this book, its cover now seen for the very first time, is a love letter: to life, and to everyone and everything that colors my world, and draws me closer to the palpable presence i know as the Holy.

curiously, it came in the wake of an uncommon cancer found deep in my lung back in the spring of 2023. it took form in the months after surgery, when the subsequent scans—every three to six months—bracketed time and brought ballast, but more so a spiritual epiphany as old as, well, time.

in the sixth century, the great monastic benedict of nursia, in his precept known as The Rule, taught his followers to “keep death daily” before their eyes. he understood, as did the sages whose wisdom threads through the millennia, that to keep our death before our eyes is to be fully, fully awake and alive. to not give short shrift to the sheer improbability of our existence. to love exuberantly. and to reach for the holiness we were all meant to be.

Broken Open is my meditation on that truth, a narrative that courses through the first two years, from surgery to scans, when i found myself living in what i came to know as Scan Time, time reframed, abbreviated, doled out in six-month measures. it’s a span of time riveted by fear and becalmed by those things that save us: a whiff of hope in the form of a doctor’s few words, a great laugh, a good friend showing up at the door, a quiet hour alone—in a pew or the woods or the nook where we turn a fine page.

its title tells its story: it’s a book about being not broken, but broken open. discovering the beauties and wisdoms within. if you can get past the brokenness, and into the opening.

it’s a scary, scary thing to put my story out there—i’m not so big on baring my medical foibles and frailties.

but here’s what slays that fear: my hope, my prayer that this book finds its way to any someone who sits alone, afraid, and desperately seeking even a sliver of light.

this book is my hand reaching for yours.

undying thanks to the great folks at Brazos Press for bringing it to the page; to Katelyn Beaty, my editor, for prodding me into the depths, and drawing light out of the murk. to all the great and glorious souls who have kept me upright (mostly) these past couple years.

Broken Open: How Our Most Fragile Seasons Invite Us to Extravagant Love will be in bookstores in early february and, as is the way of the publishing world these days, you can pre-order it now:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Open-Fragile-Seasons-Extravagant/dp/1587437112

Baker Book House: https://bakerbookhouse.com/products/9781587437113_broken-open

for all my beloved friends of the chair, this is the first missive dispatched from substack, and i sure as heck hope this finds you. the behind-the-curtain wizardry is mostly beyond my comprehension, so i’ll just cross my fingers and hope. i’ll be back friday, our regularly scheduled programming, for another round of the chair. but this special announcement just begged to be told now. (and clearly i am finding my way here, because i have no idea how to make all these little buttons below line up in a neat little row…)

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call me raggedy.

i am, at this turn in the world, the raggedy-est of raggedy souls. 

for the past four-and-a-half weeks, a sum total of thirty whole days, i’ve been holding my breath, pounding the keys, and aiming to quell the rat-a-tat-tat of my old little heart. i awake before 5, day after day, and tap till well after midnight—as long as the ghost has not given up on me.

it’s the plight of the writer on deadline (and i am starting to wonder if maybe perhaps i’m getting too old for this gig, though i can’t for the life of me imagine a life without the stringing of words into lines, into pages, complete with tables of contents).

there have been sentences to untangle, misplaced modifiers, and a bumper crop of commas where the yield should be leaner. and ideas—some of them big, some of them not so—to refine to their core.

all in all, i’ve been pushed to my depths. and then some.

it’s that book i found myself writing a winter ago, and now, at long last, 202 whole pages of it, have finally, finally been flung back to the editor with all copy-editing queries and scolds duly addressed. 

i cannot for the life of me remember a harder writing assignment, one that cut any closer to the bone than this one. 

and that, i pray, will make all the difference.

not much that’s worth saying comes easy.

i resisted at first, the idea of a book exploring the spiritual insights of cancer, when it first was dangled before my cognitive gears. i pushed it aside, dismissively and emphatically. i could barely tell a soul how deeply scared i’d become since i’d first heard of my cancer, so why in the world would i lift up that fear for all in the world to gawk at? 

but then a funny thing happened: a sisterly crew of glorious writers who i trust through and through read one or two essays, about the ways the cancer had opened my eyes and my soul, and insisted there might be something worth saying. 

what i was saying was that the scary prognoses i’d found every time i looked up my odd little cancer had propelled me into a spiritual depth that has proved most compelling. and stunningly calming, if calm is a word to be found in cancer’s vicinity. 

it’s a knowing that’s ancient, one that sages have been spouting about for ages and ages: our time here is fleeting, our purpose is certain. these are our days to get the job done. there is some urgency here.

cancer, quite curiously, has turned out to be my spiritual guide. has pointed me squarely toward the singular aims of my every last breath: to love and love deeply; to savor each morsel of living (both the light and the shadow); and, more than anything, to chisel my soul to its holiest possible iteration, the one i believe God imagined me to be. God imagines each of us to be. each in our own madcap, magnificent way.

if i have one single word to leave behind in this world, it might be a word—or maybe a string of words—found deep in the pages of the book that now has a name: it’s called broken open, and its one sustaining idea is that deep within our brokenness there lies wisdom and beauty. in all of us. i’ve no corner on that market. sometimes it takes being broken wide open to tap into those veins. 

now six books in, on a shelf with my name, i’ve learned a thing or two about filling a page with vials of neatly-arranged alphabet letters. i’ve had to work mightily: to muscle up my words, to scythe all the frills, and to surgically, surgically sharpen my thoughts. 

i think back to my earliest days in the newsroom, when the marvelous editor who hired me—the one who gave me the one-in-a-million chance to take a crack at news writing in the wake of a life devoted to nursing—used to spill gallons of bright purple ink on my printouts. she had a habit, as she tried to mold her flock of writers, of printing off the rough drafts of their stories, and poring over them with her signature purple pen. she was looking for bloopers and potholes. and she duly drew them to your attention with her marginalia the color of concord grapes.

i was, not so proudly, the queen of purple back then, the writer of prose tilting toward purple—prose that’s dripping with overwrought words, treacly and saccharine, an assault on the insulin pump. our beloved editor (sheila was her name, famous in newsrooms across the land, and often a reader here at the chair) tried mightily to purple it out of me. and maybe at last, 44 years after stepping into the newsroom, i’m beginning to get with the program. 

mostly i’ve spent the last thirty days cutting the fat, clearing the noise, plucking just the right word from the poetic universe. my aim was to pen the purest, clearest, most piercingly true telling of my story. the story of how having a good chunk of lung lifted out from under my rib cage has pointed me to timeless wisdoms and soulful epiphanies. and one or two thoughts that might be worth passing along.

i decided to spare few details, to not skip over the bumps in my past. i wrote of my fears, even the ones that scare me the most. i considered life when i was no longer. and i did not look away. 

when it came to the especially hard parts, where i told the whole truth, i had to take very deep breaths. and that’s why i’m raggedy now. 

but i cling to a knowing that’s proved to be true: we all, every one of us, work from a similar palette of struggles and pains. and if i can show you my bumps and my bruises, let you in on the unspoken unspooling of my scariest hours, then you just might find ballast when your life turns rocky too. or at least know you’re not alone. 

all my life long i’ve seen the beauty in brokenness. and what i want most is for you to see too. to believe it. to lift it up, and marvel—at the fact that despite our foibles and fumbles, despite the many steep hills in our way, we little humans somehow figure out how to muscle our way. along the way we laugh, we love, we weep. but, really, we’re in this together. all of us blundering along for as long as we’re here. and then, heaven only knows . . .

in the end, this is what i know about Broken Open, the book: i have taken the hardest part of my life (to date) and held it up to the light to say, “this is beautiful. behold it.” it is a life riven with cracks, now rivered in gold. just like the japanese kintsugi, the art of repair, which magnifies the beauty in brokenness. and fills in the cracks of the shattered vessel with radiant metals of gold or silver or copper.

thus, i might be raggedy, but i’ve tried mighty hard to pour a wee bit of ore into my cracks.

what’s the hardest thing you’ve done lately?

soon as i can, i’ll show you the cover. i am awaiting the signal from the people in charge. the ones who are daring to let me tell my epiphany story. 

p.s. happy blessed almost birthday to my beautiful and beloved A. xoxoxox

because we are not giving up on the america we believe in, the one that bears a very big heart, the one that can shoulder the world’s heavy load, the one whose muscles have always been fibered with heroes of human scale, the ones who wouldn’t get up, the ones who wouldn’t sit down, the ones who marched and meant it. the ones who died. 

and because we need a day to declare the glory of emancipation, an act of defiance, of faith, as ancient as there’s ever been. for we the species of greed seem to have long had a knack for stealing the liberties of those who might serve us, who might lighten our load. their own load, be damned. 

and because today, the nineteenth of june, juneteenth, is one such day, let us turn our attention to one for the ages: ms. rosa parks, a woman whose simple act—refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, even on pain of arrest—invigorated a movement that fundamentally changed american life. and whose story, over the years, has been diluted, made to be one with keynotes of pity, where truth be told she was all about grit. 

the story so often told of ms parks is that she was one tired soul, a seamstress who’d put in a long day’s work, when she boarded that bus in montgomery, alabama, in december of 1955. and that if not for her weary feet she might not have refused to get up from her seat where the white man wanted to sit. 

some have called that the Standard Rosa Parks Story, one that skimps on nuance and short shrifts the structural underpinnings of the civil rights movement, specifically the longstanding work of the NAACP, the national association for the advancement of colored people—the nation’s oldest such grassroots organization, founded in 1909, by a diverse, interracial corps of activists including W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells. critics of the oft-told version of rosa parks’ story would like us all to consider a Revised Standard Edition, which sets the story in more accurate context and illumination. (that edition, which i’m not outlining here, corrects a mistake and fills in an omission. you can read of it here.)

rosa parks herself rebutted the standard telling of her bus-seat story in her 1992 memoir: “people always say that i didn’t give up my seat because i was tired, but that isn’t true. i was not tired physically, or no more tired than i usually was at the end of a working day. i was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. i was 42. no, the only tired i was, was tired of giving in.”

what’s not argued is that ms. parks’ arrest that december day triggered a meticulously organized boycott of the entire montgomery bus system that lasted for 381 days. and that led to a supreme court ruling that, in 1956, expanded the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections, affirming that “separate but equal” had no place in public transportation—an evolution that culminated a decade later in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, dismantling state-sponsored segregation across all public spaces. 

the great nikki giovanni, a poet i have long loved, picked up on that course correction—specifically on the status of mrs. parks’ feet—in this poem i have always loved. she, too, ditches the notion that the seamstress was but a “tired old woman” and plants her squarely as a deliberate activist in a larger, justice-seeking movement. 

it’s a poem that begs to be read today, aloud or otherwise (i am always a sucker for a poem unfurled in a way that takes my breath away).  

there are many things to love about this poem; placing the pullman porters front and center, chief among the reasons. the whole sweep of Black history here makes for an aching, aching read. 

aches, i’ll argue though, are good for the soul. they’re what bulk up our empathies—and without empathy, what’s the point of taking up oxygen here on this rarest of planets? i love, too, how ms. giovanni winds us toward a waltz between the porters and mrs. parks. i love how they stand, arms linked, fending off cruelty and injustice. 

i am all in for rosa parks today. and the pullman porters. and the poets who bring them whirling to life on this nineteenth of june.

Rosa Parks

BY NIKKI GIOVANNI

This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said
they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago
Defender to the Black Americans in the South so they would
know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who
helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight
the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because
even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birth-
place of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The
Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the
Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both
the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would
know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled
when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954
when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “sepa-
rate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in
1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a
doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood
why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer
when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps
and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways
when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the
Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while
the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to
St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept
him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all
summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly
lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grand-
children on his knee telling them about his summer riding the
rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money,
Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unac-
ceptably murdered. This is for the Pullman Porters who, when the
sheriff was trying to get the body secretly buried, got Emmett’s
body on the northbound train, got his body home to Chicago,
where his mother said: I want the world to see what they did
to my boy. And this is for all the mothers who cried. And this is
for all the people who said Never Again. And this is about Rosa
Parks whose feet were not so tired, it had been, after all, an ordi-
nary day, until the bus driver gave her the opportunity to make
history. This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama,
who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the
moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods
aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in
Money, Mississippi, who had been so well protected by the
Pullman Porters, would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks
said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. No longer would
there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs.
Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system,
the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and
the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young
men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No. Great
voices would be raised singing the praises of God and exhorting
us “to forgive those who trespass against us.” But it was the
Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it
was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not
being able to stand it. She sat back down.

—Nikki Giovanni, “Rosa Parks” from Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. 

how will you sit back down or stand up and be counted, or not stay quiet, or refuse to acquiesce today?

in summer, when the windows’ optimal posture is open, i hear the birds at daystart. they warble their throats in the dark, not unlike the way we humans stumble to the bathroom, shove a toothbrush into our mouths, and begin the day with eyes half closed, foaming at the mouth.

the birds, specifically the red-breasted robin, like to get a jump on things. they seem to have selected—by some mysterious and far-off committee, i suppose—a start time of 4:30 a.m., roughly. very roughly. for that’s the hour when the first of the avian staccato, the chirp-chirp-chirp of the dawn, finds its way into my ears.

i rustle and rouse. feet soon planted on the ground (never too firmly these days; i am becoming of the wobbly variety), i follow the pre-ordained path: swipe my reading glasses off the bedside table (should i ever need to see in the dark, i suppose, is why i keep them there), stumble into the bath (i’ve explained that above), throw on the same clothes i wore yesterday (i am a creature of catholic school uniforms, i cannot seem to shake the habit). and then comes the good part, the part i love best: i shuffle down the stairs, and into the morning awake and alone. coffee is brewed (we still brew here, not having arrived into the coffee-pod era).

and that’s when i crank up what amounts to the family business: i lift the lid on the laptop, await its whistle and whir, and then i get to work. i type for a living. you witness it here.

of late i have been typing as many hours as i can stuff into a day. lights are out, usually but not always, by midnight. and you know when the start is. i pause for the occasional nibble. and a dunk in the pool. otherwise it’s all words all the time. i am in the penultimate throes of editing what’s turning out to be Book No. 6. and any day now, if i push hard enough through the next mornings-till-nightfall, i will whoosh it all back to the faraway editor and return to the business of breathing and living.

but i’m not there yet. there seems always to be another sentence to bolster. to untangle the inevitable grammarian knot. being of the nose-to-the-grindstone ilk (my father so ordained me decades and decades ago, warning me that keeping my nose ever to the grindstone was going to get me but one simple thing: a sharp nose), i can never quite fix things enough. so i keep at it; to be finished is wholly elusive.

and all of that is more or less why this morning i’ve no grand epiphanies to bring here to the table. i’ve simply been sharpening the instrument of my breathing, the one with the two little holes.

which brings me to the question i heard put to david sedaris the other week: “why write, david,” the inquisitor asked. why, oh why, has he tapped out enough words to amount to 16 books, hundreds and hundreds of (hilarious) essays, etcetera etcetera?

“to get better” is how he answered. and that answer, those three simple words, hit me right above my rather sharp nose. hard. with a thwop.

what better reason for living, for writing, for anything.

if you are a writer, to write to get better is the smartest thing in the world. also the smartest if you are, say, a garbage collector who lives to collect garbage. or a surgeon. (though, ideally, we humans in need of surgery should consider submitting only to those who’ve more or less gotten pretty good at their craft—their surgeoning, that is.)

“to get better” is also a very fine answer to the question of living. i realized it’s rather a koan. think about it: why do we get out of bed in the morning, plant feet firmly or not on the ground, and get about the business of whatever is our day? well, a fairly good reason is to get better at it. to put a bit of mindfulness to what otherwise might have been dawdling. wasting our days.

if we intend to live through another day—or hope to anyway—why not see if we can live just a little bit better today than yesterday? we could maybe be kinder. we could maybe listen more intently. we could take up a notch so many of the simple propositions that make us a human.

i have asked myself close to a million times why i insist on awaking with the birds on friday mornings and tapping out these missives. david sedaris, who has been writing every day since 1977, gave me my answer. i do it to get better. because better is always out of reach. and reaching is a mighty fine posture for living. maybe that’s why God gave us shoulders: so we could extend the bones from that socket and stretch our arms as far as they could—you got it—reach!

so as i slink away here, back to the tasks already piled onto the keyboard, i leave you with two simple queries (no need to answer aloud, these questions are meant simply to extend the conversation, to give you something maybe to ponder in the quiet and wonder of your very own beautiful mind):

what do you reach for each day? and where in your life do you try to get better?

sometimes when i get up early, i find i am not alone. say, yesterday, when i blearily looked out the back window and saw what seemed a mirage coiled under the trees in my garden. this sweet soul, who had apparently polished off a fine morning meal of every pansy in every pot in sight, reposed without making a sound. when i went out to visit her she paid me no mind. i might have been able to feed her from the palm of my hand. but then i thought, TICK!, and recoiled my hand. after making her promise not to partake of my so-called farmer plot (all herbs and zinnias this year), i bid her adieu and off she wandered. i’ve never seen her before, and she’s not out there now, so maybe (hopefully) she doesn’t like what my garden and i have to offer, and i’ll not have to shield my whole garden in reams and reams of plastic deer-protectant wrap.

the choreographies of heaven are beyond us. beyond me certainly. after ten long days (and i mean 5 a. m. to midnight, day after day) of nose to the grindstone, poring over every errant semi-colon, run-on sentence, and soul-dredging page of my very next book, the one on its penultimate spin through the book mill, i was feeling a bit queazy, and not unworried by the knot in my chest, right there in the spot where i imagined my heart might soon blow a gasket.

i was brought back to my senses, and my soul, by a bird. a wee little bird scared out of his wits. and right away in his trembling, feather-weighted being, i sensed some iteration of my own nervous affliction. we were, the two of us, a pair of overwrought, hyper-adrenalinized creatures. only he was the one with the wings. and i hadn’t yet lost my wits.

without pause, and per the moral code of my mother who taught us from the start never to leave a baby bird or wee squirrel or bunny in any degree of distress, i leapt to his rescue. and by the time the afternoon ended, i realized he’d rescued me.

here’s how i’d describe the holy unfolding:

the heavens vaulted open yesterday afternoon for the narrowest sliver of time, drew me in, and left me enchanted. and, as is so often the case, graced with a balm i hadn’t fully realized i’d needed. 

a baby bird’s heartbeat quivered against my bare palm, and as i released him to the wilds, after he’d found himself caged in the confines of our back porch, after he’d finally been freed and caught his breath on the grass (wings spread wide while he panted), and at last fluttered back to the bough where his mama had waited all afternoon, i felt a lift of my own heart and soul: i was suddenly rinsed of my own case of quivers. 

the little bird, a fledgling robin so newly sprung from the nest his breast feathers merely hinted at orange, had somehow flown into our screened porch, and could not for the life of him find his way out. his mama, i realized, was not letting him out of her sight, and squawked all afternoon from a branch just the other side of the porch screen. (who says love dwells only in the domain of the human?)

try as i might, i could not, could not steer the wee robin near the wide-open door. and my tenderest coaxing did no convincing (i must not speak bird). but after a while, amid all the fluttering, he up and disappeared. and i figured he’d figured it out. case closed.

but an hour or so later, the resident architecture critic (fresh from a many-hour tour of the obama presidential library center with its architects, tod williams and billy tsien) wandered into the house to divulge what he’d thought was late-breaking news: “there’s a bird stuck in the summer house,” said he (the summer house is the name long ago put to the plain old porch attached to our garage; little more than a realtor’s gussied-up label).

so out i trotted, and sure enough, the little fellow had come out of his hiding, and was banging his sweet little head and his soon-to-be redbreast again and again against the screen of the porch.

the poor thing was so quiveringly scared he nearly let me wrap my palms round him—seemingly so desperate even a human hand might be a welcome utensil.  i, though, was the one who chickened out, when i suddenly envisioned his sharp little beak pecking open my flesh. and the last thing i needed this week was a fresh case of bird-flu jitters. 

so i did what i’ve done in avian emergencies past: i leapt to the basement, praying no one had tossed out the now-ancient butterfly net, the one that works handily when trying to fetch a fledgling. a bit shabby after all these years (we acquired it three decades ago when the one who’s now professing law was an avid naturalist loping through make-believe woods in pursuit of mosaic-winged moths), the net was right where someone had left it years ago. 

fancying myself a latterday jane goodall, i loped up the stairs, out the door, and into the porch where the caged bird squawked. we played a little round of catch-me-if-you-can, but then at last, i got him!

gently, gently, i cupped him into the net, and then, while he and mama bird squawked in holy-hell unison, i delivered him to the grass, where disengaging him from the net proved a bit more of a challenge than either he or i had hoped. 

and that’s when i reached right in—bird-flu fears, be damned—and scooped his weightless little self into my palms and safely onto the grass. where first he sprawled, wings spread wide. and while i whispered sweet somethings his way, and tried to assure his mama that i was friend not foe, he finally caught his breath and fluttered away. 

the joy of their squawks—a swift change in tempo and tone from afraid to rejoice—i shall never forget.

last seen: mama and fledgling united again. side-by-side on the bough of crabapple tree. 

and with that, they flew out of sight, back to the playfields of heaven.

and i bowed to those heavens for once again drawing me into their currents, leaving me rinsed and bathed in the holy.

i am going to share a very long and deeply beautiful poem here. my beloved friend A sent this my way. i was so taken with the whole of it, and one line in particular, i tracked down the poet to ask if i might maybe use that line somewhere in the pages of my book, with all credit noted.

because the poet, matt moberg is his name, so knocked my socks off, and because his story is so triumphant, i am determined to spread the holy word. per his “about” page on his website, matt describes himself thusly: “[he] is a self-taught artist based in Minneapolis, whose journey into the world of art began as a means of staying alive. After years of struggling with addiction, Matt’s therapist suggested that when the cravings next come on, he should try art as a way of pushing back and saying no. Despite having no history in the field, Matt heeded his therapist’s advice and found new life through doing so.” mark’s drawings and poems are equally breathtaking. and i invite you to follow along….

I think every human being 
eventually has a moment
where they are standing outside in sweatpants
that have lost the will to be pants,
holding a trash bag, a divorce, a parking ticket,
or some other receipt from the universe
that says, “surprise, this too is part of it.”

And then the sky bruises purple.

And the air touches your face
like it knows your whole story.

And suddenly you realize:

all the real is actually unreal.

The dirt.
The breath.
The weird little bones in your hands.
The fact that we are here,
on a floating rock with pollen counts,
paying bills,
missing dead people,
loving living people
who say “leaving now”
while still fully naked and looking for socks.

And still,
the moon clocks in.

No applause.
No benefits.
No note from management saying,
“Great work being ancient and luminous again.”

Just the moon,
working nights
like a single mother with no applause,
packing silver lunches
for every dark thing
that still has to rise.

Tell me that isn’t holy.
Tell me there is a better word
than sacred
for the way light keeps returning
with no guarantee
we will actually stop and take note.

I know people who believe in therapy,
probiotics,
tarot,
twelve-step meetings,
manifestation journals,
and waiting exactly eleven minutes
before texting back
so they do not appear emotionally available,
even though their whole nervous system
is standing in the driveway holding flowers.

And underneath all of it,
every ritual,
every doctrine,
every smoothie with chia seeds,
the prayer is the same:

Please let me be loved.
Please let me be forgiven.
Please let this strange little life
mean something
before my lower back
submits its formal resignation.

What is going on?

For real tho—What is this place?

This unbearable tenderness
of being alive long enough
to watch steam lift from coffee in winter
like a soul practicing leaving.

To see your friend laugh so hard
they slap the table
as if joy is a mosquito
they are trying to kill.

To hear a child say “pisghetti”
and, for one shining second,
realize language
has finally been improved.

I know I already noted this in the first piece,
but the older I get,
the less use I have for certainty.

Certainty has never made me pull over
because the sunset looked like God
dropped a jar of peach jam
across the whole midwestern sky
and decided to be lazy
and not clean up.

Certainty has never made me gasp
at rain on hot pavement.

Certainty has never found me
in the cereal aisle,
holding Captain Crunch,
suddenly remembering
that everyone I have ever loved
was made from stardust,
hunger,
and a series of decisions
we probably should have slept on.

No.
It has always been awe.

Awe was the first church.

Before steeples.
Before committees.
Before men got involved
and started making rules about skirts.

Awe was there
with its wild hair
and muddy feet,
saying:

Look.
Look again.
Look until looking
becomes love.

Awe, and soup.

Awe, and someone rubbing your back
when you are sick.

Awe, and old couples at Target
arguing gently about avocados,
as if marriage is not one vow
but ten thousand errands
performed beside the person
who knows exactly
how you like the cart pushed.

Maybe gratitude
was never meant to sound elegant.

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Damn.
That woodpecker is trying
to beat that tree from itself.”

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Thank you, body,
for continuing to drag me through this world
despite the many slim jims 
I have done to you
at gas stations.”

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Thank you to the dogs
who lose their entire minds
when we come home
as if we have returned from war
and not Walgreens.”

For me, that might be my gospel.

That joy that does not wait for us
to be impressive but only needs us
to come through the door.

Because the truth is,
this life is devastating.

And ridiculous.

One minute you are 22 and invincible,
driving too fast,
eating gas station nachos
with the confidence of a Greek god.

The next minute you are googling,
“Can sneezing cause a hamstring injury?”
and the answer is,
apparently,
“Welcome to the second half of your life.”

But even now—

even tired,
even grieving,
even emotionally held together
by iced coffee, playlists,
and one very specific wolves hoodie—

we keep finding reasons
to stay soft.

We plant tomatoes
even though grief is real.

We bake bread
even though the news is on fire.

We send photos of the sky
to people we love
with captions like,
“LOOK,”
as if beauty is an emergency
and we are all volunteer firefighters.

We keep saying,
“You have to see this,”
because wonder
is the oldest form
of resurrection.

So here’s to the believers
and the atheists
and the agnostics
and the people whose entire theology
is just trying not to cry
in the DMV line.

Here’s to the people clinging to faith.

Here’s to the people clinging to Xanax
and oat milk
and the one group chat
where nobody pretends to be okay.

Here’s to the tender-hearted weirdos.

The accidental mystics.

The ones who can contemplate mortality
for six straight hours
and then become emotionally attached
to a perfect peach.

The ones who know
despair has a mouth,
but so does laughter.

May we never stop being drop-kicked by beauty
in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.

May we never become so polished
that we forget how to stand
in the Starbucks line of existence
with our dumb, gorgeous hearts open,
feeling the enormity of it all
rattle around in our bones
like thunder
looking for somewhere to laugh.

And may we remember:

whatever else this is,
whatever mess,
whatever miracle,
whatever cosmic group project
no one was prepped for—

all’ve it is astonishing.
that we are here.
that we have loved enough to be ruined.
that the moon keeps showing up.
that bread exists.

So pass it on.

Tear off a piece
with your bare hands.

Take it in as you take it down. 

And then go outside and look at that moon.
—Matt Moberg

before i go, this coming weekend is something of a national treasure occasion here at the chair, where two not one of the treasures are passing the birthday baton. neither one likes to be called out (a familiar trait here at the chair, where humility and quietude are coins of the realm), but both count among my first-level life savers, so blessed blessings to amy and to nan. i adore you both. always.

so much to wonder, so much to ponder: does any bit of the above stir you to pencil a thought? the bird rescue, the breathtaking poem, the blessings of june—pride month, juneteenth, the feast of all papas day?

by mid-morning the other day, after a lava flow of bumbling words had frothed from my mouth, after fumbling through apology and course correction that led me to nowhere, abruptly finding myself in a remarkable tizz, spinning wild and wildly into the cattails and weeds, i found myself yearning for an etch-a-sketch day.

that is: utterly drenched in your fallible, flailing, decidedly flappable self, you long to give a shake to the day, clear the screen, dispense with the scratch marks you’ve left in your wake, and start all over again. clean slate.

oh, that it were so doable. that our foibles were so very expungeable.

that we could erase our blunders, reset our starts.

my sins, such as they were, amounted to little more than worries let loose, a storm of what-ifs infusing and infecting an otherwise placid launch of the day. i feared, though, they might be contagious, that the someone to whom i was blathering might soon come down with a similar case of the shakes. and i loathed my frazzled old self for flinging my woes with such reckless abandon.

oh, to take a deep breath, a pure cleansing breath, and aim to be stalwart and steady afresh.

so it is, here in the land of the human. we are but an amalgam of shortfalls and bumbles, with only the occasional triumph to claim for ourselves.

and as much as we might drown in the muck of that unvarnished truth, there might be much more to the story.

consider the utterly human condition, our magnificent fallibility.

yes, magnificent.

lest the abrupt turn here catch you off guard, let me explain: it is against the backdrop of a papal encyclical (for me, who woke early monday to read it, the big news of the week) that i found myself catching a glimmer of something i’d only before seen as a shortfall. and therein is the beauty.

as chicago’s own father bob, aka Il Papa, Leo XIV, so lucidly put it, it is the very fact of our imperfection, our bruises and soft spots, that not only make for our lusciousness but give us our reason for being. we are here to work through the kinks. our majesty is in our not knowing, our awkward pauses in silence whilst the wheels of our brains gurgle and churn, sputter and eventually spew.

it’s this fleshed-out portrait of humanity that leo holds up against the blemishless facade of AI, the newfangled sphere where answers come swiftly (nay, instantaneously) and stripped of question or wonder or doubt. it’s the realm of the certain, the acquisitive grab of all recorded text, that produces, like a slice popped from a toaster, whatever you wanted to know about whatever you might have otherwise pondered and wondered. musing not wanted nor needed here.

and what’s lost?

cue the encyclical, paragraph 99, with special emphasis on the artificial that’s twinned with the intelligence:

“What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of ‘intelligence’ with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.”

we humans, his holiness goes on to note, are creatures who are “shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity.”

choices, mistakes, forgiveness, fidelity.

oh, the litany of all the above that has marked me and molded me, made me into the scarred, the limping, the daffy body and soul that i am. that we all are.

we needn’t erase any or all of that whom we are. we’ve all gotten here the bumpy way. the trial-and-error, the forgive-me-i’m-sorry, the let’s-take-it-from-the-top way.

we are born, all of us, without instruction manual (a fact that becomes alarmingly notable when handed a newborn outside the nursery, and told to figure it out as they point us toward the door). we bumble our way. we try, most days anyway, not to get in the way of ourselves. not to hurt those in our path. and certainly not the ones we love most.

we blow it. squelch opportunity. drop the ball. miss the mark. strike out. chicken out. fritz out.

we all have days we want to start all over again. moments we wish we could play in reverse. lines we’d do well to stuff back into our mouths. looks we wish hadn’t flashed ‘cross our faces.

but then we would be so artificial. so unmistakably automaton. our intelligence, really, would be poured from a jar. diluted with water, and stirred.

an efficient facsimile of some fraction of human.

in the end, upon actual brain-fueled consideration, i’ve come to conclude: i’ll take my days messy, mistake-y, and utterly fallible.

no need, after all, for the etch-a-sketch.

have you considered the ways your soft spots and bumps have made you more beautiful? as you look back across your life, do you see the dead ends and potholes as all part of the wonder?

here’s but one line from the encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, “magnificent humanity,” worthy of deeply human pondering, musing, meditation:

“Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others. Indeed, precisely because we experience limits—vulnerability, suffering and failure—we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.” 

and think not that moral complexity is at the heart of humanity. here again, a line from the encyclical worthy of long meditation:

“Even when persons dehumanize themselves and bring about tragedy, a small light continues to shine within humanity, one that can be rekindled, with God’s grace, along paths of conversion and reconciliation. As Viktor Frankl rightly observed, in moments of horror, ‘we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.'”

gulps of coffee fuel me this morning, groggy as i am from a near-crippling concoction of cough, cold, inhaling too much pollen, and the foolishness of staying up far too late to honor the last gasp of late night’s saving grace these past unfathomable years. i felt downright patriotic and duty-bound to stay awake and bid the nearly-midnight crew adieu. 

after all, that late-night slot has all but saved me. over these long, long, oft-unbearable years, there’ve been so, so many days when the horrors and antics of washington have found me groping for the tonic of someone who might all but croon me a lullaby and tuck me tautly between the sheets—maybe, just maybe, chase away the monsters. someone who could bore into the core of the madness, call it out for what it is, and find a way to soothe our jangled, jagged nerves. or make us laugh before and as we wept about it. 

first, they took away our brian williams, a gentle giant of old-school newscasting who, in the thick of years that straight off hit the skids with doomsday portraits of american carnage, then railroaded right along to ivermectin and bleach-in-our-veins prescriptions from the presidential podium, becalmed me at the 10 p.m. central-time slot. and now, they’ve snatched stephen right out from under us. the man could make me howl with glee at the mere cocking of his wicked eyebrow. and make me feel less a sinner for the dyspepsia the spewed inside me. “thou shalt not hate,” i repeat and repeat, trying oh-so-hard not to cross that God-drawn line. 

so i stayed up. which my raggedy body says was stupid. 

but, heck, i’d hoped my hero of the year—leo the fourteenth, Il Papa—might pop in, at least via vatican-city zoom. or some other heavenly-ordained teleportation.

all of which is to say, i should be curled asleep still. but the chair, the clarion call in my every friday morning for the last 1,018 fridays, stirred me from my slumber. 

and all of which is to back boldly and clunkily into my preoccupation of the week: a book i can’t put down.

which is where we clear our throats, shake the sleep from our eyes, and dive in: this week’s musing . . .

in my backwards, upside-down, and oft off-kilter life’s syllabus, my self-guided and plenty-potholed quest to figure out a thing or two before signing off from this lifetime, my list of texts to absorb is (as you might surmise if you eyeballed the death-defying book stack beside my bed) dangerously, dauntingly, beyond measure. 

pathetically, my ratio of books begun to books read through to the end is woefully skewed—conservatively hovering at roughly 1,000:1. 

avid starter am i. resolutely failed finisher—guilty as charged.

rare is the book that holds me page after page, so enfolded in imagination or intellect i dare not distract myself with some other tome lazing around in one of the many, many stacks that punctuate this old house. thinking back across the last decade, annie dillard’s pilgrim at tinker creek was one. niall williams’ this is happiness, might have been the only other. a third is soon to be added to the triumphant short roster.

gilead, gosh darn it, has me held captive. 

marilynne robinson’s 2004 pulitzer prize-winning “hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence” of a congregationalist minister, the reverend john ames, a late-in-life father who loves the quiet country life “from which he will soon part,” has me running up to my book-reading nook every chance i can snatch, and ferrying the dog-eared paperback hither and yon.

john ames is 76 when we meet him, long rooted in gilead, iowa, dwelling in the very parsonage in which he’s spent most of his many years, having grown up in that drafty, dreary house as his father—and grandfather—had both been ministers there in the “dogged little outpost” that is fictional gilead. straight off, we learn that ames, our protagonist, suffers from a failing heart, and believes his death is imminent. thus, he’s compelled to write a letter to his seven-year-old, late-born son (“the fruit,” as the new york times once put it, of ames’ recent marriage to a much younger woman). 

ames’ first wife and baby daughter have died in childbirth, we learn, and so this son from a wholly unexpected late-in-life redemptive marriage is the singular focus of a father desperate to pack a lifetime of wisdom and lore into jottings and passages that stretch to 247 pages. written in episodic, diary-like entries, nearly stream of consciousness, unspooling generations of wisdoms and family stories, lest the son (whose name we never learn) be left with nothing of his father, it’s a book that leaves me gasping for its sublime beauties—both the literary and the theological. 

it’s not every day i run across a tome of which it’s been said these things: “Robinson has composed a novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred). “One feels touched with grace just to read it.” (Washington Post). Mark O’Connell in The New Yorker wrote: “I have read and loved a lot of literature about religion and religious experience—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, the Bible—but it’s only with Robinson that I have actually felt what it must be like to live with a sense of the divine.”

no wonder i’ve slipped right in, and can’t bear to pull away. i too yearn to live that way, with a palpable sense of the divine, a God who brushes up against me—here, there, and anywhere.

in the very same way i’m drawn most deeply to poetry that comes at God not head-on but through the slant, the side window, so too with prose. what takes my breath away most, in just about any writing—fiction or non—is not when i’m klonked on the head but suddenly swept by a wind i feel but cannot see. “God-haunted,” the times put it. “bothered by God,” is how my friend joe the jesuit priest puts it. john ames’ “bothered” is my enlightenment. 

truth is, i finally decided i had to read gilead because father joe (whose theology class, THEO 4300, “the question of God in a secular age,” i recently visited) admits when prodded that he has memorized nearly every word of it, can recite practically any passage from it. quite frankly, i was intrigued. flat-out curious. and i trust joe implicitly.

father joe, who wrote his doctoral dissertation at oxford on the theology and literature of robinson and virginia wolff, says robinson’s writing “reveals a deeply sacramental imagination.” in one of many essays he’s written about her, father joe argues that “robinson trains her readers in the discipline of spiritual attention. where is God’s grace operating in nature and in the ordinary ways humans love, disappoint and forgive one other?” father joe goes on to point out that “in her essay ‘Psalm 8,’ she writes, ‘i have spent my life watching not to see beyond the world,’  but ‘merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes… with all due respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.’ the miracle we await in Advent is not distant, but meets us in the messiness of our human relationships: Emmanu-el, God with us.” 

spiritual attention, i suppose, is my core curriculum. urgently so. especially now, when the godless world works so very hard to pull me—pull us all—under its light-blocking curtain.  (and when i so desperately need my late-night tonic, now pulled off the shelf.)

a deep dive into gilead, into robinson, was the surest balm i could find this week.

here’s just some of what i’ve pulled from my latest excursion into this well-upholstered rabbit hole. . . 

here’s where we begin, the book’s first passage, john ames addresses his sweet little son: 

and while plenty of lines have left me reaching for a vat of highlighter yellow, here’s but one:

describing his love for iowa’s landscape, ames writes: “I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.”

or the snippets of poetry posing as passing descriptions…

in one of ames’ passages, he sees his grandfather as “a wild-haired, one-eyed, scrawny old fellow with a crooked beard, like a paintbrush left to dry with lacquer in it.” or, describing him further, the old man seemed “stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn’t actually sleeping.” 

when i step back and wonder why i spend so, so many hours of my life with my nose proverbially and literally stuck in a book, it’s to stumble across a line like this next one, one that just might set the mortar of the bricks that herringbone my path

ames recalls that “Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. ‘He will wipe the tears from all faces.’ It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.” 

and there is good company in the gilead fan club:

barack obama, who awarded robinson a 2012 national humanities medal, counts gilead as one of his favorites. in september, 2015, in what’s been noted as “a reversal of journalistic convention,” the 44th president of these united states interviewed robinson on a stage in des moines, for the new york review of books, and told her:

I first picked up Gilead, one of your most wonderful books, here in Iowa. Because I was campaigning at the time, and there’s a lot of downtime when you’re driving between towns and when you get home late from campaigning. … And I’ve told you this—one of my favorite characters in fiction is a pastor in Gilead, Iowa, named John Ames, who is gracious and courtly and a little bit confused about how to reconcile his faith with all the various travails that his family goes through. And I was just—I just fell in love with the character, fell in love with the book …

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.” — Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

---

an excerpt, john ames (via robinson’s pen) writing of his church at dawn (pages 70-71):

It’s a plain old church and it could use a coat of paint. But in the dark times I used to walk over before sunrise just to sit there and watch the light come into that room. I don’t know how beautiful it might seem to anyone else. I felt much at peace those mornings, praying over very dreadful things sometimes — the Depression, the wars. There was a lot of misery for people around here, decades of it. But prayer brings peace, as I trust you know.

In those days, as I have said, I might spend most of a night reading. Then, if I woke up still in my armchair, and if the clock said four or five, I’d think how pleasant it was to walk through the streets in the dark and let myself into the church and watch dawn come in the sanctuary. I loved the sound of the latch lifting. The building has settled into itself so that when you walk down the aisle, you can hear it yielding to the burden of your weight. It’s a pleasanter sound than an echo would be, an obliging, accommodating sound. You have to be there alone to hear it. Maybe it can’t feel the weight of a child. But if it is still standing when you read this, and if you are not half a world away, sometime you might go there alone, just to see what I mean. After a while I did begin to wonder if I liked the church better with no people in it. . . .

In the old days I could walk down every single street, past every house, in about an hour. I’d try to remember the people who lived in each one, and whatever I knew about them, which was often quite a lot. . . . And I’d pray for them. And I’d imagine peace they didn’t expect and couldn’t account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams. Then I’d go into the church and pray some more and wait for daylight. I’ve often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.

Trees sound different at night, and they smell different too. 

and here, robinson reading robinson… 

where did you find balm this week?

jane got me started. jane kenyon, the poet. she’s the one who got me thinking here.

but before i bring jane into this conversation, a conversation sparked by one of her poems, this one titled simply “happiness,” i feel compelled to consider the case of happiness, the subject dragged squarely into our attention.

happiness, i fear, has been shoved to the back of the pursuit shelf (it was a founding pursuit, after all) as it seems to have taken on hallmarkian gauze. it’s blurred at the edges. and if it were a color, it might be some sort of bubblegum pink. it’s joy lite, watered down, saccharine—or so it seems, in this dark historical moment.

it might seem an out-of-reach luxury. what with bombs dropping from skies, drones the latest iteration of lethal birds. who has room for bubble-generator happiness when dread is the common denominator?

i’m going out on a ledge here: i’ll guess i’m not alone in claiming it essential, life-sustaining, worthy of our attention. it’s the active-dry yeast in our days that just might keep us from collapse. rains down out of nowhere, quite oft; dissolves just as quickly.

at simple glance, i’ll concede, it might seem, well, silly.

joy, its elder sister, worthier of pursuit, perhaps. a bit more dignity there. never mind ebullience—a whole other rainbow, happy on steroids, so happy your toes start to wiggle.

we’re talking happiness, pure and simple here.

and that’s where jane comes in. jane, the poet laureate of new hampshire when she died in 1995, at 47 of leukemia, seized that ephemeral quiver, and did the hard work that poets do: she aimed to put words to it. reached for moments that just might capture it. opened her voluminous soul to allow you, too, to peek in. to understand what she was talking about. to grasp, even for a moment, that happiness—especially in the darkest of times—will always be wafting just beyond the margins, out of sight, seemingly out of reach. and then, kaboom! in it will ride on the breeze. tickle us deep down in that joy-registering station. the one where suddenly we realize we are not alone, and not in the dark.

happiness, she makes us think, just might be mightier and more imperative than we imagine. than we’ve cheapened it to seem.

if you’re of the God-believing ilk (and i’ve made it rather clear here that i am), i wonder if that fleeting stirring of the heart or soul, that sense that for a minute there someone cranked the burner and the chemistry inside has suddenly changed, i wonder if it’s a mistake to call it merely happiness. maybe, more aptly, it’s a moment of God. maybe the God we try and try to define, to understand, to see in living color, maybe God comes sometimes in the cloak of a tickling joy, another name for plain old, pedestrian, under-sold happiness.

i wonder if, sometimes, the ineffable, ephemeral, mysterious God drops in, out of the blue, draws us into the swift-running river of radiant light, gives us a dunk, before dropping us back on the sandy bank, uncertain of what’s just happened. and all we know to call it is happiness. but really it’s more. so, so much more.

i’ll let jane take her crack at this; see if you see what she means. maybe she will convince you.

Happiness

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

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

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

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

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

+ Jane Kenyon

happiness, she makes clear (rather than argues), is one of life’s glues. it’s on its own clock, plays by its own rules. it might lie in wait: ready to leap out from the geranium pot you found on the bargain shelf; lurk in the email that arrives out of the blue, the long lost college friend you’d thought had forgotten you. happiness, i know, comes in rooms filled with cancer. and just as surely drifts into the grocery store checkout line. it doesn’t seek invitation (and just as blithely ignores our most ardent invites, the times we’re down on our knees begging and pleading). happiness, often, is one short splice from the ever-after reel. extended play is not in its repertoire.

maybe its beauty, its levity comes from its uncharted choreography. it comes and it goes, all of its own accord. and it surely never stays long. but it peeks from just around the corner every once in a while. while enough to make us sense it might be out there; lurking. worthy of pursuit, after all.

happiness—fleeting, sometimes forgotten—is what keep us from crumbling. a pinch of it here, a dab there. its work is beyond proportion. not unlike salt, another life-sustaining grain, happiness, no matter how sparse, just might save us. and, surely, it’s worthy of our keenest attention.

that faint quiver of heart: be on the lookout.

it just might be God, in yet another disguise.

where do you find happiness? can you describe it?

jane kenyon dwells among my innermost circle of poets. i sat in her house once, the white clapboard house at eagle pond farm in new hampshire; swapped letters with her late great husband, the poet donald hall. her poems, pouring from the pen of a daughter of the heartland, rattle me in their stripped-bare simplicities, their unadorned arrows. she takes my breath away with lines so clear they settle forever in my vernacular: “otherwise,” “let evening come”. . .

in case you’re still here, and willing to ride along for a bit of a binge, a few things:

this marvelous short film from friends at the SALT Project, where we hear jane reading her poem, “otherwise” . . .

this link to a short bit of consideration of her most well-known poems.

and this fascinating article from Reformed Journal (self-described as “meaning open, curious, progressive, more interested in building bridges than walls, while still standing in the historical line of Christian orthodoxy”) exploring Jane’s work, where i found these few grafs worth a copy and paste:

Finding God

Jane Kenyon was born (23 May 1947) and raised in rural Ann Arbor, across the road from a working farm, attending a one-room schoolhouse for the elementary grades. She enjoyed the rural upbringing; her imagination flourished in the pastoral setting. Especially, then, her stays at Grandmother Kenyon’s large boarding house in downtown Ann Arbor posed a strange and dangerous world. At Grandmother’s boarding house, young Jane’s imagination took an unexpected turn. One day, after Jane helped Grandmother collect trash from the University of Michigan students’ rooms, they marched down to the basement incinerator. Recollecting the scene in an unfinished essay, “Childhood, When You Are in It,” Kenyon wrote, “As we worked, Grandmother talked about hell, a lake of fire, burning endlessly, or about the Second Coming of Christ, which would put an end to the world as I knew it.” Fearful thoughts for an eight-year-old child.These thoughts didn’t leave her. In her poem “Staying at Grandma’s,” Kenyon wrote:

“You know,” she’d say, turning
her straight and handsome back to me,
“that the body is the temple
of the Holy Ghost.”

The Holy Ghost, the oh, oh. . .the uh
oh, I thought, studying the toe of my new shoe
and glad she wasn’t looking at me.

Religion at Grandmother’s house was comprised of rooms full of theological horrors and restrictive rules.

Partly rebellious by nature, and partly aware of her own capacity for wrongdoing, young Jane simply went home and announced that she was done with religion forever. Her adamancy persisted while she was a student at the University of Michigan during the 1960s, but since it was a trait of that era to test all things, for good or bad, Kenyon decided to give religion one more try. She attended a Unitarian church one Sunday morning, and left convinced of the correctness of her youthful choice.

Having married poet Donald Hall in 1972, Kenyon moved in 1975 with her husband to his ancestral farm in New Hampshire. The enterprise was not without risk. Hall gave up his position and benefits as a literature professor at the University of Michigan; Kenyon gave up a lifetime tied to Ann Arbor for a new culture. Just how quickly that culture encroached upon them became evident one Sunday morning when Hall suggested they attend South Danbury Christian Church. One might call it a social obligation–friends and family would expect to see them there. Nonetheless, by Kenyon’s recollection, minister Jack Jensen, referred to Rilke, and something stirred in her. She sought advice from Jensen, and he pointed her first to the early mystics–Julian of Norwich, St. Therese, and others–then to the gospels. Soon she and Hall were involved in Bible studies. The “little rebel” as she once called herself, bowed down at the altar of the Christian Trinity.

Faith and Art

Kenyon’s Christian belief, however, would be sorely tried in the remaining years before her death on 22 April 1995 of leukemia. Bouts of acute bipolar depressive disorder that had hounded her since her youth, and then the physical toll of fighting off cancers, first of her salivary gland and then of leukemia, exacted their physical, psychological, and spiritual toll. How can one begin to understand the remarkable interplay of both the joys and trials of her life and also the crisp honesty of her art? Two things help us.

From her earliest lines, Kenyon devoted herself to the lyric poem, searching for what she called “the luminous particular.” The aim of the lyric poem is to take an event or experience of particularly impressive quality upon the poet, but to craft it with such telling detail, crisp language, and physicality of imagery that the reader feels this is his or her poem. The reader enters and owns it, rather than the poet simply declaring. The poem thus requires absolute honesty and exacting care by the poet.

the article goes on, but this is the gist i wanted to leave here, at the ol’ maple table…..

blessings on you this week….

love, bam

the census at this old house shifts daily of late. a sliding scale of up to four, oft measured in half-drained glasses on the counter, beds unmade and sorta made. pantry shelves are raided in the middle night. and late-night laughter rises, swirls, up the stairs and round the bend, certain as the steam from a pasta pot. that laughter lands, every time, right where it belongs: tap-tapping on the chambers of my heart—no matter how deep i am in my very own dreamland. no dream comes sweeter than the bellow of boys, brotherly boys, from down below.

this old house is playing out its second act in way-station ways. boys come, boys go. one gets a fever and the aches; we scoop him up and bring him here: gingerale and saltines are best doled out by good ol’ mama. the other boy, the professorial one, is in the thick of putting down midwestern roots, back in the heartland after so, so many years away. and this old house is just the place to plop your duffle down whilst you re-acclimate to the city of your birth (and shop for your own places to call home).

in real-time, i hear just how the date unfolded, how the phone call went, and who makes whom laugh aloud. and i am there to wake someone with a kiss instead of a phone call when i’ve been asked to be sure that someone is awake by 9 a.m.

just this week, with my bespectacled fellow off and faraway, i’d thought i just might find myself amid a stretch of days where i alone dwelled here. where i might slather my face with goo, and not feel the urge to hide. or serve a mixing bowl of lettuce leaves and call it “dinner.” or plug in the vacuum at dawn cuz that’s when the spirit stirred me. but then one boy got sick, and the other snared a date. so the arithmetic this week never equalled one, and now is back to three. with four soon on his way.

i couldn’t wish it any other way.

random glasses, messy rooms, be damned!

two januaries ago, when i was feeling especially afraid, and on the brink of highly fragile ice, i prayed with all my heart for one more birthday candle to extinguish with my semi-feeble lungs. and what i really meant, and what i really wished, was the deepest prayer i know: dear God, let me be around to catch a few more episodes of Growing Boys: The Sequels. 

in a rapids-rush the likes of which would make the colorado river run green with envy, that wish (plus one more candle since) has come oh-so-surely true. i get dizzy thinking all that’s come and gone since that cold, cold winter’s day. the fear of losing me, truth be told, prompted boy one (the professor) to pick up the phone and plot his way back chicago way. (think not that it was anything short of soul-testing and against plenty odds to earn a full-time tenure track slot as a law professor at a pretty darn-good law school within a two-hour drive of home sweet home.) and boy two has more or less called on me to join him in the journalism trenches, as he plies his gift for seeing to the pulsing heart of every story but finds himself in need of chief copy editor and fixer of misplaced commas.

not a day, not a phone call, not a late-night dash downtown, passes by without me praising the holy heavens, dumb luck, or pure fat chance for bequeathing me these moments to slip like precious beads on the rosary string i call my life.

if we’re here on earth to learn to love, to love in the holiest, humblest way possible, the way that makes our life just one little tool trying to turn the crank toward a universe of radiance, then for me there’s no tougher school, no steeper curriculum than to be in the very trenches of life with the lives i’ve labored through and birthed. they demand more of me than i ever knew was in me. they look to me to put my hoity-toi teachings into real-life practice. and should i slip up, should i prove to be a preacher of empty aspirations and hypocrisies, they’d be the first to know. and i’d be rightly crumpled.

my boys keep me honest. my boys keep me true. my boys, my boys . . .

i fall to my knees in eternal forever thanks. i know full well the due, the bliss, the wonder—the flat-out miracle—of the two who call me mama. and with all my soul, i know: the gift this mothering day is mine.

my mama, bless her, is very much here. and, truth be told, yearning to go “home.” when i miss her, which is often, i motor over to where she lives (a mere nine minutes away), and—truth again—i often don’t find her there. she is off “at programs,” the curiosities and delights that animate her day. or populate it anyway. she might be listening to a book, or sunning herself in the adirondack chairs out front, or out on one of her circumnavigations around the acreage. if i can’t track her down, i leave her notes. i leave her ice creams in her freezer, and the short litany of things she hungers for: cheese and crackers, clementines, the tall bottle she keeps under the kitchen sink.

but so many i know miss their mamas. and lucille clifton, a poet i hold close to my heart (in keeping with the lines below, i should say i hold her close to my bosom, but i don’t have much of that, so the term is rather lost on me; it’s aspirational at best. and once upon a time i must have wished for a bosom, the sort my grandma had, though those days now are long gone and far away). i love that God here is “antic.” i love that the mama lucille yearns for is the one from half her life ago. i love the whole sensual tableau into which lucille invites us. her song, her scent, the scratch of her wild hair. it’s a moment still in reach. how wild, the human mind, the capacity to reach deep into the long-ago, to bring it near to life. no AI robot will ever ever do that for us. score one for humanity. in all its messy glories.

here is lucille clifton for all of us, but especially for the ones who miss their mama on this mother’s day upon us…..

“oh antic God”

oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties   
leaned across the front porch   
the huge pillow of her breasts   
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.

I am almost the dead woman’s age times two.

I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams   
at night.   return to me, oh Lord of then   
and now, my mother’s calling,
her young voice humming my name.
—Lucille Clifton

inspired by lucille, here’s my mama from long-ago and not so long-ago. as my mama adds numbers to her years, her strength, her immutable strength is what looms at the fore. i love how deeply deeply present she has always been for me and my boys. my boys who love her so….

love you, mama. xoxo

p.s. i got a peek just yesterday at what will be the cover of my next book, a book whose title is Broken Open. i wish i could show you the two choices, but they’re under wraps till one makes the final cut. it all makes the book very, very real feeling. and i was duly blown away by the two choices. one made me cry. i am guessing that will be the one we pick.

who are the blessed mothers in your life, and what indelible lessons or stories are you remembering this mama day….??

the dentist’s chair is the last place in the world i’d think to find enlightenment (especially since i’m not of the Whitening School). but then dr. blanche walked in.

dr. blanche is orthodox. and the first such dentist who’s tended to my teeth while fully decked out in tzniut, the traditional, modest garb of orthodox women, clothing that covers collarbone, elbows, knees, and hair, a Talmudic instruction derived from the biblical injunction to “go discreetly with God,” (Micah 6:8) a line itself worthy of deep pondering in this age of bombastic self-amplification.

but back to dr. blanche. we got to talking (not easy when instruments and hands are inside your mouth.) and in that effortless way that often unfolds, our conversation soon swirled from talk of office management (which dentist worked which days) to how she’s out of office every friday, to Shabbat itself. that’s when i asked if she spent the day cooking, getting ready for the most blessed of holy days, the one that comes at sundown every friday. and that’s when she effused.

“i love cooking,” she said, sparks of joy nearly splashing me and my eye-protecting goggles. “and i love baking. i bake all my bread and challah.”

and that’s when we stood at the edge of the enlightenment to come.

she told me how she makes five pounds of challah dough on fridays. and she told me how making challah—the bread to be blessed at the start of the Sabbath meal, along with the lighting of the candles, and the blessings for the light and the cup of wine—is, in her kitchen, and in every orthodox kitchen, a prayer.

prayer upon prayer, actually. a prayer for every step, and every simple foodstuff, in the making of the blessed bread.

the holiness of sustenance; the sustenance of holiness.

she began to explain: for every ingredient, the flour, the sugar, the salt, the yeast, the egg, the oil, the water, there is a blessing. a sacred pause, and an intertwining of earthly and divine.

each ingredient imbued with sacred purpose.

while sifting flour, she prays for her own soul, to sift out the stumbling blocks that distance her from the radiance she is meant to be, and to amplify the positive, the beauties breathed into all of Creation at our beginnings.

as she measures out the sugar, she prays, not surprisingly, for a sweetness to infuse her being. “to always be able to love.”

as she adds two tablespoons of salt, she asks God to help her know how to set limits in her life, to find balance, between her own needs, her work, and the needs of her family. (she has four kidlets—so far. . .)

and so it goes: dry yeast (happiness, protection, joy); oil (strength, grace on all the world); water (faith, unity); eggs (fertility, and blessing in all she does).

the prayers themselves are beautifully unfolded, and by the time she’d recited the prayer for salt i was in tears, and nearly elevating from the cushy dental chair.

in a world that each morning shatters me with its headlines, its vitriol and violence, its toxic spew of hate, of lies, false idols, i lay (mouth wide open) beneath a prayerful soul who found the very stuff of bread and life a sacred ground for prayer.

i couldn’t stop the tears. nor the sense of awe at how the sacred so caught me by surprise, how it’s ever pulsing in the places where we’d least expect it. how it comes just when we think we might have whirled forever away from the penumbra of its light.

in the kosher kitchen of a woman bent in prayer and kneading.

oh, holy God, You astound me.

can you imagine what it means to bite into that sweet soften golden braid, one so infused with so much goodness? have you imagined, ever, sifting prayer into that which you knead, allow to rise, and put to the heat of the oven?

it is in the simple kitchen rhythms, a geometry of circles and parabolas, in the chemistry and physics of yeast + sugar + water = rise, that a whole league of women round the globe infuse with simple prayers.

i found it nothing less than stirring, i found it deeply ennobling. and i might borrow those very measures for my own ministrations at the cookstove.

the world we know is all but begging for our prayers in whatever nooks and crannies we might stir them. even in the whole-grain slice i’ll soon be popping in the toaster.

here is dr. blanche’s recipe and prayers:

a note: Hashem is the name for God in more conversational terms; it simply means “The Name,” as utterance of God’s most sacred name is reserved for the most sacred time and prayer.

she begins, per the recipe she printed out for me: When you make Challah you are partners with Hashem!!

Pray:

Thank you Hashem for all the blessings you have given me and my family. Thank-you for always protecting us and doing what is best for us.

Please Hashem help me …..It is an “Et Rratzon” (an opportune time) to connect with Hashem.

5lbs. of lbs. flour:   While sifting the flour, pray;  Please Hashem help me to separate the good from the bad ,help me to get rid of my negative character traits and my Yetzer Hara, help me to focus on the positive and incorporate positive character traits just like I am doing with sifting the flour.

14tbs. of sugar:  As you add the sugar, pray;  Please Hashem, help me to have a sweet din(judgement) help me to have Ayin Tova ( a good eye) help me and my family to have a sweet life, to always be able to love. Help me to help others and to do chesed (acts of loving kindness).

 2 Tbs. of salt:   As you add the salt around the flour, pray; please Hashem help me to know how to set limits in my life, how to balance my own needs, my work and my family life. Just like you made our bodies rely on salt for existence allow me to work for purposes of our existence as well. Yet just as overdoing salt is detrimental to us, so too allow me to know when my work is sufficient and to take proper rest and rejuvenate.

3 or 4 packages of dry yeast:  Create a hole in the center of the flour in the bowl that you have all the above ingredients in. Then in a separate bowl, add the packages of yeast, 2 more tablespoons of sugar and 1 cup of warm water. When it begins to bubble, add the yeast mixture to the larger bowl with the hole in the center of the flour. Pray: help me to have simcha (happiness) in my home, in my life. Grant us your protection (as yeast in Hebrew is called shimarim which translates to protection) now and always. Please Hashem, allow me to feel joy for others as well. Bless me with tranquility, inner peace so I can continue doing mitzvot.

1/2 cup of oil (I prefer olive oil):  Bless us in with good health always. Help us to recognize that everything comes from your hands. All our blessings come from you as well as our hardships. Help us to grow stronger from the hardships and appreciate all that you have blessed us with. Let us be zoche (merit) to see the geula (redemption) and the anointment of Mashiach with oil (shemen hamishcha) speedily in our days amen! 

4 and 1/2 cups of water (add more if you need to for the dough to be elastic): as you add the water and knead by folding the dough over and over, pray: Please Hashem help me to connect to you, strengthen my emunah (faith) in you. Help me to connect to the Torah which you blessed us with. Help me to connect to your children and to everyone around me. Help us to have unity among one another and thereby connect to you as you stand for unity. (water, is a connector, it is a key ingredient to life sustenance).

Making challah, or any bread for that matter allows us the women to make tikun on the sin of Chava. By completing the process of challah (bread) baking, we are in essence allowing our neshamot( souls) to feel complete and whole again.

3 eggs (optional):  if you add the eggs continue to mix it into the bowl and pray: Please Hashem as this egg represents fertility, so too help me and my children to be blessed with fertility. Help everything I do with my hands to have beracha and remain fertile always.

Most importantly thank you for the life you blessed me with. I realize that this egg is a reminder of my humble beginnings, thereby help me to feel this humility always. 

After completing the process of kneading, cover the dough with a large paper towel and a regular towel over that. Allow it to rest for an hour or more to rise.

It is tremendous mitzva for anyone to separate or “take” the challah. Many have the tendency to allow: a woman who is not married yet, to do this mitzvah, so she may find her spouse with ease. You can allow a woman who did not have children yet to separate the challah so she can have children in this merit. Some separate the challah in the merit of certain individual/individuals for refuah shelema (complete healing). Whatever the reason now is a great time to pray for any personal needs you may have as well as anyone else’s needs.

“Taking challah”—pinching off a ball of dough, roughly the size of a ping pong ball, a re-enactment of the temple sacrifice, and a burning in the oven—tells us that whatever we are given is not for our use alone. If we have wisdom, money or good health, our first step is to put them towards a Divine purpose.

Now you are ready to complete the mitzvah of challah. Married women, please cover your hair and make this beracha (blessing):

“May it be Your Will, Eternal, our G-d, that the commandment of separating challah be considered as if I had performed it with all its details and ramifications. May my elevation of the challah be comparable to the sacrifice that was offered on the altar, which was acceptable and pleasing. Just as giving the challah to the Kohein in former times served to atone for sins, so may it atone for mine, and make me like a person reborn without sins. May it enable me to observe the holy Sabbath (or Festival of…) with my husband (and our children) and to become imbued with its holiness. May the spiritual influence of the mitzvah of challah enable our children to be constantly sustained by the hands of the Holy One, blessed is He, with His abundant mercy, loving-kindness, and love. Consider the mitzvah of challah as if I have given the tithe. And just as I am fulfilling this mitzvah with all my heart, so may Your compassion be aroused to keep me from sorrow and pain, always. Amen.”

how do you weave prayer into your everyday?

in the house where i grew up, poetry was never far away. poetry was my mother’s native language. she awoke us with it. and recited it when we were sick in bed. she spoke of emily and hopkins as if both were neighbors down the lane who’d saunter by for tea and verse. amid especially harried afternoons, when the quintet of us were driving her mad, she’d tuck herself away in the living room and declare it off limits as she lit her rare cigarette, and cracked open a tome of poem after poem. indeterminate time later, she emerged resuscitated—by rhyme scheme or distance away from us, we never did discern (nor did it matter to us dare-not-trespass peepers who kept close and curious watch through the crack of the kitchen door).

most memorable of all perhaps (at least to my wee mind), was the occasional sunday morning recitation of lines i’ve long since etched into my heart’s smooth fibers. while missing sunday mass was never an option, the renegade in my mother was known to let loose sotto voce emily D’s rebellious defense of liturgical absence: “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – / I keep it, staying at Home – / With a Bobolink for a Chorister – / And an Orchard, for a Dome —” 

so much of who my mother is is captured in those twenty-five words. therein lies the supernatural capacity of any poem that echoes across the landscape of our lives.

and yet, never did i imagine that grown-up me would so embrace my mother’s poetic passion. in a house where words and wit were play things, and my father’s witticisms kept us on our toes, it seems my mother’s way with words is the one that snuck in sideways. and stuck firmly to my ribs. to this day, it shakes me to my rafters.

i am drawn to the ineffable, the liminal, the say-it-slant; i am drawn to the knowing that fills in the silence, the epiphany barely glimpsed in passing. i ache to grasp the depths and heights that crowd the wordless void.

or, as my muse maria popova once wrote: “language is not the content of thought but the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking, afloat on the current of feeling and time. when the vessel becomes too small to hold what we pour into it, language spills into poetry. in this respect, poetry serves the same function as prayer: to give shape and voice to our unspoken and often unspeakable hopes, fears, and inner tremblings — the tenderest substance of our lives, to be held between the palms and passed from hand to compassionate hand.”

as the hallmarkian labeling of april as poetry month* (see below) is all but wrapped for the year, i thought i’d plop a few poetic musings here on the make-believe maple table, all snipped from my commonplace source, as a way of holding poets, poetry, and poetics up to the flickering light. 

this, then, is my ode to the awe and wonder that propels each and every line of poetry, and its power to catapult us into that which cannot be contained in any string of prose. herewith, a litany of poets (and a rare scholar) on the great work and mystery of poetry: 

jane hirshfield: “Poetry's work
 is the clarification 
and magnification 
of being.”
 

billy collins: “all babies are born with knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. then, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us.” 

robert ultimo, a classics scholar who has taught the art and science of writing for the last quarter century, and now twice weekly sends brilliant missives via his Writing Smartly blog, put it pithily: “Prose wants to describe the husk, but poetry wants the seed.”

ralph waldo emerson: “For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.”

marie howe: “poetry holds . . . what can’t be said. It can’t be paraphrased. It can’t be translated. The great poetry I love holds the mystery of on being alive. It holds it in a kind of basket of words that feels inevitable. There’s great, great, great prose, gorgeous prose. You and I could probably quote some right now. Poetry has a kind of trancelike quality still. It has the quality of a spell still.

“I mean, maybe the first poem was a lullaby a woman sang to her child, the incantatory, “Everything is OK, everything is OK, everything is OK. I’m here, go to sleep.” Or we prayed for rain, or we thanked the Gods for the corn, or we sang to the deer we were going to catch. But it’s interrelational. It’s incantatory. It feels as if its roots can never wholly be pulled out from sacred ground.”

 t.s. eliot: “the great poet . . . should perceive vibrations beyond the range of ordinary men [and women], and be able to make [them] see and hear more at each end than they could ever see without [the poet’s] help. … It is therefore a constant reminder to the poet, of the obligation to explore, to find words for the inarticulate, to capture those feelings which people can hardly even feel, because they have no words for them; and at the same time, a reminder that the explorer beyond the frontiers of ordinary consciousness will only be able to return and report to his fellow-citizens, if he has all the time a firm grasp upon the realities with which they are already acquainted…

“The task of the poet, in making people comprehend the incomprehensible, demands immense resources of language; and in developing the language, enriching the meaning of words and showing how much words can do, he is making possible a range of emotion and perception for other men, because he gives them the speech in which more can be expressed.”

eavan boland, the great Irish poet, once said: “Poetry begins where certitude leaves off.”

and let us close with christian wiman, who gets the last but not final word: “Let us remember … that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.”

are you inclined to poetry, or are you more cozy inside prose? either way, who sparked the earliest such seeds in you, and when do you first remember them sprouting?

*about that poetic designation: should you be even a tad curious about how it is that the fourth month of the gregorian calendar found itself with the appellation national poetry month, the chair comes lurching to the rescue: twas the decision in 1996 of the academy of american poets who chose it for a host of reasons, not least being a poetic bit of playful towel-snapping contra to t.s. eliot’s claim that “april is the cruellest month.” pragmatically, the pedagogues among the poets decided the penultimate month of the school year was the perfect period to pack in piles and piles of poems. and should you be even remotely curious about which poem snares the title as most-read (at least in modern times), it’s claimed to be the ode to daffodils from ol’ will wordsworth, who, out wandering “lonely as a cloud” with his little sister dorothy in april of 1802, came upon a belt of yellow-bellied bloomers. exclaimed, he did:

“I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils.”

perhaps you have another that you’d consider your very own personal most-read poem . . . (all contenders welcome!)

i am besotted by the world. and i do not mean the world of humans. i speak, rather, of the song that fills the air, the perfume that wafts on breeze, and the lush lush green that spreads with a river’s insistence.

as the human inhabitants bombard, shatter, poison, crush, and bulldoze, the earth in her infinite wisdoms, her endless generosities, and incomprehensible beauties, repeats and repeats. tracing its choreography as old as time, minute by minute, our little orb turns toward the light of the great star. there it basks. and deep underground the stirring surges, evident in the leaf tips bulging by the hour, by the shocks and brushstrokes of color—of fuchsia and daffodil gold, of snow white and, my favorite, the dashes of cobalt blue—where before the world had been colorless, had been drab, a pastiche of dull brown and sooty and gray. 

have you heard the intertwining parabolas of song saturating the start-of-day soundtrack? the high-pitched white-throated sparrow piercing the dawn, the cardinal awaiting his turn. northern house wren chattering, red-winged blackbird lurching to get a note in edgewise?

more than besotted though, i am struck. struck by the profundity with which creation speaks. the way it all but shakes us by the shoulders, calls out, pay heed. this is the endosperm of it all, this way of being, of unfolding, of filling the air and the lens with beauty abundant. with grace. offering bough for the bird’s nest, pushing up an earthly apothecary. it is a masterclass in profligate goodness, “love as you would be loved” spelled out in birdsong and bloom. 

you need a short course in how to be generous? look to the viburnum who soon will be perfusing perfumes, catching you by the nose each time you waft by. perhaps a lesson in loving attention? train your eye on the nestlings and the mama robin who spends her every waking minute in search of the juiciest worm, flittering back and forth every two to three minutes, for a day’s-end tally of roughly 500 feedings.

this year, the contrast is starker than ever. the headlines and news reels are filled with rubble and gore. with vitriol and braggadocio. with ugly and uglier, day after day. 

but still springtime unfolds. it’s as if this ancient, ancient text understands how thick-headed we earthly inhabitants are. we need the lectures, the lessons, again and again: herein is the paradigm. here are the beauties. here, the graces. you could inhabit the garden of earthly diversities, the narcissus alongside the spring beauty, the red bird sharing the branch with the sparrow. 

“i will make it as plain and as clear as is possibly possible,” says the earth to the inattentive. “i will burst forth in such vibrancy you won’t look away. i will dial up the decibels, drown you in song that rises up from winged choristers. you needn’t break each other down, needn’t crush and pillage. needn’t spew hate. you are drowning the planet in the antithesis of Original Intent.”

Creation, i firmly contend, is the unabashed effusion of Godly delight. of a world we are meant to romp in, to love and love each other. that needn’t mean that we need to relish each and every one of us. but it does mean that maybe, just maybe, we look for and find the holy spark that animates us, each and every one of us. and we can make room for each other, not only in spite of but because of our differences, in this unruly paradisiacal garden that springs into joy, into improbable possibility, every quarter turn of the globe.   

may peace and beauty be with you, may tender mercies abound. so says the whisper of earth spring after spring….

we’d be wise to listen, to heed.

what whispers did you hear in Creation this week? what lessons unfolded before your eyes or ears?

we live in surreal times. in a moment when we can look upon the planet from afar and all appears serene and blue and unscarred by borders and bombs, we know that here on the surface of that living, breathing orb it is anything but serene, unscarred. 

we scroll through the daily census of dead and wounded. the numbers nearly always contain commas, for the suffering extends far beyond the hundreds columns. it’s bomb after bomb after targeted assassination. it’s little girls’ backpacks strewn, bloodied. it’s cries from tehran, from beirut, from kyiv. 

the voices that bellow are of two ilk: those who threaten to blow a civilization into a confetti of death and destruction. to “end” it. alternatively, to blast it back to the stone age. call them the vipers. and then there is leo of chicago who will not relent, who calls a spade a deadly spade. who sees those spades for the lances of death that they are. who bores through the hypocrisy, who dares to preach that the God to whom he — and we, most of us — pray is a God who does not hear the prayers of those beseeching violence, who speak in the language of hatred. 

this is a serious moment. as sobering as any i might have known, having been born not too, too long after the holocaust’s pall still cast its shadow. this is a conflagration on the planet. how surreal that as the world is on fire, the faraway space travelers cannot make out the strife. all they see is a blue orb floating amid the heavens. as it was meant to be by the one who imagined it into creation. 

we humans are not new to evil. it has long streamed through our veins. the very purpose of religion, from the beginning, might have been to curb it. to dilute it. to turn the mothership in a new direction. away from a natural pull, the pull of destruction, of petty jealousies and sordid acts.

were i not a believer in a God of mercy, a God who preaches the beatitudes—be merciful, be humble, comfort the afflicted, seek and see the divinity in the outcast, the leper, the prostitute, yes even the tax collector—maybe i too would seek vengeance. 

coming after decades of watching religions go awry, balloon into megachurches that preach the prosperity gospel, after decades of witnessing the horrors of priests who abused their flocks, of imagining a God weeping over all of it, here comes a moment, where the world stripped of the divine, a world ruled by avarice and gilded toilets is caving in on itself, i am not alone in hearing one brave voice rising over the din. 

it is the collective voice of those who will not succumb to the demonic. who call for putting down guns, turning swords into plowshares.

those voices have ever been. across the timeline of history, there is a chain unbroken of pacifists. their volumes rise and fall. we need listen. tune our ears to their cry.

this all came rushing to me when i stumbled this week on a lament written some time in the first three centuries of the Common Era. it is a lament found in the writings of the platonic philosopher apuleius as a dialogue between teacher and student, between the ancient greek hermes trismegistus (a hellenistic figure drawn from the wisdom gods of the greek hermes and the egyptian thoth) and asclepius (the greco-roman god of medicine and the healing arts), illuminating a lament for what had become of egypt, a “land, which once was holy, a land which loved the gods, and wherein alone, in reward for her devotion, the gods deigned to sojourn upon earth, a land which was the teacher of mankind in holiness and piety, this land will go beyond all in cruel deeds.”

listen for the resonance with our own broken moment in time…as trismegistus cries out to his student, asclepius: “do you weep at this?”

O Egypt, Egypt, of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tale, which thine own children in time to come will not believe; nothing will be left but graven words, and only the stones will tell of thy piety. And in that day men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and of worship. And so religion, the greatest of all blessings, for there is nothing, nor has been, nor ever shall be, that can be deemed a greater boon, will be threatened with destruction; men will think it a burden, and will come to scorn it. They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure which he has built, this sum of good made up of things of many diverse forms, this instrument whereby the will of God operates in that which be has made, ungrudgingly favouring man’s welfare, this combination and accumulation of all the manifold things that can call forth the veneration, praise, and love of the beholder.

Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven ; the pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise; the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good. As to the soul, and the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain to immortality, as I have taught you, all this they will mock at, and will even persuade themselves that it is false. No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven and of the gods of heaven, will be heard or believed.

heed the ancient and timeless prophecy. our moment is now to bring our voices—shaky, sodden, hoarse from all our trying to be heard—to the cry of those who line up on the side of love, of mercy, of sowing the seeds of all that is good. 

or else, weep without end.

what voices have called to you this week? and what’s made you weep?

i grew up in a house where a shadow was cast over good friday. a deep and mysterious shadow. one sodden with sorrows. 

i imagined a presence, imagined the whole globe bowing to the sorrows of the long ago day, the crucifixion of the jew who preached love and more love. who turned the other cheek. upturned the money tables. chastened the holier than thou. sought the solace and silence of the desert. healed the lepers. embraced the prostitute. allowed holy oils to be poured and dried with the tresses of one of the outcast. 

i grew up in a house where silence was kept from noon to three in the afternoon on the shadowed friday of crucifixion. i learned to look out the window as the clock struck three, as the heavens darkened and thunder shook the sky, somewhere off in the distance. the distance being golgotha, the place of the skulls, an abandoned quarry outside the walls of jerusalem. in the realm of mystery, no distance is too far to hear the rumble of the skies being torn into two.

of all the somber days of the year, this is the most somber—for me, anyway. 

i find it a telling i can sink deeply into. can imagine the pain, the humiliation, the weight of the cross. can even feel the coarse rub of the olive wood, the cedar, or cypress, can imagine the splinters digging into my shoulder. my arms giving way under the lumbering tonnage. 

i wince and writhe and cry every time. i beg forgiveness for our sins. collectively. globally. and mine alone. 

it is a singularly compelling bracket of time, the hours from gethsemane to golgotha. 

it begins for me on the night before the cross, the night in the garden when jesus—the radical, countercultural rabbi (for rabbi means “teacher”)—went alone into the murky darkness to pray. when he begged his father God to spare him the torture to come. 

i can imagine the night sky, the stars bright against the black cloth of cavernous space. can imagine the weightedness of one man’s chest as he felt the mounting climax, as the cock crowed and the hour was upon him. as the footfalls of soldiers and the one who betrayed came closer and closer. 

have we not all felt ourselves in such a hollow of time? felt ourselves moving closer and closer to that which we dread? 

have we not all carried some cross, the weight of it crushing?

we all have stories—stories from our families, from our religions or our histories—that draw us into their folds. that transfix us every time. 

these anointed hours, these holy holy sorrowful hours, are among the ones that hold me. it is a blessed thing to be drawn deep into the marrow of the stories we are told, the ones that carry us across the generations, and the millennia. 

wednesday, the night before i found myself deep in the folds of thursday’s gethsemane, i found myself around a table re-telling the ancient story of the exodus. the story of slavery and liberation. the story of becoming God’s chosen people. of plagues and the killing of firstborns. of the improbable crossing of the sea, and the inexplicable parting of waters. the line of the story that night that leapt out the most to me was the one where it was written: “when the people of Israel left Egypt, they became God’s people.”

“. . . they became God’s people.” 

that line struck me because it made me think of a God who not only hovers over but harbors his people, especially a people alone, and afraid, and lost in the wilderness. a God who seeks out the suffering and the shuddering. a God of the frayed and tattered margins. of the outsider. the same God who heard the prayers of the one in the garden. the same God whom i believe heard the cry of the one on the Cross. the same one who hears all the cries of this world. the cries from Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, the cries from Gaza and Iran. from Ukraine and Lebanon. from Somalia, Sudan, and, long ago, from Biafra. the cries of mothers who bury their children. the cries of those who suffer unimaginable torturings. 

count me with the pope who preached last sunday, palm sunday, that the prayers of those who call for violence, and killing, and the bombing of children are prayers not heard by the God of Love, of Peace, the God who preaches the blessedness of the meek and the merciful. 

i close with the words of that holy, holy soul we know as Pope Leo of Chicago, a righteous pilgrim not afraid to speak out, to condemn the ways of the warmongers among us :

Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood” (Is 1:15).

As we set our gaze upon him who was crucified for us, we can see a crucified humanity. In his wounds, we see the hurts of so many women and men today. In his last cry to the Father, we hear the weeping of those who are crushed, who have no hope, who are sick and who are alone. Above all, we hear the painful groans of all those who are oppressed by violence and are victims of war.

and in the spirit of that final climb up the mount of golgotha, a climb long broken into fourteen scenes, known in the Christian Church as “stations,” i leave you with this quiet and spare meditation of the stations of the cross from pádraig ó tuama. and finally a poem from the late great irish poet, seamus heaney. 

may your holy days, whichever stories stir you, draw you into a deeper sense of being alive and in service to the miseries of this most broken world.

what are some of the stories told, and the hours into which you surrender, year over year, that most embracingly, certainly, undeniably hold you?

Chorus from “The Cure at Troy”
by Seamus Heaney

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another.
They get hurt and get hard,
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that the farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and birth-cry
Or new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

and a sobering note to close out this holy week: the global conflict tracker from the council on foreign relations

UkraineRusso-Ukrainian War

IsraelIsrael-Palestine War

PalestineIsrael-Palestine War

South SudanEthnic violence

MexicoDrug War

AfghanistanCivil War/Terrorist Insurgency

HaitiCivil War/Gang War

ColombiaCivil War/Drug War

EcuadorCivil War/Drug War

EthiopiaCivil War

MyanmarCivil War

SudanCivil War

YemenCivil War

MozambiqueCivil War

SomaliaCivil War

Central African RepublicCivil War

PakistanAfghanistan-Pakistan Border Conflict

*source: World Population Review, “Countries Currently at War, 2026”

Holy One of Peace, infuse us…

i am late to history. whilst the rest of my college compatriots were piled into an old theatre, inhaling the histories of the war-torn globe, dissecting allegiances and alliances, double crossings and shots fired in the night, i and the rest of the pre-STEM nurses were across four lanes of traffic in yet another old building taking in the particulars of microbiology. or anatomy and physiology. or pharmacology.

little, really, did those lectures teach me about the ways of the world outside the hospital ward. for that the jesuits poured us volumes and volumes of theology. i drank thirstily. 

but still i didn’t learn much of a thinker—don’t remember a single mention—who made me think this week. made me stop in my tracks and think hard about the evil impulses that abound, the ones that have not been tamed over the many, many millennia. the ones that make me wonder just how, oh how, can we make a dent in their oncoming velocities, those of us who consider ourselves, in this thinker’s words, “the hidden [] of the heart and the meek and quiet spirit.” those of us, in my words, who aim to bring light, to turn the other cheek (yes, i still believe in it, despite the many many times i’ve been told that’s a fool’s game), to be in our own tiny, tiny way “instruments of peace, sowers of love, of pardon,” and maybe a droplet of hope.

perhaps the jesuits weren’t steeped in the ways of the quakers. or perhaps i’d signed up for the classes that left george fox off the syllabus. 

george fox, you might know, is the 17th-century founder of the quakers, those peaceful peoples who’ve not let the war-torn centuries tear at their steadfast conviction that peace, not war, is the way. and while i don’t know much about their volumes of wisdom or tradition, i do know that reading this passage from the journals of george fox, a passage written in 1650 while he was imprisoned in derby, england, for blasphemy, i was stirred by its echoes in this godawful moment where iran and the u.s., iran and israel, israel and lebanon, israel and gaza, russia and ukraine, grow uglier and crueler with their seemingly bottomless arsenals of war. 

this is the plea of george fox, words that arose as he sat in a silence he’d carved in his prison cell: 

What a world is this: they have lost the hidden man of the heart and the meek and quiet spirit, which is of the Lord, of great price. I saw how the powers were plucking each other to pieces. And I saw how many men were destroying the simplicity and betraying the truth. And a great deal of hypocrisy, deceit and strife was got uppermost in people that they were ready to sheath their swords in one another’s bowels. Therefore be still a while from thy own thoughts, searching seeking, desires and imaginations and be stayed in the power of God in thee, to stay thy mind upon God, up to God, and you will find strength from Him and find him to be a present help in time of trouble, in need, and to be a God at hand.

“be stayed in the power of God in thee,” an instructive to plumb the holy well within, the one i too am convinced is at the core of us, all of us, if we work to tap into it, if we allow it to infuse the whole of us, to be just one tiny, 5-foot-3, 100-some-pound, vessel of all that is, by any definition, Godly. it’s an instruction not unexpected from a man whose most quoted line is his assertion that “there is that of God in everyone.”

amen, amen i say to that.

but what of those who seem hellbent on squelching it? those who crisscross the country—and the globe—preaching that empathy is for fools, claim it “a fundamental weakness of western civilization”? who puff their chests and bellow their war plan: “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” and go on to explain, to whom i cannot fathom, “this was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. we are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” and who claim, “we negotiate with bombs,” and claim as their motto: “maximum lethality not tepid legality.” those ready to “sheath their swords in one another’s bowels.”

might we resurrect saint francis and put him in charge? pair him with george fox? send the warmongers off to mars, long known as “the war planet” anyway, drenched as it is in the color of blood (the residue of iron oxide, actually), named after the roman god of war, though he represented honorable conflict, a notion lost on those currently dropping the bombs, launching the deadliest of drones.

so how, amidst all the horrors, do i find hope, even a speck of it? i align myself with the millennia-long lineage of this who turn their backs on the bomb-droppers, who fix in my crosshairs the likes of history’s peacemakers and keepers, the jesuses and george foxes, the francis of assisis and the solomons, the gandhis and thích nhất hạnhs.

i know we’re but one. but one + one + one eventually equals a counterforce.

our time is short. our mission steep. and the half-life of love is as long as the quiet turning of the cheek, the unheralded random act of goodness, of mercy, of tender loving care, and unbroken attention to the brokenness that leaves us in pieces.

Therefore be still a while from thy own thoughts, searching seeking, desires and imaginations and be stayed in the power of God in thee, to stay thy mind upon God, up to God, and you will find strength from Him and find him to be a present help in time of trouble, in need, and to be a God at hand.

“to be a God at hand”….

amen.

who or what guides you in the countercultural ways of peace, the ways where empathy is among the highest holiest of graces?

i love this last weekend of march, for two of my most deeply beloveds will blow out their birthday candles on back-to-back bday cakes. sweet p today, and tomorrow it’s auntie mullane, the one who taught me how it feels to be loved, deeply, tenderly loved, a whole half century ago. if either of them was in charge, ours would be a world where every blessed day was as gentle on the heart, and as glowingly radiant as any of us could ever, ever imagine…..

sweet P and auntie M, my alphabet of beloveds…..

there are no palms out my window. no kitschy drive-ins in sunset shades of bubblegum pink and peach and aqua. no deco movie-house spires piercing the clouds, lit up in the night, ablaze with neon beacons. 

instead, there is drab. limbs without leaves. birdhouses atilt thanks to gale-force winds in recent days. patches of snow still dot the brick walk back to the sodden alley, where a potage of wet leaves and muck and the detritus of winter all signal: these are the middlelands, where exotic is distant, and gray the predominant shade. 

i’m home. and decidedly taking note of the vast gap—chromatic and otherwise— between LA and chicago. LA and my leafy little village. yes, there is a grand grand lake. but the waves are nowhere near pacific. and the water’s edge not so dramatic. 

we live here in the middlelands. in more ways than geography. and it made me wonder. it made me think. 

this old house is more than familiar. i know it by heart. it’s held me for decades now. i know its creaks, and which doors stubbornly refuse to close. i know which light switch is finicky. and just how to light the front middle burner. 

we hold each other’s whispers. 

this old house has heard me cry. and felt that rapid clip of my footfall when racing toward the door, because someone i love is knocking. 

this old house knows my ways. how, pretty much, day after day, i awake before dawn, sit my bum on this bench, this bench where the cushion conforms and the wide-plank maple below is scuffed from all the years of my soles rubbing against the grain. 

we humans make home where we are. where we land. but, now home from the land of abundant abundance—abundant color, abundant whim and whimsy, abundant greenscape and vertiginous terrain—i wonder how the drab infuses me. are we a less colorful people for the monochrome we’re up against? 

or is home, in the end, the comfort that’s closest to the skin? the factor that completes the equation?

it’s something of a koan: might we be more colorful souls if we lived amid color? or do we make up for the lack thereof by sparking our very own rainbows?

is it the familiar, the cozy comfort of our surrounds, that’s the deeper, truer source of what fuels us? 

how best to eke what we can out of this one shot of life? 

to step into the unfamiliar is to open the lid on the sorts of queries we’d otherwise miss. which might be the wisest reason of all to pack up a suitcase and head—for a spell—for the hills—hollywood’s or beyond.

i know i’ll adjust, because that’s what we do. we could live in a box if we had to. 

the bright hues of the city of angels will fade. i’ll forget the neon of the nimoy lighting the night. 

any day now, the snowdrops will rise, and the redbud will break out in a string of little red knots strewn along each branch. the pace of home will pick up, will sweep me into the current, and once again i’ll find myself sated. 

but for now, in the interlude, in the space between there and here, i am wondering just how much it affects us deep down in the soul. and if, in our time here, we’d be wise to consider the backdrop in which we settle our lives.

it might account for the fact that day after day, here in the drab land, i slip my old arms into the nubbiest sweater of gray you ever did see: my uniform in winter, here where gray is a hue of many colors.

have you a place you’ve visited that made you wonder why you didn’t call it home? and what might your life be like if you up and transplanted your very sweet self? (mistake not the questions stirred for any serious thought of transplant; for one, i could never afford SoCal; for two, i’ve no intention of pulling up stakes, no matter how sumptuous someplace else might be…)

time and again, i find myself drawn into the orbit of pablo neruda, the late great chilean poet-diplomat and nobel laureate. time, in particular, is a subject at the core of my many contemplations. in Elemental Odes, neruda’s collection of odes to everyday objects—tomatoes, artichokes, soap—he laid out his most explicit instruction for how to hold time:

Listen and learn.
Time
is divided
into two rivers:
one
flows backward, devouring
life already lived;
the other
moves forward with you
exposing
your life.
For a single second
they may be joined.
Now.
This is that moment,
the drop of an instant
that washes away the past.
It is the present.
It is in your hands.
Racing, slipping,
tumbling like a waterfall.
But it is yours.
Help it grow
with love, with firmness,
with stone and flight,
with resounding
rectitude,
with purest grains,
the most brilliant metal
from your heart,
walking
in the full light of day
without fear
of truth, goodness, justice,
companions of song,
time that flows
will have the shape
and sound
of a guitar,
and when you want
to bow to the past,
the singing spring of
transparent time
will reveal your wholeness.
Time is joy.
—Pablo Neruda

photo credit above: will kamin, 2011. AP photography senior portfolio, new trier high school.

in which we lolligag about palms and pools, stalk might-be movie stars, and otherwise romp amid the landscape that gave us avocado toast…

greetings from l.a., where we’ve dipped out of march’s chicago madness (the town that turns the river shamrock green, a hue that’s always struck me as just this side of toxic waste), and traded it for the antics of Oscar countdown in a town where film is king. (let us ignore the rising fear that Iranian drones will be flung this way from just offshore this weekend.)

because in our old house we seem not to have a script for travels that comes without some twist or turn, i kicked off this adventure the day before our flight by suddenly being unable to put an ounce of weight on my left leg, so off they swooped me to the place for urgent remedy, which outfitted me with a walker that’s a complete replica of the one my mama pushes.

advantage to traveling with orthopedic appendage: early boarding; kindly sympathetic smiles all along the way.

disadvantages: slows down every trip from point A to point B; all but erases your husband’s plot to hike halfway up what we midwesterners consider a mountain to pose beside the Hollywood sign.

but we push on, and do not let our two-wheeled crutch get in our way.

if i’ve absorbed any truth these past few years it’s do not, do not let life’s curves knock you back (not too hard anyway). it’s seize the day, baby! grab that bovine by the horns. and i am here to tell you: l.a. by walker is quite an anomaly. (pewter hair, though, might be the thing that makes me most stand out here where nearly every body is lithe, lean, and tv ready.

for the Queen of homebodies, i might finally be starting to catch the travel bug, as i find myself slipping effortlessly into the role of urban anthropologist-slash-unadulterated marveler at the infinite ways humans express their genius, their innate goodness, and their knack for invention. (helps to travel with a guy who has a sixth sense for sniffing out one-of-a-kind quirky inns that fuel my every ampule of delight.)

before i amble into the sunrise, let’s riffle through the photo album and leave you with a few….

(in odd particular order: our westwood home away from home; driverless cars intersecting with other driverless cars (the lanes abound with driverlessness here); UCLA’s botanical garden where hummingbirds abound (and a walker walk away); ruins of pacific palisades wildfire; and a string of Hollywood legends—the sign, the apple pan, dodger stadium (my mate poked through every nook and cranny in a three-hour walk-through with the stadium architect); Getty villa; and somewhere in there the most sumptuous whole roasted cauliflower this side of Eden….)

and with that, sweet loves, i’ll save deep thoughts and poetries for next week when home sweet home.

what stirs you most when you board a plane and step beyond your comfort zone?

note to those who might think we’re clocking in late here at the chair: we’ve risen well before sunrise here in the city of angels, but given that the sun must muscle its way across some distance before casting shadow on the pacific, what appears “late” to all you right-coasters and midlanders (who’ve been frolicking in sunlight for hours now), is in fact in sync with the rising of the California sun….

it is a strange sisterhood. it comes in out-of-the-blue phone calls that, within a sentence, pull us both into perhaps the darkest corner of our lives. “do you have time to talk?” is sometimes the precede. sometimes not even that. yesterday i got the precede. the time before i did not. (yes, that’s two such calls within the space of a month.)

i dialed the number attached to the text, and the woman who answered, a woman i barely know, suddenly inhabited the very same place i know too well, will never forget. she’d found out, the day before, that she had stage 4 lung cancer. she said it so fast — and so plainly — i had to ask her to say that again. i wasn’t quite sure i had heard what she said, couldn’t possibly have heard what it seemed like she said. she sounded so matter-of-fact when she said it.

she said it again. the day before, she’d gone in for biopsies, two of them, both in her lungs, and woke up to the surgeon telling her it was cancer, and it was stage 4, a number that scythes like a death knell.

not even a whole day later, she was working the phones, searching for doctors who would dole out what amounts to the only possible hope: chemo that just might stave off the spread, just might dial down the madness of cancerous cells that divide and multiply dervishly, devilishly, and finally deathly.

she’d heard that i too know what it is to find out cancer’s been lurking without any warning. lurking in the lungs, specifically. lurking in the very bellows of where and how you breathe.

when cancer, any cancer, is the subject at hand, you don’t need to know much about the someone you’re calling. you just call. because inside the very dark chamber in which you are finding yourself, you reach for any semblance of light seeping in. and someone who might know a doctor is all the light you might need.

so she called. and in curious ways, she sounded quite numb. as if gathering the names of oncologists, and deciding where she’d go for her daily infusions of chemo, was not too different from shopping for just the right shoes. but then the hand-grenade sentences came. when she said, “surgery isn’t an option for me. it’s all over my lungs.” and, when the subject of five-year-survival rates came up, she said plainly: “i won’t live that long.” and in between those sentences she mentioned how much she loves her life, how much she’s loved her thirty years being married to the love of her life, how her girls are her everything. it’s the whole gamut, from gut-wrenching realism to the first seeds of mourning, all in one fell swoop. and she spoke all of it without shedding a tear.

i gave her the name of the doctor i love, the doctor who pulls her stool close whenever she talks to you, presses her knees against yours, all but cups your face in her hands. i opened the door to a chamber in my heart that seems to have moulded itself into a space for those who know, for those swept into a club no one wants to belong to. but once there, we are sealed as tightly and fiercely as humans are able to be. we muster our “fight.” we pray fiercely for each other. we ride each other’s highs and lows and the muddies all in between. we laugh with the darkest of humors. we sometimes speak in a shorthand. i don’t need you to tell me how desperately you don’t want to die, to leave the luscious life you call your own; i already know. me, neither.

we speak each other’s most foreign language.

these phone calls remind me how human we are. how, within mere breaths of beginning to talk, to tell our worst imaginable stories, we can sidle so close to each other, we can almost finish each other’s sentences. at the core, there is so very much about us that isn’t so one-of-a-kind.

we humans get scared. we humans sometimes get dealt the worst possible news, news that wants to shatter us. but then, pressed against the warmth of someone else’s breath, someone’s skin, someone’s voice, we remember we’re not wholly alone.

there is someone out there who travels a similar road. someone else has heard the death-knell sentences and picked up the pieces and carried on. because that’s what humans do—till the end.

and in that associative property (the back and forth of courage and fear, of questions and answers, of hope maybe just maybe flashing off in the distance) we find the pulse beat to carry us forward. not alone. but tucked tight in a cocoon that no one wants to inhabit.

i will always, always answer those calls, make those calls, chase down the answer to questions that come in those calls. inscribe those someones on the close-to-my-heart rolls. check in just often enough, or sometimes out of the blue. because that’s what sisterhoods do. and there’s a mysterious beauty here in the chamber where no one wants to be: the truth-telling is as clear and unfettered as any i know. we might be our very most human in the space and the time when we realize time is short — so short — and all the distraction is stripped away, and we are living as close to the holy nub as we can possibly be.

i am still grieving—that raw early stage when it’s never far from mind—two of those sisterly souls who dwelled in that most sacred space, right alongside me, right till the end. their end. barely a month ago. and i can all but feel them just the other side of this worldly existence. they live in me now. i think we are sealed in the holiest union. and it all begins with the worst story we might have ever been told: you have cancer.

what’s beyond that story, that door, though, is breathtakingly, beautifully rare: the human spirit in all its magnificence; a muddling of courage and truth, of seeing through a luminous lens, asking the most eternal of questions, and sometimes just plain finding the hilarity in the ridiculous twists and turns on cancer’s godawful road.

in uncanny, indescribable ways, i am so blessed to find myself in this rarest of rooms. a room where all is magnified, and illumined, and little goes without notice. most emphatically, the marvel of every last drop of being alive.

before i go, i found a poem this week, and another poet who will someday soon be the subject of the next installment of adopt-a-poet. i found her through anglican poet, priest, singer, songwriter, and hobbit lookalike, malcolm guite, who included this poem in his anthology for lent, titled word in the wilderness: a poem a day for lent and easter. the poet, kelly belmonte, who hails from upstate new york, is the creator and founder of All Nine, a creative collaborative. she explains the “nine” as “a reference to the nine sister muses of Greek mythology. These inspirational sisters represent multiple domains of creativity and intelligence, from epic poetry to science. For any vision to move from the inside of one person’s eyelids to the physical world where it can make a positive impact, it takes a collaborative effort across multiple disciplines and an openness to many sources of inspiration. Hence, all nine.”

her latest work, the mother of all words, came out last year, and is on my library list. belmonte claims as her poetic influences an eclectic list including Kobayashi Issa, R.M. Rilke, Mary Oliver, and Frank X. Gaspar.

i found myself stunned by the interplay of the quotidian here, and the easy reach within which we find God….

How I Talk to God

Coffee in one hand
leaning in to share, listen:
How I talk to God.

“Momma, you’re special.”
Three-year-old touches my cheek.
How God talks to me.

While driving I make
lists: done, do, hope, love, hate, try.
How I talk to God.

Above the highway
hawk: high, alone, free, focused.
How God talks to me.

Rash, impetuous
chatter, followed by silence:
How I talk to God.

First, second, third, fourth
chance to hear, then another:
How God talks to me.

Fetal position
under flannel sheets, weeping
How I talk to God.

Moonlight on pillow
tending to my open wounds
How God talks to me.

Pulling from my heap
of words, the ones that mean yes:
How I talk to God.

Infinite connects
with finite, without words:
How God talks to me.

how do you talk to God?

most of us might do well, or we think so anyway, to live our lives in reverse.

or maybe it’s as it should be that the richest chapters come now, at the far end of our sprint, when we know just a shade more about where our hungers lie, and what sates us. 

maybe there’s some common thread between the long-ago me drawn to be a nurse, and the me now drawn to—can’t keep myself away from—the world of poets and poetics, where words are the fine implements that probe the soul, elicit what stirs there, often from the realm of the unspoken. 

in my best stints as a nurse, caring for kids who often were dying of terrible cancers, i prayed for the not-often-enough chances to plunk down at their bedsides, in between the passing of meds, and the chasing down of doctors’ orders, to unspool whatever was tight-wound in their souls. to listen for the words that painted the stories inside: what it felt like to be 15 and so sick from the chemo you locked yourself in the bathroom, stuffed towels under the door, and lit up the joint your mother bought for you off some street corner somewhere—because it was the only thing that quelled the endless heaving. or what it felt like to be 12 and unable to wiggle your toes cuz the tumor that tentacled your spine had cut off the nerves from your waist on down.

it’s the soul—and its uncharted interior—that’s always drawn my attention. once as a nurse where unfathomable questions loomed in rooms where children lay dying, lay suffering, and, nowadays, it’s poetry that brings me to that sharp edge.

it’s struck me of late that this old table might be a fine place for the occasional poet to drop in, to squeeze in among the circle of chairs, to be heralded as the subject of the day. where i might tell a bit of their story, unfurl a snippet of poem and praise. 

thus begins the occasional episode of adopt-a-poet here at the chair.

this morning, i bring you one lynette roberts (1909-1995), a hauntingly original welsh poet, argentine-born, whose two books of poetry—collected poems (1944) and Gods with stainless ears: a heroic poem (1951)—have been described as “as dramatic, varied, dense, elliptical and inset with verbal novelty as any experimental poetry in the twentieth century.” 

t.s eliot was her friend and editor, and offered the highest of eliotic compliments, writing that her poetry “communicated before it made sense.” (ah, both the magic and miracle of poetry; and a line worth pondering.)

dylan thomas was best man at her wedding. robert graves—he of i, claudius—was her pen pal. (graves wrote that in her fruitful years, the 1940s, during world war II, when she was living in a small welsh village, she was “one of the few true poets,” and added that “her best is the best” among a milieu that included the likes of eliot, thomas, and, yes, graves himself.)

most endearing of all to a ragtag magpie like me, roberts and her poetry were long considered eccentric. even at her height, she was an outsider, dwelling at the outskirts of london’s bohemian literary scene. then and now, literary critics describe her as “a poet’s poet,” and one of those critics defines that epithet as one “by which we designate writers we know are important but who don’t have the readership or reputation to prove it.” (long live the poet’s poets.)

that was all it took for me to decide to do my feeble best to haul her out of the shadows. to nudge her back toward the literary glow i believe is her due (or at least offer her a chair to this old table). and to read her, everywhere i could find her. 

when i read that she was committed to a mental institution after a particularly rough breakdown, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and in and out of such quarters at least four times in her remaining years, her pen going silent until her death, i grew all the more determined. 

her poetry, until its resurrection in 2005 in the tome simply titled collected poems, had been out of print for half a century. her prose, including a war diary, an autobiography, and unpublished articles and memoirs, long had been forgotten. i’d never heard of her till a week ago when i heard the american scholar‘s amanda holmes read one of her poems.

roberts’ best work, though, is considered to stand alongside that of her near-contemporaries, the anglo-welsh poets david jones, r.s. thomas (an anglican priest and poet i count among my favorites), and dylan thomas. but even in wales, her ancestral homeland and the country to which she returned and finally settled, she found herself on the margins. 

in the poets’ academy, roberts is considered a war poet, a modernist, especially focused on a woman’s life in wartime. her poetry during the second world war plumbed bereavement, brokenness, and fracturing both for those sent to the front lines and for those left at home. she’s also been called “a love poet,” and “a poet of the hearth,” though not one to idealize the domestic. she captured it in all its extremes, the heartbreaking, and the cruel. 

it’s bits of her biography beyond the poetic that might charm me as emphatically as her poems stir me. 

before ever dipping her pen in the inkwell, roberts who’d come to london to study art in the 1930s, decided she and her roommate, the writer and painter celia buckmaster, needed a holiday. perusing an atlas, she decided—on the basis of it being the only place where the Bristle Footed Worm remained—to venture off to madeira, a portuguese archipelago, and traveled there in cargo. it was in madeira, in a house high on a hill, that she settled on her life’s work as a poet. “have found my voice at last,” she announced in a telegram sent back to london.

for reasons i’d love to know, once back in london, roberts trained to be a florist, and opened a flower arranging business before marrying, birthing two children, and later divorcing the welsh writer and editor keidrych rhys about whom she had once written that he “was charming and spoke like a prince.” 

her daughter, angharad (welsh for “beloved”), describes roberts as nomadic (crisscrossing the seas and continents from buenos aires to london to madeira to wales to london and back to wales), someone who longed for nothing so fancy as a simple home, a place defined by the sparest necessities: a fire, a table, a place to look after friends in need. 

for a good bit of her life, as a single mother with a daughter and son, roberts took to living in a caravan, with an address as plain as could be: The Caravan, The Graveyard, Laugharne, on the coast of south west wales (and literally parked in the village graveyard). angharad remembers: “we spent a whole summer catching butterflies and dragonflies, draping muslin round the caravan to keep them captive so we could draw them.” roberts drew as charmingly as she penned poetry, the pages of her diary filled with both. 

and she grew roses, but not just any roses. she deciding which to grow by smelling. and she had two criteria for planting in her garden: scent + history. a proper story need be attached. oh, to plant a garden led by nose and narrative.

and so, my library this week has grown by two: i’ve added collected poems, and diaries, letters. and recollections to my shelf. and i intend to read, underline, asterisk, and dog-ear many a page, clear to the end, as i absorb the quirky wonders of one lynette roberts, and carry her forth (at least in my own little mind) into this time, the ever-so-rocky twenty-first century. 

here is the first of roberts’ poems found in collected poems, “poem from llanybri,” a welcome-poem to a soldier and fellow poet. the oxford literary critic patrick mcguiness writes of it as “a portal to the book,” one that “imagines the poetic encounter as a hospitality extended and hospitality repaid. this is poetry as dialogue, poetry as rooted tradition: a celebration of community, both in the village, here described for its uniqueness, and within the circle of poets. it takes pleasure in the welsh words and phrases—‘cawl’, ‘savori fach’, and place names such as ‘cwmcelyn’—but also in the welsh speech-patterns that make their way into english: if you come my way that is…”

what i love is nothing so much as the way she brings a wee welsh village, and its innate kindness in war time, to life. i can see the pair sitting by the fire, absorbed in the silence best shared by those who know each other so fully. “No talk. Just a stare at ‘Time’ gathering” . . .

at the end of his introduction to her collected poems, mcguinness, editor of both her republished volumes (poems in 2005; diaries, 2008) concludes that hers is a poetry “bristling with contexts, alive to its time and place even as it dazzlingly dramatizes and reimagines them—a poetry open to influence and example while perfecting its own distinct voice and vision.” 

whether it be her poems, her quirky tellings of village life, or her inspiration to plant a garden led by my nose, i intend to keep ms. roberts close and alive, in that way that poets and poetries live on long after their one last breath.

what is the medium that holds deepest allure for you? that leads you into depths so deep you lose sense of the world around, and burrow into the place beyond answers to questions?

it is among the most profound teachings of any religion. and its point is found at the root of every sage, seer, and saint.

remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.

some years, to be truthful, those words washed over me. not this year. no longer. it is the teaching at the core of my scan time epiphany, pressed onto my heart as i emerged from the months-long fog that followed the words from my surgeon, “it was cancer; i was surprised.”

we don’t have forever. our days are numbered. our time here is fleeting. we’re wise not to whittle away the hours. wiser still to work toward the nub, the holy nub, that i believe lies at the heart of why we’re among the blessed who got to draw a first breath in the first place.

the odds of being born are stacked mightily against us; biology lays it all out at roughly 1 in 400 trillion (that’s 400 million million, or a 4 followed by 14 zeroes; i’m guessing that might be more than all the stars in the heavens. but what do i know?). we’re the ones who were allotted X number of days, who were given a holy task that’s ours and ours alone. and our slot to get it done, to reach toward holiness, to exude the light this world so desperately needs, is not without end.

so knew moses in the wilderness, imploring God: “teach us to number our days, so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

come the seventh century, a pope named gregory I pulled out the ashes to press against flesh, to remind the believers, to begin the 46 days then counted as Lent, a season of penitence before the coming of Easter. in judaism, the days of awe, from rosh hashanah, the new year, to yom kippur, the day of atonement, attention is turned to the mortal imperative: we will die. and we’d best make the most of our days. in islam, the inevitability of death is a core tenet, and muslims are taught to pray “as if this is your last ṣalāh (prayer).”

i live now with those teachings pressed hard against my flesh, whether you can see the smudge on my forehead or not. just so happens this week i walked around for a few hours looking as if i’d smudged a thumbful of dirt just above my eyebrows. and this week, a week in which i’ve spent so many hours trying to reach across to the other side, in search of a wink or a nod or a squeeze from two beloveds new to the other side, i found myself transfixed by the wisdom i wore for all the world to see.

i find it imperative. it’s the truth that fuels my every day, and all the hours within.

i live now with the palpable knowing that any minute the something stirring in my lungs (a something i likened to “a couch potato of a cancer” when my surgeon first described it as indolent, or lazy) could, in that surgeon’s inimitable words, “decide to leap off the couch and start running around the house smashing things.” the analogy here refers to the cancer detonating all throughout my lungs, a demonic pinball boinging wall to wall to any old air sac, the wee little bellows that allow you to draw in oxygen, blow out the junk that remains, the carbon dioxide we need to get rid of, lest we die of suffocation.

in my latest adventure in book writing, the book now awaiting yet another round of editing, a book whose working title is when evening comes: an urgent call to love (drawn from the great teaching of saint john of the cross who once wrote, “when the evening of this life comes, you will be judged on love,” and to which the mystic evelyn underhill then adds: “the only question asked of your soul: ‘have you loved well?'”), it’s the very point of the ashes—to dust you shall return—that animates every inkling, question, and meditation in the pages soon to be bound between covers.

in the year since i started writing that book, and in the almost three years since half my lung was snipped out of me, the choice to love well is one that rises over and over, a tide that won’t be quelled. it’s the most clarifying truth i’ve ever clung to. and it expands the walls of my heart, pushes me plenty beyond my comfort zone because i know my chances are dwindling. the next scan could come with the words that something is stirring. has made itself known. and i know those words will crumple me. knock the wind right out of me. at least for awhile. till i find my bearings again.

and so i live just ahead of those words, as if they’re always on the chase, running up from the rear.

the people i love who died last week, who crossed to the other side, were beautiful souls who loved so majestically, so magnificently, and both of whose lungs were filled with the damn cancer that would not relent. each loved till the very last breath. each didn’t want to die. each one was brave—mostly—till the end. and each one finally let go.

in so many ways, their holy nub did not die. their spirit, their joy, their infinite giving, it’s as alive as ever. maybe more so. i feel each of them. i hear their words, their laughter, the very lilt in the way they spoke every word. and their invisible presence stirs me robustly. maybe it’s that we were all in the cancer gulch together, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder. maybe it’s that we spoke a language so little known outside the republic of cancer; a language into which we’d been swept, a language where shadows are looming, a language propelled by unfiltered truth and urgency.

maybe i feel like it’s up to me to carry on their brilliant-beyond-description ways of being in the world. but that would be wrong. their work, their nub, lives on in the ways it will forever animate and rub up against ours. but my work is mine. and my days to do it are now. and your work is yours. and your days are now.

the God i believe in breathed into us a constellation of wonders, and set us on our way. as rilke once wrote in a poem i’ve long pressed to my heart, imagining God speaking to each of us as God makes us, before we are born, before we leave the womb of darkness, God “walks with us silently out of the night.” and as we near the precipice of the womb, the place where the daylight seeps in, God whispers: “Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.”

and so this work that is ours to do, in this time that will end, we are here for holy purpose. and our God is at hand.

ashes to ashes. dust to dust.

the time in between is our one holy chance.

how will we use it?

in the tiny chapel where i go to pray, and where this week the ashes were smudged on my head, i found these words from psalm 103 breathtakingly beautiful. . .

for [God] himself knows whereof we are made;
he remembers that we are but dust.
Our days are like the grass; we flourish like a flower of the field;
When the wind goes over it, it is gone, and its place shall know it no more.

may our time in the field be fruitful, may our petals unfurl fully as we drink in the sunlight. before the wind blows over us, and our time here is no more….

love, bam

sending special special love to the beautiful mama of one of the beauties who has crossed to the other side….i know that all of us here reach across the table in hopes of steadying your trembling hand, tissue at the ready to dry your flow of tears….