savoring moments | pull up a chair

November 14, 2025

the ol’ ticker still ticks. and then some.

a rare peek inside this ol’ house, where three of us nestled by the fire, catching a moment that no one saw coming…

because of the way my heart leapt midafternoon yesterday as i bumbled into the house, hands all muddy from tossing out the ferns that had frozen in the snow snap, i can claim with absolute certainty that i’m nowhere near dead yet.

what might i mean by such a rash—you might say “obvious”—pronouncement?

well, quite simply, my oft-tired ol’ ticker fired off a triple flip the likes of which simone biles would be proud soon as i glanced down at my phone, that indispensable appendage i always forget to keep indispensably by my side, and noticed a smattering of words that seemed to be spelling out something about “the trip to Chicago” followed by “keep the drive daylight” followed by “i will just hit the road,“ all walloped with “on the off chance that you guys aren’t busy tonight.”

and thus i discovered the manchild who’s been heavy on my heart all week, as i worried about the car that was stuck in the tow lot, and the miracle that he’d not been slammed into metal or glass when his car fishtailed on a slick, dark country road, i discovered there’d be three not two at our dinner table last night. and how perfect that i’d just made a triple-size batch of one of my autumnal mostly vegetable stews.

never mind that he’s 32, and a law professor these days. never mind that i’ve been at this mama gig for rather a while now (well, 32 years plus the duration of mammalian gestation), it’ll never get old. it’s pretty much an indelible truth that until my last breath on this planet the number one zone in my heart will forever be the can’t-get-enough-of-my-boys zone.

and so, in less time than it takes to spell indefatigably up to the task, i had fresh flannel sheets on the bed, a basket of farmer’s market apples on the bedside table along with a mason jar of my fresh-made granola, and if i’d had time to string up holiday lights in the room where he grew up, i’d have done that too. along with a chorus of night-crooning angels.

why the back-flipping joy?

well, living as i am in a personal epoch of carpe diem, in which nearly every dawn i flutter open my eyes and unfurl a big fat gratitude prayer for making it to the sheer marvel of watching sunlight stream in, while simultaneously existing in this moment in history when good news is as infrequent as a meadow of daisies in november, the sheer joy of surprise, especially in the category guess-who’s-coming-to-dinner, is of the highest order.

and sometimes it’s just plain rejuvenating to remember your heart still knows the steps to the happy dance, and can leap into it on a moment’s notice.

my zeal for making each moment count is not a dynamic that’s waning. it only gets more and more intense as the chapters of living press in from all sides.

i seem to have been catapulted full time into that real-life equivalent of frank lloyd wright’s architectural jujitsu compress-and-release, in which the master architect squeezed in the walls of an anteroom so that once you stepped into the chamber beyond you felt the whoosh of expansiveness as the walls and the ceiling let soar. so too with life and its tough spots. in time, they finally relent and release. and you breathe deeper than you remember breathing in days.

our lives are undulations of breath, on both a grand and an intimate scale. the pattern set soon as the umbilical cord is cut—the lungs, the diaphragm, the ribs rise and fall, empty and fill accordingly. and so it is with our lives on a larger scale, as life seems to toss us into the vise, only to at last let us out. let us breathe.

i am breathing today. i am breathing as my house fills with people i love to celebrate the birthday of a woman we love, the matriarch of us all. my mama, who’s shown us grace, resilience, and who these days unendingly charms. we’re not marking the date of her birth, she tells us, but we are marking our love. and we are doing it the best we know: we are gathering in joy, and in love, from corners hither and yon.

and in this old house, when the three of us sat down to stew, we got an extra dollop of breath out of the deal. it was—and is—delicious.

a bit of social action here at the chair, for anyone who might be so inclined. here in chicago, and even here in the leafy burbs we’ve been shattered by the roving bands of federal agents decked out in the camo gear, faces covered in masks, as they’ve rough-armed and thrown to the ground dozens and dozens and dozens of those whose skin might be brown. contrary to federal messaging, these are good folk earning meager livings the hard way: cutting grass, raking leaves, tending to kids in strollers or buggies, pounding shingles to roofs. and for the sin of trying to live unnoticed lives in a country meant to be safe harbor from thugs and militias, they’ve been plucked from the streets, or their cars, or their classrooms, and sent to a hellhole, leaving behind families to fend for themselves. a little band of us here where i live have armed ourselves with whistles and courage, to stand up to the thugs. and to help in any meager way we can. one among our little band offered this possibility to help stock the grocery shelves at a free market in chicago’s mostly hispanic little village neighborhood, where the fear is rampant and the streets have been swept of their usual buzz. it felt mighty good to send off a grocery cart of simple sustenance. and, indeed, i felt the breath fill my lungs.

here’s what my neighbor wrote….

For those that are looking for an option to offer concrete support to Little Village families impacted by ICE…one of my [neighbor’s] dearest friends (Keri Krupp) is a school social worker at Little Village’s Zapata Academy, which serves 500 kids from pre-k to 8th grade and is in need of support for their free “store” Mercado Zapatista. The Mercado is completely reliant on donations and has become a source of support for many of Zapata’s families — while typically focused on winter apparel and toiletries, it is now also distributing food to families that have been hit by both the loss of income due to ICE and the disruption to SNAP benefits. Her stories are heartbreaking. You can quickly donate through by selecting items from this Amazon wishlist or by sending an Amazon gift card to her work email (kbkrupp@cps.edu).

https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/291BEA7WRUHZ9?ref_=wl_share

At a time when it can be hard to know where to best focus donations, [my neighbor] can personally vouch for Keri’s commitment to the Little Village community and prudent stewardship of Mercado Zapatista, which she began in 2024. Any donations, big or small, will make an immediate difference to Little Village children and their families!

and thank you for considering.

bless you all. what filled your lungs this week?

10 Comments

May 9, 2025

standing at the doorway of time

i found myself standing in a bedroom doorway the other day, staring. you might have thought i’d momentarily lapsed into freeze frame, but my mind was whirring wildly. it must be a sign of the times — my times, my where-did-the-years-go, i-remember-all-that-unfolded-in-this-storybook-room flash in time.

i call it a kodak-carousel moment, a name in itself that dates me. as obsolete a term as there might be here in the age of slide shows on phones. no need to plunk in the slides, the film framed by cardboard, a portrait in miniature, and click-click-click to advance.

the kodak carousel in my mind was playing and replaying the little boy room, the room where my miracle baby grew up. the room where we once stacked his baseball jersey and glove, his ballcap of his very first team, on the eve of his very first game. the room where a fallen-out wiggly tooth was laid to rest (in hope for the fairy) under the pillow. the room where night after night we prayed he would please fall asleep so we could tiptoe our escape without raising a plaintive cry.

i suppose i’ve made something of a museum of that room. added a few paper-wrapped hand-me-downs tucked in a corner (a safe spot for storage) but otherwise it’s all as it was. the alphabet rug, where i taught two boys their ABCs. the four-poster bed where my grandma once slept, a bed where i too slept for years, and then both of our boys. and now whoever comes to visit. the bins of blocks and bears and hand puppets, too. a whole childhood frozen in time.

and i won’t touch it.

the drawers of the dresser are filled these days with extra sheets, and art project makings. no longer stuffed with little boy PJs, and shorts and T shirts, size small. but if you open the top drawer on the right you can still find a vial filled with the teeny-tiniest babies of teeth. i couldn’t bear ever to toss those.

in time, an old house starts to show its cracks. and chips in the paint. and squeaks in the floorboards, and layers of impenetrable grease in the vent of the diner-grade six-burner cookstove.

i fear i might be blind to the blemishes as the house crumbles around me.

all i see is the room where i tucked into bed one reluctant sleeper, night after night, for sooo many years. where he learned how to read, and chased away night-prowling monsters. and another (the room at the bend in the stairs) where we brought home the boy with the broken neck. where he wrote his essays to get into college, and years and years later studied for LSATs. (and just a few weeks ago, home for easter, sat at the old desk and recorded a lecture for all of his first-year law students.)

i look at the pillows on the old four-poster bed, and remember the nights and the mornings we propped up against them, turning the pages of books that left us—both reader and readee—with tears soaking our cheeks. charlotte’s last web. or giggling at the antics of a big raspberry-hued rascal named Ted. or that little monkey named George.

it seems a holy thing. to pause, to turn back in time. to anoint each moment, each memory, with the deepest form of thanksgiving. to soak in to the deepest fiber of your soul those hours you thought might never end.

i hope, in that ephemeral fluidity of time, we can rewind the clock, even if only in our soul, to finger each hour, each grace, as if the bead of a rosary. to press it against the whole of who we are now. day by day each of us more graced. as we fill ourselves with accumulation of blessing we’ve lived. the boy who defied every odd of a very old singular ovary, the pregnancy that lasted all nine months, the chromosomes that aligned just as prescribed. the life that was given to me. the years upon years of joy, of undiluted wonder, that grew up in that room where i now stood. soaking it in. soaking and soaking.

saying my prayers once again.

yesterday was a glorious day in the life of the soul, and in the life of the church i was born into. it was a stunner of a moment as we listened, in italian, to the first then the middle name of the new Il Papa. in all the italian we didn’t yet know that for all of his life, he was just Bob. Bob the priest. Bob the cardinal. now Leo the Pope.

as i wrote to my boys in the flurry of texts that then punctuated the day, “i feel close as i’ve felt in a long time that God had an actual hand in worldly affairs. this world needs a voice unafraid to speak to worldly power, and proclaim the rule of God. it’s a paradigm the polar opposite of so much idolization in this world. peace and love are not vagaries. huge swaths of the world desperately need both.”

there is much to learn and to listen to from this unlikely pope from chicago’s very own south side. a pope who roots for the sorry sorry white sox, a pope who loves an aurelio’s slice. a pope, we learn, with creole roots. a pope whose grandparents identified as black in a turn-of-the-century census from new orleans’ seventh ward. a pope who left for peru as a very young priest, to work with the poor. a pope with the courage to set straight those who misread Catholic theology—no matter their office, nor the power they wield. i have been praying with all my heart for a voice of true courage in this world. and this morning, i am thinking that in time the moral arc of the universe does sometimes bend toward justice.

what doorways to time have you found yourself staring into of late? and what stirred through your heart at the news of the new Il Papa?

happy blessed almost birthday to a most beloved chair who, around here, goes by the name lamcal. a wise woman of the highest order.

and happy mothering day to all. because, in my book, mother is a verb, and if you gather here you do it magnificently. xoxox love, bam

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

June 14, 2024

settling in and summer serendipities

clippers, shovel, trowel. those are the implements of my tranquility. of returning to my roost and sinking in my roots.

i’m back from travels far and farther. old home seeps into all the crags and crevices. knows me as intimately as any living soul. the familiarity of this old house’s creaks and cracks, the way the one floorboard at the top of the stairs whines its arthritic whine (you too might whine if, for a good 85 years, you’d been underfoot to the clumsiness and weighty soles of so many), the way the light falls in at the same afternoon hour day after day and casts a halo on the old clock that never chimes the proper hour, it all is home to me. and it all comes rushing in, as if a tide pool filling once again, oozing into hollow parts now on their way toward sated.

i loved the adventure of my travels. loved being nursemaid to my boy. but coming home is, in deep down ways, where i belong. it’s in this old house that i finally found my peace. and, every time, it soothes me, quietly awaits me.

the garden, most of all, is living breathing companion. more than just a place to dig and poke, it almost speaks to me in whispers. delights me. returns the favour of my attention with its unfurled petals, its landing spot for bumblebee and butterfly and red-breasted robin. as one schooled in the storybook pages of tasha tudor, kate greenaway, and the norton anthology of children’s poetry, i honed early on my imagination’s muscles (thank you, mama). i spy a delphinium in bloom, a bloom as cobalt blue as neptune is thought to be, and i am certain an elfin soul will soon be stretching out a hammock from stem to stem down there where ladybugs and caterpillars roam. and so the garden to me is endless canvas of delight, whimsy, and unfolding tale, as if i’m something of the puppeteer to my plantings.

i relish sinking back into the rhythms of my chores: the way i stack the mugs, the wee bouquets i tuck around the house, the shopping list i know by heart.

all of it serves to cradle me. tells me i’m home where i belong.

the world and its adventures will be mine again, should i choose to wander. but for now, the summer––and the cicada––are upon us, and the tempo’s slowed, and my tank feels very much in need of filling.

i intend to surrender to summer, and let the whimsies steer me. i might not write each friday. i might write wednesdays instead. i might go a spell in silence. i might write in the middle of some night.

the point is, summer plays best in serendipitous tones. and i intend to listen. and to play along.

what will you do new this summer?

14 Comments

June 7, 2024

that inextinguishable instinct

post-tonsillectomy children’s memorial, january 2000

dispatch from 20037. . .

two dozen years ago, a little guy I loved, a little guy of six, was wheeled down a long hallway to have his tonsils plucked. i walked the whole long way beside his gurney, straight into the OR, where they let me hold his hand till they were ready to send him off to dreamless land. and then, back I walked to wait, eyes awash with tears.

just now, that same kid was wheeled away again. and I, the nurse who flew in from chicago because I couldn’t imagine being even a mile away, was by his side. This time, though, I skipped the long walk, and no tears.

I seem to have been born hardwired to not stay far away, not when someone I love is being wheeled down long hallways, and the day begins at 4:45 a.m.

It’s an urge as irrepressible as anything I know. So much of mothering comes to me instinctively, without the synaptic pause that populates most thought. I leap before I think—leap into the fire, into the deep end, into wherever is the urgency. I don’t know how not to. And, yes, maybe sometimes I’m too much. And maybe I’m unnecessary. Or redundant. But where is there room for redundancy or un-necessity in the chambers of the heart?

Among the breaths of my life that I relish most, being by the side of the ones I birthed will always, always, be my most precious, most savored.

And so, in living my days with all I’ve got, this blessed day, being plopped in this hard chair, in this cacophonous waiting room in downtown DC, is one I will always hold so close to my heart. Truth is, I pray for as many of these sorts of days as time will give me. And as long as I can be there to plant one last kiss on the forehead I have loved since the hour of his birth, I am going to board all the planes, trains, and automobiles to get me here.

And now I’m signing off to keep my holy vigil.

xox

No need for any worries; all will be well here in the nation’s capital. Trust me on that.

PSS my uppers and lowers are a jumble today because I’m typing in my wee phone and can’t stop the gremlins from insisting on at least some proper capitalization.

18 Comments

May 24, 2024

sometimes, joy makes you wait. . .

A year ago, I was crushed. Four of us were supposed to be in Paris, but one of us never made it on a plane. Passport tangles tangled him. We tried every option known to humankind, but after days of holding our breath, we faced the cold hard inevitability: there would be no four of us in Paris. No four of us encircling the cafe table, as I’d pictured it, prayed for it, since the day the doctor told me the thing in my lung was cancer. And all I wanted in the world was to be held tight, held together, by my boys. My beautiful beautiful beautiful boys.

We were determined to try again. This year: Roma. We made the law professor with the failed passport get in line early, and expeditedly, for a new-spangled one. He complied.

I held my breath anyway. The closer we got to takeoff, the harder I held all the breath in my chest.

But Monday night, two planes, carrying four people, were crossing the globe, flying through the night, pointed toward Rome.

Ever since, I’ve been inhaling in double time, breathing as deep as a girl with 1.5 lungs can possibly breathe. Because this is the stuff that makes my life hum like a mezzosoprano, like a nightingale, like the merriest mama that ever there was. We are, the four of us, entangled as one, under the blue blue of Italy’s sky.

Sometimes the unthinkable happens. And you stumble and bumble, and shed tear upon tear. But then you pick up the pieces. You make the most of what’s there in your midst, and try to not ache for what’s missing.

And life, every once in a while, gives you a rare second chance. And you realize the heartache of the past has only hollowed more space in your heart, so that when the rushing in comes in, you’ve all the more capacity for unparalleled joy.

I am giddy and dizzy and pulsing with joy. It’s the sweetest sonata that I’ve ever sung.

It’s the song of my deepest prayer answered: dear God, give me sumptuous sumptuous time with my most blessed and beautiful beautiful boys.

Amen.

A perfect poem for this moment:

Mary Oliver’s “Mindful”

Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

What are the somethings for which you’ve had to wait for what felt an unbearable wait?

22 Comments

November 25, 2022

leftovers . . . (and a few other morsels besides)

the dishes are mostly done––except for a few errant goblets. the cutting board is oiled and tucked away for a well-deserved slumber. the beds at the top of the stairs are finally all full, and certainly rumpled. (a triple delay between newark and o’hare made me wonder if boy No. 1 would ever get home.) along the day, no one got cut, or burned, or splashed with red wine, and other than bellies too full, we escaped without harms.

it was in fact as hilarious and raucous and savorable a day as ever could be––testament to julian of norwich’s promise that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. (i need to inscribe that on my kitchen wall, as i fret and perseverate and plot and re-plot my time charts and checklists, clocked to the quarter hour.)

my prayer is that your day, too, rolled out without a hitch. or at least no unfixable hitches. i know there were empty chairs, and hollowed hearts to go with them. i know some forsook big birds, and all the fussing. but deep down i hope a trickle of grace and gratitude slipped in through one of the cracks.

while the rest of the world races to the mall, or speed dials black-friday shopping deals on their keypads and phones, i’m taking to the woods, or the simple turning of pages. and i’m leaving just a few morsels here.

poets corner: first up, from ross gay, the bloomington, indiana-based poet whose “catalog of unabashed gratitude” is a fine place to begin:

“And thank you, too. And thanks
for the corduroy couch I have put you on.
Put your feet up. Here’s a light blanket,
a pillow, dear one,
for I can feel this is going to be long.
I can’t stop
my gratitude, which includes, dear reader,
you, for staying here with me,
for moving your lips just so as I speak.
Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it.”

nature beat: once upon a time in november of 1947, a poet by the name of jack kerouac sat at his mother’s kitchen table in the working-class ‘hood of ozone park in new york city. he’d just coined the term “beat,” (a word in which he saw double meaning, derived from both “beaten-down” but also “beatitude”), and while waiting to see if he might ever get anything published, he unleashed these lines on november’s harsh winds and inked them into his journal (posthumously published as Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947–1954):

Powerful winds that crack the boughs of November! — and the bright calm sun, untouched by the furies of the earth, abandoning the earth to darkness, and wild forlornness, and night, as men shiver in their coats and hurry home. And then the lights of home glowing in those desolate deeps. There are the stars, though! high and sparkling in a spiritual firmament. We will walk in the windsweeps, gloating in the envelopment of ourselves, seeking the sudden grinning intelligence of humanity below these abysmal beauties. Now the roaring midnight fury and the creaking of our hinges and windows, now the winter, now the understanding of the earth and our being on it: this drama of enigmas and double-depths and sorrows and grave joys, these human things in the elemental vastness of the windblown world.
Jack Kerouac, 1947

storybook corner: i stumbled onto a wonder from nobel-prize winning polish novelist olga tokarczuk the other day, a mostly-picture book titled the lost soul. it’s the tenderest story of a man who’s lost his soul, and in the whole book there are only four pages of text (and three of those are barely a few lines long). the story picks up here:

“once upon a time there was a man who worked very hard and very quickly, and who had left his soul behind him long ago.” a paragraph later we find that “during one of his many journeys, the man awoke in the middle of the night in his hotel room and he couldn’t breathe. . .”

he visits a wise, old doctor who tells him: “if someone looked down on us from above, they’d see that the world is full of people running about in a hurry, sweating and very tired, and their lost souls, always left behind, unable to keep up with their owners. the result is great confusion as the souls lose their heads and the people cease to have hearts. the souls know they’ve lost their owners, but most of the people don’t realize that they’ve lost their own souls.”

the wise old doctor’s prescription: “you must find a place of your own, sit there quietly, and wait for your soul.”

and so the man waits. and waits. and waits some more. and with nary another word, we finally see his soul come knocking at the door of a little cottage on the edge of the city, where the man had gone to sit in pure quiet.

and here’s the happy ending: “from then on they lived happily ever after, and john (the man) was very careful not to do anything too fast, so that his soul could always keep up with him. he did another thing too––he buried all his watches and suitcases in the garden. the watches grew into beautiful flowers that looked like bells, in various colors, while the suitcases sprouted into great big pumpkins, which provided john with food through all the peaceful winters that followed.

and may this day in the wake of so much blessing be filled to the brim with the pure joy of savoring –– all without timetables, and stopwatches, and sinks to be scoured.

which will be the first leftover you sink your fork into???

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December 3, 2021

fragility

one of those phone calls came the other afternoon, the sort that snap you into realizing with every synapse that this fragile interwebbing we call our lives is so precariously held together, barely a breath keeps the filaments from snapping right in two. it was one of those calls when one minute you think the biggest worry on your list is the ache in your hand that won’t be quelled, and then the phone rings. you hear the voice you know so well. you hear the depths of its deepest canyons, and the words can’t spill quite fast enough. you listen, and you hear words that send you tumbling, catapulting down an unimaginable chute for which there feels no bottom.

you hear words that someone you love dearly has just gotten word from a doctor, and there’s a death sentence attached.

and you spend the next 18 hours barely breathing. swiping tears from your cheeks, your chin, your nose, the hard back of your hand.

blessedly, miraculously, that call was followed by a clarifying one the morning after, and it turns out the message first conveyed was not nearly as drastic as originally told. the one i love has every reason to believe he’ll be around years and years from now.

but in the intervening space, in the hours of scanning the whole of my life and the deepest places in my heart, i stared once again at the fragile filaments that hold us, that position us, that sometimes fool us into thinking they’re indestructible. we forget the fragility. we forget how each day when we first stir under our covers, plant a wobbly foot on the floorboards, peek out the window at the rising sun’s pink wash across the sky, it’s a miracle. it’s a flat-out gift that no one dare take for granted.

because in a sweep, in a single phone call, in a tumbling out of words–in a heartbeat–it could all be gone. poof! no longer….

i didn’t mean to scare you here, the way i wrote this, the way i waited a whole paragraph to let you know the coast is clear. but i did mean to remind us all that this is fragile, oh so, so fragile.

most of us have gotten those phone calls, those knocks at the door. i got one when i was 18, and another when i was 24. i admit to living too much on the edge of fear.

but it’s hard to scrub away the clear memory of the operator breaking in the phone call, telling me there was an emergency, and someone needed to interrupt the call. hard to wipe away the long drive through the blizzard, the walking the hospital halls, kneeling with my youngest brother in the stripped-bare hospital chapel as cold as everything else that night. hard to undo the doctor’s somber words, when he walked down the hall, ashen, and simply said, “i’m sorry.”

it’s hard to forget six years earlier the unfamiliar sight of my father walking into the drug store where i worked, telling me in the middle of a weekday afternoon that i had to come home, i was being taken to a hospital. hard to forget all the nightmare that unfolded after that.

with those indelible etchings on my heart, i count myself among the blessed ones, the ones less likely to forget most days just how precious this all is. just what a miracle it is that i became a mother to two boys who are as precious to me as all the magnificence in this wide world. that i met a man i dearly fiercely love, a man whose depths have steadied me, have buoyed me, have fueled my updraft in ways i never ever dreamed. that i’ve lived well past the 52 years my blessed father was allotted. and that i never take for granted a moon’s rise, or the sun’s setting. i live to hear the cardinal singing, to stir something bubbling on the stove. life’s littlest miracles are the sum and substance of my days. and then you add the big ones — the loves that animate my heart and soul, the laughter that punctuates the hours, the wisdoms that take my breath away — and i am living, breathing, holy gratitude.

and i aim to live my life at fullest attention.

what moments in your life have made you see the fragility that underpins it all?

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September 3, 2021

it’s the little joys that sometimes carry us…

in which, after a seven-week summer’s sabbatical, our little scribe shuffles back to the table, ferrying a tall stack of books, and the hope of something to say….

well, good morning. i promised it wouldn’t be long, and it wasn’t. really. oh, i’ll admit to all but sitting on my typing hands the first few fridays, an itch to write that nearly needed ointment to make it go away. but i held on, and soon enough, savored the quiet. found plenty to fill the days. in the weeks i’ve been away, tucked behind the virtual monastery walls, i’ve been witness to the scattering of ashes of a woman we loved, i’ve flown across the country, had both my boys under this old roof for one 36-hour slice of heavenliness, cheered on the now dubbed TriathlonMan (aka former architecture critic) not once but twice as he gleefully crossed the finish line (well, he was gleeful the first time, and in last sunday’s 97-degree heat “gleeful” would be the last adjective i’d reach for), and said too many tearful goodbyes at airports and college dorms.

so here we are. not unlike the back-to-school rhythms of clean underwear and sharpened pencils, ready to dive back in. what a blessing that the holiest of holy days are upon us, just as the light takes on its amber molasses glow. and the blood in my veins percolates with its usual seasonal vivacity (i am autumn’s child, to be sure).

one of the truths of the summer — and of this moment — is that i often feel crushed by the news of the world around me. these last few weeks and days offer no reprieve. many a night i’ve lay awake imagining how it is to be sardined in a hangar in qatar with no water, no food, and sunlight beating down, all of it underscored with unchartable fear. and the cries of hungry babies all around. and now we’ve got a lone star state filled with deputized vigilantes racing around to turn in their already broken neighbors. let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

and so i was particularly struck when i stumbled on an essay this week from maria popova, she of brain pickings wonderment, an essay in which she writes of hermann hesse’s belief in little joys. i seem to gather proponents of littleness — dorothy day and her little courages, and now hesse and his little joys. anyway, i ran to the library — the candy counter equivalent for those who binge on poetries and paragraphs — and checked me out some hesse (german-swiss poet, painter, novelist; author of siddhartha*), specifically his collection, translated into english in 1974, titled my belief: essays on life and art.

hesse writes, in his 1905 essay “on little joys”:

Great masses of people these days live out their lives in a dull and loveless stupor. Sensitive persons find our inartistic manner of existence oppressive and painful, and they withdraw from sight… I believe what we lack is joy. The ardor that a heightened awareness imparts to life, the conception of life as a happy thing, as a festival… But the high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy…
Our ways of enjoying ourselves are hardly less irritating and nerve-racking than the pressure of our work. “As much as possible, as fast as possible” is the motto. And so there is more and more entertainment and less and less joy… This morbid pursuit of enjoyment [is] spurred on by constant dissatisfaction and yet perpetually satiated.
I would simply like to reclaim an old and, alas, quite unfashionable private formula: … Do not overlook the little joys!
These little joys … are so inconspicuous and scattered so liberally throughout our daily lives that the dull minds of countless workers hardly notice them. They are not outstanding, they are not advertised, they cost no money!
Hermann Hesse, “On Little Joys” from My Belief: Essays on Life and Art

he echoes annie dillard, another of my pantheon of “little” saints, she who preaches like no other on the sacred art of paying attention, she who indelibly wrote:

The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But — and this is the point — who gets excited by a mere penny?
[…]
It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

keep your eyes — nay, your whole soul — open is her point. and hesse follows suit. leaving little to chance, hesse points to the particulars, and prescribes thusly:

Just try it once — a tree, or at least a considerable section of sky, is to be seen anywhere. It does not even have to be blue sky; in some way or another the light of the sun always makes itself felt. Accustom yourself every morning to look for a moment at the sky and suddenly you will be aware of the air around you, the scent of morning freshness that is bestowed on you between sleep and labor. You will find every day that the gable of every house has its own particular look, its own special lighting. Pay it some heed if you will have for the rest of the day a remnant of satisfaction and a touch of coexistence with nature. Gradually and without effort the eye trains itself to transmit many small delights, to contemplate nature and the city streets, to appreciate the inexhaustible fun of daily life. From there on to the fully trained artistic eye is the smaller half of the journey; the principal thing is the beginning, the opening of the eyes.

yet another wise person i read this week, yuriko saito, a professor of philosophy at the rhode island school of design, calls the little joys “everyday aesthetics,” and defines them as “tiny, perfect things.” it’s the art of the ordinary, and the ordinary is where we live, those of us whose days are mapped by carpools and grocery trips and scrubbing out the bathroom sinks.

the world — even in its brokenness — is filled with tiny, perfect things. the imperative is that we keep close watch. God gave us input pipes — eyes, ears, nose, skin, tastebud. we are meant to notice. invited to, anyway. we dwell in holy kaleidoscope. it twists and turns and sways and dapples minute by minute, season upon season.

and so my days take on a hopscotch paradigm: i skip and hop from little joy to little joy, and hold on tight to those wisps of poesy that fall across my path. i mosey the alley, where wild things bloom and sway, and wander through my garden, clippers in hand, snipping stems for tiny bouquets i tuck all around the house, especially on the windowsills, a perch made for paying outward glance. i tiptoe down the brick walk to my summer porch, and keep watch from behind the screens where the birds take no notice, and carry on their birdlike ways as if i’ve morphed into just another leaf or willow frond and become unseen, no longer alien, no longer brake to their flutterings and chatter. i curl in my reading nook, keeping watch on the world passing by, on the pages i turn.

i keep a silence. a holy silence. the sort from which my prayers take flight endlessly, eternally. i pray for this world which too many days seems to be crumbling. i pray for lives i will never know. but i imagine. and my empathies carry me to faraway deserts, to tarmacs and hotlines where the desperation rises by the hour.

i’m surely not saying that the little joys will mend the brokenness. that takes a whole nother level of dedication and muscle moving. all i’m saying is that if we can fix our gaze on even the occasional tiny, perfect thing, we might stave off the paralysis that comes with the avalanche of awful news. we might gather up shards of beautiful, shards of little joy, and find the oomph to not stay stuck, the oomph to make the blessed most of these fine breaths left in us as we march through the bracketed hours of our days.

for this i pray.

what might be the little joys, the tiny perfect things that carry you through the day, even when the darkness comes?

*starting a new cumulative reading list, and first up, siddhartha, hesse’s 1920 novel which delves deep into hinduism, a religion about which i know not enough….it’s described as the “absolutely amazing and engrossing tale of one man’s journey to find that all-elusive idea of enlightenment.” enlightenment, here i come.….

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July 26, 2019

the inside-out blessing of the summer fever

i wouldn’t wish it on anyone. but now that it’s settled into this old house, now that it’s felled the boy whose legs are almost too long to stretch across the couch, the one whose peach fuzz pokes out from under the ice-cold washcloth i lay across his brow, now that it’s given us hours and hours to spend in conversation that flows from idle to silly to whatever’s been corked inside his heart, the summer fever has its advantages.

most especially when it hits on Days 30, 29 and 28 of the countdown to college. in the undulations of fever, when the hours stretch on and the mercury rises again, we’ve burrowed deep into the gift of time spent inches away from each other.

i’ve pulled out all the ministrations he’s come to know by heart, the ones synonymous with being sick in the house where he grew up: the plastic cup filled with ice chips, doused in spoonfuls of honey; the stack of saltines for nibbling, the cold washcloth swirled through the ice-water basin that sits not far from where he lays. he knows the rhythms and sounds of being nursed back to vigor. he asks, from his sickbed, from under the washcloth, “what will i do if i get sick at college?” and i sense it’s one of only dozens of college what-ifs.

the thing about fevers is they take down the walls we wear like armor to get through the highs and lows of the days. fevers strip away the tough stuff, fevers peel away the pretense. fevers let loose what lurks deep inside.

and so these have been the tenderest days. days that wouldn’t have come if the fever hadn’t landed, hadn’t slowed the boy in his i’m-soaking-up-every-hour-with-friends tracks. most days, he’s a blur whirling in and out the front or back door, up the stairs to change from basketball in the sun to dusk at the beach. he’s quite brilliantly making the most of the signature summer, the last one of high school, the last before his tight band of brothers scatters like pool balls across the smooth green velvet that is america’s collegiate landscape.

and because my singular focus these days is soaking up my end of his equation, savoring these hours before it goes silent, before the sheets on his bed are unrumpled for weeks, before i set only two knives and two forks at the dinner table, i’m receiving the summer fever as a gift from the heavens. using the hours to press against his heart the truths i want him to seize: that he’s learned, under our tutelage, just how to fend for himself; that all these years in the crucible of our love is firm foundation for whatever comes his way; that i will always, always be only a phone call away (he actually told me this week he’s going to be calling a lot — this from the kid whose version of a long phone call is three sentences before the dial tone comes).

and, of course, that i will always make house calls.

we’ve even used these hours and days to turn back the clock, to pull from the bookshelf the books he loved as a wee little fellow. he’s curled his hot self beside me as i’ve read and turned pages, followed the antics of poor james and the most giant peach. it’s not a bad thing to take a time-out, to review in real time the idiosyncrasies of how you were loved. in sickness and in health. on good days and days that were not.

it’ll be a long time is my guess till the trusty old washcloth, the one with magical powers, gets pulled from the shelf, and lovingly draped on the very hot brow of the boy i’ve loved through it all.

and now it’s time for the fever to go, and the trusty old washcloth with it….

did you grow up with particular idiosyncrasies on the days you were sick, and someone nursed you back to raring to go?

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Tag: savoring moments