My baby boy, the one they told me I’d never ever have, is graduating from a college he never thought he’d know as his own. And we are celebrating. We are jubilant. We are celebrating deep down inside both of us all those things that people say you will never ever do; but you forge right ahead and you do them anyway.
We have long thought of the kid as “the egg that wouldn’t take no for an answer.” That little egg did not care that I was 43, halfway to 45 by the time he was born. Did not care that so many other eggs had not followed instructions. That egg — his egg — refused to take no for an answer. And that egg grew and grew into the magnificent human with the very very big heart. The tenderest heart I’ve ever known. A heart that says best what it says in unpunctuated text messages, in hilarious pictures he sends of himself dressed in alligator suit, complete with spiky tail he swishes hither and yon as he stalks his native habitat.
That kid is my champion. That kid makes me believe in the impossible. That kid is living, breathing, impossible made possible.
That kid told me a few weeks ago that when he was trying to do the impossible — to reach for something well out of reach — he tapped his shoulder as if to beckon me, to give him the strength and the will and the courage he needed. Turns out, he reached what he was reaching for. And he let me in on his secret the morning after it happened. Ever since, I’ve follow his lead: when I need to reach for something beyond my reach — be it courage, or breath, or not flinching a muscle when the doctor comes at me with needles the size of a drain pipe — I now tap my shoulder too.
That kid and I might spend the rest of our lives tapping our shoulders, beckoning courage, beckoning the possible, beckoning reaching far, far beyond what we think we can do.
So I am madly wildly celebrating that kid, and the chance to be by his side when he doesn’t exactly walk across the graduation stage this weekend. Because his most recent impossible something was winning a championship along with his mates, the ones who fling frisbees into the air, and shout out in joy as they run for the discs that spin through the air, impossibly. He’s taking to frisbee fields, in the national championship, instead of seizing diploma, and I will be right there on the sideline. Jubilant. Celebrant. Waiting to see if he taps at his shoulder.
My once-impossible impossibly soaring and diving, seizing the impossible. My blue-ribbon boy. My joy and jubilance ever after…
i could sit and read jane kenyon all day any day. and this one is new to me, so i’m sharing it…
jane kenyon, a poet of the quotidian, was long and adoringly married to donald hall, the late great poet and essayist. both now gone; forever heroes to me, their poetries worthy of a lifetime’s attention. some years ago, in the blessing of one such lifetime, i sat beside hall –– on the floor tucked against his armchair –– in the living room of their white frame farmhouse on eagle pond, in new hampshire. it was during our “year of thinking sumptuously,” when we up and moved to cambridge, mass., and drank from the firehose that is the nieman fellowship for journalists. poetry was where i took my deepest dive that year. and, after that field trip to new hampshire, hall and i became something of pen pals, posting letters back and forth, letters i now save tucked between the pages of his poems. on the day we had spent at eagle pond farm, kenyon, who had been the poet laureate of new hampshire, had already died (she died at 47 in 1995), but her poetries for me are now animated by knowing the kitchen where she cooked, the desk where she wrote, and the barn where she sometimes went to weep.
here is kenyon’s “happiness”…
There’s just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place the finest garment, which you saved for an occasion you could not imagine, and you weep night and day to know that you were not abandoned, that happiness saved its most extreme form for you alone.
No, happiness is the uncle you never knew about, who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes into town, and inquires at every door until he finds you asleep midafternoon, as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair.
It comes to the monk in his cell. It comes to the woman sweeping the street with a birch broom, to the child whose mother has passed out from drink. It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker, and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots in the night.
It even comes to the boulder in the perpetual shade of pine barrens, to rain falling on the open sea, to the wineglass, weary of holding wine. + Jane Kenyon
my jubilance: apparently, he’s been dressing up as zoo animals his whole life long. here he is, my tiger.
a few years ago, maybe many years ago, i wrote something of a proclamation on mothering, the verb. in my feisty little voice, i argued — as vehemently as a girl taught to be polite could argue –– that, gosh darn it, mothering was not an art that belonged exclusively to those who happen to have pushed a wee squawker from her womb, nor only to those who’ve clutched babies to her bosom, anatomically-aligned attachments. i argued that we should be honoring not simply the noun — those who are mothers — but the verb — those who mother.
it’s an all-inclusive distinction, one i tried to describe thusly:
yes, every last someone who has stroked a brow, wiped a tear, dabbed chocolate off a little cheek, fluffed a pillow, tucked in the covers, whispered bedtime prayers, set an extra place at the table, stretched a meatloaf, picked the peas out of the pasta salad, kissed a bloody knee, kept a retching belly from falling in the toilet bowl.
yes, every pair of arms that’s lifted a dead-weight child in the pool, played red rover till the cows came home, bent half-over to push a kid on training wheels around and round the block, turned the pages of good night moon so many times you find yourself chanting good night to the mittens when no one’s in the room.
you get the point.
i believe it as firmly as i believe anything. and in fact, in the many hours i’ve spent curled in my window seat in recent days, i found myself with nose in a book that argues — again, vehemently yet politely — that we are missing out on a whole lot of God if we think of God only as a white-bearded fellow perched on a throne with a sword and a scepter, a God as king, imperial ruler and judge, as wielder of power, and slayer of sinners. (for the record, that has never been my image of God, and i admit to images, being of the simple kind who need pictures to go along with my favorite passages. and the picture i saw is a tender God, one with arms that reach, and a palm that cradles, or presses against the small of my back. and as i’ve grown and deepened into the mystery, i now sense God without image at all. i sense God in the shiver that runs up my spine when i encounter the beautiful or the unbearably tender, and i find God in the interplay — the ineffable force — that animates hearts and draws us — any of us, all of us — into each other.)
“God is that on which you lean your heart, that on which your heart depends, ‘that to which your heart clings and entrusts itself,’ in Martin Luther’s memorable phrase.”
the truth is, it’s all mystery, and we reach for metaphor so our little minds can find something to seize. how do you put words to the inexplicable, the unknowable? you simply know what you know.
but in considering a God imbued with the feminine, a God more mother-like, a God, as johnson writes, of “gentleness and compassion, unconditional love, reverence and care for the weak, sensitivity, a desire not to dominate but to be an intimate companion and friend,” i scan the landscape of my recent days, and i spell out this litany of what mothering — the verb that belongs to all who employ tender loving empathies and unending expression of gentle kindness — looks like:
mothering is the knock at the door on a rainy morning, not long after dawn, and the friend who is standing there with a handful of field-plucked flowers and a soggy brown bag of parsley and spinach and ramps, foods she grabbed from the farmer’s market, knowing from her own daughter’s deadly cancer that these are the foods that should fuel me. and she knew without asking how very much i wished i could get to the market, though i couldn’t quite yet.
mothering is my beloved husband who, every morning, makes certain the feeder is filled with seed and the bird bath fully watered, for he knows the joy i absorb watching the birds flit hither and yon. mothering is the pizza he drove into the city to fetch because it oozes the things i love — spinach and mushrooms and cheese and a heavenly red sauce –– and he is intent on fattening me my way. mothering is the rod stewart and kim carnes tapes he played all morning long to try to convince me the rasp in my so-called voice (paralyzed vocal cord caused by the surgery) was a sexy addition to life here on the homefront.
mothering is the friends who don’t back down, who don’t shy away, who know without asking just when to barge in, and when to stay quiet. and who keep coming back, week after week, willing to walk at a snail’s pace, or pick up a vacuum and suck up the kitchen-floor crumbs that are driving me batty.
mothering is my aunt who tucked a tiny enamel cross in an envelope and scribbled these words on a note card: “hope i’m helping you carry your cross!” and then wrote that as soon as her daughter could drive her up here from cincinnati, she wanted to sit side-by-side under an apple tree “to make your ‘hurts’ hurt less.”
mothering is the courage to go the distance, even when the distance is wholly uncharted and fraught with shadows and plenty of bumps. and what you need more than anything is a friend who won’t cower and run for the hills.
mothering is the way some listen for the fears tucked in an otherwise straightforward sentence, and who don’t shush those hauntings away, but make room for it all, the light, the darkness, the liminal.
mothering is the text message that comes out of nowhere and makes you laugh till the slits in your side tell you to stop. because laughter is always, always, a curative. and it can carry you for hours, the echo of its joy refusing to fade.
mothering is this holy earth unfurling its tight buds and its blossoms into frothy meringues of cumulus white and lavender blue. mothering is the dawn that reminds me again and again that the light will shatter the night. mothering is the papa bird who tucks the seed into mama’s beak, an iteration of kissing i’ll not soon forget.
mothering is without gender, independent of obstetrical status. mothering, quite frankly, is simply another name for “love as you would be loved.”
mothering, quite simply, is what God does.
blessed mothering to all of you who mother and mother and mother –– even if you don’t realize…
birthday blessings to one of the wise women among us, our beloved lamcal, who fetched me from the darkness last night, and plunked me into a circle of pure and undeniable love, even when i wasn’t sure i was up for an outing. she’d sensed it might do my soul wonders, despite my bodily wobbles and squeaks, and she was oh so very very right on the money. i sat last night in a circle of holy holy pilgrims, who poured out their hearts and their blessings. and sent me forth. happy birthday, wise one….
lest you miss it, here’s the week’s query:tell a story of a time you were so deeply mothered — perhaps by an unlikely motherer — you’ve never forgotten.
and i’m leaving you this. because it’s glorious:
Go Deeper than Love
Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths, love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock molten, yet dense and permanent. Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself. And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved. Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors. For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths out of sight, in the deep living heart.
~ D.H. Lawrence ~
p.s. even though the picture above is overt mothering with a literal mother cradling her literal baby (moi and my firstborn, the law professor) i had to reach for it today, because that tenderness, that love, is the very thing fueling me right now, as i reach out of these past upturned weeks and set my sights fervently, fiercely, on doing everything i can to keep on loving my boys –– and all of this life –– with every ounce of tender lovingness i can squeeze out of me…..so help me, MotherGod….
equal time for equal mothering: this is saying goodbye one college drop off and that’s the kid who graduates next week. my miracle baby. . .
dispatch from 20009: in which canyons of boxes in every room are ours to conquer, moi and the one i birthed first. . .
i write to you this dawn from the singular place on the planet i wanted to be this week, a point on the map now highlighted in illuminating shades of radiant. a kid i love is a professor now, and i am here where, in my book, a mother belongs: by his side, tearing open his boxes, tallying the lost and found, turning a blueprint of rooms into a place called home.
i’ve planted the kid in five points on the map since the day he left home for college, and each one for its season became a place i peered in on, checking the weather, counting the miles, watching police reports. his dot became mine by extension.
i’ve spent years now considering places called amherst and new haven, portland, manhattan, and now the nation’s capital, specifically adams morgan, a neighborhood where RBG graces the banners that waft from the light poles, with the words “live your truth.”
the kid has decidedly hopscotched across the country over the course of the last decade. but his itinerant days might be over, as a tenure-track post prompts me to think i’d better get used to the latest in zip codes. and, anyway, unpacking boxes, finding places on shelves, has become my sub-specialty. it’s a task i take on with all the love in the world. i don’t think i’ll ever extinguish the place in my heart that tells me my number one job on the planet is to soften the blows, trod the circuitous path, keep stretching my arms clear across the landscape, and always, always find space and time for side-splitting giggles and tears when they spill from both of our eyes.
the kid is 29 but nowhere in the manual i was handed in the delivery room can i find a line telling me there’s a time when the mothering stops. mothering over the decades is a three-dimensional wonder: it deepens and widens, is layered with strata of life’s most wrenching and glorious moments. just last night as we were giggling and whispering our way to sleep––me on un-sheeted bed (we’re working our way from kitchen to bedroom), him on inflatable mattress––i told him how even though i see the professorial glasses he wears these days and feel the heft of his six-foot-three pillar of flesh and bone when he wraps his arms around me, i also see plenty often a flashing picture show of his life at various points along his continuum: i see––clear as clear could be––the wet and squirmy little thing placed in my outstretched arms the very first time; i see the six-month-old who let out a belly laugh for the very first time; i see the toddler who looked up from the kitchen table one breakfast and asked, as if it was the most ordinary of questions for a three- or four-year-old, “mommy, what is facetious?” meaning what does it mean, this very long word not normally found in preschool vocabulary. and, yes, i see the kindergartener who set up a lecture hall in our living room, with a circle of stuffed-animal pupils, a chalkboard and easel, and 26 spongy alphabet letters. the professor wore suspenders and tie and bare feet, and instructed his class on the fine points of D, O, and Q.
it’s a curious thing, this mothering the grown human being. there are those, i’ve been told, who believe a mother’s role is to step into the distant background, loosen the grip on the ups and the downs of those you’ve loved every day of their lives. i’m not among them, though i can go––and i have––whole weeks without more than a short burst of texting. i find it only gets richer and richer, the closest i know to “love as you would be loved.” mothering to me is a spectacular testing ground: day after day, i re-define and refine the extraordinary intricacies of loving, of where to position myself in the tableau of his life, how much of the weight to bear, and when to stand silent and when to come running.
what i know, after a lifetime of fumbles, of occasional hits and plenty of misses, is this: the width of my brain has only grown wider over the years, as each of my boys carry me into realms i’d otherwise never explore. and my heart and my soul, they’ve at once defied the laws of physics, both deepening and rising to depths and heights i’d never ever imagined. and so, as long as i’m needed and able, i shall tear away the endless strips of packing tape till my fingers are raw and my boy has a place to call home, his very own faraway home. six hundred miles from mine.
since i’ve been busy unpacking this week, i’ve not had much chance to gather up a commonplace-y bouquet. but i did find this, from the late great bard, leonard cohen, on sainthood:
“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men*, such balancing monsters of love.”
Leonard Cohen
“achieved a remote human possibility. . . ” contemplate that for a while….
in book news: it seems hard copies of The Book of Nature have been plopping onto front stoops all over these united states, and heavenly folk, especially friends of the chair, have been sending along snaps, each of which makes my heart do a little bit of a gallop. it’s still a couple weeks till the official pub date––the vernal equinox, march 21; bring on the springtime, bring on the book!––so these early sneak-peek arrivals are both surprise and delight. and i am hoping to set that book soaring with a grand circle of chairs, as night falls on that first day of spring. see here for more details, should you be so inclined. (we’re gathering on march 21 at 7 p.m. central time, via zoom, one of the rare silver linings to emerge from our years in pandemic––or at least i count it as a silver lining, bringing me poets and thinkers from all across the globe.)
before i get back to uprooting books from their boxes, here’s the question (to ponder or drop us your thoughts): of all the mothers you’ve known or watched from some distance or close proximity, what are/were the defining qualities that allowed you to see and see clearly just what it means to love in the deepest mothering way? (and, remember, mothering for me is a verb not tied to any particular gender or state of procreativity, but rather to any and all who love with a tender loving attention and care, and the undying prayer that in some way they might both lighten another’s load and magnify the wonder of being alive…)
at one point yesterday afternoon, five of six burners were occupied on the carrier ship of a cookstove that occupies this kitchen: one boiled a vat of water for soon-to-be-roiling pastas; one simmered the beginnings of roux; one held a pot of tomatoes and basil and a chunk of parmesan cheese; one simmered chunks of apple and pear and cranberry into a compote; and one awaited the tea kettle’s whistlings.
even the cutting boards had taken assigned seats: one for the stinky onions and garlic; another for apples and pears.
we were packin’ it in.
stuffing as many favorites onto the stove, into one afternoon, into one ultra-condensed week of days jam-packed together. four of us––aka, all of us––are home this week. bedsheets are tossed in two of the rooms, the floors seem to be serving as closets and drawers. why unpack when you’ll soon be packing again, heading back out the door, into the air, and home to those faraway places?
packing it in seems as apt a way to live a life as any i can imagine. squeeze in as much as you can. (as long as those super-thick times are bracketed with spells of the monastic quiet that seems my most natural habitat.)
when it comes to loving, i’ll attach lavish every time. i don’t think an hour’s gone by this week––or maybe in my whole motherly lifetime––when i didn’t deep-down marvel at the miracle that two human beings were born to me. born from me, as a matter of fact. a feat i somehow never ever thought my wobbly old body would be able to do. i’d never put quite enough faith in my physical capacities. finish lines felt far beyond my reach; i wasn’t one to get where i needed to go by sinew and bone. and, besides, i’d mucked it up plenty along the way.
and so, the sound of their newborn cries in two dimly-lit delivery rooms is a sound that lifted me out of my body. it’s never faded.
in birthing both of them, volumes and volumes were birthed in me. i began to redefine love. and loving. i was filling in blanks, inserting my own particulars, and reaching toward the surest truth i’d ever been told: love as you would be loved. it was sacred instruction made flesh.
and all these years now––decades now––i’ve been stumbling, and bumping into walls, and trying and trying to do just that. my boys have become my paradigm for loving. my living-breathing exercise in empathy. i might try too hard sometimes. but i’d rather err in that direction than in not quite enough. not enough can feel achingly empty.
and so, here at the brink of a newborn year, another chance at trying again, it’s not a bad time to consider the ways we choose to live our days: will we pack it in? lavish a little bit of love? or as much as we can muster? will we put up with the jumble, and the noise, because it means we might squeeze in a few bits of truth, the truth that rises up from the deepest residue of the heart and the soul? will we pay close attention? will we savor our one more chance to live the love we all pray for? to be the love we imagine, we believe in?
my prayer for the new year is ancient and infinite: dear Holy Breath, that i may love as i would be loved. again and again and again. in ways never noticed, and in ways certain and strong. amen.
how will you live your days?
(the sweet boy above had promised he’d send along a photo of the jam-packed cookstove, with all its burblings and gurglings, since i was far too busy stirring to snap one, but as of friday morning press time, said photo hadn’t yet appeared, so we’re running with the one frame i managed to snap, in all its blurry glories. tis the famed mac ‘n’ cheese i’ve been making for 28 years.
p.s. long as i’m here, might as well pass along the mac ‘n’ cheese that has my boys crowding the cookstove….
mama mac ‘n’ cheese
Provenance: Gourmet magazine, May 1995, pages 200 -201; the issue that just happened to be lying on my kitchen table the day I sat down to plot the festivities for my firstborn’s second birthday.
* Preheat oven to 375-degrees Fahrenheit and butter a 2-quart shallow baking dish (the broader the crust, the better).
* In a 6-quart kettle bring 5 quarts salted water to a boil for cooking pasta.
* In a heavy saucepan melt butter over moderately low heat and stir in flour and paprika. Cook roux, whisking, 3 minutes and whisk in milk and salt. Bring sauce to a boil, whisking, and simmer, whisking occasionally, 3 minutes. Remove pan from heat.
* Stir pasta into kettle of boiling water and boil, stirring occasionally, until al dente. Drain pasta in a colander and in a large bowl stir together pasta, sauce and 2 cups Cheddar cheese. Transfer mixture to prepared dish. Macaroni and cheese may be prepared up to this point 1 day ahead and chilled, covered tightly (an indispensable trick, when confronting a serious to-do list for a day of birthday jollity).
* In a small bowl, toss remaining ¾ cup Cheddar with bread crumbs and sprinkle over pasta mixture {Note: My boys insist you go heavy on the extra cheese here, it makes it better, and my boys are ones who like their cheese to supersede their bread crumbs}.
* Bake macaroni and cheese in middle of oven 25 to 30 minutes, or until golden and bubbling. Let stand 10 minutes before serving. At last: Dig in.
we are definitely turning the page here at this old shingled house. the bespectacled architecture critic no longer calls me from the office at 8 at night, saying he’ll be stuck writing for a few more hours. there are no carpools to coordinate, no getting up at 5 in the morning for soccer matches in kingdom come. i’ve gotten used to the new geographies in my head, the ones that have me simultaneously keeping track of news, weather, and covid in new york city and the middlelands of ohio, the current turfs of both of our birthlings.
somehow, without notice, without even a sign posting the warning, we’ve moved into the loveliest calmest quietest chapter of our married life that ever there was. (do not think of even uttering a syllable of the R word, the one synonymous with hanging up one’s professional hat; one of us has no intention of putting away the keyboard and the other seems to have taken up full-time swimming, biking, and running across finish lines). underscoring the shift, this year we’ll be racking up plenty of lasts in the kid department: the last college drop off. last parents weekend. last winter and spring breaks. last graduation. last packing up the dorm room. last whopping tuition bill.
we are, very much so, on the final verge of true empty nesting.
it’s a mix tinged with poignancy, and a good measure of disbelief. time passes so swiftly, you suddenly realize. after years and years of thinking the routines will never be broken. poof, and they’re gone!
we’re late to this party, only because i found myself in a delivery room when others i knew were there awaiting their grandbabies, but i was there because of what felt and always will feel like i somehow squeaked through the maternity ward as the very last egg was being cleared from the deck. and, as with so much in my life, i’ve been soaking it in from every which angle, taking none of it lightly, extracting as much as i possibly could at every twist, turn, and trial along the way.
ours, these days, is a quiet life by choice. my favorite hours are nestled in books and on my knees in the garden, over coffees with people i love, and the dinners at the end of the day when we weave together the threads we’ve both followed all through the day. i know full well that every drop of it is pure blessing, a benevolence no one deserves, for life is not doled out in rewards and punishments. we just get what we get, and it’s ours to savor or squander. i’ve had more than enough hours staring into the shadowed abyss, imagining sudden endings, to perk up my relishing gears. (the bright side of being a doomsayer is that any and every happy ending is reason for rousing hallelujah. don’t mind my scrambled up wiring. seven decades in, it works for me just as it is.)
anyway, this weekend’s the last-ever parents weekend, that glorious mix of scintillating speakers and professorial panels, long strolls across a campus straight out of the picture books, and delivering a pile of groceries and pies and blankets and boots only a college kid’s idiosyncratic tastes would relish or request (who else would send a middle-of-the-night text asking for portwine spread cheese, rubber-soled boots, and someplace good to go out for dinner?). i plan to savor every sweet drop, knowing not long from now i’ll pine for the chance to make-believe i’m a kid savoring college. (as long as i don’t peek in the mirror, and wonder who in the world is the one with the locks now the color of silvery moon.)
i know, because life has taught me over and over, whole new adventures await, and none of this will ever get dull. but i’ve loved this part where you hover fairly closely over the shoulder of the kids you’ve brought into the world, and feel your heart grow by the week and the month and the year. i know, because life is already teaching me, each of their new adventures becomes vicariously mine, and therein lies a whole nother joy. but now, here i am at the precipice looking both ways. and mostly i’m grateful for this heart that finds it hard to let go….
because we’re motoring back and forth in three short days (the weekend cut short by a work trip to houston for the one more apt to be running or riding these days), i’m keeping this short, and will leave you instead with two little morsels: a peek inside the little book that landed on my stoop the other night, and a soup i plan to make on one of the autumnal days next week when the critic is chowing down on texas barbecue. slow cooking is in sync with my slow, savoring ways.
first, a peek at the Advanced Reading Copy of The Book of Nature, with a look at the cover, the table of contents, and the first page of the foreword.
photo by Bobbi Lin, NYT
Creamy Cauliflower Soup With Harissa Tomatoes By Melissa Clark, The New York Times Yield: 6 servings
INGREDIENTS 1 large head cauliflower (about 3 pounds), trimmed and cut into 1-inch florets (about 12 cups) Kosher salt (such as Diamond Crystal) and freshly ground black pepper 1-1⁄4 teaspoons ground coriander 7 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for serving 1 small bunch thyme (about 10 sprigs) 1 pound plum tomatoes, halved, seeds scooped out 2 to 4 tablespoons harissa paste 3 large bunches scallions, whites and greens thinly sliced (about 21⁄2 cups) 1 jalapeño, seeded (if desired) and coarsely chopped 4 large garlic cloves, finely chopped 1-1⁄2 teaspoons ground cumin 1 tablespoon tomato paste 6 cups vegetable stock 3⁄4 cup chopped cilantro leaves and tender stems, plus more for optional garnish 1 lemon
PREPARATION Step 1 Heat oven to 425 degrees and line 2 sheet pans with parchment paper. Step 2 In a large bowl, combine cauliflower, 1 teaspoon salt, a large pinch of black pepper, 3⁄4 teaspoon ground coriander, 3 tablespoons oil and half the thyme sprigs, tossing everything until well coated. Spread the cauliflower evenly across one of the prepared pans. Step 3 Using the same bowl (no need to wash it first), combine halved tomatoes, 1 to 2 tablespoons of harissa (depending on how spicy your harissa is; taste it first), 2 tablespoons olive oil, a large pinch of salt and the remaining thyme sprigs, and toss gently until the tomatoes are well coated. Spread tomatoes on the other baking sheet, cut-side up. Step 4 Place both sheet pans in the oven and roast for 20 minutes, then stir the cauliflower but not the tomatoes. Continue to roast until cauliflower is golden brown and tender, 15 to 20 minutes longer (35 to 40 minutes total roasting time). Transfer cauliflower pan to a rack, and discard thyme sprigs. Step 5 Using tongs, gently flip tomatoes over so their cut sides are down. Using the tongs, pinch off the tomato skins – they should slip right off – and discard. Brush 1 to 2 more tablespoons of harissa onto tomatoes and continue to roast until shriveled and condensed, about 15 to 25 minutes (35 to 45 minutes total roasting time). Step 6 While tomatoes are roasting, make the soup: In a large pot, heat the remaining 2 tablespoons oil over medium. Add scallions (saving 1⁄4 cup scallions for serving) and jalapeño, and cook, stirring occasionally, until soft and lightly colored, 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in garlic and cook for 1 minute. Add another 1 1⁄2 teaspoons salt, black pepper to taste, cumin and tomato paste, and cook until tomato paste darkens and caramelizes, 2 to 3 minutes. Step 7 Stir in roasted cauliflower and stock, and bring to a simmer. Cook, partly covered, over medium-low heat until all vegetables are very tender, 15 to 20 minutes. Turn off the heat. Using an immersion blender, purée the soup until smooth. (Alternatively, you can purée it in batches in a food processor or blender.) Step 8 Transfer the roasted tomatoes into a mixing bowl and add cilantro. Using a Microplane or other fine grater, grate zest from about half the lemon into the bowl, then stir in 1⁄2 teaspoon coriander and reserved scallions. Step 9 Using a fork or spoon, break up some of the tomatoes as you combine everything. Cut the lemon in half and squeeze a little into the tomatoes, then taste and add more salt and lemon juice as needed. It should taste well seasoned and a little tangy. Step 10 To serve, squeeze in the juice from half the lemon. Taste and add salt, pepper and lemon if needed. Ladle soup into individual bowls and dollop harissa tomatoes on top; top with olive oil and more cilantro, if you like.
how do you savor the most succulent parts of your life? and do you, like me, find turning the page a bit of a tug and a pull?
first day of the first year of school, at the schoolhouse doorkindergarten, day one: checking out the bus stop
it’s been getting heavier and heavier all week. my heart, that is. the boy i love—or one of ‘em anyway—is heading off again. one last time. to school, that is. we’ll be playing follow-the-leader, interstate-style, this weekend, when he pushes off with a trunk filled to the gills, and i follow not far behind with a wagon equally jammed. i’m enlisted only for my skill at hospital corners (a nurse’s way of tucking in bedsheets), and my knack for stuffing things in the teeny spaces that qualify as dorm-room closets.
all week, amid a blur of other complications, i’ve felt my heart grow heavy with tears not yet spilled. the country roads the whole way home––just me and some fine book on tape––will make for a bucolic sponge for salt-water spillage.
that boy is the best of company, that boy of the very big heart and the disposition best described as super chill, and ever animated. the boy fills this old house, and every heart in it.
so, once he’s left behind, back here at the homestead it’ll feel hollow once again till we get used to the long pauses of silence, till we get used to a room where the door isn’t sealed shut to hide the disarray inside.
a wise someone once told me that if i thought high school blurred by in a blink, i’d find college blurred in half a blink. and so it is. eight years after dropping off his big brother one last time, it’s time for the caboose to part as well. this is it: the end of tuition checks and dorm vernacular, the end of considering time in back-to-school and semester allotments.
there’s perhaps a better chance that this one will find his way back home, to call sweet chicago the place where he belongs. but till then, nine months will trickle by.
it’s the leave-taking that always bumps me up. the saying goodbye is not my strong suit. my trouble in that department dates back to when i was five and my papa got a big new job in a city far away, and every sunday night for the rest of a school year, he slid behind the wheel of his turquoise ford falcon and headed down the drive while i sat slumped on the concrete stoop there in the garage. i remember crying till my cheeks hurt. and going to bed with tummy aches. till he came home on friday nights.
nowadays i cry while spritzing the bathroom mirror, and when luring dust bunnies out from under the college kid’s bed, once he’s emptied it, once he’s faded into the faraway. then i try to find my way again, to find the joy in silence, in the slower pace with which the fridge and pantry empty, in the fewer loads of laundry. in that bathroom mirror that never splatters.
it’s come and go, all life long. and we’re wise to make the most of those blessed hyphens in between.
in the weeks ahead, i’ll be busy plotting my new cloister garden as a six-foot wall is being erected (straight through a chunk of what had been my garden, and hard up against our once-breezy screened-in summer porch) even as i type. i’m thinking of it as my monastery wall––the cedar barricade shutting out all the troubles of the world. but the thing i’ll miss most is the slant of sunlight at the twilight hour, as the great orb sinks low and the shafts of light get long and longer. it’s a golden glow that makes my summer porch seem gilded with celestial stardust.
and because the last round of page proofs got delayed till next week, i’ll fill my quiet hours with the intense concentration those pages demand. and then it’s off to the printer as i await the day the box of books lands plop on my doorstoop.
cook’s corner: here’s a truly nifty thing i bumped into this week (if meat lovers thrill to find a way to use every bit of the beast, from tongue to tail, then we who love the produce patch thrill just as mightily to find there’s more to the vine than just the fruits!). as one with a plethora of tangled vines, and one who sniffs deeply of my finger tips after plucking my daily tomato harvest, this enlightenment brings double the delight from those vines. and it’s all about the leaves…
How to Cook with Tomato Leaves
Tomato leaves contain 2-isobutlythiazole, a compound responsible for the plant’s distinctive aroma. Commercial tomato products, like ketchup, often include an isolated form of that compound to boost fresh tomato flavor.
If you have a garden full of tomatoes, though, you’ve got a great source of 2-isobutlythiazole right in your backyard. Here’s how to use tomato leaves to boost your sauce’s flavor.
1. When you harvest your tomatoes, pluck a handful of leaves from the plant.
2. Toss the leaves into the sauce and steep them for 10 minutes.
3. Remove and discard the leaves.
Taste your sauce, and you’ll find that the tomato flavor has been both heightened and made more complex and earthy.
commonplacing:
from poet and pacifist William Stafford, found in his son Kim Stafford’s intimate portrait, Early Morning: Remembering My Father: every day Stafford would write a page in his journal, his response to what he called “the emergency of being alive.”
we are all of us deep in the emergency of our being alive…
a little bit of Buechner, in memory of the blessed man who died at 96 on monday.
Frederick Buechner
a few years back, in 2016 to be precise, i counted a new collection of writings from theologian frederick buechner, with introduction by anne lamott, as one of the best books for the soul that year. his death this week made me pull that review from the shelf, and perhaps it’ll prompt you to pull a bit of buechner from your own bookshelf or that of your nearest library.
Buechner 101: Essays and Sermons by Frederick Buechner
By Carl Frederick Buechner, Introduction by Anne Lamott, Frederick Buechner Center, 170 pages, $15.99
Maybe once a generation, once every few generations, someone is born with gifts literary and sacred, in equal brilliant measure. A translator, perhaps, of the highest calling. One who can at once lift our souls and our sights, by virtue of the rare alchemy of the poetic plus the profound. Therein lies the prophet. Therein lies Frederick Buechner, at 90, one of the greatest living American theologians and writers.
In these collected works, Buechner 101: Essays and Sermons by Frederick Buechner — a table of contents that includes excerpts from his Harvard Divinity School lectures, The Alphabet of Grace; a searing essay on his daughter’s anorexia; a seminary commencement address on the hard truths of pastoring a flock of believers, doubters and everyday sinners — we are introduced to, or immersed in, the depth and breadth of this rare thinker’s literary and soulful gifts.
Anne Lamott, in her introduction, admits to being blown away by Buechner’s capacity “to be both plain and majestic” at once. She ranks him side-by-side C.S. Lewis, then declares, “No one has brought me closer to God than these two men.”
That alone might make you rush to pore over these pages. What I know is that this world sorely needs a prophet who reminds us to not give up our search for holiness amid the noise and hate and madness all around. Buechner, though, says it in words that work as poetry, shimmying through the cracks, burrowing deep within us, reverberating long after the page is turned. He writes: “We must learn to listen to the cock-crows and hammering and tick-tock of our lives for the holy and elusive word that is spoken to us out of their depths. It is the function of all great preaching, I think, and all great art, to sharpen our hearing precisely to that end.”
And it is that very sharpening that we find, paragraph upon paragraph, page after page, in Buechner 101.
poet’s corner:
two poems worth pressing against your heart…
Field Guide
Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake, up to my neck in that most precious element of all,
I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather floating on the tension of the water
at the very instant when a dragonfly, like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,
hovered over it, then lit, and rested. That’s all.
I mention this in the same way that I fold the corner of a page
in certain library books, so that the next reader will know
where to look for the good parts.
––Tony Hoagland
Moon
The moon is full tonight an illustration for sheet music, an image in Matthew Arnold glimmering on the English Channel, or a ghost over a smoldering battlefield in one of the history plays.
It’s as full as it was in that poem by Coleridge where he carries his year-old son into the orchard behind the cottage and turns the baby’s face to the sky to see for the first time the earth’s bright companion, something amazing to make his crying seem small.
And if you wanted to follow this example, tonight would be the night to carry some tiny creature outside and introduce him to the moon.
And if your house has no child, you can always gather into your arms the sleeping infant of yourself, as I have done tonight, and carry him outdoors, all limp in his tattered blanket, making sure to steady his lolling head with the palm of your hand.
And while the wind ruffles the pear trees in the corner of the orchard and dark roses wave against a stone wall, you can turn him on your shoulder and walk in circles on the lawn drunk with the light. You can lift him up into the sky, your eyes nearly as wide as his, as the moon climbs high into the night.
––Billy Collins
listening nook: because i’ll be coursing through the countryside in my red wagon this weekend, i’m bringing my reading nook on little discs. here’s the stack assembled from the library shelves:
A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean: i once was graced to work alongside Norman’s son John, a fine fine bespectacled gent with a much quieter, more studious demeanor than many of the newsroom characters. his father’s masterwork stands as one of the great “evocations of nature’s miracles…and a probing of human mysteries.”
The Abundance, Annie Dillard: a landmark collection from the writer i consider my north star.
Five by Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald: i’m ever trying to expand and deepen my knowledge of the American canon and F. Scott deserves more of my attention.
Dear Ann, Bobbie Ann Mason: mason, like me, is a kentucky native, so i feel it my native obligation to inhale her prose and her poetic ways of unspooling a story. i read my first bobbie ann mason so long ago, and it’s been ages since, so where better to reacquaint ourselves than the rolling countryside of the heartland we both call home?
Wallflower at the Orgy, Nora Ephron: ephron makes me laugh so hard i’d best keep an eye out for rest stops along the way. en route to one parents’ weekend, we listened to Heart Burn, her tale of woe from her years married to and divorcing from none other than journalistic legend Carl Bernstein. we loved listening so much we were sort of bummed we had to stop the car in ohio, where our kid was a freshman in college, and couldn’t roll along till, say, the atlantic seaboard, where we could have gotten a few more hours of ephron under our belts….
abit more buechner, because there’s never enough:
“What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are . . . because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier . . . for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own . ”
Frederick Buechner
and with that, this week’s edition of the chair gazette is a wrap. question of the week: how will suck the succulence out of summer’s august sweetness?
college kid this week, on the brink of one last back-to-school.
once the adrenaline died down, more fire-hydrant surge than all-out combat, once i paused my pounding on the window, realized how close i’d come to thrusting my fist right through the glass, shattering and bleeding sure to pre-empt the rescue i’d attempted, once i took a breath, my first impulse was to think maybe i’d jinxed it.
it must be my fault for letting out their secret. maybe i shouldn’t have extolled the wonders of the nest right before my eyes.
here’s what happened: mama and i were, as we’d been for weeks, co-existing peacefully, she on her side of the glass, blanketing her babies in her downy feathers, me tap-tapping away here on the word-churn machine. it was late saturday afternoon, just one short day and a half after i’d spun the tale of how mama cardinal and i were expectantly working toward our deadlines: mine, a book in the making; hers, a clutch of eggs.
she’d been on the nest 15 days and counting. i delighted at the way she punctuated our shared workspace –– seemingly out of the blue –– by belting out an abbreviated string of song, as if she’d suddenly been overcome by the jubilance of nesting. any day now, i would have heard the wee peep-peep-peeps of nestlings, seen the blur of pointy beaks thrusting skyward for an airdrop of worm.
but then, at nearly six o’clock that fateful evening, without so much as a peep of warning, in those final hours of what eliot so rightly termed “the cruellest month,” there suddenly arose from the bushes such squawking as i’ve never heard. i turned and saw furiously flapping wings — mama and papa both, each on separate branches of the ordinary evergreen that for two weeks now had been the nursery for their nest, the closest i had ever come to northern cardinal observation deck, a broodling in the works. while the two of them squawked and flapped, i noticed the third player in this late-breaking drama. it was furry, brown, and little. its stripe down the back gave it away: a chipmunk. a very hungry and extremely nasty chipmunk, if you don’t mind my editorializing. i leapt into life-guard mode, pounded hard as i could pound from my side of the glass. gave a holler to my own mother, ensconced in her armchair in the other room. as if she could help me here in dire land. at first my pounding seemed to confound the furry one, he turned down the branch, as if in exit. but then, he must have had a second thought, for up he turned, and scampered head-first into the nest. oh, dear god, such horror i’ve not witnessed. this was full-tilt assault. this was nature at its cruelest. and i stood witness. after plumbing the hollow of the nest, the hungry varmint turned and ran. i couldn’t swear to what i saw, but it would not be wrong to think i saw him clutching something in his mouth.
poor mama sat there flapping. her squawks slowing but not quieting. she circled the branch a few lonely times and then resumed her post. we both tried to catch our breath. i tried to convince myself that all was not lost, perhaps the casualty count was one and only one. and, besides, mama stood her post straight through to nightfall, never once lifting her belly from what she surely must be guarding with her life. only then, when darkness eclipsed my keeping watch, did i surrender too; turned off my desk lamp, whispered benediction, and tiptoed off, unsure of what the dark would bring.
alas, when dawn came, i threw off my blankets and hurried down the stairs. no mama. i’d thought i heard a muffled squawk not too too long after dark. i now presume the furry thing returned, finished the deed. the dastardly, dastardly deed.
and so, the nest is empty. quite literally as i have just now hauled a step ladder out the door and, clinging for dear life, i climbed and pulled back branches, and indeed there is not a sign of life. just the artistry of their construction, right down to the shiny cellophane they might have thought to employ as something of a rain guard, what with all the rainy weeks of april.
turns out, the cardinals never had more than a one in three chance at making it out of the nest. despite their predilection for deeply tucking away their vernal constructions — remnants of a summer past, a bricolage of bits, dried grasses, thread-thin sticks, that cellophane wrapper perhaps from someone’s pack of cigarettes — the northern cardinal ranks near the sorry cellar of the nesting-survival charts, a long tumble down from the ash-throated flycatcher who scores the highest chance of flying from the nest, with seven of ten baby flycatchers flying. only the lowly house sparrow (11 percent chance) and the european starling (16 percent) fare worse than the red birds, and both sparrow and starling are invaders, anyway, non-native species snuck in as unintended cargo on some north america-bound vessel.
it hurt to sit here the first few days, the silence pounding in my ear. the absence of mama’s brown and red tail feathers protruding from the tuft of evergreen in which she so adeptly hid her nest.
and then i started to consider my own empty nest, a consideration that comes, of course, as mothering day approaches. i think as much now about mothering as i ever have. though it consumes fewer hours of my focus, and fewer drives hither and yon, my fascination only deepens. i think often of how rare — how blessed — it is to know so fluently the whole makings of any life, let alone these two i love so dearly. day by day, it seems, the adventures pick up pace. the twists and turns in their narratives expand my own sense of being alive, being witness to lives unfurling each according to his own storyline. from my perch here at the old homestead, where i am reliably on watch and ever present, i follow two young men carving out paths that couldn’t be more different and yet entwine in ways that make me see the shared origins loud and clear and undeniably. the little boy who once could stare at a tv screen for interminably long times, he is carving out a path to be the very voices, the very storytellers, he once listened to. and the one who once set up an easel in the living room, encircled the room with every stuffed critter from his toy box, donned suspenders and necktie, scooped up a clutch of alphabet letters, and commenced a lecture on the fine points of S-U-M and Q, he looks toward a life in lecture halls filled with legal scholars in the making. let the record show it was snoopy who got first crack at his fledgling professorial skills.
my job here — simply loving through and through — will never ever be done. they might not need me (not so often anyway) to rouse them from their slumbers, to ferry them to the school house door, to shiver on their sidelines, but i’ve come to understand that my unique brand of loving means i’ll never find a way to lay aside aside my worries and my sometimes overly rambunctious fears. the phone calls these days are farther in between, the texts often unanswered, but my contemplations and my prayers deepen by the month. i’ve started worrying in a whole new way about this world we’re leaving to their keeping. i once held out hope that they could right our many, many wrongs. but now i wonder if we’re too far gone, this world so broken in so many places.
i look to mama bird, and her now hollowed nest. there is stunned silence out my window. no flicker of a sighting of mama now at it once again. she makes me think hard about the seasons of mothering, how some are full to bursting, and others pulse with a kind of aching, a sorrow for the hours out of reach, a longing for the more tactile days when every flinch and whimper was within our watch. her empty nest makes me think hard about the one i call my own, at once emptier and fuller than i can sometimes truly comprehend.
no wonder mothering never ever loosens its holy grip on me.
may your motherings be ever blessed, in whatever ways you love and hold those you count as your dearest rarest treasures.
fragment of The Adoration of the Shepherds, by Guido Reni, circa 1640
nativity, by dictionary definition, the occasion of a person’s birth. most often told in airbrushed terms. but i find myself drawn in more deeply by the grainiest of tellings.
for me, the miraculous emerges in contemplating the earthiest of details: not simply imagining the lowings of the cow, or the stench of a barn, or the cold night air, but the raw biology of birthing. how it stretches almost to the breaking point the mother’s flesh and frame; the messiness of all the leaking. from afterbirth to latching on, gestation’s final act is no theater of the sanitized.
that we begin our resurrection story in a barn, that the virgin mother did not escape the grunts and tears and unveiled exposures of labor pains, of crowning and pushing, of colostrum and breastmilk coming in, engorging. that divinity begins in common birth, as every one of us began: through birth canal and searing pain, through a mother’s intense focus and channeled superhuman forces, through flesh to flesh for days and weeks on end.
as one poet so powerfully put it: “For any birth makes an inconvenient demand; / Like all holy things / It is frequently a nuisance, and its needs never end /…” and as another poet begins her own musings, “sometimes I wonder / if Mary breastfed Jesus. / if she cried out when he bit her / or if she sobbed when he would not latch. / …”
two poems, both nativity poems, struck me hard this week. they trickled in separately, but when i looked at them together, side by side, i found them magnifying and illuminating in echo of each other.
here are the poems, and a bit about each poet. all in the spirit of drawing our deepening attention to the birthing story coming….
first the poems, beginning with the older one, written some time between 1939 and 1943 (i discovered it last year, and promptly ordered from england anne ridler’s collected poems); and the newer poem, written just two years ago and published on facebook, no less, on december 16, 2019.
Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s watercolour of The Nativity
Christmas and the Common Birth by Anne Ridler
Christmas declares the glory of the flesh: And therefore a European might wish To celebrate it not at mid winter but in spring, When physical life is strong, When the consent to live is forced even on the young, Juice is in the soil, the leaf, the vein, Sugar flows to movement in limbs and brain. Also, before a birth, nourishing the child, We turn again to the earth With unusual longing – to what is rich, wild, Substantial: scents that have been stored and strengthened In apple lofts, the underwash of woods, and in barns; Drawn through the lengthened root; pungent in cones (While the fir wood stands waiting; the beechwood aspiring, Each in a different silence), and breaking out in spring With scent sight sound indivisible in song.
Yet if you think again It is good that Christmas comes at the dark dream of the year That might wish to sleep ever. For birth is awaking, birth is effort and pain; And now at midwinter are the hints, inklings (Sodden primrose, honeysuckle greening) That sleep must be broken. To bear new life or learn to live is an exacting joy; The whole self must waken; you cannot predict the way It will happen, or master the responses beforehand. For any birth makes an inconvenient demand; Like all holy things It is frequently a nuisance, and its needs never end; Freedom it brings: we should welcome release From its long merciless rehearsal of peace.
So Christ comes At the iron senseless time, comes To force the glory into frozen veins: His warmth wakes
Green life glazed in the pool, wakes All calm and crystal trance with the living pains.
And each year In seasonal growth is good – year That lacking love is a stale story at best; By God’s birth Our common birth is holy; birth Is all at Christmas time and wholly blest.
***
William Blake’s The Nativity
sometimes i wonder by Kaitlin Hardy Shetler
sometimes I wonder if Mary breastfed Jesus. if she cried out when he bit her or if she sobbed when he would not latch.
and sometimes I wonder if this is all too vulgar to ask in a church full of men without milk stains on their shirts or coconut oil on their breasts preaching from pulpits off limits to the Mother of God.
but then i think of feeding Jesus, birthing Jesus, the expulsion of blood and smell of sweat, the salt of a mother’s tears onto the soft head of the Salt of the Earth, feeling lonely and tired hungry annoyed overwhelmed loving
and i think, if the vulgarity of birth is not honestly preached by men who carry power but not burden, who carry privilege but not labor, who carry authority but not submission, then it should not be preached at all.
because the real scandal of the Birth of God lies in the cracked nipples of a 14 year old and not in the sermons of ministers who say women are too delicate to lead.
***
Anne Bradby Ridler (1912-2001)
A British poet and librettist, remembered as “essentially a sacramental poet,” Anne Bradby Ridler was originally hired as a secretary at the London-based publisher Faber & Faber, and later worked as an assistant to T.S. Eliot, selecting the poems for A Little Volume of Modern Verse. She was a friend, too, of C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas and Lawrence Durrell, and was considered “on the edge” of the Inklings group (the closest proximity for a woman of those times). Born to a literary family, her mother was a writer of children’s books, including The Enchanted Forest; her father, a first-class cricketer, schoolmaster, and poet.
According to a charming passage in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:
“In childhood Anne Bradby was surrounded by influences that fed her imagination and intellectual inquisitiveness. At home there was white wallpaper and William Morris chintzes, a picture (attributed to Canaletto) of the Campanile at Venice and a Broadwood piano—and in playing it she experienced the joy which she later remembered Yehudi Menuhin describing as the essential ingredient for the education of any player. In Rugby School (where her father was schoolmaster) there was architecture by William Butterfield and in his style. In the community there were dramatized scenes from Shakespeare that her mother produced for the children of various families. A favourite place at home was the midway ledge of the double bookcase in the hall, in which was stored a mass of books. ‘Reading to myself’, she wrote, ‘began to be my greatest resource … and the basis of my imaginative life’.”
She’s been called a modern metaphysical poet, whose work is rife with complex metaphors. Overtly Christian, she explored religious themes, and human experience, especially motherhood and marriage. “Many of her poems mark arrivals and departures: her husband leaving in wartime, the birth of a child, the death of her father. The need to understand things passing and to give them some currency in memory and then in poetry lies at the heart of her work,” wrote Peter Forbes, editor of the Poetry Review, shortly after her death.
She earned a degree in journalism from King’s College London; her first volume of poetry was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1940. A member for three decades of the Oxford Bach Choir, her poetries are best heard aloud, “full of subtle coloration and rhetorical balance.” You can hear her reading one of my favorites, “Snakeshead Fritillaries” here.
Shortly after her death in October of 2001, TheGuardian wrote in her obituary: “Ridler’s poetry displayed an attention to cadence and musicality in both her formal and her free verse, and managed to combine a Christian spirituality and Latinate, Elizabethan elegance with a more modern, even sceptical, tone. While some poems are overtly religious – Carol To Be Set To Music and Prayer In A Pestilent Time – she would more often situate her everyday subjects in contexts of both faith and doubt.” Later in the obit, the literary critic Grave Lindop was quoted as saying: “She had the clearest and best-balanced poetic intelligence I have ever met.”
Shortly before her death, Ridley was made an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for services to literature. She sought not fame, preferring, she once claimed, “to think of herself as invisible.” According to the Poetry Archive, a British-based not-for-profit that preserves recordings of poets reading their own works aloud, “Her quiet excellence, however, is far from inaudible.”
***
Kaitlin Hardy Shetler
Kaitlin Shetler’s poem, “sometimes i wonder,” has been called a “short sermon in the form of an Advent poem.” Shetler describes herself as an “advocate for women and justice, and occasional preacher in Churches of Christ circles.” This one poem—something of an internet sensation—was thought to have reached—through the powers of social media—more than 10 million, a number exceeding the worldwide membership of the evangelical Churches of Christ. And that was almost two years ago. The arithmetic knows no bounds. What’s most critical to understanding the subtext of her poem is that hers is a church known to be one of the most restrictive to women and girls in its fold (women and girls are completely excluded from speaking, or leading, or otherwise actively serving in its worship services).
Now a senior program associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, a not-for-profit whose mission is to end the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty, Shetler is a Licensed Master Social Worker, and described on the Vera Institute’s website thusly: “Kaitlin has over 10 years’ experience working with vulnerable populations. During her senior year in undergrad, she managed the domestic violence shelter in her college’s small town. After college, she spent a year working as a case manager and mental health intern at the Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital. After graduating from the University of Tennessee Knoxville with her master’s in social work, Kaitlin worked as a behavioral rehabilitation instructor for the state of Tennessee. There she developed a passion for the disability community and best practices for advocating for young adults with disabilities.”
She started writing poetry in 2018, and her Advent poem, a year later; since then, she’s penned a growing library of Poems for the Resistance. She mentioned in one interview that she “felt a little guilty about taking credit for this poem, because I truly feel it was God speaking and I was just writing it down.”
Her mission, she says, is “to find the kicked out, the bruised, and burdened and to learn at their feet.”
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and through her poetry, we all do.
through both their poetries–through anne’s, the poet who preferred invisibility, and through kaitlin’s, who has found a pulpit in her poems–i find myself on my knees, contemplating the complexities and interweavings of birth and God, of the radical equation that is the Christmas wonder.
amen, amen to all.
your thoughts on the poems? or your own favorite nativity poem?
huge and unending thanks to my beloved friend andrea who sent me kaitlin’s poem, and to the inimitable poet priest malcolm guite, who a year ago sent me (and many others) the beginnings of my anne ridler steepings.
p.s. one tiny housekeeping thing: for clarity’s sake, when writing the biographies above, i step into my big-girl writing shoes and bring out the caps key, lest my fondness for lower-case prove too vexing when trying to seize the facts. (and maybe just to prove i can find the caps key when pressed!)
i will be backing into this if i begin by quoting a russian intellectual and novelist. but so i begin.
Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.
Leo Tolstoy
the subject, once again and always, is kindness.
it was unknown to me, and perhaps little known more broadly, that at the turn of the 19th century leo tolstoy neared completion of what he considered an imperative life’s work. not anna karenina, not war and peace, not the death of ivan ilych. but rather something he considered more timeless, more lasting: “a wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all people,” as he described it.
or as cultural critic maria popova once put it, “to be human is to leap toward our highest moral potentialities, only to trip over the foibled actualities of our reflexive patterns. to be a good human is to keep leaping anyway.” tolstoy’s book, she wrote, was to be “a reliable springboard for these moral leaps.”
in the middle of his 55th year, in march of 1884, tolstoy had set out to read and reap from a circle of the greatest thinkers and spiritual leaders who had shed light on what was most crucial in living a good and righteous life. he dug deep across millennia and miles, reading epictetus, marcus aurelius, lao-tzu, buddha, pascal, the new testament — a reading list he deemed “necessary.”
it was to be his florilegium (a compilation of excerpts from other writings, “mashing up selected passages and connecting dots from existing texts to better illustrate a specific topic, doctrine, or idea,” writes popova. the word comes from the latin for “flower” and “gather;” a bouquet of curated wisdoms). tolstoy saw it as something of a roadmap, daily sign posts pointing the way toward “the Good Way of Life.” in a letter to his assistant, he explained his project thusly:
I know that it gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness to communicate with such great thinkers as Socrates, Epictetus, Arnold, Parker. … They tell us about what is most important for humanity, about the meaning of life and about virtue. … I would like to create a book … in which I could tell a person about his life, and about the Good Way of Life.
he spent 17 years at it, and shortly after the birth of the 20th century, in 1902, he completed his manuscript, under the working title A Wise Thought for Every Day. two years later, it was published in russian, and nearly a century later, in 1997, it appeared in english translation, all 384 pages of it, under the title A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World’s Sacred Texts. for each day of the year, tolstoy plucked, or gathered, quotes by great thinkers, then added his own musings and connective tissue on the subject, with kindness as the sinew and spine of the book’s moral sensibility.
i bought the book yesterday, in the long hours after i had once again dropped my beloved husband at the curb of terminal 3 at o’hare airport, as he set off once again to race to his mother’s bedside, to honor her, to fill the hospice room with his prayer and his unending grace. in the serendipities of a long afternoon that turned into a longer night, maria popova, she of BrainPickings, the cultural compendium and literary candy counter, dropped in (to my email) with her musings on kindness, a heaven-sent subject in the hours of deep vigil i was keeping for my mother-in-law whose signature and lasting memory is exponential kindness.
i read this entry from tolstoy:
The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people.
Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy, and dull things become cheerful.
i read this from jack kerouac:
Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.
and that’s when i decided i would not merely buy the book but practice it. every day. in honor of my beautiful, blessed mother-in-law who died in the wee hours of this morning, friday, july 2.
her memory will be a perpetual blessing, to me and to all who fall in the radiance of her kindness practiced each and every day.
ginny kamin made lives more beautiful by her practice of perpetual kindness.
“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.” a life’s instruction, brought to you by leo tolstoy and one ginny kamin….imagine how you might live it today, one kindness at a time….
In which, for the first time in a year, a thousand firsts unfurl. Mostly, wrapping my arms around my firstborn, 1750 miles from where I spend most of my days…
It’s questionable whether sitting tucked in a dawn-lit corner in a faraway hotel, I can tap out too many hieroglyphics on this wee little keyboard, more fitting for the feet of an ant than for my fumbly fingers, but here I am, apparently so jazzed on the joy of watching my boys delight in each other’s company, not so adept at catching a night’s worth of zzzzz’s.
In this sweet swirl of days, so many frames have been packed in my brain, sleep has little room. There was the all-black-clad SWAT team rolling into downtown the night of the first anniversary of George Floyd’s death, when Portland once again exploded in protest with dumpster fires, fireworks hurled into the night, windows smashed, and graffiti strewn on block after block of marble, glass, or brick-walled storefronts. There are the endless miles of homeless camps on the sidewalks, spilling down embankments along the highways (and I mean right up to the shoulder of where cars race by at 70 mph), in the wells of dried-up public fountains, under the Chinese arch just outside this hip hotel outfitted with British soaps and sheets and “ethical organic” coffees to tuck into earthenware mugs inscribed, “99 problems. coffee ain’t one.” And, no, the juxtaposition, the cruel irony, doesn’t escape me. It’s a wrenching mix of utopia and dystopia here, and it seems to beg for answers to questions and conundrums that would vex a troop of MacArthur geniuses. But my firstborn is here for 16 months, and once my superpower shot kicked in and shielded me and all of us from the red-ringed invader, we strapped on our travel packs and made the trek to Stumptown.
Alongside the unsettling, there is wonder aplenty here, too, as the city seems to collect the curious, the kind, and the kooky. While I sip my ethical organic coffee and watch the sun come up, I’ll let my picture roll do the talking.
Portlandia scrapbook, in fittingly kooky order, from Mt. Hood to Voodoo donuts, from first hugs to smelling the roses.
I’ve usually been a most reluctant traveler, a top-of-the-line homebody, one who frets in the days before departure about whether my tomato plants will survive without me, whether the pansies will droop, and in this case whether the wily skunk would move inside while we’re not watching. (Shawn the SkunkTrapper sent a text to let me know he was bringing in the infrared night-vision cameras he was borrowing from one of his fox-trapping jobs; I await word any minute now…)
But here I am, four days in, and relishing every adventure. Maybe in my doddering days, I will finally slay a few of the ghosts who’ve long vexed me. Travel can test us as much as it stretches us, and I’m in for the stretch, buoyed by the boys who animate my every heart beat.
Signing off from PDX. With love, always.
Anyone else out there a natural-born reluctant traveler? And if not, what words of enticement might you offer to those of us who’d do well to take a deep breath and put some miles on our hiking boots?
pull up a chair 