remember that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.
sobering words, as the grainy smudge is pressed upon my brow. it’s the season of shadow in the liturgical calendar, the season for recognizing our mortality, our fleeting time here to attend to the task of our being.
dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
the point of religion, at its wisest, is to strip us to our unfettered incidentality. to put us squarely in our place. we are star dust by chance. but a speck in the great river of time. a mere dot ordained with a task that we trust, we believe, might tip the scales toward goodness, toward light. i believe we’re here to be blessed, to become holiness in flesh form.
six weeks of lent makes it the longest season of the church year outside of ordinary time. i’m no theologian so i’ve not read deeply on that equation, but i have to think it’s telling us something of import if more days are devoted to repenting, to remembering how mortal we are than to filling our heads with the usual noise.
i’ve found myself in recent weeks deep in the writing of a book plumbing the spiritual epiphanies of cancer, which at its heart is a meditation on paying attention, remembering that we will die, and seizing the imperative to live profoundly in the now.
i’ve called it scan time, an abbreviation of time into three- or six-month allotments that serve to focus my seeing. in knowing my time is on the clock, i dive into the work. holy work.
it’s basically living in some iteration of lent from here on in: ashes to ashes. knowing full well that i am dust and to dust i shall return.
it’s a practice of every religion; humility among the highest virtues. recognizing how tiny a dot we are. and admitting how often we falter. putting voice to confession.
judaism distills it on a single day: the day of atonement, as somber a day as there is. a day in which we fast from all things, and scour our soul, confessing our sins from A to Z acrostically. abused, betrayed, been cruel, destroyed, embittered other’s lives. . .
before the naming of each and every one of those sins, both communal and individual, these words from the Yom Kippur prayer book are recited, directed to the almighty and merciful God:
You know the secrets of the universe and the secrets of the human heart. You know and understand us, for You examine our inner lives. Nothing is concealed from You, nothing hidden from Your sight. Eternal One, our God and God of our ancestors, we pray that this be Your will: forgive all our wrongs, pardon us for every act of injustice, help us atone for all our moral failures.
the act of contrition i learned in second grade says it like this:
O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because of thy just punishments, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love.
I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin. Amen.
and the confession in the anglican book of common prayer is not dissimilar:
Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. . .
sins and ashes aren’t things we like to think about. but, oh, they serve their purpose. and in a world where madness is reigning, where blame is cast but rarely admitted, and hubris has inverted the divine equation, i find myself seeking an alternative paradigm, one that answers not to power and vengeance but to mercy and justice and light.
and for a consideration of not our failings but our goodness, meister eckhart weighs in with this wisdom:
The inner person is the soil in which God has sown the divine likeness and image and in which God sows the good seed, the roots of all wisdom, all skills, all virtues, all goodness—the seed of the divine nature. —Meister Eckhart
a few years back, i dove a bit deeper into musings on the day of atonement, a post found here:
you needn’t have been daubed with ashes, nor live with a scary diagnosis, nor recite an alphabet of sins, to recognize the wisdom of silently examining the state of your soul. and stepping forward to make right where you’ve wronged. it’s becoming countercultural in a world taking shape as it is. the ancient ways, though, have lasted. here we are millennia later, and confession still stirs in the human spirit. it takes nerve and true might to live it. needn’t answer here, but what are the profound memories you hold of learning to say, i am sorry? or any other thoughts on ashes and dust, and the sobering truth of our mortality. . .
p.s. i suppose my publisher would reallllly want me to mention (she sent me a little nudge in the social media department, a department where i’m quite often lacking) that The Book of Nature came out in paperback this week, so you can slip a copy more easily into a backpack or pocket. and it’s cheaper!! looks just like its big sister, only a flimsier–er, more pliable––cover.
in which we take a hard look at the crumbling discourse in this country, and consider a solution or two….
i’ll be honest. these are hard times. i pick up the news and feel pummeled by each new blow. i see pillars of democracy crumbling one after another. jeff bezos and the washington post, only the latest. i read of law firms—white shoe ones, meaning old-guard firms who take on some of the highest-profile clients, the most complex cases, aka “the elite”—being stripped of security clearance, being considered for criminal investigation only because they represented a client the current administration has inked onto the enemies list.
i see revenge as the rule of the day.
i’m sickened.
i’ve never prayed to a God of revenge.
but i read, too, that there are stirrings of hope. faint, yet beginning to stir.
you might call it an occupational hazard, but i happen to pay attention to the ways we get news and i worry desperately that we all cower in distant silos. (getting more distant by the day.) i get my news and you get yours and, often, ne’er the twain shall meet.
so how do we have a shared conversation? how do we sit down to the same old table and begin to listen? how do we reach across the table, and in a quiet, unquivering voice, utter the words, “i hear your point”? or the certain conversational lubricant, “say more”? or the nervier, and necessary, “that’s not actually true”?
i hold onto my hunch that most of us want what we think is fair, is just. and i’m not giving up on my fervent belief that if you saw me bleeding on a sidewalk, you would not ask first how i voted and then decide whether or not to lift me off the ground.
i’m fairly certain that in the nearly two decades we’ve been pulling up chairs here, some of us do get our news from different silos. i try to tread lightly. i respect divergence of thought. but the problem, as i see it, is that we are all being fed news in the flavors most to our liking. and that’s not the way the news is supposed to work. it’s not the way it worked for the time i was one of the ones writing what counted as news. and not in the newsroom i knew.
so here’s the jam: if the news you’re being fed is slanted, if some of it’s filtered out, and some of it’s twisted, if both sides aren’t fairly presented, it’s not any sort of surprise that conclusions are drawn, and wedges are wedged.
“…without fear or favor…”
these days, the ones helming the news––the owners, the billionaires who thought it a romp to claim a slot on the masthead––they seem to be in it for hard, cold cash. the one with the most wins. cozying up to power seems a game to which we’re not invited. to get there, you need to fly in your private jet, hopefully not one of the ones making a mess on the runways.
so much for democracy dying in darkness. or that now quaint-seeming declaration of adolph s. ochs in april of 1896, that his newspaper, the venerable new york times, would “give the news impartially, without fear or favor.”
good journalists hold firm to those words. good journalists have died defending those words.
you don’t get into the news biz––chasing after crooks and pols, climbing rickety stairs in darkened hallways, knocking on doors knowing full well you might find a muzzle pointed at the bridge of your nose––because it’s a sure way to raise your heart rate. or just cuz you’re nosey.
you get into the news biz cuz you’re a mad dog for the truth. and the fair telling of stories. you dig and you dig till you find that shimmering shard that, to your best knowledge, and according to more than one reliable source, is unassailably true. i sat beside folks in the newsroom who thought nothing of holing themselves in the dungeons of city hall or the bowels of bureaucrat mazes, riffling through file after file to track down the name and the dollar amount on contracts that might or might not have been legal. that might have unearthed wrongful convictions. or identified bodies dumped on the roadside. and those subterranean scribes had the pallor to prove it, after months and months under the glow of flimsy fluorescent lights. and cups of stale coffee. (we’ll leave the bottles of whiskey for another day.)
these days, the ones coursing the landscape with their reporter pads and pens, their itty-bitty microphones and their smartphone recorders, are plenty besmirched. discounted as little more than rousers of rabble. there’s a strong scent of disdain souring the air.
that’s an unfair and erroneous swipe at all those who abide by the time-tested codes. you might have heard that, um, democracy dies in darkness. and the reporters i know refuse to turn off their flashlights.
my little screed here won’t make a dent. but i cannot give up. none of us can. my faintest hope is that even one someone who reads this might take up the dare: fight fallacy and fiction with verifiable fact. there was an old maxim in the newsroom, one that we more or less lived by: if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.
check your sources for news. read beyond your usual silo. sit down at a table and listen. exercise your ears more than your tongue.
at least for now, it’s a place to begin….
p.s. i know there is a good handful of journalistic heroes who pull up a chair, so if any of you wander by today or tomorrow or anytime soon, feel free to pen your prolific and profound views on the state of news consumption in america, and how it might be at least part of the root of what’s tearing us apart….
only one poem this week, and it’s a wonder from a poet who is a chicago legend, a hero in Black arts…..it’s an ode to books, which is a great place to begin a grounding in knowledge, and finding common language…..be sure to get to the last line, where i’m guessing you’ll let out a sigh. as i did. so much in common….
So Many Books, So Little Time by Haki R. Madhubuti
My sanctuaries are liberated lighthouses of shelved books, featuring forgotten poets, unread anthropologists of tenure- seeking assistant professors, self-published geniuses, remaindered first novelists, highlighting speed-written bestsellers, wise historians & theologians, nobel, pulitzer prize, and american book award winners, poets & fiction writers, overcertain political commentators, small press wunderkinds & learned academics. All are vitamins for my slow brain & sidetracked spirit in this winter of creating.
I do not believe in smiling politicians, AMA doctors, zebra-faced bankers, red-jacketed real estate or automobile salespeople, or singing preachers.
I believe in books. It can be conveniently argued that knowledge, not that which is condensed or computer packaged, but pages of hard-fought words, dancing language meticulously & contemplatively written by the likes of me & others, shelved imperfectly at the level of open hearts & minds, is preventive medicine strengthening me for the return to my clear pages of incomplete ideas to be reworked, revised & written as new worlds and words in all of their subjective configurations to eventually be processed into books that will hopefully be placed on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, homes, & other sanctuaries of learning to be found & browsed over by receptive booklovers, readers & writers looking for a retreat, looking for departure & yes spaces, looking for open heart surgery without the knife.
—Haki R. Madhubuti, who turned 83 this week, is a poet, writer, and educator, who in 1967 founded Chicago’s Third World Press, the largest independent Black-owned press. He’s regarded as an architect of the Black Arts Movement. Born Donald Luther Lee, he changed his name in 1973 after traveling to Africa: “Haki” means “justice” or “rights,” while “Madhubuti” means “precise, accurate, and dependable.” Both names are derived from Swahili. Of his renaming, Madhubuti explained at the time that he wanted to arrive at a new definition of self.
have you had any hard conversations of late? were you afraid to go there? what peaceable tools did you use to navigate? how did it go? will you try again?
A screenshot of a video released by the Ukrainian Police Department Press Service of military helicopters, apparently Russian, flying over the outskirts of Kyiv, February 24, 2022
dear blessed, blessed, good people of ukraine,
we are without words for the depth of our sorrow and our shame. we have betrayed you. cruelly. mercilessly. and we are sorry. we are so, so deeply sorry.
you have no idea of my existence. i am just a silver-haired lady in the middle of america, thousands and thousands of anonymities away, and yet i woke up trembling for the betrayal, and the insanity rained upon you in the form of words. words spoken by an elected leader of a country that until a month ago was doing all it could to ensure your safety, to uphold your humanity.
it is a sordid twist in history i’d prayed i’d never live to see. i thought we vowed never to forget.
the horror is that i don’t think anything is forgotten. from where i sit in an old shingled house on a quiet street near a big cold lake, it sounds as if the betrayal is the worst kind, the knowing kind, the horror not forgotten but ignored. it’s a supreme act of evil hubris the likes of which don’t belong in any century, let alone the one where we’ve allegedly evolved so much as to make machines that almost think like humans. perhaps we should have been investing in our souls. instead of masterminding brains.
three years ago, we sat in front of screens frozen by the sights of maternity wards in rubble, of old ladies huddled in subway tunnels. some of us crowded into the nearest ukrainian churches, to pray with you. to bend our knees, bow our heads, and make the orthodox sign of the cross at the end of prayers whose words we did not know but whose intent we felt with every fiber of our being.
i can’t count the tears i’ve shed, reading stories of newborns blown to bits, of mothers laboring in bomb shelters, imagining the terror of a sky raining bomb after bomb after bomb. as, for three unbearable years, i read the stories of russian soldiers traipsing house to house, raping woman after woman, regardless of her decade. stories of herding children onto buses, tearing them away from families, all but delivering them to lives of sordid inner torture, tortures whose scars might never heal. stories of villagers lined up, plastic bags pulled over heads, shot execution style. the last sound each one heard, the sound of a rifle shot, and a body thudding to the ground, knowing that sound would next be them.
and yet, words from the white house occupant this week turned truth to lies, blamed the war on you, name-called your president, a man whose courage in the face of abysmal fear and threat not long ago brought burning hope to a darkened world. count me among the ones who cried as he walked the aisle of the house chamber of the u.s. capitol to ascend to the podium where his words shook a silent nation to the core. and where the roaring ovation from those in the chamber, and those in living rooms and rec rooms all around this country seemed a wave without end crashing to a shore. we saw hope in you. we prayed we could muster a modicum of the courage you showed, should we ever, ever find ourselves in a plight with even a fraction of the horror in which you lived.
and now, we are the people of this nation that might well become a living symbol of cruel betrayal.
and so, this humble letter, which you shall likely never read, is but one voice, speaking for many, as i fall to my knees, bow my head, and beg forgiveness for the sins thrust upon you.
this ukrainian grandma one of the lasting symbols of a feisty nation that would not, would not surrender.
three years ago, i wrote “exercise in empathy, another name for prayer,” and left it here on the chair. i am leaving it again, complete with the end note and question i left at the time. to remind us of the time when our whole nation felt united in praying for mercy, and willing to do all we could to make it happen…
can you imagine? can you imagine waking up with your bedroom windows shaking, a distant thump unmistakably drenching you in dread, even in the liminal fog of your pre-dawn dreams?
can you imagine lifting your newborn from the crib, cradling him against your breast, and running in the cold to the nearest subway shelter, where you will then spend hours upon endless hours, hearing the faint cacophony of what you know to be bombs exploding on a land you call your own?
can you imagine?
can you imagine rushing to your kitchen, clearing shelves of whatever might fuel you in the long hours ahead, grabbing your dog, your kids, your passport, and climbing behind the wheel of a car with only a half tank of gas, a tank you meant to fill the day before but one of the kids got cranky so you thought you’d put it off?
can you imagine if you were due to show up for an MRI to see how far the cancer had spread, how fractured was the tibia, the hip, the wrist, but now the air-raid sirens blare through the dawn and you have to weigh a trip to the hospital or the nearest border?
can you imagine watching your father fill his duffle bag, turning toward the door, pausing to kiss you on the forehead, watching the tears well up in your mother’s eyes, seeing how her hand now is shaking, how she clutches the sleeve of your father’s coat, and how he pulls himself away, unlocks the door and steps out into darkness? and your mother fills the sudden emptiness with a wail you’ve never heard before?
can you imagine holding a ticket to a flight out in the morning only to awake to find the airports all are closed, bombed in the night, and no air space is safe for flying?
imagining is imperative. imagining is how we weave the invisible threads that make us one united people, that make us begin to know what it is to walk in another’s hell.
imagining is the birthing ground of empathy.
and empathy fuels our most selfless urgent prayer.
empathy––a necessary precondition for loving as you would be loved, the necessity of imagining another someone’s pain or fear or desperation, for sometimes imagining nothing more complicated than cold or hunger or exhaustion so overwhelming you’re sure your heart is on its last full measure––empathy is the exercise that puts form and fuel to prayer, that enfolds its stripped-down architecture in the flesh of humanity. be it agony, or terror. be it frenzy, or dizzying confusion.
empathy is what lifts our prayer out of the trench of numbness, muttering words we memorize but do not mean. empathy fine chisels each and every prayer. catapults us beyond our own self-obsessed borders, across time zone or geography. conjoins our circumstance with that of someone we have never met, someone whose predicament is dire, and is––in fact––beyond our most ignited imagination.
truth is, our empathy cannot take us the whole distance. cannot––despite our deepest straining––plant us in the fiery pit of what it is to be awaking to the bombs, watching the ones we love walk into the inky darkness, not knowing for weeks if they’re dead or alive, maimed or shackled, or someone else’s prisoners of war.
but it’s the place to begin.
and isn’t the whole point of praying to reach across the emptiness, the void, to unfurl the one first filament that might begin to bring us side-by-side, in soul and spirit if not in flesh?
don’t we sometimes pray as if to hoist another’s leaden burden onto the yoke of our own shoulders?
isn’t the heart of it to lift us as one? we’re not here as parties of one, churning up our own little worries, butting our place to the front of the God line. we’re here to pay attention. to scan for hurt and humiliation, to go beyond, far beyond, lip service and throw-away lines.
imagination––the exercise of empathy––is a God-given gift, it’s the thing that equips us to love as you would be loved. without it, our every petition is flat. is a waste of our breath, really.
we invoke the hand, the heart of God, yes. but isn’t it our business, our holy business, to get about the work of trying to weave us into true holy communion?
it is our empathies that just might save us as a people, that just might move us toward the place where all our prayers rise in echo, from all corners, nooks, and crannies.
it’s not often we wake up to war. but we did this week. and so we will in the weeks and weeks to come.
i awake now in unending prayer. another name for exercising empathies, to stay awake to the suffering now inflicted on ones we’re meant to love. even if we’ll never know their names.
***
i searched for a prayer for peace, and came circling back to this, from ellen bass; it is a prayer for all, no matter to whom or what or how you pray:
Pray for Peace
Pray to whomever you kneel down to: Jesus nailed to his wooden or plastic cross, his suffering face bent to kiss you, Buddha still under the bo tree in scorching heat, Adonai, Allah. Raise your arms to Mary that she may lay her palm on our brows, to Shekhina, Queen of Heaven and Earth, to Inanna in her stripped descent.
Then pray to the bus driver who takes you to work. On the bus, pray for everyone riding that bus, for everyone riding buses all over the world. Drop some silver and pray.
Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM, for your latte and croissant, offer your plea. Make your eating and drinking a supplication. Make your slicing of carrots a holy act, each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.
To Hawk or Wolf, or the Great Whale, pray. Bow down to terriers and shepherds and Siamese cats. Fields of artichokes and elegant strawberries.
Make the brushing of your hair a prayer, every strand its own voice, singing in the choir on your head. As you wash your face, the water slipping through your fingers, a prayer: Water, softest thing on earth, gentleness that wears away rock.
Making love, of course, is already prayer. Skin, and open mouths worshipping that skin, the fragile cases we are poured into.
If you’re hungry, pray. If you’re tired. Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day. Shakespeare. Sappho. Sojourner Truth.
When you walk to your car, to the mailbox, to the video store, let each step be a prayer that we all keep our legs, that we do not blow off anyone else’s legs. Or crush their skulls. And if you are riding on a bicycle or a skateboard, in a wheelchair, each revolution of the wheels a prayer as the earth revolves: less harm, less harm, less harm.
And as you work, typing with a new manicure, a tiny palm tree painted on one pearlescent nail, or delivering soda or drawing good blood into rubber-capped vials, twirling pizzas–
With each breath in, take in the faith of those who have believed when belief seemed foolish, who persevered. With each breath out, cherish.
Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace, feed the birds, each shiny seed that spills onto the earth, another second of peace. Wash your dishes, call your mother, drink wine.
Shovel leaves or snow or trash from your sidewalk. Make a path. Fold a photo of a dead child around your Visa card. Scoop your holy water from the gutter. Gnaw your crust. Mumble along like a crazy person, stumbling your prayer through the streets.
–Ellen Bass
how did you learn to pray?
a note in an age of war: when the first reports started seeping in, when the news broke the other night that shelling had started along the northern, eastern, and southern borders of ukraine, it wasn’t long till i found myself thinking of all of you here at the chair. i knew we would all be huddled on the edge of our armchairs, keeping watch, keeping terrible watch. made me wish that every once in a while we could be together in real time, with our real faces and voices. our hearts and souls come to life. maybe after two years without company, without mornings when i set out mugs and bowls spilling with clementines, i am getting hungrier for human contact. made me wonder if maybe one day soon we should gather in a zoom room. i’ll leave this as a thought. i know we’re a gaggle of rather shy souls, but even us shy ones sometimes hunger for company. true company.
my question on this cold february morning of 2025, is what oh what shall we do?
the God of every religion tells us to do it. commands us: love thy neighbor as thyself.
i’ve felt it in my own life, know it to be a force that transcends time, space, and matter. i’ve felt it all but align planets whose orbits were out of whack. i’ve felt it pierce through to the core of me, prompt me to reach down and seize a source, a muscle, i didn’t know that i had. it’s made me more than i ever imagined i could be. lured me out of mighty dark years.
love, thank heaven, is patient. love is keenly perceptive. love, often, won’t take No for an answer.
i’ve felt it shrink distance, make the sound coming through the telephone as close as if we were sidled, thigh to thigh touching, on the seat of a couch in the very same room.
i’ve heard it in barely audible whispers, and in shouts across the corridors of an airport, a hospital, a college campus––a sound so ebullient my heart leaps to quicken its pace.
i’ve spent my life learning how to do it. keeping close watch on the ones i encounter who do it the best. the most emphatically.
i’ve learned it from the little bent man who perched on a hydrant, befriending the pigeons. flocks and flocks of pigeons, he lovingly tended. even in the face of taunts and jeers from the cars passing by.
i’ve learned it from my first best friend who knew without asking how deeply it hurt, how tender it felt to be seen in shadow and light.
i’ve learned it from my long-ago landlady, the one who would knock at my door, come dinnertime, and hand me a hot steaming bowl of avgolemeno, the egg-and-lemon-rich chicken-rice soup that serves as Greek penicillin, and cured what ailed me no matter how awful the day.
i’ve learned it from a 12-year-old girl who lay in a hospital bed, her legs unable to move, paralyzed from the waist down by a tumor lodged in her spine. i’ll never forget the glimmer in her eye, as she looked up and laughed, as she handed me her hand-made papier-mâché green pumpkin head, the one she’d made flat on her back, and with which she crowned me her Irish Pumpkin Queen of a hospital nurse.
i’ve learned it, and felt it: in the canyon of grief, in the vice hold of fear, and in long seasons of haunting despair. it’s the ineffable force with the power to pull us up off the ground, inch us just a little bit forward, and shake off the worries that freeze us in our tracks.
my hunch is that someone at hallmark international invented today, the day in which pink paper hearts are soared hither and yon. or maybe it was the three catholic saints, all named valentine or valentinus, and, as was so often the story, all of whom were martyred for breaking some reason or rule. in the case of third century rome, a priest named valentine defied the emporer who’d ruled that single men made better soldiers than those with a wife, and thus outlawed marriage. valiant valentine, seeing the injustice in the loveless decree, kept about the business of marrying young sweethearts in secret. for this, he lost his head.
earlier still, pagans seized the midpoint, or ides, of the month––february 15––as Lupercalia, a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the roman god of agriculture, and to Romulus and Remus, the founders of rome. a priestly order of roman pagans, the Luperci, gathered at the secret cave where Rom and Rem were thought to have been raised by she-wolves, to sacrifice a goat, which they then stripped of its hide, and sliced into strips. then, according to historians, “they would dip [the strips] into the sacrificial blood and take to the streets, gently slapping both women and crop fields with the goat hide.”*
maybe pink paper hearts are, after all, a step in the right romantic direction.
truth be told, 34 years in, it’s recycled hearts adorning someone’s place at the breakfast table…
*postscript on those slap-happy romans: far from being fearful of the bloody slaps, young roman women were said to welcome the mark of the bloody hides, for it was thought to make them more fertile in the year to come.
lifting the day out of its purely-romantic framing, here are three takes on iterations of love, reminding us of the evolution of love across the decades of marriage, and the love of this one sacred Earth we’ve been given to tend:
first up, the sage from kentucky, farmer-poet-secular priest wendell berry, from a much longer poem, but i was drawn to these three parts, meditations on a long and deepening love…
excerpts fromThe Country of Marriage by Wendell Berry
III. Sometimes our life reminds me of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing and in that opening a house, an orchard and garden, comfortable shades, and flowers red and yellow in the sun, a pattern made in the light for the light to return to. The forest is mostly dark, its ways to be made anew day after day, the dark richer than the light and more blessed, provided we stay brave enough to keep on going in.
IV. How many times have I come to you out of my head with joy, if ever a man was, for to approach you I have given up the light and all directions. I come to you lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace in you, when I arrive at last.
V. Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange of my love and work for yours, so much for so much of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are– that puts us in the dark. We are more together than we know, how else could we keep on discovering we are more together than we thought? You are the known way leading always to the unknown, and you are the known place to which the unknown is always leading me back. More blessed in you than I know, I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing not belittled by my saying that I possess it. Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light enough to live, and then accepts the dark, passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I have fallen tine and again from the great strength of my desire, helpless, into your arms.
and the belle of amherst turns our attention to this world that keeps loving us, despite the ways we batter it, and ignore it…
This world is just a little place, just the red in the sky, before the sun rises, so let us keep fast hold of hands, that when the birds begin, none of us be missing. — Emily Dickinson, in a letter, 1860
and finally, the late great naturalist and essayist Barry Lopez, on how to be awake to this still blessed world, from the foreword to Earthly Love, a 2020 anthology from Orion magazine. He is describing walking a vast landscape––a spinifex plain, or grassy coastal dunes, in North-Central Australia––for the first time, but the wisdom is how to attend to a deepening love:
My goal that day was intimacy — the tactile, olfactory, visual, and sonic details of what, to most people in my culture, would appear to be a wasteland. This simple technique of awareness had long been my way to open a conversation with any unfamiliar landscape. Who are you? I would ask. How do I say your name? May I sit down? Should I go now? Over the years I’d found this way of approaching whatever was new to me consistently useful: establish mutual trust, become vulnerable to the place, then hope for some reciprocity and perhaps even intimacy. You might choose to handle an encounter with a stranger you wanted to get to know better in the same way. Each person, I think, finds their own way into an unknown world like this spinifex plain; we’re all by definition naive about the new, but unless you intend to end up alone in your life, it seems to me you must find some way in a new place — or with a new person — to break free of the notion that you can be certain of what or whom you’ve actually encountered. You must, at the very least, establish a truce with realities not your own, whether you’re speaking about the innate truth and aura of a landscape or a person.
. . . I wanted to open myself up as fully as I could to the possibility of loving this place, in some way; but to approach that goal, I had first to come to know it. As is sometimes the case with other types of aquaintanceships, to suddenly love without really knowing is to opt for romance, not commitment and obligation.
and, later in the same essay, his call to attention for a world suffering from what he quite plainly calls, “a failure to love,” a message of urgency on a day in which love, in its many many iterations, is held up to the light.
EVIDENCE OF THE failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage the havoc — ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war — we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas — the crushing immorality of maintaining the nation-state, the life-destroying beliefs that to care for others is to be weak and that to be generous is to be foolish — can have no future with us.
It is more important now to be in love than to be in power.
these are dark times. chaotic times. times so upside down and alarming, i’m groping for what i can do. sometimes i think the solutions are way, way above my paygrade.
what i know i can’t do is whistle in the dark. blather on about incidental ponderings, pretend that all this will soon go away. it feels as if we’re witnessing wide-eyed the wielding of sledge hammers to bedrock pillars of democracy. who are these 19-year-olds re-writing code in the department of treasury? why in the world would anyone waste a minute of breath renaming a mountain, a gulf, except for extreme case of hubris? and what of claiming gaza, the land of a people who have sustained unthinkable horrors to simply exist on the land of their ancestors, a land now so deeply bloodied i fear it seeps to the core of the planet? to say nothing of erasing the existence of aid to the poor, the hungry, the marginalized around the globe. to strike language and data from federal websites, all but telling vast swaths of humanity they’ve been expunged. to imagine the labs where cures for disease are suddenly stalled, where lives––like mine––depend on those cures.
i have aimed from the beginning not to bleed into politics here. and i still hold firm to that core. what i address here, what i disdain here, is something far more foundational, a vengeance fueled by a mindset that it’s always always us v. them. a philosophy of division, of payback in the cruelest of iterations. a credo of greed. let the weak be weakened, and the few take the pot. and let it all be built on a mound of mistruths, fictions of wild proportion.
we’ve an unspoken bond here at this table that once a week i will leave some platter of words that might open a window. even a crack. let light in to our collective souls. so maybe in these dark times my place is shifting. maybe i’m meant to listen in silence, to keep close watch, to defend the tenets of the God of justice and love. a God whose wisdom is not twisted, turned on its head, shoved to the side for malevolent purpose.
maybe the chair, in these dark and cruel times, is simply a place to swing by, to listen for voices wiser and keener than mine. maybe the chair is a place to come catch your breath. to embolden your spirit. to find brief reprieve.
until the darkness lifts––and wise and faithful souls believe that it will, that We the People in our undeniable goodness and courage shall overcome––i’ll do what i quietly can. my platter today comes with two poems and a slather of chocolate. yes, chocolate. though in this case, it’s the priceless morsel of the story behind katie hepburn’s very own chocolatey brownies that might best the brownies themselves. you decide.
a beauty of a new poem found on diana butler bass’s straight-talking, life-sustaining, deeply soulful the cottage….
Love relentlessly, she said, and I want to slip these two words into every cell in my body, not the sound of the words, but the truth of them, the vital, essential need for them, until relentless love becomes a cytoplasmic imperative, the basic building block for every action. Because anger makes a body clench. Because fear invokes cowering, shrinking, shock. I know the impulse to run, to turn fist, to hurt back. I know, too, the warmth of cell-deep love— how it spreads through the body like ocean wave, how it doesn’t erase anger and fear, rather seeds itself somehow inside it, so even as I contract love bids me to open wide as a leaf that unfurls in spring until fear is not all I feel. Love relentlessly. Even saying the words aloud invites both softness and ferocity into the chest, makes the heart throb with simultaneous urgency and willingness. A radical pulsing of love, pounding love, thumping love, a rebellion of generous love, tenacious love, a love so foundational every step of what’s next begins and continues as an uprising, upwelling, ongoing, infusion of love, tide of love, honest love.
an ode to kindness….aptly titled…
Small Kindnesses
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.” —Danusha Laméris
and now, for katie’s brownies, the story of which first appeared in the letters to the editor of the new york times….
July 6, 2003
To the Editor:
Re the death of Katharine Hepburn last Sunday: For many decades, my father used to walk across town to do his food shopping on Second Avenue. He often shopped at a Gristede’s around the corner from Miss Hepburn’s town house on East 49th Street.
One day he suddenly came face to face with Miss Hepburn, who was also picking up groceries. He acknowledged her with a nod, and she responded in kind. He began thinking of her as a neighbor.
In 1983, my senior year at Bryn Mawr, Miss Hepburn’s alma mater, I was frustrated and was doing poorly, and at Christmas break, I decided to quit. I had the romantic notion of running away to Scotland to write screenplays. My father was frantic. My mother had died two years before, leaving him with all the responsibility for his headstrong daughter.
He knew that Miss Hepburn had gone through her own struggles at Bryn Mawr, so he wrote her a letter asking her to intervene. ”She’s a great admirer of yours, and perhaps she’ll listen to you,” he wrote. On the way to the grocery store, he dropped the letter in her mail slot.
At 7:30 the next morning, the phone woke me up. I answered it and heard that famous voice, crackling with command. ”Is this the young woman who wants to quit Bryn Mawr?” I said it was. ”What a damn stupid thing to do!” she snapped. She went on to give me a lively lecture, the gist of which was that I had to finish my studies and get my degree, and after that I could do what I wanted to do. There was no arguing with her imperiousness. Then she said she wanted to meet us for tea.
The day of our appointment was gray and wintry. Walking the long blocks to Turtle Bay, my father and I didn’t speak much. It felt as if we were about to meet the Queen.
Miss Hepburn greeted us warmly. With casual hauteur, she provided us with tea and some of her famous brownies. Though she was in her 70’s, she had a youthful look, enhanced by her girlish clothes: a turtleneck, a black cardigan and shabby khaki-green pants.
We talked about many things, including Bryn Mawr. She said that she was miserable there and still had nightmares about it, but she was glad she went. At the end of the afternoon she told me, in a rather grim tone, ”You’re smart.” It was a compliment, but also an admonition not to be foolish in the future.
My father was invited to visit her a few times after that. Once, he had heard that she was recovering from a serious car accident, and he stopped by to drop off a package of homemade brownies and a get-well note. To his surprise, he was ushered in and invited into her boudoir, where she greeted him in her nightgown. She sampled his brownies.
”Too much flour!” she declared. She then rattled off her own recipe, which he hastily wrote down. ”And don’t overbake them! They should be moist, not cakey!”
I’ll always be grateful to Miss Hepburn for making me stick it out at Bryn Mawr and for giving me these rules to live by: 1. Never quit. 2. Be yourself. 3. Don’t put too much flour in your brownies.
KATHARINE HEPBURN’S BROWNIES
1/2 cup cocoa 1 stick butter 2 eggs 1 cup sugar 1/4 cup flour 1 cup broken-up walnuts or pecans 1 teaspoon vanilla pinch of salt
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Melt butter in saucepan with cocoa and stir until smooth. Remove from heat and allow to cool for a few minutes. Mix in eggs, one at a time. Add sugar, flour, nuts, vanilla and salt. Pour into a greased 8×8 square pan. Bake 40 minutes. ”Don’t overbake!” They should be gooey. Let cool (an essential step) and cut into bars.
Heather Henderson St. Paul, Minn.
how, pray tell, are you finding your way? chocolatey or otherwise…
with planes crashing into helicopters, and bodies falling into the potomac, and DEI blame being cast with no evidence in sight, i am in no mood to add more noise to the prattle. why tragedy needed to take a sharp turn into retribution, why our skies feel suddenly shaky, is only adding to the despondency i struggle to keep at bay.
i heard stories this week of kids i love, one in far off thailand teaching english in remote villages for the peace corps, terrified that the freezing of federal funds would shatter their dreams in the making. i’ve heard stories of dish washers and cooks in chicago’s little village, a mostly mexican corner of the city, afraid to show their face on the streets, forgoing paychecks in lieu of being handcuffed and torn from the families they love.
we live in a rippling circle of fear and confusion, a darkness is shrouding day after day.
in my teeny-tiny circle of life closer to home, some of that darkness is countered by flickering light. i find good reason for joy. feel wishes come blessedly true. i’ve lived to see a day i had prayed and prayed for, for one of my boys. and i am witness to the fire burning in the dreams of another.
just days ago, i was holed up in a rambling old house on the shore of one great lake with four glorious women whose lives have been marred and scarred by tragedy, and yet, they’ve risen. they’ve written their way through darkness toward light. and they are magnificent. and so so brave. (one wrote the searing memoir while you were out; two others are soon coming with masterpieces all their own. a fourth, i hope, will someday publish her stories that cut to the bone.)
i hobbled home, after an otherwise uneventful walk on a stone-sprinkled beach, with an unhappy ankle.and a quick trip to the foot doc had me strapped into what feels like a leaden boot, and has curtailed my daily constitutionals for the next few weeks. but that’s not all: before week’s end, the resident triathlete in this old hovel had his knees poked and prodded and subjected to space-age medicine, and thus we’ve declared this the hobbledy house. indeed, we are a hobbling, most humbled pair, trading ice packs and heating pads, advil and tylenol, as prescribed by our duet of doctors.
and so my offerings this week rest on the shoulders of others far wiser, less wobbly, than me. cumulatively, they compound the point that we are the solution to the miasma that abounds.
this is our time, of all the times in our lives, to dig down deep as we can, and pull out the fiercest, finest truths we believe in. we must make true the life that ought to be. take it from this collection of seers and sages: clifton, mandelstam, rilke, and trommer, poets all.
In the bigger scheme of things the universe is not asking us to do something, the universe is asking us to be something. And that’s a whole different thing.
— Lucille Clifton
“What tense would you choose to live in?” the poet Osip Mandelstam once asked his journal, before answering his own question. “I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle—in the ‘what ought to be.’”
Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength.
So I can’t save the world— can’t save even myself, can’t wrap my arms around every frightened child, can’t foster peace among nations, can’t bring love to all who feel unlovable. So I practice opening my heart right here in this room and being gentle with my insufficiency. I practice walking down the street heart first. And if it is insufficient to share love, I will practice loving anyway. I want to converse about truth, about trust. I want to invite compassion into every interaction. One willing heart can’t stop a war. One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry. And sometimes, daunted by a task too big, I tell myself what’s the use of trying? But today, the invitation is clear: to be ridiculously courageous in love. To open the heart like a lilac in May, knowing freeze is possible and opening anyway. To take love seriously. To give love wildly. To race up to the world as if I were a puppy, adoring and unjaded, stumbling on my own exuberance. To feel the shock of indifference, of anger, of cruelty, of fear, and stay open. To love as if it matters, as if the world depends on it.
how might you begin to try — not to save the world, nor even your own sweet self — to practice opening your heart, to be gentle with your insufficiencies, to take love seriously, give wildly, and live in the imperative of the future passive participle, in what “ought to be”?
i’ve been mulling these past few months how to move forward in a world where values that shatter me seem to be in ascendency: revenge, retribution, greed, humiliation, belittlement, and so much of it based on a metastasis of mistruth.
i’d been thinking that keeping my head down and plowing along in a spirit of turn-the-other-cheek, love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself might be a place to begin. might go a long distance.
but i don’t think that anymore.
i don’t think it’s nearly enough.
i think something much harder is called for. i think we’re called upon to reach deep in our souls, and pull up something called courage.
courage, when you’ve been taught to demur, to not make too many waves, courage when your father forbid you to use your real name in a basically-tame high school underground paper, courage when you don’t want to hurt those whom you love, can be an awkward suit to slip on.
i stumble sometimes trying to get my arms through its sleeves.
but i’m thinking it might be a fire built from these sticks: first, root yourself in verifiable truths (check, check, and triple check your sources); second, inhale grace; be clear; be compassionate; be compassionate. keep the most vulnerable keenly in your crosshairs.
and here’s the hard part: put voice to what you believe. correct mistruths when you hear them. amplify the voice of the voiceless. whether it’s in kitchen table conversations, or what serves as the modernday public square (my preference is those sites where fact-checking and vetting are part of the constitution). whether it’s spoken or scribbled or typed.
because conflict aversion lies deep in my DNA, and all but breaks me into hives, i find i’m less afraid when i remind myself that to hold a differing opinion is not to discount or disdain the one who holds it. without discourse, we all stay stuck. without courage, we’re cowards, wasting our time and our breath on our one short ride on this planet.
i’ve been keeping close watch all week on various lists of how to meet these times, how to keep on keeping on, and not a one of the lists suggests keeping mum. speak up. speak truth.
my own code of ethics is one that insists on gentleness, on a voice imbued with humility.
i heard such a voice this week, one that broke through the cacophonies that otherwise abounded, all wrapped in shimmering glitz. you won’t be surprised, perhaps, to know that it was an ordained woman of God, a bishop in washington DC, who took a deep breath, who acknowledged being afraid, but spoke up anyway, asking for mercy, one of the essential beatitudes outlined at the sermon on the mount. and she did so looking straight into the eyes of the newly-inaugurated president, who scowled and looked away, and later deemed her a “so-called Bishop” (reminds me of how, on national TV, he called my husband a “third-rate architecture critic,” adding that “most people thought he got fired,” back in the summer of 2014 on the Today Show, when they––along with Chicago’s mayor at the time––got into an architectural scuffle over the 20-foot-tall letters of the Trump sign on the real estate mogul’s eponymous Chicago skyscraper). And then in this week’s prayer service the President went on to add that the bishop was a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater.”
her name is mariann edgar budde, and she is the episcopal bishop of washington, DC. and the full 14:56 minutes of her sermon are worth a listen (or two.) my prayer is that in my one short swift and very small life, i might find such a voice in my own, and put breath to it when and where it most matters.
bishop budde, it turns out, wrote a book on how we learn to be brave. and i’ve peeked inside while awaiting my copy. worth reading is this:
and this:
and before signing off, inspiration on courage from kentucky bard and old-fashioned farmer wendell berry:
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
― Wendell Berry
and the incomparable maya angelou:
INSPIRATION
We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life.
Love arrives and in its train come ecstasies old memories of pleasure ancient histories of pain. Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.
We are weaned from our timidity In the flush of love’s light we dare be brave And suddenly we see that love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.
— Maya Angelou
where have you found courage of late? did it feel awkward? did it make a discernible difference?
i’m not too keen on wearing my medical woes on my sleeve, and in fact i wish i could keep them locked tight in a jar at the back of the cellar. but because sometimes i can’t hide how afraid i get, and because profound wisdoms are here to be unearthed in riding the hills and vales of cancerland, i’ve thought hard about when to say what. or whether to ever say anything at all. and today, i have a story to tell that might make you smile, and might bring you hope — for whatever your own scary tale is. (and it wouldn’t seem fair to leave you thinking that happy twists are never somewhere off in the distance.)
it’s a chapter that began back in early october when my every-six-months scan came back not the way anyone wanted, and the surgeon who called to give the bad news spent less than three minutes on the phone spelling it out, including the seconds it took for him to tell me that if in fact it was a recurrence (an especially bad thing, a mere 18 months from first diagnosis) they’d consider taking out the rest of my lung. that’s a lot for a girl to swallow in less than the time it takes to peel the skin off an apple.
he wound up telling me he wanted to push up my next scan to just after the new year, a date that seemed a grand canyon away, the far side of thanksgiving, christmas, new years, and my birthday.
so i did what any scared person with a bolt of bad news might do: i stopped breathing, started to cry, and because i was home alone i dialed a brother i love, a brother i’ve leaned on more than once when life’s at its thickest. (it was too scary to tell my own boys or practically anyone else for that matter, not when there were so many questions and no answers in sight. my number one instinct, no matter the script, seems to always be to protect my boys from unneeded worries. so i waited till i could give them more than a basket of runaway fears.)
tears dried that ominous october morn, i got on the horn, or in this case the keyboard whose little black keys allow me to reach far and wide to my wee brigade of self-assembled experts who understand the ins and outs of my wily little cancer, a cancer that doesn’t like to play by anyone’s rules. my No. 1 expert, a fellow with nose to the microscope who studies this rare iteration as well as lovingly caring for people who have it, wanted me to board a plane and fly to salt lake city to go under anesthesia and have a little chunk of lung snipped out for biopsy: the surest way to get to the bottom of things. but he also decided in the end that it might be just as reasonable, and a whole lot less stress, to wait for the next scan in chicago, a mere four weeks difference between the two options.
it would not be understatement to say that i was pretty much as scared as i’ve ever been for a good bunch of that time. went so far as to type up housekeeping instructions, made sure my passwords were all up to date, and even thought hard about a few other things too dark to type here. it’s what happens when you know there’s a cancer lurking inside and you’ve no idea what it’s up to, but the indications aren’t good.
i admit to a panic attack or two before things settled down. but then i started breathing again, and the day before my birthday (the one i’d once worried would never come) i swam a mile in my little warm bath of a swimming pool (i swim with the seniors these days, and by seniors i mean the ladies who glide out of wheelchairs and into the pool where they take laps walking edge to edge of the pool.) and the day before the scan i did it again. a mile, that is. my dear mama, looked at me in that way that she can, and asked, “what are you trying to prove?” to which the answer would be, that cancer can’t catch me. as if.
well, it took a good week for the radiologists at my big fancy medical center to get a close look at the scan and when they did they finally sent word: looks good, they agreed. and even tossed in a cherry on top when they wrote “mild improvement” in one particularly concerning spot.
it took a minute or two for the truth to sink in, but the image that came soonest to mind was a big shimmering diamond. a blob of diamond the likes of which i’d not before pictured in such shimmering shards of luminous light.
i felt like someone had just handed me the hope diamond, the gift of six whole months before they need to go in there and peek around again. i felt the full sweep of six months in which every sentence my boys speak isn’t backwashed by my own private fear that i won’t be around for the end of the story.
to be told that your worries, the ones that all but froze you in fear, are lifted, are zapped, are momentarily wiped off the map, is to be catapulted into a landscape you’d thought was a no-trespassing zone.
it’s pretty much like getting your life handed back to you on a plate. a gold-rimmed one.
you get to imagine the very few ways you wish to cherish this breathtaking time. you consider buying a pair of plane tickets and telling each of your boys to pack a bag and fly away with you for a weekend. to take long walks, and sit over candlelit dinners. to hold hands on the sands of a beach. or a bustling city sidewalk. to tell the deepest truths. and to say as many times as you possibly possibly can that you will love them till beyond the end of all time.
you think of the moments you might be around to absorb now that you’re not being shoved toward the exit. and the peals of pure joy sure to rise up when wee dreams come true. and maybe a big one or two.
you think of how blessed you’ll feel, day in and day out, when not an hour nor minute is taken for granted. when staring up into a starry night, or tiptoeing into the dawn will each be a moment you’d feared would not come. will be a moment of beauty you all but bathe in, every drop of it sacred and whole.
simply because you’re alive, you’re awake, and you’re drinking it in.
you take a deep breath once again, and you all but fall on your knees: life is giving you one more run at making it count. and you’ll not waste it. you utterly, totally, certainly promise.
here, some of the holiest words i read this week, while working my way through a good old-fashioned case of influenza, the kind with fever and cough that send you under the blankets….
May you grow still enough to hear the small noises earth makes in preparing for the long sleep of winter, so that you yourself may grow calm and grounded deep within.
May you grow still enough to hear the trickling of water seeping into the ground, so that your soul may be softened and healed, and guided in its flow.
May you grow still enough to hear the splintering of starlight in the winter sky and the roar at earth’s fiery core.
May you grow still enough to hear the stir of a single snowflake in the air, so that your inner silence may turn into hushed expectation.
–David Steindl Rast, May You Grow Still Enough To Hear
and lastly, when you’re lying around under blankets, poking around the internet is the most fun you might find, so here’s what i found when i got curious about the hope diamond this week:
the Hope Diamond, which happens to be blue as the sky in july, weighs in at a walloping 45.52 carats, and thus has been heralded round the world since the 18th century, though its story traces back to when it was dug from an indian mine a century earlier.
according to the mind hive that is wikipedia, its recorded history begins in 1666, when the French gem merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier purchased it in India in uncut form. After cutting it and renaming it “the French Blue” (Le bleu de France), Tavernier sold it to King Louis XIV of France in 1668. It was stolen in 1792 and re-cut, with the largest section of the diamond appearing under the Hope name in an 1839 gem catalogue from the Hope banking family, from whom the diamond’s name derives.
did any happy twists in a tale come upon you this week?
i’m at a loss and not inclined this week to take up too much oxygen on this earth that is thirsting for rain. or snow. or even a dense fog to begin to smolder the flames that have made for apocalyptic infernos in the land of the backyard grapefruit and avocado, the storybook land where palm trees might be outnumbered only by show runners and gaffers and star-studded trailers.
the west coast is burning like hell and, among too many tragedies to count, one beloved friend has lost his whole classroom filled with 20 years of teaching, and others whom i don’t know have lost everything that constitutes the villages they call home: from the immigrant dry cleaners where they’re known by their shirts and their preference for starch, to the grocery stores where checkers are friends who ask about the kids and how quickly they’ve grown, to the churches and temples and mosques where knees are bent and prayers are sent up, to street after street of somebody’s home, once brimming with ballast and trinkets and treasures saved a whole life long––now embers at best.
it’s the unspoken threads, the immaterial, the irreplaceable human-to-human bonds that feel forever lost. and therein is the crushingest blow.
i often am inclined to keep the big, bad world at bay here. to set the table and let us live our pensive lives in sacred quietude, paying attention to the little noticed. but over the years, the outside has rushed in when the horrors and heartache are too much to ignore. when the grieving belongs to us all.
so it is with the incineration of the city of angels.
i can’t fathom it. can’t imagine the roar of a wall of flame barreling toward the windows, walls, and roofs where Christmas trees might have still been twinkling, where menorahs were just tucked back into cupboards. can’t imagine trying to not breathe in the toxins that are sure to leave scars in too many lungs (lungs are of prime consideration in my anatomy book these days).
my best friend, a long-time california girl, texts whenever she has even a percentage of power in her phone. and begs to talk so she can be soothed by the voice of someone not looking into the distance for the billowing smoke, or the closer-coming wall of red, orange, and blue flame.
she counts herself among the lucky unlucky, she says, for her husband indeed lost his meticulously cataloged classroom bookshelves, and his reams and reams of term papers saved (from before the digital age), and index card notes, and god knows what else a superstar english lit teacher saves. tragic irony is that he spent the summer finally clearing their garage of his files, and methodically transferring all to his bungalow classroom at Palisades Charter High, where beloved colleagues have lost classrooms and every bit of their homes. so suddenly the loss of only a classroom and a lifetime of teaching accoutrements stirs my best and longest friend to place herself in the lucky-unlucky column.
one of my brothers, one i adore for a million and ten reasons, not least of which is because he takes his care for the earth so deeply seriously, walking miles instead of driving, living with the sparest of necessities, always opting for a tent and starry night over any five-star hotel, hit the nail on the head when he captured the debacle thusly:
“Long past time for blame. It’s not politicians, it’s humankind. Most avoid living as if nature matters, yet many are surprised when nature reminds us that she matters. While sad, these fires and losses are not unimaginable.”
we need to do better. we need to remember: this earth is the heart of a sacred equation. it’s ours to romp in, to delight in, to “awe” in. it bountifully feeds us and clothes us and warms us and shelters us. and brings us infinite timeless wisdoms. but it’s begging we till it and keep it. as in the beginning, and ever after. amen.
a pair of bananaquit
i’m turning for wisdom again to my friend and fellow pilgrim suleika jaouad, in which she further outlines her antidotes for worry and fear, two conditions that quite prominently rear their heads in CancerLand….(here, prompted by the first bird she saw this year, a little caribbean bird called bananaquit, with a common name “the sugar bird,” suleika went for sweetness as her quest for 2025…funny how intent the searching for essence becomes when life-altering diagnosis is the propellant….
Looking for the sweetness seems like a perfect antidote to the worry and fear. By looking for the sweetness, I mean seeking beauty, presence, and peace in every circumstance, letting go of my fears of suffering and death and what binds us to the material world, being nourished by what’s already inside of us—the nectar of bliss, as its called in Bhagavad Gita. It’s an ongoing practice—to stay nimble, to accept the constant flux, to find contentment wherever I am.
a simple question answered by a modernday mystic:
What do I mean by contemplation? And why does meditation lead us into this state of contemplation? Well, Thomas Aquinas defined contemplation very simply as ‘the simple enjoyment of the truth.’ The simple enjoyment of the truth. You couldn’t get anything more simple than that. It is simply finding joy in what is. —Brother Lawrence Freeman OSB, World Community for Christian Meditation
seek joy, dear friends. and thank heaven for the peace and calm and freedom from fear that allows you to sit pensively at your kitchen table, or to look out a window, mug of hot something in hand, and dream of a kinder, gentler, more just world of our making….
arguing that loving is not some passive happenstance that wafts in like fairy dust, but rather a human art that insists we practice as a painter would daub day after day at her paints, or a sculptor with her forms and clay, the great german social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher erich fromm in his 1956 masterwork The Art of Loving makes the case: love is a skill to be honed the way artists apprentice themselves to the work on the way to mastery, demanding of its practitioner both knowledge and effort.
The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering. What are the necessary steps in learning any art? The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one — my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art — the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for music, for medicine, for carpentry — and for love. And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power — almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving. —Erich Fromm
and finally, simply because i love the language and the imagery, a bit of eliot to usher us into the week to come…
Chorus X from “The Rock” by T.S. Eliot
O Light Invisible, we praise Thee! Too bright for mortal vision. О Greater Light, we praise Thee for the less; The eastern light our spires touch at morning, The light that slants upon our western doors at evening. The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight, Moon light and star light, owl and moth light, Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade. О Light Invisible, we worship Thee!
We thank Thee for the lights that we have kindled, The light of altar and of sanctuary; Small lights of those who meditate at midnight And lights directed through the coloured panes of windows And light reflected from the polished stone, The gilded carven wood, the coloured fresco. Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward And see the light that fractures through unquiet water. We see the light but see not whence it comes. О Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!
In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain. We are children quickly tired: children who are up in the night and fall asleep as the rocket is fired; and the day is long for work or play. We tire of distraction or concentration, we sleep and are glad to sleep, Controlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the seasons. And we must extinguish the candle, put out the light and relight it; Forever must quench, forever relight the flame. Therefore we thank Thee for our little light, that is dappled with shadow. We thank Thee who hast moved us to building, to finding, to forming at the ends of our fingers and beams of our eyes. And when we have built an altar to the Invisible Light, we may set thereon the little lights for which our bodily vision is made. And we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of light. O Light Invisible, we give Thee thanks for Thine great glory!
“The Rock” was Eliot’s play written and performed in 1934, to raise money for the building of new churches. it speaks to humankind’s relation to God, and the implications of a world lived without religion. makes me wonder what Eliot might write today, in a world where religions have wandered so far from their holy essence. the “choruses” in this 21-page play are spoken by the workers, the bands of laborers who build the churches, and is thought to be strongly pro-religion with anti-communist overtones in reaction to the “looming shadow of totalitarian regimes building in Europe and the rumblings of the coming Second World War.” apt.
as i write this, snow in fat flakes is tumbling down, birds are traffic jammed at the feeder, and all is silent save for the ticking of an old, old arthritic clock and the whoosh of a furnace. i am so deeply conscious of how blessed we are that we take our physical safety for granted here in the middle lands this morning. instead of a question, this is a morning for simple reflection, counting the blessings we so often forget to notice….
top photo above by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images
when i take a deep breath in tonight, and close my eyes to make a wish, there is only one wish i’m wishing this year: i wish for a birthday next year.
that’s everything, really.
i’ll be wishing so hard.
it’s a wish that feels so far away. and so very big. like i’m asking for the moon.
it’s a wish that carries a secret. one the sages and prophets and poets have known for a very long time.
it’s a paradox wish. it’s a koan. it’s a wish that makes you think. perk up and pay attention. root around for the wisdom, the immutable truth.
truth is, it’s even bigger than it seems. it’s a russian doll of a wish. one of those ones with umpteen tiny-grained wishes within. grain by grain by grain we make it across a year, and year by year a lifetime.
a birthday next year.
doesn’t sound like too much. but, oh, it’s infinite really.
the blessing of cancer––and yes there are blessings, ones the sages and prophets all seem to have known without needing the verdict, without the scalawag cells lurking in shadows, cells that can’t wait to divide and multiply and muck up the works––is that it rejiggers your seeing. it’s the psychophysics of vision: when range is narrowed, acuity’s heightened. you learn to look not too far into the offing; you learn to look more closely than ever at whatever it is that’s right there before you. and, thus, you see all the more clearly the finest of grains all along the way.
the fine grains are where the wonder, the magic, the awe, are kerneled inside, awaiting their turn to burst forth, to be seen, savored, not left by the wayside.
life in the up-close, life when we’re listening for whispers not waiting for timpani, is how we come to know the most sacred grain therein.
in wishing for one more birthday––please God, just one is all i’m wishing this year (if wishes come true, i’ll wish it again and again and again as long as i can)––what i’m really wishing for are those tiny, tiny moments that strung onto a cord make for one holy rosary.
within my one moon-size, more-than-anything wish, here are some of the grains nestled inside:
i wish for the holy, holy sound of one or both of my boys calling me at some unlikely hour to tell me one of their dreams has come tumbling true. or at least the latest chapter therein. and before they’ve uttered a word, i’ll know from the sound of their breathing that the news that’s coming is good. and, dear God, i don’t wanna be stingy but i’d sure love one or two more of those sweet, sweet jubilant sounds.
and while i’m wishing, i sure wish i get to hear the rough draft versions of those dreams, as they’re in the making, as my boys try them on for size and dare to let me in on the beta versions.
i wish for their soft, big hands to wrap around my now-more-wrinkled littler one––to hold me steady, be it a cobblestone walk or life’s herky-jerky jolts tipping me over.
i wish for one of those early mornings where no one is stirring but me, and the dawn hasn’t yet rosied the sky, and the biggest decision i’m called to make is which mug should i pull from the shelf.
i wish to sink my teeth into the sweetest strawberry of the season. ditto the crispest apple of fall. and the juiciest of august’s tomato.
i wish to run down the airport corridor one more time and into the arms of my faraway boy, all while loudly belting out, “it’s been five years!” (even when it hasn’t been), only because all the good souls slumped in their hard plastic seats deserve a little airport sentimentality. even if it’s improv, and utterly fiction. and because there’s nothing i love so much as the arms of my boys wrapped round my shoulders.
i wish to come to the last page of a book with tears rolling down my cheeks, not yet wanting to say goodbye to characters i’ve come to love.
i wish to sit down to dinner with only the one i love, or to a table filled with nearly a dozen i adore.
i wish to exhale that one cleansing breath when the last of the dishes are done, and all that’s left is a long evening of laughter and stories and loving.
i wish for the sound of the crackling logs on the fire.
i wish to wake up one morning and remember there is not a single worry weighing me down.
i wish i could gather all the people i love—or just a good handful––and plonk down at a table where no one tries to corner the conversation and everyone takes a generous turn. and by the time i’m getting up from the table, i am marveling once again at the goodness, the depth, the hilarity of the vast human character.
i wish i could stand under the stars and behold the star-salted sky.
i wish i could pray so deeply that i felt the shoulder of God brushing against me. or catch myself walking alone in the woods and feeling a shaft of light break through the boughs, and sense that i wasn’t one bit alone, but that the God who i love was leading me forward.
i wish for those beautiful blessed souls who populate hospitals in the unlikeliest spots, the ones who radiate the gift of making you feel so deeply seen. and safe. and cocooned.
i wish for a sermon so stirring it breaks me into tears.
i wish to hear the soul-stirring sound of the deepest laughter there is from the people i love who laugh the heartiest laugh, the sort of laughter that runs tears down your cheeks. and makes you gasp for a breath.
i wish i could answer the knock at the door and be just the person that someone needs, the shoulder to cry on, the arms to hold them steady, the one to dry the tears.
i wish i could wake up one morning and read a headline that makes me believe the good guys will finally, finally win. and that plain old gentle kindness and the raw courage to speak up for what’s fair and right and just will bend the arc toward justice once again….
that’s enough wishes for one russian doll of a wish, though the truth is i’m only beginning…
i found a few nuggets to launch this holy new year, all worthy of contemplation. the first is from the writer suleika jaouad, a comrade on the cancer road (and wife of the brilliant musician jon batiste). she’s suffering godawful setbacks these days and i’m holding her in my every day’s prayers…:
This year, we’re contemplating and reveling in the idea of magic. It’s based on a theme I’ve found myself returning to: the need to let go of the fear of the unknown and instead to open ourselves up to the mysteries and the magic of the unknown. That’s my constant work—and in this time when our world feels more uncertain than ever before, I’d venture to say that it’s all of our work.
from the inimitable mystic and theologian henri nouwen who guides my every day:
Born to Reconcile
If you dare to believe that you are beloved before you are born, you may suddenly realize that your life is very, very special. You become conscious that you were sent here just for a short time, for twenty, forty, or eighty years, to discover and believe that you are a beloved child of God. The length of time doesn’t matter. You are sent into this world to believe in yourself as God’s chosen one and then to help your brothers and sisters know that they are also Beloved Sons and Daughters of God who belong together. You’re sent into this world to be a people of reconciliation. You are sent to heal, to break down the walls between you and your neighbors, locally, nationally, and globally. Before all distinctions, the separations, and the walls built on foundations of fear, there was a unity in the mind and heart of God. Out of that unity, you are sent into this world for a little while to claim that you and every other human being belongs to the same God of Love who lives from eternity to eternity.
and, not least, my favorite, favorite after-Christmas prayer-poem from howard thurman, a prophet of his time. . .
The Work of Christmas
When the song of the angels is stilled, When the star in the sky is gone, When the kings and princes are home, When the shepherds are back with their flock, The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost, To heal the broken, To feed the hungry, To release the prisoner, To rebuild the nations, To bring peace among others, To make music in the heart.
— Howard Thurman
what one wish will you make this year?(you needn’t reveal here, of course!)
bless you, each and every one for making this year more blessed than you might ever imagine. you have been there for me at every turn. even when you did not know it. and i am forever blessed by you.
p.s. photo above is from a few years back, but it captures the depth of a wish being cast to the stars and the heavens above….
pull up a chair 