giving thanks | pull up a chair

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.

24 Comments

November 28, 2025

spill-over gratitude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ditto the nice people who made the gravy.

Ditto the very nice people who smoked the turkey!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a forever favorite poem…..

Small Kindnesses

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 Comments

November 29, 2024

sated with room for more…

it’s the morning after. the floor by the stove is splattered with something we know was delicious (it’s what happens when a kid who works in a michelin-star kitchen takes to the skillet and starts flipping the beans from pan to air to pan again, with aerial cartwheels in between). the silver and plates still need to be tucked away for their long winter’s rest. the refrigerator shelves are groaning. but the counter is clean, the coffee is on, and there are four more hours till the TSA beckons Boy No. 1, and his plane takes to the sky.

i am as sated as a girl could possibly be. but insatiable always when it comes to time with people i love. our table was full, the fire was roaring, and the house was all but decibly quaking (the requisite fire alarm sounded, football whistles were blowing, aretha was crooning straight through it all, and 11 of us were firing words in every direction). it was perfect. and perfectly loud.

some years back, i counted my way through the blessings of a day. and this year, as with the currier & ives thanksgiving plates, i’m hauling it out of safe-keeping, for one more round of service.

i’ve even more thanks to add to this year, beginning and ending with being right here. holding tight to the hands of the peoples i love. and falling against the very broad chest of the boys who i birthed some years ago. their heartbeats pressed to my ear will be the song that carries me forward through the adventures ahead.

here’s my centenary of blessing…

enchanted by celtic and jewish and ignatian understanding that we are called to anoint the holy hours of our every day with blessing — 100 blessings precisely, in the case of the jews — i decided to unspool my own centenary of thanks across the arc of a day.

in this season of bountiful thanks, as we gather roots from the ground, and fowl from the field, i march through time, sewing blessing into the whole cloth of my day. (it’s a might bit long, so you might want to take this in doses, a swallow here, another there. forgive me for counting clear to 100…)

a centenary of blessing, of deep and undying Thank You…

In the liminal landscape between asleep and awake, thank you, Holy One, for heart still beating, for breath, for first thought, the one that tickles us into consciousness. Thank you for darkness before dawn, morning after morning a reawakening to the metaphor, the truth, that in our darkest hour we might hold on just one more minute, for surely the stars will dim, and horizon’s edge will be doused in tourmaline and tangerine, and finally radiant gold. (4)

Thank you, by the way, for celestial paint set.

Thank you for bed, and blanket. Thank you for the one I love who lies beside me, whose breathing I know by heart. Thank you for the lump that’s warm, that’s there when I reach across sheets in the night, in the morning. Thank you for deepening love and the long winding road that brought him to me, to my heart.

Thank you for the dawn itself, that sacred cloak of in-between, when crescent moon dangles just above, but night gives way to morning’s light, and heaven’s dome, at the seam of earth and sky, soaks up scant threads of all-absorbent amber rose. Thank you for the stillest hour when all that moves is barest breeze that rustles leaves, and far off, the stirrings of the lake that never cease. (13)

Thank you for this old house, with arthritic floor boards, ones that creak at just the same juncture, with just the same footfall. Thank you for kitchen, and heat that is cranked. Thank you for whiny old cat there at the door. Thank you for coffee beans and hissing pot, and the old chipped mug that fits snug in my palms. (20)

Dear Maker of All That’s Blessed, thank you for the sound of those footsteps clomping onto the floorboards above, and the certitude that — so far this day — all is well. Thank you for shower, hot and pulsing and shaking off sleepy-eyed resistance to standing upright.

Thank you for porridge I stir at the cookstove. Thank you for the sustenance I dollop in spoonfuls, the alchemy of cooking for those we fuel for the day. Thank you for faith in the vespers unfurled, in between handfuls of raisins and walnuts and jewel-toned dried fruits, the ones we toss with abandon into the bubbling pot.

Thank you for clementines, and sugary cinnamon. Thank you for butter, slathered and melted. Thank you for school bus drivers who wait. Thank you for the click of the door when at last the morning rush is over, is ended, and no one is reaching for car keys, muttering under her breath.

Thank you, Blanketer of Wonder, for the quiet stitched into the morning’s hours, the quiet so thick I can drink in the tick and the tock of a grandfather’s clock. And the squawk of the bluejay, and the chatter of sparrows. (35)

Thank you for work to be done. Thank you for dishes piled in the sink, whose scrubbing and rinsing gives me a moment to think, to ponder the day. Thank you for typewriter keys who call me, and fingers that play on the alphabet rows. Thank you for sentences that write themselves, and words that are birthed from deep down inside.

Thank you for wisdom, the sort that comes in unexpected flashes, when you only know you’ve found it as you feel your heart go thumpety-thump, and you sit bolt upright, or feel the goosebumps sprout up and down unsuspecting flesh. That wisdom might come reading along the pages of news, or in a poem slipped under your transom, or from a stranger passing by. Plenty often, it comes through the holy gospel of a wonder child, as you catch one last phrase tossed over a shoulder at the schoolhouse door.

Thank you for all that’s poetry — wisdom-steeped or just plain beautiful, breath-taking. And thank you for Gospel of any brand — be it birthed from holy child, everyday saint, or even the so-called kook who stands on the street corner, proclaiming through a megaphone.

Thank you, yes, for telephones, for that rare sound of a voice that nestles against the tenderest heart. That, within the first breath of the very first syllable, brings comfort, collapses miles and aloneness, amplifies the hours absorbed in coming to this holy bond of deep knowing each other, inside and through.

Thank you even for the bits of news — of whatever ilk, good or bad or nasty — that percolate the hours of each day, make one slice of time so vastly different from the next, stitch drama to the script of life, offer us the chance to absorb each and every frame from an angle never before perceived. (45)

Thank you, most of all, for the deep down knowing that you, Holy Depth and Gentleness, never leave me adrift. Never let my quakings take me down. Ever bring me light, and tender touches. Ever hold me up, against the chilling winds. And bring me to communion with all that’s glorious and bountiful in this rugged, rugged landscape.

I might be among the few who salute the cloudy skies of November on my long list of thanks. Ah, but those angora gray skies, they comfort me, harbor me. I’ll take the somnolence, the introspection of a gray day any day. So thank you for cloudy and gray.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how thankful I am for hearts that continue to tick, day in and day out, despite the trials we toss their way, as we worry and fret, then, without notice, shriek in deep joy and excitement. Poor ol’ heart, the one that landed in me anyway, it might not have realized it was signed on for a roller-coaster ride of such seismic proportion.

Speaking of ticking, thank you for the schoolhouse clock that does just that, minute by minute, hour upon hour, heartbeat against the wall.

Thank you, too, for windows. And for the flutterings and flashes just beyond the glass, as clouds of gentle creatures take off and land, from sky to limb and back again — each time, lifting just a little bit of my soul.

Thank you for doors, the ones that let in unexpected someones, someones we love. And keep out the wind and the cold.

Thank you for fires that roar and logs that crackle. Thank you for the one that’s turning the so-called sleeping room, across from the kitchen, into a chamber of flickering gold. Thank you for the two lumps under blankets, snoozing by the fire as I sit here, now typing. (59)

Thank you, Lighter of Night, for the cloak of darkness that comes early now, velvety backdrop for twinkling of stars, and moon that holds me, most every eve, in its trance.

Thank you for dusk, dear Lighter of Light, the far edge of the day, beginning of nightfall, when the last seeds of illumination are scattered, are rosy.

Thank you for dinner hour, and the blessing of slow simmering stew. Thank you for the bounty of greens from your earth, and spices from pods and seeds and stamens.

Thank you, God, for the trees and the gnarly limbs, and the hummingbird now buried deep in my garden.

Thank you for candlelight. And the lights of Your making: moonlight and sunlight and dappled radiance scattered like seed across the landscape. Thank you for twinkling stars and streaking ones, too — chalk marks etched across the slate of the night sky. (76)

Thank you for drifting off to sleep, and dreams that color our imagination. Thank you even for revelations that come to us in the awful interludes of tossing and turning. Thank you for wanting to wake up again, to climb from the bed. Thank you for the blankets we tuck under the chin of our sleeping child.

Thank you, dear God, for the child. For the breathtaking chance to infuse all that’s good in this world. Thank you for lessons taught while holding a hand, or wiping a tear. Thank you for band-aids that quell the hurt, and words that do the same. Thank you for everyone who lifts up our child, the teachers who inspire, the coaches who are kind. And the lady down the block who never fails to plant a fat wet kiss on that child’s pink cheek. (90)

Thank you for the year drawing to a close, and this pause to nod our heads and whisper gratitude. Thank you for the kaleidoscope of turning season, the ever-shifting call to attention. Thank you for crunching leaves, and tumbling snow flake.

Thank you for love in all its iterations. For birth, and death, and all that animates the interstitial hours. Thank you for those who walk beside us, who put a hand to the small of our back, or reach out to carry us across the bottomless abyss. (100)

Thank you, God, for all of this. And more. So, so much more.

what do you count in your litany of deep and undying thanks?

8 Comments

November 22, 2024

countdown. . .

i clambered up from the basement yesterday morn, and found myself face-to-face with a whiteout. snow falling in thickets. snow whirling wildly. snow, snow, and more snow for hours and hours and hours.

it was all the currier & ives i needed to supercharge my countdown clock. the one that’s percolating at quicker and quicker clip as the days turn closer to wednesday a week, the eve of thanksgiving itself, when not just one but both of the boys i so love will––for the first time in almost a year––unfurl their dreams on the pillows of their long-ago boyhood beds, all nestled cozily under this mostly dependable, nearly centenarian roof.

and i will savor the joy of kissing both on the forehead as i trundle off to bed hours before my wide-eyed night owls, or should we all stay up till the same insensible hour i will give it my best waltons’ bedtime holler, and call out from under my bedsheets and across the hall and down a few stairs, “good night, will. good night, Bear. good night, old house. sweet dreams, my beautiful boys.”

it’s been a long hard autumn, held in the vise of worries and fear the likes of which i’d not recommend. and so this coming thanksgiving is the emotional equivalent of frank lloyd wright’s trademark compress-and-release, in which the great architect intentionally magnified the vast spaciousness of a room by first pressing in the walls and the ceiling of the space leading into the room, so that upon stepping through the tight corridor and into the vaulted chamber the sense of openness would be perceived as vaster than ever.

and so it is with the human dynamic of fear, grace, and gratitude: to walk through unbearable days, days that stretch into weeks, and weeks that stretch into more than a month, and then to find yourself falling into the arms of the human beings you most long to hold onto; it’s the pinnacle of paradise on earth, to be released from the vise and enwrapped in a love without end.

cancer sharpens that point. cancer sometimes brings on seasons of uncertainty that are quickly populated with ghosts and demons that defy containment. i’m learning the undulations of cancer that are colored in shades of gray. interminable shades of gray. questions that come without answers. doctors who call with unwelcome news. and barely stay on the line long enough to answer a single question. and then you hang up and feel the floor drop out from under you. sometimes––if you’re me––you take the short road to doom. because that’s what worriers do. we worry. we pray for holy release.

in time, we get a grip. regain our bearings. hold our chin high, dry our tears, practice at being brave. whistle into the in-blowing winds. hold tight to the hands of the one or two who know how dark it’s become, and we fall to our knees, or fold to the ground and enter the depths of divine meditation. i’ve spent more hours with eyes closed, palms open, sitting in silence, beckoning the perpetual God-flame within, than ever before. i’ve been tempted to beg, “more time, please.” but i don’t any longer believe i can––or hold any special claim to––change God’s equation, so what i pray for is grace. is heightened attention. what i pray for is an emphatic aliveness that infuses each turn of the day with unbarred acceptance. i don’t want to blink and miss something holy.

those prayers––for grace, for keen attention, for seeing deeper than ever day in and day out, for pausing to savor––are answered, blessedly. and my own season of unending thanks coincides with that of this nation founded on pillars of moral perpetude, and the hope of equal justice for all.

the essence of my life’s gratitude has always been the improbable miracle that i became a mother. that i birthed not one but two glorious humans, and devoted the best of my heart, my soul, my breath, my being, to carving out for them a space in which they’d be cocooned in the purest love i could imagine, could muster. along the way, i’ve tossed every life line i could whenever they needed, and now, lo and behold, they’re the lifelines and i’m the one needing.

and so all these past 45 days, i have longed for only one thing: hours more to sit side-by-side the ones i so fervently sumptuously love. to giggle at their antics. to marvel at their wild-eyed wonder tales. to feel their hands squeeze mine, to be wrapped in their arms, my ear pressed to their chest, absorbing the heartbeat i’ve loved since the very first ultrasound when that echoing lub-dub-dub poured over and through me like the holiest chrism.

this is a countdown like never before. and my heart is more than open for business. the business of loving my boys. in real time. under one shared and sheltering roof.

here’s a poem, fittingly, a prayer poem by the great madeleine l’engle, who lived by words but found herself wordless in prayer. which, indeed, is sometimes the way to our deepest depths…

Word

I, who live by words, am wordless when
I try my words in prayer. All language turns
To silence. Prayer will take my words and then
Reveal their emptiness. The stilled voice learns
To hold its peace, to listen with the heart
To silence that is joy, is adoration.
The self is shattered, all words torn apart
In this strange patterned time of contemplation
That, in time, breaks time, breaks word, breaks me,
And then, in silence, leaves me healed and mended.
I leave, returned to language, for I see
Through words, even when all words are ended.
I, who live by words, am wordless when
I turn me to the Word to pray. Amen.

––Madeleine L’Engle

and here, because i love to imagine ladling steaming bowls of soup to people i love, is my new favorite stoup recipe, lemony chicken-feta meatball with spinach from my friends at NYT Cooking (you will be licking the bowl; it’s that good):

Lemony Chicken-Feta Meatball Soup With Spinach
By Yasmin Fahr
Yield: 4 servings
Total Time: 30 minutes
Note from NYT: Some might be suspicious of the rolled oats called for in this recipe, but used in place of breadcrumbs, they help create a light and tender chicken meatball. A half-cup more is simmered in the broth, which thickens it and provides a pleasant texture. The meatballs, made with ground chicken, feta and fresh dill, swim in a lemony, spinach-filled broth that’s comforting and light, perfect for lunch or dinner. Serve any leftovers with a fresh squeeze of lemon juice to brighten the soup.

INGREDIENTS
1 pound ground chicken or turkey, preferably dark meat (i use white meat)
½ cup crumbled feta
¾ cup old-fashioned rolled oats
1 small red onion, halved (½ diced, and ½ grated, then squeezed with a paper towel to remove excess liquid)
⅓ packed cup fresh dill leaves and fine stems, finely chopped
1 tablespoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon plus 1 tablespoon ground turmeric
Kosher salt and black pepper
3 tablespoons olive oil
½ teaspoon red-pepper flakes, plus more for serving
4 cups low-sodium chicken broth
4 packed cups baby spinach (about 5 ounces)
2 lemons (1 juiced and 1 cut into wedges for serving)

PREPARATION
Step 1
In a medium bowl, add the chicken, feta, ¼ cup oats, the grated onion, most of the dill (reserve about 2 tablespoons for garnish), the cumin, ½ teaspoon turmeric and 1 teaspoon salt. Gently combine without squeezing too hard or overworking the meat. Lightly wet your palms and shape the meat into small balls, a little smaller than the size of a golf ball, about 1½ inches. (You will have approximately 25 balls.)

Step 2
Heat the oil in a large Dutch oven or wide pot over medium until shimmering. Add the diced onion, season with salt, and cook until it begins to soften, about 2 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon turmeric and the red-pepper flakes, and stir until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Push the onions to the sides as best you can, then add the meatballs. (They will be close together, and that’s OK.) Cook until browned on two sides, 5 to 7 minutes total.

Step 3
Pour in the broth and remaining ½ cup oats, then gently tilt the pot to the right and left to distribute the oats and broth without disturbing the meatballs. Bring to a gentle boil, then immediately reduce the heat to maintain an active simmer. Season with salt. Cook, gently stirring occasionally to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom, until the oats have softened and the meatballs are cooked through, about 4 minutes more.

Step 4
Stir in the spinach and lemon juice until the spinach is wilted, about 2 minutes more. Adjust the seasoning to taste. Spoon into bowls, top with pepper and the remaining dill. Serve with lemon wedges.

what is your heart longing for this season of through-and-through thanks?

17 Comments

November 24, 2023

an off-the-top-of-my-head thank-you list

this one’s a bit more heavily weighted in the medical department, but only because this year brought a tsunami of things i wasn’t expecting….and each of those things has amplified my fierce attention and devotion to the miracle—yes, miracle—of being alive and immersed in the intense wonder of all those things i count as the miracles of my one wild and precious life…

dear holy God, and Breath of Breath,

i am oozing thanks this season. oozing it out of my every breath and every pore.

thank you, God, for surgeons first and most, the ones who cut out the things that otherwise might do us in. thank you especially for ones who deliver tough news with all the compassion in the world, and follow it up with a big fat dollop of great good humor. and make us laugh out loud while swiping back a tear.

thank you for the ones who hold us up — who squeeze our hand, who stand by our bedside, who bend down to kiss us on the forehead and do not leave us alone with our awful terrible worries.

thank you for every kindness offered up from here at this old, much-loved table. and for the kindness of each and every blessed soul who ever pulls up a chair and shares her wisdom, aloud or in a holy whisper.

thank you for long phone calls with the ones i love, the ones whose world i never ever want to leave.

thank you for the fellow travelers who forge their own tangled paths through the rough terrain that comes with any daunting diagnosis, and who never give up, never lose their brilliant sense of humor, never ever leave me feeling anything other than wholly, wholly heard, and blessed, and understood.

thank you for the dawn, and the way the sky ignites in flamingo-feathered plush. thank you for the cloak of inky night and the way the starlit pinpricks remind us there is depth beyond our reach, always depth.

thank you for the two boys born from me, and most of all for the invisible cord that ties our hearts and that will never ever be scythed. thank you for the times they reach across the car seat and take me by the hand, saying more in silence than a thousand pages might ever say.

thank you for the grace that led me back from the precipice of fear to the steadying ground of hope, for that faint sliver of light that lets me look not around the next bend, but clearly and brilliantly at each sure step along the way.

thank you for brothers who take my hand at the end of long, hard days, and in silence steady me. thank you for the mother who laughs aloud these days. a giggling that never fails to melt my heart. and who, amid last night’s thanksgiving kitchen melee, quotes me lines from shakespeare during a tete-a-tete about where i might have tucked her lipstick when i unpacked a bathroom moving box: “fair in that she never studied to be fairer than Nature made her,” quoteth she, with sparkle in her eye, as she recited the line she remembered they inscribed beside her name in her high school yearbook.

thank you for the rare doctor who took the time — and heart — to sit down across a screen from me, and filled me with kindness and the answers to questions others had swatted away.

thank you for those nights when the dining room is filled with noise, and stories zinging here and there. thank you for all the noise that’s always risen from the tables where we gather.

dear God, thank you for the flocks. every last one of the antics out my window. the squawking jays, and cheery wren. the radiant papa cardinal, and his lifelong mate, the one in much-diluted garb. and thank you for my lifelong mate, the one who’s made it his morning task to ferry out the can of seed that draws in all the avian animations. and who now presses his nose to the windowpanes to keep close watch.

thank you for express check-out on those days when you realize you forgot the one more block of cream cheese you needed for your mashed potatoes.

thank you for that blessed sister-in-law who stepped up to the sink last night and insisted that washing dishes was one of her favorite things to do (“tangible results,” she claimed!) and thus plowed through a dinner table’s worth of mashed-potato-dressing-cranberry-and-gravy-splattered plates.

and thank you for the never-failing inclination to pause, to pay attention, to offer up deep thanks for this heaven here on earth. even when it’s messy.

in this season of holy praise, this…

Praise Song by Barbara Crooker

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

what are the words to your praise song?

and before i go, this beauty slid under the transom yesterday from my friends at Image Journal, and not only because the poet makes up words (as i so love to do) but because it’s breathtaking, i leave you with this to carry you across the day….

“Imagineer of Variety” by John Terpstra

Maker of heaven and earth
——–of time and season
Thinker-upper of soil
—— of autumn decay, and rot
and roots drawing nutrients
——-whatever they are
that feed and sustain
—— the beauty of the lilies, and the violets
Imagineer of variety
Puller-offer of the impossible
breaking our hearts
——-every spring day
——-with greater magnolia blossom
————–finer, more delicate red bud
Overwhelmer

——-we’re speechless
——-we need a moment to collect ourselves

Not everyone buys this, of course, O God
Not everyone sees or recognizes
——-You
They’ve thought their way out of it
——-or give it no thought
And we have no proof
——-other than what our eyes see
————–our hearts feel
——-other than the telltale marks and events
————–in our lives
——-the conviction of the starlight
Is that the flutter of your Spirit
——-which just brushed its winged breath against our cheek?

It’s okay
we’ll believe for them

We have no proof
——-other than our parents
——-and their parents
————–parents by birth, parents by choice, parents by adoption
other than the witness
——-of multitudinous generations
——-the choir chorusing through time
——-children in the front row
————–who are not yet quite settled into the song
————–children by birth, by choice, by adoption
we have no proof
other than the story we have heard
——-and have ourselves entered
holding the children’s hands
————–letting their hands go

everyone thinks
——-we know how the story will go
when we know very little
——-other than this grace in which we stand
——-and a certain kind of trust

other than these words
this morning
here
——-in your presence

What a riot
to be able to speak, together
——-to you
what a blast of pure delight

though it’s hard to let go
——-the sorrow and concern that crowds round
help us
——-in the sufferings of a world that brings us such joy
——-in our own sufferings
let the blast last
the riot of life, the green burst
——-that’s filling in the blanks
————–of a winter landscape
——-as if it has something to say
and is saying it
singing it
——-to our very souls
——-which sing along

bless you, bless you, each and all. . .

7 Comments

November 10, 2023

the roof and the trees under which i grew up

i’d told myself that ever since the night my papa died, when i walked in that dark house, his tennis sweater flung over the back of a kitchen chair, as if he’d breeze through any minute, the night when i sat in the den afraid and unwilling to take in a breath, for i didn’t want to let go of the last one i breathed when he was alive, i’d told myself that house was mostly hollow to me.

it’s held a chill for me ever since.

i didn’t think i’d much miss it.

but then i drove back the other day. drove back to walk through the rooms where no sound was stirring, not even the whir of the furnace. drove back to see rooms emptied, the rugs a radiograph in reverse where the geometries of now-taken-away furniture shone bright against decades-worn dim. where you could make out the plot where my mama’s four-poster bed had been, and the circular table beside it. where the den, too, was a checkerboard of absence, chairs and a couch lifted and moved.

this week my mama moved out of the house where she lived, the house she called home, for six whole decades. long long ago, when my papa got a job in chicago (an ad man in the age of the Mad Men), and they’d moved us again from a faraway city, she’d picked that house out of many along the north shore of lake michigan because it was the house with the oaks. more than a half dozen big old oaks. maybe a whole dozen once upon a time. my mama loves big trees and big skies. the house gave her both.

my mama moved into that house in 1963, with four of us under third grade; two, still tricycle-bound. one of us, the fifth among us, was born to that house. never knew another till the day he went off to college. we used to joke that he and my mama are the only northerners among us. all the rest were born south of the mason-dixon line. we all grew up, though, on brierhill road, a winding dead end of a street carved into the woods. a golf course just across the way made for sixty years of unobstructed sunsets for my mama, who kept watch dusk after dusk through the kitchen window. the creek and the crawdads, the green pond, and the logs in the woods made for my playthings, the topography of all my imaginings.

i made my way back there this week, after it was mostly emptied, when i knew i could be alone. i wanted to walk room to room to room, and up the stairs to my old bedroom at the top of the stairs. the room where you can still find my sixth-grade scribble on the wall in the closet’s back corner. the room where so many nights i looked up and out through the oaks into the stars and the moon, where i rocketed all of my prayers and my dreams.

as i drove there, to the house at the bend in the road, i thought of all that had happened there. how i got married there, under the trees, breezing through the garden gate flanked by all four brothers. how, ten years before that, we’d sat round the kitchen table the night after my papa died, and tried to make sense. i thought how that was the house from which i was taken to hospitals, especially the time at the end of high school, and how our family pediatrician (yes, he really truly was Dr. Kamin, the most beloved housecall-making pediatrician that ever there was) came in the middle of nights when i was burning with fever. i thought how i’d close the door to my room in those sodden sulky middle-school years when i was sure no one loved me, and how during high school i’d yank the telephone cord from the kitchen round into the dining room, as far as i could uncoil it, to steal a wee bit of sanctuary amid the roar of a family of seven.

and then i walked the rooms, poked into drawers, shooshed away cobwebs, and inhaled it all one last time. when i got to the oaks out back, looked into the grove where my little girl log cabin once had stood, when i counted the feeders that still swayed in the november breeze, i felt the tears begin to pool in my eyes.

maybe the old house wasn’t so hollow to me, after all. maybe the old house where we’d all grown up, the house that had so long harbored my mama, maybe it would be hard to leave behind, to say a proper goodbye––and thanks–– to.

my tears spilled one last time on that bumpy old earth under the oaks on brierhill road.

i stooped to pluck one last acorn, now tucked in my snow coat’s pocket, and then i climbed in my own red wagon, the one that has ferried my very own boys through their growing-up years, back and forth plenty of times to their grammy’s. and i drove ever-so-slowly away.

but not without whispering a very deep blessing for the house that held us all, and mostly my mama, for so very blessedly, blessedly long.

what do you miss most about the house where you grew up?

19 Comments

October 6, 2023

canticle of gratitudes in shadowed times

I’ve always noticed the light shines through more perceptibly, more piercingly, when the skies are grizzled gray, and there’s a fissure, a peep hole, in the clouds.

And so, in this shadowed episode in which I find myself –– awaiting word on my first lung scan since before surgery, trying to navigate my mama through the roiling seas of rehab and the stark knowing she won’t go home –– I wend my way through the days on watch for grace notes which tumble onto me like snowy flakes before the melt: each one unlike any before or aft, each one magnificent in its own faceted incandescence.

And, in the spirit of blessed Francis of Assisi, I am stringing them into a canticle, a praise song typically referencing Gospel text. I’m not so literate in those Scriptural ways, so I am stringing mine in the vernacular of the everyday:

Praise be the blessed, blessed nurse named Vishruti whose charcoal eyes are ever sparkling, and whose attendance to my mama’s every woe is pure blessing before my most grateful eyes.

Praise be the harvest moon pinned high in the night sky one especially hollow night, and the acolyte Jupiter who clung to Moon’s southwestern rim, as if to catch any drippings once the melt began again.

Praise be my blessed “baby” brother who seems the answer to my every prayer before I’ve even prayed it: the one who keeps every necessary form on file (to ensure nary a hiccup in our mama’s journey), attends to every detail with fastidious care, and who is so blessedly tender with our mama’s every ache and pain and worry that in watching him tears spring to my eyes nearly every time. Praise be that brother who has always fit me like my other half. I’m 1/3/57 and he just happens to be 2/4/68. Mathematically sequenced, and aptly paired, we are.

Um, addendum to brotherly praise (did Francis addend his canticles? hmmm): As I was typing that very verse above, said saintly brother was ambling through a lumber yard, intent on rebuilding our mama’s four-poster bed to make it six inches closer to the ground, thus subtracting risk by six not-insignificant inches. And he’s not even the carpenter brother! Be still my brothered heart….

Praise be the ones who fill my stoop with dahlias, and chicken ala yummy, and farmer’s market bounty. And whose prayers and hand squeezes hold me up, even when I wobble.

Praise be my sweet Fred who holds my hand in the dark of night, even when I don’t let on that I am thinking hard about the day ahead, or the one just left behind…

Praise be Pope Francis who, in his latest encyclical, Laudate Deum, squarely implored us to face these crucial questions:

“What is the meaning of my life? What is the meaning of my time on this earth? And what is the ultimate meaning of all my work and effort?”

Praise be Alice Walker who gave us these lines in The Color Purple:

Listen, God love everything you love — and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration.

You saying God vain? I ast.

Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

What it do when it pissed off? I ast.

Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.

Yeah? I say.

Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.

You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say.

Yes, Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
Alice Walker, “The Color Purple”

Praise be that God who aims to please us, even with the color purple. Praise be the God who’s “always making little surprises.”

And praise be the simple, simple miracle of a smile spread across any human face. I don’t know why God thought to give us the capacity to upturn our lips in tenderness or joy, but oh, there is little so life-saving as that simple twitch of those few muscles.

In gratitude, in joy, in infinite blessing, and with deepest smile, for all the little surprises that steady us through and through…

what blessings steadied you this week?

5 Comments

December 9, 2022

sixteen.

sixteen years old. old enough to drive a car, the chair now is. not quite old enough to vote, but we’ve stayed away from politics all these years; allowing only goodness, grace, to be our guide––even in those rare few times we’ve wandered in the public square, celebrated the election of a president, felt crushed by the words and ways of another.

we’ve stood watch here as the world crushed us (i can still see the image of that precious little two-year-old, the syrian toddler––alan kurdi was his name, the little boy in the bright-red T shirt, the little black sneakers, and scrunched-up navy pants––washed up on the sands of the aegean sea, trying to escape a war’s unimaginable horrors and terrors). we’ve felt the crushings, too, of close-to-home heartaches, the ones not felt much beyond our own intimate borders, but more piercing than all the rest sometimes.

why do we invite in crushings here? because it’s how i’m wired, i suppose. i’ve always felt hurts so, so deeply (some say too deeply; to them i say not sorry). and i have always wished for a place where tender comforts, heart healings, might occur. where the one who’s hurt could find a featherdown place to curl into. to be tucked under fuzzy afghans. handed warm mugs of tea. and a bowl of clementines, for when the tears paused long enough to give way to nibbling. maybe it’s the nurse in me, the heart of me. i can’t bear to see, to hear, to feel, to imagine hurting. but i will witness every time. for every hurt needs witness. needs bearing. needs extra body parts––shoulders to lean on, hands to squeeze, eyes to gently smile––to bear and share the load.

sometimes, i’ve brought silly here. not because i’ve any proclivity for clowns or clownishness. but because life not seen through comic lens is sometimes too unbearable. to laugh is to lighten the load. to be lifted by the effervescence of a good giggle. or even a guffaw. there’s alchemy and medicine in the sound of joy rising from the lungs.

in sixteen years, we’ve held up to the candlelight life’s beginnings and endings and all in-betweens: goodbyes and homecomings, births and death, and the littlest flickerings of the everyday.

i’ve uncorked a bit of my soul here, let you see my heart’s wanderings as i moved deeper and deeper, bolder and bolder into saying aloud what i was sometimes plenty timid to whisper. somehow, over the years, the sacred i call God––God, a name that resonates a tenderness to me, a name whose very uttering fills me with a knowing, a hope––has pulsed so palpably through my every day, i now put breath to it without too much trembling. and in words––i hope––that do not close doors. i’m more intent than ever to draw forth the wisdom, the wonder, the light from any path that winds toward God, Allah, Adonai, Divine and Holy Wisdom. i reach for the doorways, have no use for locks on doors.

i’ve brought tinkerings at the cookstove here, too. in part because i will always be trying to find my way back from a dark, dark place when i was just 18, and, for reasons that escaped me at the time, i’d somehow decided i’d see how little food i could swallow in a day. it’s a place that filled me with cringing shames for years, and years. and tangled me in terrible knots. not knowing how to eat, being daunted by and quaking in the face of simple food, is a scourge i’d wish on no one. the question i’d long asked, and which was long asked of me: how does the homecoming queen find herself riding an elevator to a full-blown psych ward? (1975 was back in the day before anyone really knew what anorexia was; and there were no such eating disorder programs as there are today. and the movie “one flew over the cuckoo’s nest” had just come out on the very big screen, so it set the stage for a most awful fright.) i can type those sentences now because the years have gentled my shame, and slowly, faithfully, i’ve found my way to a shore of my own. a shore where olive oil doesn’t scare me anymore. and where just last week i drizzled honey (on dorie greenspan’s sweet & smoky roasted carrots*). and it seems that when you’ve struggled so to feed yourself, you find a quiet certain joy in feeding those you love. (and maybe by osmosis you’re hoping to absorb some ease…)

i didn’t intend for this birthday note to grow so confessional. but over all these years, you’re the ones who’ve made this place into the sacred, gentle, quiet space i once dreamed of. and always believed in. you’ve shown me, though your unending kindness, that what i write here is safe here––and i will protect to the end your safety to say here what you will. and, hard as it might be to imagine (given the crude world in which we live), never once in all these years have i found a harsh or mean-spirited comment left here at the so-called “old maple table.” (it would crush me if i found one.) your gentle graces, your heartfelt, heartfelt notes and comments, as well as your incredibly heavenly occasional snail mails, have emboldened me to tell only truth here. life is short, too short, we know. and why waste a day fudging around the edges when what draws us whole––and into each other’s embrace––is saying who we are, and what hurts us, and what makes us giggle? and aren’t we all, in truth, wobbly creatures at the core, only slowly ascending from all the snags and quirks that make us so delightfully who we are?

so here’s to truth. and sixteen, a number imbued with introspection, and spiritual purity, and a sign of good things to come, according to those who study numbers, find meaning therein.

may this next whirl around the sun bring blessings to us each and all…

i have an especially lovely birthday present for all of you, one i will leave here on the table (down below). my friends at the SALT project dug it up from wendell berry’s bookshelf, and it’s a beauty like no other. it’s called “the birth (near port william)” and as you’ll see, it’s a nativity poem for all. happy blessed birthing day, for whatever it is you’ll birth today….(the poem is long, so i will leave it at the very bottom here….) (p.s. because the formatting itself is lovely and i can’t get it replicated here, and because you might love the SALT project, i’m leaving the link to their page here.)

one other gift, before i leave you the poem. little alan kurdi’s father, the only one of the family of four who survived the escape in a rubber boat back in the early autumn of 2015, a few years later started a foundation to help children whose lives have been torn apart by war. it’s yet another miracle of the human spirit’s capacity to rise from the deepest, darkest ashes. you can find out more about the kurdi foundation here.

and another treat: the other evening i time-traveled to amherst, mass., for a birthday celebration in the glorious home of emily dickinson, the great butter-yellow house on the hill, known as the homestead, and during that hour and a half of marvelousness, one of curators mentioned that emily’s beloved sister-in-law susan had written emily’s obituary, which was published in the springfield republican on may 18, 1886. immediately curious, i asked for the link, and here tis, with some of the most lovely writing, and most charmed intimacies of emily’s life, written in the immediate wake of emily’s death by the one who perhaps knew her most dearly…. https://www.emilydickinson.it/edobituary.html

here is but one passage i found delectable…

As she passed on in
life, her sensitive nature shrank from
much personal contact with the world,
and more and more turned to her
own large wealth of individual resources
for companionship, sitting thenceforth, as
some one said of her, “In the light of
‘her own fire.” Not disappointed with the
world, not an invalid until within the past two
years, not from any lack of sympathy, not be-
cause she was insufficient of any mental work
or social career – her endowments being so ex-
ceptional – but the “mesh of her soul,” as
Browning calls the body, was too rare, and the
sacred quiet of her own home proved the fit
atmosphere for her worth and work.

and the obit ends thusly:

To
her life was rich, and all aglow with God and
immortality. With no creed, no formulated
faith, hardly knowing the names of dogmas,
she walked this life with the gentleness and
reverence of old saints, with the firm step of
martyrs who sing while they suffer. How
better note the flight of this “soul of fire in a
shell of pearl” than by her own words? –

Morns like these, we parted;

Noons like these, she rose;

Fluttering first, then firmer,

To her fair repose.

*oh, and those carrots drizzled with honey? dorie greenspan’s sweet + smoky roasted carrots you’ll thank my sister-in-law, brooke, who sent them my way…

and that, dear friends, is the stack of gifts i have for you this blessed early morn…..(one question, and then wendell berry’s poem…)

so here’s the question: how did you find the chair?

“THE BIRTH (NEAR PORT WILLIAM),” BY WENDELL BERRY

They were into the lambing, up late.
Talking and smoking around their lantern,
they squatted in the barn door, left open
so the quiet of the winter night
diminished what they said. The chill
had begun to sink into their clothes.
Now and then they raised their hands
to breathe on them. The youngest one
yawned and shivered.

   “Damn,” he said,
“I’d like to be asleep. I’d like to be
curled up in a warm nest like an old
groundhog, and sleep till spring.”

“When I was your age, Billy, it wasn’t
sleep I thought about,” Uncle Stanley said.
“Last few years here I’ve took to sleeping.”

And Raymond said: “To sleep till spring
you’d have to have a trust in things
the way animals do. Been a long time,
I reckon, since people felt safe enough
to sleep more than a night. You might
wake up someplace you didn’t go to sleep at.”

They hushed awhile, as if to let the dark
brood on what they had said. Behind them
a sheep stirred in the bedding and coughed.
It was getting close to midnight.
Later they would move back along the row
of penned ewes, making sure the newborn
lambs were well dried, and had sucked,
and then they would go home cold to bed.
The barn stood between the ridgetop
and the woods along the bluff. Below
was the valley floor and the river
they could not see. They could hear
the wind dragging its underside
through the bare branches of the woods.
And suddenly the wind began to carry
a low singing. They looked across
the lantern at each other’s eyes
and saw they all had heard. They stood,
their huge shadows rising up around them.
The night had changed. They were already
on their way — dry leaves underfoot
and mud under the leaves — to another barn
on down along the woods’ edge,
an old stripping room, where by the light
of the open stove door they saw the man,
and then the woman and the child
lying on a bed of straw on the dirt floor.

“Well, look a there,” the old man said.
“First time this ever happened here.”

And Billy, looking, and looking away,
said: “Howdy. Howdy. Bad night.”

And Raymond said: “There’s a first
time, they say, for everything.”

   And that,
he thought, was as reassuring as anything
was likely to be, and as he needed it to be.
They did what they could. Not much.
They brought a piece of rug and some sacks
to ease the hard bed a little, and one
wedged three dollar bills into a crack
in the wall in a noticeable place.
And they stayed on, looking, looking away,
until finally the man said they were well
enough off, and should be left alone.
They went back to their sheep. For a while
longer they squatted by their lantern
and talked, tired, wanting sleep, yet stirred
by wonder — old Stanley too, though he would not
say so.

“Don’t make no difference,” he said
“They’ll have ’em anywhere. Looks like a man
would have a right to be born in bed, if not
die there, but he don’t.”

   “But you heard
that singing in the wind,” Billy said.
“What about that?”

   “Ghosts. They do that way.”

“Not that way.”

   “Scared him, it did.”
The old man laughed. “We’ll have to hold
his damn hand for him, and lead him home.”

“It don’t even bother you,” Billy said.
“You go right on just the same. But you heard.”

“Now that I’m old I sleep in the dark.
That ain’t what I used to do in it. I heard
something.”

   “You heard a good deal more
than you’ll understand,” Raymond said,
“or him or me either.”

They looked at him.
He had, they knew, a talent for unreasonable
belief. He could believe in tomorrow
before it became today — a human enough
failing, and they were tolerant.

   He said:
“It’s the old ground trying it again.
Solstice, seeding and birth — it never
gets enough. It wants the birth of a man
to bring together sky and earth, like a stalk
of corn. It’s not death that makes the dead
rise out of the ground, but something alive
straining up, rooted in darkness, like a vine.
That’s what you heard. If you’re in the right mind
when it happens, it can come on you strong;
you might hear music passing on the wind,
or see a light where there wasn’t one before.”

“Well, how do you know if it amounts to anything?”

“You don’t. It usually don’t. It would take
a long long time to ever know.”

   But that night
and other nights afterwards, up late,
there was a feeling in them — familiar
to them, but always startling in its strength —
like the thought, on a winter night,
of the lambing ewes dry-bedded and fed,
and the thought of the wild creatures warm
asleep in their nests, deep underground.
Wendell Berry

**sixteen, in case you wondered, is how many years the chair has been this quiet little place where these days we gather every friday morn. or at least that’s when i pull up a chair. you’re welcome to stop by any time, stay as long as you’d like. or, for years and years….’twas launched, the chair was, on 12.12.06, with this little post…

36 Comments

November 18, 2022

a jump on counting my blessings . . .

the days of late have been plenty gray, sodden gray, gray the color of chimney ash.

the gray started seeping into me especially this week when someone i love lost her father who might have qualified as one of the dearest men on earth. he was 97 and as alive and filled with curiosity and charm as anyone whose tales i’ve ever known through the close transitive property of one shared soul. i’d never met him, though i longed to, but he came alive to me because his daughter, our very own amy of the chair, told the most animated love-drenched stories of him. his last name was neighbour, and i am pretty sure his amy must have grown up thinking the whole world was singing along with mister rogers when the sweatered one belted, “won’t you be my neighbour?” because who wouldn’t want to be hub neighbour’s neighbor??

the grayness, though, started to shatter when i looked up late yesterday afternoon and saw not one, not three, but six scarlet cardinals circling round my feeder, taking turns at the 0s where the seed dribbles down for the plucking.

that’s all it took to remind me to count my blessings.

so i begin with six: cardinals, all in a ring, chasing away the murky gloom of twilight, chasing away the murky shadow that’s been eclipsing a chunk of my soul. . .

more blessings:

the boy driving home from college on sunday. the dinner i’ll serve, a birthday feast for my very own mama who turned 92 this week, and who longs for birthdays to end, so she can “go home,” to the heaven she pines for. . .

the boy flying home on thanksgiving morn, when his hours among us are brief, too brief, but at least he’ll be here long enough for me to reach under the table and give his fingers a squeeze. and that hallowed night i’ll fall asleep to the sounds of two boys in two ‘cross-the-hall rooms rustling the sheets of their boyhoods, snug in their long-ago beds. . .

the faraway cousin who bathes me in books, this week’s batch a quartet on the birds and wild herbs and trees and critters of ireland, complete with marvelous lore and legend. (according to one celtic telling, the robin is the bird thought to bring comfort to the wounded and suffering. and here’s my favorite part: the plump little bird came to boast its red breast, according to the heavenly irish, when it pulled either a thorn from Jesus’s crown while he hung on the cross, or a nail from his hands or his feet, so Jesus’s blood spattered on the robin and thus it became red-breasted.) . . .

the husband who sits across from me at dinner each night, fielding my curiosities and never ever failing to say thank you for a dinner he always claims “delicious,” (even, i swear, when it’s not). and who, even after all these years, can set my heart soaring because of the way he captures a thought or a phrase, and whose unheralded kindnesses often only i witness. . .

these lines i read from rabbi jonathan sacks’ posthumously published, studies in spirituality: a weekly reading of the jewish bible (more on this some other friday), in a chapter on judaism as a religion of listening . . .

“If I were asked how to find God, I would say: Learn to listen. Listen to the song of the universe in the call of the birds, the rustle of trees, the crash and heave of the waves. Listen to the poetry of prayer, the music of the Psalms. Listen deeply to those you love and who love you. Listen to the words of God in the Torah and hear them speak to you. Listen to the debates of the sages through the centuries as they tried to hear the texts’ intimations and inflections.

“Don’t worry about how you or others look. The world of appearances is a false world of masks, disguises, and concealments. Listening is not easy. I confess I find it formidably hard. But listening alone bridges the abyss between soul and soul, self and other, I and the Divine.”
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

the poet friend who’s found the courage to once again plunk herself at my so-called kitchen table writing school (virtually, this go-around), so we can try to chase away whatever demons spook her into thinking she can’t write when in fact she writes in a way that takes my breath away. . .

the friend who never fails to ping me when there’s a glorious moon rising or looming out my late-night window. . .

every single one of you who pulls up a chair. for all these years, known or unknown, you have graced me and blessed me. . .

that’s more blessings than i can count, and i am only just beginning.

what lines are you adding to your litany of gratitudes this year?

*photo by will kamin, from his AP art photo portfolio from his senior year of high school. now professor kamin, our very own assistant professor of law….

please keep our amy in your prayers. and the soul of her papa.

18 Comments

December 10, 2021

almost old enough to drive a car…

fifteen years ago, on a cold and dark december dawn, i picked a name, a font, a picture, and i began to type. following the faint outlines of a dream, a vision, a sacred place where the ordinary—the quotidian—was lifted up and plumbed for universal truths and wisdoms and epiphanies. sometimes made sacramental, a transfiguration of domesticity, of the everyday, the plane where most of us live, far from fanfare, from headline, from public debate.

this old chair, pull up a chair—an invitation and a welcome—is now old enough that i nostalgically think back to the beginning, when a kindergartener was asleep upstairs. when the patterings of his pajama-bottomed feets syncopated the rhythms of this house, and when i could—and would—sweep him up in my arms, perch him on a hipbone, and bring him along, my sidekick to whatever was afoot. he’s 20 now. and he shaves.

one whole school year, this old chair (sometimes thought of as the old maple table where elbows and mugs are planted every friday morning) traveled to cambridge, our year of thinking sumptuously in the deep bookshelves and densely-packed lecture halls of harvard college, poking around in the wilds of walden pond, calling it all home sweet home from our third-floor aerie high above franklin avenue and the bells of harvard square.

two boys grew up under my close watch here; their inimitable lines and antics inscribed here. a moon walk, a lesson in the art of seeing (binoculars optional), the adventures of the long and crooked way home. and more and more…

over the years, i’ve marked deaths, and lifted up ones we dearly loved: a grandfather, grandmother, dear dear friends (mary ellen and ceci, to name two). a house, and, yes, even a beloved family cat who went by the name of turkey baby meow meow choo choo. but, too, i’ve captured birth: a niece, and a nephew who’s turning nine today.

we’ve weathered dark days—in our souls and in our one republic under God. we’ve gathered shards of light. so many, so so many.

we’ve ticked off the seasons, savoring each one for its parables, its wisdoms, and its beauties.

four books* have been birthed from here, beyond my wildest, wildest dreams. what matters is not their royalties (enough to buy a donut at the donut shop, perhaps with side of coffee) but their simple quiet existence and their placement on two particular shelves, where some day they might be pulled down, opened, read. and rememberings will come. if i’m blessed, my heart and soul will jump off the pages, and they’ll be wrapped again in my most essential murmurings. they will know, once again, how i loved them. and exactly how i made my mac ’n’ cheese.

i’ve recorded here chapter endings: my leavetaking after almost 30 years at the chicago tribune, the newspages that brought me love, joy, and lasting lessons; the leavetaking just this past year of my very own prize-winning architecture critic. high schools have been graduated from, and college, too (with another one of those now moving squarely onto the horizon). and a law school, to boot.

i’ve watch suns rise and moons illuminate the night. heard cardinals sing. and awaited the viburnum’s deliverance as it punctuates the springtime with its magnificence and its spicy perfume.

i’ve discovered saints and poets. unfurled poetries. penned ten thousand prayers. made lasting friends.

you’ve allowed me to be my truest self: quiet, shy in a way that can also be effervescent and effusive. profoundly prayerful, outside the bounds of any walled cathedral. you’ve allowed me to bring my heart’s many aches. and no one once has ever shamed me, a condition i was hard-wired to fear in my growing-up years.

most of all we’ve made this the sacred quiet gentle place we all believed in, and all built together. stories have been told, tears shed, laughter arisen. you’ve made me wiser, made me gasp, and taken my breath away with your wonders, your wisdoms, your ways with words.

for 15 years. almost old enough to drive a car…

bless you and thank you, thank you, thank you, from my old chair here at this most blessed table.

you have made these chairs a holy table. without you, this would be a hollow echo in a long-lost nook or cranny.

xoxox

*a fifth book is coming, and it’ll be the first whose roots are not directly traced to here. it’s my first from-scratch book, and it’s titled: The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text, so clearly its spirit is rooted here…..

where were you in december of 2006? and how did you find the chair?

in the category keepin’-it-humble, i had a spectacular fail last friday when i was giving a zoom talk to some 300 souls, gathered for a virtual First Friday Club of Chicago lunchtime talk, and my laptop first stuttered then died, right in the middle of 50 carefully curated slides and words. some of you might know that i get spectacularly nervous before any talk (which is why i would never ever mention an upcoming talk here), and even though wings seem to carry me most times, this was a doozy. pretty much a zoom nightmare in real time. the good folks in the control room were able to re-record the part where the fail happened, and splice it to the rest. so, thanks to the wizardry of tech geniuses, you can’t quite tell anything was amiss. but i know, and i might have a hard time forgetting. it was a talk titled, In the Stillness of Winter, Stirring Assuredly Comes. it’s about half an hour, and if you want a bit of chair come to life, minus the blooper, here tis.