finding courage | pull up a chair

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?

16 Comments

February 23, 2024

poster child for fear

be not afraid is the instructive. it comes in a hymn we belt from our pews, and in one form or another it’s spelled out in sacred text in most every religion. i’ve belted the words to the hymn with voice cracking, and tears running down my cheeks. i’ve belted out those words as if in singing them loudly i could muscle up to the task.

to be not afraid, we’ve been told, is to be certain of faith. what then of us wafflers? the ones with wobbly knees?

i sometimes think i’m the poster child for fear. and the fear i’ve felt in this whole last year is a whole new subterranean trembling. it’s one that wakes you in the night. and one that sends you and your worries catapulting off into nevernever land. all it takes is a headache that won’t go away. or a pang in the side that’s not from cold ice cream.

sometimes i think it’s only fair that i find myself in the company of fear so very often these days. it’s an unerasable fact of my life that not quite a year ago i awoke from a surgery and heard the doctor say, “i was so surprised, it was cancer.” and then, as if needing proof there on my gurney, i reached down to where the holes were, five of them––front, back, and side––the slits from which they pulled out a good chunk of my lung.

surprises like that are a bit hard to shake.

so now, for two long weeks, a curious constellation of queasies has been pinned to me like a shadow, and i am pretty much wide-eyed afraid. last night my doctor sent me for blood tests. a whole slew of them. i almost thought they’d grab a jug off the shelf and start to fill it.

for someone who doesn’t like talking about my medical woes, i am wading in a bit too deep here. but i am someone who takes to heart the knowledge that i’m not the only scaredy cat in the litter. and sometimes i think it’s the right thing to do to put voice to the truth that there are times when we aren’t so brave. there are times when we wish we could hide under the covers, or under the bed, and wait for the bogeyman’s footsteps to turn and go away.

does it mean i’m faithless because i’m afraid? i don’t think so. i think it means i’ve been keeping watch long enough to know that stories don’t always end with happy endings. and God can love you to pieces, but not write the story quite the way you’d plot it out. i mean, i’ve been to funerals of souls so breathtakingly good, you sit there gasping at the hole now left in their absence. at how the world without those particular angels living, breathing, and wafting among us is a far sorrier place. at how you can’t quite fathom a world without their showing us day after day just how magnificent the human species can be.

turns out the words to the song, “be not afraid,” were written by a jesuit priest-in-training who was deeply afraid when he wrote it. he was quaking with fear. the fear of not knowing what lay ahead. would he be any good at this priestly existence? where in the world would it lead him? was he hours away from the biggest mistake of his lifetime? well, father dufford was his name, and, on the cusp of his ordination, he was sent off to pray all by his lonesome. and that’s when he opened the nearest book to his elbow, which happened to be a Bible. flipping through chapter and verse, he turned to the story of the Annunciation, when the angel gabriel is said to have come to the Blessed Virgin Mary––an unmarried teen, you recall––to tell her she was “with child,” and gabriel said to her “do not be afraid.”

father dufford had his first line.

a few weeks later, as father D tells the tale, a friend of his told him she was being sent to ghana to do missionary work. and that made him really want to finish his hymn before she left. but hymn writing is not always easy. and despite his determination, he could only come up with a second line: “i go before you always.”

it would be a whole year before he got to the last line: “and i will give you rest.”

it’s a hymn that since 1975 has poured into the brokenness that defines so much of history, both the intimate personal history we know to be our very own, and the collective history of us as a people who’ve been crushed and shattered and brittled by so, so much.

it’s a hymn sister helen prejean, the great saint of death rows upon rows, often sings to those inmates she walks to death’s door––the last words they hear before their last breath. it’s the hymn bill clinton chose for his first inauguration at the morning prayer service. father dufford says that he’s gotten notes from people who lull themselves to sleep humming it on those nights when sleep won’t otherwise come.

when father dufford’s own father died some years later, he added one last verse:

And when the earth has turned beneath you and your voice is seldom heard,
When the flood of gifts that blessed your life has long since ebbed away,
When your mind is thick and hope is thin and dark is all around,
I will stand beside you till the dawn.

maybe i should remember all the words.

and on the subject of fear and holding hands in the face of fear, here is this excerpt from naomi shihab nye’s “EVERY DAY AS A WIDE FIELD, EVERY PAGE,” a poem in which she puts word to the one sure thing i know that takes away my fears: when i picture ones i love huddled right beside me, squeezing my hand; when i remember that all of us together can keep our knees from buckling. isn’t that why we’re here? given that the world these days has plenty to knock us off our rockers, it’s a blessed thing to picture wide-eyed tender-hearted folk all around the globe, looking up into the night, holding hands in a virtual steadying circle. here’s naomi’s take on that, a thought that came to her watching fireflies blink in the dark of night….

We didn’t have to be in the same room —
the great modern magic.
Everywhere together now.
Even scared together now
from all points of the globe
which lessened it somehow.
Hopeful together too, exchanging
winks in the dark, the little lights blinking.
When your hope shrinks
you might feel the hope of
someone far away lifting you up.
Hope is the thing …

when i am afraid, i look to the stories and the strength of ordinary folk whose hurdles are daunting, and yet who lope forward with grace. i seize on the kindness of strangers, the lady at the immediate care check-in desk, the schedulers on the hospital phone, the sweet woman who tied on the tourniquet and borrowed those many tubes of blood. in the past year, i’ve bumbled into a troupe of brave souls whose fearlessness takes my breath away. some of their roads are far bumpier than mine, and yet they press on, shedding their light on all who are blessed enough to take a few steps beside them. maybe the gift of being afraid is that it makes you reach beyond your own trembling walls. it makes you take a deep breath and step into the darkness. and in time, you find your bearings, and you look down and realize you’re stronger and braver than you ever imagined.

where do you turn when you are afraid?

p.s. in poking around just now, looking for a photo that wasn’t hokey, i stumbled on this bit of intrigue: apparently the words, “do not be afraid,” appear in the bible 365 times. (i love the folks who count these things…) so, apparently, that’s a reminder a day. except for in leap year. which is this year. which is six days from now. so we’ll have to remind ourselves: do not be afraid.

34 Comments

October 20, 2023

amid the cacophony, these are the rare few voices that saved me this week. . .

i’ll be honest (as if i’m ever not): this was an unbearably hard week. and i am exhausted to the bone. the horrors of the world––images and stories i could barely take in––shred us, and scare us; make me wonder if we’re teetering on another apocalyptic precipice. and within the world’s horrors, there is a much-closer-to-home struggle that’s absorbed my every ounce of attention and strength: the not-insurmountable, steep incline of moving my mother into the next much-dreaded chapter of her life. a chapter she had adamantly refused to consider until the bones in her body were broken and the home she has loved for six decades can no longer be a place of safety and refuge.

the days have been long, have been wearing. but time and again through the week, my eyes fell on words that all but saved me. i gathered them up each time, hungrily. voraciously. as if the ones who spoke the words, or wrote the words, or somehow laid the words all in a life-saving line had reached out through the darkness to give me their hand. each time i held on tight. here are the words that steadied me this week. maybe they’ll steady you too.

i turn first to the irish, because where better to turn in the face of a broken world, and a battered heart: this comes from pádraig Ó tuama, who wrote: “there’s an irish phrase, ‘Is olc liom do bhris,’ which we say during a time of grief. a literal translation is ‘your brokenness brings me horror.'”

i couldn’t pronounce the irish if you paid me, but i love that the irish soul immediately understands that sometimes we’re not simply saddened but out-and-out broken under the weight of our sorrows.

but then, at the very moment i needed it, anne sexton came along: as i sat there watching my mother, now bent over a walker, sometimes crying out in pain, i watched my somewhat shy mother shuffle into a dining room filled with strangers. i watched her gently lay her hand on the shoulder of someone she was shuffling by, and i heard her say, “hello, i’m barbara, i’m new here.” and i felt my belly gurgling like jelly, as in the days when i pressed my ear against the kindergarten door, praying my firstborn would make it through the morning, my tender brave boy in a sea of new faces and voices. i watched my mother show me courage in the face of everything she’d prayed would never come to her. and then anne sexton’s words slipped under my nose. and i thought for a minute the heavens must have been listening, or maybe instructing.

Courage

It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you’ll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you’ll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

~ Anne Sexton ~

(The Awful Rowing Toward God)

and then, the news of the death of louise glück, the nobel prize-winning poet from cambridge, mass. a poet i once sat inches away from in a bookstore in harvard square, so close to me that i could feel the whoosh of her hand as she swept it through the air, punctuating one of her lines, pushing back her lioness locks of silver-streaked hair. louise died of cancer, and her beautiful words held a deep resonance in this week when i found myself talking to the kindest physician i’ve met in a long summer of looking for answers. in between worrying about my mother, i remembered i too am still looking for light in my own shrouded tunnel. a doctor from mass general, just down the road from cambridge, gave me that light. and she was more than kind in doling it out. but here’s louise:

CROSSROADS
by Louise Glück

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young —

love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised —

My soul has been so fearful, so violent;
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,

not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:

it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.

and those are the words i clung to this week, the words that carried me across an awful abyss.

what words carried you?

p.s. there’s one other poem that saved me this week, because it always saves me: naomi shihab nye’s kindness. here tis:

KINDNESS

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye

14 Comments

August 18, 2023

they call it grounding for a reason . . .

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

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

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

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

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

this holy earth is here for healing.

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

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

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

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

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

XI.
Katydids

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

what radical joy is saving you these summery days?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

we should heed the ancients, is the moral here…

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

26 Comments

April 28, 2023

some words are hard to say. . .

i don’t think i will ever forget the first time i heard the word cancer spoken in a sentence in which i was the unspoken subject. i was groggy from anesthesia, but there was my surgeon, leaning against the curtain in the recovery room. he was dressed in street clothes, his backpack slung over his shoulder, headed home to dinner, i imagined, with his little brood up here in the leafy suburbs, where we happen to both share the same zip code. i heard him say “it was cancer,” and i heard him say he was so surprised. i don’t think i heard much after that. and for all the days since i’ve been trying on that word.

it’s a word that’s hard to say. it’s a word that’s hard to slip your lips around. especially when it belongs to you. and when the cancer in question is the one that was settled quite inconspicuously in your very own lung. i’ve thought a lot about the eight years since they first saw it there. no one thought it was cancer. they thought maybe it was a scar, from a pneumonia i’d once had. or an old broken rib. nothing to worry about. all those years. all those christmases and birthday candles blown. all those graduations and droppings off at college, and at law school. all those late late nights when a million worries kept me up, but never that one. never ever a worry that i had cancer in my lungs.

until december, when someone once again saw it by accident and decided we should not ignore it anymore. i owe that someone every year of the rest of my life. and while the next weeks of january into march were a wild, wild ride, it took till april 18 to finally figure out what it was, to finally figure out that the suspicious “neoplastic process” was in fact just that: neoplastic is another word for cancer.

and it’s gone now. they cut it out. all of it, we hope. my surgeon called the other day and in the cheeriest voice i might ever have heard, he said “congratulations;” said “it’s as good a report as we could hope for, knowing it was cancer.”

i am writing the word here, because words are how i make sense of life. i have always found my way with words. words on paper most of all. words on paper even more than words in air. words on paper are the tracings across the topography of my life. i find my way stringing one word to another, groping along from one to another till the sentence ends. and right now i am in a thicket that makes very little sense. for a few days there, i could not for the life of me tell which way was north, and which was south. i was all turned around, and upside down. i wept and wept some more.

but slowly, slowly, i am feeling my way. and i am feeling very brave. braver than i ever would have guessed. i would have guessed i’d crumble. but maybe all my crumbling is only in my imaginings. maybe, over the years, when i’ve played out my potpourri of disaster scenarios, i’ve been getting the crumbling out of the way, so that when the real thing came along i was practiced, i was ready to step boldly, bravely, even valiantly up to the plate.

part of being brave is learning to say those two words, strung together: lung + cancer. lung cancer. i am now part of an unwelcome sisterhood; i’m among the ones to whom those words now belong, and whose lives are shaped and re-shaped thereafter and ever after. and i am linking arms emphatically with the ones who know these hauntings and these hollows. i am, so help me God, intending with every ounce of will and fierce determination to be among the ones who say aloud that we’ve had lung cancer and we are here to prove you can live beyond it. you can live with it shrinking––day by day, month by month––into the distant distance.

i am still going to dance at my firstborn’s wedding, and my secondborn’s too (or whatever is the life event for which cakes will be ordered and flowers strung). i am going to sashay through my garden, the wise old woman who communes with birds and bumblebees and baby ferns. i will some day tell stories that include the chapter of the time they made the words lung and cancer a part of my vernacular. how never in a million years did i think those words would find their way into my narrative. but here they are. and who knows where they’ll take me, though i’ve a hunch it will be a heady, heady heart-swelling somewhere. i’m not one to leave life’s sheddings by the wayside, unstudied, unplumbed for all their wisdoms and epiphanies.

these might be the two hardest words i’ve ever said. but i am going to say them till they shrink in size, in wallop. i am going to say them till they’re stripped of high-voltage burn capacity.

we all have words that are hard to say, words we don’t think will ever be ours. words we don’t want to be ours: widow, widower, survivor, victim, divorcee, depressed, anxious, anorexic (the word that used to be my hardest one to say), amputee, diabetic, dyslexic, broken-hearted. maybe the point is to take on those words, slip our arms through their sleeves, make them a part of who we are, but not the whole of who we are. to be not afraid, nor defined solely by their simple syllables. but to allow them to deepen who we are, to add contour and dimension, to layer on the empathies. to shape our particular view of how we see the world. and where we find our place within it.

i don’t intend to turn this into a place where we contemplate cancer. not at all. but right now, it’s the woodsy thicket in which i am trying to find my way. if i—someone who never smoked a single cigarette, someone who never lived with anyone who smoked—can bring the words out into the open then maybe, just maybe, it won’t be such a surprise to the next someone who finds herself stymied by a spot on her lung that cannot be explained. i will be the first one to wave my hand in the air, and say, please don’t wait. don’t hesitate. bite the bullet and let them have at it. find out if it’s cancer or not. don’t dawdle. cuz dawdling does not buy time.

only courage buys time. stare it down, this cancer. let it know who’s in charge. let it know that you’ve no intention of letting it steal a day of your most precious life.

i have always known that life is fragile precious. i’ve known that since long before the day my papa died, and i somehow kept on breathing after he was gone. i’ve known it over and over and over again. i’ve known it on the day i got married, when walking down the aisle was something i never really knew i’d know. i’ve known it when i birthed each of my two boys, one whose birth almost felt as if it was about to slip away, but i was determined, and i was not going to lose the answer to the million prayers i’d prayed. i knew it, too, the night i miscarried my baby baby girl, a night as real to me as the ones that ended with babies cradled in my arms.

i’ve lived so many days i’d never thought i’d see.

and i am going to live even more. and i am going to say aloud that i once had cancer in my lung, but they cut it out, and now it’s gone. and i am going to tell the story of what it’s like to live emphatically after the doctor in the recovery room tells you he was so surprised. so so surprised to find out that it was, in fact, cancer idling in my lung.

cancer i hope and pray is gone. completely, totally, forever gone.

the two little bits i found this week seem fitting for a day of telling hard truths. first, musician Nick Cave’s advice to a 13-year-old:

“Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts — be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential.

“Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defence, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude. A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world.”

and next up, annie dillard on why we read and write at all….

“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?”

– Annie Dillard

and, this, maybe more than anything. . .

a friend who will be a lifeline sent me this late last night, and i breathed it in through my tears. we can do hard things. humans have done hard things since the beginning of time.

a little note: i am not going to share any medical details here, only the rumblings of my heart. please know that i have a team of angels on my side, medically.

what hard things have you done? and what lightened the load?

29 Comments

January 19, 2018

when muttering under your breath isn’t enough…

“Leave safety behind. Put your body on the line. Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind–even if your voice shakes. When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. Well-aimed slingshots can topple giants.” —Maggie Kuhn, social justice activist, founder of the Gray Panthers

despite the fact that i came of age in the 1960s, can remember chillingly the assassinations of JFK, and bobby kennedy, and martin luther king jr., can remember being afraid when draft numbers were called and boys i knew were whispered to be leaving for canada. despite the fact that mahatma gandhi and mother theresa were the faces i cut from the pages of magazines and taped to the inside of my spiral notebooks, i’ve not spent much time with soles to pavement, marching with a picket sign.

so i turn to maggie kuhn, the gray-haired activist and founder of the gray panthers, whom the new york times once described as “a tiny woman who wore her hair in a prim bun that gave her the look of an ideal candidate to be helped across the street by a Boy Scout.” maggie fought it all, every discrimination, oppression, and injustice she ran into. and in her 89 years, dying in april 1995, a mere two weeks after joining a picket line for striking transit workers, she ran into plenty.

it’s been a year now, since the chill january morning when i awoke in prayer, and soon found myself writhing on the couch, listening to an inaugural address that steam-engined through “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” and “students deprived of knowledge,” and “crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives,” all rising toward the crescendo that “this american carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

i was aghast that morning. and at least a hundred other mornings since. i’ve felt hollowed and gutted and stripped of hope. i’ve cringed. and heard the thump of my heart pounding in my ears, as blood pressure rose and i watched in disbelief. how, i’ve wondered time and again, have we gotten to this low?

it’s all of it: the language, the lies, the schoolyard taunts. the bullying. the lack of backbone all around. the refusal of sycophants and hangers-on to call a spade an ugly spade. it’s so much more than politics that makes me boil, it’s the degradation, the shredding of decency, the depravity. it’s needing to turn off the tv if kids are in the room, because i don’t want them hearing the words spoken by the fellow in the oval office. i don’t want them reading of porn star affairs, while a wife is home cradling her newborn son. i don’t want pussy talk. the moral compass is seizing, is spinning without north star.

all year, i’ve muttered and mumbled, and all but thrown shoes at the tv screen. i’ve composed letters to the president in my head. i’ve imagined myself plonked on the steps outside the west wing, just beneath that portico where all the hotshots come and go. i’ve wondered if i implored loud enough, would he listen? could i tell him quite exquisitely enough just how vile i’ve found this year-long unraveling of those rare few things i believe to be essential?

in my day to day, i’ve employed those tools i’ve always counted on: i’ve typed, tried to gently whisper truth. i’ve upped the everyday acts of kindness. i’ve tried to be a heart-seeking missile of empathy, looked more folks in the eye, listened more intently to their stories. prayed and prayed some more. tried to untangle discord. turned the other cheek.

i’ve no idea if the scales of justice have moved one iota, if one voice, one pair of lungs, one heart, one imagination can make a dent in the ocean churning with each toxin.

so i’m tossing my lot toward compound interest, the magnifying power of multiples: toward clogged streets of voices, toward the impact of the aerial photo, and the fine-grain, on-the-ground collective of stories heard, faces watched closely.

i’m donning my triple layer long johns, shimmying on my walking shoes, spinning the turnstile and hopping on the “el,” chicago’s answer to a polyglot on rails. i’m headed downtown tomorrow to the hordes who will be taking to the streets for a hundred thousand reasons, all falling under the rubric, “enough is enough.” it’s time to put breath to our hopes and prayers and protests. it’s time to reclaim civility and justice. time to leave behind our couches and our clickers and bring our voices to the public square. it’s time to tell our children we did not sit silently while the national conversation crumbled, and what passed for fairness, for decency, for equal rights for all, was in shambles.

i am one voice, and mine might be shaking. but one plus one plus one just might bend the arc toward that justice, that fairness, the radiant light of pure and gentle love that i will not ever stop believing in. nor working toward.

so help me God.

who taught you to use your voice, and how will you use it?

23 Comments

August 11, 2017

front-row seat

it’s the miracle of being thisclose, ushered to a front-row seat, for the drama of the unfolding human spirit, that more than anything takes my breath away. my whole life long, i’ve found myself perched in watch posts where i could absorb and chart every flinch of the face, every swelling of the human heart, as i learned just how expansive the soul could be.

i’ve watched children bravely take their mama’s hand, as they were rolled into rooms for spinal taps. i’ve watched those unflinching children tell their mamas not to worry, it would all be okay. i’ve watched those children make their mama laugh, as she brushed away a tear, and then found herself doubled over, caught in i-can’t-believe-he-just-did-that, as the kid was rolled away in mickey mouse glasses (pulled out from under the pillow case).

i’ve watched a kid sit down to write a letter to the principal, letting the head of school know that he’d witnessed injustice at the lunch room table, injustice in the name of bigotry because of the way that someone prayed. i watched that kid fold the letter, and send it off, awaiting eighth-grade justice.

this week i’ve been watching a kid i love live and breathe the sort of courage that means everything when you’re a soccer-loving kid, and you’ve been told once already that you don’t belong on the high-school roster. i’ve watched that kid all summer lace up those soccer cleats, lift weights, all but stretch himself with ten-pound discs tied to his ankles as he lay in bed at night. he’d do anything to grow a couple inches. maybe half a foot, if there’s one to spare. i’ve watched him forego cherry pie on his birthday, because he thought the sugar just might shave a chance off his hopes of winning this time round. it’s a three-day test of courage, and we’re not yet at the end.

so all i can do — resigned to supporting role as scrambler of eggs, purveyor of blackberries, filler of water bottle — is stand back and hope and pray like there’s no tomorrow. because, darn it, tryouts end today, and we’ve lived once already through that crushing silence of a kid whose heart is shattered.

for those who think it’s mere cliche to say “my kids are my teachers,” i say this: phooey.

take a seat. open up your playbook. and watch a kid whose shoes you used to lace, to tie in floppy bows, watch that kid hold his head high, step onto the playing field — in the face of all his friends and coaches charting every move — watch him show you how it looks to stare down kids who tower over you in half-foot measures, watch him take the balls at full impact, dive into unforgiving turf, dust off the scrapes up and down his knees and elbows, and rise up again.

watch him hope. watch him hope so hard it hurts.

and you, not nearly so brave as the kid who teaches you, you sometimes get withered by nothing more brutal than a nasty line shot across the internet. from someone you don’t even know. for all you know, it’s nothing but a bot (one of those cyber-ghosts who churn out idiocies and fake news by the megabyte). talk about lessons to be learned.

of all the breathtaking filaments that comprise the growing of a human child, it’s the front-row witness that astounds me most, that leaves me brimming with blueprints for how to be a fuller version of who i thought, who i hoped, i could be.

it’s not just parents, of course, who get the chance to see the inch-by-inch stretching of another’s soul. doctors see it every day. can you imagine looking someone in the eye and delivering the most somber news? watching that someone not crumble, not lash out, not let spew a mighty line of damnation, but instead take the diagnosis with more grace than you swear you could ever muster? can you imagine being the teacher who day after day tries to navigate a kid through vowels and consonants that insist on being muddied, that appear to the kid to be indecipherable hieroglyphics, and then one day, without a drumroll, the kid, who’s never wobbled, suddenly reads straight across a line? and what about the priest or pastor or cop who takes in confession, who looks into the crumbling face of someone who bares his sin? who makes no flimsy excuse, lays no blame, and is crushed by the truth of how much irreparable hurt he’s done?

it’s in those rare uncharted moments when the screen is pulled away, when the screen that stands guard in front of stripped-down soul is erased from the equation, and what you see is unfettered human character. like peeking into the knobs and wires that make an engine run. only in this case, it’s the fibers of courage, of resilience, of this-is-where-i-choose-to-take-the-higher-road.

it takes your breath away — every blessed time. offers you a glimpse of straight-up holiness, the way that God meant for us to be. and, frame by frame, i am taking notes, stockpiling all these lessons. front-row student in the school of courage, of immeasurable blessedness, of grace in action.

and so, i crack and scramble eggs. i keep watch from my post here at home. i wave from the front stoop as the car pulls away. i watch the clock. i pray. and i gird my heart for what may come. and marvel at the gift of watching a very brave kid stare down the very odds that would wither a less determined soul.

dear patron saints of soccer, have mercy.

who are your heroes in the soulful department?

27 Comments

April 12, 2017

that one brave thing (an update)…

illustration by Antony Huchette, for the New York Times Book Review

just a quick middle-of-the-week update from the courage department…

not so very long ago, i wrote here about trying very, very hard to be brave.

these are some of the words that tumbled straight from my truth-telling heart:

i forget sometimes that i can be brave.

i sometimes think the countervailing forces of the world — the ones that whisper to me that i’m not good enough, don’t belong, won’t pass muster — they’ll knock me down. buckle me at the knees.

…i sometimes think of myself as a chicken. a wimp of the first order. i keep watch on folks who look to be brave, and wonder, “how, oh, how do they do that?” here’s a secret: sometimes when i talk to them, when we both unfold our hearts, i find out that they’re just as scared as i am, but they shush away those nasty whispers. or march headlong into them, never minding the awful bluster.

of course i have to remind myself — over and over and over — of that little truth. that the courage to face fears is sometimes simply plugging your ears to the noise, and deciding to hum your own little courage tune.

and just in case, i’ve come up with a back-up plan, or maybe it’s a fortifying plan. it’s modeled off the vitamins of my youth. it’s the one-a-day plan. one brave thing each day. that’s it.

i understand deeply that the trail up the mountainside comes one footstep at a time. no one’s taking giant leaps for womankind. they’re taking normal human strides, one foot in front of the other, and suddenly they’re at a point that’s halfway up. or nearly at the top.

it’s the one-brave-thing plan. i muster as much courage as it takes for one bold move — sending off the email that makes me quiver in my clogs. making the scary phone call before my voice gets caught in my throat. taking five deep breaths then plunging in.

here’s what happened the day i took a deep breath, and mustered all my courage:

Boyhood on a Shelf, April 9, 2017, New York Times Book Review, page 13.

thank you, and thank you, dear mother courage.

i’ll be back, as always, friday morning. it’ll be hushed because, for me, it’s Good Friday, that day of sacred silence from noon till three bells, the hours of the Crucifixion.

delighted to hear if your courage took you to any heights of which you’d only dreamed….

14 Comments

March 24, 2017

one brave thing

FullSizeRender

i forget sometimes that i can be brave.

i especially hear those whispers when i’m standing at a precipice, about to take a flying leap off a ledge. a ledge like walking into a newsroom as a nurse + 1 year of grad school (as if that gave me any cred to run around the big bad city, with my reporter’s notebook flapping in the wind). a ledge like walking into labor and delivery, knowing the lump in my belly would soon be cradled in my arms and heart forever after. a ledge like writing a book from the deepest place in my heart and being afraid it will be panned.

i sometimes think of myself as a chicken. a wimp of the first order. i keep watch on folks who look to be brave, and wonder, “how, oh, how do they do that?” here’s a secret: sometimes when i talk to them, when we both unfold our hearts, i find out that they’re just as scared as i am, but they shush away those nasty whispers. or march headlong into them, never minding the awful bluster.

and just in case, i’ve come up with a back-up plan, or maybe it’s a fortifying plan. it’s modeled off the vitamins of my youth. it’s the one-a-day plan. one brave thing each day. that’s it.

and here’s the beauty: once you’ve done the single deed, you’re done for the day. no more bravery required. or if you do decide to fling on your bravery cape, you do so with the triumphant knowledge that you’re now in extra-credit land. (i admit to being one of those little kids who always loved the buffer zone of extra credit; more or less the shortcut up the mountainside. or at least a remarkable insurance plan, there in case you need it.)

this one brave thing can work for anyone. no matter what the commodity you’re in search of. it’s just as easily the one-blank-thing plan. say kindness is what you quest; do one kind thing a day, and you’re on your way. maybe it’s patience. same plan. fill in the blank, and tackle it one sure feat at a time.

i used to think — and often still do, truth be told — that courage was black or white, an on or off switch. you have it or you don’t. and i was pretty sure i would never be called up to the courage major leagues. but what i’m working on — trying to teach my thick-headed little self — is that, like muscles, you can build it, drop by drop, layer by layer, bit by bit.

so i’m not looking to turn into the queen of confidence. i’m just trying to start and end the day with one new checkmark in the courage column. i’ve sent off notes — one by one — to folks whose work i love. i still await reply. but honestly, the replies might not matter as much as figuring out that i can dig down deep and yank out my daily dose of being brave.

one of these days i just might glance in the foggy mirror and see a brave girl looking back at me.

till then, i’m working on it: one brave thing, my humble quota for the day.

we’re all works in progress and isn’t that the place from which our beauty comes? and speaking of courage, top of my mind this morning is a boy i love who is walking into a very big meeting but feeling VERY under the weather. he is being oh so brave. and i am offering up all my courage — and whatever else it takes — for him to glide through that meeting, unscathed.

no need to answer down below (these are private matters of the heart and soul, after all), but what one thing might you submit to the one-a-day plan? what’s the commodity you long for, and might you find it slowly surely certainly?

a bit of housekeeping: i know some of you have loved “on the wings of the hummingbird,”the blog of my beautiful friend mary ellen sullivan, who died last year. for a few weeks, it’s seemed the hummingbird was lost, but the good news is that it’s forever in the cybersphere, thank you to the great good folk at wordpress.com. and you can find it here. (it’s just a slightly longer url, but it’s all there, beautiful as ever.)

15 Comments

January 27, 2017

baking bread: essential communion

i baked bread a sunday ago. all day. with a beloved friend. and in the rhythms of yeast and friendship — yeast leaping into action, yeast rising, yeast resting, interlaced with the pas de deux of courage instilled, folly shared, revelation of heart — i found an elusive blessing, one necessary, curative, in these steep and shaky times.

it began with the humblest of offerings (as all friendship, all holiness does): wheat milled into flour; grains from the field; seed from the sunflower; honey, the bees’ sweet contribution; and yeast, God’s gift to the belly — and parable, too.

by the time the oven was blasting its gas-fueled insistence, we’d savored the blessing of pushing up old sweater sleeves, one friend reciting instruction, the other (uncertain and seeking conviction) following along, the blessing of slow time, of deep unspooling conversation, and an afternoon in which the slant of light slipped imperceptibly away. all punctuated with a thick slice of grain, slathered in soft salty cheese.

it’s as determined an equation for healing as any i’ve stumbled into of late. it was the gift of the sharing of hours — not a phone call squeezed in between errands, not a text passed in the night — that held the miracle. it was the rare chambered nautilus of friendship, a structure within which we could burrow, nestle into sacred uncharted spaces.

perhaps, too, it was the particular alchemy of shared labor — engaged task — across those hours. we’d started from scratch and were working our way — together — toward shared triumph. it was altogether richer than my usual preferred art of sitting side-by-side or foot-to-foot under blankets, sharing words and stories and mugs of spiced tea.

indeed, the tea kettle would sing before the afternoon ended, before two toothsome loaves would be pulled from the oven. and ever since, each time i pull a slice from the loaf, each time i sit down to lunch, i return, at least a part of me does, to that fine afternoon and the knowledge that i can bake my own bread, leaning all the while on the sturdy friendship of the rarest of companions.

there is something breathtaking about baking with a friend. something in sharing a kitchen, a cookstove, something in finding our way together. i grew up afraid of two things (my inventory here is confined to fears in the kitchen): yeast and pie crust. the former i thought i could kill, a notion that felt murderous to me; and the latter i thought would crumble in my indelicate fingers. so i did what any deep-fearing girl would do: i stayed away. steered clear. bought my bread, more often than not, from the very nice baker who shared not my particular fears.

for me to enter the kitchen, to haul out the mixer with bread hook and paddle, to tear open the packet of yeast, to try not to wince when i submitted said yeast to the bath my friend promised would not kill it, leave it gasping for breath, well, that was, in fact, a small act of courage. and i find i’m in need of courage-building these days. there is a world that needs our voice — our calm and gentle and deeply considered voice. and there is a world that needs our conviction, our conviction put into action.

it came as something of a surprise that my starter class in courage, my beginner’s curriculum, unfolded in the kitchen. yet there i found steadier footing. it all came in the certain embrace of a friend to whom i could bare my uncertainties, my qualms about yeast and life far beyond. it’s friendship that weaves the strong with the faint. none of us come to the kitchen, to the world, with all threads emboldened. we are, each one of us, tapestries; some threads glimmering, some threads too thin, too easily frayed. and in the submission to friendship, the willingness to say aloud, “i’m scared of this” (be it yeast or life or speaking up in the face of opposition), and then dive in anyway, well that’s what finding courage looks like. and courage is the thing we need — in double doses, at least — if we stand half a chance of making a difference, making our one small life matter, of leaving this world more filled with even one drop of grace, of goodness, of kindness, of light.

and so i started with wheat + yeast + the dearest of friends, and i wound up with two fine loaves, and the wisp of knowledge that i’d moved a baby step or two closer to finding my way across the rocky landscape.

in these times that tear at my heart and my soul on a daily or hourly basis (depending on the news of the day), i found something holy, i found essential communion, in the baking of two loaves of power bread. and i did not kill the yeast.

my annotated recipe: power bread from food52
by someone who goes by the name boulangere

makes 2 large loaves

1/2 cup kamut*
1/2 cup buckwheat groats*
1/2 cup pearled barley*
3/4 – 1 1/2 cups tepid water
1 1/2 tablespoon active dry yeast
3 cups whole wheat flour
3 cups unbleached bread flour
1 tablespoon kosher or sea salt
2 ounces canola oil
2 ounces honey
1/4 cup chia seeds
1/4 cup golden flax seeds
1/4 cup sunflower seeds, toasted
1/4 cup polenta

*my dear friend tells me that you needn’t follow precisely the rules (see why i love her); any combination of grain will work, as long as you start with a total of 1-1/2 cups uncooked. i for instance skipped the kamut altogether and then forgot to double the buckwheat, and all ended well anyway.

Place barley, kamut, and buckwheat groats in saucepans with ample water to cover, bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer, cover pot, and cook until not quite done through. They still want to be a bit toothy when you take them off the heat so that they retain their integrity in the dough. Kamut will take the longest, about 1/2 hour; barley about 15 minutes; and buckwheat groats about 10. When done, strain off water and allow to cool a bit before adding to the dough.

To mix dough, pour water into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle. (my dear friend tells me 25 seconds in the microwave gets water to just the right non-murderous temp.) Add yeast and whisk to blend. Add all other ingredients, including slightly cooled grains. Mix on lowest speed until dough comes together and looks homogenous. This will be a sticky and fairly soft dough, but it should generally leave the sides of the bowl, so add some bread flour if necessary; just don’t add so much that it is too firm. (here we have the debate on whether to use the bread hook or the paddle on the super-stand mixer; we tried both, first hook, then paddle, then quickly back to hook.)

When dough comes together, stop the mixer and wrap a piece of plastic wrap around the top of the bowl. Let the dough have an autolyse for 20 minutes. (that’s a scary word to me, but my friend tells me not to be afraid, just let the dough have at it.) This will allow the whole wheat flour to become fully hydrated, and also allow the water in the grains to settle down. If you overknead this dough, you’ll essentially start squeezing water out of the grains.

After the autolyse, remove the plastic and again begin kneading on the lowest speed. Within a few minutes, the dough should come fully together, leaving the sides of the bowl. Knead for 5 minutes, then test for a windowpane. It will not be as thin as what you’d expect from a dough without all the grainy content, but it will form a general windowpane.

Transfer dough to an oiled bowl large enough to contain it as it doubles. (my friend tells me to use the largest possible bowl. i used one that might have bathed a plump tot.) Turn dough over once, then cover bowl with plastic, not a towel. Let it proof at room temperature until doubled in size.

Flour your work surface – remember, this is a sticky dough! Gently turn dough out onto it. Keep your piece of plastic! Divide dough in half, and shape each as you wish: either shape it for conventional bread pans (my friend says don’t forget to oil your pans), or shape as hearth loaves. Dust the top of each with flour (I love that rustic look!), then drape your piece of plastic over them. While your bread is proofing again (and the second proofing goes faster, so keep an eye on it), preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Just before putting bread in oven, decoratively slash the tops a good 1/2″ deep. Bake for about 30 minutes, rotating loaves halfway through. This bread is deceptive – it tends to look done before it is. When done, an instant read thermometer inserted in the middle should read 180 degrees. (or, says my friend, who is now your friend, anywhere between 190- to 210-degrees Fahrenheit.)

Remove from oven and cool on a rack. Because of all those great, moist grains, and a touch of honey, this is an excellent keeper, and also freezes just fine. While it is still warm, cut a slice, butter it, maybe add some honey or your favorite preserves, and get ready to power up!

notes from food 52 and boulangere:

Food52 Editors’ Comments: Boulangere’s multi-grain bread is hearty and delicious. The combination of grains and seeds makes the bread both flavorful and texturally appealing. I had to use the upper end of the water amount for my dough to have a good consistency. I was unable to find chia seeds, so substituted millet instead. One of the beauties of this recipe is its ability to accommodate different grains and seeds based on what you have in your pantry. It makes 2 pretty huge loaves of bread. I made mine 2 days ago, and have been nibbling on it ever since. I highly recommend giving this bread a try — you won’t regret it! – hardlikearmour

I developed this bread originally using spent grains from a friend who is a gifted and endlessly creative artisan brewer, along with a mix of seeds, depending on what I had on hand. I never knew exactly what the mix would be, but it always made bread so deeply good that people would call ahead on bake day to reserve loaves of it. I adapted it for the Bulk Bin project to replace the mix of spent grains with some of my other most favorite grains and seeds. I still call it Power Bread for the intrinsically wonderful protein, fiber, and EFA qualities of kamut, buckwheat, pearled barley, chia and golden flax seeds. And I always toss in some uncooked polenta for a bit of crunch in every bite. It makes great toast, and a killer grilled cheese sandwich! As you read through the list of ingredients, if you think the water measurement seems unclear, bear in mind that you’re going to cook the whole grains, and though you’ll also drain them, they contribute a lot of hydration to the dough, depending on how thoroughly you drain them. Don’t press water out of them, in other words. And feel free to add additional water to the dough if need be. – boulangere

and a note from me, not about bread but about the state of the world and what i write about here: dear beloveds, because long ago i set out to make this a sacred place, a place that keeps close watch on the world, and close watch on the soul, i am trying to thread a very fine needle here and keep politics off the table. i know we come from myriad perspectives, and because i want to preserve the sense of shared communion, of a place where we can all breathe deeply and purely, away from the everyday noise and congestion, i am aiming for matters of the soul. you might have gleaned that these are hard times for me, and that would be an accurate assessment. but because i can’t stand the dissolution of conversation i see in so many places, because i can’t stand the sense that division is the math of the moment, i’m trying for inclusion, trying to weave and not tatter, staking my hopes on the deep faith that we have many places in our hearts that spark to the same beauties, crack at the same shatterings. i hope we all speak up for justice and never ever muffle our outcries against what we see as injustice — and i won’t muffle here. i emphatically aim to live a gospel of love, an instruction found in every holy book of every world religion, and, yes, in the books of those who claim no religion but follow a sacred light. as a journalist i have long practiced the art of keeping my politics out of my stories, and so even here, especially here, where my aim is deeper and higher at once, i continue to pray that this is a sacred place, a place for everyone of gentle heart, fierce belief, and carefully considered thought.

your thoughts? or if you prefer, your bread baking tips? or, perhaps, what you’ve found as the most delicious ways to deepen a friendship. xoxox

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pull up a chair

Tag: finding courage

January 24, 2025

a short course in courage