autumn | pull up a chair

October 25, 2024

pay attention to this one most blessed day. . .

i am sitting here in a shaft of golden light spilling across the worn planks of this old maple table. i am looking out at a world ablaze in iterations of gold. as if the world out my window is a benjamin-moore paint strip, all in the key of saffron.

i sighed a deep sigh when i tiptoed down the stairs this morning, and filled my lungs with the glorious knowing that this day held no appointments. no doctors. no dentists. no needs to stand or sit in front of a crowd and talk about the words i’d poured onto a page.

this day is a big blank slate. a slate to fill with the simple wonders of being alive. and i intend not to waste it, not a drop of it. and urgently so.

it’s the unintended gift of holding on for dear life to the life that you love with every cell of your being.

it’s a day i might otherwise not have noticed quite so keenly. but i see more vividly now. the blessing of holding on dearly to life is that you see each new dawn for the miracle that it is.

it might have been just another weekday. but suddenly, perceptibly, it is the answer to my deepest prayer, a day to simply be alive and breathing it in. every pore of it. the earthy rummesence of autumn leaves crisping and crinkling and falling in heaps to the ground. the last gasp of the garden, exploding in singular vibrancies that beg to be remembered all through the winter. the air, a mix of chill with undertones of heat as if the earth’s autumnal respirations draw forth the last breaths from summer’s stockpiled embers.

to knowingly not waste a day is to live at fullest attention. while we can. while we’re upright and ambulant.

sometimes we realize we shan’t take it for granted.

sometimes we need a reminder.

i am reminded.

i am living inside a body that reminds me to savor it, to inhale it. to all but rub it over my skin, to let it soak in through each wide-open pore.

we all have days when our hours are clogged with the usual distractions. we forget the marvel of a friday reliably following a thursday. we look to the calendar as if it’s the sovereign of how we spend our time. we are chained and unchained. we’re obliged to to-do’s, and we forget that all the in-betweens might just be the hours we’re most deeply alive. we might, at any moment, put down the chores, surrender the assignments. we might seize the day in whatever outline or equation rises from the blur.

we might call a friend whose voice we’ve not heard in too long. we might find a log in the woods, plop ourselves down, and keep watch––close watch. we might fill a bowl with the indulgences of autumn, the leaves and the seeds and the roots, all meant for seasonal sustenance.

we might light a candle. sit in a shaft of sunlight, watching the dust motes ride the air. we might roll up our sleeves, or get down on our knees, and plant a few bulbs for the joy of it––for the allure and the promise and perpetual hope of the springtime to come.

more and more, one of the first prophets i turn to for wisdom is the incomparable maria popova, she of marginalian wonders. in a cataloging of eighteen wisdoms she’s extracted from her eighteen years of gathering wisdoms (she must have started her brain pickings––now re-named the marginalian––a mere two months before the first chair was pulled up, for we too are about to mark 18 years of chairing), she included this bit of wonder and wisdom that says it as beautifully as it might be said:

Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

and she includes these lines from poet and former zen monk jane hirshfield’s “the weighing”:

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

and if all that isn’t enough joy stoking for the day, here’s one other wonder and wonder-soul i learned of this week at a book talk where to my delight and pure joy i was pointed toward good souls i fully intend to get to know more deeply and intimately. (i never cease to be amazed at the goodness lurking in utterly unexpected nooks and crannies of this world.)

here is a woman—one with a PhD in human anatomy and cell biology, no less—who happens to live in a house with a four-acre flower garden who coaxes beauty from the earth for the sole purpose of giving it all away, filling the flower fridges at hospices and homeless shelters, and the larders at food pantries near and far. she calls it the backyard flower lab. and it sounds like a holy slice of sustenance to me. i intend to point my old wagon in the direction of her flower farm before the sun sets on this day, and i will see where the adventure takes me. her name is april potterfield (which sounds to be a perfect plucked-from-the-storybook name for someone who grows beauty for joy), and you can find her on instagram at @thebackyardflowerlab.

what prompts you to find joy and seize the slender threads of which we weave our lifelines? and what are some of your favorite ways of doing so?

the cobalt beauty perched on the windowsill above is an autumn vibrancy from my garden, the closing note of a summer’s-long love song. i call it monkshood, but it has other names: aconite, wolfsbane, leopard’s bane, devil’s helmet, or blue rocket. the name aconitum comes from the greek word ἀκόνιτον, which may derive from the greek akon for dart or javelin, the tips of which were poisoned with the substance, or from akonae, because of the rocky ground on which the plant was thought to grow.

deep thanks to maria popova who week after week for years now has filled me with wonder, with curiosities, and most of all with the breathtaking beauty of her intellect and imagination…

10 Comments

October 18, 2024

in the tabernacle of an autumn’s night

these are days of awe, all right. the earth and heavens––at least here on the northern half of the globe—are turning in, the shadows growing longer. yet the last gasps of summer’s bounty do not fade without an exuberance of autumn. the sky somehow seems more star-stitched. and the moon, the moon at its most zaftig of the month bathes all in amber wash.

it’s as if all is ringing out in exclamation. one tree more golden than the next. berries so abundant on the bough, the boughs are bent in botanic downward dog.

i can almost hear the whisper of the woods, and even my ramshackle garden, calling out, don’t forget us, don’t forget how glorious we were and are, the delights and wonders we’ve offered since the symphony of spring began: the perfumes, the unfolding petals, the sweetness of the fruits, the earthly prayer of wind rustling through the leaves.

it’s a paean in minor key––part elegy, but mostly gratitude and grace.

to partake of it is holy.

the other night i stepped into the chill of just-past dusk, ferrying a crumb-strewn pizza box to the recycling bin, and before two footfalls had crossed the bricks, the haunting whoot-whoo-whoo of a great horned owl called out from somewhere in the trees.

owls might be my spirit bird. i learned reverence for owls from my grandma lucille, who wore one in a jeweled brooch she pinned to her bosom, and tucked in many a nook and cranny of her ivy-covered house. far back as i can remember, the front of her ice box was forever festooned with strigiform, a magnet onto which she’d glued an owlish silhouette cut from felted wool and adorned with alphabet-letter pastas as its eyes and ears and markings. not one for idling, my grandma once or twice was spied by little me with ear pressed hard to windowpane, rapt by the nightcall from the woods.

i too stand rapt.

of all the notes that rise from avian throats, the owl’s are the ones that stir me deep down where the prayers rise up. at the first of the whoot-whoo-whoo the other night, i felt myself break out in goosebumps. then i lifted my eyes, drank in the light of that nearly full hunter’s moon, and prayed. mightily.

i sometimes think that trips to the recycling bin are my surest daily invitation into prayer. into the cloak of night. against the silence of a day gone hush. the tabernacle in which i offer up my nightly office is one that stations me on the cracked concrete slabs of my alley. trash cans line the side aisle. and the nave is vast. is infinite. in between where trees and old garages block the view, the sky opens wide and deep. here where i live, sky is a bit of a commodity. sunsets aren’t free for the viewing, blocked by those mainstays of suburbia: house and tree and fence. but the night sky, the obsidian up above, is blocked by no one or nothing and it is enveloping enough to soak up my every verse of prayer.

and so i stood there flinging madly. add-on after add-on. a madwoman hungrily hanging her prayers out to dry. as if a clothesline of prayer i string across the alley, flinging each one skyward as i inch my way down the line.

it’s a sacred thing to stand beneath a wheel of yellow moon, with a whoot-whoo-whoo as chorister, and to pour out your insides to the heavens.

i pray the heavens heard.

here’s a bit of what else stirred me this week . . .

vassar miller was an american poet and writer, who served as poet laureate of texas in 1982 and 1988. born with cerebral palsy, her father encouraged her from a young age to write by typewriter, which she did prodigiously. and powerfully. she once said that the purpose of her life was “to write. and to serve God.” it brings me great joy to bring her here to this holy table.

Morning Person

God, best at making in the morning, tossed
stars and planets, singing and dancing, rolled
Saturn’s rings spinning and humming, twirled the earth
so hard it coughed and spat the moon up, brilliant
bubble floating around it for good, stretched holy
hands till birds in nervous sparks flew forth from
them and beasts — lizards, big and little, apes,
lions, elephants, dogs and cats cavorting,
tumbling over themselves, dizzy with joy when
God made us in the morning too, both man
and woman, leaving Adam no time for
sleep so nimbly was Eve bouncing out of
his side till as night came everything and
everybody, growing tired, declined, sat
down in one soft descended Hallelujah.

+ Vassar Miller

and this beauty from christian wiman…

Prayer
By Christian Wiman

For all
the pain

passed down
the genes

or latent
in the very grain

of being;
for the lordless

mornings,
the smear

of spirit
words intuit

and inter;
for all

the nightfall
neverness

inking
into me

even now,
my prayer

is that a mind
blurred

by anxiety
or despair

might find
here

a trace
of peace.

what stirred you to awe this week?

13 Comments

September 27, 2024

when writerly rabbit holes swallow you whole….

in which a writing assignment, one that’s wholly captured my imagination, has taken over my gray matter (the stuff inside my head, not the pewter hairs that spring from it), and precluded most any other human activity—save for the occasional re-fueling at the cookstove to keep from puddling to the floor, famished. and for which i’ve shared my simmering salvation down below…

excuse me while i type over here. i seem to have fallen down-down-down into an engrossing writerly rabbit hole, and as the week’s worn on, i’ve only found myself burrowing deeper and deeper. it’s been a while since i’ve chased a thread of idea down to where the earthworms wriggle and the bunnies make hutches. and while i admit that my inner mad-scientist might be vividly on display here, in the way that i can’t put down my wild-eyed pursuit, there is a preponderance of joy stirring the madness.

i love chasing ideas. love untangling cognitive threads. discovering new ways of thinking i’d not known of before. love when one read leads to another and another. and then it’s my task to slice it, and dice it, and make it all make sense. extra points if it comes out poetic.

i’ve been a rabbit-hole writer as long as i’ve been slapping verbs and nouns into sentences. back in high school, i decided to write a mega theme paper on the misuse of wealth in america, and pretty much took hostage the dining room table for weeks on end. if anyone wanted easter dinner that year, they were going to have to shove aside my teetering stacks of tomes chronicling the gatsby brigade of modernday over-conspicuous consumption. years later, when the tribune set me off on a cross-country steinbeckian journey, zigzagging the continent from the deep woods of maine to the pacific northwest and plenty of points between, chronicling stories of hunger in america for a 10-part series, i distinctly remember my editor, a rumpled import from the new york times, sauntering over to my cubicle and insisting i unchain myself from my keyboard to at least stand under a shower, or swim a lap in a pool, long enough for one or two big ideas to snap into place. i was never much for taking breaks.

granted, writing that way might have been bad for the eyes and tough on the spine and the wrist, but i kept at it (one night, in the thick of telling a murderous tale, my writing partner and i took turns falling asleep on a very fat phone book). until i birthed a wee child. and said child insisted on eating. and i was the source, the one and only. swiftly realizing that typing while nursing had its drawbacks, i reluctantly succumbed to the art of the pause.

lo and behold, i discovered epiphany.

amazing things happen in the chambers of the mind when you stop hard-charging the thoughts. when you allow a synapse to slow to a pokier pace.

more often than i wish to admit, some elusive sentence has snapped into place while rinsing a plate under the faucet. and a sugarplum of a word has skydived in from seeminly nowhere. so i’ll concede that there’s virtue in lifting my head from the writerly hole.

but now that this old house is mostly empty again, there’s no stopping me. except that there is still one other mouth to feed. (fear not, he feeds himself well and is happy to do so on the nights i relinquish my post at the cookstove.) and besides, chopping and stirring, i’ve found, provides fine syncopation for the drumming of thoughts while assembling an essay.

soup by the kettleful is my solution. all it takes is one afternoon of onion slicing, garlic mincing, and the tossing in of a few other things. and by nightfall, and the night after too, you’ve got plenty to slurp from your bowl.

my ode to autumn, lemony white bean soup with turkey and tuscan kale, is what i bring you this week with the promise that it is utterly, perfectly, shlurpably delicious. it comes, as so much of my best cooking does, from my very fine friends at NYT Cooking, one of the perqs of seven-day-a-week home delivery, the last house this side of the block to still believe in turning actual newsprint pages.

Lemony White Bean Soup With Turkey and Greens
By Melissa Clark
Total Time 45 minutes

INGREDIENTS
Yield: 4 servings

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion, diced
1 large carrot, diced
1 bunch sturdy greens, such as kale, broccoli rabe, mustard greens or collard greens
1 tablespoon tomato paste
3⁄4 teaspoon ground cumin, plus more to taste
1⁄8 teaspoon red-pepper flakes, plus more to taste
1⁄2 pound ground turkey
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon finely grated fresh ginger
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1 quart chicken stock
2 (15-ounce) cans white beans, drained and rinsed
1 cup chopped fresh, soft herbs, such as parsley, mint, dill, basil, tarragon, chives or a combination
Fresh lemon juice, to taste

PREPARATION

Step 1: Heat a large pot over medium-high for a minute or so to warm it up. Add the oil and heat until it thins out, about 30 seconds. Add onion and carrot, and sauté until very soft and brown at the edges, 7 to 10 minutes.

Step 2: Meanwhile, rinse the greens and pull the leaves off the stems. Tear or chop into bite-size pieces and set aside.

Step 3: When the onion is golden, add tomato paste, 3⁄4 teaspoon cumin and 1⁄8 teaspoon red-pepper flakes to the pot, and sauté until paste darkens, about 1 minute. Add turkey, garlic, ginger and 1 teaspoon salt, and sauté, breaking up the meat with your spoon, until turkey is browned in spots, 4 to 7 minutes.

Step 4: Add stock and beans, and bring to a simmer. Let simmer until the soup is thick and flavorful, adding more salt if needed, 15 to 25 minutes. If you like a thicker broth, you can smash some of the beans with the back of the spoon to release their starch. Or leave the beans whole for a brothier soup.

Step 5: Add the greens to the pot and simmer until they are very soft. This will take 5 to 10 minutes for most greens, but tough collard greens might take 15 minutes. (Add a little water if the broth gets too reduced.)

Step 6: Stir herbs and lemon juice into the pot, taste and add more salt, cumin and lemon until the broth is lively and bright-tasting. Serve topped with a drizzle of olive oil and more red-pepper flakes, if desired.

and because even amid my mad musing this week, i still found myself melted by poetry, i bring you this beauty…

End of Summer

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.

Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
—Stanley Kunitz

named the tenth poet laureate of the united states in the autumn of 2000, kunitz was 95 at the time. his poetry was said to get richer with age. and one of his lifetime’s most pervasive themes probed the simultaneity of life and death. “it’s the way things are: death and life inextricably bound to each other,” he once explained. “one of my feelings about working the land [as a gardener] is that i am celebrating a ritual of death and resurrection. every spring i feel that. i am never closer to the miraculous than when i am grubbing in the soil.” he once told the new york times: “the deepest thing i know is that i am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that dialogue. it is a rather terrifying thought that is at the root of much of my poetry.” kunitz won the pulitzer prize in poetry in 1959. he died in 2006. (boldface emphasis mine…)

“my conviction is to report that dialogue. . .” and thus is the reason writers fall into rabbit holes…

i was looking high and low for a roz chast cartoon of a madwoman pulling her hair out, for illustrative purposes above. but, alas, i could not find. though ed koren’s wild-haired woman did come in a close second, and in the end i opted for the wanna-be writer above, courtesy of mr. koren…

see you next week when if all goes well i hope to tell you the story of how i got myself a new name last week, and a hebrew one at that…

in the meantime, are you, like me, one who prefers to tie on the blinders and not come up for air till the task is completed, or are you of the sort who finds that leisurely attending to a task makes for all-round saner existence?

5 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

September 22, 2023

turn, turn, turn . . .

“Ecclesiastes was onto something,” i wrote, as i dove into a meditation on the notch-by-notch turning of the dial, the dance between heaven and earth that is the shifting of season, as one fugue surrenders to another and another, over and over and over again.

and here we are again, at another cusp. the autumnal equinox. tonight (or, rather, tomorrow morning in the wee wee hours) at 10 minutes to 2 here in the heartland, central time zone.

in my musing on seasons, in the pages of that latest little book of mine, the book of nature, i prattled on a bit longer. . .

“Each season, in four quarter turns, brings forth its own headlines. There’s the yin and yang of spring, the season of exodus and resurrection, of equal parts heartbreak and magic. ‘The fizz and the roar of the land coming back to life again,’ is how Robert Macfarlane brilliantly captured the vernal animations. There’s summer with its invitation for indolence, for taking it slow, savoring, all but licking your plate of its succulence. And autumn, the season that changes its tense, is letting-go time, the beginning of burrowing in, when the shadow grows longer and sunlight goes amber, when half the globe is stripping to its essence, revealing its unadorned spines. Then there’s winter, the stillest of all, when deep-down stirrings are all but invisible, and we learn to keep faith. Sometimes I think God couldn’t decide which channel was best, so the heavens kept jabbing the clicker.

“It’s a wonder reel that never ends, yet never truly repeats—a koan for the ages.

“I often contemplate the geometries of time, how the year is not an inescapable circle, a shape that would get us nowhere, but rather it’s a spiral, and from one winter to the next we’re never the same, always ascending, closer to the holiness we were meant to be—or so that’s the hope and the plan, anyway. Maybe that’s why God keeps this seasonal show on autoplay: maybe God knows how dense we are in the figuring-it-out department, how some of the lessons we need to review. Over and over and over again. Most especially at the fraying hems of the seasons when the doubt begins to creep in, the fear that we’ll never be loosed from whatever it is that tangles and knots us, and God needs to show us those few immutable threads: Resurrection comes. Quiet must follow exuberance. So too dormancy. Surrender to earth’s holy rhythms, the very ones that pull the tides and the flocks, paint the woods, star- stitch the night sky. Expect heartbreak. Await healing. Start all over again.

“’The seasons are our scripture text,’ writes Celtic spiritualist Christine Valters Paintner. ‘This earth we are riding keeps trying to tell us something with its continuous scripture of leaves,’ echoes William Stafford, a poet and pacifist who referred to himself as ‘one of the quiet of the land.’ To the ancient Celts, the unfolding of the seasons read as ‘gospel without haste.’ And Walt Whitman, America’s latter-day Homer, put something of a military spin to it when he wrote that ‘nature marches in procession, in sections, like the corps of an army.'”

i prattle on a few pages more. but i’m already thinking anew about seasons. life, when we’re paying attention, comes in all sorts of seasons. some, clocked by the sun. some, by the tumults and percolations from deep down in our hearts and our souls.

the season of my soul that i’ve been dwelling in all these past months is one that opened in mystery, back when every day was bringing another scan, another long wait, another doctor’s uncertainty. then, when the surgeon finally extracted the answer, “it’s cancer,” i landed in shock and bewilderment. and ever since i’ve been encountering an underworld, a sometimes murky, sometimes brilliantly glistening world potholed with reams of unanswered questions and populated by fellow travelers who nearly always, uncannily, know just what to say and just what i’m thinking. it’s those fellow travelers who have thrown me life rope after life rope. just when i begin to feel the walls closing in, one of them pings me with hope. or pure simple kindness. or laugh-out-loud irreverence (eileen N i am looking at you!).

one thing i know, which i am going to be thinking about for a long time to come (and trying desperately to put into words), is how love truly is a magnetic force field all its own. i can be teetering at the edge of some quicksand-y bog, and all of a sudden, out of the blue, kindness will come. and kindness, love’s gentle sister, can shatter the darkness to shards. kindness makes you not all alone. kindness holds your hand and squeezes it so tightly it won’t let you dangle. or drop. or run out of air.

just this week, a brilliant brilliant poet friend of mine sent me a note. and it might have been one of the wisest, kindest, gentlest things i’ve read in a long time. he wrote:

“You have spent a lifetime thinking and feeling deeply. In my experience of living like that, I’ve found that pains are more painful and joys more joyful. I think it also means that you are better able to face the sort of scary stuff you’re now facing. I hope that your lifetime of thinking and feeling deeply gives you the strength to deal with this face-to-face…whatever ‘this’ ends up being.”

and so, my prayer as i look to my first post-surgical scan in the weeks just ahead, is that i begin to move now into a season where the edges aren’t so raw, and the fears aren’t quite so suffocating. there is love all around, and i know it will save me. no matter what comes.

tell a story of a kindness that saved you.

the apple slices above, already doused in caramel-y bath, are my sweet line cook’s first attempt at pie baking. his slicing alone impressed the heck out of me. just a month into the job at one of chicago’s finest eateries and the kid is picking up tricks. and pie recipes too. pretty sweet living at our house.

may this autumn, season of awe, of turning in and deepening, enrobe you in the brilliance you reach toward….

and a big giant thank you to each and all of you who have lavished me with kindnesses and love in this long season now turning…

p.s. i’m writing this from a hotel in ohio where tonight, squeaky squawky voice and all, i am getting up to a podium and giving a keynote address on the blessed book of nature…

6 Comments

October 14, 2022

turning the page with a tug and a pull

we are definitely turning the page here at this old shingled house. the bespectacled architecture critic no longer calls me from the office at 8 at night, saying he’ll be stuck writing for a few more hours. there are no carpools to coordinate, no getting up at 5 in the morning for soccer matches in kingdom come. i’ve gotten used to the new geographies in my head, the ones that have me simultaneously keeping track of news, weather, and covid in new york city and the middlelands of ohio, the current turfs of both of our birthlings.

somehow, without notice, without even a sign posting the warning, we’ve moved into the loveliest calmest quietest chapter of our married life that ever there was. (do not think of even uttering a syllable of the R word, the one synonymous with hanging up one’s professional hat; one of us has no intention of putting away the keyboard and the other seems to have taken up full-time swimming, biking, and running across finish lines). underscoring the shift, this year we’ll be racking up plenty of lasts in the kid department: the last college drop off. last parents weekend. last winter and spring breaks. last graduation. last packing up the dorm room. last whopping tuition bill.

we are, very much so, on the final verge of true empty nesting.

it’s a mix tinged with poignancy, and a good measure of disbelief. time passes so swiftly, you suddenly realize. after years and years of thinking the routines will never be broken. poof, and they’re gone!

we’re late to this party, only because i found myself in a delivery room when others i knew were there awaiting their grandbabies, but i was there because of what felt and always will feel like i somehow squeaked through the maternity ward as the very last egg was being cleared from the deck. and, as with so much in my life, i’ve been soaking it in from every which angle, taking none of it lightly, extracting as much as i possibly could at every twist, turn, and trial along the way.

ours, these days, is a quiet life by choice. my favorite hours are nestled in books and on my knees in the garden, over coffees with people i love, and the dinners at the end of the day when we weave together the threads we’ve both followed all through the day. i know full well that every drop of it is pure blessing, a benevolence no one deserves, for life is not doled out in rewards and punishments. we just get what we get, and it’s ours to savor or squander. i’ve had more than enough hours staring into the shadowed abyss, imagining sudden endings, to perk up my relishing gears. (the bright side of being a doomsayer is that any and every happy ending is reason for rousing hallelujah. don’t mind my scrambled up wiring. seven decades in, it works for me just as it is.)

anyway, this weekend’s the last-ever parents weekend, that glorious mix of scintillating speakers and professorial panels, long strolls across a campus straight out of the picture books, and delivering a pile of groceries and pies and blankets and boots only a college kid’s idiosyncratic tastes would relish or request (who else would send a middle-of-the-night text asking for portwine spread cheese, rubber-soled boots, and someplace good to go out for dinner?). i plan to savor every sweet drop, knowing not long from now i’ll pine for the chance to make-believe i’m a kid savoring college. (as long as i don’t peek in the mirror, and wonder who in the world is the one with the locks now the color of silvery moon.)

i know, because life has taught me over and over, whole new adventures await, and none of this will ever get dull. but i’ve loved this part where you hover fairly closely over the shoulder of the kids you’ve brought into the world, and feel your heart grow by the week and the month and the year. i know, because life is already teaching me, each of their new adventures becomes vicariously mine, and therein lies a whole nother joy. but now, here i am at the precipice looking both ways. and mostly i’m grateful for this heart that finds it hard to let go….

because we’re motoring back and forth in three short days (the weekend cut short by a work trip to houston for the one more apt to be running or riding these days), i’m keeping this short, and will leave you instead with two little morsels: a peek inside the little book that landed on my stoop the other night, and a soup i plan to make on one of the autumnal days next week when the critic is chowing down on texas barbecue. slow cooking is in sync with my slow, savoring ways.

first, a peek at the Advanced Reading Copy of The Book of Nature, with a look at the cover, the table of contents, and the first page of the foreword.

Creamy Cauliflower Soup With Harissa Tomatoes
By Melissa Clark, The New York Times
Yield: 6 servings

INGREDIENTS
1 large head cauliflower (about 3 pounds), trimmed and cut into 1-inch florets (about 12 cups)
Kosher salt (such as Diamond Crystal) and freshly ground black pepper
1-1⁄4 teaspoons ground coriander
7 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for serving
1 small bunch thyme (about 10 sprigs)
1 pound plum tomatoes, halved, seeds scooped out
2 to 4 tablespoons harissa paste
3 large bunches scallions, whites and greens thinly sliced (about 21⁄2 cups)
1 jalapeño, seeded (if desired) and coarsely chopped
4 large garlic cloves, finely chopped
1-1⁄2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 tablespoon tomato paste
6 cups vegetable stock
3⁄4 cup chopped cilantro leaves and tender stems, plus more for optional garnish
1 lemon

PREPARATION
Step 1
Heat oven to 425 degrees and line 2 sheet pans with parchment paper.
Step 2
In a large bowl, combine cauliflower, 1 teaspoon salt, a large pinch of black pepper, 3⁄4 teaspoon ground coriander, 3 tablespoons oil and half the thyme sprigs, tossing everything until well coated. Spread the cauliflower evenly across one of the prepared pans.
Step 3
Using the same bowl (no need to wash it first), combine halved tomatoes, 1 to 2 tablespoons of harissa (depending on how spicy your harissa is; taste it first), 2 tablespoons olive oil, a large pinch of salt and the remaining thyme sprigs, and toss gently until the tomatoes are well coated. Spread tomatoes on the other baking sheet, cut-side up.
Step 4
Place both sheet pans in the oven and roast for 20 minutes, then stir the cauliflower but not the tomatoes. Continue to roast until cauliflower is golden brown and tender, 15 to 20 minutes longer (35 to 40 minutes total roasting time). Transfer cauliflower pan to a rack, and discard thyme sprigs.
Step 5
Using tongs, gently flip tomatoes over so their cut sides are down. Using the tongs, pinch off the tomato skins – they should slip right off – and discard. Brush 1 to 2 more tablespoons of harissa onto tomatoes and continue to roast until shriveled and condensed, about 15 to 25 minutes (35 to 45 minutes total roasting time).
Step 6
While tomatoes are roasting, make the soup: In a large pot, heat the remaining 2 tablespoons oil over medium. Add scallions (saving 1⁄4 cup scallions for serving) and jalapeño, and cook, stirring occasionally, until soft and lightly colored, 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in garlic and cook for 1 minute. Add another 1 1⁄2 teaspoons salt, black pepper to taste, cumin and tomato paste, and cook until tomato paste darkens and caramelizes, 2 to 3 minutes.
Step 7
Stir in roasted cauliflower and stock, and bring to a simmer. Cook, partly covered, over medium-low heat until all vegetables are very tender, 15 to 20 minutes. Turn off the heat. Using an immersion blender, purée the soup until smooth. (Alternatively, you can purée it in batches in a food processor or blender.)
Step 8
Transfer the roasted tomatoes into a mixing bowl and add cilantro. Using a Microplane or other fine grater, grate zest from about half the lemon into the bowl, then stir in 1⁄2 teaspoon coriander and reserved scallions.
Step 9
Using a fork or spoon, break up some of the tomatoes as you combine everything. Cut the lemon in half and squeeze a little into the tomatoes, then taste and add more salt and lemon juice as needed. It should taste well seasoned and a little tangy.
Step 10
To serve, squeeze in the juice from half the lemon. Taste and add salt, pepper and lemon if needed. Ladle soup into individual bowls and dollop harissa tomatoes on top; top with olive oil and more cilantro, if you like.

how do you savor the most succulent parts of your life? and do you, like me, find turning the page a bit of a tug and a pull?

10 Comments

October 7, 2022

an ode to figs, the “bursten” fruit

in which for no reason other than pure whimsy and succulence itself, we behold the fig—to my taste, the essence of autumn, and the finest fruit borne from the boughs of any earthly tree….

few are the foods for which i churn an honest-to-goodness hankering. foods that might wake me up in the night, and turn my tummy to growling. the fig of october is one such specimen. i am not one to dream of cakes, couldn’t care less for a mousse, and turn up my nose at anything chocolate (yes, yes, i count these among my mis-wirings). and while there are foods aplenty that i eat day after day—broccoli, apples, nonfat greek yogurt, frozen bananas (the banal list of a thoroughly unadventurous eater)—rare is the edible that stirs me from stupor or slumber, yearning to nibble. (midway through wednesday’s yom kippur fast, and deep in my recent string of high-fevered days, i found myself longing for even one succulent fig. and that’s when i knew i needed to compose a commonplace ode to the Ficus carica, a fruit ancient and timeless.)

yes, rare is the fig, which i pile on my plate but for one short season a year. well before we get to its taste, the way it melts across the tongue and glides down the gulch with a honeyed-sweetness all along the way, i find the fig a mouthwateringly beautiful object, a bulbous aubergine orb, streaked with brushstrokes of plum and sienna. and that’s only the outside.

to split the fig from its umbilical nub into quarters is to expose its sumptuous flesh, densely seeded, nearly R-rated. it’s no wonder renaissance painters often found ways to tuck a fig into the frame (almost a where’s waldo of painterly fruits). inside or out, it’s summa botanica.

it’s a fruit at the root of all the world’s religions. did not adam and eve reach for the leaf of the fig the very instant they realized their nakedness? the original pasties, i suppose. even now, the fig leaf is the very symbol of flimsy modesty, of shabbily covering that which shames or embarrasses but which is more or less in plain sight anyway. hardly shamefully, the fig was the tree that shaded Siddhartha Guatama for the 49 days during which he enlightened his way toward becoming the Buddha. his fig tree was the Bo, or Bodhi—Ficus religiosa, a species known to grow ninety feet tall and live for two thousand years, and whose leaves are shaped like hearts.

for the more than the nine thousand years the fig has heavied boughs in the global garden, it’s been considered a “keystone species,” one critical to the survival of a disproportionately large chunk of an ecosystem, and without which that ecosystem would be drastically changed. no fewer than twelve hundred different kinds of animals depend on figs, including one-tenth of the world’s birds, and, yes, a certain wasp that takes its name from the fleshy fruit, the diminutive fig wasp.

you might be surprised to know that figs are actually inside-out flowers, hundreds of flowers trapped inside that aubergine casing. and if perhaps, as a young child, you were scared off from figs because someone told you that if you bit into it you’d be biting into a dead wasp wedged inside, here’s the real story:

the female fig wasp, dusted with pollen from her own birth inside yet another fig, wriggles her way into an unripe fig by way of the opening at the round base, called the ostiole, whereby stripping off her wings in the process. (imagine a piling of itty-bitty diaphanous wasp wings there at the base of every wild fig tree.) she is a wee waspy thing—roughly the size of the tip of a pencil or crayon (an aubergine crayon perhaps, from the original 64-color crayolas that stand as pert bright-colored soldiers all in their rows)—and she lives for only two days, during which she is duty- and DNA-bound to safely penetrate the fig and lay her eggs among the tiny flowers, thus pollinating the flowers. she dies shortly after. (fear not, the enzymes of the fruit dissolve what’s left of the wee wasp; and fear even less because nearly all figs you might find in the fruit bin these days have been domestically produced, and are not of the wild waspy variety.) of the juice left behind, post waspiness, pliny the elder termed it “the best food that can be taken by those who are brought low by long sickness.” (case in point: my febrile hankering.)

figs, it’s been said, are “extra, full of drama.” cleopatra, it’s told, ordered that the Egyptian cobra she intended as her suicide weapon, be brought to her hidden in a basket of figs. alexander the great claimed that ten thousand of his soldiers sheltered under a single fig tree. and d.h. lawrence, whom i never knew was something of a raunchy ol’ fellow, compared an overripe “bursten” fig to a prostitute “making a show of her secret.”

here’s the poem where he plays with that…

the first few lines of his 1924 poem, titled simply, “figs”…(and said to be confirmation of why this man of letters was considered one of the most risqué writers of his time…)

The proper way to eat a fig, in society
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist,
honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

Then you throw away the skin
Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,
After you have taken off the blossom, with your lips.

But the vulgar way
Is just to put your mouth to the crack and take out the flesh in one bite.
Every fruit has its secret.

now i’ve not ever considered the fig in a trollopian way, though i can see how its sweet succulence might push it toward the precipice of such considerations.

while my one and only way to eat a fig is straight-up; rinsed, quartered to reveal its “bursten”-ness, speared with tine of fork, and inhaled in a single shwoop, you might take your figs more encumbered, or rather baked into something beyond deliciousness. if you’re of the latter class, here’s an almond and fig cake for you….

almond and fig cake
from mrs. larkin’s kitchen on food52
Serves 6

8 – 10 small ripe figs, stems removed, sliced in half vertically
3/4 cups slivered blanched almonds
1/2 cup sugar, plus extra for sprinkling on top of batter
zest of 1/2 large orange
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
3/4 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon salt

*Set oven rack to upper third. Preheat oven to 400 F. Butter an 8″ cake pan and line with parchment paper.
*Process almonds, 2 Tablespoons of sugar and orange zest until finely ground.
*Beat butter and remaining sugar together at high speed until pale and fluffy. Add vanilla and combine. Add eggs, beating well after each addition. On low speed, beat in the almonds, flour and salt.
*Spread batter in cake pan. Place fig halves in concentric circles, evenly spaced, over the batter. Press in slightly. Sprinkle some sugar (about 2 tablespoons) over the entire surface. Bake on a sheet pan until cake is firm and nicely golden brown with darker edges, about 25 minutes.
*Cool on a rack for 10 minutes. Invert cake onto a dish, remove parchment, and re-invert onto a serving plate.

what might be the fruits that lure you to the fridge (or the tree) in the deep of the night, or the heat of the day??? and how do you like them best?

with a little poking around, i found the taste of the fig described thusly, as if a high-end wine assayed by a fine-palated sommelier: NPR describes its “honey-like sweetness with a subtle hint of berry and fresher shades of the flavor you might recognize from a certain cookie.” a restaurateur says figs taste something like a “berry dipped in a honey glaze.” one poet wrote that the taste of a perfect fig “cuts straight through time.” how might you describe it?

p.s. i am, i believe, cured from whatever the heck ailed me for six straight days. whatever it was, it wasn’t covid, and it was nasty. but it’s history now, and the month of october awaits….

8 Comments

September 2, 2022

it’s the-light-will-save-you season

it wafts in, gold dust, falls in rivulets across the table, broad swaths and shafts through the windowpanes. it’s molasses light, the amber season, the light of autumn coming that just might save me. it holds alchemical powers, makes my heart quicken, might even push out the walls of my veins a wee bit. i imagine it expands the little red blood cells ferrying molecules of oxygen all around my labyrinthine insides. it makes me more alive than any other season’s sunlight. and it’s coming day by day.

the sun is slipping is how we put it. but, really, that’s not the science. that’s the egocentric way we humans always try to think: putting ourselves in the core of the equation. really, it’s just plain old geometry, all about the angles of earth to sun, and axis to angle. we’re spinning at our cockeyed angle, and come autumn, when we’re leaning out from the sun, the angle shrinks from summer’s straight-on-from-on-high 90-degrees to the slenderer 23.5 degrees, meaning the sun no longer shines straight down in an intense tight cone, but rather the light’s diffuse, the shadow longer. the sun––should you imagine it as a flashlight shining on a table (should you care to do a bit of third-grade science, here)––is not shining from straight above, but now (imagine moving your hand and the flashlight lower in an imaginary arc) it’s shining from off to the side, and the light cast is, per our hypothesis, less intense, more spread out, and––here’s the magic, if we’re talking earth and not flashlights and tables––more golden.

dylan thomas said we should “rage against the dying light.” mary oliver called it “the old gold song of the almost finished year.” i call it molasses light. and i won’t rage against it. i will all but gulp it down. heck, i’d lick it off the table like an autumn lollipop if i didn’t know how impolite that was.

it’s the-light-will-save-you-season, and it’s saving me.

it comes with its cousin, tinge-in-the-air. or at least it does here where i live, not far from the shoreline of that great lake michigan. as one long summer sings it’s almost-finished song, i will relish the next one on the song list: the song of autumn’s gold, with a chaser of goosebumps-in-the-morning air…

commonplace corner: i tend to read in tandem, two books at once; sometimes more. and it’s magic when one book finds itself in conversation with another, unbeknownst to all of us till we stumble on the paragraphs that talk to each other. that happened this week when the subject was how we learn to tell stories. and it’s making me think hard and long about the places in my life where i learned what it meant to sit at a table and be transfixed by the ones from whom the words were pouring, the one with the magical capacity to make a whole room laugh at the very same moment, as if a giant feather had just tickled all our funny bones. at once. how miraculous is that, to make a whole room laugh? to make a whole room cry? to make a whole room think? i can’t think of anything more magical. maybe other than making someone walk who’d never walked before.

here are two sumptuous paragraphs that made me think this week. one’s from erskine caldwell, an american novelist and short story writer whose father was a home missionary at the turn of the last century who moved from place to place in the clay hills of georgia, so young erskine absorbed the dialect and wisdoms of the impoverished sharecroppers where his papa preached. the other’s from kerri ní dochartaigh, a breath-taking writer born on the border of the north and south of Ireland, whose recent memoir, thin places: a natural history of healing and home (pointed to me by beloved chair sister sharon b.) seems to be taking the writerly world by storm. deservedly so. she too has written a sumptuous paragraph about the storytellers in her life. maybe they’ll make you think about the story spinners in your own sweet life…

Erskine Caldwell

I was not a writer to begin with; I was a listener. In those early decades of the century, reading and writing were not common experiences. Oral storytelling was the basis of fiction. You learned by listening around the store, around the gin, the icehouse, the wood yard, or wherever people congregated and had nothing to do. You would listen for the extraordinary, the unusual; the people knew how to tell stories orally in such a way that they could make the smallest incident, the most far-fetched idea, into something extraordinarily interesting. It could be just a rooster crowing at a certain time of night or morning. It’s a mysterious thing. Many Southern writers must have learned the art of storytelling from listening to oral tales. I did. It gave me the knowledge that the simplest incident can make a story.

from Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

My grandfather was born in the same week as the Irish border. He was a storyteller, and his most affecting tales, the ones he gave me that have shaped my life, were about place, about how we relate to it, to ourselves, and to one another. Good seanchaidhthe––storytellers––never really tell you anything, though. They set the fire in the hearth, they draw the chairs in close; they shut all the windows so the old lore doesn’t fall on the wrong ears. They fill the room with a sense of ease, a sense of all being as it should be. The words, when they spill quietly out of the mouth of the one who has been entrusted with them, dance in the space, at one with the flames of the fire. It is, as always, up to those who listen to do with them what they will.

“‘Consider the lilies,’” Emily Dickinson said, “is the only commandment I ever obeyed.” Some days, that one is enough. More than enough.

and finally in this week’s version of the chair gazette, a celebration this week of shifting sunlight and words that awaken us, i need to leave one last bit. some but hardly all of you play on the various social media playgrounds — facebook or instagram (i try to do little of either) — and my job as a person with a book in the publishing chute is to tell the world it’s coming (which i intend to do as quietly as my publisher allows). and this week the marketing folks at broadleaf books sent me my “blurbs,” those words of kindness that early reviewers send along. because i promised those marketing wizards that “the chair” would always be my core people, i need to quietly leave those blurbs here to keep up my end of the promise. if you’ve seen ’em in a little post i left on facebook, well then apologies. if not (and my mother counts among those who’ve not seen them elsewhere) here’s the lineup that frankly broke me out in goosebumps. the kindness of these five, all of whom are heroes of mine, pretty much made the last two years worth it….

some heart-melting kindnesses from early reviewers of The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text

“Regardless of where one’s spirituality (or lack of it) may lie, Barbara Mahany’s The Book of Nature is a deeply rich celebration of the ageless overlap between religion and the many faces of the natural world—the ‘Book of Nature’ to which mystics, monks, and others have turned for insight into the sacred. Best of all, this thought-provoking exploration is wrapped in Mahany’s luscious and luminous writing, which makes every page a delight.”
—Scott Weidensaul, author of A World on the Wing

“Attention is among the deepest forms of integrity. In The Book of Nature, Barbara Mahany pays attention. She doesn’t look through nature; she looks at nature and, there, sees the mysteries that make and unmake us. In an age of environmental threat and neglect, Barbara Mahany’s book is a theological, poetic, and devoted plea for attention to our most fundamental constitution: matter—and everything that comes from it, including us.”
—Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of Poetry Unbound from On Being Studios

“The Book of Nature is an invitation to step into the newness of each day: sunrise, garden, forest, waters, nightfall. These pages reflect both awe and heartbreak, a pause when our world feels on fire and the climate crisis calls us to collective lament, communion, and action.”
—Mallory McDuff, author of Love Your Mother: 50 States, 50 Stories, and 50 Women United for Climate Justice

“Following in and deepening the footsteps of the Desert Mothers and Fathers, Barbara Mahany’s The Book of Nature invites you to engage with nature as the body of God: to know that all life is the happening of a nondual Aliveness called by many names. Calling to a humanity drunk on transcendence and desperate to escape from Nature and our responsibility to Her, The Book of Nature reveals the sobering immanence of God as the Source and Substance of all reality.”
—Rabbi Rami Shapiro, author of Judaism Without Tribalism

“Lovely and smart reflections—the perfect book to slip into a rucksack on a day you’re planning a wander through the larger world!”
—Bill McKibben, author The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon

and that, dear friends, is that. page proofs are due tuesday, so i’ll be back–perhaps–to more regular chairs, less gazette (though it’s been deliciously fun to assemble morsels every week) and more single-subject essay.

but in the meantime, spill your thoughts about autumn sunlight, storytellers, or words that’ve stirred you this week as we move into golden time….the season of the light that just might save you….

6 Comments

November 19, 2021

praise song for november

ever since the jersey sojourner landed safely back home here along the shores of our great lake, this old house has been awash in crumpled-up wads of packing paper, and boxes, and bubblewrap. i’ve been up to my hipbones wading through it all, trying to find tucked-away places for treasures now in our keep, relics salvaged from a faraway house now awaiting its death blows.

and that’s when, while sipping a time-out tea, i scrolled through the mail and stumbled upon a praise poem, a praise poem so lovely it made time expand, a few short minutes turned into what felt like a goodly chunk of time, and i carried the praise poem with me while i worked.

here’s the poem worthy of praising:

Praise Song
Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there’s left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn’t cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it’s all we have, and it’s never enough.
~ Barbara Crooker ~
(Abalone Moon, Summer 2004)

next time i took a break from all the stripping away of papers and the swiping away of cobwebs in the places i’d found for storing, i decided to dig into a bit of knowledge about this literary genre that pulses with pure and unfiltered heart, one praise practically tripping over another.

here are but a few bare bones, mostly dug up from my friends at britannica (the encyclopedia, that is): praise poetry first stirred in medieval literature, especially during the renaissance, when it poured forth worship of or admiration for heroes, kings, or deities.

it seems the praise poem––also called mlenmlen, oriki, or praise name––is one of the most widely used poetic forms in africa, a series of laudatory epithets––descriptive word-pictures or word-paintings––applied to gods, men, animals, plants, towns, you name it. the point is to capture the essence of whoever or whatever is being praised, and to lavish praise.

think not that just anyone is inclined to get up and start praising, at least not in the african homeland. professional bards––akin to a court poet––are the ones ordained to chant praise songs, with the reciter taking position in an open space, visible to all assembled. the reciting begins in high voice, rhythmic backbeat sometimes provided by spear stomped against ground, a punctuational note that would get my attention. metaphor is a key device, so too poetic license for coining new words. (i’m in with anyone who’s making up words.)

it’s an oral form that, not surprisingly, found its way to worship in the american black tradition, and, now rooted there, fills the sanctuary of many a black church. you might remember elizabeth alexander’s glorious “praise song for the day” written for and recited at president obama’s first inauguration, on that cold yet hopeful january day in 2009. (so far in the distance now, it almost seems like another america.)

inspired by this notion of rolling praise, especially in this season of gathering gratitudes, i decided to try my own, mindful that praise is another name for anointing through blessing. the beannacht is the celtic version thereof, the bracha is how jews unfurl their blessings. all the earth and its inhabitants, certainly the ones humble enough to know we’re not here of our own making, seem hardwired to nod, bend knee, and bow. i beg permission to attempt the tradition, and hereby begin:

Praise the homecomings of late November, the footsteps you know by heart, the ones that tell you someone you love is just one floor above, and any minute now his bear-like hungers will awake, will startle, and he’ll come foraging into the woods of your well-fruited refrigerator.

Praise the mottled gray November skies, the herringbone of heaven and cloud, infinite afghan we draw round our shoulders, as November signals its call to begin the turning in, the deepening quiet of winter coming.

Praise the molasses light of waning November, pooling across floorboards, magnifying the smudge and the splatters of each and every unwashed windowpane.

Praise the gathering table you’ll set for the first time in a too-long time. Praise the remembering that comes as you haul out the once-a-year dishes, as your riffle through the recipe tin, bring to the feast heirlooms––and long-gone stirrers of pots––of kitchens past.

Praise the voices soon to rise from the room where the forks and the knives will scrape against plates, where stories will unspool, and laughter—praise be—will punctuate the convening, weave the disparate souls of the room into one.

Praise the stripped-bare essence of autumn’s end, the disrobing almost over now. Limb and bough and trunk, exposed against the palette of sky. Praise the way we see more now, as less is there to get in the way. Let that be our guiding vision.

Praise the wisdom that comes with November’s close, these days ripe for inner harvest. When the orchard’s gone sleeping, the fields have gone fallow, sift through the loam that’s rich in your soul. Root around, take in wisdom, turn the page, listen to the forest, or the grasses that rustle to the song of winter’s-coming. Let it sink in, sink deep, all through the slumbering months.

here’s a variation on praise, a heavenly one, albeit written in deepening shades of darkness, from one of my very favorite poets, w.s. merwin. it’s titled simply, “thanks.”

Thanks
W. S. Merwin – 1927-2019
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
From Migration: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 1988 by W. S. Merwin.

both the crooker praise poem and possibly the merwin (should you care to make a point, to stir a somber note into your table’s conversation) might be welcome at your gratitude table. or you might be inclined to pen your own. either way, from my old maple table to your table in whatever its form, blessings, blessings, and praise be to the chairs.

do you have a praise poem you love? what praise would you pen should you be so inspired?

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October 8, 2021

sweet, sweet earth

it was gasping for air, really.

i’d loped to the garage, grabbed the crusty old trowel, grabbed my prophylactic spritz bottle of stay-away-squirrels spray, and headed out to the secret sinuous side garden where i looked for a desperate patch crying for hope. crying for something to rise up in the spring, on the far side of the harsh and impending winter.

i was armed with a battery of bulbs, bulbs in various girths, fat ones that promised me daffodil, itty-bitty wisps of bulbs who promised me the tenderlings, snowdrops and siberian squill, and those space-age globes of allium, in this case promising a puff ball of blue. as pretty a thing to bury my nose in as i could imagine.

i’d somehow gotten the itch to give back, to give back to dear mama earth what she so unfailingly offers me: tender and certain shelter, jolt of resilience, undying promise that even if daunted she’s not going away. not yet anyway. not if we can muscle the forces to cease and desist with the trashing of the one glorious blue marble long, long ago entrusted to us.

a few mornings before, amid the cleaning and clearing and worrying, i’d leapt into the old red wagon, the car that takes me wherever i aim it, and i’d motored over to the store with the rows and bins of springtime bulbs, an adventure that’s something like a trip to the candy counter, only without the threat of cavities. i’d filled my arms, judiciously putting aside the bulbs that would have cost as much as a pound of burgers. and then, when the urge struck, i’d be stocked and ready to dig, bury, and someday behold.

i’ve always found it sacramental, the dropping to my knees, gashing into the surrendering soil, shaking a powder of bulb-boosting fortifier, and then carefully lifting just the right bulb for the purpose: to tuck in for the winter the concentrated pouch of promise. the thing that looks like a dried-up onion, laying it to rest in the shadow of autumn, nestling it soft against the earth’s curve, the earth’s cupped hands, the earth’s promise: i’ll take it from here.

and all winter long, through the ice and the wind that will pound at my windowpanes, my bevy of bulbs will be silently doing their thing, shooting down roots, stirring within.

the tasks of autumn are the stockpiling tasks, the turning-in ones. slip on an extra layer of sweater, slow roast the last of the tomatoes, make them last through the long months ahead. upholster the garden with unseen but certain patches of promise.

when your heart hurts or is heavy, i’ve found, it helps to ply tender ministrations to whomever or whatever falls in my path. this week it was my paltry patch of earth. there’ve been times when it was one of my boys, one whose knee or whose heart had been banged up and bloodied. or a friend who needed little more than a hot mug of tea and an hour of listening.

but the taking care of this holy earth is bigger even than that. it’s understanding how sacred it is at its core, and in its every blessed breath. go silent for a minute or two (or three or four) and simply keep watch: listen for the mournful cry of the geese veeing the sky. watch the leaves go gold. plop yourself at the water’s edge and marvel at its infinite rhythm.

i’ve just started reading a marvelous book by john philip newell, one titled, sacred earth, sacred soul, and like newell’s earlier books, it’s an exploration of celtic wisdoms, a reawakening of the ancient and eternal truths long ago snuffed nearly into extinction. it’s a book i’ve already managed to slather with my inky underlinings, page after page.

newell, once the warden of iona abbey, a sixth-century monastery rising up from a wee island off scotland in the roar of the north atlantic, beckons us to listen for the beat of the sacred deep within ourselves and one another, and deep within the body of the earth. sacred, he writes, “is not bound by religion.” sacred is the soulful knowing, the keen awareness, that deep down in all things — in the earth, and in everything that has been born — there pulses an inextinguishable holiness. it’s our task, our holy task, to sense it, to seize it: to see it, to feel it, to honor it. to make way for it, make an altar for it, hold it up high.

my bulb-burying the other morning might have been seen as just another autumnal chore. or, through the celtic lens, the lens of an ancient wisdom shared by all the world’s great religions, it’s that i was quietly tucking in visible manifestations, reminders come spring, that what pulses deep within the earth, deep within each of our souls and our selves, is something unflaggingly beautiful. and holy. at once tender and resilient.

digging those bulbs, turning newell’s pages, brought me back to a peaceful holy calm. and i filled my lungs with pure blessed air.

what brings you breath? what’s your understanding of sacred? and how do you sense the sacred within?

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Category: autumn