like all of us,
he finally remembered
everything, including the white birds
weightless and unaccountable,
floating around the towns
of grit and hopelessness––
and this is what would finish him:
not the gloom, which was only terrible,
but those last yellow fields, where clearly
nothing in the world mattered, or ever would,
but the insensible light.

and with that i shall wonder, where did you find color this week?

jean cooke’s “springtime through the window,” 1980s

6 Comments

January 5, 2024

new year upon us: proceed with all the grace you can muster

Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.

~ Hafiz ~

and so we begin. wrapped in the whisper of unknowing. all is vast, and formless. we etch out possibilities, promises, in our mind’s eye. we put shape to what we hope will come, what we worry might come, in the allotment of time we call “the new year.”

as long as humans have been harnessing time, putting order to the rhythms of darkness to light, warming to cooling to warming again, we have imagined our dominion over the hours unspooling. some of us live by clocks. and calendars. and pings and beeps and the showtunes we set to awake us, to remind us to sleep.

i’m especially attuned to the timekeeper beyond the clouds: the solar star. the one around which we turn and spin and revolve in our somewhat elliptical geometries.

what if we returned to a time without second hands, and minutes parsed into fractions, what if we surrendered to shadow and light, allowed the cosmos to do our timekeeping? what if we understood the passage of time by the wrinkles on the backs of our hands, or the ebbing of wisdom that comes with a life lived at attention?

but that is not the world we live in, the moment we live in. we’ve been conditioned, all of us, to count time in blocks, and the newest addition to our arithmetic table is the one we’ve named 2024. and so it shimmers before us: new, unmarked, not yet broken.

not a half day in to this newly-bordered chunk of time, the year threw me a challenge. decided to let me know that my well-laid plans for my first birthday since losing half a lung would not be quite the occasion i’d (for once) carefully plotted (a dinner i’d cook for beloved old friends on the eve thereof, followed by a dinner for three at a charming cafe on the day itself). indeed, they’d be altogether scrapped. our old friend covid decided to drop in unannounced, in the form of a grand exposure (my mate sat for four hours on new year’s eve beside a woman who awoke to a positive test the next morn). and so we did what any respectable citizen would do: we donned our masks for five straight days, steered clear of any and all, and tested accordingly along the way. (so far, so clear.)

i admit to meeting the news with a mighty harumph. and a stinging tear in my eye. in my heart i was crooning something along the lines of “can’t i please catch a fresh start here?” but, alas, covid is covid and there’s no getting around it. so, i cobbled the best that i could: roaring fire all day, long walk under gray cloudy skies; i seized what i could, and turned the page anyway.

and here we are, in what hafiz reminds us is best thought of as “the season to know that everything you do is sacred.”

the new year, i sense, is going to ask plenty of us. i, for one, am strapping on my seat belt. for, as a dear friend reminded me last night, “you may just want, as bette davis said, to ‘tighten your seatbelts. it’s going to be a bumpy night.'”

indeed, it might be. and for such a bumpy spell ahead we shall need to equip ourselves. my plan is to take it slow, and with all the grace i can muster. i’ll bite my tongue when wisest to do so. and speak up with actions not words when that is most warranted. i’ll aim to dollop out goodness all along my way, not unlike hansel and gretel in the woods, leaving behind their breadcrumbs. i’ll imagine droplets of sunlight scattered like shards. and hope to enter and leave each encounter with a soft unspokenness, a sense that something like an angel wing has just wafted by. it’s a big ask, but it’s the litany for which i pray. for i’ve an inkling, like bette, that we’re in for one bumpy night.

what are you seeking to equip you for this year?

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December 15, 2023

love letter to the chairs on the occasion of seventeen years

dear chairs,

a calendar turned the other day, a yearly one. and it turned for the seventeenth time. thus begins the eighteenth year of this little old chair.

that first day of that first year –– december 12, 2006 –– i faced a blank white screen and a motherlode of trepidation. that screen plus the trembling inside equaled a scarier form of publishing than i’d ever really done before –– and that was 25 years into my stint at the late great Chicago Tribune.

to write what at the time was a newfangled thing — a blog, an ugly gutteral word if ever there was — was, to my mind, to take away the filter that might have allowed me to occasionally put my heart to my sleeve in the stories i told and how i told them, but it shielded me from going deeper than that, from willingly baring my soul, where my truest self stirs.

i was compelled to write the chair because i was convinced that the deepest truths of our lives are played out in the quotidian. on the humdrum stage of our day-after-day domesticities, and the confines of hardly exotic daily rounds. i’d come to believe that the common, plain-wrapped stories of our lives are in fact imbued with the sacred, the lasting, the shared. and more than worth holding up to the light.

i still think so.

chances are, you and i are not going to find our names chiseled in the roll call of global heroes. we are going to live on in the scant traces we leave behind, the simple kindnesses, the one or two times we mustered just the right words, the softening we brought to someone’s unbearable hour.

and so, i thought then and think now, if this one bracket of time is ours, then perhaps we’d do well to plumb the depths of it. or at least plumb a little more pointedly. root around a bit. not shy from asking the tough question, the true question. search for the sacramental. name the holiness where we find it. shine the light on it. make known the magnificence that runs through the river of each of our lives.

because i firmly believe that, in the end, we are all animated by a few certain yearnings: to love and be loved; to be seen or be heard; to reach out in the darkness and be met with a soft and warm hand to hold onto. some of us live to be stirred, to feel our hearts beating hard against the wall of our chest. to delight in the whimsies of each and any hour. and to know more when we fall asleep than we knew upon waking that day.

so i offered up the stories of my own life’s spool. i scanned the day to day, and plucked the shards that shimmered the most, the ones that seemed to hold the most questions. maybe even a quiet holiness. the ones i’ve described as exuding the most wattage. the ones i thought might resonate a bit more than all the rest. ones worth examining.

and so for 17 years i’ve turned here, plopped my bum on this rickety chair that’s missing a spindle, tapped at the alphabet letters as if i was at once alone and in the company of the dearest of soulmates. i’ve pushed toward the truth, even when i worried you might wriggle a bit. even if i pictured you rolling your eyes. to write the truth is to blot out the worries of just how your words might land. especially if your mother-in-law or your mother is one of the ones reading your words. (i learned not to hyperventilate on the days when only a weighted silence followed a post, when my usually exuberant mother-in-law chose silence as the way of letting me know she was, um, not such a fan of whatever i’d mused that morning.)

over the years, dear chairs, you’ve chimed in, and made me laugh aloud, and more times than you might imagine you’ve moved me to tears with the words and the wisdoms you’ve brought here.

and this year, this darn nasty year, you all but kept me from keeling right over.

the fourth wall, the one they talk about in the theater, the invisible screen that separates actors and audience, it’s non-existent in the realm of writing, or at least in the writing i write here.

ever since that long ago first morning, i’ve meant for this to be a back and forth, a call and response. yet i never imagined the friendships that would leap off the page, break through the cybersphere and become so very real, some of the dearest in my life.

whether we’ve sat in the same room never or once, or dozens of times, your very big hearts, your high-soaring souls, your whimsies, your tender ways, have worked their numinous magic in a world that’s sometimes so, so dark: you’ve become true, true friends. the sort you tell truths to, the sort whose hands you reach for when your own are trembling like leaves in an autumn wind.

so all of this is a long-winded way of simply saying thank you. from the bottom of my very big heart, the one i’ve long worn on my sleeve. where it now shares a space with my soul.

and thank you to willie, who long long ago, got me started. and to teddy, who long let me tell his collection of growing-up stories. and, of course, to each and every one of you, whether you ever leave a trace, or tiptoe in and out quiet as a mullipuff bobbing on the breeze….

where do you sense the holy in your lives?

photos by Will Kamin, long long ago. xoxo

29 Comments

December 1, 2023

fallowing

fal·low
/ˈfalō/
adjective
(of farmland) plowed and harrowed but left unsown for a period in order to restore its fertility as part of a crop rotation or to avoid surplus production.
verb
leave (land) fallow.
”fallow the ground for a week or so after digging”

i am fallowing. i am also making up a word (a particular quirk of mine), but a word most apt for i use it here to describe the wide-open plain of time when i see no deadlines peeking from behind trees, nor wide gulleys and ditches to swallow me whole.

after season upon season that taxed me from every which angle, i am all but stringing a wintry hammock between cedar posts in my fir lot and settling in for a long winter’s nap.

i am fallowing. i am, per merriam webster’s instruction and strict definition, leaving my days “unsown for a period in order to restore fertility” of both soul and imagination.

i have been so thirsty for days that unfurl with little to do, for days that meander from daybreak to starshine. i am, per the law of the fallowing land, partaking of those soulful things that stoke my deepest flickering flame: i am reading deep and thick theological treatises; i am making burgundy stews, and sorting through boxes of long-ago treasures; i am reading old letters, and wiping back tears; i am simmering bones into broth and ferrying batches of soups to friends i’ve long wanted to visit. i am even reciting the occasional poem with my mother. at the moment, i am listening to rain, the fallowest thing i might know how to do.

i am not actively worrying.

to fallow is to partake of an otherworldliness, at least when you find yourself born into an age that grows increasingly attention-deficient. when the background noise is incessant. and so little of it sustenant.

sometimes you don’t realize how deeply you need something till it’s suddenly there in your grasp. and then you can’t let it go. or you hope you don’t have to anytime soon.

advent for me is quieting time. advent ushers in the stillness of winter. advent, i’ve written, is the season of anticipation, of awaiting, of holding our breath for spectacular coming.

as the darkening comes minute by minute, day after day, the liturgical calendar, prescriptive in its wisdoms, unfurls the sacred instruction: make the light be from you. deep within you. seize the month. reclaim the days. do not succumb to the noisy distraction.

make your december a blessed one, a quiet one. a stretch of kindled light against the whole cloth of darkness.

this world is aching, is crying, is calling for even one matchstick of light. imagine if we all struck a match, put flame to wick, and allowed it to burn long through the night. my light + your light + your light would = a light that would make ours one glowing orb.

the instructive is this, even in fallowing times: one mere droplet. one bare kilowatt of luminsence to shatter the darkness. it’s ours to kindle, to light, to enflame. day by day, droplet by droplet. might we gather our goodness and bring back a flicker of light to this world?

how and where will you strike your match?

15 Comments

November 17, 2023

when the day calls for a good collapse

i likened the way i was feeling to all the leaves quaking in the wind all around me, the day a tumbling down of golden-glowing five-point sails, a summer’s worth of sunshine stored and radiant and dropping now to autumn’s calling.

i felt all aflutter inside. in an exhausted, tank-tapped-out sort of way. in the sort of way that so rarely hits, but when it does, i know to listen. it has been a long, long summer, followed by an uphill fall, preambled by a bumpy spring. and my whole self––all sinew and bone, every ligament and synapse––was calling for a holy pause.

i listened.

out of fear and trembling as much as anything. afraid i just might topple if i didn’t give myself a sabbath day. sabbath on a thursday. the God who calls to me is not a Day-Minder god. mine is a God who must have looked down upon my weary, worn-thin soul and whispered just enough caution that i couldn’t help but listen.

so this is how my day of good collapse unfolded:

i walked amid the golden-tumbling leaves. i walked and walked. and listened to the rushing wind. i raked my garden, and dug up errant brambles, brambles that had shoved aside the finer, tamer citizens of my so-called farm. i excised the thorny rascals from their elevated plot and moved them down and north to where they might stretch and reach without elbowing out the neighbors. while there on my knees at the raised-bed edge, i raked my hand through spent black earth, the summer’s labor ended. it’s time now for all the loam to bask in winter’s sun, drink up that for which it thirsts. and so i cleared the way, shooshed away the detritus the way a farmer tills her tired, worn-thin field. make-believe is but one of my balms; i’ve escaped into once-upon-a-time as far back as my brain cells have ever stirred.

before calling it a day, i knocked on a neighbor’s door, just to say hello. and down we plopped, a necessary catch-me-up; long overdue. a chat with the good people with whom we intersect by accident of geography, is one of life’s unchoreographed and relished blessings.

and then, at last, i curled into my favorite chair and read and read: t.s. eliot is on this week’s docket. “east coker,” the quartet i read and read, trying to imagine a mind so lush it pours such words onto the page:

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

it’s a poem that fits the day, the week, the season’s turning. and not only for its mention of the late november (a couple stanzas on). i find the sacred text of poets long-ago to be, at once, elixir and ablation. i find healing there, deep amid the stanzas. curled up, limbs tangled like an autumn vine, as the arc of sunlight rises, falls, and rises once again…

the world is testing us, all of us who can’t abide the horrors. and so i found solace in the words of the late, glorious, raspy-throated leonard cohen who proclaimed this:

“I wanted to stand with those who clearly see G-d’s holy broken world for what it is, and still find the courage or the heart to praise it.”
Leonard Cohen

and finally this one short paragraph might hold more than enough to think about through the week of gratitudes ahead…

I have been thinking lately about how the search for God and the search for our deepest selves ends up being the same search. This insight is not unique to me, but it has become truer for me as I’ve grown older. Teresa of Ávila often expressed the wonderful idea that one finds God in oneself, and one finds oneself in God. Both are true! And when one experiences this and discovers one’s chosenness and inherent belovedness, one can rest deeply in it. Indeed, that is a great spiritual gift of contemplative seeing.

—Richard Rohr

neither last nor least, happy 93 to my mama, who has fought hard these past many weeks to shuffle on again. and so she is—daunted, yes, but not surrendered. i could have written a meditation on my mama, but she much prefers to be out of the spotlight, at the edge of the crowd. i will say that as i roamed my mama’s house these past few alone times, browsed her bookshelves, plucked a tome or two, i’ve been struck––deeply––by the many titles she has saved that are ones i cannot wait to take to heart. eliot’s four quartets among them. the complete works of robert frost. botanical shakespeare: an illustrated compendium. i am so so grateful for this gentle chapter of my mother’s life. when she is harbored well in a lovely place and we just might have time to learn another thing or two about each other’s souls. i love you mama, in case you’re reading this. xoxoxo

how might you choreograph a day of good collapse?

4 Comments

November 3, 2023

the light does come . . .

the light does come. this is a reminder. this is a note to tuck away for the days when the shadows occlude the sun.

we all live among darkness sometimes. sometimes for spells that stretch on for so long we’re sure we’ll run out of oxygen. but we muscle on anyways. because what other choice do we have? even in the darkest times, there are tiny shards that fall on our path. the kindness of someone we didn’t realize was paying attention. the encounter that puffs just enough hope back into our hearts. the wholly unexpected solace of finding ourselves shoulder to shoulder with someone who knows something about the steepness of the incline we’re climbing.

we all find ourselves in chapters so impossibly hard we’ve no choice but to tap into playbooks we’ve not yet scanned. we revert to those fine few things that just might steady us: we remember to breathe; we stand under the sunshine just long enough to plump a few shrunken cells; we giggle aloud at the ridiculous humor that never fails to creep its way in. even in ICUs. and funeral homes.

truth is: ours is a choreography of shadow and peekaboo sunlight. we bank on it. wars end. babies are born. laughter comes. so does the dawn. even the night is speckled with stars.

i’m here to say that after an almost unbearable few weeks, weeks that had me teetering, all but certain this might be the time my heart called it quits, the load is lighter again. my mama is chipper. my mama is finding her way, carving her path, skittering hither and yon, all on her new red convertible. (the name we’ve given her little red rollator, the latest iteration of spiffy walker, with wheels and brakes and a little compartment for stashing your assorted sundries.)

we’ve pulled through. none of us too worse for the wear.

my mama’s return to her lifelong indomitable state of being happens to coincide with the end of my jam-packed calendar of book talks. and after a summer of searching for answers to questions of cancer, i finally found someone who knows my cancer inside and out. and who laid out a scenario i can live with.

feels to me like someone’s rung the school’s-out-for-summer bell, and i might wiggle a jig all the way home.

because this week held one of my favorite feast day — all saints — and because i love looking for saints in places where no one might think to look, i found myself swooned by this blessed sonnet, “a last beatitude,” from malcolm guite, an anglican priest and poet who’s been said to resemble a hobbit, what with his predilection for waistcoats and long-necked pipes (from which he blows smoke rings), and whose tonsorial tastes tend toward the bushiest of beards, and long locks to go with it.

herewith, “a last beatitude” by malcolm guite . . .

And blessèd are the ones we overlook;

The faithful servers on the coffee rota,

The ones who hold no candle, bell or book

But keep the books and tally up the quota,

The gentle souls who come to 'do the flowers',

The quiet ones who organise the fete,

Church sitters who give up their weekday hours,

Doorkeepers who may open heaven’s gate.

God knows the depths that often go unspoken

Amongst the shy, the quiet, and the kind,

Or the slow healing of a heart long broken

Placing each flower so for a year’s mind.

Invisible on earth, without a voice,

In heaven their angels glory and rejoice.

and one last bit of poetry, as autumn, the season of awe is upon us, these lines from rilke’s poem “Onto a Vast Plain”:

Summer was like your house: you know
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.

and, lastly, before i skitter off, this line from the thirteenth-century mystic and monastic mechtild of magdeburg:

When simplicity of heart dwells in the wisdom of the mind,

Much holiness results in a person’s soul.

what, pray tell, carries you through your darkest hours?

11 Comments

October 20, 2023

amid the cacophony, these are the rare few voices that saved me this week. . .

i’ll be honest (as if i’m ever not): this was an unbearably hard week. and i am exhausted to the bone. the horrors of the world––images and stories i could barely take in––shred us, and scare us; make me wonder if we’re teetering on another apocalyptic precipice. and within the world’s horrors, there is a much-closer-to-home struggle that’s absorbed my every ounce of attention and strength: the not-insurmountable, steep incline of moving my mother into the next much-dreaded chapter of her life. a chapter she had adamantly refused to consider until the bones in her body were broken and the home she has loved for six decades can no longer be a place of safety and refuge.

the days have been long, have been wearing. but time and again through the week, my eyes fell on words that all but saved me. i gathered them up each time, hungrily. voraciously. as if the ones who spoke the words, or wrote the words, or somehow laid the words all in a life-saving line had reached out through the darkness to give me their hand. each time i held on tight. here are the words that steadied me this week. maybe they’ll steady you too.

i turn first to the irish, because where better to turn in the face of a broken world, and a battered heart: this comes from pádraig Ó tuama, who wrote: “there’s an irish phrase, ‘Is olc liom do bhris,’ which we say during a time of grief. a literal translation is ‘your brokenness brings me horror.'”

i couldn’t pronounce the irish if you paid me, but i love that the irish soul immediately understands that sometimes we’re not simply saddened but out-and-out broken under the weight of our sorrows.

but then, at the very moment i needed it, anne sexton came along: as i sat there watching my mother, now bent over a walker, sometimes crying out in pain, i watched my somewhat shy mother shuffle into a dining room filled with strangers. i watched her gently lay her hand on the shoulder of someone she was shuffling by, and i heard her say, “hello, i’m barbara, i’m new here.” and i felt my belly gurgling like jelly, as in the days when i pressed my ear against the kindergarten door, praying my firstborn would make it through the morning, my tender brave boy in a sea of new faces and voices. i watched my mother show me courage in the face of everything she’d prayed would never come to her. and then anne sexton’s words slipped under my nose. and i thought for a minute the heavens must have been listening, or maybe instructing.

Courage

It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you’ll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you’ll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

~ Anne Sexton ~

(The Awful Rowing Toward God)

and then, the news of the death of louise glück, the nobel prize-winning poet from cambridge, mass. a poet i once sat inches away from in a bookstore in harvard square, so close to me that i could feel the whoosh of her hand as she swept it through the air, punctuating one of her lines, pushing back her lioness locks of silver-streaked hair. louise died of cancer, and her beautiful words held a deep resonance in this week when i found myself talking to the kindest physician i’ve met in a long summer of looking for answers. in between worrying about my mother, i remembered i too am still looking for light in my own shrouded tunnel. a doctor from mass general, just down the road from cambridge, gave me that light. and she was more than kind in doling it out. but here’s louise:

CROSSROADS
by Louise Glück

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young —

love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised —

My soul has been so fearful, so violent;
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,

not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:

it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.

and those are the words i clung to this week, the words that carried me across an awful abyss.

what words carried you?

p.s. there’s one other poem that saved me this week, because it always saves me: naomi shihab nye’s kindness. here tis:

KINDNESS

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye

14 Comments

October 13, 2023

the beauty of small things

sometimes when i pull up a chair, and plonk myself down at this table i am really only beginning to trace an idea, almost like beginning a drawing by dragging my finger through a scattering of powdered sugar. (who paints in powdered sugar, i do not know, but then my mind is a mysterious sometimes-tilted place…)

and so, this morning, with a tidal wave of a week behind me, and a busy day ahead, i am sitting here tracing my finger along the tabletop, thinking aloud about a thought that surfaced and re-surfaced all through the week.

it’s the beauty of small things.

a few nights ago i was sitting below ground in a library where once upon a time i would have been a regular resident. i was back at my college, a college where one of the study carrels on the fourth floor of the old library all but had my name engraved in it; it certainly had my coffee stains seeped into its woodgrain. this night i was in the new iteration of what had once been my temple of memorization and occasional epiphany.

i was talking about my book, and talking about how my holiest posture, the one that stirs me most deeply, is when i feel small against the vastness of the universe. how i break out in goosebumps, the most comforting goosebumps, when i am crouched down low, arms wrapped around shins, an origami of flesh and joints folded, nestled between dune grasses, perhaps, looking up, into the star-salted heavens.

i consider it a holy thing to know how infinitesimal we are in this vast and intricate cosmos. our modernday world could do with a very strong dose of downsizing our egos. humility is wanting in the 21st century.

as serendipities so often happen, that one moment was followed by this:

not long after the talk had wrapped up, a jesuit priest i’d met earlier in the day––a brilliant young priest i hope to befriend, for i do believe we both felt something of a lightning bolt strike in our shared fascinations with theology and literature and their divine intertwining––my new friend father joe came bounding up to the armchair where i was still sitting, slipped a piece of paper into my hand, and began speaking in latin. yes, latin. he then told me (in english, thank heaven) that when i was talking about how i love to go small, he just happened to think of the great line from thomas aquinas, a line often quoted by pope francis:

“not to be confined by the greatest, but able to be contained by the least, is a mark of the divine.”

i am still marveling that i have a new friend who whips off lines from aquinas, in latin no less. and i admit to being schoolgirl-crush blushed when i learned (from a little morning-after googling around) that he earned his DPhil at oxford, and might be the closest thing to an Inkling (that literary cadre of Tolkein and CS Lewis and Oxfordian friends in the mid-20th century) in my current state of being.

but back to small things.

the very morning after being so taken by that line from aquinas, the first thing i happened to read was this paragraph from the japanese writer Miho Nonaka “on the beauty of small things.”

“I am drawn to small things. I wrote the poem [“The Museum of Small Bones”] after seeing an exhibit of the skeletons of small animals like bats, moles, and baby lizards. …There was a sense of dignity to the architecture of each animal’s bones. When you see something like that, you can’t help but reflect on God’s creativity as an artist. And for me, smallness matters, because it makes God’s intentionality and investment in each creation appear that much more acute.”

the reason i read with pen and sometimes scissors in hand is because other people always say what i’m trying to say, only better than i can. and so it is with Miho: “…smallness matters, because it makes God’s intentionality and investment in each creation appear that much more acute.”

the intersection of thirteenth century aquinas, and 21st-century nonaka, is what stirs me to attention. surely there is wisdom to be plumbed, and contemplation to be unspooled in the hours and days before me, as i deep-dive further into the beauty of small things. we are living in a world of atrocity. we can be broken at any moment by the sheer evil and deceit that comes without pause, it so often seems. but there, on the simple footpath we trod, we stumble on tiny shards of shimmering light. shards that just might save us.

and this week, the beauty of small things is the shimmering shard of thought that just might brace me against the unending brokenness.

and on the subject of brokenness, i offer this prayer for the state of israel*…..

Our Father in Heaven, Rock and Redeemer of Israel, bless the State of Israel, the first manifestation of the approach of our redemption. Shield it with Your lovingkindness, envelop it in Your peace, and bestow Your light and truth upon its leaders, ministers, and advisors, and grace them with Your good counsel. Strengthen the hands of those who defend our holy land, grant them deliverance, and adorn them in a mantle of victory. Ordain peace in the land and grant its inhabitants eternal happiness.

Lead them, swiftly and upright, to Your city Zion and to Jerusalem, the abode of Your Name, as is written in the Torah of Your servant Moses: “Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather you, from there He will fetch you. And the Lord your God will bring you to the land that your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it; and He will make you more prosperous and more numerous than your fathers.” Draw our hearts together to revere and venerate Your name and to observe all the precepts of Your Torah, and send us quickly the Messiah son of David, agent of Your vindication, to redeem those who await Your deliverance.

Manifest yourself in the splendor of Your boldness before the eyes of all inhabitants of Your world, and may everyone endowed with a soul affirm that the Lord, God of Israel, is king and his dominion is absolute. Amen forevermore.

i pray too for the innocent of gaza, for those without hope, or water, or food, or electricity. i pray and i pray. and i wonder over and over who in hell’s name beheads a child? pray for this desperate world. pray however you do, however you can…..

what saved you from brokenness this week?

*”prayer for the state of israel” from the jewish virtual library

photo above by my favorite law professor, will kamin, back when he was taking AP photography his senior year of high school….

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Category: antidotes to madness