world weary | pull up a chair

let me begin by saying i have no business commenting on national affairs. and i confess to brandishing naivete at the highest level. but, in that way i always do come friday mornings, i scan the week and pluck the one particular thing that zings me the most. this week it’s war. it’s the word war. it’s opting for war instead of defense, it’s heralding a drive toward muscularity of the violent sort.

i’ve been studying Torah week after week for a few years now, more than long enough to know this tendency toward warring, toward violence, be it in the name of protection or crushing the opposition, stealing land, or seeking fortune, is as hard-wired into the human species as can be.

and yet…

and yet, there are those who’d see a rock and build it into a cairn, a path marker signaling to the stranger who comes behind, this is the way. this is the way toward a holiness, a holy place.

and there are those who see a rock and stoop to pluck it from the ground and fling it. where it lands, be damned. who or what it shatters, oh well.

i grew up on a street where there were rock flingers and cairn pilers. some of us played in the woods, being careful not to step on the trillium. some rode their bikes through the woods, fast and furious and zooming off logs piled for the purpose of velocity. crushing was part of the point. speed, the aim.

i live now in a country where the department of defense is considering a change of name, department of war. for all i know it’s happened overnight in one of those postings that now serve as executive orders. of all the countless assaults in a nation where rockets red glare once was a line in a patriotic hymn, why is one three-letter word so crushing to me?

because at heart i want to build cairns. i don’t want to be of a nation that only sees force as the way out. i know there’s a God seen as vengeful in the pages of ancient sacred text. but i know there came in time a Godly voice who took to the mountaintop and spoke: blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are the poor in spirit. blessed are the meek, the humble, the merciful.

that’s my tribe. by creed and by blood. but mostly by spirit.

and as the years accrue, as i have deepened into a sacred hollow, found my peace and my bliss there, i cannot fathom nor abide a mindset that heralds its predilection for bombs, for guns, for ballistics.

is there not might in the pen—the aphorism says that there is, that it’s mightier. is there not might in working it out, coming to the table with an understanding that we are but one tiny blue marble in the vastness of space, and we’ve been adorned with more than plenty, and all we need do is work out our share. the lines drawn in the sand are just that: subject to rearranging winds.

we needn’t turn into hermits, each in our own secluded and faraway hut (though it’s an idea that sometimes appeals to me). but we might be a village. a village where my empty cupboard is stocked when i need it by yours. where my faltering gait is held steady by you, because you respond to the impulse as hardwired into us as the rock-flinging one, the one that rushes to pluck the fallen from the sidewalk.

i am wise enough to know that’s not necessarily the dominant instinct, the peacemaking one. but i know there are ways to bolster it. it might be in following the lead of the everyday saints in our midst, the ones who rush to wherever there’s pain, or loss, or lacking. or the ones who quietly, quietly get the job done. it might be deep in the countless pages of ink poured over the millennia, the ones that brilliantly brilliantly illuminate a holier truth. the way toward blessedness is the path of the peacemaker.

i know my weighing in on the matter verges on silly. who am i but one breath in the wilds?

and all i’m saying is i am crushed, crushed, by one three-letter word.

and so very much more…

a choice: what crushed you this week? or what bolstered you?

i happen to have a big brother, his name is john, and he is marking a big birthday today. and so, i pause for a moment here (sometimes he pulls up a chair) to send a boatload of blessings and love. he’s been looking out for me since my beginning….(in this very old photo, he is kindly helping me climb into a little red car; he in red cap, me in the blue….)

this is from one of our ol’ home movies, a famous scene in family lore. i am soon either pushed over or assisted into car, depends on your perspective. since it’s his birthday, let’s give dear john the benefit of the doubt: he’s assisting. (though the next frame has me splat on the ground!)

12 Comments

February 28, 2025

in search of the common

in which we take a hard look at the crumbling discourse in this country, and consider a solution or two….

i’ll be honest. these are hard times. i pick up the news and feel pummeled by each new blow. i see pillars of democracy crumbling one after another. jeff bezos and the washington post, only the latest. i read of law firms—white shoe ones, meaning old-guard firms who take on some of the highest-profile clients, the most complex cases, aka “the elite”—being stripped of security clearance, being considered for criminal investigation only because they represented a client the current administration has inked onto the enemies list.

i see revenge as the rule of the day.

i’m sickened.

i’ve never prayed to a God of revenge.

but i read, too, that there are stirrings of hope. faint, yet beginning to stir.

you might call it an occupational hazard, but i happen to pay attention to the ways we get news and i worry desperately that we all cower in distant silos. (getting more distant by the day.) i get my news and you get yours and, often, ne’er the twain shall meet.

so how do we have a shared conversation? how do we sit down to the same old table and begin to listen? how do we reach across the table, and in a quiet, unquivering voice, utter the words, “i hear your point”? or the certain conversational lubricant, “say more”? or the nervier, and necessary, “that’s not actually true”?

i hold onto my hunch that most of us want what we think is fair, is just. and i’m not giving up on my fervent belief that if you saw me bleeding on a sidewalk, you would not ask first how i voted and then decide whether or not to lift me off the ground.

i’m fairly certain that in the nearly two decades we’ve been pulling up chairs here, some of us do get our news from different silos. i try to tread lightly. i respect divergence of thought. but the problem, as i see it, is that we are all being fed news in the flavors most to our liking. and that’s not the way the news is supposed to work. it’s not the way it worked for the time i was one of the ones writing what counted as news. and not in the newsroom i knew.

so here’s the jam: if the news you’re being fed is slanted, if some of it’s filtered out, and some of it’s twisted, if both sides aren’t fairly presented, it’s not any sort of surprise that conclusions are drawn, and wedges are wedged.

these days, the ones helming the news––the owners, the billionaires who thought it a romp to claim a slot on the masthead––they seem to be in it for hard, cold cash. the one with the most wins. cozying up to power seems a game to which we’re not invited. to get there, you need to fly in your private jet, hopefully not one of the ones making a mess on the runways.

so much for democracy dying in darkness. or that now quaint-seeming declaration of adolph s. ochs in april of 1896, that his newspaper, the venerable new york times, would “give the news impartially, without fear or favor.”

good journalists hold firm to those words. good journalists have died defending those words.

you don’t get into the news biz––chasing after crooks and pols, climbing rickety stairs in darkened hallways, knocking on doors knowing full well you might find a muzzle pointed at the bridge of your nose––because it’s a sure way to raise your heart rate. or just cuz you’re nosey.

you get into the news biz cuz you’re a mad dog for the truth. and the fair telling of stories. you dig and you dig till you find that shimmering shard that, to your best knowledge, and according to more than one reliable source, is unassailably true. i sat beside folks in the newsroom who thought nothing of holing themselves in the dungeons of city hall or the bowels of bureaucrat mazes, riffling through file after file to track down the name and the dollar amount on contracts that might or might not have been legal. that might have unearthed wrongful convictions. or identified bodies dumped on the roadside. and those subterranean scribes had the pallor to prove it, after months and months under the glow of flimsy fluorescent lights. and cups of stale coffee. (we’ll leave the bottles of whiskey for another day.)

these days, the ones coursing the landscape with their reporter pads and pens, their itty-bitty microphones and their smartphone recorders, are plenty besmirched. discounted as little more than rousers of rabble. there’s a strong scent of disdain souring the air.

that’s an unfair and erroneous swipe at all those who abide by the time-tested codes. you might have heard that, um, democracy dies in darkness. and the reporters i know refuse to turn off their flashlights.

my little screed here won’t make a dent. but i cannot give up. none of us can. my faintest hope is that even one someone who reads this might take up the dare: fight fallacy and fiction with verifiable fact. there was an old maxim in the newsroom, one that we more or less lived by: if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.

check your sources for news. read beyond your usual silo. sit down at a table and listen. exercise your ears more than your tongue.

at least for now, it’s a place to begin….

p.s. i know there is a good handful of journalistic heroes who pull up a chair, so if any of you wander by today or tomorrow or anytime soon, feel free to pen your prolific and profound views on the state of news consumption in america, and how it might be at least part of the root of what’s tearing us apart….

only one poem this week, and it’s a wonder from a poet who is a chicago legend, a hero in Black arts…..it’s an ode to books, which is a great place to begin a grounding in knowledge, and finding common language…..be sure to get to the last line, where i’m guessing you’ll let out a sigh. as i did. so much in common….

So Many Books, So Little Time
by Haki R. Madhubuti

My sanctuaries are liberated lighthouses of shelved books,
featuring forgotten poets, unread anthropologists of tenure-
seeking assistant professors, self-published geniuses, remaindered
first novelists, highlighting speed-written bestsellers,
wise historians & theologians, nobel, pulitzer prize, and american book
award winners, poets & fiction writers, overcertain political commentators,
small press wunderkinds & learned academics.
All are vitamins for my slow brain & sidetracked spirit in this
winter of creating.

I do not believe in smiling politicians, AMA doctors,
zebra-faced bankers, red-jacketed real estate or automobile
salespeople, or singing preachers.

I believe in books.
It can be conveniently argued that knowledge,
not that which is condensed or computer packaged, but
pages of hard-fought words, dancing language
meticulously & contemplatively written by the likes of me & others,
shelved imperfectly at the level of open hearts & minds,
is preventive medicine strengthening me for the return to my
clear pages of incomplete ideas to be reworked, revised &
written as new worlds and words in all of their subjective
configurations to eventually be processed into books that
will hopefully be placed on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, homes,
& other sanctuaries of learning to be found & browsed over by receptive
booklovers, readers & writers looking for a retreat,
looking for departure & yes spaces,
looking for open heart surgery without the knife.

—Haki R. Madhubuti, who turned 83 this week, is a poet, writer, and educator, who in 1967 founded Chicago’s Third World Press, the largest independent Black-owned press. He’s regarded as an architect of the Black Arts Movement. Born Donald Luther Lee, he changed his name in 1973 after traveling to Africa: “Haki” means “justice” or “rights,” while “Madhubuti” means “precise, accurate, and dependable.” Both names are derived from Swahili. Of his renaming, Madhubuti explained at the time that he wanted to arrive at a new definition of self.

have you had any hard conversations of late? were you afraid to go there? what peaceable tools did you use to navigate? how did it go? will you try again?

5 Comments

August 28, 2020

maybe we do one, just one, bold (but little) thing…

and by bold i mean one something, anything, in the name of bending that stubborn arc of justice. by bold i mean do one certain something today — maybe even within the next hour — that you otherwise wouldn’t have mustered the will or energy or courage to do.

feeling the full weight of what we’re up against in this world that is not letting up in this long hot summer, so many mornings feeling knocked back, feeling impotent, frozen in the face of injustice, in the wake of sirens and spilling blood and streets chaotic, i turn — as i so often do — to the words of dorothy day, who in turn had leaned into the holy wisdom of therese of lisieux, the little saint who preached a spirituality of “the little way,” to mine her everlasting, every day truth:

From Therese, Dorothy learned that any act of love might contribute to the balance of love in the world, any suffering endured might ease the burden of others….We could only make use of the little things we possessed — the little faith, the little strength, the little courage. These were the loaves and fishes. We could only offer what we had, and pray that God would make the increase. It was all a matter of faith.
Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, Edited and with an Introduction by Robert Ellsberg

it’s a place, and a way to begin, for us little people, the ones of us who know full well the real battlefield that calls us every day is the one not too far from our front door, the quotidian one, the one whose players we might know well or not at all. the strangers within our reach. the ones who might be taken wholly by surprise by a sudden gust of kindness, out-of-nowhere kindness. the ones who might find courage a little bit contagious, who might pick up the pieces and pass it on.

once upon a time, stoked by pictures of starving children from biafra, fueled by the stories in time magazine i’d take to my room to read when no one was watching, i used to dream i’d cure world hunger. i imagined i could lope the globe, fill bellies, spoon unicef gruel into mouths open and hungry, like little birds.

it hurts plenty to shed those dreams, to watch them wither away, to realize you were pie in the almighty sky, and some crazy fool besides. what gets tough, gets real, is to station yourself squarely in the middle of your humdrum life, to look out across the landscape, and seek the moments where you might infuse your own cockeyed brand of dorothy day’s little kindness, little strength, little courage.

this bedraggled world needs every bold (but little) drop.

where will you begin?

14 Comments

August 14, 2020

make it stop. please, make it stop.

my voice is only one whisper. my fingers, just one at a time, tap along the rows of these keys without sound. but the lump in my throat is ready to burst. and my heart is too.

stop the ugliness, world. stop the hate. stop the made-up lies and the mudslinging. tear yourself away from the impulse to tromp on the neck of the one you perceive as your enemy.

doesn’t need to be this way. doesn’t need to be a national throw-em-to-the-lions.

the world doesn’t need to wake up every morning searching for the ugliest route to the trail head.

there are moments, plenty of ’em, when i picture myself marching to the steps of the u.s. capitol, unfurling a parchment, invoking a code of radical decency, insisting the ugliness cease and cease now. oh, what i’d give to back some of these fools into a corner, to poke em on the chest, look em in the eye, and ask if really, really, they want to expend their God-given breath on slicing and dicing each other to bits, trampling truth, teaching children the ways of the playground bully.

i got sick of bullies back in first grade. never outgrew my distaste.

all these months i’ve retreated deeper and deeper into a realm where the rules of the world are not the ones with discernible weight. i dwell much of the time in a monastery of my own making. it’s quieter there. and gentler. i take time for the monarch butterfly, leave out saucers of sugar water, scatter seeds for the milkweed that makes for a butterfly landing pad.

in the quietude i wrap all around me, the rules i live by are the ones of an otherworldly iconoclast. the code is the one inscribed by a God who asks only one thing: love without end. love as you would be loved, love every last inch and ounce of creation. behold the wonder. of each other. of the monarch. and the dawn. and every last shimmering light in the night sky.

and, sometimes, to love means to put breath to the words that are stuck in your throat. to march to the capitol steps, to reach for the microphone, to try with every ounce of your might to shake sense into the senseless. the ones dizzy with power, or the pursuit thereof. it’s a sickness and it needs to stop. it’s as contagious, it seems — and as deadly — as this invisible virus, the plague that’s upon us. maybe more so. maybe it’s worse.

because once upon a time i was a nurse, because i’ve stood at the side of a hospital bed in the hours just before a last breath was drawn, i know something of deathbed confessions. i know how, at last, the veils of the everyday are pulled away, and what’s left is the essence. holy essence. how the sins and the glories float to the surface. how one last sweep of the soul, of a lifetime, is what carries us off to whatever comes next.

our time here is fleeting. do the ones breathing fire and lies, do they really want to fritter away the hours allotted? is that churn in their belly the only way they know to crawl from their beds? is bitter the singular taste of the day?

the choice is quite simple: make of your life an instrument of peace, of goodness, of attainable holiness. or let it extinguish in smoke and in flames, in pride and deceit, in ugliness out-of-control.

we make our choice minute by minute, day after day.

what will you choose, world, what will you choose?

if you were writing a code of goodness, decency, and gentle kindness for the world, what would you inscribe? what would constitute breaking the law?

18 Comments

July 24, 2020

of plastic shields and impenetrable helmets: an improbable american summer

*new york times* photo of portland street protest, braced and armed with umbrella shields, this summer’s symbol of resistance

mothers reach for what they need. mothers reach for amulets and gear, paraphernalia and patron saints, to protect their children. it’s an impulse as ancient as time. and will go on till the end of time. of that i am certain.

a mother’s wiring drives me, has driven me now for the better part of 28 years, ever since the doctor told me, incontrovertibly, with the swishing heartsounds of the sonogram echoing wall-to-wall across the darkened tiny room — nine months after the heartache of losing our first — that a life stirred within.

ever since, my first and last impulse, above all, is to keep him safe. to shield life and limb, and cranium too, from incoming assault, be it playground invective, asphalt bike path, high-speed hardball, or any of the fully-pictured atrocities that have played — and replayed — in my too-colorful head.

it is dystopian, at least, that this summer i’ve found myself clicking “buy” on a two-pack of plastic shields, the better to keep the red-ringed virus at bay when a boy i love is flying hither and yon, criss-crossing america at altitudes of 35,000 feet. tuesday night, he dons it for the second time, as he flies from JFK to PDX, that’s new york to portland, oregon, about as long a flight as the american continent offers.

and PDX is where the impenetrable helmet comes in. ever since i started reading reports of unidentified federal forces cruising portland’s downtown streets, driving unmarked vehicles, plucking protestors from sidewalks, stuffing them in vans, without word of miranda rights or where or why on earth they were taking them (leaving some to fear to god they were literally being kidnapped by bands of who knows who), i started thinking about helmets. about what my firstborn might put on his not insignificant head to keep it from getting bashed with the wrong end of a police baton, or any other unidentified thrashing implement.

mind you, it’s not that i worry my firstborn will soon be leaping into the late-night protest. it’s that he’ll be walking to and fro to work. to and from a federal courthouse, as it so happens (though not the one at the epicenter of all the melee; his is the other federal courthouse, two blocks north and west). and in this american summer, in a city besieged by federal forces wielding tear gas canisters and “less-than-lethal” (thank god for modifiers here) weapons, a mother starts considering the selling points and perqs of various impenetrable protective head gear.

which is utterly dystopian, improbable in any other summer than the one that is the america of 2020, a year decidedly not clear-focused. and it makes me think of the litany of mothers who through time have had to send off sons and daughters, who’ve awaited letters, answered the ominous knock at the door, as my own grandmother did, when her son was killed in a midnight ambush on iwo jima. it makes me think of the south side chicago mothers who cannot count on the windows of their minivans to shield the incoming bullets, the ones killing toddlers — even babies; a five-month-old shot just last week in old town — strapped in car seats.

there are mothers weeping across america, across this globe, and the tears seem endless, are endless. will the weeping and the wailing ever, ever end? do we stand a chance to finally stanch the sorrow?

mothers shouldn’t have to plot the surest bullet-free path to school. nor which playlot might prove lethal. children shouldn’t have to spend their summers behind closed curtains, in the corner of a room farthest from the picture window, where crossfire could soar in. mothers shouldn’t have to lay awake nights imagining the phone call, calculating how long it would take to race to the ICU bedside. mothers shouldn’t have to hear the click of the coffin closing.

this is no easy summer in america.

short of searching the internet for plastic shields and bash-proof helmets, we’ve got work to do here in the land of the brave and the free.

america is crying. are we listening? are we doing what we must?

and those my friends are the questions, the imperative questions: are we listening? are we doing what we must?

6 Comments

July 3, 2020

summer vacation

even the sound of it, those two easy-does-it words hammocked together: summer + vacation = kick back, fling your shoes across the yard, sink your toes in the sand (or the dew-dazzled grass), take your to-do list and tear it into confetti.

it’s the necessary pause. the shot of pure oxygen to the suffocating soul. the certain truth that, even for a day, we can–and must–call time out. all but scribble the long-forgotten permission slip, giving our weary little selves a break from the unrelenting everyday.

never more than now.

this year, maybe for a day we can shelve the motherlode of worries, revel in the tiniest of wonders: the firefly, the cucumber vine’s improbable curlicue, the invention of the blueberry.

maybe for a day, or a whole string of days, we can make-believe we’ve piled in the station wagon, rolled along the back roads, taken a turn at the windmill or the “raccoon crossing” road sign, listened for the gravel spitting up from our wheels, unpacked at the ramshackle cottage deep in the woods (minus mosquitoes), packed the fridge from the nearest farmer’s market, and unfurled the beach towel or aforementioned hammock (see first sentence above), settling in to the preferred posture of the day.

can you hear your old bones sighing? or whistling along to their happy tune?

sometimes all it takes is the mere whiff of vacation ahead to slow the heart’s staccato, ramp up the oxygen content of the lungs. sometimes the magic is in the imagining. maybe that’s why God gave us doodle pads for brains.

there are a million and one ways to dawdle through a day. to seize emphatically the indolent season. to master the art of doing next to nothing (it’s harder than you’d think). to make the turning of the page, the slicing of the tomato, counting firefly flickers be the most arduous task of your day.

irony of ironies, you might scribble just such a litany onto your to-do list of the day: 1.) plop your bum on the nearest ledge under the sun. 2.) stay put for a good half hour. 3.) tick off three whimsies in which you rarely indulge. 4.) do them. 5.) call it a day.

it is always a fine thing to upholster your indolent day with proper feasting. i find the blueberry–that swollen burst of summer–to be synonymous with a july-fourth fete. think backdrop to stars on betsy ross’s american flag. i’ve used them as inkblots in pancakes, embroidered the top of a summery flag cake, plopped them by handfuls straight into my mouth. but the way i find them most apt for the moment is that wonder of indolence i call blueberry slump*.

and wonder of wonders, here–from the pages of Slowing Time, my first foray into the world of book publishing–is your very own road map to blueberry confection.

From the Summertime Recipe Box…

No-cook summer, the aim. Pluck tomato from the vine. Shake with salt. Consume. Repeat with the sweet pea, the runner bean, the cuke. And who ever met a berry that demanded more than a rinse — if that? Thus, the blueberry slump. A no-frills invention, concocted — lazily, one summer’s afternoon — in the produce aisle. Even its verbs invoke indolence: dump, splash, dash…spoon and lick. With lick, though, comes a sudden surge of gusto.

Blueberry Slump

(As instructed by a friend bumped into by the berry bins; though long forgotten just whom that was, the recipe charms on, vivid as ever…)

Yield: 1 slump

2 pints blueberries dumped in a soufflé dish (fear not, that’s as close as we come to any sort of highfalutin’ cuisine Française around here….)

Splash with 2 to 3 Tbsps. fresh lemon juice

Cinnamon, a dash

In another bowl, mix:

1 cup flour

1 cup sugar

1 stick butter, cut into pea-sized bits

{Baker’s Note: Add a shake of cinnamon, and make it vanilla sugar, if you’re so inspired…(I usually am. All you need do to make your sugar redolent of vanilla bean is to tuck one bean into your sugar canister and forget about it. Whenever you scoop, you’ll be dizzied by high-grade vanilla notes.)}

* Spoon, dump, pour flour-sugar-butter mix atop the berries.

* Bake at 350-degrees Fahrenheit, half an hour.

(Oh, goodness, it bubbles up, the deepest berry midnight blue. Looks like you took a week to think it through and execute. Ha! Summer in a soufflé dish. Sans soufflé….)

* Serve with vanilla ice cream. But of course….

Tiptoe out to where you can watch the stars, I was tempted to add. But then I quickly realized you might choose to gobble this up for breakfast, lunch or a late summer afternoon’s delight. In which case a dappled patch of shade will do….

*my beloved friend paula, who is in fact idling by a lake house this weekend, asked me for this recipe yesterday, so she could carry it along in her beach bag. it reminded me, and both of my boys, that we could not make it through the weekend without a few scoops. so thank you to paula for the tap on the recipe tin.

how will you idle away your indolence?

2 Comments

April 24, 2020

this is the part of the story where some of us hit the proverbial wall…

having now lived 44 days in fear of invisible spiky red-ringed viri that might or might not be lurking on the sides of my milk carton, having grown accustomed to wrapping my face in a variety of shmatas, having mastered the art of bleach spritzing, i think it’s fair to say we all know a thing or two about Life in Pandemic.

the trajectory, i submit, goes something like this: week 1, dizzying nausea at the prospect that we really truly are running low on toilet paper and, for the first time in our lives, we hold little chance of bringing in reinforcements; week 2, full-throttle determination that we will surrender to the new-found wonders of Zoom and the vernal explosions that must be teaching us lessons; week 3, a creeping sense that a calendar can get just as overbooked and exhausting by Zoom as in the Time Before Corona; weeks 4 through 6, a blur. which brings us crashingly to now, the thick of week 7 in which many many of us — for a host of reasons indecipherable and/or clear as the day is long — hit or are soon to hit the proverbial wall.

the signs are these: dinnertime is drowned in tears (note to self: you can omit the salt shaker on the table if the tears are profuse enough). you wake in the night because your left baby toe is throbbing (reason unclear; something to do with knots of nerves wedged between your tootsies, which has something to do with, ahem, aging) and that’s it for the night as a thrashing storm of what-ifs hurl through your noggin, and propel you from bed drenched in a glistening sweat.

all around this week i gathered up evidence to back up this half-baked notion of mine: my best friend in california went to bed the other night worried to death about rising temperatures and the too-real threat of wildfires, awoke to her mattress vibrating under her bum (it was an earthquake, not the latest in west-coast slumber device), and stumbled into the bathroom where she writes that she consoled herself with the somewhat comforting thought that “at least we’ll all die together.” (it might now be obvious why we’ve long been very best friends; we share a disaster-is-looming view of the world.)

she’s not the only one teetering on the pandemic brink. (for quick — and rare, here — current events commentary i might also submit that the present inhabitant of the white house, the one who last night suggested we all guzzle — or inject — lysol as cure for the red-ringed virus, he too might have succumbed to the pressures. but then again…)

even CNN’s media guru, brian stelter, admitted in print that he’d flat out hit the wall, after failing to send out his nightly roundup of all you need to know about news and the news biz.

it can get to be too much: the daily death count, the ever-extending shelter-at-home orders, the shelves that might never again hold toilet paper or lysol (and now that the president is urging ingestion thereof, it might be a public health boon to keep the lysol out of the hands of the american masses).

and, frankly, this is novel to all of us. some days i’m tempted to peek behind the budding leaves of the trees to see if maybe this is a movie set (not too many years ago in this leafy little town they filmed a horror film called “contagion,” and hordes of cute little kids from my then-first grader’s class were cast in roles that had them bleeding to death and being rushed from the schoolhouse on stretchers). maybe if we shake our heads wildly enough, we’ll awake and tumble back into our humdrum life of abundant TP and milk cartons that don’t beg to be run through the lysol bath.

truth is it hit me hard the other day when i found out a beautiful and glorious mom down the block had died, one month after being diagnosed with a cancer. she used to work with me at the tribune. she was one of the brilliant lights on the marketing side of the news biz. she was the mother of three magnificent girls, and she lived and breathed for those girls. they buried her yesterday, after a service held by Zoom.

i can’t shake the sadness of that, can’t stop thinking how the last month of her life — sheltering at home while dying of cancer — must have been unbearably suffocating. or maybe, i pray, there came a clarity — and a calm like my friend in her california bathroom who consoled herself — staring into the razor-sharp truth, holding tight to the few fine things that make it all matter.

some days these are impossible times. some days we can breathe again. some days we weep. and some day, i’m certain, we will once again be able to wash away the tears from the cheeks of the ones we love — from less than six feet away.

i won’t ask if you’ve hit the wall. i will only say that, if so, it’s the truth of the times in the age of pandemic, a subject on which we are now immediate experts.

15 Comments

July 12, 2019

resurrection gardening

i am practicing resurrection. with a trowel and a bag of supercharger root booster. i am digging holes. big holes. unearthing what to you might look like dried brown sticks. but if you look close, really really close, there are bits and shoots — and occasionally tendrils — of green.

i call it resurrection gardening.

i’m hellbent, it seems, on bringing things back to life.

it’s a fine pursuit on a hot summer’s day when the world all around is going to hell in a hand basket. or so it sounds — especially if you listen to the chatter and the vitriol that percolates on air waves all day long, all summer long, all these-last-three-years-long.

as is so often the case in the realm of the garden, it’s become something of an obsession. i dream of half-dead (okay, five-sixths dead) vines i won’t give up on. i dream of digging them out of their sun-forsaken plots and moving them, with surgical-nurse precision and intensive-care-nursery tenderness, around a corner and down the fence line to where their ganglionic roots might take a liking to the new surroundings and do the little wiggle dance that is a root tunneling through earth, sucking up sustenance, rewarding the resurrection gardener with a little whoop-de-doop! (the triumphant yelp that comes, even in a whisper, when knot of green appears where before there was only stick. and dead-looking stick at that.)

i like to think of my little bumper crop of almost-dead things as my lazarus contingent. this week alone, i’ve counted two trees, a bush, and two vines among the not-yet-fallen. after the long hard winter, my garden had taken on a hardstruck look. bushes that once had burst with leaves were now not much besides a collection of barren stick or branch, all jutting this way and that as if to shout, “we’re dying here, and we’d like an assist before we take our last and final exhale.”

i’d ignored their cries long enough. i’d let the summer wind into july before i mustered the chutzpah, the courage, the lopper-power it takes to ply a miracle or two. or to try anyway.

this week, something hit me. overcame me, really. if you tried to find me for long hours on end, you wouldn’t have had much luck. unless you poked around the corners of my semi-acre. then you might have spied a mud-streaked, pewter-haired, shovel-wielding missus, wrenching this muscle or that, grunting on occasion, eventually trotting triumphantly, holding a vine or bush by the hairs (as if a pussycat plucked from too deep a mud puddle). i’d survey the so-called acreage, find a spot of promise, and begin again to dig. i’d sprinkle prestidigitation powders, do a little voodoo dance, and plop that salvaged vine/bush/quasi-tree into its new digs.

by nightfall, i ached all over. and needed nothing short of a scrub bush to un-cake the muck from in between my toes, up my shins, and the same on the upper limbs, the ones that had me muddy clear past my elbows.

but deep down inside i was humming. humming a happy, i-saved-something-today tune. it’s not a song i get to sing very often. almost never. which might have been what made it so so sweet. and such an unstoppable obsession. in a world of things i cannot fix, presidents i can’t make go away, attorneys general who make me want to scream, kids i love hauling off to college sooner than i’d like to think, i am quite tickled by the notion that a sharp-edged shovel, a bag of super-booster, and a little bit of i’ll-show-you is enough to shift the narrative, to re-write the death knell of the climbing hydrangea, the summer snowflake viburnum, and the plain old humdrum hydrangea.

i’ll be keeping watch through the days and weeks (and occasional nights) ahead. i’ll be on the lookout for even the itty-bittiest proof that all is not lost, and one lowly little specimen is on the rise, not the death watch.

if i can leave this planet even one iota greener, lusher, more apt to spread its roots and rise, well then my days caked in mud, my nights caked in ben-gay, will not have been in vain.

what did you resurrect this week?

my most promising — and challenging — resurrectee…

a few weeks back, when i was off at poetry school, the poem i memorized, wendell berry’s “manifesto: the mad farmer liberation front,” ends with the magnificent instruction, “practice resurrection.” which is precisely what i’ve been doing all week. i like to think farmer berry would wink in approval at the notion that i’ve taken up the practice, with shovel.

here, once again, are the lines i memorized, from “manifesto”…(on second thought, i’m letting the whole thing rip here. it’s too glorious to only quote a stanza or two.) celebrate mr. berry’s instruction: get out there and practice resurrection this week. xoxoxox

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

12 Comments

November 9, 2018

baselines of hope

these times, they are shaky.

that’s one way to put it, waking up, catching the first snow fall on my nose as i lope outside with coffee can and birdseed in tow, on a mission to make my first act of the day one of tender caring, even if the caring comes in the form of feather balls who float on the wind, who fill the air with chirps and cheeps and fluttering wings. and then, while that peace-filled breath is sinking deep in my lungs, in my soul, i lope back inside, click this lit-up clamshell that brings me the news — oh, the news — of the world, and just now told me of atrocities in melbourne, australia. australia, a nook and cranny of the world we like to think of as too far from the madness, somehow immune, inoculated. if only there was a vaccine against having our hearts blown to shreds.

every day now, it seems to come. to find its way in. to shake us, rattle us, frazzle our hope and sometimes our faith, deep to our core. australia. thousand oaks. tree of life. kentucky kroger grocery store. pipe bombs across america. (and that’s just the shorthand of horrors for the last 30 days.)

but i stumbled into a lifeline this week. or a little something that might just help.

by the grace of God, i have this crazy wild job that puts me in the front line of books for the soul — i read them, lots of them, and pluck out the ones especially worth passing along — and every once in a while that means i get an early crack at a book that just might save us — or at least give us a place to eddy our hearts for awhile. that’s how it happened that anne lamott’s newest, “almost everything: notes on hope,” came to be following me everywhere i go.

because she’s the master of embedding rocket blasts of wisdom unsuspectingly into the middle or ends of a sentence (p. 45: “help is the sunny side of control”), distilling knock-your-socks truths into words or combinations of words you’d never before known could work in that way (p. 47: life is “like free theater in the park — glorious and tedious; full of wonder and often hard to understand, but right before our very eyes, and capable of rousing us…”), lamott is someone to read with pen and post-its at the ready. you’ll want to scribble in the margins, and up and down the end papers, too. (best not to play this game with a library book, so i’d urge you to buy your own copy so you can play along without racking up ginormous library fines.)

one of the tripwire lines she’d buried deep in one of her sentences was one that — as plotted, i’m certain — stopped me in my tracks and got me to thinking. (the very best books for the soul can take a very long time to read start to finish because they are filled with cul-de-sacs and ridge trails that force you to plop down on the side of the mountain and look out over the valley, far and wide and clearer than you’ve ever before noticed.)

she was writing about how even when life seems to be humming along, “the cosmic banana peel awaits.” in other words, stuff happens. bad stuff. stuff that makes us feel like our heart’s been blown to bits. banana peel stuff. “without this reality,” lamott writes, “there would be no great art or comedy.” and then she goes on to remind us to “savor what works when things are sort of harmonious.” the million and one things that don’t steer us into the ditch, don’t trigger the air bags.

it’s these little-counted miracles — the toe that wasn’t stubbed when you nearly walked into the bathroom door in the night, the pink dot by your eye that didn’t turn into a sty, the vote tally that did fall in your favorite faraway candidate’s favor — these “fleeting, lovely satisfactions” that lamott writes give us “a baseline hope.”

baseline hope.

it was as if she’d twisted the kaleidoscope just enough for me to see from a whole new angle. it was white-on-black instead of the usual black-on-white. take one minute (or be radical and take maybe five, or 10), consider the census of everyday barely-noticed things that do go the way you’d want them to go if you were the one in charge of your plot line. the things you barely pause to realize have saved you from falling into the rat’s nest, the ant hill, the gutter.

the baselines of hope.

i’ll go first: there might be a recount in florida. the furnace is humming, not sputtering. my slippers are fuzzy and warm. my hopefully-college-bound kid got his essays written on time. the computer did not crash as he was submitting said essays to college. the kid i love who’s in law school, he put down the books long enough to go to the symphony last night (a sign he’s learning to live like a human, and not just a caffeine-fueled freak of high-stakes angst).

you catch the drift, i’m certain.

these days the world can and does bombard us. it’s incoming always. and it’s not often pretty. but underpinning our everyday, more often than not, the furnace is working, the gas tank is filled, someone we love remembers to call us.

baselines of hope.

what’s required is the root of all sacred practice: pay attention. pay close, close attention. harvest the joys and the wonders and the narrowly-missed calamities. those fine few things that keep the trap door from ripping right open, catching us, tumbling us down to the cobwebby cellar.

consider the miracle of most of the time….

what constitutes your baseline of hope?

10 Comments

October 5, 2018

home alone — and hearing a cry

it’s just me and the basement crickets here. (i ought to name the whole herd of them since they so noisily, chirpily, send me love songs through the dawn — and the midday — and the late afternoon — and the twilight. deep into the darkness they keep up their chatter.)

the boys i love are faraway. i stayed home because i have a job at the high school, hosting 414 debaters from around the country. feeding each one, breakfast and lunch for the next two days (today we load in provisions). i’d thought i’d write a meditation on being alone. on the luxury of it when you don’t often have it. i know for some it’s a curse; alone bleeds often, bleeds quickly into loneliness. the first syllable — the a of alone — breaks off, and two new ones cling to the end — loneliness — and suddenly the gift of doing as you please, sleeping with windows open and shades up — because you love the light of night, love even more the dawn’s beginning — all those singular quirks, they can become the humdrum hollowed refrain of a life lived alone not wholly by choice. by grief. by happenstance. by necessity.

but i woke up this morning, and the cavernous cry of this nation — of the countless volumes of women putting breath to the screams they once muffled — it’s echoing inside, rising louder and louder. and i know there’s a vote just hours away. and i know that sitting here listening to the roll, hearing the single syllable rise up, yea or nay, one after another, it’s going to feel something like a gut punch. did you hear her? i will ask, over and over and over.

there will come — for some of us anyway — an unshakeable sense of being kicked aside. of “ramming this through,” as the senate majority leader himself so unpoetically put it.

there is, though, a gentle breeze of hope this morning. it comes from sweden, from the nobel committee which during our night (their midday) awarded the peace prize to two who’ve dedicated their lives to a fight against sexual violence. one, nadia murad, is a 25-year-old woman, captured, repeatedly raped and tortured by ISIS; she escaped and, ever since, travels the globe speaking out against the atrocities. her inexhaustible journey has left her exhausted, but she refuses to pause, insisting: “i will go back to my life when women in captivity go back to their lives, when my community has a place, when i see people accountable for their crimes.”

time magazine, in their annual centenary of “most influential people,” included nadia in 2016. eve ensler, the playwright and founder of V-Day, a movement to end violence against women, wrote this for the magazine’s roster:

A witness for war’s victims

Nadia Murad stands in a long, invisible history of fierce, indomitable women who rise from the scorched earth of rape during war to break the odious silence and demand justice and freedom for their sisters. At 19 she lost her home, her country, her culture, her mother to murder; witnessed male members of her family murdered in mass killings; and was kidnapped, sold and endlessly raped by members of ISIS. She now travels the world speaking out on the genocide being inflicted on her Yezidi people and demanding release for the more than 3,000 women still held in bondage.

As Europe closes its borders to terrorized refugees in Greece and the U.S. turns its back on the suffering, Nadia is a beacon of light and truth—a reminder that it was the American-led war in Iraq that laid the path for ISIS, that U.S. arms left behind on the battlefield fell into the hands of ISIS and that the U.S. waited too long to intervene in the mass killing and enslavement of the Yezidi people. At 23, Nadia Murad is risking everything to awaken us. I hope we are listening, because we too are responsible.

time-100-2016-nadia-murad

i leave you with nadia, with the faint waft of hope. i know, come time for the vote, we will all be standing shoulder-to-shoulder, heart-to-heart, promising we will do better for our daughters, our sisters, our sons, and our brothers.

(i do not for a minute want to overlook the second nobel peace prize winner, dr. denis mukwege, 63, a congolese gynecological surgeon, who campaigned relentlessly to shine a spotlight on the plight of congolese women, even after nearly being assassinated a few years ago. working from a bare hospital (often without electricity or enough anesthesia) in the hills of the eastern democratic republic of congo, he has emerged as a champion of the congolese people and a global advocate for gender equality and the elimination of rape in war, traveling to other war-ravaged parts of the world to help create programs for survivors.

“it’s not a women question; it’s a humanity question, and men have to take responsibility to end it,” dr. mukwege once said in an interview. “It’s not an africa problem. in bosnia, syria, liberia, colombia, you have the same thing.”)

may the persistence of justice rise up in all of us today. and tomorrow, and all the tomorrows thereafter. may the fiery determination of nadia and the unrelenting faith of dr. mukwege drive all of us through the fog of despair.

where might you try to carve out space for justice? where might you bring comfort today?

p.s. i’m leaving off a picture up top today, because silence and the sound of a cry are best left unseen….

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pull up a chair

Category: world weary

September 5, 2025

crushed by a word