in summer, when the windows’ optimal posture is open, i hear the birds at daystart. they warble their throats in the dark, not unlike the way we humans stumble to the bathroom, shove a toothbrush into our mouths, and begin the day with eyes half closed, foaming at the mouth.
the birds, specifically the red-breasted robin, like to get a jump on things. they seem to have selected—by some mysterious and far-off committee, i suppose—a start time of 4:30 a.m., roughly. very roughly. for that’s the hour when the first of the avian staccato, the chirp-chirp-chirp of the dawn, finds its way into my ears.
i rustle and rouse. feet soon planted on the ground (never too firmly these days; i am becoming of the wobbly variety), i follow the pre-ordained path: swipe my reading glasses off the bedside table (should i ever need to see in the dark, i suppose, is why i keep them there), stumble into the bath (i’ve explained that above), throw on the same clothes i wore yesterday (i am a creature of catholic school uniforms, i cannot seem to shake the habit). and then comes the good part, the part i love best: i shuffle down the stairs, and into the morning awake and alone. coffee is brewed (we still brew here, not having arrived into the coffee-pod era).
and that’s when i crank up what amounts to the family business: i lift the lid on the laptop, await its whistle and whir, and then i get to work. i type for a living. you witness it here.
of late i have been typing as many hours as i can stuff into a day. lights are out, usually but not always, by midnight. and you know when the start is. i pause for the occasional nibble. and a dunk in the pool. otherwise it’s all words all the time. i am in the penultimate throes of editing what’s turning out to be Book No. 6. and any day now, if i push hard enough through the next mornings-till-nightfall, i will whoosh it all back to the faraway editor and return to the business of breathing and living.
but i’m not there yet. there seems always to be another sentence to bolster. to untangle the inevitable grammarian knot. being of the nose-to-the-grindstone ilk (my father so ordained me decades and decades ago, warning me that keeping my nose ever to the grindstone was going to get me but one simple thing: a sharp nose), i can never quite fix things enough. so i keep at it; to be finished is wholly elusive.
and all of that is more or less why this morning i’ve no grand epiphanies to bring here to the table. i’ve simply been sharpening the instrument of my breathing, the one with the two little holes.
which brings me to the question i heard put to david sedaris the other week: “why write, david,” the inquisitor asked. why, oh why, has he tapped out enough words to amount to 16 books, hundreds and hundreds of (hilarious) essays, etcetera etcetera?
“to get better” is how he answered. and that answer, those three simple words, hit me right above my rather sharp nose. hard. with a thwop.
what better reason for living, for writing, for anything.
if you are a writer, to write to get better is the smartest thing in the world. also the smartest if you are, say, a garbage collector who lives to collect garbage. or a surgeon. (though, ideally, we humans in need of surgery should consider submitting only to those who’ve more or less gotten pretty good at their craft—their surgeoning, that is.)
“to get better” is also a very fine answer to the question of living. i realized it’s rather a koan. think about it: why do we get out of bed in the morning, plant feet firmly or not on the ground, and get about the business of whatever is our day? well, a fairly good reason is to get better at it. to put a bit of mindfulness to what otherwise might have been dawdling. wasting our days.
if we intend to live through another day—or hope to anyway—why not see if we can live just a little bit better today than yesterday? we could maybe be kinder. we could maybe listen more intently. we could take up a notch so many of the simple propositions that make us a human.
i have asked myself close to a million times why i insist on awaking with the birds on friday mornings and tapping out these missives. david sedaris, who has been writing every day since 1977, gave me my answer. i do it to get better. because better is always out of reach. and reaching is a mighty fine posture for living. maybe that’s why God gave us shoulders: so we could extend the bones from that socket and stretch our arms as far as they could—you got it—reach!
so as i slink away here, back to the tasks already piled onto the keyboard, i leave you with two simple queries (no need to answer aloud, these questions are meant simply to extend the conversation, to give you something maybe to ponder in the quiet and wonder of your very own beautiful mind):
what do you reach for each day? and where in your life do you try to get better?
sometimes when i get up early, i find i am not alone. say, yesterday, when i blearily looked out the back window and saw what seemed a mirage coiled under the trees in my garden. this sweet soul, who had apparently polished off a fine morning meal of every pansy in every pot in sight, reposed without making a sound. when i went out to visit her she paid me no mind. i might have been able to feed her from the palm of my hand. but then i thought, TICK!, and recoiled my hand. after making her promise not to partake of my so-called farmer plot (all herbs and zinnias this year), i bid her adieu and off she wandered. i’ve never seen her before, and she’s not out there now, so maybe (hopefully) she doesn’t like what my garden and i have to offer, and i’ll not have to shield my whole garden in reams and reams of plastic deer-protectant wrap.
can you see her, hiding under the cedars?making herself known.adieu.
by mid-morning the other day, after a lava flow of bumbling words had frothed from my mouth, after fumbling through apology and course correction that led me to nowhere, abruptly finding myself in a remarkable tizz, spinning wild and wildly into the cattails and weeds, i found myself yearning for an etch-a-sketch day.
that is: utterly drenched in your fallible, flailing, decidedly flappable self, you long to give a shake to the day, clear the screen, dispense with the scratch marks you’ve left in your wake, and start all over again. clean slate.
oh, that it were so doable. that our foibles were so very expungeable.
that we could erase our blunders, reset our starts.
my sins, such as they were, amounted to little more than worries let loose, a storm of what-ifs infusing and infecting an otherwise placid launch of the day. i feared, though, they might be contagious, that the someone to whom i was blathering might soon come down with a similar case of the shakes. and i loathed my frazzled old self for flinging my woes with such reckless abandon.
oh, to take a deep breath, a pure cleansing breath, and aim to be stalwart and steady afresh.
so it is, here in the land of the human. we are but an amalgam of shortfalls and bumbles, with only the occasional triumph to claim for ourselves.
and as much as we might drown in the muck of that unvarnished truth, there might be much more to the story.
consider the utterly human condition, our magnificent fallibility.
yes, magnificent.
lest the abrupt turn here catch you off guard, let me explain: it is against the backdrop of a papal encyclical (for me, who woke early monday to read it, the big news of the week) that i found myself catching a glimmer of something i’d only before seen as a shortfall. and therein is the beauty.
as chicago’s own father bob, aka Il Papa, Leo XIV, so lucidly put it, it is the very fact of our imperfection, our bruises and soft spots, that not only make for our lusciousness but give us our reason for being. we are here to work through the kinks. our majesty is in our not knowing, our awkward pauses in silence whilst the wheels of our brains gurgle and churn, sputter and eventually spew.
it’s this fleshed-out portrait of humanity that leo holds up against the blemishless facade of AI, the newfangled sphere where answers come swiftly (nay, instantaneously) and stripped of question or wonder or doubt. it’s the realm of the certain, the acquisitive grab of all recorded text, that produces, like a slice popped from a toaster, whatever you wanted to know about whatever you might have otherwise pondered and wondered. musing not wanted nor needed here.
and what’s lost?
cue the encyclical, paragraph 99, with special emphasis on the artificial that’s twinned with the intelligence:
“What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of ‘intelligence’ with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.”
we humans, his holiness goes on to note, are creatures who are “shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity.”
choices, mistakes, forgiveness, fidelity.
oh, the litany of all the above that has marked me and molded me, made me into the scarred, the limping, the daffy body and soul that i am. that we all are.
we needn’t erase any or all of that whom we are. we’ve all gotten here the bumpy way. the trial-and-error, the forgive-me-i’m-sorry, the let’s-take-it-from-the-top way.
we are born, all of us, without instruction manual (a fact that becomes alarmingly notable when handed a newborn outside the nursery, and told to figure it out as they point us toward the door). we bumble our way. we try, most days anyway, not to get in the way of ourselves. not to hurt those in our path. and certainly not the ones we love most.
we blow it. squelch opportunity. drop the ball. miss the mark. strike out. chicken out. fritz out.
we all have days we want to start all over again. moments we wish we could play in reverse. lines we’d do well to stuff back into our mouths. looks we wish hadn’t flashed ‘cross our faces.
but then we would be so artificial. so unmistakably automaton. our intelligence, really, would be poured from a jar. diluted with water, and stirred.
an efficient facsimile of some fraction of human.
in the end, upon actual brain-fueled consideration, i’ve come to conclude: i’ll take my days messy, mistake-y, and utterly fallible.
no need, after all, for the etch-a-sketch.
have you considered the ways your soft spots and bumps have made you more beautiful? as you look back across your life, do you see the dead ends and potholes as all part of the wonder?
here’s but one line from the encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, “magnificent humanity,” worthy of deeply human pondering, musing, meditation:
“Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others. Indeed, precisely because we experience limits—vulnerability, suffering and failure—we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.”
and think not that moral complexity is at the heart of humanity. here again, a line from the encyclical worthy of long meditation:
“Even when persons dehumanize themselves and bring about tragedy, a small light continues to shine within humanity, one that can be rekindled, with God’s grace, along paths of conversion and reconciliation. As Viktor Frankl rightly observed, in moments of horror, ‘we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.'”
the balm of gilead: in ancient, Biblical times, a resin derived from the buds of Pistacia lentiscus, or pistachio trees, found along the Jordan River
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.
i grew up in a house where a shadow was cast over good friday. a deep and mysterious shadow. one sodden with sorrows.
i imagined a presence, imagined the whole globe bowing to the sorrows of the long ago day, the crucifixion of the jew who preached love and more love. who turned the other cheek. upturned the money tables. chastened the holier than thou. sought the solace and silence of the desert. healed the lepers. embraced the prostitute. allowed holy oils to be poured and dried with the tresses of one of the outcast.
i grew up in a house where silence was kept from noon to three in the afternoon on the shadowed friday of crucifixion. i learned to look out the window as the clock struck three, as the heavens darkened and thunder shook the sky, somewhere off in the distance. the distance being golgotha, the place of the skulls, an abandoned quarry outside the walls of jerusalem. in the realm of mystery, no distance is too far to hear the rumble of the skies being torn into two.
of all the somber days of the year, this is the most somber—for me, anyway.
i find it a telling i can sink deeply into. can imagine the pain, the humiliation, the weight of the cross. can even feel the coarse rub of the olive wood, the cedar, or cypress, can imagine the splinters digging into my shoulder. my arms giving way under the lumbering tonnage.
i wince and writhe and cry every time. i beg forgiveness for our sins. collectively. globally. and mine alone.
it is a singularly compelling bracket of time, the hours from gethsemane to golgotha.
it begins for me on the night before the cross, the night in the garden when jesus—the radical, countercultural rabbi (for rabbi means “teacher”)—went alone into the murky darkness to pray. when he begged his father God to spare him the torture to come.
i can imagine the night sky, the stars bright against the black cloth of cavernous space. can imagine the weightedness of one man’s chest as he felt the mounting climax, as the cock crowed and the hour was upon him. as the footfalls of soldiers and the one who betrayed came closer and closer.
have we not all felt ourselves in such a hollow of time? felt ourselves moving closer and closer to that which we dread?
have we not all carried some cross, the weight of it crushing?
we all have stories—stories from our families, from our religions or our histories—that draw us into their folds. that transfix us every time.
these anointed hours, these holy holy sorrowful hours, are among the ones that hold me. it is a blessed thing to be drawn deep into the marrow of the stories we are told, the ones that carry us across the generations, and the millennia.
wednesday, the night before i found myself deep in the folds of thursday’s gethsemane, i found myself around a table re-telling the ancient story of the exodus. the story of slavery and liberation. the story of becoming God’s chosen people. of plagues and the killing of firstborns. of the improbable crossing of the sea, and the inexplicable parting of waters. the line of the story that night that leapt out the most to me was the one where it was written: “when the people of Israel left Egypt, they became God’s people.”
“. . . they became God’s people.”
that line struck me because it made me think of a God who not only hovers over but harbors his people, especially a people alone, and afraid, and lost in the wilderness. a God who seeks out the suffering and the shuddering. a God of the frayed and tattered margins. of the outsider. the same God who heard the prayers of the one in the garden. the same God whom i believe heard the cry of the one on the Cross. the same one who hears all the cries of this world. the cries from Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, the cries from Gaza and Iran. from Ukraine and Lebanon. from Somalia, Sudan, and, long ago, from Biafra. the cries of mothers who bury their children. the cries of those who suffer unimaginable torturings.
count me with the pope who preached last sunday, palm sunday, that the prayers of those who call for violence, and killing, and the bombing of children are prayers not heard by the God of Love, of Peace, the God who preaches the blessedness of the meek and the merciful.
i close with the words of that holy, holy soul we know as Pope Leo of Chicago, a righteous pilgrim not afraid to speak out, to condemn the ways of the warmongers among us :
Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood” (Is 1:15).
As we set our gaze upon him who was crucified for us, we can see a crucified humanity. In his wounds, we see the hurts of so many women and men today. In his last cry to the Father, we hear the weeping of those who are crushed, who have no hope, who are sick and who are alone. Above all, we hear the painful groans of all those who are oppressed by violence and are victims of war.
and in the spirit of that final climb up the mount of golgotha, a climb long broken into fourteen scenes, known in the Christian Church as “stations,” i leave you with this quiet and spare meditation of the stations of the cross from pádraig ó tuama. and finally a poem from the late great irish poet, seamus heaney.
may your holy days, whichever stories stir you, draw you into a deeper sense of being alive and in service to the miseries of this most broken world.
what are some of the stories told, and the hours into which you surrender, year over year, that most embracingly, certainly, undeniably hold you?
Chorus from “The Cure at Troy” by Seamus Heaney
Human beings suffer, They torture one another. They get hurt and get hard, Can fully right a wrong Inflicted and endured.
History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change On the far side of revenge. Believe that the farther shore Is reachable from here. Believe in miracles And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing, The utter self-revealing Double-take of feeling. If there’s fire on the mountain And lightning and storm And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing The outcry and birth-cry Or new life at its term. It means once in a lifetime That justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.
my favorite, favorite telling of good friday’s stations…
and a sobering note to close out this holy week: the global conflict tracker from the council on foreign relations
it is among the most profound teachings of any religion. and its point is found at the root of every sage, seer, and saint.
remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.
some years, to be truthful, those words washed over me. not this year. no longer. it is the teaching at the core of my scan time epiphany, pressed onto my heart as i emerged from the months-long fog that followed the words from my surgeon, “it was cancer; i was surprised.”
we don’t have forever. our days are numbered. our time here is fleeting. we’re wise not to whittle away the hours. wiser still to work toward the nub, the holy nub, that i believe lies at the heart of why we’re among the blessed who got to draw a first breath in the first place.
the odds of being born are stacked mightily against us; biology lays it all out at roughly 1 in 400 trillion (that’s 400 million million, or a 4 followed by 14 zeroes; i’m guessing that might be more than all the stars in the heavens. but what do i know?). we’re the ones who were allotted X number of days, who were given a holy task that’s ours and ours alone. and our slot to get it done, to reach toward holiness, to exude the light this world so desperately needs, is not without end.
so knew moses in the wilderness, imploring God: “teach us to number our days, so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
come the seventh century, a pope named gregory I pulled out the ashes to press against flesh, to remind the believers, to begin the 46 days then counted as Lent, a season of penitence before the coming of Easter. in judaism, the days of awe, from rosh hashanah, the new year, to yom kippur, the day of atonement, attention is turned to the mortal imperative: we will die. and we’d best make the most of our days. in islam, the inevitability of death is a core tenet, and muslims are taught to pray “as if this is your last ṣalāh (prayer).”
i live now with those teachings pressed hard against my flesh, whether you can see the smudge on my forehead or not. just so happens this week i walked around for a few hours looking as if i’d smudged a thumbful of dirt just above my eyebrows. and this week, a week in which i’ve spent so many hours trying to reach across to the other side, in search of a wink or a nod or a squeeze from two beloveds new to the other side, i found myself transfixed by the wisdom i wore for all the world to see.
i find it imperative. it’s the truth that fuels my every day, and all the hours within.
i live now with the palpable knowing that any minute the something stirring in my lungs (a something i likened to “a couch potato of a cancer” when my surgeon first described it as indolent, or lazy) could, in that surgeon’s inimitable words, “decide to leap off the couch and start running around the house smashing things.” the analogy here refers to the cancer detonating all throughout my lungs, a demonic pinball boinging wall to wall to any old air sac, the wee little bellows that allow you to draw in oxygen, blow out the junk that remains, the carbon dioxide we need to get rid of, lest we die of suffocation.
in my latest adventure in book writing, the book now awaiting yet another round of editing, a book whose working title is when evening comes: an urgent call to love (drawn from the great teaching of saint john of the cross who once wrote, “when the evening of this life comes, you will be judged on love,” and to which the mystic evelyn underhill then adds: “the only question asked of your soul: ‘have you loved well?'”), it’s the very point of the ashes—to dust you shall return—that animates every inkling, question, and meditation in the pages soon to be bound between covers.
in the year since i started writing that book, and in the almost three years since half my lung was snipped out of me, the choice to love well is one that rises over and over, a tide that won’t be quelled. it’s the most clarifying truth i’ve ever clung to. and it expands the walls of my heart, pushes me plenty beyond my comfort zone because i know my chances are dwindling. the next scan could come with the words that something is stirring. has made itself known. and i know those words will crumple me. knock the wind right out of me. at least for awhile. till i find my bearings again.
and so i live just ahead of those words, as if they’re always on the chase, running up from the rear.
the people i love who died last week, who crossed to the other side, were beautiful souls who loved so majestically, so magnificently, and both of whose lungs were filled with the damn cancer that would not relent. each loved till the very last breath. each didn’t want to die. each one was brave—mostly—till the end. and each one finally let go.
in so many ways, their holy nub did not die. their spirit, their joy, their infinite giving, it’s as alive as ever. maybe more so. i feel each of them. i hear their words, their laughter, the very lilt in the way they spoke every word. and their invisible presence stirs me robustly. maybe it’s that we were all in the cancer gulch together, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder. maybe it’s that we spoke a language so little known outside the republic of cancer; a language into which we’d been swept, a language where shadows are looming, a language propelled by unfiltered truth and urgency.
maybe i feel like it’s up to me to carry on their brilliant-beyond-description ways of being in the world. but that would be wrong. their work, their nub, lives on in the ways it will forever animate and rub up against ours. but my work is mine. and my days to do it are now. and your work is yours. and your days are now.
the God i believe in breathed into us a constellation of wonders, and set us on our way. as rilke once wrote in a poem i’ve long pressed to my heart, imagining God speaking to each of us as God makes us, before we are born, before we leave the womb of darkness, God “walks with us silently out of the night.” and as we near the precipice of the womb, the place where the daylight seeps in, God whispers: “Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.”
and so this work that is ours to do, in this time that will end, we are here for holy purpose. and our God is at hand.
ashes to ashes. dust to dust.
the time in between is our one holy chance.
how will we use it?
in the tiny chapel where i go to pray, and where this week the ashes were smudged on my head, i found these words from psalm 103 breathtakingly beautiful. . .
for [God] himself knows whereof we are made; he remembers that we are but dust. Our days are like the grass; we flourish like a flower of the field; When the wind goes over it, it is gone, and its place shall know it no more.
may our time in the field be fruitful, may our petals unfurl fully as we drink in the sunlight. before the wind blows over us, and our time here is no more….
love, bam
sending special special love to the beautiful mama of one of the beauties who has crossed to the other side….i know that all of us here reach across the table in hopes of steadying your trembling hand, tissue at the ready to dry your flow of tears….
i am, as i so often am, late to the game. late to the nick cave game. i’ve known of his profound capacity to pierce the armament of the contemporary human wardrobe: the shield that keeps us at a distance from our own vulnerability. i’d heard rumor that he was a writer’s writer. but i’d never really dived in.
until now.
when a beloved, beloved friend sent me a letter he’d written that rang so, so close to truth — to my truth, anyway — i signed right up for more, more, more.
nick cave, in case he’s floated outside your circle of knowing, is, in a nutshell, a once-upon-a-time choir boy from australia, who went on to a wild ride through the early punk rock scene, and with his shock of black black hair and an emaciated profile, might aptly be described as a goth pioneer (note to mom: that means someone who takes on a wardrobe that’s something of a cross between a corpse and your most ghoulish uncle, and wallows in the literature and the language and the aesthetic of similar darkness, verging on the macabre). in time, he moved into the quieter, more contemplative lane of soulful song. his trademark, a baritone so deep it feels pulled from igneous rock, is fittingly in sync with the haunting, soulful lyrics he’s come to write.
nick cave
i’d known that tragedy struck dear nick, when his then 15-year-old son, arthur, fell from a cliff near brighton, england, and seven years later another son, jethro, died at 31, a death he doesn’t talk about, abiding by the wishes of jethro’s mother. i’d read bits of his writings about grief.
It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief’s awesome presence. It occupies the core of our being and extends through our fingers to the limits of the universe. Within that whirling gyre all manner of madnesses exist; ghosts and spirits and dream visitations, and everything else that we, in our anguish, will into existence. These are precious gifts that are as valid and as real as we need them to be. They are the spirit guides that lead us out of the darkness.
but never have i read any of the longer works i will now go find (faith, hope and carnage, an extended interview with the journalist seán o’hagan.) what’s intrigued me most, in poking around and gathering bits in the ways of magpie (a bird known for scavenging trinkets hither and yon), is his take on religion. it’s always the soulful entrée where i find my curiosities leading me. this paragraph alone shouts, read, read, read more to me….
Cave is an avid reader of the Bible. In his recorded lectures on music and songwriting, Cave said that any true love song is a song for God, and ascribed the mellowing of his music to a shift in focus from the Old Testament to the New. He has spoken too of what attracts him to belief in God: “One of the things that excites me about belief in God is the notion that it is unbelievable, irrational and sometimes absurd.”When asked if he had interest in religions outside of Christianity, Cave quipped that he had a passing, sceptical interest but was a “hammer-and-nails kind of guy.” Despite this, Cave has also said he is critical of organised religion. When interviewed by Jarvis Cocker of Pulp on 12 September 2010, for his BBC Radio 6 show Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service, Cave said that “I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it.”
*(emphasis, mine; in the case of “hammer-and-nails” it just struck my funny bone.)
the red hand files is the name of his blog, where he writes perhaps his most spontaneous writing (the hidden beauty of blogging [among the uglier words in the lexicon]). started years ago, it was a place for nick cave fans to send him questions, questions he’d sift through and choose to answer—or not. it seems to have morphed into a place of profound nakedness, another name for truth in unprotected, unshielded, undressed form.
here, the letter that drew me in, or most of that letter anyway:
As the ground shifts and slides beneath us, and the world hardens around its particular views, I become increasingly uncertain and less self-assured. I am neither on the left nor on the right, finding both sides, as they mainly present themselves, indefensible and unrecognisable. I am essentially a liberal-leaning, spiritual conservative with a small ‘c’, which, to me, isn’t a political stance, rather it is a matter of temperament. I have a devotional nature, and I see the world as broken but beautiful, believing that it is our urgent and moral duty to repair it where we can and not to cause further harm, or worse, wilfully usher in its destruction. I think we consist of more than mere atoms crashing into each other, and that we are, instead, beings of vast potential, placed on this earth for a reason – to magnify, as best we can, that which is beautiful and true. I believe we have an obligation to assist those who are genuinely marginalised, oppressed, or sorrowful in a way that is helpful and constructive and not to exploit their suffering for our own professional advancement or personal survival. I have an acute and well-earned understanding of the nature of loss and know in my bones how easy it is for something to break, and how difficult it is to put it back together. Therefore, I am cautious with the world and try to treat all its inhabitants with care.
I am comfortable with doubt and am constitutionally resistant to moral certainty, herd mentality and dogma. I am disturbed on a fundamental level by the self-serving, toddler politics of some of my counterparts – I do not believe that silence is violence, complicity, or a lack of courage, but rather that silence is often the preferred option when one does not know what they are talking about, or is doubtful, or conflicted – which, for me, is most of the time. I am mainly at ease with not knowing and find this a spiritually and creatively dynamic position. I believe that there are times when it is almost a sacred duty to shut the fuck up.
I’m not particularly concerned about where people stand – I’ve met some of the finest individuals from across the political spectrum. In fact, I take pride and immense pleasure in having friends with divergent views. My life is significantly more interesting and colourful with them in it.
Perhaps this all amounts to very little, but I suppose, in the end, I value deeds over words. I see my own role as a musician, songwriter, and letter writer as actively serving the soul of the world, and I’ve come to understand that this is the position that I must adopt in order to attempt to cultivate genuine change. In fact, I am now beginning to understand where I do stand, Alistair – I stand with the world, in its goodness and beauty. In these hysterical, monochromatic, embattled times, I call to its soul, the way musicians can, to its grieving and broken nature, to its misplaced meaning, to its fragile and flickering spirit. I sing to it, praise it, encourage it, and strive to improve it – in adoration, reconciliation, and leaping faith.
Love, Nick
but that’s not all….
maybe what we need in this age is to move beyond words. to use our eyes more than our ears. to look and look closely at the common bonds of our humanity, and herein is precisely the study we might need, to see the human visage wrought by sorrow, or grief: on the brink of tears, fighting tears, to watch the flinching of muscle, the biting of lips, the contortion of muscle, pulled by nerves tied to whatever is the emotional core of us. to see how the human face on the brink of tears is sooooo deeply universally understood, felt, responded to. maybe in that place of wordlessness we can remember that we are all one, of one species, and that within us all is the emotion called grief, called sorrow. and we’d do well to remember that we are all always on the verge of brokenness. and, too, we might be the arms that reach out to dry the tear, to hold the quivering shoulders, to brace the wobbling spine against whatever strength we might muster. maybe we need to remember how tender we all are, somewhere, somewhere deep inside…..
only one poem this week, and it wasn’t actually written as a poem, but laid out that way here it works mightily. it’s excerpted from abolitionist Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” address, in the version published in 1863. The speech was originally delivered in the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. we might do well to ask, in the face of so much inhumanity, if swapping out the word “human” for “woman” stirs its own seeds of compassion….i am bereft; hollowed, haunted by the stories of immigrants pulled from their churches, their cars, their homes, flung to the ground, stomped on, kicked, living in fear…..
sojourner truth (unknown birth date; died 1883)
but this, as written, is more than mighty as is…..
Ain’t I A Woman?
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?
Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?
I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it — and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?
I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman? . . . Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them!
+ Sojourner Truth
because you are all so wise in so many ways, what thoughts might you add to a conversation on love and grief, and the intermingling therein?
i’m off to my 50th high school reunion this weekend, a date that gives me pause, as it was one of the tenderest times in my life 50 years ago, a time that marked me through all these years. it was a steep uphill climb for a long time there. and thank holy God i lived long enough to get here. my prayer is that those who show up find compassion and grace, and that those who choose to stay home look around and see lives that have grown beyond the bounds of whatever have been the obstacles.
and i pray, oh i pray, for this world. no kings rally tomorrow….i heard a story this week about the not-far-away catholic church where ICE agents filled the parking lot during spanish-language mass, targeting the prayerful inside. so the priest becalmed those in the pews, locked the church doors, promised protection to his flock, and a brigade of rapid-response volunteers drove parishioners safely to their homes. cars had to be left behind. prayers were laced with terror. this is not the america my uncle died for, bayoneted in the night in a tent on iwo jima….
as my beloved friend fanny put it, “they come after us because we’re brown.”
Mostly, this is a love letter. One I might have tucked in the pine coffin now buried beneath a foot-and-a-half of Chicago’s clumpiest earth, earth we shoveled onto it, one full spade at a time. The one to whom I write this, though, my fairy gardenmother, is not one ever confined by boxes or borders or hard lines scrawled in the dirt. She, my Marguerite, was as free a spirit as they come. So I cast this to the wind, and know she will catch it.
Marguerite made beauty for a living. She sowed joy in abundance. Not a single root or shoot was tucked in the earth or tied to a trellis without the ringing sound of her laughter.
Marguerite’s acanthus
She bequeathed me beauty, her beauty and that of this holy earth. And grace, and a tidepool of peace, the sort that settles deep within, calming what had long been a turbulence. It all came in a litany of botanic derivative, a litany I water and witness: tree peonies, fuchsia and ruffled and broad as a dinner plate; oakleaf hydrangea, its bottle-brush blooms now bursting in time for the Fourth of July. Pieris japonica (sometimes known as lily-of-the-valley shrub, or flame of the forest) whose delicate white star-blooms are the petit point of late springtime, stitched along the bluestone path that bends toward my front door. A dwarf lilac that defies its definition and perfumes profusely my brick walk out back. My garden blooms with acanthus, the ancient Greek thistle of endurance and immortality, and white bleeding hearts that, as instructed, seem to be on the verge of spilling succulence drop by drop by drop. Everywhere, the vanilla scent of Jack-in-the-pulpit rises. There are ferns in abundance, and climbing hydrangea who wouldn’t be daunted by Everest. And about a dozen other beauties whose names I often forget, and when I do I’d text her, and she’d remind me, always with annotation of what she loved most about it. And another something I might want to try.
If I tried to describe her, I’d begin with her face. Her face was alive, was radiant, was always revved up in joy. Or deep concentration. Her laugh came easy, so easy. Her limbs flowed. She was a ballerina in the everyday. Clogs buried in garden, wielding a shovel or pruners, she swayed with the wind, with the whims, with purpose.
She planted my secret garden, the one that meanders along the side of my house, from my writing room window, past the kitchen door, and into the garden out back. It’s the place I’d point to if pressed to answer the question: Where did you finally find your long-sought peace? It was there in the garden that Marguerite grew.
I first met Marguerite a garden ago, back in 1991, months after we married, my beloved and I. The very day we wandered into the old Victorian that became our house for a decade, the house to which both our boys first came home, the house that held so many joys and so many sorrows, Marguerite was there. She was packing up boxes with Jim the sculptor who was dying of AIDS, and who would soon leave us his beautifully sculpted three-story house (and a set of Old Willow dishes besides). They wept and wailed and laughed together. We heard the echo of their affections before we saw them, and when we climbed the stairs there she was: radiant, a mop of blond curls, eyes hazel and sparkling.
She knelt beside me summer after summer, teaching me much of what I know about what grows in a garden. We wandered nurseries and tree lots. We planted according to her unorthodox teachings. When anything ailed, she knew the fix. Or we yanked it and started again.
My jewel box of a tiny urban garden, one where the alley rats dared not roam for the fierce farm cat who patrolled it, grew to be a wonder. One whose measure in my mind far exceeded a yardstick.
When at last we decided we’d finished our work, at least for the time being, Marguerite and Ted, her rabbi of a husband who presided over a congregation of his psychotherapy clients, came by one late summer’s evening to bless the little plot. In a story I love so much I included it on pages 37 and 38 of The Book of Nature**, Ted offered up fertility prayers for my garden, that it would blossom and bloom, and multiply. Four months later, on the brink of my 44th birthday, after eight years of broken hearts and infertility, I discovered that I was the one blossoming and multiplying. I was “with child,” as the Bible would put it. I always giggled that Ted had mixed up his fertility prayers, and pulled out the ones for the barren woman instead of the ones for the garden.
ted and marguerite
And so, of course, and ever since, Marguerite is the one to whom I turned with every garden question, and every delight as it bloomed. When Ted died not quite two years ago, I knew Marguerite’s heart was shattered. And there was no glue in the world to put it back together. But I didn’t know it would kill her.
I now know that it did. For she died on Monday, and was buried on Tuesday. And ever since I’ve been strolling through my garden, stopping to marvel here, stooping to deadhead there. I’ve been shlepping my hose, and giving big drinks to each and every bloom bequeathed to me by my Marguerite.
Marguerite will always bloom in my garden. Her longtime sidekick, David the cop, is coming soon to help me dream once again. There is a plot under the ornamental lilac and the row of burning bush, and I have named it Marguerite’s Garden, and I will be planting it before the month of her death turns to August.
And it will be abundant in beauty. Because that’s what Marguerite taught me to grow. And that will never die.
the jewel box of a flower shop: Marguerite Gardens (from Victoria Magazine)
Marguerite’s genius in the garden spread far beyond our little block of Wellington Avenue, 60657. When she couldn’t be contained, she launched a for-hire garden crew (a motley crew counting two cops, a U of C theology grad fluent in Mandarin Chinese, a commodities trader, a banker, and a pet photographer) with a seasons-long waiting list. She planted tulips by the thousands up and down Boul Mich, Chicago’s grand Magnificent Mile. She planted the city’s lushest rooftops and balcony gardens. She was a connoisseur of miniatures, and knew how to cram the most in the least. She opened a dream of a flower shop in Andersonville, aptly named Marguerite Gardens, and twice daily received imports from her beloved Netherlands. The shop, with the bell that tinkled as you walked in, held a European-style flower market, and was stuffed to the rafters with eighteenth-century antiques, from bird cages to terraria. Aptly, she was named for the daisy whose name means “pearl” in French, and is the bloom from which petals are plucked in the prognostication game, “he loves me, he loves me not.” Married for 43 years to the inimitable, unorthodox, Yale-educated rabbi and psychotherapist, Theodore Gluck, Marguerite died 656 days after Ted, three days short of what would have been his 95th birthday. Marguerite was 75.
**excerpt from pages 37 and 38, Marguerite’s star turn in The Book of Nature, in which i describe that first garden we planted and blessed together…
. . .That garden—where a priest, a rabbi, and a tight circle of people we love gathered for blessings shortly after the births of each of our boys; where baby bunnies and nestlings and goldfish were buried after premature deaths; where our stubbornly resistant house cat mastered the art of escape—that plat of earth became as sacred to me as any cloister garth.
Not only was it where I knelt to teach my firstborn the magic of tucking a spit-out watermelon seed into the loam and, each morning after, tracking its implausible surge. During seven long years of miscarriage after miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy and emergency surgery, and doctors finally telling us to give up hope, I dug and I dug in that garden, all but willing the tiniest bulbs and tenderest sprouts to beat impossible odds, refusing to let anything else die on my watch. And then, at the end of one summer, as the crab apples were starting to turn, a rabbi who lived down the block came by with his wife, whom I’d long called my fairy gardenmother for her magical ways and her unbroken guidance. Standing under the stars, the rabbi, his wife, and I, we blessed the garden itself, casting prayers and sprinklings of water. By that Christmas, I was pregnant, with nary a drop of medical intervention. Just shy of forty-five when that blessing of a baby arrived the next August, I’ve always wondered if maybe the rabbi mixed up the garden fertility prayers.
It’s all a holy whirl—that intricate and inseparable interweaving that is the cosmos.
one poem this week, from a bouquet of many i plucked:
Desiderata
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself…
Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism…
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth…
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
“it’s like we’re the great kaleidoscope, all little pieces, but every time you turn it, it’s different. so you and i are made up of exactly the same stuff, but every one of us is unique. there’s only one in all the world. and the same with every petal of a pansy….i’m the star thistle, and the grass, and the dirt. i am you; you are me.”
i tumbled into this most breathtaking old soul, majestic soul, and i shall let her do the talking today. i quickly grew so enchanted by her voice, her deep and gravely voice, a voice that must have traveled rocky roads, that i began to take notes, and i am leaving those notes here: part transcript, part poem. i’m not catching every word but the words i’m catching are those i do not want to lose. it’s as if a great elder has come today to impart something. to share a light, the light she came to know was her one thing to share. to leave with the world.
may we all be so.
may we all by illuminated by this nearly 96-year-old, who is a veritable masterpiece of all that matters.
and here are notes, in prayer form, in poetry…
that i can still breathe easy i don’t want to have just visited this world i want to be a child of wonder and astonishment
i’m having my second childhood now, my happy childhood i was always the outsider, i was always pointed at, i always felt terribly self-conscious so i have fun now
i’m just learning about play because i didn’t know what play was when i was a child i think play means exploring, experimenting, being curious, looking, seeing, being in the body not being afraid
it’s about the miracle and mystery of being alive
“we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time”
that’s t.s. eliot.
i had cancer once and . . . and afterwards i had surgery and i felt like i had to give myself a reaon that i was spared. that i got my life back and then, over many years, i saw that i had something to give, my light
something ineffable that i don’t know that light of harmlessness and harmony and singing and being joyful and rejoicing and being grateful
we’re here to experience the wonder of being in a body. . . to know that we are each other that we’re the same we’re made of all the same stuff . . . we’re little bits of stars, we’re dust
it’s like we’re the great kaleidoscope all little pieces but every time you turn it, it’s different so you and i are made up of exactly the same stuff, but every one of us is unique. there’s only one in all the world. and the same with every petal of a pansy….
i’m the star thistle, and the grass, and the dirt. i am you; you are me.
. . . my prayer is to go gently and as much aware of myself leaving with gratitude and joy and the satisfaction, “i’m done, i’m outa here. and it’s ok” it’s all such a mystery
thanks, i wanna say thank you not try to figure anything out, or understand it
but just be in awe
what’s the secret? it’s go slow for me . . .
[breaks into song. . .]
this beautiful film was made by two south african filmmakers who go by first names only as far as i can tell, justine and michael. their mission: to explore our shared humanity. their enterprise is known as reflections of life, formerly green renaissance. i do believe there is a trove worth plumbing…..i do not know the name of this blessedly beautiful nonagenarian so i shall name her simply Wisdom.
as we enter into supremely holy time, in both the jewish and the christian spheres, (are we not always in supremely holy time?), our friend here prompts the question how will you choose to live in awe?
the God of every religion tells us to do it. commands us: love thy neighbor as thyself.
i’ve felt it in my own life, know it to be a force that transcends time, space, and matter. i’ve felt it all but align planets whose orbits were out of whack. i’ve felt it pierce through to the core of me, prompt me to reach down and seize a source, a muscle, i didn’t know that i had. it’s made me more than i ever imagined i could be. lured me out of mighty dark years.
love, thank heaven, is patient. love is keenly perceptive. love, often, won’t take No for an answer.
i’ve felt it shrink distance, make the sound coming through the telephone as close as if we were sidled, thigh to thigh touching, on the seat of a couch in the very same room.
i’ve heard it in barely audible whispers, and in shouts across the corridors of an airport, a hospital, a college campus––a sound so ebullient my heart leaps to quicken its pace.
i’ve spent my life learning how to do it. keeping close watch on the ones i encounter who do it the best. the most emphatically.
i’ve learned it from the little bent man who perched on a hydrant, befriending the pigeons. flocks and flocks of pigeons, he lovingly tended. even in the face of taunts and jeers from the cars passing by.
i’ve learned it from my first best friend who knew without asking how deeply it hurt, how tender it felt to be seen in shadow and light.
i’ve learned it from my long-ago landlady, the one who would knock at my door, come dinnertime, and hand me a hot steaming bowl of avgolemeno, the egg-and-lemon-rich chicken-rice soup that serves as Greek penicillin, and cured what ailed me no matter how awful the day.
i’ve learned it from a 12-year-old girl who lay in a hospital bed, her legs unable to move, paralyzed from the waist down by a tumor lodged in her spine. i’ll never forget the glimmer in her eye, as she looked up and laughed, as she handed me her hand-made papier-mâché green pumpkin head, the one she’d made flat on her back, and with which she crowned me her Irish Pumpkin Queen of a hospital nurse.
i’ve learned it, and felt it: in the canyon of grief, in the vice hold of fear, and in long seasons of haunting despair. it’s the ineffable force with the power to pull us up off the ground, inch us just a little bit forward, and shake off the worries that freeze us in our tracks.
my hunch is that someone at hallmark international invented today, the day in which pink paper hearts are soared hither and yon. or maybe it was the three catholic saints, all named valentine or valentinus, and, as was so often the story, all of whom were martyred for breaking some reason or rule. in the case of third century rome, a priest named valentine defied the emporer who’d ruled that single men made better soldiers than those with a wife, and thus outlawed marriage. valiant valentine, seeing the injustice in the loveless decree, kept about the business of marrying young sweethearts in secret. for this, he lost his head.
earlier still, pagans seized the midpoint, or ides, of the month––february 15––as Lupercalia, a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the roman god of agriculture, and to Romulus and Remus, the founders of rome. a priestly order of roman pagans, the Luperci, gathered at the secret cave where Rom and Rem were thought to have been raised by she-wolves, to sacrifice a goat, which they then stripped of its hide, and sliced into strips. then, according to historians, “they would dip [the strips] into the sacrificial blood and take to the streets, gently slapping both women and crop fields with the goat hide.”*
maybe pink paper hearts are, after all, a step in the right romantic direction.
truth be told, 34 years in, it’s recycled hearts adorning someone’s place at the breakfast table…
*postscript on those slap-happy romans: far from being fearful of the bloody slaps, young roman women were said to welcome the mark of the bloody hides, for it was thought to make them more fertile in the year to come.
lifting the day out of its purely-romantic framing, here are three takes on iterations of love, reminding us of the evolution of love across the decades of marriage, and the love of this one sacred Earth we’ve been given to tend:
first up, the sage from kentucky, farmer-poet-secular priest wendell berry, from a much longer poem, but i was drawn to these three parts, meditations on a long and deepening love…
excerpts fromThe Country of Marriage by Wendell Berry
III. Sometimes our life reminds me of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing and in that opening a house, an orchard and garden, comfortable shades, and flowers red and yellow in the sun, a pattern made in the light for the light to return to. The forest is mostly dark, its ways to be made anew day after day, the dark richer than the light and more blessed, provided we stay brave enough to keep on going in.
IV. How many times have I come to you out of my head with joy, if ever a man was, for to approach you I have given up the light and all directions. I come to you lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace in you, when I arrive at last.
V. Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange of my love and work for yours, so much for so much of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are– that puts us in the dark. We are more together than we know, how else could we keep on discovering we are more together than we thought? You are the known way leading always to the unknown, and you are the known place to which the unknown is always leading me back. More blessed in you than I know, I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing not belittled by my saying that I possess it. Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light enough to live, and then accepts the dark, passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I have fallen tine and again from the great strength of my desire, helpless, into your arms.
and the belle of amherst turns our attention to this world that keeps loving us, despite the ways we batter it, and ignore it…
This world is just a little place, just the red in the sky, before the sun rises, so let us keep fast hold of hands, that when the birds begin, none of us be missing. — Emily Dickinson, in a letter, 1860
and finally, the late great naturalist and essayist Barry Lopez, on how to be awake to this still blessed world, from the foreword to Earthly Love, a 2020 anthology from Orion magazine. He is describing walking a vast landscape––a spinifex plain, or grassy coastal dunes, in North-Central Australia––for the first time, but the wisdom is how to attend to a deepening love:
My goal that day was intimacy — the tactile, olfactory, visual, and sonic details of what, to most people in my culture, would appear to be a wasteland. This simple technique of awareness had long been my way to open a conversation with any unfamiliar landscape. Who are you? I would ask. How do I say your name? May I sit down? Should I go now? Over the years I’d found this way of approaching whatever was new to me consistently useful: establish mutual trust, become vulnerable to the place, then hope for some reciprocity and perhaps even intimacy. You might choose to handle an encounter with a stranger you wanted to get to know better in the same way. Each person, I think, finds their own way into an unknown world like this spinifex plain; we’re all by definition naive about the new, but unless you intend to end up alone in your life, it seems to me you must find some way in a new place — or with a new person — to break free of the notion that you can be certain of what or whom you’ve actually encountered. You must, at the very least, establish a truce with realities not your own, whether you’re speaking about the innate truth and aura of a landscape or a person.
. . . I wanted to open myself up as fully as I could to the possibility of loving this place, in some way; but to approach that goal, I had first to come to know it. As is sometimes the case with other types of aquaintanceships, to suddenly love without really knowing is to opt for romance, not commitment and obligation.
and, later in the same essay, his call to attention for a world suffering from what he quite plainly calls, “a failure to love,” a message of urgency on a day in which love, in its many many iterations, is held up to the light.
EVIDENCE OF THE failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage the havoc — ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war — we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas — the crushing immorality of maintaining the nation-state, the life-destroying beliefs that to care for others is to be weak and that to be generous is to be foolish — can have no future with us.
It is more important now to be in love than to be in power.
when i take a deep breath in tonight, and close my eyes to make a wish, there is only one wish i’m wishing this year: i wish for a birthday next year.
that’s everything, really.
i’ll be wishing so hard.
it’s a wish that feels so far away. and so very big. like i’m asking for the moon.
it’s a wish that carries a secret. one the sages and prophets and poets have known for a very long time.
it’s a paradox wish. it’s a koan. it’s a wish that makes you think. perk up and pay attention. root around for the wisdom, the immutable truth.
truth is, it’s even bigger than it seems. it’s a russian doll of a wish. one of those ones with umpteen tiny-grained wishes within. grain by grain by grain we make it across a year, and year by year a lifetime.
a birthday next year.
doesn’t sound like too much. but, oh, it’s infinite really.
the blessing of cancer––and yes there are blessings, ones the sages and prophets all seem to have known without needing the verdict, without the scalawag cells lurking in shadows, cells that can’t wait to divide and multiply and muck up the works––is that it rejiggers your seeing. it’s the psychophysics of vision: when range is narrowed, acuity’s heightened. you learn to look not too far into the offing; you learn to look more closely than ever at whatever it is that’s right there before you. and, thus, you see all the more clearly the finest of grains all along the way.
the fine grains are where the wonder, the magic, the awe, are kerneled inside, awaiting their turn to burst forth, to be seen, savored, not left by the wayside.
life in the up-close, life when we’re listening for whispers not waiting for timpani, is how we come to know the most sacred grain therein.
in wishing for one more birthday––please God, just one is all i’m wishing this year (if wishes come true, i’ll wish it again and again and again as long as i can)––what i’m really wishing for are those tiny, tiny moments that strung onto a cord make for one holy rosary.
within my one moon-size, more-than-anything wish, here are some of the grains nestled inside:
i wish for the holy, holy sound of one or both of my boys calling me at some unlikely hour to tell me one of their dreams has come tumbling true. or at least the latest chapter therein. and before they’ve uttered a word, i’ll know from the sound of their breathing that the news that’s coming is good. and, dear God, i don’t wanna be stingy but i’d sure love one or two more of those sweet, sweet jubilant sounds.
and while i’m wishing, i sure wish i get to hear the rough draft versions of those dreams, as they’re in the making, as my boys try them on for size and dare to let me in on the beta versions.
i wish for their soft, big hands to wrap around my now-more-wrinkled littler one––to hold me steady, be it a cobblestone walk or life’s herky-jerky jolts tipping me over.
i wish for one of those early mornings where no one is stirring but me, and the dawn hasn’t yet rosied the sky, and the biggest decision i’m called to make is which mug should i pull from the shelf.
i wish to sink my teeth into the sweetest strawberry of the season. ditto the crispest apple of fall. and the juiciest of august’s tomato.
i wish to run down the airport corridor one more time and into the arms of my faraway boy, all while loudly belting out, “it’s been five years!” (even when it hasn’t been), only because all the good souls slumped in their hard plastic seats deserve a little airport sentimentality. even if it’s improv, and utterly fiction. and because there’s nothing i love so much as the arms of my boys wrapped round my shoulders.
i wish to come to the last page of a book with tears rolling down my cheeks, not yet wanting to say goodbye to characters i’ve come to love.
i wish to sit down to dinner with only the one i love, or to a table filled with nearly a dozen i adore.
i wish to exhale that one cleansing breath when the last of the dishes are done, and all that’s left is a long evening of laughter and stories and loving.
i wish for the sound of the crackling logs on the fire.
i wish to wake up one morning and remember there is not a single worry weighing me down.
i wish i could gather all the people i love—or just a good handful––and plonk down at a table where no one tries to corner the conversation and everyone takes a generous turn. and by the time i’m getting up from the table, i am marveling once again at the goodness, the depth, the hilarity of the vast human character.
i wish i could stand under the stars and behold the star-salted sky.
i wish i could pray so deeply that i felt the shoulder of God brushing against me. or catch myself walking alone in the woods and feeling a shaft of light break through the boughs, and sense that i wasn’t one bit alone, but that the God who i love was leading me forward.
i wish for those beautiful blessed souls who populate hospitals in the unlikeliest spots, the ones who radiate the gift of making you feel so deeply seen. and safe. and cocooned.
i wish for a sermon so stirring it breaks me into tears.
i wish to hear the soul-stirring sound of the deepest laughter there is from the people i love who laugh the heartiest laugh, the sort of laughter that runs tears down your cheeks. and makes you gasp for a breath.
i wish i could answer the knock at the door and be just the person that someone needs, the shoulder to cry on, the arms to hold them steady, the one to dry the tears.
i wish i could wake up one morning and read a headline that makes me believe the good guys will finally, finally win. and that plain old gentle kindness and the raw courage to speak up for what’s fair and right and just will bend the arc toward justice once again….
that’s enough wishes for one russian doll of a wish, though the truth is i’m only beginning…
i found a few nuggets to launch this holy new year, all worthy of contemplation. the first is from the writer suleika jaouad, a comrade on the cancer road (and wife of the brilliant musician jon batiste). she’s suffering godawful setbacks these days and i’m holding her in my every day’s prayers…:
This year, we’re contemplating and reveling in the idea of magic. It’s based on a theme I’ve found myself returning to: the need to let go of the fear of the unknown and instead to open ourselves up to the mysteries and the magic of the unknown. That’s my constant work—and in this time when our world feels more uncertain than ever before, I’d venture to say that it’s all of our work.
from the inimitable mystic and theologian henri nouwen who guides my every day:
Born to Reconcile
If you dare to believe that you are beloved before you are born, you may suddenly realize that your life is very, very special. You become conscious that you were sent here just for a short time, for twenty, forty, or eighty years, to discover and believe that you are a beloved child of God. The length of time doesn’t matter. You are sent into this world to believe in yourself as God’s chosen one and then to help your brothers and sisters know that they are also Beloved Sons and Daughters of God who belong together. You’re sent into this world to be a people of reconciliation. You are sent to heal, to break down the walls between you and your neighbors, locally, nationally, and globally. Before all distinctions, the separations, and the walls built on foundations of fear, there was a unity in the mind and heart of God. Out of that unity, you are sent into this world for a little while to claim that you and every other human being belongs to the same God of Love who lives from eternity to eternity.
and, not least, my favorite, favorite after-Christmas prayer-poem from howard thurman, a prophet of his time. . .
The Work of Christmas
When the song of the angels is stilled, When the star in the sky is gone, When the kings and princes are home, When the shepherds are back with their flock, The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost, To heal the broken, To feed the hungry, To release the prisoner, To rebuild the nations, To bring peace among others, To make music in the heart.
— Howard Thurman
what one wish will you make this year?(you needn’t reveal here, of course!)
bless you, each and every one for making this year more blessed than you might ever imagine. you have been there for me at every turn. even when you did not know it. and i am forever blessed by you.
p.s. photo above is from a few years back, but it captures the depth of a wish being cast to the stars and the heavens above….
pull up a chair 