pull up a chair

when i need to talk to God, and i do plenty often these days, there is one certain place i know God will be waiting. i know it because i feel it. and feeling God is much more than knowing. at least to me it is.

the place where God all but reaches down and swoops me into God’s arms is at the shoreline, where the vault of blue heaven is vast, is infinite, where the water’s edge might take on any one of uncountable modes: it might be uncannily calm, so calm the ripple is but a purling, a burbling so barely perceptible it’s as if the lake is tickling the sand; or it might be roiling and cacophonous, so deafening you can barely hear the words rising from your own throat.

i could stand there all day, my toes planted in sand, my head tilted back, eyes wide. heart thrust forward and up, up.

i’ve been walking there each day with my beloved. our footfalls in the sand the only sign we’ve been by. sometimes, if i go alone, i curl small as a hedgehog and settle into the grasses that rise from the hillocks of sand. i stay till the last of my prayers are unfolded, laid at the lap of the One Who Is Listening.

it’s as holy a place as i know.

to feel God reach down and hold you, to know that the vastness above is deep and wide and forever enough to absorb each and every whisper and plea, to know that the deepest cries of your heart might be heard, to feel the soothing that comes as if your trembling shoulders are now wrapped in angora skeins, that is to me the very essence of a God who’s bigger and deeper, more infintely tender and close, than anything or anyone i could ever, ever imagine. or behold.

some days i need a God of extra-big volume and size. a God big enough to hold me, to press against me so firmly that all of my worries, like wrinkles, are melted away. those are the days i look to the heavenly dome. where mine is a God who knows me inside and out. sometimes my insides are so very scrambled and messy.

it’s the closest i’ve come to that magnificent image of saint john of the cross, the one who rested his head against jesus’ chest at the very last supper, who let it be known that he was listening for the heartbeat of God. an indelible image that’s become a life-giving instructive (a particularly celtic one) for us all: to listen wherever we go for the unending pulsebeat and presence of God.

sometimes, inside the rooms of a house your worries can clang around noisily, too noisily. they can crowd out all of the air, and make you want to climb out of your skin. that’s where the heavens come in, where the shortest reach between me and my God is the indigo dome of the night at the beach, or the undulations of blues and grays in mid-afternoon. dawn at the water’s edge is a whole other slide show, one played out in the fieriest streaks of the rosy-red color wheel.

and those are the days i all but run to the shoreline, to the water’s edge, where the alchemy of sand, sea, and sky are stirred into a medicinal balm, a sacred balm, like no other. and the God to whom i run always, always is there for me.

here’s a little extra beauty from the late poet anne sexton, whose story is drenched in struggle and sorrow, but who reached for the light coming in through the cracks. i tell a little bit of her story down below, but first, the poem:

Welcome Morning

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry “hello there, Anne”
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard,
dies young.

Anne Sexton

sexton, a 20th-century american poet, was considered one of the Confessional poets, along with maxine kumin, sylvia plath, and robert lowell. after the birth of her first daughter, she suffered from post-partum depression, had her first so-called nervous breakdown, and was admitted to a psych hospital. she suffered depression the rest of her life, a life that ended in suicide when she was 45.

although her poetry was criticized by some as “soap opera-ish,” others praised it for the ways it expressed “the paradoxes deeply rooted in human behavior and motivation. her poetry presents multiplicity and simplicity, duality and unity, the sacred and the profane.”

one of sexton’s earliest champions, erica jong, reviewing her 1974 The Death Notebooks, argued for sexton’s poetic significance, claiming her artistry was seriously overlooked: “she is an important poet not only because of her courage in dealing with previously forbidden subjects, but because she can make the language sing. of what does [her] artistry consist? not just of her skill in writing traditional poems … but by artistry, i mean something more subtle than the ability to write formal poems. i mean the artist’s sense of where her inspiration lies …there are many poets of great talent who never take that talent anywhere … they write poems which any number of people might have written. when anne sexton is at the top of her form, she writes a poem which no one else could have written.”

where are the places in your world where your prayers feel especially heard? where a holy comfort might enwrap you? and you just might feel held? and, thinking of sexton’s poem, if you were to write a litany of morning joys, what would be among your joys?

prayers for this country as we cross over the threshold of this next election. prayers for peace, prayers for truth, prayers for grace….

9 Comments

October 25, 2024

pay attention to this one most blessed day. . .

i am sitting here in a shaft of golden light spilling across the worn planks of this old maple table. i am looking out at a world ablaze in iterations of gold. as if the world out my window is a benjamin-moore paint strip, all in the key of saffron.

i sighed a deep sigh when i tiptoed down the stairs this morning, and filled my lungs with the glorious knowing that this day held no appointments. no doctors. no dentists. no needs to stand or sit in front of a crowd and talk about the words i’d poured onto a page.

this day is a big blank slate. a slate to fill with the simple wonders of being alive. and i intend not to waste it, not a drop of it. and urgently so.

it’s the unintended gift of holding on for dear life to the life that you love with every cell of your being.

it’s a day i might otherwise not have noticed quite so keenly. but i see more vividly now. the blessing of holding on dearly to life is that you see each new dawn for the miracle that it is.

it might have been just another weekday. but suddenly, perceptibly, it is the answer to my deepest prayer, a day to simply be alive and breathing it in. every pore of it. the earthy rummesence of autumn leaves crisping and crinkling and falling in heaps to the ground. the last gasp of the garden, exploding in singular vibrancies that beg to be remembered all through the winter. the air, a mix of chill with undertones of heat as if the earth’s autumnal respirations draw forth the last breaths from summer’s stockpiled embers.

to knowingly not waste a day is to live at fullest attention. while we can. while we’re upright and ambulant.

sometimes we realize we shan’t take it for granted.

sometimes we need a reminder.

i am reminded.

i am living inside a body that reminds me to savor it, to inhale it. to all but rub it over my skin, to let it soak in through each wide-open pore.

we all have days when our hours are clogged with the usual distractions. we forget the marvel of a friday reliably following a thursday. we look to the calendar as if it’s the sovereign of how we spend our time. we are chained and unchained. we’re obliged to to-do’s, and we forget that all the in-betweens might just be the hours we’re most deeply alive. we might, at any moment, put down the chores, surrender the assignments. we might seize the day in whatever outline or equation rises from the blur.

we might call a friend whose voice we’ve not heard in too long. we might find a log in the woods, plop ourselves down, and keep watch––close watch. we might fill a bowl with the indulgences of autumn, the leaves and the seeds and the roots, all meant for seasonal sustenance.

we might light a candle. sit in a shaft of sunlight, watching the dust motes ride the air. we might roll up our sleeves, or get down on our knees, and plant a few bulbs for the joy of it––for the allure and the promise and perpetual hope of the springtime to come.

more and more, one of the first prophets i turn to for wisdom is the incomparable maria popova, she of marginalian wonders. in a cataloging of eighteen wisdoms she’s extracted from her eighteen years of gathering wisdoms (she must have started her brain pickings––now re-named the marginalian––a mere two months before the first chair was pulled up, for we too are about to mark 18 years of chairing), she included this bit of wonder and wisdom that says it as beautifully as it might be said:

Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

and she includes these lines from poet and former zen monk jane hirshfield’s “the weighing”:

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

and if all that isn’t enough joy stoking for the day, here’s one other wonder and wonder-soul i learned of this week at a book talk where to my delight and pure joy i was pointed toward good souls i fully intend to get to know more deeply and intimately. (i never cease to be amazed at the goodness lurking in utterly unexpected nooks and crannies of this world.)

here is a woman—one with a PhD in human anatomy and cell biology, no less—who happens to live in a house with a four-acre flower garden who coaxes beauty from the earth for the sole purpose of giving it all away, filling the flower fridges at hospices and homeless shelters, and the larders at food pantries near and far. she calls it the backyard flower lab. and it sounds like a holy slice of sustenance to me. i intend to point my old wagon in the direction of her flower farm before the sun sets on this day, and i will see where the adventure takes me. her name is april potterfield (which sounds to be a perfect plucked-from-the-storybook name for someone who grows beauty for joy), and you can find her on instagram at @thebackyardflowerlab.

what prompts you to find joy and seize the slender threads of which we weave our lifelines? and what are some of your favorite ways of doing so?

the cobalt beauty perched on the windowsill above is an autumn vibrancy from my garden, the closing note of a summer’s-long love song. i call it monkshood, but it has other names: aconite, wolfsbane, leopard’s bane, devil’s helmet, or blue rocket. the name aconitum comes from the greek word ἀκόνιτον, which may derive from the greek akon for dart or javelin, the tips of which were poisoned with the substance, or from akonae, because of the rocky ground on which the plant was thought to grow.

deep thanks to maria popova who week after week for years now has filled me with wonder, with curiosities, and most of all with the breathtaking beauty of her intellect and imagination…

10 Comments

October 18, 2024

in the tabernacle of an autumn’s night

these are days of awe, all right. the earth and heavens––at least here on the northern half of the globe—are turning in, the shadows growing longer. yet the last gasps of summer’s bounty do not fade without an exuberance of autumn. the sky somehow seems more star-stitched. and the moon, the moon at its most zaftig of the month bathes all in amber wash.

it’s as if all is ringing out in exclamation. one tree more golden than the next. berries so abundant on the bough, the boughs are bent in botanic downward dog.

i can almost hear the whisper of the woods, and even my ramshackle garden, calling out, don’t forget us, don’t forget how glorious we were and are, the delights and wonders we’ve offered since the symphony of spring began: the perfumes, the unfolding petals, the sweetness of the fruits, the earthly prayer of wind rustling through the leaves.

it’s a paean in minor key––part elegy, but mostly gratitude and grace.

to partake of it is holy.

the other night i stepped into the chill of just-past dusk, ferrying a crumb-strewn pizza box to the recycling bin, and before two footfalls had crossed the bricks, the haunting whoot-whoo-whoo of a great horned owl called out from somewhere in the trees.

owls might be my spirit bird. i learned reverence for owls from my grandma lucille, who wore one in a jeweled brooch she pinned to her bosom, and tucked in many a nook and cranny of her ivy-covered house. far back as i can remember, the front of her ice box was forever festooned with strigiform, a magnet onto which she’d glued an owlish silhouette cut from felted wool and adorned with alphabet-letter pastas as its eyes and ears and markings. not one for idling, my grandma once or twice was spied by little me with ear pressed hard to windowpane, rapt by the nightcall from the woods.

i too stand rapt.

of all the notes that rise from avian throats, the owl’s are the ones that stir me deep down where the prayers rise up. at the first of the whoot-whoo-whoo the other night, i felt myself break out in goosebumps. then i lifted my eyes, drank in the light of that nearly full hunter’s moon, and prayed. mightily.

i sometimes think that trips to the recycling bin are my surest daily invitation into prayer. into the cloak of night. against the silence of a day gone hush. the tabernacle in which i offer up my nightly office is one that stations me on the cracked concrete slabs of my alley. trash cans line the side aisle. and the nave is vast. is infinite. in between where trees and old garages block the view, the sky opens wide and deep. here where i live, sky is a bit of a commodity. sunsets aren’t free for the viewing, blocked by those mainstays of suburbia: house and tree and fence. but the night sky, the obsidian up above, is blocked by no one or nothing and it is enveloping enough to soak up my every verse of prayer.

and so i stood there flinging madly. add-on after add-on. a madwoman hungrily hanging her prayers out to dry. as if a clothesline of prayer i string across the alley, flinging each one skyward as i inch my way down the line.

it’s a sacred thing to stand beneath a wheel of yellow moon, with a whoot-whoo-whoo as chorister, and to pour out your insides to the heavens.

i pray the heavens heard.

here’s a bit of what else stirred me this week . . .

vassar miller was an american poet and writer, who served as poet laureate of texas in 1982 and 1988. born with cerebral palsy, her father encouraged her from a young age to write by typewriter, which she did prodigiously. and powerfully. she once said that the purpose of her life was “to write. and to serve God.” it brings me great joy to bring her here to this holy table.

Morning Person

God, best at making in the morning, tossed
stars and planets, singing and dancing, rolled
Saturn’s rings spinning and humming, twirled the earth
so hard it coughed and spat the moon up, brilliant
bubble floating around it for good, stretched holy
hands till birds in nervous sparks flew forth from
them and beasts — lizards, big and little, apes,
lions, elephants, dogs and cats cavorting,
tumbling over themselves, dizzy with joy when
God made us in the morning too, both man
and woman, leaving Adam no time for
sleep so nimbly was Eve bouncing out of
his side till as night came everything and
everybody, growing tired, declined, sat
down in one soft descended Hallelujah.

+ Vassar Miller

and this beauty from christian wiman…

Prayer
By Christian Wiman

For all
the pain

passed down
the genes

or latent
in the very grain

of being;
for the lordless

mornings,
the smear

of spirit
words intuit

and inter;
for all

the nightfall
neverness

inking
into me

even now,
my prayer

is that a mind
blurred

by anxiety
or despair

might find
here

a trace
of peace.

what stirred you to awe this week?

13 Comments

October 11, 2024

the names we are called, and the names that call us

my little irish grandma mae, as my grandpa, “choo-choo papa,” received his 50-year gold watch from the L&N Railroad, for which he was a locomotive engineer on the cincinnati-to-corbin (ky.) line

the email from synagogue came back in the spring. the rabbis and cantor had been thinking for awhile about some of us. an odd lot of us. we were the ones who’d found our way, through one inlet or another, into the river of jewish life — at synagogue and at home — yet “don’t identify as jewish.” (that wording, so very of the cultural times, cracks me up. in the old days wouldn’t we simply have been “not jewish”?)

they, this lovely trio of clergy, all young, brilliant, and devoted to their callings, recognized that we were in many ways bringing our lives to the poetries and prayers of judaism, and that judaism’s poetry and prayers had found its way fairly deep into our lives. they wanted to honor that.

they weren’t asking that we convert, weren’t asking us to sign on any dotted line.

but they had a radical idea, deeply radical when set against the context of a tradition that long saw intermarriage as the great scourge, one of the most grievous threats to the ancient and blessed religion. the radical idea of our rabbis and cantor was to give us each a hebrew name. but not without deeply engaging in weeks of contemplation and discussion, coming to synagogue on wednesday nights as summer turned to autumn, as the air grew cooler, and the trees more golden and crimson.

we talked the first night about the journey into judaism, they asked us to talk about moments of pain, times we felt excluded, rejected, pushed to the margins. or when we’d felt welcomed. we talked about being an outsider versus insider. did we feel we had a voice in the conversation, in the congregation, at our own kitchen tables, and even more broadly in the jewish world?

they asked us to tell the stories of each of the names we’d been given at birth, and the names we’d chosen to carry through life. they asked us to unspool the narrative of nicknames that ebbed and flowed through our stories.

and they asked us to think deeply about what a name means. and to pull from our lives and from Torah particular names of particular souls who somehow stirred us. with whom we felt some deep, almost palpable pull.

i knew fairly quickly whose pull i was feeling. but before settling on my little irish grandma, the only grandparent i never knew, one with whom i’ve long felt an uncanny cord, i briefly considered sarah, she who — like me — thought she was “barren,” and found out at the ripe old age of 90 (i was nearly 45) that she was “with child.” and who greeted the news by laughing out loud. sarah, like me, is the archetypal old mother.

we had homework: a sheet of essay questions pondering names, all of which were meant to evoke for the rabbis a few hebrew names that might be fitting for each of us. after poring over our essays, they sent us our custom-curated list of possibilities. i didn’t choose from high up on the list; i found my name deep down in the unlikelier choices. but, turned out, it was a tight fit. a name with the same roots, the same meaning, whether celtic or hebrew. (you’ll see below.)

once we had our names, and had written the stories of how we came to those names, and why, we were invited to synagogue for a special friday night Shabbat service, where we’d be called to stand in a half circle on the bimah (the raised platform from which the Torah is read). one by one, we’d speak our names, and tell our short stories.

before we told our stories, the rabbi, who i love, and whose name is ally or allison, (i don’t know her hebrew name, i just realized), set the stage with the eloquence and grace i’ve come to think of as her trademark, her inimitable magnificent, heart-melting way.

“Jewish tradition believes that names have great power,” she began. and then she read this poem from the israeli poet zelda, who is known widely by only her first name:

“Each of us has a name given by God and given by our parents.
“Each of us has a name given by our stature and our smile and given by what we wear.
“Each of us has a name given by the mountains and given by our walls.
“Each of us has a name given by the stars and given by our neighbors.
“Each of us has a name given by our enemies and given by our love.”

in a sentence that took my breath away before she called us from our pews to stand in our half-circle, to step to the podium, she said that we’d “earned these names through sacrifice and grit, through tenderness and care. they earned these names through their openness, their tolerance, their expansive and soft hearts.”

that sentence made me riffle through the rolodex of my life, through the hard conversations at the kitchen table, the tears on long telephone calls when a Jew and a Catholic were hashing it out in the three years before we married, trying to decide whether we could work it out, whether we could braid two faiths, two traditions, two deep ancestral ties into something that might even be greater than the sum of its parts. made me think of the blessing ceremonies in our tiny little garden on Wellington Avenue, when a rabbi and a priest poured their words, their wisdoms, and their blessings on two baby boys we were both blessing and naming (with eight years between each). made me think of the pair of Shabbat candlesticks, layered with wax from candles dripping and dripping over the years. made me think of the lamb stew we’ve stirred at the cookstove, my beloved and i side-by-side.

i thought how, indeed, both of our hearts have softened, have opened, have grown.

and then it was my turn to step to the podium, clear the tears from my eyes, and read these words to those gathered:

I’ve spent much of my life peeking beyond the borders of what was before me. Yearnings have always stirred me––reaching for what I don’t yet know, reaching for the holiness I deeply believe in, reaching for loves long after they’re gone.

And there is a particular grandmother, the only grandparent I never met, who has always, always animated my imagination. I yearned to know this daughter of Irish immigrants, a Kentucky schoolteacher, who, according to family lore, was the first woman to graduate from college in the commonwealth, who snagged the highest score on her county’s teachers’ exams, and just as importantly, could wring a chicken’s neck!––a praiseworthy prelude to many a Sunday supper in the Bluegrass State.

Her name was Mae, Mae Shannon, and her only child, her beloved child, was my beloved long-gone papa, Eugene Shannon Mahany.

Until now, my connection to Mae has been purely by heart, and through a few fading photographs that show we share an uncanny resemblance.

Her name, Mae, is a Celtic derivitive of Mary or Margaret, and one of its meanings is “pearl.” So, too, the Hebrew name Margalit—yet another “pearl.”

Considered the gemstone of inner wisdom, the pearl is one of creation’s wonders, formed through the mysterious interplay of oceanic depths and the celestial pull of the tides.

The pearl is formed when the mollusk, or bivalve, senses an irritant—a grain of sand, perhaps—which it enwraps by secreting layer upon layer of minerals, all extracted from seawater. Sand to seawater to pearl.

Ergo, pearl equals protection, luminous protection. Its very creation, an equation of awe. And the pearl, a moonlike orb, is thus said to be a vessel for water’s energy, to carry the lucid movement of the tide’s ebb and flow. It’s believed to hold deeply healing powers.

Its beauty, formed in unseen depths.

Radiance, evolved over time.

The pearl, Margalit––the Hebrew name of my choosing––my tie at long last to the little Irish grandma I so long to sit down beside. And whose inner luminous wisdom I so yearn to absorb.

And mightn’t she be wonderstruck to discover she’s inspired her only granddaughter’s new Hebrew name.

love you, dear chairs. by your names that i know, and your names that i don’t.

what’s the story of your names?

p.s. our rabbis are pretty sure that ours is the first congregation in the U.S. to undertake such a process, the giving of hebrew names to those who don’t identify as jewish.

and tonight we begin the highest and most solemn of high holy days, yom kippur, the day of deep atonement.

14 Comments

October 4, 2024

tefillah (תפילה) for a sweet new year in the season of awe

it is the soft dawn of a new year here, the jewish new year, an ancient calendar i’ve been drawn into, enfolded by, graced by, for all the decades since i met my beloved. he was the one who caught my eye back in the long ago, leaving the newsroom before sundown on friday nights to go to synagogue. i was moved by that devotion. leaving the newsroom on a friday night, back in the days when the big fat sunday newspaper was being “put to bed,” all the sections laid out, the stories edited, photos cropped and captioned, leaving the newsroom before deadline on a friday night meant you were breaking a mold. and you’d better have had a very good reason.

he broke my mold, all right, that tall bespectacled fellow loping toward the door. broke open a love of sacred creation, broke open an ancient text, the poetries and prayers that rose from the rocky, dusty, sometimes fertile terrain of a land indeed holy.

it would be a couple years before i found out the reason the bespectacled fellow was heading out to synagogue early on those friday nights: that was the hour of the singles’ shabbat service. he was looking to meet a nice jewish girl, and theirs was the six o’clock service. oh, well. that didn’t quite work the way he’d intended.

nor did i ever expect to be so deeply entwined with the religion of ancient ancient times. though there were hints. way back in high school, i asked a jewish friend of mine if i could come to her family’s seder, the passover meal at which the story of the exodus is told and retold. she answered that her family didn’t really mark the occasion, but maybe that year they’d make an exception. so there i was at their table, turning the pages of the exodus story, searching for the hidden matzah at the end of the meal. i came back year after year.

and all these years later, i’m the one who opens the jewish cookbook as the holidays near. over the arc of time, we’ve inscribed customs into the trace of the year: rosh hashanah, the new year, is when lamb stew (a middle-eastern iteration with chickpeas, and raisins, and apples and rice) is on the stove, though this year, just the two of us, we opted for the modern-day jewish classic, chicken marbella from the silver palate cookbook.

i crack open the prayer book too. crack it open weeks and weeks ahead of time, for the prayers are what draw me deep into the currents of the great river of judaism. awaken me to the mysteries and sumptuous beauties all around. remind me to see the miraculous in the most ordinary: the dust mote wafting by, the shadow of a tree, the call to pray “in the moments when light and darkness touch.” sometimes it’s the language, a simple line chiseled over time, that breaks me wide open, like this one: “prayer is our attachment to the utmost.”

let that one filter in…

sometimes i think my blessing is that i am still new to all this, so the way the words are unspooled is still fresh enough to catch my attention, my breath. i am often the one quietly gasping in the pews. or here at my kitchen table.

one last thing before i unfurl my prayer, my tefillah, for the new year: the other night at synagogue, just before the prayer for healing, the rabbi told of a midrash taught over time. she began by pointing to the eternal light that hangs above the arc where the Torah scrolls are kept. she noted that in the ancient temples the light that burned was from a wick floating in oil, specifically olive oil, the only oil allowed to burn in the eternal light. and then she went on to talk about the olive, the abundant small but ubiquitous fruit of the hillsides of the holy land. she noted that the oil from an olive is released only when it’s pressed, and crushed. and then, in that majestic humble way of hers, she taught us a lesson i’ll never forget: “when the olive is crushed it’s brightest light comes forth.”

ponder that the next time you feel the world pressing in from all sides, when you feel crushed. your brightest light might soon be burning.

here is my prayer for the new year. . .

tefillah for a sweet new year in the season of awe…

O One who robes this world in threads of crimson and bronze, who reaches in the paint pot for persimmon, goldenrod, and concord grape, the palette of autumn ablaze,

under newborn moon, under deep black dome of night, i bend my knees and pray…

i ask for blessing abundant. i ask stingily, you might think.

but then, you look around the world, see the tally from which i draw, and realize i’m barely beginning.

i pray first for forgiveness, for the sins of this selfish, self-obsessed culture of course, but more immediately and closer to the bone, for the sins of my own failings: my unwillingness to stray too far beyond the comfortable, to not muster the radical courage to cut a bold swath, to heal what’s deeply broken; for my inability to see my own blind spots; for the flippant dismissals i sometimes make too quickly; for being afraid, to the point that it occludes my seeing and breathing, my being.

i pray for peace, peace of nations and peace of each unsettled heart.

i pray for wisdom to discern that which lasts and that which crumbles over time.

i pray for grace which i define as radiance that will not fade in the face of shadow, will not step aside when life inflicts sharp elbow.

i pray for the hand that reaches out to dry the tears of the one whose cheeks are splotted, streaked, and sodden. even when, especially when, those cheeks belong to a someone we do not know. yet the simple presence of those tears signals how deep, how stinging, the hurt must be, the pain. i pray for the woman who sat beside me at synagogue and could not stanch her tears.

i pray for those who go through life fists clenched, driven by a fury that won’t allow unfurling. won’t release the tendons taut, won’t uncoil the hands God gave so we could do the work of loving, of reaching, and cradling in times of turbulence and tumult.

i pray for the echo of laughter’s peals rising from the kitchen tables, the diner counters, the park benches, those flat plains where good souls congregate to dig down deep and tell their stories.

i pray for morning light to rush in before eyelids flutter open so that when they do all is golden, nearly blinding, in its insistence to start the day awash in luminescence.

i pray for mothers who buried their children this week. i pray for the papas whose hearts were hollowed by deaths too soon, too impossibly inexplicable. i pray for memory to fill in the cracks, to begin to piece together the jagged edges of the shattered vessel that is the grieving heart.

i pray and i pray for the children––afraid, broken, scared out of their wits, looking into a night sky not for stars but for rockets’ red glare.

i pray for silence from the bombs and the hell screech of rockets.

i pray for those pummeled by rain — be it the rain of those rockets or the deluge of storm and hurricane winds.

i pray we see You in the sparks that animate the woods, the streams, the darkened skies. i pray that all the cosmos becomes as if a light-catching prism of holy wonder and wild astonishment that points to the One Creator God.

i pray we see You, too, in the gentle murmur of kindness, of tenderness, of heavenly mercy that is certain trace of Holy Presence.

i pray, dear holy, holy God, for these days of awe to fuel us for the long winter to come. let us stock the larder, fill the shelves that line the walls of heart and soul. let us go forth, each and every blessed day, fully awake to the miracle of those we love, and those we don’t yet know whose lives, like ours, contain untold tragedy as well as untrumpeted triumph, and whose wholeness any day just might depend on the goodness of those who do not pass them by unnoticed.

amen. and thank you.

what lines would you add to our prayer, communally or privately?

the gull above is diving into lake michigan to gather up a chunk of bread one of us has tossed into the water, a symbolic casting of our sins into the lake in an act of absolution.

the line, “prayer is our attachment to the utmost,” is from rabbi abraham joshua heschel, and the full line is: “unless we aspire to the utmost, we shrink to inferiority. prayer is our attachment to the utmost.”

24 Comments

September 27, 2024

when writerly rabbit holes swallow you whole….

in which a writing assignment, one that’s wholly captured my imagination, has taken over my gray matter (the stuff inside my head, not the pewter hairs that spring from it), and precluded most any other human activity—save for the occasional re-fueling at the cookstove to keep from puddling to the floor, famished. and for which i’ve shared my simmering salvation down below…

excuse me while i type over here. i seem to have fallen down-down-down into an engrossing writerly rabbit hole, and as the week’s worn on, i’ve only found myself burrowing deeper and deeper. it’s been a while since i’ve chased a thread of idea down to where the earthworms wriggle and the bunnies make hutches. and while i admit that my inner mad-scientist might be vividly on display here, in the way that i can’t put down my wild-eyed pursuit, there is a preponderance of joy stirring the madness.

i love chasing ideas. love untangling cognitive threads. discovering new ways of thinking i’d not known of before. love when one read leads to another and another. and then it’s my task to slice it, and dice it, and make it all make sense. extra points if it comes out poetic.

i’ve been a rabbit-hole writer as long as i’ve been slapping verbs and nouns into sentences. back in high school, i decided to write a mega theme paper on the misuse of wealth in america, and pretty much took hostage the dining room table for weeks on end. if anyone wanted easter dinner that year, they were going to have to shove aside my teetering stacks of tomes chronicling the gatsby brigade of modernday over-conspicuous consumption. years later, when the tribune set me off on a cross-country steinbeckian journey, zigzagging the continent from the deep woods of maine to the pacific northwest and plenty of points between, chronicling stories of hunger in america for a 10-part series, i distinctly remember my editor, a rumpled import from the new york times, sauntering over to my cubicle and insisting i unchain myself from my keyboard to at least stand under a shower, or swim a lap in a pool, long enough for one or two big ideas to snap into place. i was never much for taking breaks.

granted, writing that way might have been bad for the eyes and tough on the spine and the wrist, but i kept at it (one night, in the thick of telling a murderous tale, my writing partner and i took turns falling asleep on a very fat phone book). until i birthed a wee child. and said child insisted on eating. and i was the source, the one and only. swiftly realizing that typing while nursing had its drawbacks, i reluctantly succumbed to the art of the pause.

lo and behold, i discovered epiphany.

amazing things happen in the chambers of the mind when you stop hard-charging the thoughts. when you allow a synapse to slow to a pokier pace.

more often than i wish to admit, some elusive sentence has snapped into place while rinsing a plate under the faucet. and a sugarplum of a word has skydived in from seeminly nowhere. so i’ll concede that there’s virtue in lifting my head from the writerly hole.

but now that this old house is mostly empty again, there’s no stopping me. except that there is still one other mouth to feed. (fear not, he feeds himself well and is happy to do so on the nights i relinquish my post at the cookstove.) and besides, chopping and stirring, i’ve found, provides fine syncopation for the drumming of thoughts while assembling an essay.

soup by the kettleful is my solution. all it takes is one afternoon of onion slicing, garlic mincing, and the tossing in of a few other things. and by nightfall, and the night after too, you’ve got plenty to slurp from your bowl.

my ode to autumn, lemony white bean soup with turkey and tuscan kale, is what i bring you this week with the promise that it is utterly, perfectly, shlurpably delicious. it comes, as so much of my best cooking does, from my very fine friends at NYT Cooking, one of the perqs of seven-day-a-week home delivery, the last house this side of the block to still believe in turning actual newsprint pages.

Lemony White Bean Soup With Turkey and Greens
By Melissa Clark
Total Time 45 minutes

INGREDIENTS
Yield: 4 servings

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion, diced
1 large carrot, diced
1 bunch sturdy greens, such as kale, broccoli rabe, mustard greens or collard greens
1 tablespoon tomato paste
3⁄4 teaspoon ground cumin, plus more to taste
1⁄8 teaspoon red-pepper flakes, plus more to taste
1⁄2 pound ground turkey
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon finely grated fresh ginger
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1 quart chicken stock
2 (15-ounce) cans white beans, drained and rinsed
1 cup chopped fresh, soft herbs, such as parsley, mint, dill, basil, tarragon, chives or a combination
Fresh lemon juice, to taste

PREPARATION

Step 1: Heat a large pot over medium-high for a minute or so to warm it up. Add the oil and heat until it thins out, about 30 seconds. Add onion and carrot, and sauté until very soft and brown at the edges, 7 to 10 minutes.

Step 2: Meanwhile, rinse the greens and pull the leaves off the stems. Tear or chop into bite-size pieces and set aside.

Step 3: When the onion is golden, add tomato paste, 3⁄4 teaspoon cumin and 1⁄8 teaspoon red-pepper flakes to the pot, and sauté until paste darkens, about 1 minute. Add turkey, garlic, ginger and 1 teaspoon salt, and sauté, breaking up the meat with your spoon, until turkey is browned in spots, 4 to 7 minutes.

Step 4: Add stock and beans, and bring to a simmer. Let simmer until the soup is thick and flavorful, adding more salt if needed, 15 to 25 minutes. If you like a thicker broth, you can smash some of the beans with the back of the spoon to release their starch. Or leave the beans whole for a brothier soup.

Step 5: Add the greens to the pot and simmer until they are very soft. This will take 5 to 10 minutes for most greens, but tough collard greens might take 15 minutes. (Add a little water if the broth gets too reduced.)

Step 6: Stir herbs and lemon juice into the pot, taste and add more salt, cumin and lemon until the broth is lively and bright-tasting. Serve topped with a drizzle of olive oil and more red-pepper flakes, if desired.

and because even amid my mad musing this week, i still found myself melted by poetry, i bring you this beauty…

End of Summer

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.

Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
—Stanley Kunitz

named the tenth poet laureate of the united states in the autumn of 2000, kunitz was 95 at the time. his poetry was said to get richer with age. and one of his lifetime’s most pervasive themes probed the simultaneity of life and death. “it’s the way things are: death and life inextricably bound to each other,” he once explained. “one of my feelings about working the land [as a gardener] is that i am celebrating a ritual of death and resurrection. every spring i feel that. i am never closer to the miraculous than when i am grubbing in the soil.” he once told the new york times: “the deepest thing i know is that i am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that dialogue. it is a rather terrifying thought that is at the root of much of my poetry.” kunitz won the pulitzer prize in poetry in 1959. he died in 2006. (boldface emphasis mine…)

“my conviction is to report that dialogue. . .” and thus is the reason writers fall into rabbit holes…

i was looking high and low for a roz chast cartoon of a madwoman pulling her hair out, for illustrative purposes above. but, alas, i could not find. though ed koren’s wild-haired woman did come in a close second, and in the end i opted for the wanna-be writer above, courtesy of mr. koren…

see you next week when if all goes well i hope to tell you the story of how i got myself a new name last week, and a hebrew one at that…

in the meantime, are you, like me, one who prefers to tie on the blinders and not come up for air till the task is completed, or are you of the sort who finds that leisurely attending to a task makes for all-round saner existence?

5 Comments

September 20, 2024

the equinox of scan time: equal parts shadow and light

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

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

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

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

i try not to cry.

but sometimes i get scared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

she wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

we do not have forever to find it…

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

what steadies you when you’re afraid?

22 Comments

September 13, 2024

a literary form for the slipperiest of minds

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

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

humans, it seems, like to scribble things down.

may our scribbling never cease.

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

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

count me in on the slippery mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9 Comments

September 6, 2024

the quickening of september

if i were truly of the prairie, rooted into its undulating loam, rather than a citizen merely plopped here by geography, because it’s the place i call home, i’d know the turning of the celestial wheel and its interplay with earth as robustly as the marrow that courses my bones. alas, my knowing is fainter than that. and yet, still, each september i feel it. the angle of light shifts, and the lens does too. it’s amber now, or so i seem to imagine. the days are drenched, more and more, in molasses hue. and the air holds a chill one minute, a warming the next.

the season itself is playing meteorological tug-of-war: do we want to let go? do we want to surrender? or shall we hang on with the last of our oomph?

ah, but the signs, they abound. and they quicken my spirit, each and every one. the school bus sightings, for one. they lumber the streets now, that slow serpentine crawl, disgorging couplets of children at most any corner. i’m detached from the school calendar now. it’s merely there at the edge of the frame. but, nonetheless, i notice.

my cooking’s changed too. i simmered this week. slow stirring a vegetable stew. i spent a good chunk of hours stationed by the stove, overseeing allium play sidekick to eggplant, to pepper. offering up its essence to add just a pique to the whole.

but mostly i feel the turning of earth in the garden, the plot that keeps me most rooted in the wonder, the majesty, the undying wisdom that is the sacred whole of creation. i felt it in the proliferation of spider webs, those silken geometries of arachnid architectures. the uncanny way the eight-legged thing knows to construct its trapping, and in the process makes beauty of pace-pausing proportion. i felt it in the crisping of blooms, and the heads of hydrangea and black-eyed susan starting to droop, the weight of their long season now taking its toll. a last gasp before death.

i hear it just now in the distant cloudcall of the goose, threading the sky, signaling autumn. it’s a cry that can shroud me in goosebumps. a call to prayer if ever there was.

september is when i feel myself beginning to curl like the nautilus, inward spiral, expanding the chambers within. making room for the quiet, the sacred, to come.

thirty some years into a spiritually-braided marriage, i know september to be the season of awe. quite literally. liturgically speaking. we are in the hebrew calendar’s month of elul, counting the days till the high holiness of the jewish new year. according to jewish tradition, it is the month for contemplating the question, “how should i live the existence that i am.”

just the other day, i –– along with a rabbi i love and a gathering of women –– walked to the water’s edge, recited three blessings, and dropped into the water, into the great lake michigan. it was a cleansing, a beginning anew, a rite of purification. it was a mikveh, an ancient ancient tradition that is symbolically a turning of the page.

the question at the core of elul, “how should i live the existence that i am,” is one that especially quickened for me in a paragraph i read this week that had little to do with religion, and everything to do with the holiness of how we live our lives. it was the beginning of a review of a children’s picture book, and it was written by one of the high priestesses of everyday cultural commentary, maria popova.

she was writing about kamau & zuzu find a way, an “uncommonly soulful” story of a little boy and his grandmother who, somehow, find themselves living on the moon.

popova begins her essay this way:

The astonishing thing is that not one human being who ever lived has chosen the body, brain, place, or time to be born into, and yet in the narrow band of freedom between these chance parameters, we must find a way to live lives of substance and sweetness. Chance deals the hand and we must play it, and in how we choose to play it lies the measure of who we are.

“we must find a way to live lives of substance and sweetness.

“chance deals the hand and we must play it, and in how we choose to play it lies the measure of who we are.”

those are the questions i shall carry into my fading garden, and under the dome of a sky now rife with the cries and the calls of the flocks flying as one, in the migrational river that carries them faraway home.

in the quiet of your own soul, that’s the question for today: how do you choose to play the hand that chance has dealt you? what will be your sweetness and your substance?

8 Comments

August 30, 2024

the imperative prompts: realizing life while we live it

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

“No.”

Pause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

where did you find your wisdoms this week?