blessings | pull up a chair

April 17, 2026

besotted and struck: a springtime emphatically poignant

i am besotted by the world. and i do not mean the world of humans. i speak, rather, of the song that fills the air, the perfume that wafts on breeze, and the lush lush green that spreads with a river’s insistence.

as the human inhabitants bombard, shatter, poison, crush, and bulldoze, the earth in her infinite wisdoms, her endless generosities, and incomprehensible beauties, repeats and repeats. tracing its choreography as old as time, minute by minute, our little orb turns toward the light of the great star. there it basks. and deep underground the stirring surges, evident in the leaf tips bulging by the hour, by the shocks and brushstrokes of color—of fuchsia and daffodil gold, of snow white and, my favorite, the dashes of cobalt blue—where before the world had been colorless, had been drab, a pastiche of dull brown and sooty and gray.

have you heard the intertwining parabolas of song saturating the start-of-day soundtrack? the high-pitched white-throated sparrow piercing the dawn, the cardinal awaiting his turn. northern house wren chattering, red-winged blackbird lurching to get a note in edgewise?

more than besotted though, i am struck. struck by the profundity with which creation speaks. the way it all but shakes us by the shoulders, calls out, pay heed. this is the endosperm of it all, this way of being, of unfolding, of filling the air and the lens with beauty abundant. with grace. offering bough for the bird’s nest, pushing up an earthly apothecary. it is a masterclass in profligate goodness, “love as you would be loved” spelled out in birdsong and bloom.

you need a short course in how to be generous? look to the viburnum who soon will be perfusing perfumes, catching you by the nose each time you waft by. perhaps a lesson in loving attention? train your eye on the nestlings and the mama robin who spends her every waking minute in search of the juiciest worm, flittering back and forth every two to three minutes, for a day’s-end tally of roughly 500 feedings.

this year, the contrast is starker than ever. the headlines and news reels are filled with rubble and gore. with vitriol and braggadocio. with ugly and uglier, day after day.

but still springtime unfolds. it’s as if this ancient, ancient text understands how thick-headed we earthly inhabitants are. we need the lectures, the lessons, again and again: herein is the paradigm. here are the beauties. here, the graces. you could inhabit the garden of earthly diversities, the narcissus alongside the spring beauty, the red bird sharing the branch with the sparrow.

“i will make it as plain and as clear as is possibly possible,” says the earth to the inattentive. “i will burst forth in such vibrancy you won’t look away. i will dial up the decibels, drown you in song that rises up from winged choristers. you needn’t break each other down, needn’t crush and pillage. needn’t spew hate. you are drowning the planet in the antithesis of Original Intent.”

Creation, i firmly contend, is the unabashed effusion of Godly delight. of a world we are meant to romp in, to love and love each other. that needn’t mean that we need to relish each and every one of us. but it does mean that maybe, just maybe, we look for and find the holy spark that animates us, each and every one of us. and we can make room for each other, not only in spite of but because of our differences, in this unruly paradisiacal garden that springs into joy, into improbable possibility, every quarter turn of the globe.

may peace and beauty be with you, may tender mercies abound. so says the whisper of earth spring after spring….

we’d be wise to listen, to heed.

what whispers did you hear in Creation this week? what lessons unfolded before your eyes or ears?

13 Comments

April 10, 2026

a world torn by two voices . . .

Earth rising over the lunar surface, *NASA image taken from the far side of the moon*

we live in surreal times. in a moment when we can look upon the planet from afar and all appears serene and blue and unscarred by borders and bombs, we know that here on the surface of that living, breathing orb it is anything but serene, unscarred.

we scroll through the daily census of dead and wounded. the numbers nearly always contain commas, for the suffering extends far beyond the hundreds columns. it’s bomb after bomb after targeted assassination. it’s little girls’ backpacks strewn, bloodied. it’s cries from tehran, from beirut, from kyiv.

the voices that bellow are of two ilk: those who threaten to blow a civilization into a confetti of death and destruction. to “end” it. alternatively, to blast it back to the stone age. call them the vipers. and then there is leo of chicago who will not relent, who calls a spade a deadly spade. who sees those spades for the lances of death that they are. who bores through the hypocrisy, who dares to preach that the God to whom he — and we, most of us — pray is a God who does not hear the prayers of those beseeching violence, who speak in the language of hatred.

this is a serious moment. as sobering as any i might have known, having been born not too, too long after the holocaust’s pall still cast its shadow. this is a conflagration on the planet. how surreal that as the world is on fire, the faraway space travelers cannot make out the strife. all they see is a blue orb floating amid the heavens. as it was meant to be by the one who imagined it into creation.

we humans are not new to evil. it has long streamed through our veins. the very purpose of religion, from the beginning, might have been to curb it. to dilute it. to turn the mothership in a new direction. away from a natural pull, the pull of destruction, of petty jealousies and sordid acts.

were i not a believer in a God of mercy, a God who preaches the beatitudes—be merciful, be humble, comfort the afflicted, seek and see the divinity in the outcast, the leper, the prostitute, yes even the tax collector—maybe i too would seek vengeance.

coming after decades of watching religions go awry, balloon into megachurches that preach the prosperity gospel, after decades of witnessing the horrors of priests who abused their flocks, of imagining a God weeping over all of it, here comes a moment, where the world stripped of the divine, a world ruled by avarice and gilded toilets is caving in on itself, i am not alone in hearing one brave voice rising over the din.

it is the collective voice of those who will not succumb to the demonic. who call for putting down guns, turning swords into plowshares.

those voices have ever been. across the timeline of history, there is a chain unbroken of pacifists. their volumes rise and fall. we need listen. tune our ears to their cry.

this all came rushing to me when i stumbled this week on a lament written some time in the first three centuries of the Common Era. it is a lament found in the writings of the platonic philosopher apuleius as a dialogue between teacher and student, between the ancient greek hermes trismegistus (a hellenistic figure drawn from the wisdom gods of the greek hermes and the egyptian thoth) and asclepius (the greco-roman god of medicine and the healing arts), illuminating a lament for what had become of egypt, a “land, which once was holy, a land which loved the gods, and wherein alone, in reward for her devotion, the gods deigned to sojourn upon earth, a land which was the teacher of mankind in holiness and piety, this land will go beyond all in cruel deeds.”

listen for the resonance with our own broken moment in time…as trismegistus cries out to his student, asclepius: “do you weep at this?”

O Egypt, Egypt, of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tale, which thine own children in time to come will not believe; nothing will be left but graven words, and only the stones will tell of thy piety. And in that day men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and of worship. And so religion, the greatest of all blessings, for there is nothing, nor has been, nor ever shall be, that can be deemed a greater boon, will be threatened with destruction; men will think it a burden, and will come to scorn it. They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure which he has built, this sum of good made up of things of many diverse forms, this instrument whereby the will of God operates in that which be has made, ungrudgingly favouring man’s welfare, this combination and accumulation of all the manifold things that can call forth the veneration, praise, and love of the beholder.

Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven ; the pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise; the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good. As to the soul, and the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain to immortality, as I have taught you, all this they will mock at, and will even persuade themselves that it is false. No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven and of the gods of heaven, will be heard or believed.

heed the ancient and timeless prophecy. our moment is now to bring our voices—shaky, sodden, hoarse from all our trying to be heard—to the cry of those who line up on the side of love, of mercy, of sowing the seeds of all that is good.

or else, weep without end.

what voices have called to you this week? and what’s made you weep?

9 Comments

March 6, 2026

lung by lung

it is a strange sisterhood. it comes in out-of-the-blue phone calls that, within a sentence, pull us both into perhaps the darkest corner of our lives. “do you have time to talk?” is sometimes the precede. sometimes not even that. yesterday i got the precede. the time before i did not. (yes, that’s two such calls within the space of a month.)

i dialed the number attached to the text, and the woman who answered, a woman i barely know, suddenly inhabited the very same place i know too well, will never forget. she’d found out, the day before, that she had stage 4 lung cancer. she said it so fast — and so plainly — i had to ask her to say that again. i wasn’t quite sure i had heard what she said, couldn’t possibly have heard what it seemed like she said. she sounded so matter-of-fact when she said it.

she said it again. the day before, she’d gone in for biopsies, two of them, both in her lungs, and woke up to the surgeon telling her it was cancer, and it was stage 4, a number that scythes like a death knell.

not even a whole day later, she was working the phones, searching for doctors who would dole out what amounts to the only possible hope: chemo that just might stave off the spread, just might dial down the madness of cancerous cells that divide and multiply dervishly, devilishly, and finally deathly.

she’d heard that i too know what it is to find out cancer’s been lurking without any warning. lurking in the lungs, specifically. lurking in the very bellows of where and how you breathe.

when cancer, any cancer, is the subject at hand, you don’t need to know much about the someone you’re calling. you just call. because inside the very dark chamber in which you are finding yourself, you reach for any semblance of light seeping in. and someone who might know a doctor is all the light you might need.

so she called. and in curious ways, she sounded quite numb. as if gathering the names of oncologists, and deciding where she’d go for her daily infusions of chemo, was not too different from shopping for just the right shoes. but then the hand-grenade sentences came. when she said, “surgery isn’t an option for me. it’s all over my lungs.” and, when the subject of five-year-survival rates came up, she said plainly: “i won’t live that long.” and in between those sentences she mentioned how much she loves her life, how much she’s loved her thirty years being married to the love of her life, how her girls are her everything. it’s the whole gamut, from gut-wrenching realism to the first seeds of mourning, all in one fell swoop. and she spoke all of it without shedding a tear.

i gave her the name of the doctor i love, the doctor who pulls her stool close whenever she talks to you, presses her knees against yours, all but cups your face in her hands. i opened the door to a chamber in my heart that seems to have moulded itself into a space for those who know, for those swept into a club no one wants to belong to. but once there, we are sealed as tightly and fiercely as humans are able to be. we muster our “fight.” we pray fiercely for each other. we ride each other’s highs and lows and the muddies all in between. we laugh with the darkest of humors. we sometimes speak in a shorthand. i don’t need you to tell me how desperately you don’t want to die, to leave the luscious life you call your own; i already know. me, neither.

we speak each other’s most foreign language.

these phone calls remind me how human we are. how, within mere breaths of beginning to talk, to tell our worst imaginable stories, we can sidle so close to each other, we can almost finish each other’s sentences. at the core, there is so very much about us that isn’t so one-of-a-kind.

we humans get scared. we humans sometimes get dealt the worst possible news, news that wants to shatter us. but then, pressed against the warmth of someone else’s breath, someone’s skin, someone’s voice, we remember we’re not wholly alone.

there is someone out there who travels a similar road. someone else has heard the death-knell sentences and picked up the pieces and carried on. because that’s what humans do—till the end.

and in that associative property (the back and forth of courage and fear, of questions and answers, of hope maybe just maybe flashing off in the distance) we find the pulse beat to carry us forward. not alone. but tucked tight in a cocoon that no one wants to inhabit.

i will always, always answer those calls, make those calls, chase down the answer to questions that come in those calls. inscribe those someones on the close-to-my-heart rolls. check in just often enough, or sometimes out of the blue. because that’s what sisterhoods do. and there’s a mysterious beauty here in the chamber where no one wants to be: the truth-telling is as clear and unfettered as any i know. we might be our very most human in the space and the time when we realize time is short — so short — and all the distraction is stripped away, and we are living as close to the holy nub as we can possibly be.

i am still grieving—that raw early stage when it’s never far from mind—two of those sisterly souls who dwelled in that most sacred space, right alongside me, right till the end. their end. barely a month ago. and i can all but feel them just the other side of this worldly existence. they live in me now. i think we are sealed in the holiest union. and it all begins with the worst story we might have ever been told: you have cancer.

what’s beyond that story, that door, though, is breathtakingly, beautifully rare: the human spirit in all its magnificence; a muddling of courage and truth, of seeing through a luminous lens, asking the most eternal of questions, and sometimes just plain finding the hilarity in the ridiculous twists and turns on cancer’s godawful road.

in uncanny, indescribable ways, i am so blessed to find myself in this rarest of rooms. a room where all is magnified, and illumined, and little goes without notice. most emphatically, the marvel of every last drop of being alive.

before i go, i found a poem this week, and another poet who will someday soon be the subject of the next installment of adopt-a-poet. i found her through anglican poet, priest, singer, songwriter, and hobbit lookalike, malcolm guite, who included this poem in his anthology for lent, titled word in the wilderness: a poem a day for lent and easter. the poet, kelly belmonte, who hails from upstate new york, is the creator and founder of All Nine, a creative collaborative. she explains the “nine” as “a reference to the nine sister muses of Greek mythology. These inspirational sisters represent multiple domains of creativity and intelligence, from epic poetry to science. For any vision to move from the inside of one person’s eyelids to the physical world where it can make a positive impact, it takes a collaborative effort across multiple disciplines and an openness to many sources of inspiration. Hence, all nine.”

her latest work, the mother of all words, came out last year, and is on my library list. belmonte claims as her poetic influences an eclectic list including Kobayashi Issa, R.M. Rilke, Mary Oliver, and Frank X. Gaspar.

i found myself stunned by the interplay of the quotidian here, and the easy reach within which we find God….

How I Talk to God

Coffee in one hand
leaning in to share, listen:
How I talk to God.

“Momma, you’re special.”
Three-year-old touches my cheek.
How God talks to me.

While driving I make
lists: done, do, hope, love, hate, try.
How I talk to God.

Above the highway
hawk: high, alone, free, focused.
How God talks to me.

Rash, impetuous
chatter, followed by silence:
How I talk to God.

First, second, third, fourth
chance to hear, then another:
How God talks to me.

Fetal position
under flannel sheets, weeping
How I talk to God.

Moonlight on pillow
tending to my open wounds
How God talks to me.

Pulling from my heap
of words, the ones that mean yes:
How I talk to God.

Infinite connects
with finite, without words:
How God talks to me.

how do you talk to God?

15 Comments

February 20, 2026

ashes to ashes…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ashes to ashes. dust to dust.

the time in between is our one holy chance.

how will we use it?

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

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

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

love, bam

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

8 Comments

February 6, 2026

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

lupercalia: purification rite of ancient rome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i needed no further prompting.

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

for instance:

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

next up: giggles.

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

a close look at life’s first laughs:

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

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

MIRACLES

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

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

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

+ Walt Whitman

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

where did you find light or levity this week?

8 Comments

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….

14 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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Category: blessings