pull up a chair

September 15, 2023

let us speak of the awesomeness

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of all the majestic moments in the days to come, the days of awe to come, for this is the cusp of the jewish new year –– the hours when we drop to our knees (figuratively, for there’s not a lot of kneeling in the synagogue) in thanks for all creation, for the newbornness of the world, this world we are entrusted to keep, meaning not to possess but to preserve, to tend, to watch over as a shepherd over his lambs –– one of the moments that will stop time for me is when the chanting of the unetanneh tokef (“let us speak of the awesomeness”) begins.

its words are as stirring as they come, deep down to the marrow. and they will stir me so deeply this year.

Unetanneh Tokef (ונתנה תקף) (“Let us speak of the awesomeness”) is a piyyut, or Jewish liturgical poem, woven into the hours of prayer of Rosh Hashanah, the new year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement to follow. it is chanted just before the Kedushah, the prayer in which the angels sing of the holiness of God, and when the ark that holds the Torah, or sacred scroll, is opened.

leonard cohen sung from it. in his glorious, goosebumping “who by fire?”**

it’s a prayer poem in which we stare into the face of our ending, our death, and examine closely the sharp edges of that terrain we so often run from. while it hurls us into attention, a mortal attention that is the base of plenty of theologies (those teachings believe we heighten our game when we’re aware it will end), it doesn’t look only at the last steps, but, too, at the ones we might take as we march there. it’s in the unflinchingness of judaism –– the bracing, no-beating-around-the-bush, straight-on-ness of it –– that so often grabs me by the scruff of the neck and keeps me transfixed.

and certainly here, and in the hours and days ahead, when we will take public inventory of our sins, when we will stand before a body of water and along with those who stand beside us cast our sins (in the form of bread chunks) into the currents or tide. and when, in the silence of our own pews, we will once again ask these mortal questions. it is the second section of the four-part prayer-poem, the litany of not only death but life, that stirs me most profoundly.

here are its words (with emphasis on the lines that emphasize living, not dying):

“On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed – how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die after a long life and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by upheaval and who by plague, who by strangling and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted. But Repentance, Prayer, and Charity mitigate the severity of the Decree.”

one of the prevailing pounding questions of this long hard summer has been my considerable wondering about what lies ahead for me, how many years to love on this world that i love so lavishly. it’s left me breathless, a true foggy night of the soul. and yet, as fall emerges, and the new year begins, so it’s time for me to turn (another command of the days of awe, teshuva, to turn in forgiveness, to repair what we’ve broken) to face the light of the days i won’t –– and can’t –– count.

it’s a soul-scouring exercise, one that was flung upon me the moment i heard “it’s cancer,” and i’ve taken it to heart. spent more hours than anyone knows contemplating how i will live what remains of my portion. if i emerge living more alive than ever before, if i emerge wildly embracing each and every dawn and the day that follows, if i love as i would be loved, if i take to heart every last prompt to be gentle, to be kind, to forgive as i would be forgiven, then my prayers this year, my Unetennah Tokef, will be answered.

this is a question to be answered in your own silence: how will you live the next holy days of your one blessed life?

the whole text, for anyone keen to read, broken into four thematic sections:

fear and trembling:

“Let us now relate the power of this day’s holiness, for it is mighty and frightening. On it Your Kingship will be exalted; Your throne will be firmed with kindness and You will sit upon it in truth. It is true that You alone are the One Who judges, proves, knows, and bears witness; Who writes and seals, Who counts and Who calculates. You will remember all that was forgotten. You will open the Book of Remembrances — it will read itself – and each person’s signature is there. And the great shofar will be sounded and a still, thin voice will be heard. Angels will be frenzied, a trembling and terror will seize them — and they will say, ‘Behold, it is the Day of Judgment, to muster the heavenly host for judgment!’ — for even they are not guiltless in Your eyes in judgment.”

God judges us:

“All mankind will pass before You like a flock of sheep. Like a shepherd pasturing his flock, making sheep pass under his staff, so shall You cause to pass, count, calculate, and consider the soul of all the living; and You shall apportion the destinies of all Your creatures and inscribe their verdict.

“On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed – how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die after a long life and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by upheaval and who by plague, who by strangling and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted. But Repentance, Prayer, and Charity mitigate the severity of the Decree.”

we are helpless:

“For Your Name signifies Your praise: hard to anger and easy to appease, for You do not wish the death of one deserving death, but that he repent from his way and live. Until the day of his death You await him; if he repents You will accept him immediately. It is true that You are their Creator and You know their inclination, for they are flesh and blood. A man’s origin is from dust and his destiny is back to dust, at risk of his life he earns his bread; he is likened to a broken shard, withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shade, a dissipating cloud, a blowing wind, flying dust, and a fleeting dream.”

God is enduring:

“But You are the King, the Living and Enduring God.

There is no set span to Your years and there is no end to the length of Your days. It is impossible to estimate the angelic chariots of Your glory and it is forbidden to pronounce Your Name. Your Name is worthy of You and You are worthy of Your Name, and You have included Your Name in our name.”

bless you all, profoundly.

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**i tried to post a video, a glorious recording of leonard cohen singing “why by fire?” but the video seemed to be getting in the way of publishing this post, so if you’d love a musical blessing, try googling “who by fire?” by leonard cohen. it’s worth a listen. xoxox

6 Comments

September 8, 2023

in which we pause to remember one who would bristle at being called the patron saint of anything. . .

She stretches from Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap to Christine Valters Paintner’s Dreaming of Stones on my bookshelf. Sixteen volumes in all. And that’s just the poetry. Doesn’t count her essays, housed on a whole other shelf. I am talking, of course, of the poet I call my “patron saint of paying attention.” Mary Oliver.

You might also say she’s the poet master of astonishment. She breaks me out in goosebumps and wonder. Line after line after line.

Oh, I’ve heard her poetries dismissed for their “surface simplicity and populist reach.” But when it comes to stirring my soul, I’ve no need for the critics. I side with those who, as was written in her New York Times obituary, find that “her poems, which are built of unadorned language and accessible imagery, have a pedagogical, almost homiletic quality.”

I call them holy.

Give me a writer who can write of the “uncombed morning,” or confess that “sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.” Or cobble together words into a stanza that reads: “All things are inventions of holiness / Some more rascally than others.” Give me that writer and I’ll hitch my starship any last day.

These days, this long hard season, I seek saving grace wherever it falls. I find it in an evening’s sky punctuated by dragonflies drifting and darting in parabola. I find it in any sentence that ends “unlikely distant metastasis.” And I most certainly find it in the poet who reminds me: “So quickly, without a moment’s warning, does the miraculous swerve and point to us, demanding that we be its willing servant.”

Count me willing.

Emily D. taught me to look for and love the slant, the wisdom that slides in on a steep-edged, improbable angle. Mary O does that every time. I am reading of a bluefish being washed at the water’s edge, and suddenly I am remembering to be on the lookout. To find God, the Holy, in all of creation. Or, as Emerson put it: “To attend all the oratorios, the operas, in nature,” in life, in the day upon day.

Mary O is the one who puts her ink to the sacred as it spills across creation’s page. How else to describe the one who, when writing of a lone seal pup found on a desolate beach, muses: “. . . maybe / our breathing together was some kind of heavenly conversation / in God’s delicate and magnifying language, the one / we don’t dare speak out loud, / not yet.”

Pay attention to how she places that very last line. The barbed last hook. The one that sticks in your craw just a little bit longer. Whispers a gossamer faith. Mary O was a theologian of the barest brushstroke. You’d barely know you were shaken, but then you quake through to your deepest marrow.

Mary Oliver’s birthday is September 10. She would have been 88.

And here, in her poem “Messenger,” she describes her life’s work:

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

—by Mary Oliver

Seeing Not Looking

Celtic scholar Esther de Waal considers Thomas Merton’s practice of contemplative photography:

Thomas Merton was of course a writer and a teacher, and a poet, but he was also a photographer, and it is from his photographs that we learn much about how he saw the world, and how he prayed—and the two are of course intimately connected…. He handled a camera as an artist would, and used it as an instrument of delight and perception. It was in the later 1950s that the journalist John Howard Griffin [1920–1980] visited Merton in his hermitage. He had his camera with him and … let [Merton] keep it on extended loan. At first when Merton sent him the negatives, John Howard Griffin was puzzled, for [Merton’s] view was so different from that of most people. Merton photographed whatever crossed his path—a battered fence, a rundown wooden shack, weeds growing between cracks, working gloves thrown down on a stool, a dead root, a broken stone wall. He approached each thing with attention, he never imposed, he allowed each thing to communicate itself to him in its own terms, and he gave it its own voice.

Later on when he was out in the woods with a young friend, Ron Seitz, both with their cameras, Merton reprimanded him severely for the speed with which he approached things. He told him to stop looking and to begin seeing:

Because looking means that you already have something in mind for your eye to find; you’ve set out in search of your desired object and have closed off everything else presenting itself along the way. But seeing is being open and receptive to what comes to the eye…. [1]

He used his camera primarily as a contemplative instrument. He captured the play of light and dark, the ambience, the inner life. But above all he struggled towards an expression of silence through the visual image, so that his photographs show us that ultimately his concern was to communicate the essence of silence.

it’s the month of Elul in the Jewish calendar, a month for accounting of the soul before the high holidays, Rosh Hashanah, the new year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. i’ve been deep in soulful accounting, and bring along this prayer from the blessed Rabbi Nachman, who taught that life should be lived with joy. and centered in prayer.

A Prayer of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810)

Grant me the ability to be alone;
may it be my custom to go outdoors each day
among the trees and grass – among all growing things
and there may I be alone, and enter into prayer,
to talk with the One to whom I belong.
May I express there everything in my heart,
and may all the foliage of the field –
all grasses, trees, and plants –
awake at my coming,
to send the powers of their life into the words of my prayer
so that my prayer and speech are made whole
through the life and spirit of all growing things,
which are made as one by their transcendent Source.
May I then pour out the words of my heart
before your Presence like water, O God,
and lift up my hands to You in worship,
on my behalf, and that of my children!

hummingbird photo (above) by shelia zimmerman, sister of my beloved late friend mary ellen sullivan, may her memory be a blessing, (and it is. every day.)

happy blessed sunday birthday to a personal patron saint of mine, mark burrows.

looks like i was in the mood for capitals this morning, maybe just to prove i know how to find the shift key. hope you don’t mind the tall letters every once in a while. i do understand how it makes a sentence filled with proper nouns a bit easier to read…..

let’s play a bit of book group: what are some of your favorite Mary O lines, or words, or phrases?

p.s.s. i almost forgot: i’m taking The Book of Nature on the road this weekend. sunday afternoon, in fact, when i’ll be at Winnetka’s Book Stall at 2 p.m. for a book talk canceled last spring and now back on the calendar. problem is my little voice has gone missing again, and my vocal cord injections are on the books for tuesday, so it’ll be a bit squawky but the show must go on. it’s also Printers Row LitFest this weekend, so lots of getting pulled in several directions. wherever you are, have a lovely blessed almost-autumn weekend.

6 Comments

September 1, 2023

light lessons

i was slinking into the early-morning light of my garden, when i startled to the sound of a chainsaw. (a chainsaw in morning’s newly-born hours is, by any definition, a startling eruption.) i looked up and there was a man high in the limbs of the woodland grove that hugs the other side of the fence, the fence that now borders my quiet, contemplative, pretend-cloister garden.

i swallowed my yelp, but let out a pipsqueak of question: “cutting down trees?” (my questions are so utterly incisive when chainsaws, at any hour, are involved.)

“only this one that’s in the way,” he replied as a tree as tall and willowy as our chimney came shimmying down. it was “in the way” of the soon-to-be hot tub that will gurgle and whir just the other side of said fence.

i swallowed back tears, and darted inside.

i couldn’t bear to look at the now naked space, where once a gnarly old serviceberry had offered its limbs as occasional nursery and everyday waystation for the sparrows, and robins, and cheery wee chickadees that flock––season by season, hour by hour––to my feeders and fountains and free-for-all baths.

hours later, though, i needed distraction in the form of a hose. so i cranked the faucet and started my rounds.

and that’s when i noticed: the light in that crook of my garden was suddenly dappled. and beautifully so. sunlight falling in splotches. and sprees. sunlight igniting the backsides of leaves. where once there’d been only monochrome of shadow, there now was shimmer and glint and translucence on flat plane of leaf and frill of each fern frond. the patch was a playlot for luminescence as never before. a landscape “tricked out in gilt,” is how annie dillard once wrote of the play of peekaboo light as it darted and dodged.

i almost swore i could hear the wide-mouthed leaves gulping down sunlight, a commodity they’d tasted far too little of over the long many years.

i stood there beholding. letting each molecule sink deep down within.

and i had to admit it was as lovely a light show as i’d seen since the one in the night sky the midnight before, when the great mama blue moon headlined the stage in her most zaftig dimensions.

seems light is my gospel of the week. moonlight leading me home in the night. sunlight alive where it’s not fallen in decades.

this whole holy earth, it seems, is straining to fill in my shadowy cracks with every last drop of all the light it can muster.

and i, like my forget-me-not’s leaves, am guzzling it greedily down.

after dousing myself in this splash of a light bath, this bit of earthly gospel from the center for spirituality in nature landed in my mailbox: more insight on light, the way the trees bend toward the light. botanically, biologically speaking, i mean. it’s the leaves that lead the way. specifically, the cells on the dark side of the leaves elongate and stretch toward the light, seeking photosynthesis, that alchemical wonder that stirs sunlight and water and carbon dioxide and somehow winds up with O2 and sugar, and moves the whole show along. the branches and twigs follow the lead of the leaves. so the tree actually bends, reaches toward light. and the question is asked: what would it mean to turn toward the light with all of our energy and substance and being? is their holy wisdom to drink in here?

it’s something to ponder, all right. so have a listen right here:

sometimes i think the folks in charge must have a check by name, letting them know i’m one of the ones who needs lessons in duplicate or triplicate. so when three times in 24 hours i’m struck by a lightbeam, i get the idea there’s something i’m supposed to be pondering.

what light lessons have struck you lately?

this beautiful poem, on how the world is saturated in prayer — voluntary and involuntary, spoken and sung, resounding and silent — is one i bumped into this week. it’s by carol ann duffy, one of the UK’s best-known poets, the first woman, and first openly LGBTQ+ person, to become poet laureate of the UK. it’s a poem with a bit of vernacular that might benefit from a few notes. so these, from my friends at SALT Project, a not-for-profit production company dedicated to visual storytelling and to my mind a humming hive of creativity:

(1) “Minims” are half-notes written on a page of musical notation.

(2) BBC Radio has long broadcast the “Shipping Forecast” for the various seas around the British Isles, waters divided into 31 sea areas, including Rockall, Malin, Dogger, and Finisterre. These regular broadcasts, especially the ones late at night, are for many Britons a deeply familiar touchstone: the announcer’s voice methodically reciting the sea areas all around the islands, one by one, forecasting the weather.

(3) And finally, “Finisterre” (pronounced “FIN-iss-tair,” rhymes with “BIN-kiss-fair”) literally means “end of the world”; the sea area’s name was recently changed to “FitztRoy,” but many Britons (such as the poet Duffy herself) grew up hearing the older name “Finisterre” repeatedly intoned on BBC Radio…

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer —
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Carol Ann Duffy

p.s. lots of chair birthdays in the days past: sharon b, jcv, my dear neighbor sarah who keeps us in sweets. and in the days ahead, my big brother john. happy blessed days to each and every one of you, and anyone else i might have happened to miss…

14 Comments

August 25, 2023

bee season

when you happen to tiptoe outside into the dewy sop of dawn, just after the light breaks through, you might hear a noise, at that liminal hour when noise is one thing there’s not. not much of, anyway.

i was standing there with my mug and my prayers, when all of a sudden i heard it. the sound of a mosquito buzzing your ear, only amplitudes louder. it’s not as loud as the nighttime’s cicada, nowhere near it. it’s the buzzsaw of dawn, when the bees are up early and nose-deep in work.

i followed a pair, fat, fuzzy, all full of themselves. full of unctuous beads of gold-dazzled pollen. looked like they’d rolled in a can of it. which they more or less did, dive bombing into the gold-dusted pincushions that rise from the swirl of anemone petals.

because i tend to read nature in a scriptural way, meaning i stand there in the face of a question, connecting the dots, unpuzzling the parable, i wondered what lesson i might extract from the bee, while the bee was drowsily, drunkenly, extracting its pollen-y porridge.

what i came up with was unrelenting. unrelenting as in the bee, morning after morning, rises up from the hive, zigzags out the door, and plows ahead with his one holy task: he gathers up gold dust, the baseline of honey. it’s the task he was born to, a task he can’t shirk. a task he dives into with unrelenting enthusiasms.

i stood there for a while marveling at all there is in the tableau of dawn. the breeze already stirring. the moon now off the clock, back under the covers. or maybe just hiding back behind clouds. one or two birds were up and starting to chirp. but centerstage, in my attentions at least, was that fine pair of harvesting bees.

i thought about the perfect harmony of this early hour. how all of creation plays its own part.

i thought about my own holy task and not being daunted. i don’t really know yet what exactly i’m up against — none of us do. but, i took a note from the bees: head down, nose first, gather up gold dust wherever you can.

be unrelenting. don’t be distracted. or daunted. even on days when it’s harder than hard: nuzzle your way into the gold dust, suck up what you can.

it’s the reason you’re here on this holy earth.

maybe the bee understands: his days in the hive, they’re numbered. just like yours and like mine. so he gets down to business. gathering all that he can.

i let that sink in, while i kept up my watch, mesmerized by the bee who would not be dissuaded, distracted, or daunted.

bee season brings lessons. but you need to perk up your ears.

among the gold-dusted pollens i gathered this week was one heavenly spoken-word poet, podcaster, and author: amena brown. “a breathtaking blend of poet, prophet and pioneer,” one reviewer wrote. “her life and words will bless your soul.” no less than richard rohr, the modern-day mystic, and his center for contemplation and action pointed me in her direction. and what a direction it is. have a listen:

amena brown: “She Said How Do You Know When You’re Hearing From God”

i ran out and bought the book from which it came, so knocked off my socks by it was i. and i was only going to share the first verse. or two. but i can’t bear to leave out a one. it’s a bit long. and worth every drop. thank you, amena, for sharing your wonder…

She said, “How do you know when you are hearing from God?”
I didn’t know how to explain
It is to explain the butter grit of
cornbread to a mouth that just
discovered it has a tongue
The sound of jazz to ears that only ever
thought they’d be lobes of flesh
The sight of sunsets to blinded eyes
that in an instant can see
To fail at the ability to give words to
how the scent of baked bread can
make the mind recall a memory
Every detail
Of a house, a room, a kitchen, a
conversation
Like explaining to a newborn baby this
is what it feels like to be held
My words never felt so small, so
useless, so incapable

I wanted to say
Put your hand in the middle of your chest
Feel the rhythm there
I wanted to say you will find the holy
text in so many places
On crinkly pages of scripture
In dusty hymnals
In the creases of a grandmother’s smile
The way she clasps her hands
The way she prays familiar, with
reverence as if to a dignitary and friend
The way she sings a simple song from
her spirit and porches turn to cathedrals

I learned from my great-grandmother
how to pray
How to talk to God
How to listen
Watching her and the other silver-
haired church mothers gather in her
living room
Worn wrinkled hands on top of leather
bibles well traveled

They prayed living room prayers
because you don’t have to be inside
the four walls of a church to cry out to
the God who made you
Because no matter where you sing or
scream or whisper God’s ears can
hear you

And despite what the laws say or what
our human flaws say
God’s ears don’t play favourites
God’s ears don’t assess bank accounts
or social status before they attune
themselves to the story your tears or
your fears are telling

God’s ears are here for the babies
For the immigrant, for the refugee
For the depressed, for the lonely
For the dreamers
The widow, the orphan
The oppressed and the helpless
Those about to make a mess or caught
in the middle of cleaning one up
Dirt don’t scare God’s ears
God is a gardener
God knows things can’t grow without
sun, rain and soil

I want to tell her to hear God
You have to be willing to experience
what’s holy in places many people
don’t deem to be sacred
That sometimes God sits next to you
on a barstool
Spilling truth to you like too many beers
That God knows very well the dance
we’ll do
When we love ourselves so little that
just about anyone will do

That God cares about the moments we
find ourselves
On the edge of a cliff
On the edge of sanity
On the edge of society
Even when we have less than an inch
left of the thread that’s been holding
us together

I want to tell her God is always waiting
Lingering after the doors close
And the phone doesn’t ring
And we are finally alone
God is always saying
I love you
I am here
Don’t go, stay
Please

I try to explain how God is pleading with us
To trust
To love
To listen
That God’s voice is melody and bass
lines and whisper and thunder and
grace

Sometimes when I pray, I think of her
How the voice of God was lingering in
her very question
How so many of us just like her
Just like me
Just like you
Are still searching
Still questioning, still doubting
I know I don’t have all the answers
I know I never will
That sometimes the best thing we can
do is put our hands in the middle of
our chest
Feel the rhythm there
Turn down the noise in our minds, in
our lives
And whisper,
God
Whatever you want to say
I’m here
I’m listening

– Amena Brown

and one last wonder, sent my way this week, from rebecca solnit’s 2004 Hope in the Dark, her counterpoint to a world in despair, an exploration of hope as “an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable.”.

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal…

To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
Rebecca Solnit

finally, finally, but maybe sweetest for last: 32 years ago i married the love of my life. my tall sequoia of a sweet and steady soul. he has been my ballast all these holy blessed years, and never more than now, so one big giant i love you from me.

how were you unrelenting this week? and did you gather up gold dust?

20 Comments

August 18, 2023

they call it grounding for a reason . . .

mistletoe (now studied for its tumor-shrinking capacities) fights “convulsion fits, the apoplexy, palsy, and vertigo.” (elizabeth blackwell, 1737)

there’ve been days of late when i feel dizzy, dizzy with a lightheadedness that comes from being afraid, from not knowing, from wondering if i’m standing on a very thin edge, and worrying about what might swallow me.

dizzy from trying to figure things out on my own, because doctors don’t always tell you all you need to know. so you piece it together the smartest ways you know.

on those dizzying days, the days that come because it seems my cancer is more complicated than i was first told, i all but plant myself –– ground myself –– in this holy earth. i listen for the cardinal’s aubade at the hour of first light, as the inky molecules of night dissolve into the tissue-paper pink of dawn. i pluck flowers with whimsy and abandon, and tuck them willy-nilly into wee tiny bottles that line my sink and my windowsill, and make me dizzy with short breaths of joy. i stare into the depths of the starry night. i all but beg all the heavens and earth to enfold me.

if creation is holy, and i believe it is, if holy God is the spark that animates the whisperings of the cottonwood’s quaking and the duet of the butterfly couplet, and i believe that God is, then this holy earth is here for more than just astonishment and wonder.

this holy earth is here for healing.

for healing what’s broken inside. deep inside. and broken in ways where you barely recognize the pieces, and can’t quite find the way to piece them together.

holy earth has offered its healing since the beginning. the very beginning.

sometimes, it’s straight-up medicinal. the foxglove, a magnificent stalk dangling with deep-throated bells, is the font for digitalis, the cure for a galloping heart. coneflower is where we pluck echinacea, the compound that chases away a cold. even morphine, the pain killer to which i’m allergic, comes to us from the fields of poppies that sway in the mountains of turkey and burma. and it was madagascar periwinkle, described as a “carefree annual,” that gave its leaves to heal the kids with leukemia i cared for so long ago. (how gobsmacking miraculous is each of these earth-given cures?)

sometimes, it heals in ways that infuse without compound or molecule. sometimes, pharmacology is not in the equation. but the healing is as certain, as deep, as true, as that from any pill or tonic i’ve ever swallowed or slurped from a spoon.

i was drawn back to the groundedness that comes from this earth, to the veritable apothecary of cures upon which we dwell –– both the medicinal and the ethereal (the ones that most often infuse me) –– when i stumbled upon a poem-slash-essay in orion magazine the other day. it was titled “11 interventions in the 10 days of your dying,” and, one by one, it ticks through the litany of earth’s holy graces that saved its writer as she watched her husband die. it ends in this coda:

XI.
Katydids

I have kissed you goodbye, made the calls, packed our things. I step out into a hot summer midnight to the paeans of katydids ringing the trees. The only conceivable response is to set down our bags and bow.
trebbe johnson

i read that its author, a blessed woman named trebbe johnson, is a writer, wilderness leader, and founder of a global community that goes by the name “radical joy for hard times,” a community that describes itself as “devoted to finding and making beauty in wounded places.” sign me up, say i!

because poking around is my default mode, i poked around long enough to peek into trebbe’s newest book, fierce consciousness: surviving the sorrows of earth and self, a book i’m ordering up from my friends at the library. here’s one paragraph that just might pull me out of the cold, dark well where i’ve been splashing about:

so joy is what i’m seizing. joy with its amazing, even if only momentary, loft. startling joy. joy that comes up and grabs you at the heart, and taps on your chest long enough for you to notice. joy is the thing that carries us forward when our feet might feel stuck in the muck.

joy comes in so many colors, and sounds, and serendipities. joy comes when someone breaks into a particular smile, and zings straight to your heart. joy comes when i sit here typing (another source of deep grounding i’ve noticed) and a word or three pop out in a particular order, one i’d not realized would happen, nor even imagined.

joy, to me, is when an old friend i love as dearly as life calls me out of the blue, and out of the decades. just after i’ve walked in the door from a harrowing too many hours in the ultrasound chamber. joy is the sound of his voice when he tells me something he was reading felt like “a theological poem from the heart of God.” joy is remembering how deeply i loved him, my dear friend the priest who’s as joy-filled and funny and holy as just about anyone i’ve ever known.

and joy, nearly every day, is what pours from the throat of the cardinal, and the wing of the butterfly whirling. and the way the sunlight darts and illuminates.

and joy, strung like beads on a string, just might save us. no matter the darkness.

what radical joy is saving you these summery days?

p.s. i should probably listen to the old roman, seneca, who has this to say about groundless fears:

“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

and i should probably pay heed to his follow-up advice:

“What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.

“Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.”

and here’s his kicker, quoting epicurus, an old greek philosopher:

“The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.”

we should heed the ancients, is the moral here…

p.s.s. dearest chairs, i want to be sure you know that there is no need to worry about me. i am finding my way, and have chosen to be truly honest with you in the wake of my medical mystery tour (though sparing any medical details, as this is not the place for that). i don’t intend to write too often on the subject, but when it interlaces with whatever leaps out from my emotional landscape for a chosen pondering, i won’t skirt around it, and i will always write true. so when i write of being afraid, it’s because that is how this is, this thing that has boggled me and thrown me into territory i never would choose to enter. there are days that leave me gasping for breath and hope. and there are days where i can be utterly swept into joy upon joy. mostly, it’s just that this is all new, and uncharted. and i didn’t see it coming. i have always taken life and its emotional obstacles head-on. my knees might buckle, but my spine stays strong. and the only way i know is the truth way. we are all humans who find ourselves afraid. and i’m not afraid to say so. because in our vulnerabilities, we discover our strengths. especially when there are glorious hands to hold all along the way….

26 Comments

August 11, 2023

praise song for black-eyed susan

should you poke through the lore-and-legend files of the black-eyed susan, that luminescent exclamation of the august meadow, you’d find it’s long been treasured for its curative charms. the keetoowah peoples (formerly known by the name cherokee, which translated to “people who speak a different language,” which begs the question who’s the different one?) squeezed juice from the roots to cure an earache. a tea made from dried leaves served as a mild diuretic; in other words, it made the bloat go away. and the native peoples of my neck of the woods, the neshnabék (formerly known as the potawatomi) chased away a cold with the ooze they squeezed from black-eyed susan roots. the anishinaabe (a name that means “the good humans”) used it as a poultice against snake bites or open wounds.

i’d like to amend the apothecary: rudbeckia hirta, it turns out, is the perfect balm for rinsing away whatever hurts you deep inside. and i mean the sort of hurt that won’t show up on x-ray, nor splotch a purply bruise on flank or limb or bum. in other words, the black-eyed susan just might be the original pick-me-upper. especially when those nodding heads embroider the banks of a ripple-less pond, especially when their cheery saffron heads stick their necks out as far as the eye can see.

i stumbled onto such a swath this week, after days and days of poring over medical journals that must have been quick-sinking me into summer’s gloom. i’d not known quite how much i needed a spoonful of black-eyed whimsy till it unfurled before me, and far, far beyond me. but once i crouched down low, once i spied the bumbly bees doing their doh-si-doh and la-dee-da, poking their probisci into pollen pouch upon pollen pouch, i found myself entranced. and might have plopped myself permanently amid said swath, except for the fact that chicago’s finest would have given me a chase come the closing hour of the grand old park.

i can’t quite put my finger on whether it’s the hoop skirt of golden petals or the way the fuzzy black-eyed dome periscopes up the middle, or the way the flock of them insistently interrupt the summer fade to jolt us back to joy, but there is a certain je ne sait-something that stands tall and wafts my way, and ever makes me break into a jolly when i come upon a black-eyed susie.

maybe the other day it was the unendingness of it all, the exuberance of earth, rising up and rolling out the golden carpet, one french-knotted with those black-eyed buttons. it was as if the earth was daring me to laugh, to set aside my worries and my dread, to roll with what it offered: it offered stubborn testament to holy hope. it all but rubbed joy in my face, plucked the weight right off my soul, shouted in its earthly way: ”be not afraid; this here’s a world where skies turn pink at dawn, and posies rise in paint-box colors.”

the black-eyed susans got it done. and thus i poked around, to see what else i just might learn while traipsing by their beds.

with one of the more curious common names among the prairie inhabitants, i exercised my curiosities and found out that the name traces back to an old english ballad, one penned near the dawn of the eighteenth century (in 1720, to be precise) by a fellow named john gay. it tells the sad, sad tale of a lovelorn lass (aka susan) who leaps aboard a fleet of moored ships soon to set sail for battle. she’s desperate to find her lover (a sweet fellow by the name of wiliam, the tale so goes) before he shoves off to sea. with tears spilling from her dark, dark eyes (here we find the black-ey’d bit), she cries out his name, he hears her from high above the ship’s yardarms, and, don’t you know, he scrambles down to bid his susan one last farewell. and so it goes in “sweet william’s farewell to black-eyed susan,” the first stanza of which rolls out like this:

All in the Downs the fleet was moor’d,
The streamers waving in the wind,
When black-ey’d Susan came on board:
Oh! where shall I my true love find?
Tell me, ye jovial Sailors, tell me true,
If my sweet William sails among your crew!

never mind that love language of the seventeen hundreds all but drips with sticky treacle.

and here’s a gardener’s tip to go with it (cuz we never stop pouring it on here at the chair!): it’s said that if you seed wild Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus) with Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), the pair will bloom at precisely the exact the same time. forever twinned, the star-crossed, black-eyed lovers.

so goes the etiology of the common name, and now for a bit about the latinate, the rudbeckia hirta, so named by the great father of taxonomy, carl linnaeus, who tidily ordered the world of nature, dividing and naming every which thing according to genus and species.

as these things go, there’s always a backstory. and it’s all in who you know. in this case, before hitting it big in the taxonomy department (binomial nomenclature, his claim to fame), it seems mr. linnaeus needed a little side job. a professor at uppsala university, a school founded in sweden in 1477, a professor by the name of olof rudbeck, was in need of a tutor for his three children, and, in 1730, he hired linnaeus to do the job. linnaeus returned the kindness years later when he conferred immortality on his boss, the good prof, by pinning his name to the black-eyed beauty. as andrea wulf explains in The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession: “For his old teacher Olof Rudbeck, Linnaeus chose the popular Rudbeckia. The tall flower reflected Rudbeck’s stature, Linnaeus explained, and the ray-like petals bore ‘witness that you shone among savants like the sun among stars.’”

its second name, hirta, is latin for “rough and hairy,” which if you rub your nose up against the black-eyed dome is pretty much what you’ll bump into.

but from here on in, i’m going to think of the rudbeckia hirta as the bloom that makes the hurt go ‘way…

…and there’s pretty black-eyed Susan,

perfect as the night is blue…
George Elliott Clarke, from “King Bee Blues”

where’d you find your joy this week?

should you need your own dose of rudbeckia hirta, i beg you waste no time and point yourself in the direction of the brilliantly restored north pond in chicago’s lincoln park. it’s breathtaking in the extreme. and will cure whatever ails you.

p.s.s. the perseid meteor showers — summertime’s biggest celestial splash — hit the skies this weekend. without a full moon this year, the good folk at NASA promise A+ viewing. just find yourself a cozy spot to plop (i’d vote for black-eyed susan proximities), align your spine with the curve of earth and look straight up. they’ll be hard to miss.

8 Comments

August 4, 2023

early morning

Forest in the Morning Light, 1855 (Oil on Canvas), by Asher Brown Durand

early morning is when the veil is thinnest, my soul most porous. i sometimes imagine the air i breathe then, the soft air, the air a recipe of oxygen and dew, is dispatched directly from the heavens. it’s why i slide out from under the bedsheet, to begin the percolating thoughts that rise while the coffee brews. i step outside, and there, as always, is my old friend ancient moon. all but winks at me, that moon, lets me know i’m not alone. there’s watchkeeping at work. from up where angels roam.

my thoughts feel less alone then. in bed they sometimes wrestle me, won’t let me sleep. but once i’m upright, once there’s mug in hand, and moon above, they settle down, fall in some semblance of a line. i find sense then. i feel infused then. infused in a Godly way. as if my gliding out of bed when the clock strikes five gives me just a wee little jump on what God might want me to consider. as if that might be the hour when the clarity comes.

this morning was one of those mornings, after a long, long week that took every ounce of courage my little self contained. i flew hundreds of miles away to talk to a doctor who knows a thing or two about the cancer in my lung. i walked into a shiny tower with expanse of glass, where as much light could shine in as the heavens had to spare. the place is infused with light, as if to tip the balance of all the darkness you can feel in every hallway, in every bent over human body, bodies leaning on canes, on walkers, in wheelchairs, on whomever walks beside them. where every body seemed to have an extra limb in the form of plastic tubes and tiny pumps, all attached, sometimes trailing, peeking out from under pant legs or flapping-open gowns, or tethered to misbehaving poles. all chasing out the demon cells that know not when to stop.

to sit in those waiting rooms is to witness human compassion at its most majestic. hands rubbing shoulders, rubbing backs. hands trying to knead the ache out of someone else’s flesh and bone. foreheads pressed against foreheads. words whispered. holy words. the most emphatic prayers i might ever have witnessed from across a room.

the prayers prayed there are the ones that gush up from untapped places in the soul. those places not known till life excavates to its deepest depths. till prognoses are spelled out, and sentences put forth — and i don’t mean the sentences with verb and nouns.

my visit was not so dire, but it was a visit that’s left me plenty to sift through, as i work hard — so hard — at absorbing all that’s been, and deciding how to seize my holy, holy days.

so i’m up early. where me and God are most likely to bump into each other. where sometimes when i plant my bum on the stoop just beyond the kitchen door, i almost feel another shoulder rubbing up against mine.

little gems just kept floating my way this week, in that way that sometimes blessings know to come. r.s. thomas, an anglican priest poet who kept watch on the rocky edge of wales, is one of my most favorite holy poets. i discovered him when i went to poetry school at yale divinity school a few blessed summers back. reading him always carries me back to the sunlit seminar room where i first met him.

THE BRIGHT FIELD

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
— R. S. Thomas

this one came from a gentle tender soul who breathes poetry. i thought as i started to read it, that she had written it, but then i glanced down and saw “david whyte,” another in my pantheon of saintly poets, the ones who capture threads of my very own heart and weave them into stanzas…

AT HOME

At home amidst
the bees
wandering
the garden
in the summer
light
the sky
a broad roof
for the house
of contentment
where I wish
to
live forever
in the eternity
of my own
fleeting
and momentary
happiness.

I walk toward
the kitchen
door as if walking
toward the
door of a recognized
heaven

and see the
simplicity
of shelves and
the blue dishes
and the
vapouring
steam rising
from the kettle
that called me in.

Not just this
aromatic cup
from which to drink
but the flavour
of a life made whole
and lovely
through the
imagination
seeking its way.

Not just this
house around me
but the arms
of a fierce
but healing world.

Not just this line
I write
but the
innocence
of an earned
forgiveness
flowing again
through hands
made new with
writing.

And a man
with no company
but his house,
his garden,
and his own
well peopled solitude,

entering
the silences
and chambers
of the heart
to start again.

-from The House of Belonging
David Whyte

this one, from pablo neruda, needs no introduction. simply behold it.

Night,
night of mine,
night of the entire world,
you have something inside you, round
like a child
about to be born, like
a bursting
seed,
it is the miracle,
it is the day.
You are more beautiful
because with your darker blood
you feed the poppy being born,
because you work with eyes closed
so eyes can open,
so water can sing,
so our lives
might resuscitate.

—Ode to Night by Pablo Neruda (translated by Ilan Stavans)

and here, if you’ve read all the way down to here, is one last succulence. again, sent by a friend, a blessed friend, of this old chair.

Life is amazing. And then it’s awful. And then it’s amazing again. And in between the amazing and awful it’s ordinary and mundane and routine. Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary. That’s just living heartbreaking, soul-healing, amazing, awful, ordinary life. And it’s breathtakingly beautiful.
L.R. Knost

what time of day is thinnest for you? and did any gems flutter from the heavens for you this week?

i swear there must be more babies born in august than any other month (it’s not the case; i’ve checked) and some of my favorites are in the parade: my beloved brother david (today); my beloved blair (sunday, in which he will find himself among those competing in the triathlon world’s big national swim, bike, run along milwaukee’s lakefront); and my teddy (who is camping under the stars out in the rocky mountains for the next two weeks, and whose big day is tuesday). happy birthday to each of you whom i love with every chamber of my heart and then some! xoxoxox

17 Comments

July 28, 2023

writing school

we call it “the kitchen table writing school,” and every once in a while someone i love, someone who’s eager to put words to a page with more oomph or less ouch, wanders over and we plunk our bums down on the chairs, pull out pads of paper and pens, and have at it. might be muscular verbs, the lesson of the day. might be fluid lines of poetry. might be all about one-of-a-kind telling details, not a profligate slop of as many descriptives as can fit in a breath, but that one singular––and immediate––detail that telescopes layers of meaning and knowing into a single keen––and immediate––observation. (while i was poking around for a good example, i came across this, and can’t say it one iota better, so here’s this from the gotham writers’ workshop):

A telling detail does what it says: it tells the essence of what it’s describing. Telling details are the scotch tape holding up Susie’s hemline in the back, the tiny piece of ice that never seemed to melt in the bottom of Mom’s martini, the street sign on the corner that still says, to this day, SCHOOL CROSSING, though the school is long gone. A telling detail can speak volumes in a very short amount of time. They help you achieve a golden mean–enough description to paint the picture, but not so much as to weigh it down.
Chris Lombardi

so whilst i’m puttering about in my so-called quiet summery time, i gathered up a few fine thoughts on the subject of writing, a thread that draws together many of us here at the old maple table. so pull out your pens––or your pencils––and follow along…

first up, this delicious bit from rainer maria rilke, from his Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge:

“For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one has long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars — and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.”

so luscious is this instruction, i might scribble it onto a square of paper, fold it, and tuck it into my pocket, to pull out and read at regular intervals.

and, in keeping with pens and pencils, naomi shihab nye, one of my favorite poets, plays right along…

ALWAYS BRING A PENCIL
by Naomi Shihab Nye

There will not be a test.
It does not have to be
a Number 2 pencil.

But there will be certain things —
the quiet flush of waves,
ripe scent of fish,
smooth ripple of the wind’s second name —
that prefer to be written about
in pencil.

It gives them more room
to move around.

no less than the great david bowie has this to say about writing:

“Never play to the gallery… Always remember that the reason that you initially started working is that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society. I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations — they generally produce their worst work when they do that.

“…If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

go a little bit out of your depth…maybe in writing, and in this thing called living…

and finally there’s nick cave who is something of a mystic, a mystic who happens to be in the business of making music, and lifting words from the soul and onto the page…

“There is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things…. and recognise the evident value in doing that, and summon the courage it requires to not always shrink back into the known mind.

“…The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful.”

on the lookout for the luminous as i step into this day, one that began with the rumbling of distant thunder and broke into a light show of celestial proportion, luring me leapingly from under my bedsheets…

and which of these thoughts spark deeper rumblings in you? might it be bowie’s “go a little bit out of your depth? or nick cave’s remaining alert to “the luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday”? or is there a telling detail you stumbled upon this week that won’t let you go? do tell…

(a few gremlins seem to have put my font through the wash, and shrunk it, and while i try to bring it back to size, apologies for the wee wee words here…)

8 Comments

July 21, 2023

peachy

this crate of delectable, a fireworks of flavor that bursts on our tongues, plopped onto the front stoop not long ago (courtesy of a long-distance angel/saint/and holy mensch), and after parceling into brown paper sacks for a few of our favorite neighbors, the whole block has unanimously declared them the most delicious peaches that ever there were. in honor of their magical appearance out of the summer fog, a few morsels from the “peach” file.

first up, this perfection of a poem from a poet i only recently discovered, a chicago poet in fact, a longtime warehouse worker who penned beauties once he clocked off the job, and who before that made jewelry from soda bottle tops and wound up in the pages of vogue. his name is li-young lee, born in indonesia to chinese parents, and settled in chicago in 1964. he’s now described as a world-renowned poet, one who’s won the lannan literary award, a paterson poetry prize, and an american book award, among many. after reading “from blossoms,” i ran to the library and scarfed up all his books from the shelf. and then i read a few interviews. and now i sit and inhale his poetries as if to fill my lungs with the numinous.

his is an abiding belief that all the cosmos is imbued with a spark of the sacred, an idea i’ve spent a long time believing.

From Blossoms

BY LI-YOUNG LEE

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

in a conversation at a literary fest a few years ago, one i found in the los angeles review of books, lee says this, and you’ll see why i’m swooning:

If the person is a vessel then what would poetry be?

The mind of God. I think poetry is the mind of God. All the great poems that I love seem to me to all have that little ingredient. You feel like you’re in the presence of the mind of God. You can’t even account for the level of wisdom in certain poems. Take Rilke, I mean, you can’t just live and come to the conclusions he came to. I think his mission was to learn to get out of the way so that something bigger could speak through him.

Emily Dickinson, my God, she’s full of the mind of God. You can just feel God shining through those poems, darkly. So it was her, but it wasn’t. It’s unaccountable. In other words, if you wanted to be Emily Dickinson you couldn’t just have been born on the East coast, done the things she did. That wouldn’t guarantee that you could write anything. There’s something unaccountable that happened to her. And it’s that unaccountable thing that I love.

elsewhere lee has said that he considers every poem to be “a descendent of God.” and when asked about flawed poems by poets and writers, he explained: “There are great poems that have flaws. There are failures of perception, failures of understanding, but those flaws become a part of the poem’s integrity, so I still feel that those poems are descendants of God. But if a poem isn’t even good enough to be a poem, I don’t think it’s descended from God: [If] there is no “I” [as in Martin Buber’s I and Thou], there is no God. The ‘Me’ talking about ‘Me’—that’s not enough.”

and in a lineup of descendants of God, surely here’s a preacher: wendell berry, kentucky farmer, field plower, poet. it doesn’t take long for some to pack an almighty wallop; here’s wendell in a single stanza:

A Spiritual Journey

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.

~ Wendell Berry ~
(Collected Poems)

and here’s one that especially melted me, because it came to me from the budding philosopher in this house. a recent college grad who has an eye for these things, and whose curiosities in this department are as delicious to me as the juiciest peach that ever there was….

Confucius, the renowned Chinese philosopher, once said, “A seed grows with no sound, but a tree falls with a tremendous noise. Destruction has noise, but creation is quiet. This is the power of silence. Grow silently.”

and finally, in honor of said budding philosopher and the juiciest peaches that ever there were, here is a long-ago-concocted rendition of peach-blueberry bread pudding, though truly the only way to eat these (or any plucked-straight-from-the-tree) peaches is bent over the sink, ready to swipe the dribble as it runs down your chin and wherever else it tries to escape.

teddy’s bread pudding, the peachy summer edition*

3 cups milk (or cream)
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter, more for greasing pan
1-1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 cup sugar, plus 1 tablespoon
Pinch salt
½ loaf sweet egg bread like challah or brioche, torn into 2-inch cubes (about 5 to 6 cups)
3 eggs, beaten
3 peaches, sliced
3 to 4 tablespoons brown sugar
1 cup blueberries

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Over low heat in a small saucepan, warm milk, butter, 1/2-cup sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, and salt. Continue cooking just until butter melts. Meanwhile, butter a 4-to-6-cup baking dish and tear the bread into bite-sized bits. Place the bread in baking dish.
Slice peaches into separate medium-sized mixing bowl; stir in brown sugar. Set aside (wherein magic ensues, and syrup emerges). Rinse blueberries, and allow to drain.
Once peaches are bathing in their brown-sugary juices (anywhere from five to 10 to even 15 minutes should do it), dump fruits atop bread chunks. Stir gently.
Pour hot milk over bread, peaches, and blueberries. Let it sit for a few minutes, poking down the occasional chunk of bread that rises to the top. Beat the eggs briefly, and stir them into bread and fruit mixture. Mix together remaining cinnamon and sugar, and sprinkle over the top. Set the baking dish in a larger baking pan, and pour hot water into the pan, to within about an inch of the top of the baking dish, effectively making a bath for your bake.
Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until custard is set but still a little wobbly and edges of bread have browned. Serve warm or at room temperature.

inhale the endless comfort vapors….

*thank you, mark bittman, for your endless guidance and your recipe on much-splattered page 662.

what was peachy ’bout your week?

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July 14, 2023

a little bit of wonder. . .

since this is my time of quiet interlude, and my brain is on inhale, i come tiptoeing with just a couple morsels worth leaving on the table, as if notes scribbled in the night to greet you when the morning comes. these are deliciousnesses i plucked during the week, one from hermann hesse on wonder, and a prayer poem from john o’donohue looking at light from every angle….oh, and because it was beloved e.b. white’s birthday this week, a little bit from the obit he once wrote for the new yorker when his dog daisy met her demise on a new york city sidewalk when a taxi cab jumped the curb…

hermann hesse, the great german-swiss poet, novelist, and painter, whom some consider “the eternal patron saint of wonder,” on that very subject itself…

“Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene, vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs, contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in, enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies, that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious, blind world of human need, and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him, other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.

. . . “Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.”

“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.”
Hermann Hesse

and from the late great irish poet john o’donohue…

For Light

Light cannot see inside things.
That is what the dark is for:
Minding the interior,
Nurturing the draw of growth
Through places where death
In its own way turns into life.

In the glare of neon times,
Let our eyes not be worn
By surfaces that shine
With hunger made attractive.

That our thoughts may be true light,
Finding their way into words
Which have the weight of shadow
To hold the layers of truth.

That we never place our trust
In minds claimed by empty light,
Where one-sided certainties
Are driven by false desire.

When we look into the heart,
May our eyes have the kindness
And reverence of candlelight.

That the searching of our minds
Be equal to the oblique
Crevices and corners where
The mystery continues to dwell,
Glimmering in fugitive light.

When we are confined inside
The dark house of suffering
That moonlight might find a window.

When we become false and lost
That the severe noon-light
Would cast our shadow clear.

When we love, that dawn-light
Would lighten our feet
Upon the waters.

As we grow old, that twilight
Would illuminate treasure
In the fields of memory.

And when we come to search for God,
Let us first be robed in night,
Put on the mind of morning
To feel the rush of light
Spread slowly inside
The color and stillness
Of a found word.

~ John O’Donohue ~

(from To Bless the Space Between Us)

and, lastly, in blessing for e.b. white, who gave us charlotte’s web, and stuart little, and whose birthday was july 11, 1899, here’s the beginning of the marvelous obit he wrote in the new yorker when his dog, daisy, died. i can’t leave the whole thing here because it’s locked in the new yorker archives and you can only find it with a subscription, but here’s how it begins….

what deliciousness did you find this week??

happy birthday across-the-way….

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