blessings | pull up a chair

January 2, 2026

when you greet the new year, your very own, with a whisper not a bang. . .

fresh is the year, fresh as the newly-fallen tableau of snow. fresh as a bedsheet unwrinkled by the toss and turn of night. fresh, fresh, fresh.

as with any wintry panorama, the horizonless plane is punctuated with little-noticed hideaways, nooks and crannies for peeking out unseen, for safe harbor within. one of those nooks of the new year, tucked in the shadows of the timpani of christmas, of hanukkah, of new year’s, is a nook all my own. i curl inside it, pulling taut the woolen spans within which i wrap myself. i am a child of the fresh new year. my begin-again in sync with that of time’s eternal ticking.

i mark it devotedly, and by long-ago acquired habit, in some degree of solitude and silence.

it is my pianissimo of blessing. and it needs no accompaniment.

it’s one of a kind, yet not unlike any other.

i will never not celebrate the dawning of each new day. not ever. i live now in the land of gratitude and grace, where every day given is a welcomed bead of prayer answered, an unearned gift, on the abacus of joy. a whole new year is possibility, is joy, is grace, compounded and multiplied. it’s beyond measure, truly. i intend to spend it wisely.

nearly three years ago, in the wake of a surgery that had me calculating five-year-survival odds, sixty-nine seemed far beyond my reach. it was a sum i dared not count. though i wished mightily. prayed heartily.

and now that it’s come, on the third of this new year, i welcome it between my double daily doses of tamiflu, the magic capsule meant to avenge the virus coursing through my achy hollows and my knotty sinew.

instead of gathering tomorrow night round a table at a place hand-picked by my very own aficionado of chicago kitchens, it seems we’ll be gathered here at home (or at least the three-fourths of us now sharing iterations of influenza A). the yuletide tree still standing, still blinking like a night sky stitched with twinkling stars, it’s as cozy a place as i could ever dream. and i’m more than blessed to call it home.

looking back across the years, and all the january thirds, i count more than a handful spent under covers, a thermometer poking from my pucker. it seems the time of year when bugs catch up to me. knock me off my stride.

the lesson here is elementary, and not profound: what matters is not the way you spend a certain day, but how you enter into each and every one.

and i am entering full of bliss.

i know, and won’t forget, how priceless is each day; how not a one of these is to be assumed, presumed, taken for granted.

my birthday gift, once again, is the gift i open every given day: this day, these beauties, these people i so dearly love; the sky that shifts from pink to peach to blue to gray to indigo; the stirrings of the critters who imprint their nighttime rustlings in the snow, or the birds who animate the winter boughs; and especially the quietude, the wintry quietude, that underscores it all—these are the wrappings of the shimmering at my deepest core, the against-all-odds chance to be alive here and now, to love and love some more, to bring some faint grain of blessedness to each and every day.

for all of this, in any form, in every form, i bend my knees and bow: thank you, O Holy, Holy One, for the breath that animates and infuses, the breath that fills my heart and lungs with the inextinguishable, ineffable trace of You.

epiphany is the light shining in the not-so distance. may it cast its glow on our uncharted paths and illuminate our way….and may this new year bless all of us. deeply, contentedly, quietly.

what lights do you see in the not-so distance?

18 Comments

December 26, 2025

the holy hush of the morning after

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

it’s my own hushed holy day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

amen.

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

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

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

first, the blessing….

A Christmas Blessing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the story begins thusly….

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

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

8 Comments

December 19, 2025

greening: another word for bringing the holy within

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a little bit of bingen to stir the greening….

12 Comments

December 12, 2025

oh, the places we’ve come . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Laurence Freeman

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

IF YOU WANT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kenosis
By Luci Shaw

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

amen.

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

25 Comments

December 5, 2025

so close to the bone

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

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

but that wasn’t the only reason for goosebumps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Jeanne Lohmann ~
(The Light of Invisible Bodies)

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

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

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

Quarantine
by Eavan Boland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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November 28, 2025

spill-over gratitude

morning-after kitchen: when the cookstove becomes the drying rack

in this old house, the day after the feasting is the day for leftovers and long walks in the woods. we steer clear of the malls, the black-friday deals, and the great american drive to consume. among the leftovers spilling this morn are the ones of my heart which never ever has enough room for all there is for which to whisper “thank you”….

And so I begin with that glorious morning-after inhale and exhale of a put-back-to-order kitchen, a very full fridge, and the echoes of the night before still pinging off the walls, making me giggle as I count out my coffee scoops: the 95-year-old mama who still sits by my side, still notices the one or two things I might have forgotten, and nibbles “quality control” of every dish at every stage on its way to the groaning board; the brother and his beloved who drove in from Detroit, and the one who flew from LA; the new friend who drove down from the Twin Cities and brought along his Rhode Island clam fritters; the beloved friend who mashed every last potato and dolloped in butter, heavy cream, cream cheese, half and half (and sent us all to the cardiologist morning after)…and of course, of course, the miracle of both our boys, the line cook and the law professor, here for the holy hour when we bow heads, hold hands, and pour forth our litanies of thanks; and at the far end of the table, my most beloved, whose presence across from me is always, always the sweet spot of any day…

Moving along, and thinking back across the last stretch of days, the kid mechanic at our neighborhood garage who got rid of the “check-engine” light with a know-how that had me back on the road less than ten minutes later. Phew.

The oncologist who talks to me with her knees pressing against mine, intent that we look into each others’ eyes. And sometimes deeper, I swear.

The orthodontist who put down her pen amid banal history taking and announced: “Let’s just go for coffee!”

The law professor colleague of my very own kid who saw how cold I was in the first quarter of my first football game in 51 years, who slithered from her seat for what I presumed was a dash to the powder rooms, only to have her return with a brand-new-from-the-merch-store, very-warm, blue-and-gold scarf to wrap round my neck and up to my ears.

My sweet line cook of a kid who called to insist he was making two of the sides, plus an appetizer, for Thanksgiving “because you already have a million other things to do, and you shouldn’t have to do everything, and everyone should have skin in the game.” Where did he come from this kid who is always thinking of how it is to be the other someone?

The nice people at the grocery store who made my stuffing so I didn’t have to.

Ditto the nice people who made the gravy.

Ditto the very nice people who smoked the turkey!

The sister-in-law who always always rolls up her sleeves and scrubs every last plate, knife, and serving platter.

The editor who finally said I could send along the latest drafts of a book in the works, a book exploring the undulations and awakenings of Scan Time, that netherworld for those whose days are measured scan to scan to scan.

The countless, countless tenderhearted souls who have paved this bumpy road of a year with more kindness than any girl would dare fall to her knees and ask for…..from hand-stitched quilts, to crocheted afghans, to tea loaves, to the electric blanket that does not fail.

The blessed, blessed souls who dared to share their immense and sometimes unbearable grief; especially the two whose course was so deeply fraught and who dared to unfurl the whole of their fears as they marched face-forward to inevitable ends, and in those unmaskings gave me a glimpse of the ineffable courage and mortal core that will carry us all across our last distance and beyond the sacred veil.

The curious thing that what could have been any old Thursday is now, in this moment, a draw that pulls people we love from across the hills and vales, and rivers and lakes, to sit round one single table, to partake of platters of bird and bread and roots pulled from the ground, for the simple sacrament of saying thank you, And I love you enough to put up with airports and very-packed roads.

For the wisdom guides in this life, the likes of whom include the incomparable Maria Popova, who is adamantly not a religionist but is deeply sacred, and who astounds me time after time with her epiphanies—often all the more forceful because we come from different angles but land at the same sublime spot. She strikes one of my polestar beliefs when she writes this passage, concluding with the line: “It may be that we are only here to learn how to love.”

Because the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness and consciousness the crowning achievement of the universe, because the mystery of the universe will always exceed the reach of the consciousness forged by that mystery, love in the largest sense is a matter of active surrender (to borrow Jeanette Winterson’s perfect term for the paradox of art) to the mystery.

It may be that we are only here to learn how to love.

With all my heart, I believe that. And devote my days to the doing of it, an urgency all the more sacred now that my life is set by the metronome of Scan Time….

a forever favorite poem…..

Small Kindnesses

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
+ Danusha Laméris

a bit of theology, in advent of Advent, the season of anticipation, awaiting the soon to come Silent Night…..

this is from my friends at the SALT Project who always stir thoughts because they poke around and enter through uncommon angles. i found myself stirred by the idea of Three Advents, one of which comes without folderol or clanging of cymbals, which is in keeping with the quietist that is my soul’s natural setting….

Advent means “arrival,” and Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century abbot and theologian, wrote eloquently of “three Advents”: first of all, the Incarnation, the Advent at Christmas; and last of all, the Parousia, the Advent at the end of the age (Matthew’s subject in this week’s passage). And the second or “middle” Advent, the one in between these other two, is the everyday arrival of Jesus: the host at the table, the still small voice, the hungry mother, the weary migrant. In other words, Jesus comes to us again and again, calling us, inviting us to help repair the world, little by little, a thousand swords remade into a thousand ploughshares. The new era of God’s shalom is dawning even now — though its glimmers aren’t always obvious at first. On the contrary, they often shine in unexpected places and at unexpected hours, like a thief in the night.

and in the spirit of Thanksgiving’s groaning board, one last dollop, a line that echoes Maria Popova’s wisdom on love; this, from the poet Philip Larkin who ends his famous poem, An Arundel Tomb, with this indelible truth and unforgettable line: “what will survive of us is love.”

the obvious question: what lines will you add to the litany of deep thanks?

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November 14, 2025

the ol’ ticker still ticks. and then some.

a rare peek inside this ol’ house, where three of us nestled by the fire, catching a moment that no one saw coming…

because of the way my heart leapt midafternoon yesterday as i bumbled into the house, hands all muddy from tossing out the ferns that had frozen in the snow snap, i can claim with absolute certainty that i’m nowhere near dead yet.

what might i mean by such a rash—you might say “obvious”—pronouncement?

well, quite simply, my oft-tired ol’ ticker fired off a triple flip the likes of which simone biles would be proud soon as i glanced down at my phone, that indispensable appendage i always forget to keep indispensably by my side, and noticed a smattering of words that seemed to be spelling out something about “the trip to Chicago” followed by “keep the drive daylight” followed by “i will just hit the road,“ all walloped with “on the off chance that you guys aren’t busy tonight.”

and thus i discovered the manchild who’s been heavy on my heart all week, as i worried about the car that was stuck in the tow lot, and the miracle that he’d not been slammed into metal or glass when his car fishtailed on a slick, dark country road, i discovered there’d be three not two at our dinner table last night. and how perfect that i’d just made a triple-size batch of one of my autumnal mostly vegetable stews.

never mind that he’s 32, and a law professor these days. never mind that i’ve been at this mama gig for rather a while now (well, 32 years plus the duration of mammalian gestation), it’ll never get old. it’s pretty much an indelible truth that until my last breath on this planet the number one zone in my heart will forever be the can’t-get-enough-of-my-boys zone.

and so, in less time than it takes to spell indefatigably up to the task, i had fresh flannel sheets on the bed, a basket of farmer’s market apples on the bedside table along with a mason jar of my fresh-made granola, and if i’d had time to string up holiday lights in the room where he grew up, i’d have done that too. along with a chorus of night-crooning angels.

why the back-flipping joy?

well, living as i am in a personal epoch of carpe diem, in which nearly every dawn i flutter open my eyes and unfurl a big fat gratitude prayer for making it to the sheer marvel of watching sunlight stream in, while simultaneously existing in this moment in history when good news is as infrequent as a meadow of daisies in november, the sheer joy of surprise, especially in the category guess-who’s-coming-to-dinner, is of the highest order.

and sometimes it’s just plain rejuvenating to remember your heart still knows the steps to the happy dance, and can leap into it on a moment’s notice.

my zeal for making each moment count is not a dynamic that’s waning. it only gets more and more intense as the chapters of living press in from all sides.

i seem to have been catapulted full time into that real-life equivalent of frank lloyd wright’s architectural jujitsu compress-and-release, in which the master architect squeezed in the walls of an anteroom so that once you stepped into the chamber beyond you felt the whoosh of expansiveness as the walls and the ceiling let soar. so too with life and its tough spots. in time, they finally relent and release. and you breathe deeper than you remember breathing in days.

our lives are undulations of breath, on both a grand and an intimate scale. the pattern set soon as the umbilical cord is cut—the lungs, the diaphragm, the ribs rise and fall, empty and fill accordingly. and so it is with our lives on a larger scale, as life seems to toss us into the vise, only to at last let us out. let us breathe.

i am breathing today. i am breathing as my house fills with people i love to celebrate the birthday of a woman we love, the matriarch of us all. my mama, who’s shown us grace, resilience, and who these days unendingly charms. we’re not marking the date of her birth, she tells us, but we are marking our love. and we are doing it the best we know: we are gathering in joy, and in love, from corners hither and yon.

and in this old house, when the three of us sat down to stew, we got an extra dollop of breath out of the deal. it was—and is—delicious.

a bit of social action here at the chair, for anyone who might be so inclined. here in chicago, and even here in the leafy burbs we’ve been shattered by the roving bands of federal agents decked out in the camo gear, faces covered in masks, as they’ve rough-armed and thrown to the ground dozens and dozens and dozens of those whose skin might be brown. contrary to federal messaging, these are good folk earning meager livings the hard way: cutting grass, raking leaves, tending to kids in strollers or buggies, pounding shingles to roofs. and for the sin of trying to live unnoticed lives in a country meant to be safe harbor from thugs and militias, they’ve been plucked from the streets, or their cars, or their classrooms, and sent to a hellhole, leaving behind families to fend for themselves. a little band of us here where i live have armed ourselves with whistles and courage, to stand up to the thugs. and to help in any meager way we can. one among our little band offered this possibility to help stock the grocery shelves at a free market in chicago’s mostly hispanic little village neighborhood, where the fear is rampant and the streets have been swept of their usual buzz. it felt mighty good to send off a grocery cart of simple sustenance. and, indeed, i felt the breath fill my lungs.

here’s what my neighbor wrote….

For those that are looking for an option to offer concrete support to Little Village families impacted by ICE…one of my [neighbor’s] dearest friends (Keri Krupp) is a school social worker at Little Village’s Zapata Academy, which serves 500 kids from pre-k to 8th grade and is in need of support for their free “store” Mercado Zapatista. The Mercado is completely reliant on donations and has become a source of support for many of Zapata’s families — while typically focused on winter apparel and toiletries, it is now also distributing food to families that have been hit by both the loss of income due to ICE and the disruption to SNAP benefits. Her stories are heartbreaking. You can quickly donate through by selecting items from this Amazon wishlist or by sending an Amazon gift card to her work email (kbkrupp@cps.edu).

https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/291BEA7WRUHZ9?ref_=wl_share

At a time when it can be hard to know where to best focus donations, [my neighbor] can personally vouch for Keri’s commitment to the Little Village community and prudent stewardship of Mercado Zapatista, which she began in 2024. Any donations, big or small, will make an immediate difference to Little Village children and their families!

and thank you for considering.

bless you all. what filled your lungs this week?

10 Comments

November 7, 2025

remedy against despair

sometimes, it’s just not so complicated.

how to survive in the modernday melee, i mean.

how not to get sucked into the cesspool, or the tarpit of utter despair.

there are flocks of us, bumbling around, looking down at our weathered, timeworn selves, our selves that are wrinkled or missing some parts, wondering what in tarnation little old me can do about this. all of this chaos, all of this cruelty, all of this jaw-dropping gilding and seizing of power, all of this thuggery, what in the heck can i do?

it’s pretty much the question that runs on auto-pilot through the spheres of my brain.

what oh what oh what?

i turn to the poets, i turn to the pacifists. this week i found myself in the pages of history. more and more i am drawn to the plain old truths of our not-yet-extinguished civilization.

as a species we’ve been cruel from the start, that’s a streak that runs in us. we’ve had so much darkness it makes me want to run for the hills. no wonder the desert elders of the third and fourth centuries did just that, ducked out in far-flung caves and barely ever came out. they just prayed and prayed, imagined God as their next-door neighbor and turned their humble selves into living, breathing prayer altars.

but, just as emphatically, there’ve always been those who turned the other cheek, who refused to partake in whatever the scourge of the age. who did not give up on the vision of radiance, of equal justice for all. there have always been those who heeded the words of the jew from bethlehem: blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, those who hunger for righteousness, blessed are the peacemakers. jesus didn’t even make it to ten. he cut off the list at eight. later on, he threw in “love as you would be loved,” which is actually a teaching he would have learned in the temple, leviticus 19:18, “love your neighbor as yourself.” (i hate to break it to christians, but we’ve no corner on that commandment, it’s as old as time, and core of nearly all world religions.)

it’s the revolutionaries, the radicals, the refuseniks who would not succumb, they’re the ones who might hold the clues: how to be a force against daily injustice when all you’ve got is your will and your hope and your deadset compass pointed at kindness, at mercy, at justice for all.

their point, the refuseniks, ever has been thus: we cannot decide that we’re not equipped. we cannot throw in the towel. the heroes of history usually don’t come with superman capes. it’s people like us, with a limp or a lisp, figuratively or literally, who might look in the mirror and decide, “i’m all i’ve got, so i’d best get to work.”

which brings us back to the cruelty and chaos du jour.

this week, beating back the latest bout of teeming futility and powerlessness, against the backdrop of scenes i’d not imagined emerging from the american landscape—federalized gangs knocking heads against pavement, crushing ribcages under the weight of full-body clutch holds, beaning clergy in the head with pepper balls, and most recently dragging a preschool teacher from her classroom in front of her gaggle of toddlers—i found myself once again on the prowl for what in the world little old me might do to push back against any of this, to counter the cloak of rampant despair.

and i found it—curiously, plainspokenly—in the introduction to a book of letters from prison, specifically the gdansk prison during poland’s communist takeover by the totalitarian regime that clamped down cruelly on every facet of daily life in the last decades of the 20th century.

adam michnik, an irrepressible political activist, is the writer of the letters, a lifelong dissident first arrested at 18 for partaking in the writing and dissemination of “an open letter to the party,” critical of the communist regime. he would become one of the leaders of the solidarity movement that in 1989 ended communist rule in poland, and went on to become editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, credited with elevating the newspaper to become “a sort of conscience of the New Poland.” he rightfully lays claim to a life spent provoking debate on democracy and human rights.

during that lifetime, punctuated by intervals of activism followed by imprisonment, again and again, michnik often found himself in jail cells where he forged his activism with pen and paper, his letters and essays smuggled out of prison, and widely distributed on the far side of the prison walls.

what i find especially notable about his essays, as i rail against blatant mis- and dis-information in our clickbait age, is that his essays were then and still now are considered models of balance and fairness. what drove him was a singular concern for “deepening his own and others’ understanding, and therefore he [could] not afford the luxury of distortion for partisan reasons.” (emphasis mine). oh, that we should emulate his restraint, seize his clear-eyed purpose.

while ours certainly isn’t a national moment that rises to the level of “organized evil” of poland’s totalitarian regime, it seems fair to say we’re witnessing “authoritarian adjacent” dictates and dramas, particularly in the demonization of the helpless, and the thuggery thrust viciously upon them.

and so, turning to even darker moments in history, we find our cues.

in the introduction of michnik’s letters from prison and other essays, the new yorker’s longtime foreign policy analyst, jonathan schell, captured michnik’s revolutionary counter-revolutionary approach.

he leads into it by first laying out the norm in mapping revolution, and illustrating how the poles turned it on its head, ultimately triumphantly: “the classic formula for revolution is first to seize power and then to use that power to do the good things you believe in. in the polish revolution, the order was reversed. it began to do the good things immediately, and only then turned its attention to the state. in a sort of political and moral version of the hedonist’s credo, ‘carpe diem,’ the opposition proceeded directly, and without postponement toward its goals. its simple but radical guiding principle . . .”

what comes next seems to me the wisest, most doable action we might take:

“Start doing the things you think should be done, and . . . start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in freedom of speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.”

do not succumb to the ways of the demonizers, the clickbaiters, the shills for distortion, deceit, and demagoguery.

put simply: love as you would be loved.

or, in the words of james baldwin: “the place in which i’ll fit will not exist until i make it.”

so, go make it.

how would you describe the world in which you pray to live?

9 Comments

October 3, 2025

hallowing the hollows

“the garden of eden with the fall of man” (ca. 1615):
Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Brueghel the Elder

i emerge here from a day of prayer, a day of poring over the sins of my soul, and the sins of us all collectively. it is a day that’s not easy to leave behind. certainly not this year.

Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, opened with the rabbi once again sharing shattering news. a horror in manchester, england, he told us, without details, had left more than one dead.

morning light streamed in.

i felt us all move in closer, a natural deeply human instinct to harbor each other. it’s those natural instincts that tend to get drowned out on ordinary days, days when it’s noisy, days when we’re so distracted we don’t pay attention to the sound of our breath, the warmth of our skin, the deeply human instinct to run toward, not away, from someone who’s hurting.

we live in a world so distant now from the original vision. from an edenic world where boughs were bent from the heaviness of their fruits, where the silence allowed for the chorus of chirring and chirping to rise from the underbrush, from the branches. in the beginning, in the genesis, after the cascade of wonders—light, darkness, seas and sky, dry land and waters, seed-bearing plants and fruits with seeds buried inside, two great lights in heaven’s vault, the demarcation of day and night, teeming waters and birds filling the air, wild beasts and slithering, down-on-the-ground ones—the one who’d imagined it all, the one we name God, God looked down and saw still a void. how would the garden be tilled? how would it be kept?

and so God made beings in God’s own image, so genesis tells us. and for a short flash of time, man and woman lived in peaceful accord. but temptation arose. and it all shattered and changed. eden was no longer. the man and the woman were banned.

and all these millennia later, we are a people plagued by temptation. temptation of power, of greed, of malice and evil, of hurtful whisper, and weapons of war.

we have fallen so far from the garden of peace and tranquility.

and so, on Yom Kippur, we atone. all world religions, as far as i know, hold confession at the core, are built on the knowing that we will go wrong, exercise evil, traffic in hate.

and so, through the day, over and over and over again, we confess. we confess in short form and long form. we confess and confess, each go at it grating closer and closer to the core.

against the backdrop of the world in which we are living, these are a few of the confessions we prayed:

“The ways we have wronged you by hardening our hearts; and the harm we have caused in Your world through careless speech.”

“The ways we have wronged You by giving in to our hostile impulses; and the harm we have caused in Your world through inflexibility and stubbornness.”

or this, one of the pleas to the Almighty and Merciful, Avinu Malkeinu:

“Avinu Malkeinu, halt the reign of those who cause pain and terror.”

so ardently we confess and we pray.

to enter the sanctuary, be it the one of a synagogue or the one under the heavens in my own backyard, is to submit to a paradigm other than the distortions of a world ruled by greed, and power, and envy, and lust.

in these past godawful years, when i can almost hear the walls of decency and democracy crumbling, i retreat more and more into the sanctuary. the voice to whom i answer is that of the Merciful, Benevolent God, a God who is gentle, and tender, a God who seeps into the deepest parts of me, the parts where i surrender, where i know my place is so, so small, and yet, whatever light i can bring to this world, whatever infinitesimal flickering flame, it matters. because we are not the only flame. we inch closer together when word comes, once again, of horror and chaos and evil upon evil. we are many, many flames. or we can be. if we so choose.

it is a mighty thing to stand and sit through a day when over and over we confess our sins, our evils, our hurt-making acts. we are a nation that could do with a day of atoning.

and i am blessed that i, a lifelong believer in God’s tender mercy, was asked to atone for the sins of my own and the sins of us all.

i enter quietly back into this shattered, and shattering world.

i will not extinguish my faint little flame.

what will be your flame this holy day?

i leave you with words of john lewis, the late great hero of civil rights and warrior for justice:

Every human personality is something sacred, something special. We don’t have a right, as another person or as a nation, to destroy that spark of divinity, that spark of humanity, that is made and created in the image of God.
—John Lewis

and should you care to be moved by one of the gentlest, fiercest spirits ever to walk among us, this beautiful interview, recorded just last week, of jane goodall, the great primatologist and anthropologist who died at 91 on wednesday. bless her, she was deep in her last book tour when her blessed heart beat its last.

i remember how, when there was a jane goodall special on national geographic, my mother would huddle us around the TV, for she was someone worthy, and i always found her a brilliant source of hope, kindness, an uncanny attunement with nature and nature’s creatures. i have prayed all my life to live to be a wise grace-filled woman like her…..wrinkles worn with dignity, hair whitened by the sun, wrapped in her shawl, at once wise and funny, of the moment and yet timeless. . . .

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August 22, 2025

acquiring acquaintances: another name for pen pals

it started because months, or maybe years, ago, i stumbled onto a poem that took my breath away. it was written by a poet i’d not known of, didn’t think i’d ever read. but the poem, titled “Nativity,” stayed with me, a poem that paints the first Christmas scene in strokes and shades that settled deep into my marrow, and forever more are the Christmas i imagine.

it’s a poem that lays the baby Jesus in a rough-sawn barn, the air pungent with animal. “the wind tugging at the shutters.” there is nothing gilded about it. and it was written, i knew right away, by someone at ease with being small, tucked off in a corner keeping watch. it was written, i could tell, by someone whose very veins course with humility, and understood a God who preached the same, a God who asks us to get about the business, the holy business, of loving as we would be loved without noise or bombast or folderol.

the poet’s name is kenneth steven.

it turns out he lives on an isle on the scottish west coast, a place where the wind might tug at shutters. and it turns out he is something of a polymath: a poet, a painter, a children’s book writer, a translator of great works. and, above all, something of a pilgrim, a pilgrim seeking the quiet beauties that punctuate the everyday. he calls them “atoms of delight.”

and he writes of pilgrimage: “the word is often used to describe the journey to a shrine or sanctuary in search of spiritual transformation, which is a meaning i acknowledge. but now pilgrimage has become a much bigger thing for me; it has gone far beyond that rather heavy and medieval sense of going on a journey to visit a holy site. why shouldn’t it be about a walk to a hill loch to listen to the impossibly beautiful singing of red-throated divers? why shouldn’t it be about a child running into the forest in the early morning to find the treasure they dreamed of? these are journeys of the heart, seeking the profoundly precious places where little miracles happen. and why shouldn’t it be about panentheism—the finding of God in all things?”

it’s not hard sometimes to recognize a kindred soul.

what is hard is to imagine finding yourself in conversation with such a kindred someone. but that’s what’s happened. kindness is the thing that opened the door, his kindness. in a world ruled by transaction, where fees are paid and contracts signed for any exchange of goods—be it words or bricks or lumber—kenneth steven lives otherwise.

i found that out not long ago, when, during the editing phase of my next book, i dove into the task called “permissions,” in which for any chunk of text—poetry or prose or lyrics to a song—beyond a certain measure, you must secure permissions from its author. this can be a costly exercise. and it is always one that makes me quiver, wondering what walls i’ll encounter, and what cold-shouldered hubris i might have to tiptoe through.

it’s that poem, “Nativity,” that’s stayed with me all these years. and i’d included the whole of it, eight lines, at the start of an essay that i hope to include in the book.

wondering if i was whistling into the wind, i sent off a proper letter, the digital kind, and shipped it cross the sea. i’d no idea if mr. kenneth steven would ever reply. but, lo and behold, come monday morning, there he was, tucked kindly in my mailbox. and more than generously writing: “of course you are more than welcome to use the poem. i’m sure you’ll mention where you found it.”

and thus, with the stroke of his generous heart, a friendship has unfolded. and a treasure trove of poetries have now brushed through me. and i am richer for this scottish friend who, as a boy, awoke one night at midnight, and hearing a great and ferocious wind, hurriedly dressed and left the house, where he climbed a hill in howling winds, before crossing through a field to reach his favorite tree, where he knew the horse chestnuts would be falling, and he was out to save them, to gather them up. “i felt given a whole world,” he writes in an essay about the midnight escapade. “it was about the autumn and the big winds, and the thrill of running up that long hill and entering the field at last at what felt like the middle of the night.” and the indescribable delight of knowing “that all this treasure was mine.” the treasure: a cloth bag of chestnuts shaken from the limbs, their deep and woody smell, orbs that looked as though they were made of shoe leather.

befriending him, he who writes me every day now, sometimes more than once a day, is magical. is akin to befriending any of the authors from my childhood who’ve long entranced me, drew me into storybook tableaus: tasha tudor; e.b. white; frances hodgson burnett, who wrote the 1911 children’s classic, the secret garden, a book that featured my holy trinity—an orphaned girl, a padlocked garden, and a robin redbreast that finds the key—and once prompted me to fake a fever so i could skip church one sunday to stay at home and turn its pages.

long ago, when i’d be asked if i’d ever want to write a book, i demurred, brushed away the thought. didn’t think i could hold a thought long enough to pen more than a few pages. i didn’t know, though, that the magic of a book comes in all the threads unspooled along the way. threads that carry me to places far and wide, and to souls i’d never otherwise know. but words, like little birds, or prairie seeds, catch on the wind and settle into fertile loam. and we are richer for them.

in much the way, my beloved chairs, through all the words and all the years, have become my dearest treasures.

bless you.

love, bam

have you a penpal in this digital, globe-crossing, email world? someone you’ve not met but who seems a certain friend?

i promised kenneth i would share word of his beautiful meditative podcast, Imagining Things, on the patreon platform. recorded in a studio that seems to be just behind his island home, you can sometimes hear the scottish winds blowing off the atlantic, and a bird or two not far away. (or maybe i’m imagining.) and of course he speaks in a scottish-soaked timbre, and in between reflections he shares poems that will make you hit rewind so you can listen once again, so breathtaking are the lines.

his latest book, one that should be landing on my front stoop within days, is Atlantic: Selected Poems of Faith. but i’m already deep into Atoms of Delight: Ten Pilgrimages in Nature, and Iona: New and Selected Poems.

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Category: blessings