books for the soul | pull up a chair

gulps of coffee fuel me this morning, groggy as i am from a near-crippling concoction of cough, cold, inhaling too much pollen, and the foolishness of staying up far too late to honor the last gasp of late night’s saving grace these past unfathomable years. i felt downright patriotic and duty-bound to stay awake and bid the nearly-midnight crew adieu.

after all, that late-night slot has all but saved me. over these long, long, oft-unbearable years, there’ve been so, so many days when the horrors and antics of washington have found me groping for the tonic of someone who might all but croon me a lullaby and tuck me tautly between the sheets—maybe, just maybe, chase away the monsters. someone who could bore into the core of the madness, call it out for what it is, and find a way to soothe our jangled, jagged nerves. or make us laugh before and as we wept about it.

first, they took away our brian williams, a gentle giant of old-school newscasting who, in the thick of years that straight off hit the skids with doomsday portraits of american carnage, then railroaded right along to ivermectin and bleach-in-our-veins prescriptions from the presidential podium, becalmed me at the 10 p.m. central-time slot. and now, they’ve snatched stephen right out from under us. the man could make me howl with glee at the mere cocking of his wicked eyebrow. and make me feel less a sinner for the dyspepsia the spewed inside me. “thou shalt not hate,” i repeat and repeat, trying oh-so-hard not to cross that God-drawn line.

so i stayed up. which my raggedy body says was stupid.

but, heck, i’d hoped my hero of the year—leo the fourteenth, Il Papa—might pop in, at least via vatican-city zoom. or some other heavenly-ordained teleportation.

all of which is to say, i should be curled asleep still. but the chair, the clarion call in my every friday morning for the last 1,018 fridays, stirred me from my slumber.

and all of which is to back boldly and clunkily into my preoccupation of the week: a book i can’t put down.

which is where we clear our throats, shake the sleep from our eyes, and dive in: this week’s musing . . .

in my backwards, upside-down, and oft off-kilter life’s syllabus, my self-guided and plenty-potholed quest to figure out a thing or two before signing off from this lifetime, my list of texts to absorb is (as you might surmise if you eyeballed the death-defying book stack beside my bed) dangerously, dauntingly, beyond measure.

pathetically, my ratio of books begun to books read through to the end is woefully skewed—conservatively hovering at roughly 1,000:1.

avid starter am i. resolutely failed finisher—guilty as charged.

rare is the book that holds me page after page, so enfolded in imagination or intellect i dare not distract myself with some other tome lazing around in one of the many, many stacks that punctuate this old house. thinking back across the last decade, annie dillard’s pilgrim at tinker creek was one. niall williams’ this is happiness, might have been the only other. a third is soon to be added to the triumphant short roster.

gilead, gosh darn it, has me held captive.

marilynne robinson’s 2004 pulitzer prize-winning “hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence” of a congregationalist minister, the reverend john ames, a late-in-life father who loves the quiet country life “from which he will soon part,” has me running up to my book-reading nook every chance i can snatch, and ferrying the dog-eared paperback hither and yon.

john ames is 76 when we meet him, long rooted in gilead, iowa, dwelling in the very parsonage in which he’s spent most of his many years, having grown up in that drafty, dreary house as his father—and grandfather—had both been ministers there in the “dogged little outpost” that is fictional gilead. straight off, we learn that ames, our protagonist, suffers from a failing heart, and believes his death is imminent. thus, he’s compelled to write a letter to his seven-year-old, late-born son (“the fruit,” as the new york times once put it, of ames’ recent marriage to a much younger woman).

ames’ first wife and baby daughter have died in childbirth, we learn, and so this son from a wholly unexpected late-in-life redemptive marriage is the singular focus of a father desperate to pack a lifetime of wisdom and lore into jottings and passages that stretch to 247 pages. written in episodic, diary-like entries, nearly stream of consciousness, unspooling generations of wisdoms and family stories, lest the son (whose name we never learn) be left with nothing of his father, it’s a book that leaves me gasping for its sublime beauties—both the literary and the theological.

it’s not every day i run across a tome of which it’s been said these things: “Robinson has composed a novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred). “One feels touched with grace just to read it.” (Washington Post). Mark O’Connell in The New Yorker wrote: “I have read and loved a lot of literature about religion and religious experience—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, the Bible—but it’s only with Robinson that I have actually felt what it must be like to live with a sense of the divine.”

no wonder i’ve slipped right in, and can’t bear to pull away. i too yearn to live that way, with a palpable sense of the divine, a God who brushes up against me—here, there, and anywhere.

in the very same way i’m drawn most deeply to poetry that comes at God not head-on but through the slant, the side window, so too with prose. what takes my breath away most, in just about any writing—fiction or non—is not when i’m klonked on the head but suddenly swept by a wind i feel but cannot see. “God-haunted,” the times put it. “bothered by God,” is how my friend joe the jesuit priest puts it. john ames’ “bothered” is my enlightenment.

truth is, i finally decided i had to read gilead because father joe (whose theology class, THEO 4300, “the question of God in a secular age,” i recently visited) admits when prodded that he has memorized nearly every word of it, can recite practically any passage from it. quite frankly, i was intrigued. flat-out curious. and i trust joe implicitly.

father joe, who wrote his doctoral dissertation at oxford on the theology and literature of robinson and virginia wolff, says robinson’s writing “reveals a deeply sacramental imagination.” in one of many essays he’s written about her, father joe argues that “robinson trains her readers in the discipline of spiritual attention. where is God’s grace operating in nature and in the ordinary ways humans love, disappoint and forgive one other?” father joe goes on to point out that “in her essay ‘Psalm 8,’ she writes, ‘i have spent my life watching not to see beyond the world,’ but ‘merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes… with all due respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.’ the miracle we await in Advent is not distant, but meets us in the messiness of our human relationships: Emmanu-el, God with us.”

spiritual attention, i suppose, is my core curriculum. urgently so. especially now, when the godless world works so very hard to pull me—pull us all—under its light-blocking curtain. (and when i so desperately need my late-night tonic, now pulled off the shelf.)

a deep dive into gilead, into robinson, was the surest balm i could find this week.

here’s just some of what i’ve pulled from my latest excursion into this well-upholstered rabbit hole. . .

here’s where we begin, the book’s first passage, john ames addresses his sweet little son:

and while plenty of lines have left me reaching for a vat of highlighter yellow, here’s but one:

describing his love for iowa’s landscape, ames writes: “I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.”

or the snippets of poetry posing as passing descriptions…

in one of ames’ passages, he sees his grandfather as “a wild-haired, one-eyed, scrawny old fellow with a crooked beard, like a paintbrush left to dry with lacquer in it.” or, describing him further, the old man seemed “stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn’t actually sleeping.”

when i step back and wonder why i spend so, so many hours of my life with my nose proverbially and literally stuck in a book, it’s to stumble across a line like this next one, one that just might set the mortar of the bricks that herringbone my path

ames recalls that “Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. ‘He will wipe the tears from all faces.’ It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.”

and there is good company in the gilead fan club:

barack obama, who awarded robinson a 2012 national humanities medal, counts gilead as one of his favorites. in september, 2015, in what’s been noted as “a reversal of journalistic convention,” the 44th president of these united states interviewed robinson on a stage in des moines, for the new york review of books, and told her:

I first picked up Gilead, one of your most wonderful books, here in Iowa. Because I was campaigning at the time, and there’s a lot of downtime when you’re driving between towns and when you get home late from campaigning. … And I’ve told you this—one of my favorite characters in fiction is a pastor in Gilead, Iowa, named John Ames, who is gracious and courtly and a little bit confused about how to reconcile his faith with all the various travails that his family goes through. And I was just—I just fell in love with the character, fell in love with the book …

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.” — Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

an excerpt, john ames (via robinson’s pen) writing of his church at dawn (pages 70-71):

It’s a plain old church and it could use a coat of paint. But in the dark times I used to walk over before sunrise just to sit there and watch the light come into that room. I don’t know how beautiful it might seem to anyone else. I felt much at peace those mornings, praying over very dreadful things sometimes — the Depression, the wars. There was a lot of misery for people around here, decades of it. But prayer brings peace, as I trust you know.

In those days, as I have said, I might spend most of a night reading. Then, if I woke up still in my armchair, and if the clock said four or five, I’d think how pleasant it was to walk through the streets in the dark and let myself into the church and watch dawn come in the sanctuary. I loved the sound of the latch lifting. The building has settled into itself so that when you walk down the aisle, you can hear it yielding to the burden of your weight. It’s a pleasanter sound than an echo would be, an obliging, accommodating sound. You have to be there alone to hear it. Maybe it can’t feel the weight of a child. But if it is still standing when you read this, and if you are not half a world away, sometime you might go there alone, just to see what I mean. After a while I did begin to wonder if I liked the church better with no people in it. . . .

In the old days I could walk down every single street, past every house, in about an hour. I’d try to remember the people who lived in each one, and whatever I knew about them, which was often quite a lot. . . . And I’d pray for them. And I’d imagine peace they didn’t expect and couldn’t account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams. Then I’d go into the church and pray some more and wait for daylight. I’ve often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.

Trees sound different at night, and they smell different too.

and here, robinson reading robinson…

where did you find balm this week?

11 Comments

January 30, 2026

end notes

for weeks now, i’ve been toiling on the latest iteration of the manuscript for a book in gestation*. and this week, i came to the writerly part known as the “end notes,” as in dotting every i, and crossing every t, to be certain all is as clean as clean could possibly be.

and, most of all, should anyone someday reading said book become curious about the source of this or that line, the author (that would be me in this case) must leave a perfectly followable trail of breadcrumbs through the woods, so that the curious someone can find exactly the spot where i, the author, once found those very words.

in other words, fastidiousness is not negotiable. it is a must. (and i might as well sleep with the chicago manual of style, 18th edition, under my pillow, for i consult it every other breath, at a minimum.)

per than manual’s strict instruction, and to be sure that every last page i cite is the exact page in the exact edition of each and every book in my notes, i have been skittering hither and yon to those temples of bookshelves known as public libraries.

i gather up books by the armload, and haul them off to a library table, where i dutifully record (in image and scribble) all pertinent info.

of all the books i’ve scooped up and returned to the shelves, there was one—and only one—that i chose to haul home once again. it called me to do what i’m not so adept at doing these days: to dilly and dally inside its pages. to read for the holy essence of it, not merely to cross off the last of the end notes (currently numbering 103).

the book i brought home was the gift: poems by hafiz the great sufi master, translated by daniel ladinsky. and it is exactly what it purports to be: a gift.

its poems, quite often, are short, not too taxing on the eyes or the brain. and yet, and yet, they do pack a wallop. concentratedly so.

in this era of emotional saturation, when every day seems to bring reams and volumes of terrible news, a droplet of wallop is just about all i can swallow.

but even before i got to the poems, it was the backstory of the sufi master that held me. (sufiism, in the west, is regarded as a form of islamic mysticism; its name is derived from the farsi word meaning “wisdom,” “purity,” or, curiously, “wool,” so drawn from the coarse woolen garments of wandering dervishes.)

hafiz, a persian poet of the 14th century, has been called “a poet for poets” by emerson, who wrote “he fears nothing. he sees too far; he sees throughout. . .” goethe enthused that hafiz “has inscribed undeniable truth indelibly,” and called him “mystically pure.”

such superlatives can get you in trouble, it seems. it’s estimated that 90 percent of his work was destroyed over the centuries by clerics and rulers who disapproved of what he wrote in his poems.

“hafiz was viewed as a great threat, a spiritual rebel, whose insights emancipate his readers from the clutches of those in power—those who exploit the innocent with insane religious propaganda. for hafiz reveals a God with a billion I.Q.—a God that would never cripple us with guilt or control us with fear.” so writes ladinsky in his preface.

it’s said that hafiz’s poetry can be read “as a record of a human being’s journey to perfect joy, perfect learning, and perfect love.”

that’s a journey for which i’ll buy a ticket.

here are a few stops (poems) you might find along the way:

the lessons from 14th-century persia: hold tight to each other, for that is love; allow the light to unfurl your beauty; every cell in all of us, in all creation, yearns for God—or however you name the Holy Being, the Author of Us All.

sustenance in small sips: more than plenty for this day.

what inspired you to hold on this week?

*the book in gestation, you might have read here earlier, though i’ve yet to officially unveil it, is for now titled When Evening Comes: An Urgent Call to Love (Brazos Books, Spring 2027), and it’s a book about being broken open (by whatever the cause) and discovering that in between the brokenness, amid the puzzle of shards, a light finds its way in. i’m currently on the third round of edits with the main editor, and soon will be moving to copy editing, and then production, when the boxes of books will land plop on my stoop. call me crazy (a redundant suggestion perhaps) but i tend to find the imperative fastidiousness of end notes an exercise as delightful, engrossing, and challenging as a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle. in this case, 103 pieces.

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January 9, 2026

keening.

the winds have been howling all night, a rushing, a roaring of air on amphetamines. sometimes the sound rises in pitch, almost a keening, the sound of a soul in mourning.

keening, a word that draws me half around the world to the banshees of that faraway island from which my people came (a good half of my people, actually, but it seems the half i’m rooted in). it’s a word that places me in a dark and damp room where a fire roars, and the people are circled in sorrow, cloaked in black woolen wraps. swaying and rocking, the sound that rises up is the sound that lives at the pit of us, the sound that rises when our heart or our soul is shattered. cracked wide open. it’s the ooze of anguish that comes without volition. keening sometimes comes without knowing. it just is. it’s primal. a reservoir so deep inside us it takes velocities of sorrow to tap into it, to draw from its well.

i might have keened once or twice, but i barely remember. both times someone had died, and it felt like part of me did as well. i remember the sound, remember i barely knew where it rose from, or that i’d had it inside.

the God who imagined us imagined so far beyond the imaginable. the God who imagined us gave us a sound, buried it deep, deep inside, where it awaits necessity. there are in our lives times when only that keening will do. that high pitched guttural whoosh that captures the unspeakable, a whoosh that rises and falls, traces the scale from basso, the animal roar, to mezzo soprano, up high where it’s piercing.

and why would the wind be keening?

look around.

listen.

don’t let us dull to the litany.

waking up to find we live in a pariah nation is one. but that’s almost too big for my head. i tend to operate in the finer grain. and the closest i came to keening this week was the news that the poet had been shot through the head.

what poet, you might ask?

the one in minnesota. the one whose first description i read was “37-year-old, mother of a six-year-old, award-winning poet.”

who shoots a poet? how often does the descriptor of a violent death include the word poet?

poets are porous. poets live in the world permeable to the little-noticed. poets process what’s breathtaking and put it, miraculously, to words. poets, the ones i love, the ones whose words put form and frame to unutterable parts of me, they’re among the most gentle-souled humans i’ve known.

renée good was a poet. a mother. and she died at 37, in the front seat of her maroon van we’ve all now watched over and over.

renée good, back when she went by the name renée nicole macklin, won the 2020 academy of american poets prize. that’s not a prize for a piker. that’s a real-deal prize, a trophy worth tucking on the highest shelf in your house. she won it for a poem curiously titled “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.” now, that might not be the first thing that stirs me to want to write a poem. but poets begin in curious places sometimes and take us into terrain where wisdom or epiphany comes.

when we become a nation where a poet is shot through the windshield, just minutes after dropping her six-year-old off at school, we need to ask who in the world we’ve become. it only becomes more twisted when we can see for ourselves how the scene unfolded, and the people in charge, the ones holding the guns, the ones not letting a doctor rush to the scene, tell us that we didn’t see what we saw.

i wonder how apt this headline would be: good is dead.

that would be the headline atop the poet’s obituary. rachel good, award-winning poet and mother of three, was shot through the head. by federal agents. who then refused to let a doctor rush to the front seat of her bloodied, bloodied minivan. and waited too many fading heartbeats before giving the okay to call 9-1-1.

no wonder the wind is keening.

no wonder the world is tapping into its most guttural cries.

not long before i’d found myself tripping over the violent death of rachel good, i’d been thinking deeply about poets. thinking about a breed of poets i’d likened to “a tribe of saintesses.” that’s a feminization of saint, an intentional genderizing, if you will, because the poets i’m most drawn to might technically, and in an old-time world, be coined poetesses, and because the ones to which i am most deeply drawn are ones who weave the sacred, even the liturgical, into the vernacular from which they write. because the saintesses to whom i am most drawn are the ones whose verse scans the divine, shimmers at the edge of the ineffable, catches me unaware, but grounds me in a certainty more certain than many a gospel, i turn to them for edification and plain old uplift of my weary soul.

i keep them in close reach.

sitting just beside me here at this old maple table are two such poet saints, the ones whose lines leave me gasping, my spine tingling as if something holy has just wafted by and through me. because it has.

here’s one. her name is kathleen hirsch, and this is from her mending prayer rugs (finishing line press, 2025). it’s the last stanza of her poem “prayer rugs” (emphasis mine):

I bend in blessing toward all that breathes
May each hour enlarge the pattern—
rose dawn, wind song, tender shoots of faith—
that I may see the weft of the hidden weaver.

or, also sitting right by my elbow, jan richardson’s how the stars get in your bones: a book of blessings (wanton gospeller press, 2025), i flip through pages and pluck just one, titled “the midwife’s prayer.” it begins:

Keep screaming, little baby girl.
Keep practicing using those lungs
and do not stop,
because hollering will help
to ease the shock
every time you go through
another birth.

the saintesses, i swear, speak from a godly vernacular. they see deeper than the rest of us, dwell deeper too. their gift is the gift taken away at Babel. while all the rest of us were stripped of the powers of universal understanding, the saintesses kept on. they speak words that speak to all of us—if we listen closely. if we trace our fingers across the lines they offer, sacramental lines, lines that lift off the page, lift us off the page and into the transcendent, where for just a moment we get to reside.

i don’t know the rest of rachel good’s poems. but i know she was a poet. and the silence where once she spun the words of the unspoken, the little-heard voice, that silence now is cacophonous.

and even the winds are keening.

you can read the whole of rachel good’s prize-winning fetal-pig poem here.

and here are the first few lines…

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
by Renée Nicole Macklin

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,
& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores
(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—
the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

keening in minnesota on the block where rachel good was killed

what shall we do to quell the need for keening? and what poets draw you into the depths of the Holy?

16 Comments

September 19, 2025

turning inward, turning back

these times call for pronounced postures, for intention. ultimately we want to reach out, to be the bridge, the peacemaker. or, maybe little more than one flickering flame amid the global shadow. but first, in aim of fortification, we turn in. it’s where we stoke the fire, clarify the vision, and maybe just maybe find the peace, the calm, from which to set forth.

i’d call myself a quietist. one of the ones who finds the solitude and silence a necessary interiority. it is the place of prayer, of wisdom seeking, reaching far beyond the bounds of life as i know it, and drawing in pole stars to point the way. more and more, i start to think i subscribe to the church of the bookshelf. an eclectic crowd of thinkers and seers, the holy well from which i draw.

the noise of the world is beyond cacophony these days. rafters are rattling, pots and pans are clanging. all of which pushes me into the cracks of the world, where i poke around endlessly, sniffing out wisdoms like a mouse after cheese. i’m intent.

this week i turn east, and i turn back in time. way back, and way east. east to india. back to the first century of the common era, roughly 55 CE.

epictetus, the unsung stoic, goes first. he was as unlikely a pole star as they might come: born a slave, a slave with a limp, he carved out 93 instructions, bound them as a book, slapped on a catchy title (the art of living), one that came with a wallop of staying power (we’re still seeking the art), and all these millennia later, we’re still turning its pages.

a marvelous philosopher and musician, a northern californian by the name of sharon lebell, back in 1995 took a crack at translating epictetus anew. her translation stuck, and it’s now considered a classic. i found epi’s wisdoms rather timeless, and in keeping with survival in tumultuous times.

here’s epictetus:

Caretake This Moment

Caretake this moment.
Immerse yourself in its particulars.
Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed.

Quit the evasions.
Stop giving yourself needless trouble.
It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.
You are not some disinterested bystander.
Exert yourself.

Respect your partnership with providence.
Ask yourself often, How may I perform this particular deed
such that it would be consistent with and acceptable to the divine will?
Heed the answer and get to work.

When your doors are shut and your room is dark you are not alone.
The will of nature is within you as your natural genius is within.
Listen to its importunings.
Follow its directives.

As concerns the art of living, the material is your own life.
No great thing is created suddenly.
There must be time.

Give your best and always be kind.

~ Epictetus ~
(Epictetus: The Art of Living a New Interpretation by Sharon Lebell.)

the next wise soul i bumped into this week was arundhati roy, the booker prize-winning novelist, who grew up and lives still in india; delhi specifically these days. she’s getting plenty of ink of late because her latest work, her first memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, has just been published. it’s an exploration of her complex relationship with her “iconic” and “extraordinary” mother, whom she describes as both “my shelter and my storm.”

roy’s 1997 novel, The God of Small Things, is what won her the booker prize for fiction, which in this mercenary worldly equates with that murkily-defined “success,” and its often evil twin, fame. roy, wise woman, wasn’t having it. she was not one to be deluded, or seduced, by such worldly measures. as she tells it she was keenly influenced by an uncle, a beloved uncle, who was one of india’s first rhodes scholars for his work in greek and roman mythology, but gave up his academic pursuits to start a pickle, jam, and curry-powder factory with his mother. and to build balsa-wood model airplanes in his basement.

not surprisingly, someone schooled in the shadow of such an uncle might have strong instincts on the “right” definition of success. and in a conversation with an old friend, arguing that “recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth,” she noted the friend’s eyebrow arching. skepticism, in full display. so roy did what any cocktail debater might do: she pulled the paper napkin out from under her drink, and a pen from her purse, and began to scribble.

what she wrote amounts to a gospel of success that belongs not on half-soggy paper, but a granite slab somewhere:

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

sometimes i think i’m a broken record, saying over and over—and over—such a few simple truths.

never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you.

seek joy in the saddest places.

never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple.

respect strength, never power.

above all, watch.

never look away.

love.

what inscription might you add to a granite wall of truths?

p.s. i hyperlinked to a marvelous interview with sharon lebell above (i love her whole story, how she was drawn to study philosophy, inspired by a neighbor with more books than she’d ever seen, and how she found those first classes in philosophy “exercises in obfuscation” — might that describe much of the noise here on planet Earth in the year 2025?). here is just one of the grafs from that interview you might find as delicious as i did….

“Epictetus drew me in particular because in the mid-1990s he was the unsung Stoic. People had heard of Marcus, of Seneca. No one, except the cognoscenti, had heard of Epictetus or could pronounce his name. I liked his humble background: he wasn’t an emperor or a big cheese. As a former slave with a limp, he was someone who wasn’t expected to have a voice, but he used his voice anyway. He was a relatable everyman trying to figure out best practices for getting through the day. Since I am female, this mattered a lot. Many philosophers invoke male experience as a stand-in for the universal human experience. Epictetus did not, of course, address females when he taught, but his teachings have an inclusive, of-the-people feel.”

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August 29, 2025

add this to your constellation of poetries

i’ve been on rooster time for weeks now, though there’s no rooster pecking about the nearby yards. the rooster resides in my little noggin where it cock-a-doodle-doos round about four, and i patiently wait till five. as if the nuns have granted permission and at last i can dash out from under the bedsheets and into the playground that is my kitchen table at that early early hour.

ostensibly i’m up to write, to think, to edit. and i do get to that. i always do. but first i soften into morning turning pages. in other words: i read.

it sometimes seems my mission here is morphing into something more along the lines of slipping poets under your noses; writers, too. any weavers of wonder i happen to happen upon. this week i happened upon an astronomer poet, a brilliant soul who died too soon at 39. she spent her life mesmerized by the heavens, and hers was the gift of reaching into the stars, scooping up a glug of moon, and giving us a taste.

her name was rebecca elson (1960-1999), a canadian-american who at 16 began her studies at smith college, and would go on to earn her PhD from the university of cambridge, somehow fitting in years at radcliffe college and harvard teaching creative writing as well as an expository writing course on science and ethics. at cambridge’s institute of astronomy she was awarded an isaac newton studentship, meaning they paid for her to be there. it’s where she died, amid a field of star embers, i do hope.

her posthumously-published slim volume of poetries and extracts from her notebooks is titled a responsibility to awe (carcanet press, 2001). that title alone is poetry, and tells you all you need to know. in four short words, some might argue, it lays out our holy purpose. our one assignment while we’re here on planet earth, that little orb floating amid a universe of burning flecks of star dust and helter-skelter sky litter (though there’s nothing remotely litter-ish in even one celestial orb, from jupiter to milky way, to the not-yet-named planet L 98-59 f (identified just last month!, the fifth such planet in a splotch of far-off space unpoetically named L 98-59, a system of “remarkably diverse worlds.” little f is orbiting so close to its star, it’s possible liquid water might exist there, the scientists tell us.)

back to rebecca, known to those who loved her as becky. soon as i read the words astronomer and poet coupled in a pair, i was drawn magnet-like to snatch up a copy of her awe-struck works. it’s considered a contemporary classic, in the world of poetries. and not a line of it disappoints. among the pages that left me awe-struck: an ode to discovering zero; another asking what if there were no moon? (her reply: “there would be no months / a still sea / no spring tides / no bright nights / occulations of the stars / no face / no moon songs / terror of eclipse / no place to stand / and watch the Earth rise.”)

a mind as facile and deep as one that imagines darkest night, scans heavens for answers to questions others never even think to ask, is a mind i want to enter. to add my footprints to the paths that have traversed it. as if, in poring over her way of seeing, i too might see more vividly.

that rebecca/becky died too young of a cruel cancer (isn’t every one a cruel one?) added but another element to my quest to know her by her words. her masterwork is considered her six-stanza poem, “antidotes to fear of death.” she begins (as only a star-studier might): “sometimes as an antidote / to fear of death / i eat the stars.”

from there, extracts from her notebooks follow, and we almost watch a mind at work. as she cobbles poetries, we see the words struck out, the finer ones she chose instead. we see, in a swatch titled “origins,” her change of mind, in the line “shaken in the dark soil ~~soul~~ of space.” soil, a richer word (more unexpected) than soul here. we see adjectives get ditched, as she pares and pares her lines. titles of poems are revised. it’s a nimble mind, exercising in the gym, and we are peering through the windows.

two years after elson’s death, the economist, in 2001, named responsibility to awe (her one published poetry volume, though she published 56 scientific papers in her short life) a “book of the year,” writing “with great poignancy, she shows us the world through the eyes of a human being faced by her finite time.”

the bulletin of the american astronomical society, in their roster of supernovae gone dark, described the breadth of elson’s scientific research, her work ranging from “a search for stars in the halo of our own galaxy to regions of rapid star formation halfway across the Universe. She set strong limits on the contribution normal stars could make to the Milky Way’s dark matter halo, using counts from the Hubble Deep Field to rule out a significant stellar component.”

maria popova, who first pointed me to the poet-astronomer, calls her poem “antidotes to fear of death,” a “stunning cosmic salve for our creaturely tremblings of the heart.” she recorded a recitation of it, set against the mournful strains of cello, for her 2020 “universe in verse” extravaganza, popova’s “annual charitable celebration of the science and splendor of nature through poetry.”

elson, whose book now rests beside me, belongs in that rare constellation, a favorite of mine, of those who study the cosmos and, side-by-side the formulae and theorems, see the poetry, and draw it forth: loren eiseley, lewis thomas, robin wall kimmerer. they and their ilk (there are more and more) hold a sacred space on my bookshelves. without them, there are volumes i’d not see, musics i’d not hear.

the back jacket of responsibility to awe says it best, describing elson’s work as “a book of poems and reflections by a scientist for whom poetry was a necessary aspect of her research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it, even as, having contracted terminal cancer (non-hodgkins lymphoma, diagnosed at 29), she confronted early death.” the text goes on to say that elson was an astronomer whose work took her “to the boundary of the visible and measurable.” isn’t that the space we’re all drawn to, meant to explore? isn’t that where theologians and mystics ply their minds? isn’t that where simple us might wonder too?

in the end, elson, like all who dare to ponder deep beyond the lunar surface, was “undeterred by knowing how little we can know.”

and thus we all now have our one assignment: to search undeterred for what we can. knowing there is majesty in the mystery, and beauty far beyond what we’ve yet glimpsed. our responsibility, of course, is always, always to awe.

where did you stumble into awe this week?

i’ll leave you with a page. . .

have a blessed, awe-filled week….

oh, i promised my dear friend wini i’d share this wonderment she is bringing to town (town being chicago, or the northern environs to be specific). wini is a poet, and she’s worked closely with, and had one of her poems judged “best in class” by the marvelous poet rosemerry wahtola trommer. wini, who makes things happen, invited her and now is inviting all of us for a day of poetries. part workshop, all wonder, it promises to be a day to remember. here are the details, courtesy of wini:

Come experience the gorgeousness of poet, teacher, and storyteller Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. This event is about more than just poetry; it’s a chance to listen to what is true in your heart and open to “The all of it — the Beauty and Sorrow.”

It is beyond lovely to be in-person with Rosemerry, and truly what a treat to sit in community again with like-minded people, and to uplift and celebrate each other’s beauty and light.

I hope you’ll join us. It would be so lovely to see you again.

When: Saturday, September 27, 9:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. (lunch included)
Where: Valley Lo Club, Glenview, IL
Details: Three different ticket prices are available.

Buy your ticket here

thank you, wini, for bringing this priceless gift…..

4 Comments

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.

10 Comments

June 27, 2025

incurably circuitous

my favorite reading nook in all the world. o’connell’s dairy farm in drumellihy, county clare

i tried. i truly did. it seems i’ve, well, failed. if failed is the verdict we choose to put to the determined effort to concentrate, to focus, to linearly follow page after page.

instead i am a jackrabbit of a reader. i cannot, for the life of me, trace a straight line. one minute i’m attempting ulysses, starting with an easy reader after traipsing the trail of leonard bloom through dublin. another minute i’ve decided pope francis’s slim collected works, against war: building a culture of peace, is the page i need to put to heart. then it’s onto raising hare, a love story so gentle i found it the perfectly prescribed balm in a week when bombs fell and mistruths fired right, left, and sideways.

i know full well that i set out to stick to one and only one tome till i—or summer—came to its end. etty hillesum was going to hold my attention. but my attention didn’t listen. it was distracted. as it so often is.

my irish poet penpal tadhg described rabbit holes, the literary divots i fall into, in charming irish terms not so long back. he makes every word he writes and utters sound poetic or profound, and he fails not here (his description of how it was that my last name leapt out and caught his attention during a morning’s meditation):

“Like the early Irish monks who doodled mystical nature poems on the margins of sacred manuscripts, I was distracted by the spelling of your name and wandered off, as those monks were wont to do (excuse the arrogant comparison), down a boreen (from Irish bóthairín, diminuitive of bóthar, meaning ‘road’, from the Irish ‘bó’, ‘cow’. A meandering pathway made by a cow).”

i am now—especially after strolling country lanes pocked with aftermath of bovine traipsing—inclined to consider my rabbit holes in more bucolic irish terms, and think of them as my boreens, meandering pathways made by my cow mind.

my boreen, in physical form, looks not bucolic at all. in fact, it’s rather a beehive of possible distraction, all piled and teetering hither and yon:

i cannot for the life of me go straight.

besides gulping down my friend tadhg’s glorious meditations on the stations of the cross, i found my nose deep in raising hare (see last week’s mention), and am tucking in my overnight bag practice of the presence, a glorious little tome of translations from one of my favorite saintly souls ever, brother lawrence, whom i think of as the patron saint of pots and pans, though in fact he’s more oft referred to as the friar of pots and pans, and ultimately the friar of amour (love). he’s the humble little monk who toiled fifty years in a monastery, forty of those in the steamy kitchen, and thirty as a sandal repairer (monks wear through their soles on the road to polishing their souls). he described himself, famously, as “a clumsy oaf who broke everything” in his early attempt at being a hermit, and then a footman. when at last he found the monastery at 74 rue de vaugirard, he found his peace and his place.

and in him, i find mine: the gentle, humble soul who finds grace and God in the most quotidian of daily tasks, and spends his hours in the company and comfort of the Author of It All. even in the steamy monastery kitchen.

what’s notable is that dear brother lawrence hated kitchen work, but in his biographer’s writings it’s told that he did it “with the greatest love possible.” and that his practice of the presence of God in the most ordinary of moments, stirring a kettle, pulling trays of bread from the oven, “grew like dew, or mist on mountains.”

the translation i’ve just found, by carmen acevedo butcher, is extraordinary in the fullest measure, and might be the soothingest read yet of this hot summer.

the little monk’s spiritual maxims, work gently, be humble and authentic, includes this boreen (meandering cow path, remember?) on the highest reach of the soul, writing that in true spiritual union:

“the soul is not asleep as in the other unions, but finds herself powerfully stirred. its activity is more intense than fire, and brighter than the sun when not obscured by cloud. we can, however, misunderstand this feeling, for it is not a simple expression of the heart, like saying, ‘my God, i love you with all my heart,’ or other similar words. no, it is an i don’t know what, a je ne sais quoi of the soul, a something indescribable, loving, and very simple, that carries the soul and nudges her to love, respect, and embrace God with a tenderness that cannot be expressed, and that only experience can conceive.”

to this indescribableness, i dive deep. turning page after page. in no particular order. but trusting i’ll find the grace i seek.

may your distractions, too, carry you to lofty heights and voluminous depths. what distracted you this week?

before i go, and scurry off to a writerly retreat at my dear friend katie’s on the lake, i am sending love without end to my beloved friend andrea whose birth we celebrate tomorrow, and who is closing the book on one fine chapter of her life on the same day. i love her dearly. her wit, her hilarity, her unconditional and undemanding love. she is like no other.

there are a few brother lawrence books out there, but the one i’ve just procured and cannot recommend more heartily is carmen acevedo butcher’s, from broadleaf books. you can find it here.

7 Comments

June 20, 2025

irish bath

annagh river at kildimo south, my ancestral land, as it flows toward the sea at spanish point

i don’t want to wash it off. instead, i am in that necessary liminal state of in-betweens, when a newfound knowing needs time and space and silence to seep in. when we’re wise to open wide our pores, to fill our lungs, to allow our synapses to affix to new neural pathways. to come to indelible understanding.

if that seems an odd way to describe an adventure, so be it. my days in ireland were so much more than a “trip,” a “vacation,” a “getaway”—banal descriptors for folderol and whimsy, with suitcase attached. instead, my days in dublin, cork, and county clare were something of a journey in its deepest form: a coming to know someone, some place, i’ve always known but not yet fully met. and that someone, in fact, was me. a deep-down part of me long stirring, long felt, but not yet seen in fine focus. as if untold parts of me longed to know from whence they came. and not just my affinity for cloudy days and wit and poetry. and why i feel the hand of God so profoundly in the morning’s mist, and the moonbeams’ amber glow.

or maybe it was propelled by a yearning never sated, a yearning my whole life long to know the people from whom i sprang. the grandmother whose stories have stirred me from the start. the father who spoke so little of his past, and whose answers to my questions died when he breathed his last in 1981.

maybe my search was a daughter’s reaching for the hem of her father’s cloak. to run my fingers along its nubby threads, to stitch in quilt squares where the cloth had worn too thin. maybe there is something of longed-for re-union in my diligent tracings of ancestral ties and tales. maybe my father is who i try still to reach.

and then there’s the radiant present, the crucible of time that amplifies the here and now, the intense knowing that each and every hour is a gift, and before it ends, i intend to magnify the time, to expand the boundaries of my heart, to leave tracings on the ones i love so that my imprint might not fade so quickly. so that some part of me forever lingers in the one place where it matters: their blessed hearts.

i remember, in the darkest turns of these past two years, and especially at the turning of my latest birthday, how deep the wish i made, when i closed my eyes and drew a deep, deep breath, one that filled my lung and a half. i wished with all my might for precious time with my boys, time huddled close, time punctuated with the percolations of laughter without end. time punctuated with the sort of silence that is sodden even its wordlessness, because you know each other so well, so adoringly, you’ve room for time inside the vault of your own thoughts.

my wishes, every one of them, came tumbling true in the trek we took these past eight days, returning to the homeland of my soul, my spirit, my way of being.

in that uncanny way we can reach across time, reach into a past that was not ours, i’ve long felt that tugging cord to my grandma anna mae, the kentucky schoolteacher whose papa, thadius shannon, hailed from the granite house at annagh bridge, in county clare, on the wedge of land squeezed between the confluence of the annagh and the kildimo rivers as they flow into the sea at spanish point.

to press my sole onto that soil, to walk the land and listen to the rush of water playing over rocks, to do so with my boys at my side, and my God shining down and through me, was to feel bathed and baptized in life as sweet as it allows.

it’s too soon, really, to step back and make sense of all of it, so at this just-home stage i’ve little but a mosaic of moments i’ll not forget, and which i’m scrambling to scribble onto the page in hopes of holding on for a good long while. among the litany i’m pressing to my heart, re-looping through the sleepless jet-lagged night, there are these:

awaking on a rain-sodden morning when the country lane was still puddled, and the branches dripping diamond-like droplets of morning drink, and stepping into the soundscape of magpie and rook and lowing cows and calves. the whir of the milking machines beginning to rumble before the roar.

arms that reached out to wrap me in the minute i knocked on the door and introduced myself as a long-lost cousin, no questions asked. the rounds of drink at the pub that night where we gathered to tell tales above the lilt of harp and fiddle. and the hilarity of the cousin who moaned, “oh jezus!” when i asked if they might have a prosecco. and when i leapt into the self-mockery right along with her, she continued on, “you’re in a pub in a wee town, jezus, what are ya thinkin’?” or words nearly to that effect.

harp and fiddle in the “snug” at friel’s pub in milltown malbay

driving down country lanes that turned like corkscrews (in fact one set of directions included the name “corkscrew hill,” and i feared dear blair’s heart might skip a beat or two, if not pause altogether), and threaded through ancient arbors where branches on each side of the road reached out to join hands.

the plates of food that arrived with herbs from the sea and tendrils of sweet pea, the butter from cows who sleep in the fields, under stars and moon each night and chew the sweet grasses by day, the fish you imagine leapt from streams just beyond the kitchen where little more than heat was put to flesh.

the hilarity and wit. of just about everyone. from the taxi drivers in dublin to the tattoed and multi-pierced fellow clearing away your luncheon plates.

the charms of signs like: “matchmaking goat farm.” do they matchmake goats or give you a choice? a mate or a goat, your pick. (photo to come!)

the english food market in cork, a veritable labyrinth of fresh-from-the-earth-and-sea delicious. a butter chicken pie in a crust so flaky the only apt desciption, according to what i witnessed in the expressions of my boys, might be (excuse my language) “orgasmically delicous.”

a whole museum that heralds words, and language, poetry and wit, the Museum of Literature Ireland, where Copy Number One of Ulysses basks under glass, and whole rooms are filled with epigraph upon epigraph, one of those rare places on the globe where human language and its infinite configurations are held up as priceless treasure.

the straight-from-a-storybook propietor of the Dublin pharmacy, Sweny, where on page 88 of Ulysses, in the chapter “Lotus Eaters,” Leopold Bloom buys his lemon soap. the drippingly elegant gent who, upon barely-whispered request, broke into Gaelic song while sipping from his vat of burgundy wine on the eve of Bloomsday.

i’ll turn it over here to a bit of Joyce and his telling of Sweny’s:

“The chemist turned back page after page. Sandy shrivelled smell he seems to have. Shrunken skull. And old. Quest for the philosopher’s stone. The alchemists. Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character. Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants. All his alabaster lilypots. Mortar and pestle.”

the bookseller Séan in Milltown Malbay, the town from which my people hail, whose shelves near collapsed under the weight of thousands upon thousands of tomes, with that telltale musty smell of words embalmed in ancient ink, and dusts of time a welcome attribute.

the countless times we heard the sympathies for us pitiable americans who at the moment seem to find ourselves under the rule of the “feckin ijeet.” eye rolls every time only served to emphasize the point. one cousin told us they keep keen eye on news from america as if it’s real-time soap opera leaping from the daily news.

the infinitely comforting knowing that 45 years after my first and only other trek to the land of forty shades of green, it’s truly not too changed. sure, there are homes built bigger and sturdier than i’d seen before, but ancient thatched roofs are not a rarity, stone walls still scythe the hillsides, a geometric grid that bespeaks hard labor never shirked and an undying reliance on the old ways, and town centres present row after row of storefronts in kaleidoscopic colors, no pink too pink, no purple or orange too vivid. as one new friend, a poet and old irish professor, told us: in a land so gray, a language rife with wit, and a townscape of vivid palate is but necessity.

my friend Tadhg Ó Dúshláine, poet, writer, professor of Irish

and i shall let my poet and professor friend tadhg close us out here with these words sent to me upon our arrival home….

It’s just after 8.00 a.m. here in West Kerry, as I look out at the sun rising over the top of Mount Brandon, the holy mountain of the Navigator, across the bay of Smerwick Harbour (google Battle of Smerwick). The ebb and flow of the sea and the steadfast reassurance of the mountain reminds us that the flux, change, coming and going, restlessness, which is part of the human condition, is reflected in the sea; just as our eternal destiny is represented by the mountain, to which we lift up our eyes, in the awesome wonder of faith and hope. At times like this I embrace Isaiah’s vision: ‘… and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares’, le cúnamh Dé.

Bíodh lá maith agat agus fan slán.

Tadhg.

may you too take the necessary journeys of your heart and soul.

while away, i got notice from my little library that a book i’d requested was waiting on the “hold shelf,” and before i got back in the door, i began to read. it is so fine a read, i am leaving it here on the table should you be poking around for a summer wonder. a new read: raising hare: a memoir, by chloe dalton, described as “a moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare.”

and whilst in the little town of milltown malbay (pop. 921), from where my people hail, we stumbled into Seán’s Bookshop, an emporium of well-read books all but falling off the shelves, and curated by a bookseller with twinkle in his eye, and tales to tell till midnight sundown. there, i plucked a tome from a poet i’ve read too sparsely till now. the book, rapture, by carol ann duffy, winner of the 2005 t.s. eliot prize, is aptly described (per the irish times): “brilliant, beautiful, and heart-aching.” here’s but one of its beauties:

p.s. happy blessed birthday this sunday to my most beloved firstborn, and law professor, will. soon to be teaching within a morning’s drive away, at the university of notre dame law school, another dream come true, prayer answered, and holy wonder for all time.

sweet will with one of ireland’s top barristers, brendan grehan, who shared his silks and wig for the occasion.

what journeys home have called to you, those taken or not yet taken?

and may the full sunlight of the solstice warm you and bring radiance to your soul….

15 Comments

May 23, 2025

finishing school

i suffer from a common ailment. especially among a certain breed of bibliophile. i don’t finish. i start, enthusiasms drawing me in like ink to a blotter. pages are turned. pens pulled forth and margins scribbled with scrawl. and then another seductress comes along. another delectable enticement: author. idea. or merely a title.

and it happens all over again.

i’m talking books, of course. and my long-held habit of starting and stopping.

start. stop. rinse. repeat.

crack open the binding, turn pages, ink it all up. add to the pile. the towering, toppling, could-knock-me-out-if-it-fell pile of books.

there’s a name for the ailment: tsundoku. (積ん読)

it’s the japanese word meaning, quite literally, “reading pile.” nowhere in the definition—“the phenomenon of accumulating books but not reading them”—would you find evidence of the lethal nature of said phenomenon (ten books falling on your nose will leave a dent). nor the drip-drip-drip of guilt that accumulates every time one sashays past said pile and fails to move forward in a page-turning way.

so i’ve hatched a plan, an antidote to what ails me. i call it finishing school. i shall, in the summer months ahead, the months when the sun is strong and summer sounds abound, commit to a single purpose: one by one tracking my way toward the last sentence of at least some of the many books piled on my nightstand, my reading nook, my writing room floor, and most any other horizontal plane sturdy enough to hold a vertical biblio-ascension.

by virtue of this determination to see literary arcs through to the end, i shall be relieving all of you of the task of checking in on the chair to see what’s astir. i am intending to post mostly what leaps off the pages, as i plod along through plots, poetries, and otherwise paradisiacal paragraphs.

i envision something of a commonplace summer reading adventure, in which we all can chime in with any ol’ ‘graph or line that makes your heart thump, or your eyes fill with tears.

my summer’s focus will be more reading than writing, at least here.

the writing portion of my summer will apparently have me bent over the keyboard tapping out pages for a new project i’m not yet free to chat about. there’s an end-of-summer deadline, i do believe, so i’ll be burning up the keys to make that happen. and my refueling time will be spent deeply in reading. in finishing, specifically.

i plan to officially begin my finishing school with a book that’s tugged at me for years, one i started and loved, and truly need to wade deeper into. it’s etty hillesum: an interrupted life and letters from westerbork. begun in 1941, nine months after the netherlands fell to hitler, it’s the epistolary journal of a young dutch jewish woman who traces the darkening shadow of the nazi presence in her homeland as well as her own moral awakening before her death at auschwitz in november of 1943. it seems as essential a book in my stack as any there is. and i’m committing to etty.

back in 1986, in a review of the book in the new york times, michiko kakutani wrote this:

“All Holocaust writings, of course, must deal with the inadequacy of words in the face of events that defy the imagination, but while Miss Hillesum frequently speaks of her inability to convey the awful magnitude of events around her, she proves herself a most eloquent witness to history—a witness whose grave yet shining testimony attests to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of incalculable odds.”

it seems a book for this moment.

and even though the official starting bell hasn’t chimed, i tiptoed into my project this week by reading start-to-end not one but two magnificent poetry collections: water, by rumi, translated from the farsi by haleh liza gafori (new york review book classics), the second volume of gafori’s translations of the thirteenth-century persian poet (the first one, unfinished but in my pile, of course, was gold, acclaimed for its fluid rendering of rumi’s lyric ecstasies). water’s essence is Love, capital L, gafori writes in her introduction, in which she claims: “Love is a 360-degree embrace of creation, a compassionate acceptance of what it…Love is our unobscured essence, at the root of the root of all creation…Above all, Love is a practice.”

and but one line that took my breath away in the poems themselves, was this: “Come or go, Love told me, / I am here, closer to you than the vein in your neck.”

and the second collection of poems i gulped down, start to finish not once but twice, was a book i bumped into quite by accident and whose author immediately swooped into the inner circle of kindred spirits. it’s titled mending prayer rugs, poems by kathleen hirsch (finishing line press), and this collection mines the sacred amid the quotidian, with a particular focus on women of prayer, women whose wisdom is hard-won, be they women from the Bible, craftswomen, workers, wanderers or women we recognize from among our own generations.

in her opening poem, “prayer rug,” hirsch (a longtime journalist and spiritual director) writes in the voice of a woman i imagine with gnarled knuckles and fading eyesight, the cost of a lifetime spent pulling needle and thread through the tatters of prayer rugs for those who prostrate in prayer: “I bend in blessing toward all that breathes: / May each hour enlarge the pattern— / rose dawn, wind song, tender shoot of faith— / that I may see the weft of the hidden weaver.”

the weft of the hidden weaver. another name for the Unnameable One. it is the metaphors of poetry that catch the breath in our throats, and frame our seeing anew.

lines such as this, a line that had me choking back tears in a poem titled, “in the end”: “Kiss the light / before it dies / leave those you love / the heirlooms of your passion, your gratitude, your tears.”

i envision a magical summer.

straight through to the end.

will you read along?

a subtly transgressive little poem from the bard of the bluegrass state:

The Hidden Singer

The gods are less for their love of praise.
Above and below them all is a spirit that needs nothing
but its own wholeness, its health and ours.
It has made all things by dividing itself.
It will be whole again.
To its joy we come together –
the seer and the seen, the eater and the eaten,
the lover and the loved.
In our joining it knows itself. It is with us then,
not as the gods whose names crest in unearthly fire,
but as a little bird hidden in the leaves
who sings quietly and waits, and sings.

+ Wendell Berry

p.s. a bit more on tsundoku: The term combines “tsunde-oku” (積んでおく), meaning “to pile up ready for later and leave,” with “dokusho” (読書), meaning “reading books”.

a note: i’m sensing we all need to shake off some of the routines of our lives that begin to feel too confining, and i don’t ever want the chair to feel that way. so my intention is to be a little bit looser about it, but still to leave faint tracings here on the table, should you happen by. summer for me has long been synonymous with reading, and thus a reading project. feel free to bring your favorites.

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March 21, 2025

spring might be sprung, but i’m not springing

they say it’s spring out there. celestial lines were crossed in the wee, wee hours of yesterday, and, for a flash there, light and shadow fell in equal measure.

i don’t feel the light though. not in sync with springtime’s beckoning. i’m inclined still to hunker down in winter’s shadow.

for reasons i can’t quite fathom, i’m not ready this time ’round for the seasonal advance. i still feel wintry in my bones. the light change is too abrupt for me, too ice-white for me. my inner metronome is far too slow for the prestissimo that’s rising. i don’t mind the cardinal’s vernal song, though, rung out from treetops high, and piercing through still-frigid air. but i’m not seasonally adjusted. i’m lagging at least two lopes behind.

i can’t tell if it’s that my winter felt circumvented. or that i’m wishing for all of time to freeze in place. since the world is rather dire these days, that cannot be a wise solution. in that regard, i’ll take time in double measure. may we all wake up on the morning of eight november, 2028, with a whole new glimmer in our eyes. and the present firmly in the past.

i’m feeling somewhat stuck. hardly welcoming of burgeoning to come. and that’s a most peculiar state for me.

might the whole universe be toppled on its head, upside down and inside out?

the one sure sign that spring is here is that when i awoke, just hours after equinox, the world i saw was dumped with snow. which in these parts is something of a rite of spring. tulips rise, and snowflakes fall. my mother swears she knows it’s spring when she slides on her winter boots and brushes all the glops of snow off her daffydills.

no wonder we of the four-quarter year take spring in slow, uncertain sips. there is no fine delineation, as if the calendar and earth set their clocks in synchronous coordination.

on a day when snows fell in glops, and then proceeded to melt in same-sized gloppings, and on the day when headlines kept insisting the springtime was upon us, i heard a thump at my door, and therein found prescriptive for my seasonal laggings.

there, in a plain brown box, lay a book i’d been awaiting. my friend chelsea steinauer-scudder, as intelligent and beautiful a writer as could be, became a mother back when she and i were reading books and writing in the zoom rooms that covid carved. i’d first read chelsea in the pages of emergence magazine, a wunder site (online and print magazine, as well as creative production studio) that probes the depths of ecology, culture, and spirituality, and where she was a writer and editor for five years. when i saw she’d be leading reading circles (braiding sweetgrass, among them) and ones for the craft of nature writing, i signed up, and cemented myself to what would otherwise have been a front-row seat.

chelsea grew up on the great plains of oklahoma and the sandhills prairie of nebraska, where for a time her papa researched bison, fire, and native plant communities, so she comes to her native landscape––language enfolding the sanctity of earth––with what seems an effortless fluency, as if she grew up breathing it. which, of course, she did. and then she went on to harvard divinity school, where she earned a masters in theological studies, and ever since she’s been writing sumptuously, focusing her work, in her words, “on the confluence of relationship to place with experiences of the sacred.”

her first book, Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling (Broadleaf Books), is what brought the thud to my front stoop. it’s due out april 8, but my copy landed yesterday. and it might be the cure i needed to lull me into spring.

a.) it gives me excuse to curl under a blanket for a day or two, and b.) here’s what i’m about to bathe in, passages such as this:

“I wish to invite you into a kind of mothering that is wild and porous. The kind that draws blood, that loves and fears, rejoices and doubts, that exposes where we are most deeply vulnerable and from there stretches us into what is beyond us. I mean the kind of mothering that works within uncertainty and mystery. The kind that leaves soil beneath our fingernails and seeds in our hair.”

she writes about mothering and being mothered by places. ecological mothering. she defines ecological motherhood as: a shared, place-based responsibility to nurture and support human and more-than-human life. she writes of the karmic cycle of rebirth, a subject aptly plucked from the vernal syllabus. she writes of the silent flight of barn owls, of nursing and endangered right whales, of real and imagined forests, eroding salt marshes, and newly planted gardens.

she writes that the protagonists of these stories have been teaching her facets of mothering (a verb that she, like me, insists is not tied to gender nor obstetrics). those facets belong to us all, no matter our life’s work: “language, belonging, entanglement, community, edge work, homemaking, and how to think about the future.”

my friend chelsea just might nudge me over my springtime bump, and land me softly on the vernal side….

as i await the vernal skip in my own heart, i scan the literary landscape for those others who, along with chelsea, might nudge me there. and no surprise, i turn to two favorites, the great naturalist and writer, aldo leopold, and the poet mary oliver, who drew the sacred from her every path and passage.

“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.”
aldo leopold

North Country

In the north country now it is spring and there
   is a certain celebration. The thrush
has come home. He is shy and likes the
   evening best, also the hour just before
morning; in that blue and gritty light he
   climbs to his branch, or smoothly
sails there. It is okay to know only
   one song if it is this one. Hear it
rise and fall; the very elements of your soul
   shiver nicely. What would spring be
without it? Mostly frogs. But don’t worry, he

arrives, year after year, humble and obedient
   and gorgeous. You listen and you know
you could live a better life than you do, be
   softer, kinder. And maybe this year you will
be able to do it. Hear how his voice
   rises and falls. There is no way to be
sufficiently grateful for the gifts we are
   given, no way to speak the Lord’s name
often enough, though we do try, and

especially now, as that dappled breast
breathes in the pines and heaven’s
windows in the north country, now spring has come,
are opened wide.

––Mary Oliver

a little peek at what a few other authors have to say of *Mother, Creature, Kin.* may i call your attention to the one who writes that this beautiful book belongs in the company of works by Ursula LeGuin, Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, and Robin Kimmerer, to name a constellation of the highest-reaching lights…

are you finding yourself in springlike mode, and what sights and sounds and scents are stirring you there?

9 Comments

pull up a chair

Category: books for the soul

May 22, 2026

the balm in gilead