pull up a chair

July 7, 2023

summer’s sabbatical. . .somewhat. . .

it’s time for me to slip into a deep well of quiet. one where a pebble tossed into a pond or a puddle makes barely a ripple.

i’ll still be gathering bitlets and wonders that send heart or soul or imagination soaring, and i’ll quietly slip them here onto the “table” on friday mornings, but i am going to practice stillness with magnified focus — at least for the next few whiles.

my body and soul have been turned on their sides in these last few months. and they’re calling for the blessing of a sabbath’s rest. thus, sabbatical; the ancient invention of a God who toiled six days (creating sky and sea, landmass and creature, blooming thing and someone to till it) and deemed that the seventh be made holy, and blessed, and that rest be the call for the day.

this summer sabbatical is my summer’s seventh day.

i’m gentling it with the “somewhat” because i can’t quell my commonplacing, and i do delight in passing along the treasures and trinkets i find. so expect offerings week by week till i rev up my engines again. and, who knows, there might come a week when i’ve something fulsome to say. but i feel a bit thin right now. thin in the voice, and thin all around.

and as any airline passenger knows, we’re instructed to slip on our own oxygen mask before tending to those in our care. and i suppose i need the oxygen that comes with quiet. the rare gift of time to wander, to let thoughts unspool as they will.

i can’t catch my breath. and quiet might help.

from deep down in my quiet, i promise to send forth edification in the forms i find most fitting for a summer’s gambol. but mostly i’m craving the summer relish of bare toes in the grass or the sand. and the cognitive equivalent thereof.

and the sigh that comes on their heels.

shhhh….

i came upon this morsel this week, a definition of happiness that i knew would have launched me down intricate paths. i shall leave the launching to you. but here’s the line that first stirred me…

willa cather defined happiness as the feeling of being “dissolved into something complete and great.”

(she inscribed it on her gravestone…”that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. the keyword, it seems to be, is “dissolved,” to be dissipated into atoms and ions that meld into the atmosphere. that truly, biochemically become one with the beyond. to lose a sense of one’s boundaries, to float on an innertube of utter vast blessing…)

and while we’re on the subject of happiness, here’s a poem to go with it…(think not that what’s coming is frothy confection…)

THE WORK OF HAPPINESS
by May Sarton

I thought of happiness, how it is woven
Out of the silence in the empty house each day
And how it is not sudden and it is not given
But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.
No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark
Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.
No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,
But the tree is lifted by this inward work
And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.

So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours
And strikes its roots deep in the house alone:
The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,
White curtains softly and continually blown
As the free air moves quietly about the room;
A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall —
These are the dear familiar gods of home,
And here the work of faith can best be done,
The growing tree is green and musical.

For what is happiness but growth in peace,
The timeless sense of time when furniture
Has stood a life’s span in a single place,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness?
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.

here’s a breathtaking definition/description of love (can anyone define love? i think not):

the poet Robert Graves defined love as “a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that…makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other.”

so beautiful…

and because joy harjo deserves the last best word….here she is…

We heard it.
The racket in every corner of the world. As
the hunger for war rose up in those who would steal to be president
to be king or emperor, to own the trees, stones, and everything
else that moved about the earth, inside the earth
and above it.

We knew it was coming, tasted the winds who gathered intelligence
from each leaf and flower, from every mountain, sea
and desert, from every prayer and song all over this tiny universe
floating in the skies of infinite
being.

And then it was over, this world we had grown to love
for its sweet grasses, for the many-colored horses
and fishes, for the shimmering possibilities
while dreaming.

But then there were the seeds to plant and the babies
who needed milk and comforting, and someone
picked up a guitar or ukulele from the rubble
and began to sing about the light flutter
the kick beneath the skin of the earth
we felt there, beneath us.

—excerpt from When the World as We Knew It Ended
by Joy Harjo

consider this a summer’s potluck, and feel free to bring by your own morsels and delicacies. the cupboard is open…

19 Comments

June 30, 2023

the blessing of an open window and other wonderments. . .

the whoosh of summer’s soundtrack is back again. windows were blessedly opened as the stars beckoned last night, as the little numbers on the don’t-breathe-this scale finally slid down to mere double digits. we are breathing again.

canadian forests are burning and we here along the great lake were taking our due. as this noxious cloud wafts back and forth across the continent––making apocalyptic scenes of the brooklyn bridge, choking the air out of cleveland, blocking the view of the john hancock from chicago’s lake shore drive––we were holed up in a seasonal inversion: it’s one thing to be nose pressed to the window when snows are whirling and harsh winds are howling, but the summer sun was shining, the garden was begging attention, and we couldn’t step outside for fear of the poisons that’d swirl in our lungs (and some of us are paying particular attention to what swirls in our leftover lungs).

it’s a curious quirk of humanity, how we long for whatever it is we can’t have. and so i stood nose to the glass watching the summer without me. i longed for my wicker chair, the one that lets me watch mama wren unnoticed. and then i wondered about mama wren’s lungs, and what happens when she warbles or burbles like nobody’s business. her lungs are wee things, and i imagine the toxins that threaten my big ol’ (comparatively) breathers might all but close hers off. so now i am listening extra intently, hoping for that trademark mama-wren burble to come.

the week’s barely-breathable script was apocalyptic preamble. summer is the season of screens in the windows and doors left wide open. the indoors and outdoors, permeably conjoined. except when they’re not. except when the toxins per breath reach uninhabitable levels.

it’s a blessing to watch the curtains stir. to fall asleep to the hummings of nightfall’s lullaby. to hear the distant siren, the train in the offing, the raccoons holding their hootenanny.

when the windows are sealed, and the summer hermetically wrapped at safe distance, there’s little to do but long for the way summer once was. when sunlight glistened. and the creek tickled your toes. and long days in the woods were the very best thing you could do for your soul.

summer is back now. we can breathe again. and we can open our doors and our windows.

and i, for one, intend to breathe deeply.

teddy’s raspberries–three years in the making–finally ripe for the plucking.

summer reading from the e.b. white and kate di camillo files, a celestial pairing if ever there was…

this comes from a glorious letter di camillo, author of because of winn dixie and the tale of despereaux, once wrote to a fellow author who’d written her asking how honest a writer should be with the young children to whom they both wrote (a question that pertains just as vividly to any writing, i’d argue, and a question that has especially animated my writing in recent weeks).

“E. B. White loved the world. And in loving the world, he told the truth about it — its sorrow, its heartbreak, its devastating beauty. He trusted his readers enough to tell them the truth, and with that truth came comfort and a feeling that we were not alone.

“I think our job is to trust our readers.

“I think our job is to see and to let ourselves be seen.

“I think our job is to love the world.”

in yet another conversation di camillo refers to the writing she does as a “shortcut to the heart.”

and when she was awarded her second newbery medal (in 2004 for tale of despereaux and 2014 for flora & ulysses: the illuminated adventures), di camillo brilliantly captured her life’s work as this: “We have been given the sacred task of making hearts large through story. We are working to make hearts that are capable of containing much joy and much sorrow, hearts capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries … of ourselves and of each other.”

and finally, this capturing of grief by the tender and brilliant and fierce suleika jaouad, the author of the best-selling between two kingdoms: a memoir of a life interrupted, who was diagnosed with a rare form of acute myeloid lymphoma in 2011, a disease which recurred in late 2021, and for which she has had a second bone marrow transplant. she is married to the brilliant musician and magnificent soul jon batiste. and here’s what she wrote of grief:

“Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you’re at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you’ve forgotten.”

a more finely-grained exposition of grief i’ve not seen captured. and, by the way, suleika is exceedingly, exceedingly kind i’ve found out.

what stirred you most this week? or stifled you? and what’s topping your summer reading stack? i’ve been imagining a kate di camillo summer’s binge. and suleika’s is already on hold at my friendly local library…

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June 23, 2023

our job is to savor. . .

i’ve been especially partial to summer for precisely three decades — or 10,958 days — now, for my firstborn was born on the very first full day of the season precisely 30 years ago yesterday. i fell instantly in love. deliriously so. with my firstborn, yes, but also with the way the summery light slanted in on the long june morning i waited for him, and the new days thereafter, and every start of summer since, as it always brings me back to the solstice when the dial on my summer-savoring machine was cranked up infinite notches.

truth is, i’ve savored summer’s start for as long as i can remember: it was the day my mama picked us up at the schoolhouse gate, end-of-year report cards in hand, and took us out for grilled cheese and fries. it was the day we trotted into the library and signed ourselves up for the summer reading brigade, an adventure i thought of as something of a secret society that promised me long afternoons with nose curled in a book, and the sheer delight of marching up to the children’s librarian with my summer-reading-club card, and my latest finished book, awaiting the inky stamp she’d press onto my card that felt like a passport, proof to me and the world that i was a serious reader. (or so i imagined.)

i was told just the other day that more than ever my job is to savor, that i’d make more room in my life, proportionally diminish the grief (that a diagnosis of cancer inevitably brings) if i made a point of savoring those joys that i love, each and every day.

grief, this wise person explained, doesn’t ever go fully away. the things that bring it on, the things that break our hearts into pieces, can’t be erased. but they can settle into nooks and crannies of our souls where they might go quiet, or lose some of their sting. and, yes, it’s true too that those slumbering griefs will still make unannounced appearances all on their own schedule and of their own accord. grief, i’ve found over the many, many years, likes to catch you in the throat when you are, say, stumbling down a grocery store aisle, and suddenly you see the thing that makes you think of your long-gone papa, or the baby you lost, or your life before you worried about cancer cells running amok.

but, the wise person explained, the more room we make in our life for those things that aren’t grief, the more alive and less strangled we might feel.

so, savor it is. specifically, savor this summer, the unspooling of week upon week with barely an inkblot on the docket. no deadline, no due date. just one simple job: to savor.

it’s not such a tough assignment: conjure the things you love, the things that bring in the joy — or the peace or the grace or the wonder — as the tide to the shore, as the river that flows only forward and over the rocks and onto the sea.

it’s a job, in fact, that belongs to all of us always. it’s just that cancer — or any one of those indelibly stamped diagnoses, or the sudden loss of someone or something you love — sharpens the urgency and the focus. if you don’t want to be strangled, if you’re searching for a light to come in through the cracks, a place to begin is racking up joys. an abacus of joy, one bead at a time. joy counting in plainest arithmetic. intricate, intricate calculus of the heart and the soul.

my joys are so, so simple. they rise from the garden, from the mud stained on my knees and under my fingernails. they are stirred at the cookstove. they flutter my heart when i curl into my old wicker chair and listen to mama wren warbling to her babies.

when i lean my head against the chest of the boy i once birthed, when i drink in the tick and the tock of his heart, the surest steadiest lullaby i’ve ever known. when someone i love calls on the phone. or leaves a note tucked in the box by the door. when the sunset dizzies me.

the point, i’m told, is to root myself in all the things that make me feel most alive. the ones that slow the pounding in my heart. the ones that might make me giggle. the ones that make me know someone out there is listening.

here’s to summer, the season when savoring is fresh in the air.

and here’s a roadmap to joy that converges multiple routes: herbs from the garden, simmering caramelized onions, squeezing a lemon, and summery salad. it’s nutritious and delicious and it comes from my friends at NYT Cooking, where they never ever lead me astray, nor off the path of the straight road to Joy.

it’s not a pretty salad in a rainbow-y sense, but oh my it’s delicious. i promise. sometimes joy comes in plain clothes and drab colors (it can be sneaky like that….) here’s to joy, however it comes…`

Caramelized Zucchini and White Bean Salad
By Yossy Arefi for The New York Times
Time: 45 minutes, plus cooling and chilling
Yield: 6 servings

Start with a big pile of shredded zucchini and onions, and marvel at how much it cooks down as it browns and caramelizes. Toss that potent blend with creamy white beans and herbs –– it’s easy as that! The mint adds brightness, and pairs well with other soft herbs, like parsley, dill and basil. The caramelized zucchini mixture makes a great base for bean salad, but it can be used in many other ways: Make a big batch and toss it with pasta, serve it on top of ricotta-slathered toast, or top a flatbread with it; you really can’t go wrong, says the Times.

INGREDIENTS

2 large zucchini, shredded on the large holes of a box grater
1 large yellow onion, thinly sliced
4 tablespoons olive oil
1⁄2 teaspoon red-pepper flakes
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
2 (15-ounce) cans white beans, like cannellini, rinsed
1 lemon, plus more if needed
1⁄2 cup roughly chopped mint
1⁄2 cup roughly chopped parsley, dill or basil

PREPARATION

Step 1
Wrap the shredded zucchini in a clean kitchen towel and gently squeeze it to remove excess moisture.

Step 2
In a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat, combine the zucchini and onion with 3 tablespoons olive oil, the red-pepper flakes, 1 teaspoon salt and a few grinds of pepper. Cook the mixture, stirring occasionally, until the water has evaporated and the zucchini and onion turn golden brown, 25 to 30 minutes. You will have to stir more often toward the end of cooking to prevent burning.

Step 3
Add the cooked zucchini mixture to a large bowl along with the beans. Zest and juice the lemon over the top and add the remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil; stir gently to combine. Let the mixture cool to room temperature, then add the herbs and stir gently. Season to taste with salt, pepper and additional lemon juice, if desired. Serve at room temperature or cold.

someone wise sent this beauty…

A Prayer

Refuse to fall down
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.
If you cannot refuse to stay down,
lift your heart toward heaven,
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled.
You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you from lifting your heart
toward heaven
only you.
It is in the middle of misery
that so much becomes clear.
The one who says nothing good
came of this,
is not yet listening.

and, as she so often does, mary oliver preaches:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

+ Mary Oliver

what will you savor as summer begins its unspooling?

15 Comments

June 16, 2023

maybe acres of flowerpots would help. . .

in which i tell the truth and let on that this is a bumpy road right in here…

my summer companion, a fellow named tedd, leapt into the passenger seat, as he is wont to do these days. he loves nothing more than wending his way through the city, curiosity propelling the route. we stopped along the way, biscuits with cheddar and honey, fuel for the road. he took notes of places he’d want to come back to, the romanian sausage shop, the honeybear pancake house where the windows were bursting with clouds of silk flowers.

we were headed to a chicago institution, a garden shop that’s sprawled across city blocks. a garden shop that upholstered my very first garden, long long ago. we were looking, allegedly, for a fountain whose splash would punctuate the summer sounds, whose soothing whoosh might lull us into that fugue state that comes when you plop in a chair and listen to all that the world has to offer.

i love my companion more than life, and i love our urban adventures. but truth is, there was yet another uninvited passenger in the old red wagon, and its name was fear. i am inhabited of late by runaway fears, and worries, that this cancer has let loose and is running amok in odd parts of me. it’s too scary to say aloud to the people i love, so i mostly hold it inside. except for here, where words tapped out on keys have always been my one certain release valve.

it seems that two months after the day i first heard the words “it was cancer,” i’ve been caught in what’s likely an inevitable gulch. it’s a lot to absorb. it’s a lot to have half your lung up and cut out, sent off to pathology, where science-y folk slice it apart and mark it with names, stamp it with numbers that scare and confuse you. even the oncologist the other day said as much, though i think her words were something along the lines of “it rocks your world, especially when it’s right there in your chest.”

i was listening to a podcast the other day, a podcast for people with cancer (i still gulp when i write phrases like that, realizing i’m now among them, the people with cancer), and they talked knowingly about “the middle-of-the-night questions,” the ones that basically all circle back to “am i going to die?” there is solace, much solace, in knowing how universally some of this hits us. we are all human beings, a motley collection of bones and flesh, of freckles and smiles that wrinkle our faces in particular ways. we all hope big, though my big is different from yours. and we’ve all suffered hurts we’ll never forget, even if we’ve pushed them off to the side. and a lot of us get scared. the thing about cancer –– or any one of the other life-altering diagnoses –– is that it strips away so very much of the pretense. it’s brass tacks, and un-glittered questions. it’s a swift dunk in the truth-telling end of the pool, where you dispense with roundabout thoughts and spit out the unedited ones. the ones you might not bring up in the produce aisle, sifting through the bunches of carrots, or reaching for the ripest avocado.

once you have cancer, and find out the one or two others in your life who are on the same road, it’s like you’re ushered in to a particular locker room, where everyone walks around with the same flimsy towels, and no questions are barred. where you can say out loud those things that keep you awake in the night. and, somehow, putting breath to the words, seeing the knowing in the eyes of the one to whom you are talking, reminds you, over and over, how very much we all want to cling to this life we have built, this life filled with people we love, and dreams we still hold.

i’m thinking i’m struggling because all of this is so new, and it still feels like it came out of the blue. and it knocked the breath right out of me. i keep thinking that once i get one of those scans under my belt, the ones that will come every six months, i might settle in to the notion that maybe the cancer is gone. or at least settled back to its indolent state, my couch potato of a cancer, as the doctors proclaimed it (after all, it had been lolligagging down at the bottom of my lung for eight long years before anyone realized what trouble it was).

i realize i can’t call my doctor every time there’s an odd sensation — say, like the lump i feel in my armpit — or maybe i should just get a diagnostician on retainer, one who wouldn’t hold it against me for all of my worries.

somehow or other i am going to find my way to the other side of this rather dark cloud.

i intend to get on my knees. with trowel at my side. and a big jug of pellets, the ones that give plant roots a boost. while i’m down there i intend to dig deep into my very own soul, open up a portal to the God who animates the whole of me, and the whole of this earth.

deep in the night i spend plenty of time asking “those” questions. but i also spend just as much time lying in silence, holy silence, channeling the God in whose palm i am trying to rest, aching to rest.

i tend to find God when i’m out in the garden, or lying in the impossible dark. i tend to find God, too, when i tell the whole truth, and the balm comes — Holy Balm comes — to settle deep in the cracks.

how do you find your way to the other side, when the dark clouds come, or the wall of fear feels too high to scale?

i did find a couple poems i was going to leave here today, but i will save them for another day. and simply close with this blessed thought from rabbi abraham joshua heschel, one of my great, great sages…

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.
Abraham Joshua Heschel

p.s. a delightfully joyful thing did happen this week when, lo and behold, i discovered that none other than richard rohr, the great modern-day mystic, had quoted from The Book of Nature in his daily meditation for tuesday. and i’m getting back in the saddle this weekend, for a nature walk with an oak park synagogue, a two-hour radio show with a pittsburgh priest i’ve come to love, and a trek to milwaukee tuesday night for a conversation with the journal sentinel’s book critic, jim higgins, at the boswell book company, an east side literary institution.

p.s.s. happy blessed father’s day to the brilliant fathers who sometimes gather here…

19 Comments

June 9, 2023

of night sounds and saints and summer poems. . .

i wasn’t too deep into a jet-lagged slumber when the sound i’d waited to hear rose from the kitchen last night, wended its way up the stairs and into the room where my head lay on the pillow. it was the sound i’d hoped to hear in faraway paris, the sound of two brothers bouncing off each other’s humors and wits and midnight banter. it was a sound that oozed into the cracks in my heart, and the tender spots too. it was a soundtrack so sweet it lulled me back to my dreams.

we finally caught up with the boy who couldn’t get to france when we met him in the international terminal day before last, shortly after he’d flown into chicago from DC, where he’d waited all week for our return. he happens to have a dear friend getting married in town tomorrow, and he’d long planned to fly home with us, to be here for the weekend. so the reunion in the airport was sweet as it could be. long-awaited. much pined for. and i’ve been indulging in every drop of it ever since.

theirs is the soundtrack that makes me more whole than anything else. the soundtrack i’d dreamt of in the days after surgery when i knew more vibrantly than ever before in my life what i lived for. and long, long ago, the soundtrack i’d dreamt of in the very long years before there was ever even a brother, when it seemed “one and only” would be our equation forever. and it’s the soundtrack i pray will go on long into the forever, long after i’m gone and they have each other.

though they’re eight years apart they both share particularly nuanced humors. they tango with words, and glances that only they understand. it’s shorthand for brothers. and it’s the holiest balm i know. i’d longed for it, as if a summer’s hammock tied between trees, one that would rock me into the semi-fugue state of a lazy afternoon’s nap. i’d imagined it unfurling in parisian cafes; threading through crowded sidewalks along the boulevard st. germaine; or taking off into the night as the intrepid pair ventured into the city of lights.

but that wasn’t to be. and the waiting––the hole in my heart that never went away––might have made its midnight appearance last night all the sweeter.

it’s the unexpected twist in the story, the script that didn’t play out as i’d imagined. life is like that. life likes to remind me of its stubborn insistence that i’m not the screenwriter here. and just because it doesn’t turn out the way i’d plotted it, doesn’t mean the happy ending won’t come. sometimes you have to stick it out through the hard parts to get to the part where sweetness comes in.

i’m thinking a lot about hard parts and scripts that don’t seek my opinion, scripts that play out in ways i’d never suggest. i admit to finding myself in a role that’s foreign to me, one that doesn’t make sense: i run out of breath and i run out of steam, and i can get scared by runaway worries. i’ve a long quiet summer ahead to figure some of this out, and i intend to do it the slow way. with the brotherly sound track propelling me onward whenever i get to the hard parts.

side chapel at Chartres, devoted to therese of lisieux

a little bit about a saint: i was one of those catholic school girls, the ones who wore plaid jumpers and were told to pick a saint upon which to model our ways, especially when it came time for our confirmation, and we got to wear white lacy dresses and the bishop would splotch our foreheads with oil. i picked therese of lisieux, the little flower of jesus, partly because i liked little flowers, and i always saw pictures of her surrounded by wee purple violets. i loved that in her quiet little way, she never abandoned love. and i too believed that in my quiet little ways i could make my way through the world, infusing little drops of love all along my route. i didn’t know until last week, when i stepped into a side chapel at the cathedral of chartres honoring the 150th anniversary of her birth, that therese was born the day before me. 84 years earlier. over the years i’ve discovered that dorothy day, one of my heroes, loved her too, for her teaching of “the little way”–by little acts of kindness, little acts of courage, little acts animated by love, we can shift the balance of love in the world. and it turns out that just this week, pope francis (yet another hero of mine, and yet another someone who loves saint therese) devoted his remarks in st. peter’s square to the little flower of jesus, imploring us to imitate her ways, by doing even the littlest things with great love. because she was sickly most of her life, and died at 24, pope francis went on to say that though her body was sickly, “her heart was vibrant and missionary.” i find particular resonance these days in a saint who saw herself as “a small grain of sand,” and who never let her bodily frailties impede her heart’s zeal.

three poems: two summer poems, and a stanza from audre lord that took my breath away…

from mary oliver’s “Six Recognitions of the Lord”

My heart
sings but the apparatus of singing doesn’t convey
half what it feels and means. In spring, there’s hope,
in fall the exquisite, necessary diminishing, in
winter I am as sleepy as any beast in its
leafy cave, but in summer there is
everywhere the luminous sprawl of gifts,
the hospitality of the Lord and my
inadequate answers.

— Mary Oliver

a stanza from audre lord’s, “A Litany for Survival”

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

In Passing

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

~ Lisel Mueller ~

a curious hodgepodge here, fueled by jet lag perhaps, but nonetheless: what are the summer sounds (or poems) that soothe you most?

15 Comments

June 2, 2023

and then there were three…

dispatch from 75005 paris, in which one of us is very much missing as we stroll the bedazzled city of lights . . .

there must be a rule about not being allowed to be heartsick in paris, but i’m breaking it. three of us are here, in a fifth-floor aerie beside the luxembourg garden, where the buttery scents of the creperie below slither in through the wide-open windows. but one of us is very much not here.

amid the myriad rules the french seem to have drawn up but kept close to the vest (more on that in a minute…), there is the one that insists your passport is valid for 90 days after you leave the country. well, our very own law professor, not having memorized the fine print of french law, found out at check-in saturday night that his passport, valid until august 27, falls 11 days short of that bar. so: no “valid” passport, no boarding pass, no way to get in.

for five anguishing days, he and we and a superhero named mary (my long-adored once-upon-a-time babysitter-slash-make-believe sister who’s never even met the professor in person, but who made it her mission to move this immovable mountain) tried every last trick in the emergency-passport book: standing in line at 6 a.m. at the US Passport Agency in washington, d.c., where not an appointment was granted (and without an appointment, no chance at a passport); trying to get in the door at the french embassy, where the professor wasn’t even allowed to stand near the door and ordered to move across the street; even a wild-eyed last-ditch scheme to fly to calgary, canada, where a rare passport appointment slot was to be had (but mary’s 11th-hour call to her immigration lawyer—yes, she happens to have one—revealed that the emergency passport he might get there would still not get him into the country). so, hearts sunk and throbbing with hurt, we declared it a loss and canceled the last flight united airlines was offering. (they admitted that when we bought the tickets to paris way back in january, the agent we talked to might have been wise to mention the so-called schengen rule, and thus they had been willing to rebook his flight until wednesday, insisting he should have had time to fix le probleme.)

tears have been wept here in paree. and very good thing the gendarmes seem not to have noticed. there might be a rule and, mais oui, a penalty.

the whole point of this trip, from beginning to end, was a very rare chance—after three years of covid, after law school, after college, and emphatically after a surgery that knocked the breath right out of me—to bask in the light of simply being together. without distraction. without deadline.

for weeks now, while my lung and its new metal threads stitched themselves back together again, and i learned how to take a deep breath again, i pictured one simple scene, one that carried me across many a bump in my most recent road: i imagined looking up from my chair in a bistro, at the radiant glow of my beautiful boys circling the table—mid-laugh, mid-long-winded tale, mid the most simple treasure of being together.

not too many weeks ago i was weighing five-year survival rates, and when that becomes your math, each day’s import is quadrupled, quintupled, or more. so, yes, this city amazes and charms at every twist and turn in the ancient allees and at every wide-open vista along the grand boulevards. but part of me is very much missing, and if the doctors looked at my heart this very minute, they’d declare it a sick little ticker, missing a part of its most heavenly beat.

adding insult to injury in the annals of this unforgettable trip, sweet boy No. 2 was yesterday all but accosted by a phalanx of gendarmes who rushed onto our train car as we neared our station, home from versailles, asked to see our tickets, rattled off something menacing en francais, then pulled out a laminated card and something about “penalty 60 Euro.” we sat bewildered (and alarmed that the next thing we’d see was a dangling pair of silvery cuffs). and tried to insist we’d seen not a warning, nor quite understood. mais non! the crime for which he was fined: resting the edge of his shoe on the edge of the seat across from him.

the morals of this sorrowful tale: check your dang passport, check the intricacies of crossing any international border (see: Schengen Rule), and don’t rest your sole on the edge of the train seat.

other than that, all is charmed in the city of so many bedazzling lights. (see photos below.)

and i’ll just have to wait till we’re back in the states to plop myself down with all three of my boys. no passport required.

of course you expected no dispatch so glum, certainly not from the home of the crepe and escargot, and i’m trying my darnedest to savor each hour. just telling the truth, as is always my promise.

what vacation mishaps do you have to tell? and how did you manage to make it all right? or at least glean a wisdom from out of the ashes?

19 Comments

May 26, 2023

catching my breath . . .

catching my breath is something i do quite often these days. my breath runs away from me. or it gets lost deep down inside me, down where the sacs of my lungs are no longer, i sometimes imagine. and i steady myself in ways i like to think are inconspicuous: i lean against walls, i grab onto the arm of whomever i’m walking with. i plop swiftly onto the nearest flat plane. i lurch to a pause in the thick of a sentence, one that never would have stopped me before.

but the breath i’m catching this week is the breath that comes from deeper than lungs. it’s the breath of being home, of feeling swept into the holy embrace of the nooks and crannies you know by heart. the ones on which you’ve been keeping watch for whole long decades. the ones you sense keep watch on you.

especially the ones in the garden, the patch of earth you call your own. where every square inch is a story unfolding, a story that bedazzles me, that fills me with wonder, a story that feels like watching the impossible prove the possible: like how, after three years of being nothing but prickly canes and leaves, does the raspberry bush know to put forth teeny tiny clusters of what will be sunbursting shades of fat juicy berries? or how, out of the stark and bare ground, does the fern know to jut forth frill upon frill of feathery fronds, tight curled into commas that only slowly relent? and how, pray tell, does the red-breasted robin know right where in the grass to pluck out a worm? (here’s a hint: the robins can hear the slithering of the worm underground. how’s that for astonishing wonder?!?!)

because i’m sauntering at the slowest of paces these days, i find my long silent spells in the garden particularly punctuated by questions like these. and the answers that come, given their long-winded meanders and the places they take me along the circuitous way, give me plenty of time to consider how all of creation proclaims the one certain truth i need in these days: there is an animating force, beyond comprehension, and as it choreographs the turning of this holy earth and the unfolding of wonder, so too it keeps watch over me. which is just another way of saying the God who greens the world is the very God who, so too, keeps me so tenderly, tenderly close.

being home, being back in my garden, is the closest i know to curling into the palm of my God’s holy clutch.

we’re only home for the shortest of spells, which is why i’m so busily catching my breath here. last week we were away for a longer stretch of days––truth be told––than i’d felt ready to be, but it was the graduation of that boy i so love. and it was, uncannily, at the very same time, ultimate frisbee, the national championship. for three days in the sun, and the rain, perched on the sidelines, and under the power lines, in picturesque obetz, ohio. and in a few more days we are going away again: to the city of lights and baguettes and the eiffel tower. it’s a rare trip for the whole motley lot of us, and i can’t think of a quartet to which i’d rather belong. even if it means this ol’ homebody is going to have to uproot her slowpoke of a self once again.

a part of me aches to leave so soon. i am, after all, the queen of the homiest homebodies. but, as i work to absorb the wisdoms this hard chapter brings, i will trust my ferns to unfurl, and my not-yet berries to fatten. i will leave the robins and cardinals in charge. and i will inhale the city of lights, and a few baguettes besides.

i long to be home again. home for a long quiet summer. where my breath will be caught, and my lungs will be filled, and, holy God willing, i will be deeper than ever before.

a few treasures before i go….

And I am thinking: maybe just looking and listening
is the real work.
Maybe the world, without us,
is the real poem.
Mary Oliver (an excerpt from “The Book of Time”)

and this from my friends at SALT Project, who this week bring us denise levertov’s poem about caedmon, the earliest english-writing poet whose name we know, though only one of his compositions—translated as “caedmon’s hymn”—survives. caedmon was a seventh-century northumbrian cowherd, our SALT friends tell us, “who took care of the local monastery’s cattle, and who wasn’t much of a talker or a singer (cowherds would sometimes sing to pass the time, keep the cattle close, and keep predators away).” but “one night in the cowshed, the story goes, an angel inspired him to sing about creation—and he never looked back. convinced he was divinely called, the monastery took him in as a monk, and he wrote lyrics for songs on Genesis, Exodus, the New Testament, and more, always honoring God the Creator. so when it comes to the English language, the earliest poet we know of was a composer praising creation.”

in “caedmon,” levertov imagines that fateful night, to tell the story of an ordinary, humble person who’s given the courage to speak, create, and sing.

*one other note, from SALT: “a twist / of lit rush” refers to a rushlight, an old, inexpensive sort of candle (essentially a wick of rush drenched in fat).

Caedmon

All others talked as if
talk were a dance.
Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet
would break the gliding ring.
Early I learned to
hunch myself
close by the door:
then when the talk began
I’d wipe my
mouth and wend
unnoticed back to the barn
to be with the warm beasts,
dumb among body sounds
of the simple ones.
I’d see by a twist
of lit rush the motes
of gold moving
from shadow to shadow
slow in the wake
of deep untroubled sighs.
The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure. Until
the sudden angel affrighted me — light effacing
my feeble beam,
a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:
but the cows as before
were calm, and nothing was burning,
nothing but I, as that hand of fire
touched my lips and scorched my tongue
and pulled my voice
into the ring of the dance.

+ Denise Levertov

how do you catch your breath?

a heavenly friend arrived at my door with a library of my books, in miniature.

p.s. i promise a few picture postcards from paris….

happy blessed day to my beloved jan, safe harbor for so many years. may this year bring you those things of which you dream….

14 Comments

May 19, 2023

jubilance and the boy who made impossible possible

My baby boy, the one they told me I’d never ever have, is graduating from a college he never thought he’d know as his own. And we are celebrating. We are jubilant. We are celebrating deep down inside both of us all those things that people say you will never ever do; but you forge right ahead and you do them anyway.

We have long thought of the kid as “the egg that wouldn’t take no for an answer.” That little egg did not care that I was 43, halfway to 45 by the time he was born. Did not care that so many other eggs had not followed instructions. That egg — his egg — refused to take no for an answer. And that egg grew and grew into the magnificent human with the very very big heart. The tenderest heart I’ve ever known. A heart that says best what it says in unpunctuated text messages, in hilarious pictures he sends of himself dressed in alligator suit, complete with spiky tail he swishes hither and yon as he stalks his native habitat.

That kid is my champion. That kid makes me believe in the impossible. That kid is living, breathing, impossible made possible.

That kid told me a few weeks ago that when he was trying to do the impossible — to reach for something well out of reach — he tapped his shoulder as if to beckon me, to give him the strength and the will and the courage he needed. Turns out, he reached what he was reaching for. And he let me in on his secret the morning after it happened. Ever since, I’ve follow his lead: when I need to reach for something beyond my reach — be it courage, or breath, or not flinching a muscle when the doctor comes at me with needles the size of a drain pipe — I now tap my shoulder too.

That kid and I might spend the rest of our lives tapping our shoulders, beckoning courage, beckoning the possible, beckoning reaching far, far beyond what we think we can do.

So I am madly wildly celebrating that kid, and the chance to be by his side when he doesn’t exactly walk across the graduation stage this weekend. Because his most recent impossible something was winning a championship along with his mates, the ones who fling frisbees into the air, and shout out in joy as they run for the discs that spin through the air, impossibly. He’s taking to frisbee fields, in the national championship, instead of seizing diploma, and I will be right there on the sideline. Jubilant. Celebrant. Waiting to see if he taps at his shoulder.

My once-impossible impossibly soaring and diving, seizing the impossible. My blue-ribbon boy. My joy and jubilance ever after…

i could sit and read jane kenyon all day any day. and this one is new to me, so i’m sharing it…

jane kenyon, a poet of the quotidian, was long and adoringly married to donald hall, the late great poet and essayist. both now gone; forever heroes to me, their poetries worthy of a lifetime’s attention. some years ago, in the blessing of one such lifetime, i sat beside hall –– on the floor tucked against his armchair –– in the living room of their white frame farmhouse on eagle pond, in new hampshire. it was during our “year of thinking sumptuously,” when we up and moved to cambridge, mass., and drank from the firehose that is the nieman fellowship for journalists. poetry was where i took my deepest dive that year. and, after that field trip to new hampshire, hall and i became something of pen pals, posting letters back and forth, letters i now save tucked between the pages of his poems. on the day we had spent at eagle pond farm, kenyon, who had been the poet laureate of new hampshire, had already died (she died at 47 in 1995), but her poetries for me are now animated by knowing the kitchen where she cooked, the desk where she wrote, and the barn where she sometimes went to weep.

here is kenyon’s “happiness”…

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon,
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.

It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

+ Jane Kenyon

my jubilance: apparently, he’s been dressing up as zoo animals his whole life long. here he is, my tiger.

13 Comments

May 12, 2023

this is what mothering looks like. . .

a few years ago, maybe many years ago, i wrote something of a proclamation on mothering, the verb. in my feisty little voice, i argued — as vehemently as a girl taught to be polite could argue –– that, gosh darn it, mothering was not an art that belonged exclusively to those who happen to have pushed a wee squawker from her womb, nor only to those who’ve clutched babies to her bosom, anatomically-aligned attachments. i argued that we should be honoring not simply the noun — those who are mothers — but the verb — those who mother.

it’s an all-inclusive distinction, one i tried to describe thusly:

yes, every last someone who has stroked a brow, wiped a tear, dabbed chocolate off a little cheek, fluffed a pillow, tucked in the covers, whispered bedtime prayers, set an extra place at the table, stretched a meatloaf, picked the peas out of the pasta salad, kissed a bloody knee, kept a retching belly from falling in the toilet bowl.

yes, every pair of arms that’s lifted a dead-weight child in the pool, played red rover till the cows came home, bent half-over to push a kid on training wheels around and round the block, turned the pages of good night moon so many times you find yourself chanting good night to the mittens when no one’s in the room.

you get the point.

i believe it as firmly as i believe anything. and in fact, in the many hours i’ve spent curled in my window seat in recent days, i found myself with nose in a book that argues — again, vehemently yet politely — that we are missing out on a whole lot of God if we think of God only as a white-bearded fellow perched on a throne with a sword and a scepter, a God as king, imperial ruler and judge, as wielder of power, and slayer of sinners. (for the record, that has never been my image of God, and i admit to images, being of the simple kind who need pictures to go along with my favorite passages. and the picture i saw is a tender God, one with arms that reach, and a palm that cradles, or presses against the small of my back. and as i’ve grown and deepened into the mystery, i now sense God without image at all. i sense God in the shiver that runs up my spine when i encounter the beautiful or the unbearably tender, and i find God in the interplay — the ineffable force — that animates hearts and draws us — any of us, all of us — into each other.)

the book i’ve been reading — She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, by Elizabeth A. Johnson , a brave and brilliant theologian who happens to be a roman catholic nun –– says this:

“God is that on which you lean your heart, that on which your heart depends, ‘that to which your heart clings and entrusts itself,’ in Martin Luther’s memorable phrase.”

the truth is, it’s all mystery, and we reach for metaphor so our little minds can find something to seize. how do you put words to the inexplicable, the unknowable? you simply know what you know.

but in considering a God imbued with the feminine, a God more mother-like, a God, as johnson writes, of “gentleness and compassion, unconditional love, reverence and care for the weak, sensitivity, a desire not to dominate but to be an intimate companion and friend,” i scan the landscape of my recent days, and i spell out this litany of what mothering — the verb that belongs to all who employ tender loving empathies and unending expression of gentle kindness — looks like:

mothering is the knock at the door on a rainy morning, not long after dawn, and the friend who is standing there with a handful of field-plucked flowers and a soggy brown bag of parsley and spinach and ramps, foods she grabbed from the farmer’s market, knowing from her own daughter’s deadly cancer that these are the foods that should fuel me. and she knew without asking how very much i wished i could get to the market, though i couldn’t quite yet.

mothering is my beloved husband who, every morning, makes certain the feeder is filled with seed and the bird bath fully watered, for he knows the joy i absorb watching the birds flit hither and yon. mothering is the pizza he drove into the city to fetch because it oozes the things i love — spinach and mushrooms and cheese and a heavenly red sauce –– and he is intent on fattening me my way. mothering is the rod stewart and kim carnes tapes he played all morning long to try to convince me the rasp in my so-called voice (paralyzed vocal cord caused by the surgery) was a sexy addition to life here on the homefront.

mothering is the friends who don’t back down, who don’t shy away, who know without asking just when to barge in, and when to stay quiet. and who keep coming back, week after week, willing to walk at a snail’s pace, or pick up a vacuum and suck up the kitchen-floor crumbs that are driving me batty.

mothering is my aunt who tucked a tiny enamel cross in an envelope and scribbled these words on a note card: “hope i’m helping you carry your cross!” and then wrote that as soon as her daughter could drive her up here from cincinnati, she wanted to sit side-by-side under an apple tree “to make your ‘hurts’ hurt less.”

mothering is the courage to go the distance, even when the distance is wholly uncharted and fraught with shadows and plenty of bumps. and what you need more than anything is a friend who won’t cower and run for the hills.

mothering is the way some listen for the fears tucked in an otherwise straightforward sentence, and who don’t shush those hauntings away, but make room for it all, the light, the darkness, the liminal.

mothering is the text message that comes out of nowhere and makes you laugh till the slits in your side tell you to stop. because laughter is always, always, a curative. and it can carry you for hours, the echo of its joy refusing to fade.

mothering is this holy earth unfurling its tight buds and its blossoms into frothy meringues of cumulus white and lavender blue. mothering is the dawn that reminds me again and again that the light will shatter the night. mothering is the papa bird who tucks the seed into mama’s beak, an iteration of kissing i’ll not soon forget.

mothering is without gender, independent of obstetrical status. mothering, quite frankly, is simply another name for “love as you would be loved.”

mothering, quite simply, is what God does.

blessed mothering to all of you who mother and mother and mother –– even if you don’t realize…

birthday blessings to one of the wise women among us, our beloved lamcal, who fetched me from the darkness last night, and plunked me into a circle of pure and undeniable love, even when i wasn’t sure i was up for an outing. she’d sensed it might do my soul wonders, despite my bodily wobbles and squeaks, and she was oh so very very right on the money. i sat last night in a circle of holy holy pilgrims, who poured out their hearts and their blessings. and sent me forth. happy birthday, wise one….

lest you miss it, here’s the week’s query: tell a story of a time you were so deeply mothered — perhaps by an unlikely motherer — you’ve never forgotten.

and i’m leaving you this. because it’s glorious:

Go Deeper than Love

Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,
love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock
molten, yet dense and permanent.
Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself.
And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.
Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.
For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths
out of sight, in the deep living heart.

~ D.H. Lawrence ~

p.s. even though the picture above is overt mothering with a literal mother cradling her literal baby (moi and my firstborn, the law professor) i had to reach for it today, because that tenderness, that love, is the very thing fueling me right now, as i reach out of these past upturned weeks and set my sights fervently, fiercely, on doing everything i can to keep on loving my boys –– and all of this life –– with every ounce of tender lovingness i can squeeze out of me…..so help me, MotherGod….

equal time for equal mothering: this is saying goodbye one college drop off and that’s the kid who graduates next week. my miracle baby. . .

12 Comments

May 5, 2023

nursing tender things along. . .

barely perceptible nub of palest green, on the first outpost of the left branch of what might once again be my peewee hydrangea…see it?

i found myself crouching down as low as i could go the other day—likely lower than a girl with slits in her side should wisely have gone. but i was intent on inspection. i was searching clumps of stick for little nubs of green. of life. of any sign that the last shrub i planted in the fall — the day before the frost came — had survived the long winter.

it was a long winter for plenty of us — certainly for my garden, newly planted in the weeks not long after the dreaded fence went up next door, and indeed for me.

and yet now the season of birth and rebirth is upon us. from every bough and limb, from every red bird’s throat, the song of springtime’s hallelujah bursts forth and keeps on forthing.

i find myself particularly intent on the tendernesses of this holy spring. i am crouching down low day after day, keeping watch for signs of life, coaxing beauties to unfurl.

poor mama robin laid her egg on a porch railing. oops. fear not, all now is well.

seems a wise posture, that of nursemaid to the birthing earth. it’s one i am learning to mimic as i consider my own deeply tender places, as i picture the convulsions of my poor little lung that likely has no clue what hit it, and why all the folderol and commotion a week or so ago. but it is now doing its darnedest to sew itself back to whole, pressing tight the seams that now are held in place with metal threads. the miracle of the human body is not unlike the miracle of holy earth, and as i slowly walk my garden’s edge, stooping here or there to lend a hand — lifting clematis vine to its fallen trellis, rescuing a robin’s egg mislaid on a railing’s edge — i am breathing in the tender caretaking ways of the God who so tenderly holds us in God’s sacred trusted hand. or so i imagine. none of us has a clue really just what form this God of ours inhabits, so from time to time i apply my storybook imaginings to make it all more apprehensible. i understand the naiveté of picturing a God who scoops me in God’s hand, but somewhere deep in that vision there is a grain of holy comfort. there is an image put to the ineffable. and right in here, i need that image.

i’m not the first to put pictures to my God, and i know i’m not the last. it’s a hard task here on earth to imagine the Divine goodness that inhabits all the cosmos, and surely all the heavens, and then the questions come: is heaven the holy light deep in our hearts? is heaven that palpable knowing that we are held by a goodness beyond our wildest imagination? once upon a time the nuns taught that heaven had a pearly gate, and was carpeted in clouds. oh, lord, they shouldn’t teach such things to wide-eyed little children; it can take a long long time to revise the picture reel inside your head, and why waste time in lala land when God is so much more and vaster and infinitely deeper.

i am spending many chunks of time pondering the presence of God in this messy chapter of my life. what i know is this: when i was deep in the dark tunnel of an MRI that scanned the vessels of my brain, and told not to flinch a single muscle for 45 excruciating minutes, i surrendered to the softest arms i’ve ever known. i imagined them as the arms of God, cradling me. and in that space of utter peace, i rested. and did not flinch, did not cough, did not exercise the itch or cramp in my shoulder; i found the holy wherewithal to do precisely as the doctor ordered.

and that is how i pass the hardest hours. i go deep down under. into the place where God and angels dwell. i’ve no knowledge of this landscape. it’s all uncharted and unknown. but when i go there i am safe. and i am cradled in what feels like love. and that to me is how it feels when i walk my garden’s edge, crouch down low, and lift a hand to bud or vine or mislaid egg. we are all nurturing each other along. God and all of us. and i’ve no idea just how it works, or what it is. but i know i sense a holiness that i am choosing to call my God.

amen.

(i fully grasp that i’m going out on limbs here, groping along in wholly naked ways, but if i don’t use these hours of my life to plumb the deepest questions, to fumble for the truest answers i know, then what worth will these struggles hold? we have a chance to be our best selves in our darkest hardest hours. and these are mine. so far. so why not open the book and see what stirs? i’m impelled to wonder and to muse aloud….)

mama robin, safely atop her mislaid egg. photo by kerry, who saved the egg and whose porch is mama’s birthing room….

and now a few morsels, as has been my way in this year of gathering up bouquets of wisdoms…

Julian of Norwich, an English anchoress who experienced a vision in 1373 and wrote about it in a work titled Showings or Revelations of Divine Love — the earliest surviving book by a woman in the English language. my friends at the SALT Project (emmy-award-winning visual storytellers with a spiritual bent; check them out) laid this excerpt out as a poem. i found it lovely….

And in this he showed me a little thing
the quantity of a hazelnut,
lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed.
And it was as round as any ball.

I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding,
and thought, ‘What may this be?’
And it was answered generally thus,
”It is all that is made.”

I marveled how it might last,
for I thought it might
suddenly have fallen to nothing
for littleness.

And I was answered in my understanding:
It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it.
And so have all things their beginning
by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties.
The first is that God made it.
The second that God loves it.
And the third, that God keeps it.

+ Julian of Norwich

as has been my habit in recent months, i mark the turning of each month by turning to the pages of Henry David Thoreau’s The Journal: 1837–1861. here’s a dreamy entry from the ninth of may when thoreau was 34 and aswirl in the warmth of mid-Spring. (may our warmth please come….)

May 9. It is impossible to remember a week ago. A river of lethe flows with many windings the year through, separating one season from another. The heavens for a few days have been lost. It has been a sort of paradise instead.

Saw a green snake, twenty or more inches long, on a bush, hanging over a twig with its head held forward six inches into the air, without support and motionless. What there for? Leaves generally are most beautiful when young and tender, before insects or weather has defaced them.

These are the warm-west-wind, dream-frog, leafing-out, willowy, haze days. Is not this summer, whenever it occurs, the vireo and yellowbird and golden robin being here? The young birch leaves reflect the light in the sun.

Mankind seen in a dream. The gardener asks what kind of beans he shall plant. Nobody is looking up into the sky.

a little dictionary for those of us who don’t know our greek: lethe: “forgetfulness,” from the river in Hades that causes drinkers to forget their past.

one more thing a brilliant woman sent me this week when i was inquiring whether a certain “tiny retreat” (that’s how it was billed) had a virtual component, for those of us whose lives are pretty zoom-y these days…..

“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”
Catherine of Siena

finally, a profound note of thanks, to the brilliant and bold mountain-mover of a friend i have in poet and scholar (and my former cambridge landlord) mark burrows, who sent a note to all who were at the zoom book launch a few weeks ago (a lifetime ago!), and who implored you to add a little amazon review to my “languishing” Book of Nature. well, the book isn’t languishing but its state of review sure was. i have no understanding of the algorithms of amazon, but apparently, without reviews, you’re sunk. glub. glub. glub. so mark, unbeknownst to me, rallied the forces and got the reviews boosted from 3 to 11, currently. in a million years i couldn’t have done what he did. in these otherwise upturned days, the human species has shown me in brilliant colors just how magnificently we all can be, and love is pouring forth with the might to rocket me to the holy moon, which was magnificent last night if you happened to notice.

so, thank you, blessed blessed mark. and thank every one of you who in your own magnificent ways has stepped to my side in this curious curious walk through springtime 2023…..

love, bam

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