wisdom | pull up a chair

November 15, 2024

unearthing the wisdoms entwined in the past. . .

in which these uncharted times have me leaning on the wisdoms of great minds and expansive souls who’ve navigated their own immensely dark and tough times…

more and more i find history is my balm. i think back to the eras of darkness across the arc of time and the indomitable human spirit that has never yet been extinguished, no matter the force of the counterwinds.

curiously, albert camus––whom i’d never thought of as any sort of balm––has served well in that role. though considering the era in which he was writing, it’s no wonder it was darkness he saw through, shone a fierce beam of light on the way through the horrors of europe during the holocaust.

so often it’s the artists and writers, the makers of films and penners of poems, the ones endowed with an eye to see beyond the occlusions, the ones who imagine what others can’t conceive, who cast the lifeline beyond the capacities of strategists and political operators, power brokers and thieves.

in his 1940 essay titled “the almond trees” (a species that brilliantly blooms in winter), found in his Lyrical and Critical Essays, camus weighs in on happiness, despair, and how to amplify our love of life.

only twenty-seven when he wrote this, here is the french-algerian philosopher who gave us the plague, the fall, the stranger,and the myth of sisyphus:

We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.

Let us know our aims then, holding fast to the mind, even if force puts on a thoughtful or a comfortable face in order to seduce us. The first thing is not to despair. Let us not listen too much to those who proclaim that the world is at an end. Civilizations do not die so easily, and even if our world were to collapse, it would not have been the first. It is indeed true that we live in tragic times. But too many people confuse tragedy with despair. “Tragedy,” [D.H.] Lawrence said, “ought to be a great kick at misery.” This is a healthy and immediately applicable thought. There are many things today deserving such a kick.

echoing the sentiments of an earlier manifesto written in the immediate wake of the first world war, the 1919 “declaration of the independence of the mind,” again by a french philosopher, this time romain rolland––and signed by such luminaries as bertrand russell, albert einstein, bengali poet and nobel laureate rabindranath tagore (a favorite of mary oliver), social worker and activist jane addams (chicago’s own), upton sinclair, and hermann hesse––camus argues that this “kick” is to be “delivered by the deliberate cultivation of the mind’s highest virtues”:

If we are to save the mind we must ignore its gloomy virtues and celebrate its strength and wonder. Our world is poisoned by its misery, and seems to wallow in it. It has utterly surrendered to that evil which Nietzsche called the spirit of heaviness. Let us not add to this. It is futile to weep over the mind, it is enough to labor for it.

But where are the conquering virtues of the mind? The same Nietzsche listed them as mortal enemies to heaviness of the spirit. For him, they are strength of character, taste, the “world,” classical happiness, severe pride, the cold frugality of the wise. More than ever, these virtues are necessary today, and each of us can choose the one that suits him best. Before the vastness of the undertaking, let no one forget strength of character. I don’t mean the theatrical kind on political platforms, complete with frowns and threatening gestures. But the kind that through the virtue of its purity and its sap, stands up to all the winds that blow in from the sea. Such is the strength of character that in the winter of the world will prepare the fruit.

elsewhere in lyrical and critical essays, we find the line that practically serves as camus’s epigraph: “in the depths of winter, i finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

no less than toni morrison takes the baton, elaborating that the task of the artist is as a grounding and elevating force in turbulent times, in her essay titled “no place for self-pity, no room for fear,” included in the 150th anniversary issue of the nation, the monthly founded by abolitionists in 1865, not long after the adoption of the thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery.

morrison writes:

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.

and finally let us turn way back the clock to ancient wisdoms, in this case those of good ol’ marcus aurelius, the roman emperor whose meditations were suggested to me the other day by one of my more astute and heavenly comrades. the meditations, written in the late second century of the Common Era during the emperor’s military campaigns against germanic tribes along the danube, are thought to be a window into his inner life, uncannily recognizable to our own deep-down whisperings. i borrowed the stoics from the library, but have already decided i need a paper copy all my own, the better for underscoring and stars in the margins. here’s but one of marcus’s wonders, from book II of his meditations, thought to be written in about the year 170 C.E. (uncanny how true wisdom is timeless, as this fits the november of 2024 as fulsomely as it fit nearly two millennia ago):

Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not [only] of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in [the same] intelligence and [the same] portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.

what timeless wisdoms do you find anchoring, or elevating? and where might lie your invincible summer; how might you summon it?

here’s a challenge: imagine what’s possible. work toward it. begin with a baby step.

7 Comments

November 8, 2024

undaunted

only when it is dark enough can you see the stars…

Undaunted is the word that came to me. Once the shock began to dull. Once I quelled the queasing in my belly. Once I decided I won’t surrender this blessed world, won’t shift the course of the project I call my most urgent life’s work.

I am undaunted.

My life’s work is accelerated these days. Its urgency is upon me, upon us all.

My life’s work aligns with that of every sage and mystic that ever has been: I am devoted to molding myself closer and closer to the holiness I was made to be, we were all made to be. Because this world is a sacred work in progress, and we are its players. We are the ones with the hearts and minds and hands to bend the arc of justice, to kindle more and more brightly the flame of the sacred. To reach toward the holiness infused through our every breath, every utterance, every inkling. The whole of it. At every turn. To be gentle, and kind. To tenderize the fibers of our heart. Especially the ones that have been torn and shorn over the years.

This is a path beyond the politics and power seekers of the world. I answer to a call from deep within, the eternal flame of the Divine breathed into us all in the beginning. In our beginnings. And the very beginning.

We’re called to play out our work in the milieu of the everyday, on a plane peopled with those who might test us, or just as certainly––often, more certainly––those who reach out a hand, and carry us along. Shimmy us onto their shoulders, if need be. And we in turn will do the same when we’re the ones whose knees aren’t buckling.

It’s contagious more often than not, this reaching toward kindness, toward peeling open the heart, digging deep, living for joy.

I’ve come to know that it’s a work best played out in incremental barely-noticed exchanges: the heart-melting smile shared in a crowded hallway; the hospital scheduler who takes the time to squeeze your hand, knowing you’re afraid; the grocery-store clerk who wipes away the tear that has crept down your cheek.

I once dreamed of solving world problems, curing life-crippling ills. Now, all I ask of each day is that I find moments to be bigger than I’ve been before, to reach deeper into the well of ordinary kindness, to bow my head and heart in deep thanks for every drop of beauty, wonder, decency.

That work is unaffected by whatever plays out on the world stage. The powers that be hold no power over our souls, and we needn’t succumb. Needn’t employ the crude or the cruel we witness too, too often these days; in fact, we need amplify the opposing forces. Be radical in our generosity. Our empathies. Our magnanimity. Our humility. And our righteous indignation when called for.

It so happens that this week found me being schooled in some of these very practices, and through the doorways of two great world religions. On Monday, a magnificent soul who happens to be a Hindu yogi, sat me down, lit a candle, and taught me the ways of deep meditation, turning my focus inward to the eternal flame of the Divine within; I am practicing every day. On Wednesday, I walked into the first of a series of classes at our synagogue on an ancient Jewish spiritual practice called the Mussar, centered on the verse in the Torah that tells us, “You shall be holy.” By drawing on seventeen soul attributes, and spending an arc of time––a season, a month, a week––keenly attuned to each, we exercise the muscles of our deepest being to become holy, to work toward our “primary mission in this world…to purify and elevate the soul.” The practice begins with humility.

In simplest terms, as the great Chasidic teacher known as the Kotzker, once put it: “Fine, be holy. But remember first one has to be a mensch.”

No one can stop us. Mensches will be we.

I’ve spent the week gathering around me a wagon train of wisdoms, a line from the Talmud, a prayer from Judy Chicago, a profoundly wise passage from EM Forster, another from Hannah Arendt, a post from Rebecca Solnit, and finally a paragraph or two from Kamala Harris’ gracious concession speech…..

from the wisdom of the Talmud, found in what’s known as the Pirkei Avot, which translates to Chapters of the [Fore]Fathers, a compilation of ethical teachings and maxims from Rabbinic Jewish tradition. It is a part of the Mishnah, a code of Jewish law compiled in the early third century of the Common Era.

“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

A Prayer for Our Nation
by Judy Chicago

And then all that has divided us will merge
And then compassion will be wedded to power
And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind
And then both men and women will be gentle
And then both women and men will be strong
And then no person will be subject to another’s will
And then all will be rich and free and varied
And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many
And then all will share equally in the Earth’s abundance
And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old
And then all will nourish the young
And then all will cherish life’s creatures
And then all will live in harmony with each other and the Earth
And then everywhere will be called Eden once again.

The English novelist, essayist, and broadcaster E.M. Forster (January 1, 1879–June 7, 1970) took up questions of societal empathies in an essay titled “What I Believe,” originally written just before the outbreak of WWII and later included in the out-of-print Two Cheers for Democracy, his 1951 collection of essays based on his wartime anti-Nazi broadcasts. Here’s Forster:

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too… I believe in aristocracy, though… Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke… Their temple… is the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.

With this type of person knocking about, and constantly crossing one’s path if one has eyes to see or hands to feel, the experiment of earthly life cannot be dismissed as a failure.

Politcial theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt reminds us our reach for change needn’t be in the boldest strokes in The Human Condition, her 1958 study of the state of modern humanity, thought to be more striking now than at the time of its first publishing. Here’s but one sentence underscoring that claim:

“The smallest act in the most limited circumstances, bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”

Rebecca Solnit’s message the morning after the election:

You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember …what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.

and finally, these two passages from Kamala’s gracious concession speech:

Fight in the voting booth, in the courts and in the public square. And … in quieter ways: in how we live our lives by treating one another with kindness and respect, by looking in the face of a stranger and seeing a neighbor, by always using our strength to lift people up, to fight for the dignity that all people deserve. The fight for our freedom will take hard work. … The important thing is don’t ever give up. Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop trying to make the world a better place. … This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves. This is a time to organize, to mobilize, and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together.

and she closed with this…

You have the capacity to do extraordinary good in the world. And so to everyone who is watching, do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves. This is a time to organize, to mobilize, and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together. Look, many of you know I started out as a prosecutor and throughout my career I saw people at some of the worst times in their lives. People who had suffered great harm and great pain, and yet found within themselves the strength and the courage and the resolve to take the stand, to take a stand, to fight for justice, to fight for themselves, to fight for others. So let their courage be our inspiration. Let their determination be our charge. And I’ll close with this. There’s an adage a historian once called a law of history, true of every society across the ages. The adage is, only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case. But here’s the thing, America, if it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars.

what bright stars did you see this week? and how do you intend to carry on?

to those who note the rare use of caps this week, indeed sometimes you need to stand tall and say it loud and with proper capitalization, and so it is this fine morning. i mean what i say, and i say it undaunted.

25 Comments

September 20, 2024

the equinox of scan time: equal parts shadow and light

you start to wonder. which is another name for worry. for most of the last five months, i’ve worked at pushing it off to the edge of the frame. to keep it out of my focus. but october is coming. and with it, the next scan. the next clear-eyed peek into my insides, into my lungs, to see if anything’s lurking that oughtn’t be.

i’ve mused about the saintly side of scan time. how it’s akin to memento mori, the ancient and holy practice of remembering our death so that we maximally live our one swift shot at this astonishing life.

but the other side of scan time is the deeply human side. the wake-me-up-in-the-night, the try-not-to-worry-that-the-pain-in-my-ribs-is-anything-scary side.

i feel it rumbling around the edges. the what-ifs i bat down as if a pesky mosquito that won’t leave me alone. i try not to tumble down the shadowy mole hole of imagining a call to my boys, letting them know i need another round of surgery. i try to quash the dialogue that runs through my head, my doctor’s voice telling me there’s something in the scan that looks worrisome, that needs more poking around. i try not to let cancer be the ice to my spine.

i try not to cry.

but sometimes i get scared.

i am, always, bumpily, raggedly, very much human.

i’m still new to the tidal ebb and flow of scan time. and the scan now rising on the horizon’s edge is only my third since surgery, since they took out a chunk of my lung, since they found an uncommon cancer that sometimes decides to shuffle around in the lungs, settle in where it wasn’t before. what i’m finding here in the precinct of scan time is that when i near the one-month-to-go mark, the palpable fear comes.

maybe each round i’ll get a little bit less wobbly (though, having lived with myself and my keen imagination for all of these years now, i tend to doubt that). maybe i won’t be tempted to imagine the worst.

but the flip side, the smarter side, even now, even at the less-than-three-weeks-to-go mark, is that the hovering worry makes me sink deeper and deeper into the now. “today is a day when i don’t know anything’s wrong yet,” i sometimes hear myself saying. i suppose there are healthier ways to frame the day (for instance, omitting the “yet”), but once the doctor stamps the C word onto your chart, once it follows you pretty much wherever you go, it gets decidedly hard to unshackle yourself from being afraid.

remember, i’m bumpily, raggedly, very much human.

which is why a necessary ingredient on this bumpy, pock-riddled road is to enlist a battalion of comrades. some are fellow travelers i know up close and personal. a few are glorious souls i only know through their words, words they beam to me as if telepathic lifelines to put oomph where i’m lacking.

whether they’re friends whose numbers i could find in my phone, or soulmates by circumstance, they’re all someones who know by heart how it is to live in the penumbra of cancer. what i find utterly indispensible about each and every one of them is that they put words to the rumblings i’d otherwise keep under lock and key.

and when you hear the worst of your worries, the very words you’ve not yet dared to utter aloud, come out of a mouth that’s not yours, there comes an incomparable sigh, a sheer and certain relief to find you are hardly alone. and deep in communion, even if it’s a union to which you wish you didn’t belong.

one of my incomparable comrades is suleika jaouad, the best-selling author of between two kingdoms: a memoir of a life interrupted, the new york times writer of the “life interrupted” column, and every week in my inbox, the author of “the isolation journals,” her unfolding and intimate chronicle of her rare leukemia and relapse and bone marrow transplant. she’s one of the ones whose wisdom and courage i lean on. she infuses me. and, often, she steadies me.

just the other day, after a weeks-long silence that signaled something amiss, suleika, who indeed has suffered yet another relapse and is back to chemotherapy, mused about radical acceptance.

she wrote:

That’s not to say I don’t feel fear—of course, I do. But strangely, the anticipation of pain can be far scarier than just being in it, actually confronting it. After my first transplant, in the years when I was cancer-free, I felt hijacked by the prospect of a recurrence and afraid that I wouldn’t be able to handle it. When it actually happened, I faced it. Knowing that, I have been trying to practice a kind of radical acceptance of whatever comes up, responding with whatever the situation calls for.

Take last weekend, for example. On Saturday, I had to go in for my last infusion of my second round of chemo. The side effects compound day-to-day, and afterward I felt awful, and I knew I’d be spending the day in bed. It had been a rainy morning, but on my way home, the sky began to clear, and I beheld a spectacular rainbow. For a moment, I glimpsed a sense of wonder. When I got to my room, I said to myself, “If I have to be in bed all day, so be it. What can I do to make this a little less miserable?” I took some anti-nausea meds and got a big glass of water. I put on my favorite face oil, wrapped myself a heating pad, gathered my pups around me, and queued up some favorite old movies to watch. Did I still feel awful? Yes. But instead of fighting it, or lamenting all of the things I wouldn’t be able to accomplish that day, I accepted it. And it turned out that staying in bed all day felt almost luxurious.

she speaks such truth. and then she somehow wraps it in what feels like a velvet blanket, somehow makes even a day in the sickbed sound a bit like a day at the spa. no wonder suleika is someone whose hand i would reach for on the darkest and scariest of days.

even though she wouldn’t know me if i bumped into her in the revolving door of sloan-kettering (a hospital entrance both of us have spun through) i wrote her right away to thank her for planting seeds of courage that some day might be my ballast. and i seized on her phrase, “radical acceptance,” to try to put it to practice. to not let my fears escape from the barnyard. to not be hijacked by fear, but to stare it square on, and to remind myself that time and again in my fair little life, i’ve steadied my knees and my spine in the fulcrum of whatever would have been my worst fear. i’ve always been braver than i’d ever imagined. i think we all are.

another one of my unparalleled big-hearted compatriot warriors who speaks to my deepest-down soul is the spoken-word poet and queer activist andrea gibson, diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2021 and a recurrence last spring. i can’t count the times she’s sprung me to tears. tears of recognition. of stripped-naked truths. of beauty so rare and so fine i sometimes imagine she dwells with celestial beings.

here’s a line from one of her poems that stiffened my spine and reminded me to steady my ways:

My worst fear come true. But stay with me y’all-
because my story is one about happiness
being easier to find once we finally realize
we do not have forever to find it.

we do not have forever to find it…

i play their words over and over, as if a broken record, hoping and hoping that with each spin of needle to groove, i might finally inscribe their wisdom, their wonder, their truth, onto my heart. or at least find a strong steady hand to hold while i aim there….

what steadies you when you’re afraid?

22 Comments

September 13, 2024

a literary form for the slipperiest of minds

a page from british sailor henry tiffin’s commonplace book, 1760

more and more, the literary form into which i ease is one that traces roots to the ancients. to pliny, the great naturalist, whose mind must have been a beehive of sorts back in first-century rome. it’s an enthusiasm for accumulation that courses its path on through the renaissance when humanists, especially, were anxious to lock down their thoughts, keenly aware of the tragic loss of ancient learning, as libraries were so often, too often, the sites of military revenge. it’s a form that wends its way on and on through the centuries, straight through the twentieth, when mark twain, thomas hardy, ralph waldo emerson, and henry david thoreau, to name but a few, all partook of the habit. and here we are now, with plenty of us keen practitioners of the urge to gather up bits of literary esoterica and assorted ephemera before they skitter away. i think of myself, more often than you might imagine, as a rag picker of ideas in any which size, from the itty-bitty and poetic to the mindbogglingly big.

humans, it seems, like to scribble things down.

may our scribbling never cease.

the fancy name for this scribbling is commonplacing, the literary form the italians once named zibaldone, “a salad of many herbs,” in culinary terms, or a “hodgepodge” more broadly. we’re contemplating here the hodgepodge.

it’s the mosquito netting of the mind, of wonders and thoughts before they escape. or, as the 13th-century dominican monk, vincent of beauvais, once explained, it was “the multitude of books, the shortness of time, and the slipperiness of memory” that compels one to scribble.

count me in on the slippery mind.

vincent’s not-so-slippery solution: a ginormous tome, totaling 4.5 million words (someone counted!), an exhaustive compendium of all medieval knowledge, which he titled speculum maius (literally “great mirror”), speculum a word he chose because it contained “whatever is worthy of contemplation (speculatio), that is, admiration or imitation.” and thus he set out, over the course of his monastic lifetime to gather all the “flowers” (his word), or best bits of all the books he was able to read, in a selfless quest to save others the strains (time, money, trips to the library) of doing so themselves.

over the last many months, as the population of this old house has dwindled to two, and the stories to tell are fewer and fewer, my efforts here seem to have morphed into a looser, yet more concentrated consideration of the bountiful ideas and thunderbolts i bump into across the arc of a week.

there is something so natural about the human instinct to share what we’re thinking. of course there are those who might protest, who might consider me rude for shoving a book or a page or a picture in your face. but, when you think of it, isn’t that the instinct that drives so much of social media? (i often think we’ve gone overboard there, but that might be because too often it’s the magnification of any or every passing brain burp and not necessarily ones that might leave us enlightened. and too often amount to plain old overgazing at navels, or hair-raising nastiness and gut-wrenching vulgarity. but i digress…)

i’ve been keeping what amounts to my salad of many herbs for years and years now, and that urge seems to have spilled over to here, where week after week sometimes i seem to be assaulting you with the few morsels i’ve found most delicious in recent days. it’s a way, i suppose, of collectively swelling our brains. and our souls, most certainly.

in the spirit in which i bring my rag picking here, i like to think of us sitting side-by-side, cozy against the pillowy confines of an armchair broad enough for two. and in the gentlest, yet conspiratorial whisper, i offer you a page or a passage, my eyes widened and sparkling with glee, as if to say, wait’ll you see this one. what wonderments or deep thoughts spring to your mind?

any one of these next morsels is worthy of long and deep consideration. here are the ones that struck me this week:

these first two come from maria popova, whom i’ve referred to in the past as the high priestess of cultural commentary, and one of the most voracious gatherers of ideas i’ve encountered in recent years. her online literary journal, now known as The Marginalian, has been described as a compendium of hundreds of thousands of entries “that search for meaning, cross-linking ideas and connecting metaphysical dots.” here’s where she thunderbolted me this week:

“joy is a stubborn courage we must not surrender.”

“. . . love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”

another place i often turn for soulful sustenance is Emergence magazine, a wellspring that explores the timeless connections between ecology, culture and spirituality. in a recent talk, titled “memory, praise, and spirit,” the filmmaker, composer, sufi teacher, and driving force behind Emergence, emmanuel vaughan-lee, opened with these words:

“The mystics say that we are like a seed; that we hold the blueprint for our highest potential within us, and that much of spiritual practice, regardless of what tradition, is unlocking that potential.”

and i close with this one from the great james baldwin, a passage from his 1964 collection of intimate but somewhat little-known essays, titled nothing personal. this passage is from the fourth of the four essays collected there:

“One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.”

i could write an essay on any one of the above, but instead i invite you to chew on each or any one. each one, a morsel worthy of your time, your mind, your soul.

which one spurs you and stirs you the most, and what deep thoughts spring to your mind?

i’ve written before of commonplacing. here at the chair, and in my latest book, The Book of Nature, on pages 87 and 88. it’s a habit i can’t get enough of, an urge i can’t quench.

pages from the commonplace book of charles dodgson, aka lewis carroll

9 Comments

August 30, 2024

the imperative prompts: realizing life while we live it

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?––every, every minute?”

“No.”

Pause.

“The saints and poets, maybe––they do some.”

it’s these three lines plus the pause from thornton wilder’s “our town” that stopped me cold this week. released to the world in 1938, the three-act classic set in grover’s corners, a celebration of “ordinary people who make the human race seem worth preserving,” was once described by edward albee as “the greatest american play ever written.” i’m sure that claim is dusted over now, but its timelessness is proven. and these lines between emily and the stage manager, rising off the page after the commonplace litany of ticking clocks, and sunflowers, food and coffee, new-ironed dresses and hot baths, are the ones that called out to me across the arc of time.

it is the question that preoccupies me. it is the spiritual quest at my core: can i stay awake to the marvel around me? can i sift through the detritus and chaff that inevitably litter the days, and seize the glittering wonders? can i palpably know that these are the days i’ve been given to give what i have, to tap into the holiness within and leave at least some in my wake?

and thornton wilder was putting those questions on the stage nearly a century ago. and before wilder, and since wilder, countless sages have put forth the very same prod. are we awake yet? are we taking this all for granted? are we forgiving those who’ve trespassed against us, and asking forgiveness for the sins of our very own making?

we are meant to pay attention. we are meant to be kind. we are meant to love and love gently yet fiercely. we are meant to notice the ticking of clocks, the falling of rain, the sunglorious glow of one fat red tomato.

it’s the saints and the poets who sometimes remember. who point us, perhaps, in the certain direction. it was that reminder, the ranking of poets right up there with saints, that captured me too. that underscored and amplified a truth i know to be true: the imperative prompts so often come in the unlikeliest, quietest voices among us. in the script of a play nearly a century old.

where did you find your wisdoms this week?

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July 19, 2024

summer idyll: another name for “idle”

summertime is for slow. and slow i am this summer. i watch bunnies make breakfast buffet of my flowerpots. i keep vigil for a redbud tree that might be on its death march. i cut corn off the cob and dump it into confetti-like salads, delicious salads of tomato, armenian cucumber, and fists full of basil. i swim, slowly and gasping for air at the end of the lanes, in a pool where i am the youngest by a few decades.

and of course i read, an exercise that requires little other than the moving of one’s pupils, the occasional blink, and the turning of pages should one resort to that quaint document, the page.

and so it was in reading this week that those pupils of mine––and the braincells behind them––paused for deep consideration when i came across a commencement address by the late great russian poet and essayist joseph brodsky.

in the summer of 1989, two years after he won the nobel prize in literature and two decades after he fled the soviet dictatorship with the help of w.h. auden, brodsky stepped to the podium at dartmouth college to give the commencement address, later published in a posthumous collection titled, “on grief and reason: essays” (farrar, straus and giroux, 1997).

the topic he chose, curiously, was boredom. but brodsky being brodsky, he soared with it. and because i found it altogether mesmerizing, and because his closing passage stuck with me in what amounts to the cerebral iteration of gum to the bottom of your sneakers, i’m bringing it here to the old make-believe maple table.

what’s true, in these months of living fully awake to the ephemerality of time, is that i soak in especially the wisdoms of those who understand that fleetingness to be central to the sanctifying of time’s each and every parcel. to understand that time is not endless, but rather bracketed and with certain end, is for me anyway the gravitational force that drives my attention out of malaise and into full-on savor.

i hold each grain of time, as often as i pause and catch myself, up to the incandescent luminescence that reveals and magnifies its wonder. in other words, i aim to live with one of these in my back pocket, gliding time beneath my ever-ready looking glass:

here then is where brodsky begins his deep-dive into boredom, as he looked out upon a sea of soon-to-be-graduates at that ivy-covered college in new hampshire’s piney countryside (i’d endorse reading clear through these next few grafs, but if you’re pressed for time, leap down to the bottom of read to see if you, too, are struck by brodsky’s likening our time here to a ride on a runaway train, and his admonition to seize each blessed frame as it’s passing by):

Known under several aliases – anguish, ennui, tedium, doldrums, humdrum, the blahs, apathy, listlessness, stolidity, lethargy, languor, acedia, etc. – boredom is a complex phenomenon and by large a product of repetition. It would seem, then, that the best remedy against it would be constant inventiveness and originality. That is what you, young and newfangled, would hope for. Alas, life won’t supply you with that option, for life’s main medium is precisely repetition.

[…]

In a manner of speaking, boredom is your window on time, on those properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. In short, it is your window on time’s infinity, which is to say, on your insignificance in it. That’s what accounts, perhaps, for one’s dread of lonely, torpid evenings, for the fascination with which one watches sometimes a fleck of dust swirls in a sunbeam, and somewhere a clock tick-tocks, the day is hot, and your willpower is at zero.

Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. For boredom speakes the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life – the one you didn’t get here, on these green lawns – the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. “You are finite,” time tells you in a voice of boredom, “and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.” As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequences and the attendant self-aggrandizement.

For boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility. The former, it must be noted, breeds the latter. The more you learn about your own size, the more humble and the more compassionate you become to your likes, to that dust swirls in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your table. Ah, how much life went into those fleck! Not from your point of view but from theirs. You are to them what time is to you; that’s why they look so small. And do you know what the dust says when it’s being wiped off the table?

“Remember me,”
whispers the dust.

Nothing could be farther away from the mental agenda of any of you, young and newfangled, than the sentiment expressed in this two-liner of the German poet Peter Huchel, now dead.

brodsky closes his address with the words that first caught my eye this week, and that i––once again––will aim to not forget:

[…]

What lies ahead is a remarkable but wearisome journey [on a] runaway train. No one can tell you what lies ahead, least of all those who remain behind. One thing, however, they can assure you of is that it’s not a round trip. Try, therefore, to derive some comfort form the notion that no matter how unpalatable this or that station may turn out to be, the train doesn’t stop there for good. Therefore, you are never stuck — not even when you feel you are; for this place today becomes your past… receding for you, for that train is in constant motion. It will be receding for you even when you feel that you are stuck. So… look at it with all the tenderness you can muster, for you are looking at your past.

i reached for that confetti salad glamour shot above because it was a bit more visual than trying to find an image of boredom. it was perhaps the most delicious thing i made this week (the grilled salmon that arrived with the salad was mighty good, but i did nothing other than introduce it to the heat of the grill), and if you’re now hungry, here’s the recipe, courtesy of david lebovitz, a former pastry chef from chez panisse now a cookbook writer living in paris. lucky david.

fresh corn, tomato, cucumber, avocado, basil summer salad

2-3 ears of fresh corn
2 cups (350g) cherry tomatoes , (or 2 cups fresh tomatoes, diced)
1 ripe avocado
1/2 cucumber, peeled and seeded
1 cup (75g) loosely packed chopped fresh basil, (reserve any small leaves for garnish) Freshly ground black pepper
Vinaigrette
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
4 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1-2 small shallots, peeled and minced (1-2 tablespoons)
1 teaspoon sea or kosher salt
6 tablespoons (90ml) extra-virgin olive oil

Shuck the corn and remove it from the cob.
Remove any stems and slice the cherry tomatoes in half.
Peel the avocado, remove the pit, and dice the flesh. Cut the cucumber into similar sized cubes.
Put the corn kernels, tomatoes, avocado, cucumber, and basil into a serving bowl and season with freshly ground black pepper.
In a small bowl, whisk together the vinegar, mustard, shallots, salt, and olive oil. Pour the vinaigrette dressing over the salad and gently mix together. Taste, and add more salt and pepper if necessary.

Serving and storage: The dressed salad can be served right away or in a few hours. (It can be stored in the refrigerator or at room temperature, but should be served room temperature.) It’s best the same day it’s made.

your thoughts on the runaway train (above) welcome here, with the related question, what are the ways you remind yourself to live each day mindful of the preciousness and miracle that it holds?

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July 12, 2024

summer reading: the writer who gave us spider webs and a little mouse, plus other wisdoms

elwyn brooks white, best known to those who loved him as “andy,” and best known to you and me alphabetically as “e.b.,” taught me as much about love as just about any author i’ve ever read. and that includes the sacred texts of just about any religion i’ve happened upon.

every time i’ve pored over the words of charlotte’s web, or stuart little, or “death of a pig,” among the most masterful essays put to paper, i’ve felt the walls of my heart widen, and the bottom go deeper. perched against pillows in the old four-poster bed where both our boys inhabited the dreamland of their youths, i recall the sobs coming in echoes––from the one who was reading and the one being read to––as i choked my way through the tear-blurred words at the top of a still-splotted page 171: “she knew he was saying good-bye in the only way he could. and she knew her children were safe.” (i can’t even type that last sentence now without the tears coming again, filling my sockets.) “. . . she never moved again.” and then “. . .no one was with her when she died.”

we are reading, of course, of a spider. a spider we have all come to love, named charlotte.

and any writer who could make me love with all my heart an arachnid is a writer about whom i can never ever know enough. so it was with purest, geyser-like joy that i turned the pages this week of the first-ever fully illustrated biography of the legendary elwyn brooks white.

part collage, part scrap book, with excerpts of e.b.’s letters, and sketches, and reprints of early drafts and revisions in his own handwritten manuscript, Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White, by the caldecott honor winner melissa sweet, is at heart a love story told of one of the great disciples of love in its quietest, most undeniable forms.

e.b.’s life’s work, as he saw it, and as he wrote in a letter to a reader of charlotte’s web, boils down, pretty much, to this:

love these days seems to be a commodity of which the world is running short. but andy, or e.b., set out to make us see it, and feel it deep in our bones, by telling us the stories, as he put it, “of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the heart.” he calls those matters “the only kind of creative work which i could accomplish with any sincerity or grace.”

well, dear andy, my gratitude to you is etched on the chambers of my heart, a graffiti of the highest order. to teach a child that love comes in the corner of a barn or even atop the manure pile where wilbur the pig so merrily huddled, well, that’s a blessing pure and certain. and imperative, i’d argue. and too often missed, i’d add.

because he’s earned his post as ballast for my wobbly, sometimes-too-tender heart, wasn’t i delighted when i turned to page 132 in this charmed and charming illustrated biography, and found this excerpt from andy’s letters, which seemed to me a prescriptive for these hard times and the dark clouds under which we find ourselves:

“things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. it is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. but as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time, waiting to sprout when the conditions are right.“

i’ll stop there with my old friend e.b., because that’s the line i want to consider, the line i want us to latch onto and live.

and so, what a curious thing that the next wise soul i wandered into this week was one olga jacoby, a german-jewish englishwoman and mother of four adopted children, who, in 1909 at age 35, had received a terminal diagnosis from her doctor, and sat down to write him a letter on the subject of living and dying without religion, but with moral courage, kindness, and a stunning receptivity to beauty. their correspondence would unfold until jacoby’s death four years later, and her letters, “by turns funny, touching, and intensely sad,” were published posthumously and anonymously by her husband in 1919.

in her first letter, to “my dear doctor,” she boiled down her belief to this:

“To leave a good example to those I love [is] my only understanding of immortality.”

and a year into her diagnosis she illuminated that notion:

“. . . More and more to me this simplest of thoughts seems right: Live, live keenly, live fully; make ample use of every power that has been given us to use, to use for the good end. Blind yourself to nothing; look straight at sadness, loss, evil; but at the same time look with such intense delight at all that is good and noble that quite naturally the heart’s longing will be to help the glory to triumph, and that to have been a strong fighter in that cause will appear the only end worth achieving. The length of life does not depend on us.”

and, she leaves us with this bedrock of lived truth:

“. . . Love, like strength and courage, is a strange thing; the more we give the more we find we have to give. Once given out love is set rolling for ever to amass more, resembling an avalanche by the irresistible force with which it sweeps aside all obstacles, but utterly unlike in its effect, for it brings happiness wherever it passes and lands destruction nowhere.”

who teaches you on the subject of love? what seeds of goodness harbor in you, and how will you coax them to sprout? and how might you put into practice the avalanche of irresistible force practiced by spiders and pigs alike (at least in the rich imagination of one e.b. white) and that, to the dying mother of four, was the most lasting thing that ever there was?

Some Writer! came to me, as so many of the best so-called children’s books do, by way of my best longest friend, auntie mullane, the children’s librarian, who prescribed it as the sure cure for summer blues, or any blues that might befall us in this dark-clouded era.

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July 5, 2024

of joy and hope in hard times

evidence of joy lurking somewhere in the house

joy comes in curious form. in simplest form sometimes. it arrived deep in the night last night in the form of tiptoes up the stairs. and then a creak of bedroom door. had i not been lost in the murky land of dreams i might have been startled, might have worried that burglars were afoot. instead, i somehow thought it was the mate asleep beside me, that he’d roused and went out lurking. but then i felt the lump beneath the sheets. and as the murk faded i realized the night visitor must be the very one who’d called that room his own for so many years.

a night visitor, sometimes, brings joy.

and so it is that the simple knowing that, come the waking hour (his waking hour clocks in hours beyond mine), i’ll be at the stove tossing berries in a pond of batter, is enough to wash me in a morning’s joy.

it’s as simple as that sometimes. as narrow-focused.

these days, i contemplate strategies for making joy. and survival.

we live in dark times. not so dark as other moments in history, perhaps, but dark enough to make it hard to dodge the shadow. or the pit in my belly that will not subside.

i found myself turning, this week, in three different instances to albert camus. not the first on my list when it comes to literary prozac, but thrice he and his wisdoms came through for me. his words, drawn from a collection of posthumously published essays, speak across the decades, and if a writer born into one world war, who lived through another, could find it in his soul searching to seek and find a trail of hope, well then he’s one to whom i’ll listen.

in the year i was born, camus (1913-1960) became the second-youngest laureate of the nobel prize for literature, awarded for writing that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience.” the problems he mined were these: art as resistance, happiness as our moral obligation, and the measure of strength through difficult times.

one of my modern-day muses, as you might have gathered if you read here very often, is the cultural critic maria popova who rarely fails to pluck gems worth tucking in forever chests. in a trail that led me to her this week, i found that some years ago she too took a turn into the deep well of camus. she wrote:

“During WWII, Camus stood passionately on the side of justice; during the Cold War, he sliced through the Iron Curtain with all the humanistic force of simple kindness. But as he watched the world burn its own future in the fiery pit of politics, he understood that time, which has no right side and no wrong side, is only ever won or lost on the smallest and most personal scale: absolute presence with one’s own life, rooted in the belief that ‘real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.’”

she goes on to point out that in camus’ writing she hears the echo of the young dostoyevsky’s exultant reckoning with the meaning of life shortly after his death sentence was repealed (“to be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart,” dostoyevsky wrote to his brother, “that’s what life is all about, that’s its task”). these giants of literature belong on our nearest shelves for, in so many ways, they’ve left us instructions––or is it imperatives?––for living.

and here we hear camus:

“What counts is to be human and simple. No, what counts is to be true, and then everything fits in, humanity and simplicity. When am I truer than when I am the world?… What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness… I hold onto the world with every gesture, to men with all my gratitude and pity. I do not want to choose between the right and wrong sides of the world, and I do not like a choice… The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death. Besides, how can I define the link that leads from this all-consuming love of life to this secret despair?… In spite of much searching, this is all I know.”

not realizing i was tracing camus through the week, the first time he caught my eye this week was in the single short first sentence below, which hit me as a fist to the belly as i count my days under the penumbra of those first three words:

“Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one’s time. They say I’m active. But being active is still wasting one’s time, if in doing one loses oneself. Today is a resting time, and my heart goes off in search of itself. If an anguish still clutches me, it’s when I feel this impalpable moment slip through my fingers like quicksilver… At the moment, my whole kingdom is of this world. This sun and these shadows, this warmth and this cold rising from the depths of the air: why wonder if something is dying or if men suffer, since everything is written on this window where the sun sheds its plenty as a greeting to my pity?”

and finally, at 27, camus wrote this, speaking for this moment as well as the dark, dark times of 1940 when he wrote them:

“Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.”

as if all that was not enough to carry me across the tide of this july’s miasma, it was with joyful inkling of recognition that my reading unearthed this most unforgettable line of camus: “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

do yourself a favor and check out camus’ lyrical and critical essays. and consider leaving the front door unlocked lest any night visitor might wander in with reservation for blueberry pancake breakfast.

and may we all find that invincible summer.

what carried you across the abyss this week?

my night visitor, of course, is the boy we rarely see these days as he is ever toiling in the kitchen of stephanie izard’s famed girl and the goat eatery. but the holiday upon us drew him out of the city to an old friend’s house, where the hour was late enough that trains must have ceased their chugging along the track, and thus we scored him for the night. good thing the sheets are always clean, and the griddle ever at the ready.

the cookie dome above, scattered with bits of brownie crumb, is one of the few clues left behind by the night visitor. i always delight in remnant evidence when i awake in the morning and find the kitchen not exactly as i’d left it. those crumbs bring volumes of joy to me…

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June 28, 2024

where my rabbit hole led me this week. . .

one in a series of summertime esoterica, in which for no particular reason my attention is drawn to this, that, or the other thing…

deep in my summertime poking-around ways, a pursuit of reading akin to ambling barefoot through dew-sodden grass, i found myself the other day burrowing into a rabbit hole, following the trail of a late-19th-century theologian with radical ideas and gloriously poetic prayers. (i might just as effortlessly follow the trail of what to do with too much zucchini, or why banana-peel-steeped waters are so fine for my fledgling tomatoes…it’s a carousel of wonders here on curiosity row…)

the theologian of the week, here in rabbit-hole land, is one walter rauschenbusch, the late 19th-century clergyman and theologian who led the Social Gospel movement in the U.S., and whose work is said to have influenced a litany of great 20th-century social-justice warriors, among them martin luther king jr., desmond tutu, lucy randolph mason, reinhold niebuhr, and george mcgovern. his animating idea was that not just individuals but the whole of society needed to work toward what he termed “the kingdom of God” on earth, a place where justice and peace as well as equal rights and a democratic distribution of economic power were holy and necessary works, ones that demanded constant and unrelenting effort.

rauschenbusch’s radical theology, it seems, was informed by eleven years working as a baptist pastor in NYC’s aptly-named Hell’s Kitchen, where he presided over the funerals of hundreds of children who died from the ravages of impoverishment—malnutrition, domestic violence spurred by overcrowded tenements, or any of the other ills born of economic destitution.

rauschenbusch wrote: “I began to realize that God hates injustice and that I would be quenching God’s spirit within me if I kept silent with all of the social sin of the world around me.”

of the hundreds of children’s funerals over which rauschenbusch presided (many of them for children younger than five), he wrote:

“At each funeral I would find myself crying out to God, ‘Why do the children have to suffer in this manner?’ I recall on one occasion one of the church members, a single father who worked at a factory for 12 hours each day. His daughter was dying at home and calling out for her daddy. The employer refused to allow the father to go home to be with his daughter in her last hours.

“It was not uncommon to see grown men near our church just begging for work, just so they and their families could survive.

“It was in this context that I began to understand sin in a new and radical way. Baptists had always been known as railing and condemning the sins of alcoholism, smoking, gambling, and sexual promiscuity, such as were exemplified in the lives of the many prostitutes who lived and worked very close to our church. . . .

“The radical conclusion that I came to was this: all of these personal sins which were so obvious to everyone were somehow connected to the sin of structural injustice. So many people saw no hope, no way to extricate themselves from their living hell, their dead-end street. So many would resort to alcoholism. Women would feel compelled to become a prostitute so they could feed themselves and their families. Charles Dickens in his writings helped us see and somewhat feel the environment that could ensnare anyone who was trapped in a world of deprivation and desperation.

“The less obvious sins to most Baptists and other conservative leaders were those that were represented by the vast gulf between those who were extremely opulent, you might say ‘filthy rich,’ and the vast majority of people who were barely able (and oftentimes not able) to get by.”

finding wisdoms from the past for these arduous times is, perhaps, too futile a pursuit. but i believe in the endosperm of hope. and rauschenbusch’s prayers––and his theology––seem apt for a dusting off. and, besides, his prayers are beautifully wrought.

my eye was caught first by one of those prayers, the evening prayer (below) but as i kept reading it was the line above––“I began to realize that God hates injustice and that I would be quenching God’s spirit within me if I kept silent with all of the social sin of the world around me.”––and the children’s funerals that informed it, that clutched me at the gut and won’t let go.

here, as a place to begin, is but one of his prayers, with particular resonance for one who delights in all of creation, especially the trials and triumphs just beyond my own back door:

FOR OUR WORLD, OUR EARTH

O God, we thank You for this universe, our great home; for the vastness and richness of our cosmic environment; for the manifoldness of life on the planet of which we are a part.

We are thankful for the morning sun and the clouds and the constellations of stars.

We rejoice in the salt sea and the deep waters and green leaves of grass.

We thank You for our sense by which we experience earth’s splendor.

We would have souls open to all this joy, souls saved from being so weighted with care that we pass unseeing when the thornbush by the wayside is aflame with beauty.

Enlarge within us a sense of fellowship with all that lives and moves and has being in space and time, especially with all who share this earth as their common home with us.

Remembering with shame that in the past, we human beings have all too often exercised high dominion with ruthless cruelty, we admit that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to You in song, has been a groan of travail.

May we so live that our world may not be ravished by our greed nor spoiled by our ignorance.

May we hand on earth’s common heritage of life, undiminished in joy when our bodies return in peace to You, our Great Mother who has nourished them.

and here is the beginning of his evening prayer:

LORD, we praise thee for our sister, the Night, who folds all the tired folk of the earth in her comfortable robe of darkness and gives them sleep. Release now the strained limbs of toil and smooth the brow of care. Grant us the refreshing draught of forgetfulness that we may rise in the morning with a smile on our face. Comfort and ease those who toss wakeful on a bed of pain, or whose aching nerves crave sleep and find it not. Save them from evil or despondent thoughts in the long darkness, and teach them so to lean on thy all-pervading life and love, that their souls may grow tranquil and their bodies, too, may rest. And now through thee we send Good Night to all our brothers and sisters near and far, and pray for peace upon all the earth.

if you’re interested, here’s a link to a PDF of rauschenbusch’s 1910 collection of prayers, For God and the People: Prayers of the Social Awakening.

in the book’s preface, rauschenbusch explained the collection’s genesis: “The language of prayer always clings to the antique for the sake of dignity, and plain reference to modern facts and contrivances jars the ear. So we are inclined to follow the broad avenues beaten by the feet of many generations when we approach God. We need to blaze new paths to God for the feet of modern [women and] men.”

amen, pastor rauschenbusch, amen.

as long as we’re quoting old white men, i admit to being an admirer of the writings of that old-time radio humorist garrison keillor, who has mellowed beyond measure with age. in an ode to summer’s slow pace the other day, he wrote this about morning light, one of the blessings that comes with waking early, a habit i consider essential to the deep breathing of my soul:

It’s a revelation of delight, of our Creator’s delight in His creation, and though we’re brought up to be skeptical, wary of big hopes, prepared to deal with the injustices of life, still the dawn light argues with stoicism and you see the beauty of the ordinary.

what ordinary beauties or big ideas captured your imagination this week?

and here’s a harder question (to ponder in your own soul): what shall we do so as not to stay silent in the face of the social sin of the world?

and happy blessed blessed day to my beloved andrea, who makes me laugh hard and often, and whose goodness seems vaster than the circumference of this big blue globe. (A is one of the chair friends who reads dutifully nearly every week, and more often than not sends along a note that melts me or makes me laugh every time…)

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May 31, 2024

a narrative twist and the wisdoms that come in its wake

when last we pulled up a chair, we were a gladsome foursome giddily gadding about the eternal city. unbeknownst to us, a fifth was among us. a red-ringed hanger-on who might have climbed aboard on the plane that flew through the night. or perhaps in the crowds in one art-ringed room or another.

but by nightfall one friday ago, a mere four days into our roman romp, one among us was lying flat on his back when he plaintively asked, “could you feel my head?” and suddenly the tiniest of sniffles i’d been hearing for the past two days, and the uncharacteristic naps that were beckoned mid-morning and again mid-afternoon snapped into sense, and a not-so-subtle hypothesis bolted into my brain: “this couldn’t be covid, could it?!?”

and with that, lickety split, i leapt out the door and wiggled my way through ancient streets and crowds thick with myriad tongues. i found myself a farmacia and in the clearest italian i knew, asked, “covid test?” the farmacista knew too. it seems the red-ringed word is universally understood. she handed me the prova covid, i handed her euros, and off i flew.

didn’t take more than a minute for that dreaded double line to flash into sight. bright purple it was, as my pictures of rome in quartet whirled down the drain. we had among us a covid-plagued fellow, the very one who had spent weeks and weeks planning and plotting. signing us up for this tour and that. and now, the poor chap was confined to a room at the back of the Airbnb, and i was moved to the couch.

i felt my heart crack.

i pictured a big pink eraser descend from above, dashing our roman holiday and turning our fine little appartamento into a quarantined clinica covid. i feared, right away, that the dastardly viral intruder would tear us asunder. that i, too, would be felled. and then boy 1 and boy 2.

i reached for my phone and dashed off a text to my beloved american doctor. as the sun set in rome, it was just reaching its midday peak in the states, so, lo and behold, she swiftly wrote back. told us they’re basically treating covid as a head cold these days, and that 24 hours after the fever broke or symptoms abated, our chief travel guide would enter the five-day mask-and-distance phase. and the rest of us should hope for the best.

without delay, the ailing one and i both reached for our phones to alert the dear friends with whom we’d shared the previous evening of rooftop aperitifs and a long and lovely roman dinner. and, belly flip-flopping all the while, i texted the sorry update to our boys, who’d gone out with a professorly friend for pastas and spritzes and whatever else might unfold on a friday night in glorious rome when you’re young and with nary a care.

i couldn’t sleep. so i lay there on my couch till the wee hours, listening for the boys’ signature voices and the clomp of their feet on the stone-cobbled street down below. when in they wandered, i confirmed that they’d seen the bum news spelled out on their phones. and we figured the weekend engagements — a guided tour of the colosseum and forum, as well as a lazy sunday lunch on our friends’ rooftop terrace (which had been the imagined highlight of the trip to little old me) — had gone up in vatican smoke.

but here’s where the story once again takes a turn, rises into the allegorical, and makes of one player a hero: assuming the boys would never in a million years awake for an early-morning architectural tour of ancient roman ruins, i’d already scratched the colosseum and forum off the list. so wasn’t i proven to be the fool when, with an hour to spare before the already-paid-for tour, the bedroom door cracked open and out strolled a towel-clad gent on his way to the shower. as he sauntered sleepily past me, he uttered only three words that soon set the tone for the day and all those that followed: “when in rome. . .”

and so we were off. if he, a boy who’d slept a mere few hours, could pull himself off the pillow to make good on his papa’s pre-ordained plot for the day, certainly boy No. 1 could follow, and i — who had originally declined a tour of what i referred to as “the ancient blood bath” and imagined instead a leisurely morning alone — could step into gear. turned out we missed the guided part of the tour, but we managed to get into the old ruin and carried on the self-guided way. all that walking and gawking made us hungry, so kid No. 2 called time-out and guided us through the meandering streets to an osteria that he’d been told had the very best food in all of roma (and it certainly did)*. and then, bellies full and sunscreen slathered, we climbed to the tippy top of the palatine gardens, and all of rome lay majestically, magnificently sprawled out before us.

the boy’s simple instructive “when in rome. . .” is the essence of carpe diem, the code by which he not only lives but inspires. he’s a mere 22, a kid born just before 9/11, a kid whose years have been punctuated by the horrors of parkland and sandy hook, a kid who cowered inside our cambridge apartment the terrible week of the boston marathon bombing when we could watch the police helicopters whirring in the sky just out our windows, a kid who went to college during covid and got sent home for half a semester to watch pre-recorded lectures on the laptop perched on the covers of his boyhood bed.

he’s emerged with an unshakeable knowing that life comes around but once, and you’d better seize it while you can. because there’s no cinch on tomorrow. which pretty much is the truth it’s taken me decades — and a medical scare of whopping proportion — to figure out.

we talked plenty (be it discoursing eternal verities or swapping silly serendipities) as we wound through the ancient streets of rome (his hand always reaching for mine, to make sure i didn’t wobble or fall), as he insisted we mosey down the block to the corner watering hole for spritzes at dusk, as he and his brother led us hither and yon to the best eats in the city. and his ironclad creed is that life is to be lived to the fullest.

my number one teacher in rome was the kid who grew in my womb long after the doctors insisted there’d never be another; an odds-breaker ever since, a kid who dwells in the joy of exclamation. and his lesson is one i’ll not tuck away on a shelf now that we’re home. nor ever.

it’s a beautiful and glorious thing when the teacher appears in the form of a kid who serves up his lessons with spritzes and leads you through rome on a quest for flavors you’ll never forget.

bless you, and thank you, dear T.

post script: our covid-afflicted fellow made it through mostly unscathed, and is now back among the unmasked. once his fever broke, and 24 hours had passed, he made the most of his unfettered hours to stand and absorb the architectural wonders of rome for as long as his big ol’ heart desired. none of the rest of us ever tested positive. though we missed the rooftop lazy sunday lunch of our dreams, we now have reason and incentive to return. i brought a good chunk of rome home in my heart.

what wisdoms have come your way in the wake of a narrative twist?

*in case you find yourself in the eternal city any time soon, the best food we inhaled in rome was at the little osteria il bocconcino, just up the hill and around a few bends from the colosseum. if you ask the boys, there are multiple other contenders as well. every bite, in a word, was sublime.

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Category: wisdom