Poem - The Low Road - Marge Piercy

What can they do to you?
Whatever they want..

They can set you up, bust you,
they can break your fingers,
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember.
they can take away your children,
wall up your lover;
they can do anything you can’t stop them doing.

How can you stop them?
Alone you can fight, you can refuse.
You can take whatever revenge you can
But they roll right over you.
But two people fighting back to back
can cut through a mob
a snake-dancing fire
can break a cordon,
termites can bring down a mansion

Two people can keep each other sane
can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.

Three people are a delegation
a cell, a wedge.
With four you can play games
and start a collective.
With six you can rent a whole house
have pie for dinner with no seconds
and make your own music.

Thirteen makes a circle,
a hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity
and your own newsletter;
ten thousand community
and your own papers;
a hundred thousand,
a network of communities;
a million our own world.

It goes one at a time.
It starts when you care to act.
It starts when you do it again
after they say no.
It starts when you say we
and know who you mean;
and each day you mean
one more.

Poem - To have without holding - Marge Piercy

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

What will you become? Meditation for a new year

Snowflake burning to steam on a long poker

Soft wood carved to gentle curve fitting a smaller space

Raindrop crying down a window, magnifying the spaces I pass

I do not contain multitudes

Even my voice echoes in here

There is no top and no bottom

No up

All down

Falling

Shedding

Listening

Reaching

Trying for stillness

Centeredness

Branching

Rooting

Connecting earth to sky

Hand to hand

Intent to impact

One to all

Myself to the better parts of my nature

Invitation to Brave Space - Micky ScottBey Jones

Together we will create brave space

Because there is no such thing as a “safe space”
We exist in the real world
We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds.
In this space
We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world,
We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,
We call each other to more truth and love
We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.
We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know.
We will not be perfect.
This space will not be perfect.
It will not always be what we wish it to be
But
It will be our brave space together,
and
We will work on it side by side.

 My parents met at the University of New Mexico. My mom was studying anthropology, and my dad studied history (I think). They met singing in a choir, which seems strange for both of them, honestly.

Both talked at some point about the phenomenon of wanting to buy a particular car and suddenly seeing that car everywhere. They had a fancy name for it, which I remember hearing but not what it was.

Over the years, I've asked them for the term, but neither now remembers knowing it!

And then, just recently, I've heard the term EVERYWHERE. Replicating the very phenomenon that it was coined to describe.

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is the phenomenon where something you recently learned suddenly appears 'everywhere'. Also called Frequency Bias (or Illusion), the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is the seeming appearance of a newly-learned (or paid attention to) concept in unexpected places.

Song - I Am Light - Indie Arie

 

Song - Japanese Bowl - Peter Mayer

I’m like one of those Japanese bowls
That were made long ago
I have some cracks in me
They have been filled with gold

That’s what they used back then
When they had a bowl to mend
It did not hide the cracks
It made them shine instead

So now every old scar shows
from every time I broke
And anyone’s eyes can see
I’m not what I used to be

But in a collector’s mind
All of these jagged lines
Make me more beautiful
And worth a higher price

I’m like one of those Japanese bowls
I was made long ago
I have some cracks you can see
See how they shine of gold.

Quote by Australian activist Christine Caine

 "Sometimes when you're in a dark place, you think you've been buried, but actually, you've been planted."

Poem - Wintered Over - Lisa Breger

 

Water carries sunlight along a narrow twisting stream;

sunlight glitters on the water’s back

light among dark trees.

I watch a hawk in the distance glide the thermals

rise and circle the open space over Lake Cochituate.

Soon it will be lilac season

among other kindnesses.

To have weathered this harsh winter

didn’t take courage or strength

though the lilacs are hardy

and the season brings forth.

How can I have nothing to say about this;

a survivor always has a story.

Maybe you just keep on living

even when the odds are against you.

A nurse brings a saucer of milk to your lips

and the cat in you,

how many lives now,

takes a swallow.

Then, you lift a hand and take her hand,

another sip,

and lift yourself up

which is what I remember.

Transplanted stem cells find their way back to the marrow.

I was neither strong nor brave.

I stayed in bed and looked out the window.

Some days the old oaks across the way swayed in the wind other

days: stillness and birds.

I don’t know why I made it.

Don’t we all have a fierce desire

to see a hummingbird

drink from the trumpet vine?

Poem - Heavy - Mary Oliver

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it –
books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled –
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?

Resilient - Rising Appalachia (song)

 

Poem - from "A Brave and Startling Truth" - Maya Angelou

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

Poem - MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS (PART 5) - Tracy K. Smith

When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.

He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Raegan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled

To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is —

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

Poem - ODE TO BUTTONING AND UNBUTTONING MY SHIRT - Ross Gay

No one knew or at least
I didn’t know
they knew
what the thin disks
threaded here
on my shirt
might give me
in terms of joy
this is not something to be taken lightly
the gift
of buttoning one’s shirt
slowly
top to bottom
or bottom
to top or sometimes
the buttons
will be on the other
side and
I am a woman
that morning
slipping the glass
through its slot
I tread
differently that day
or some of it
anyway
my conversations
are different
and the car bomb slicing the air
and the people in it
for a quarter mile
and the honeybee’s
legs furred with pollen
mean another
thing to me
than on the other days
which too have
been drizzled in this
simplest of joys
in this world
of spaceships and subatomic
this and that
two maybe three
times a day
some days
I have the distinct pleasure
of slowly untethering
the one side
from the other
which is like unbuckling
a stack of vertebrae
with delicacy
for I must only use
the tips
of my fingers
with which I will
one day close
my mother’s eyes
this is as delicate
as we can be
in this life
practicing
like this
giving the raft of our hands
to the clumsy spider
and blowing soft until she
lifts her damp heft and
crawls off
we practice like this
pushing the seed into the earth
like this first
in the morning
then at night
we practice
sliding the bones home.

Anger - David Whyte

 Loving Brainpicking today!

Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on Anger, Forgiveness, and What Maturity Really Means

ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.

...

What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.

Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability… Anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics.

...

Anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence.

...

To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity, we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.

Poem - The Weighing - Jane Hirschfield

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

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

Day after the 2020 Presidential Election in 2020

 What's the right metaphor? Oil and water. Knit and perl? We are made from the same cloth, yet in taking shape for one, we shape the other. We face opposite worlds and so come to opposite conclusions. America is just; America is just racist.

I want to ask each Trump voter, when you were alone in a voting booth made for you, and you went to cast your secret ballot, between you and the outcome you wanted, what was your vote FOR? What did you cast your vote AGAINST?  What did you fear would happen, is happening? What do you see that you want more of? More COVID deaths? More kids in cages? More lunatic rants via Twitter? More countries to see us and despair, form their own coalitions to save the globe? More emptying of the federal coffers into Trump golf properties?

When the pollster asked who you would vote for, why couldn't you bring yourself to say "Trump" out loud? Did you go to his rallies? Did you listen? What did you hear that you liked? That made you feel safe? That said, "this guy should lead our country for 4 more years!"

Lines from H.D.'s Eurydice: 

what was it you saw in my face?
the light of your own face,

the fire of your own presence?

....

So for your arrogance
and your ruthlessness
I have lost the earth
and the flowers of the earth,
and the live souls above the earth,
and you who passed across the light
and reached
ruthless;

you who have your own light,
who are to yourself a presence,
who need no presence;

yet for all your arrogance
and your glance,
I tell you this:

such loss is no loss,
such terror, such coils and strands and pitfalls
of blackness,
such terror
is no loss;

hell is no worse than your earth
above the earth,
hell is no worse,
no, nor your flowers
nor your veins of light
nor your presence,
a loss;

my hell is no worse than yours
though you pass among the flowers and speak
with the spirits above earth.

Against the black
I have more fervour
than you in all the splendour of that place,
against the blackness
and the stark grey
I have more light;

and the flowers,
if I should tell you,
you would turn from your own fit paths
toward hell,
turn again and glance back
and I would sink into a place
even more terrible than this.

At least I have the flowers of myself,
and my thoughts, no god
can take that;
I have the fervour of myself for a presence
and my own spirit for light;

and my spirit with its loss
knows this;
though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell must break before I am lost;

before I am lost,
hell must open like a red rose
for the dead to pass.

And Robinson Jeffers - The Answer

 What is there to hold onto when half of us won't admit what we want or face the consequences of our vote? 

I am reading Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, and the research linking Nazi Germany during the Third Reich with their legal model - the Jim Crow era South is truly terrifying. How did Germany recover when so many participated and so many let it happen? There will be no Nuremberg trials here. No calling to account. No fleeing of war criminals to Venezuela. Trump will make and lose another $400 million. And Tweet the whole time about hate and unfair treatment - of him and his cronies. He'll be lionized as the worst-treated president of time. Poor him. 

And we're left to ... what? Try to cobble together a coalition of the not-quite-terrible. The turnable. The ones who will only admit it was about the economy but say they never liked what Trump said in his worst moments. 

I hope we ask more questions of the people who supported or propped up or voted for or just held their nose for this despicable, petty despot. I want to understand. I'm listening for common ground. For hope. For shared values. For shared fears, even. For something that resembles a thought that I might have on a tough day or after a few dozen tough years. 

These are Hillbilly Ellegy people. Saying that no one else should get bootstraps until they've made it out of the coalmine. I don't want to join them there. Or leave them there. Or leave anyone there. 

The canary's dead. Let's all make our way into the light. It will take some time to get us all up in the lift. We'll take turns, and you can send water and food down with each return trip. Let's sing together as we wait. Who knows this one? I'm gonna keep on moving forward...

Poem - V'ahavta - Aurora Levins Morales

 

Full poem here.

Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up,
when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning
and in times of joy. ...
[R]ecite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire:
Another world is possible.

Thus spoke the prophet Roque Dalton:
All together they have more death than we,
but all together, we have more life than they.
...So instead,

imagine winning. This is your sacred task.
This is your power. ...
Lean with all your being towards that day
when the poor of the world shake down a rain of good fortune
out of the heavy clouds, and justice rolls down like waters.

Defend the world in which we win as if it were your child.
It is your child.
Defend it as if it were your lover.
It is your lover.

...

Don’t waver. Don’t let despair sink its sharp teeth
Into the throat with which you sing. Escalate your dreams.
Make them burn so fiercely that you can follow them down
any dark alleyway of history and not lose your way.
...

Hold hands. Share water. Keep imagining.
So that we, and the children of our children’s children
may live

Poem - A Small Needful Fact - Ross Gay

 

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

Copyright © 2015 by Ross Gay. Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.

See also: Frederick Douglass

"this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air"

Song - Keep on Moving Forward/Sigamos Adelante - Emma's Revolution

 

Poem - The Sound of One Fork - Minnie Bruce Pratt

Through the window screen I can see an angle of grey roof
and the silence that spreads in the branches of the pecan tree
as the sun goes down. I am waiting for a lover. I am alone
in a solitude that vibrates like the cicada in hot midmorning,
that waits like the lobed sassafras leaf just before
its dark green turns into red, that waits
like the honeybee in the mouth of the purple lobelia.

While I wait, I can hear the random clink of one fork
against a plate. The woman next door is eating supper
alone. She is sixty, perhaps, and for many years
has eaten by herself the tomatoes, the corn
and okra that she grows in her backyard garden.
Her small metallic sound persists, as quiet almost
as the windless silence, persists like the steady
random click of a redbird cracking a few
more seeds before the sun gets too low.
She does not hurry, she does not linger.

Her younger neighbors think that she is lonely.
But I know what sufficiency she may possess.
I know what can be gathered from year to year,
gathered from what is near to hand, as I do
elderberries that bend in damp thickets by the road,
gathered and preserved, jars and jars shining
in rows of claret red, made at times with help,
a friend or a lover, but consumed long after,
long after they are gone and I sit
alone at the kitchen table.

And when I sit in the last heat of Sunday, afternoons
on the porch steps in the acid breath of the boxwoods,
I also know desolation. The week is over, the coming night
will not lift. I am exhausted from making each day.
My family, my children live in other states,
the women I love in other towns. I would rather be here
than with them in the old ways, but when all that’s left
of the sunset is the red reflection underneath the clouds,
when I get up and come in to fix supper,
in the darkened kitchen I am often lonely for them.

In the morning and the evening we are by ourselves,
the woman next door and I. Still, we persist.
I open the drawer to get out the silverware.
She goes to her garden to pull weeds and pick
the crookneck squash that turn yellow with late summer.
I walk down to the pond in the morning to watch
and wait for the blue heron who comes at first light
to feed on minnows that swim through her shadow in the water.
She stays until the day grows so bright
that she cannot endure it and leaves with her hunger unsatisfied.
She bows her wings and slowly lifts into flight,
grey and slate blue against a paler sky.
I know she will come back. I see the light create
a russet curve of land on the farther bank,
where the wild rice bends heavy and ripe
under the first blackbirds. I know
she will come back. I see the light curve
in the fall and rise of her wing.

Poem - Visitation - Mark Doty

When I heard he had entered the harbor,
and circled the wharf for days,
I expected the worst: shallow water,

confusion, some accident to bring
the young humpback to grief.
Don't they depend on a compass

lodged in the salt-flooded folds
of the brain, some delicate
musical mechanism to navigate

their true course? How many ways,
in our century's late iron hours,
might we have led him to disaster?

That, in those days, was how
I'd come to see the world:
dark upon dark, any sense

of spirit an embattled flame
sparked against wind-driven rain
till pain snuffed it out. I thought,

This is what experience gives us ,
and I moved carefully through my life
while I waited. . . Enough,

it wasn't that way at all. The whale
—exuberant, proud maybe, playful,
like the early music of Beethoven—

cruised the footings for smelts
clustered near the pylons
in mercury flocks. He

(do I have the gender right?)
would negotiate the rusty hulls
of the Portuguese fishing boats

—Holy Infant, Little Marie—
with what could only be read
as pleasure, coming close

then diving, trailing on the surface
big spreading circles
until he'd breach, thrilling us

with the release of pressured breath,
and the bulk of his sleek young head
—a wet black leather sofa

already barnacled with ghostly lice—
and his elegant and unlikely mouth,
and the marvelous afterthought of the flukes,

and the way his broad flippers
resembled a pair of clownish gloves
or puppet hands, looming greenish white

beneath the bay's clouded sheen.
When he had consumed his pleasure
of the shimmering swarm, his pleasure, perhaps,

in his own admired performance,
he swam out the harbor mouth,
into the Atlantic. And though grief

has seemed to me itself a dim,
salt suspension in which I've moved,
blind thing, day by day,

through the wreckage, barely aware
of what I stumbled toward, even I
couldn't help but look

at the way this immense figure
graces the dark medium,
and shines so: heaviness

which is no burden to itself.
What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?

Poem - Blessings for the Beginning - Kari Kopnick

The things to do have been done, well, for the most part.
The people we need are in place, almost.
We are ready, or as ready as we will be.

Bless this most perfectly imperfect beginning.
May we find the right people to do the right things as we go.
May we discover that what we needed was right here all along.
And may we remember to stop and marvel at the magic of each moment as it floats by.

 Weird thing. 

My family traveled to Umeå, Sweden a year ago for a memorial for my husband's mother.

The kids, then 10 and 6, did great. But every time we passed McDonald's the call of "home" was almost undeniable.

We ate there for the first time in Stockholm, and I was thrilled to see a "Chicken and Hummus Salad" on the menu, as well as sparking water! I ate better at a McDonald's than ever before or ever since.

The salad features hummus and grilled chicken alongside black rice, edamame, and green and red cabbage. To finish off the dish, the salad is drizzled with a sweet and tangy chili dressing.

The next time the kids wanted to hit Mickey D's, they got a big YES from me.

Little did I know that I should have said yes even more than I did. I figured Sweden just got to "test" the salad until they rolled it out in the U.S. But no! Now I know McDonald's offers different menu items all over the world!

And I'm left mourning for a tasty, budget-friendly salad from a restaurant that my kids love, too.

Such a strange thing to be craving McDonald's!

As an aside, I think not only would I consider this McDonald's item as a factor in my decision to go back to Sweden, but ... it may just drive my tourism destinations in other areas.

Check out the Cadbury Creme Egg McFlurry, available only in Canada and Australia, and only at Easter:

Come on, big arches! Bring me joy in my home town!!!

Barrett died this week. He went to see his doctor because he just wasn't feeling himself, and his heart stopped on the examining table. They brought him back with a defibrillator in the ambulance.

He got a pacemaker and says he's eager for more life.

I'm 45 and barely know why I wake up every day.

I know these are not the days to measure our worth or gauge the meaning of our lives.

I am keeping my kids safe and sane and loved. I am keeping a house running. And a team at work. And helping with church.

But.

All the shoulds press so insistently, and the years of regret I am forecasting when I see how little I make of my days now. 

"Trust in the laws of accretion," Barrett said more than 20 years ago to me. And I have very little writing to show for it. Baudelaire may have called it better. I am a product of ennui. Barely dragging myself through the days and then anesthetizing myself once in bed with bad tv, a game or two, some news.

I read some. I love some. I exercise some.

I know I should do more. I feel so empty, so drained, so exhausted. Maybe I am doing all I can.

What is the most loving thing to do for myself? Forgive and let languish or push and produce?

I would love Barrett as much even if he never wrote a poem. I would adore Rini just as much if she never picked up a brush. And for years, she didn't. 

A career was plenty for many people. Why do I want a whole other life? Ah, there's the rub.

Poem - Love Is Calling - Jess Reynolds

Love is calling for liberation.
Love is hoarse from calling,
her voice raw from the decades
she has spent chanting at protests
and speaking from pulpits
and singing the songs of freedom.
Love is weeping into a white candle
she cups in her hands at a vigil
for one more Black life lost, ripped away, gunned down, forgotten.
She is holding the hands of a grieving mother
and praying aloud for peace.
This is where Love shows up, where Love has always shown up.
She is tugging at our hands and sleeves, begging us to lay down our egos
and take up our courage
and dedicate our lives to justice.

Poem - When You Are Weary - Jess Reynolds

Waking up is enough. Putting on shoes
before you walk out on the wet leaves

that plaster the driveway is enough.
It is enough to love one person,

one dog, one tree in a neighbor’s yard,
one fifty-cent mug at the thrift store.

You turn on the radio in the car.
You let a minivan merge into your lane

during rush hour. After three weeks
of half-darkness, you change the light bulb

above your desk. It is enough to breathe,
to put your face in your cold hands

and tell your palms and the empty kitchen
that you don’t know what else to do.

You open the blinds just enough
to see if the mail carrier has come today.

You turn your head at the sound
of a musician on the street corner,

their guitar slightly out of tune.
You buy bananas at the supermarket

and eat all but one before they turn
to mush. It is enough to be here,

to drink cold water from the tap,
to fall asleep on the couch

with a cat in the crook of your knees.
It is enough to be alive.

 Sermon at First Unitarian by the Rev. Bob LaVallee

9/27/2020

Racism is not a failure of character.

[It's a failure of persistent practice.] Only consistent effort is rewarded.

When we see the divinity in everyone, we allow the divine to show up.

Our faith intentionally contraverts empires of oppression.

Anti-racism is aligning ourselves with the world as it should be and will be.

Poem - We Are Worthy - Elandria Williams

We are worthy
Not because of what we produce
But because of who we are
We are divine bodies of light and darkness
You are not worthy because of what you offer, not because of what is in your mind, not for the support you give others, not for what you give at all
We are worthy and are whole just because

In this great turning, in this great pandemic, in this radical readjustment and alignment
We are not disposable, we are needed, we are the very people that have withstood everything that has been thrown at us as a people and as Maya Angelou would say
Still I Rise

We arise from the pain
We rise from the grief
We arise from the limits people place on us and the limits we place on ourselves
We rise to be the children and the ancestors
We rise to be our true selves
Our true selves in relationship to our families and communities
Recognizing our liberating and whole selves
Honoring them and others as we strive for abundant communities, abundant lives, abundant relationships, and abundant values and cultural manifestations
We are worthiness personified

I, you, and we are worthy and deserve a life where we are not always fighting for our existence
Imagine what we could create if we were not always in the struggle
Imagine what we could envision if we could just be let to just go there
So tired of always having to resist, to fight, demanding, pushing...
To everyone that has the courage, the power, the ability to co-create what we want and need while rooting in what we can’t lose and who we are
You are the visionary
You are the hope
You are our ancestor’s dreams

No, you might not ever end up on some list somewhere
But you are on a list in someone’s heart and mind
And if it’s in how you move in the world so people can see by example
You are the embodiment of what we need
Thanks to all that are the embodiment
The embodiment not of productivity but the embodiment of radical love, care and sanctuary
It’s time
Embodiment time
Embodiment
Living one’s values out loud
Let me everyday live my values out loud
Let us everyday live our values out loud
Embodying our values
Not the productivity quotient
Beyond productivity
Past productivity
True embodiment
Life —

On the eve of Yom Kippur

 How have I failed to live up to my values?

I see the ways I have failed.

I have compassion for what I still have to learn. 

I am on the path.

I honor my journey, my awareness of where I am, where I am going, and my dedication to taking the next step.

I see the holy in myself.

I vow to begin again in love.

 This article from the Atlantic by Mychal Denzel Smith!!!

Police Reform Is Not Enough: The moral failure of incremental change

"Incremental change keeps the grinding forces of oppression - of death - in place. Actively advocating for this position is a moral failure."

This seems to be a definitive answer to the question posed by my Senior English teacher, Ms. Firstenberg, who had us read Rousseau and Hobbes (both thinking about the social contract and whether people are inherently good or inherently flawed) and then write about which one was right - the one advocating for revolution (Rousseau) or the one advocating for incremental change (Hobbes).

Other quotable from this article:

"Progress is wrestling concessions from the behemoth of systematized oppression."

Poem - Little Lesson on How to Be - Kathryn Nuernberger

The woman at the Salvation Army who sorts and prices is in her eighties
and she underestimates the value of everything, for which I am grateful.

Lightly used snow suits, size 2T, are $6 and snow boots are $3.

There is a little girl, maybe seven, fiddling with a tea set. Her mother
inspects drapes for stains.

Sometimes the very old and lonely are looking for an opening.

She glances up from her pricing and says something about the tea set
and a baby doll long ago.

I am careful not to make eye contact, but the mother with drapes has
such softness in her shoulders and her face and she knows how to say
the perfect kind thing—“What a wonderful mother you had.”

“Yes, she was.”

Why do children sometimes notice us and sometimes not?

From the bin of dolls: “What happened to your mother?”

“She died.”

The woman at the Salvation Army who sorts and prices is crying a little.
She seems surprised to be crying. “It’s been eighty years and I still miss her.”

When my daughter was born I couldn’t stop thinking about how we were going to die. If we were drowning, would it be better to hold her to me even as she fought away or should I let her float off to wonder why her mother didn’t help her? What if it’s fire and I have one bullet left? I made sure my husband knew if there were death squads and he had to choose, I’d never love him again if he didn’t choose her. If I’m lucky, her crying face is the last thing I’ll see.

The mother with drapes is squeezing her daughter’s shoulder, trying to
send a silent message, but children are children. “Why did she die?”

“She was going to have a baby and—And she died.”

“But she was a wonderful mother.”

I’m holding a stack of four wooden jigsaw puzzles of farm animals,
dinosaurs, jungle animals, and pets. Each for a quarter.

“It’s silly how much I still miss her.” She takes out a tissue and wipes
her eyes and then her nose.

When my grandmother threw her sister, Susie, a 90th birthday party, one hundred people came, including 5 of the 6 brothers and sisters. At dusk only a few of us were left, nursing beers with our feet kicked up on the bottom rungs of various walkers.

Susie said then to my grandmother, “Can you think of all the people
watching us in heaven now? And our mother must be in the front row.”

Grandma took her sister’s hand. “Our mother—Estelle.”

“Yes—her name was Estelle. I forgot that.”

They looked so happy then, saying her name back and forth to each
other. Estelle. Estelle.

Poem - Self-compassion - James Crews

My friend and I snickered the first time
we heard the meditation teacher, a grown man,
call himself honey, with a hand placed
over his heart to illustrate how we too
might become more gentle with ourselves
and our runaway minds. It’s been years
since we sat with legs twisted on cushions,
holding back our laughter, and today
I found myself crouched on the floor again,
not meditating exactly, just agreeing
to be still, saying honey to myself each time
I thought about my husband splayed
on the couch with aching joints and fever
from a tick bite—what if he never gets better?—
or considered the mess of the next election,
or remembered in just a few more minutes,
I’d have to climb down into the cellar and empty
the bucket I left beneath a leaky pipe
that can’t be fixed until next week. How long
do any of us really have before the body
begins to break down and empty its mysteries
into the air? Oh honey, I said—for once
without a trace of irony or blush of shame—
the touch of my own hand on my chest
like that of a stranger, oddly comforting
in spite of the facts.

Quote - prayer

Prayer doesn't change things;
prayer changes people,
and people change things.

- Adapted from quotes by Mother Theresa / Joyce Meyer

Poem - Translations - Kathryn Nuernberger

I want to believe we can’t see anything
we don’t have a word for.

When I look out the window and say green, I mean sea green,
I mean moss green, I mean gray, I mean pale and also
electrically flecked with white and I mean green
in its damp way of glowing off a leaf.

Scheele’s green, the green of Renaissance painters,
is a sodium carbonate solution heated to ninety degrees
as arsenious oxide is stirred in. Sodium displaces copper,
resulting in a green precipitate that is sometimes used
as insecticide. When I say green I mean
a shiny green bug eating a yellow leaf.

Before synthetics, not every painter could afford a swathe
of blue. Shocking pink, aka neon, aka kinky pink,
wasn’t even on the market. I want to believe Andy Warhol
invented it in 1967 and ever since no one’s eyes
have been the same. There were sunsets before,
but without that hot shocking neon Marilyn, a desert sky
was just cataract smears. I want to believe this.

The pale green of lichen and half-finished leaves
filling my window is a palette very far from carnation
or bougainvillea, but to look out is to understand it is not,
is to understand what it is not. I stare out the window a lot.
Between the beginning and the end the leaves unfolded.
I looked out one morning and everything was unfamiliar
as if I was looking at the green you could only see
if you’d never known synthetic colors existed.

I’ve drawn into myself people say.
We understand, they say.

There are people who only have words for red
and black and white, and I wonder if they even see
the trees at the edge of the grass
or the green storms coming out of the west.
There are people who use the same word for green
and red and brown, and I wonder if red
seems so urgently bright pouring from the body
when there is no green for it to fall against.

In his treatise on color Wittgenstein asked,
“Can’t we imagine certain people
having a different geometry of colour than we do?”

I want to believe the eye doesn’t see green until it has a name,
because I don’t want anything to look the way it did before.

Van Gogh painted pink flowers, but the pink faded
and curators labeled the work “White Roses” by mistake.

The world in my window is a color the Greeks called chlorol.
When I learned the word I was newly pregnant
and the first pale lichens had just speckled the silver branches.
The pines and the lichens in the chill drizzle were glowing green
and a book in my lap said chlorol was one of the untranslatable
words. The vibrating glow pleased me then, as a finger
dipped in sugar pleased me then. I said the word aloud
for the baby to hear. Chlorol. I imagined the baby
could only see hot pink and crimson inside its tiny universe,
but if you can see what I’m seeing, the word for it
is chlorol. It’s one of the things you’ll like out here.

Nineteenth century critics mocked painters who cast shadows
in unexpected colors. After noticing green cypresses do drop red
shadows, Goethe chastised them. “The eye demands
completeness and seeks to eke out the colorific circle in itself.”
He tells of a trick of light that had him pacing a row of poppies
to see the flaming petals again and figure out why.

Over and over again Wittgenstein frets the problem of translucence.
Why is there no clear white?
He wants to see the world through white-tinted glasses,
but all he finds is mist.

At first I felt as if the baby had fallen away
like a blue shadow on the snow.

Then I felt like I killed the baby
in the way you can be thinking about something else
and drop a heavy platter by mistake.

Sometimes I feel like I was stupid
to have thought I was pregnant at all.

Color is an illusion, a response to the vibrating universe
of electrons. Light strikes a leaf and there’s an explosion
where it lands. When colors change, electromagnetic fields
are colliding. The wind is not the only thing moving the trees.

Once when I went into those woods I saw a single hot pink orchid
on the hillside and I had to keep reminding myself not to
tell the baby about the beautiful small things I was seeing.
So, hot pink has been here forever and I don’t even care
about that color or how Andy Warhol showed me an orchid.
I hate pink. It makes my eyes burn.

Poem - Harold & the Purple Crayon - D. Gilson

Berkeley psychologists told Harold
his anger was justified. What parents
let their child go for a midnight walk
under no moon? I couldn’t have
been more than four, Harold told
the doctor in her crisp beige office.
Doctor, could it ever be OK
for a four-year-old to eat nine
different types of pie? Harold asked her.
Call me Lisa, the doctor replied.
Everyone knew Harold could draw.
By sophomore year, he was critiquing
grad students. By twenty, Harold knew
exactly when to quote Sontag. Standing
in front of a professor’s latest pastel
of Mojave succulents: This just makes me think
how in place of a hermeneutics, we need
an erotics of art. Harold’s professors
would hum & nod their dragon heads
(though none of them understood, exactly,
what Harold said). By senior year, Harold
became distant, his work increasingly angry:
apple trees, their fruit rotting in monochrome
purple, under the notable lack of a moon.

Poem - Where the Wild Things Go - D. Gilson

The night Max wore his wolf suit
made him infamous, bred the child star
never sent to bed. Middle school,
Max started drinking. Not in my house,
his mother begged, No, no, no, wild thing.
Max reminded her who bought
this condo, who paid for her meds.
Freshman year, Max raved. Roared
his terrible roar, rolled, and almost
wound up in a warehouse dead.
Where, oh where, do the wild things
go? To rehab in high school.
To college on residual book sales.
Max kept his head down. Laughed
at drunken frat boys. Bro, let the wild
rumpus start. Max said, No thanks,
and volunteered for the Peace Corps
instead. Two years in Kenya, one
in Belarus, the president thought
Max might be of some use. Max
moved to Washington, appointed
at the State Department a cultural
attaché. One important day Max wore
his wolf-gray suit, then drove home
well past rush hour in a freak snow storm.
Max drove on the deserted beltway,
thought it his throne. Yes, Max belted,
this is where the wild things roam.

Poem - Excerpt - Theories of the Soul - Karen An-Hwei Lee

If you’re a bird or soul
    I am only one mile

from the sea. If you
    are a soul in two bodies

life is more complex
    and we must labor

twice the field of sorrow
    after sleep, bath, and a glass

as Aquinas whispers, the things
    we love tell us who we are.

Poem - Prayer of Radiolucence - Karen An-hwei Lee

After I turned forty, I received my first 42 millirem dose of X-rays.
I heated the machine with my uncupped body, tabled my rib cage
to cool shoulders dear as a beloved relative who could no longer see
due to intraocular weather in her eyes. Women in an outer room
awaited bone scans. Backscatter is 5 microrems or .005 millirems.
A dental bitewing X-ray, around 0.5 millirem. Mammogram, 40 to 70.
Do not know about bone scans. Annual background radiation is 300,
higher if we live on a mesa or often fly. Ozone plus uranium decay,
daughters of radon gas.
                                    How about our radiogenic thyroids, butterflies
shimmering with table-salt iodine? Peonies of  bone marrow spun
        rails of flesh in a waiting room of  jacquard chairs,
of  round mirrors and water lilies, paper hydrangeas, African violets.
If  I broke the silence, then I drew the flame of  your sun into my chest.
Unshielded, I entered an inner room to don a rose-colored cotton kimono.
For a minute, I thought of  flying fish roe and forgot its  Japanese name.
What is the risk of carcinogenic harm while estrogen acts on my cells?
Coralline of  the radiology room inside my mouth, the clinical air
exuded an odor of magnolia powder although no one wore it, a scent
riper than radical scavengers of  blackberries. I uttered a prayer
of radiolucence
                        then remembered the word, tobiko.

Poem - I wish I loved lawnmowers - Mark Waldren

I really do wish I did. Because if I loved
lawnmowers I could go

to the lawnmower museum I just heard
about on the radio in a piece

about small museums.
It’s in Southport apparently — 

a seaside town “fringed to the north by
the Ribble Estuary,” according to Wikipedia.

It would be quite a trip to go up there,
and I’d almost certainly

have to stay the night. I think I might stay
in the Prince of Wales Hotel, which looks

conveniently situated for the station
and the museum too. I can hardly bear

to think how much I’d be looking forward
to making that trip if I loved lawnmowers.

On the radio they said they have all sorts
of models from Victorian ones all the way

through to a state-of-the-art robot one
that’s powered by solar energy.

If I was planning the visit I’d probably
have a bit of a virtual walk-round

on Street View, and in fact I’ve just done
exactly that in an effort to capture

the feeling I’d have if I was actually
anticipating a trip to the lawnmower museum.

Exploring the area I discovered
that Southport looks very much like

Weston-super-Mare, where, as it happens,
I stayed in a halfway house many

years ago after doing a stint in rehab.
Now crack cocaine — that I loved.

Notes:

This poem originally appeared in The Poetry Review. You can read the other poems in this exchange in the May 2017 issue.

Poem - Socratic - Jacqueline Jones LaMon

The students know the agenda. When I step
inside our classroom, the PowerPoint is loaded,
the student presenting her report stands poised

to begin. And so she does. This day is her
second try, the first a wash due to our failed
technology. I ask, Do you think you will earn

another chance each time error is out of your hands?
This day, a new day, she stands confident,
prepared for questions from her peers, the one

question she’s noted that I ask of them all — 
What is it that this artist has allowed you
to achieve? This day, I forget the other

questions I always wait to ask. This day, they ask
no others, just stare outside at the lot
of parked cars, play with the ends of their hair.

They want to hear voices that give them reason
to listen. They want the blare of car horn,
tires screeching without a final thud. They

want a lecture, a formula that does it all,
a recitation of the method that always gets
things done. And one woman says it, that she

is sad, and all of them nod, and another says
that she is angry, too. And how could they
not indict. And why won’t justice ever be

served. And why won’t anyone do anything
to change the America in which we live. And
I look at my classroom — the brown, the black,

and the white of my room — and I ask who
it is that must make the change we need.
And they talk about the Government. They

talk about the System. They talk about our
Economics. And our Judges. And our Juries.
They. And they tell me of their lives, their fears,

their boyfriends and their fathers, our illness
and our poverty, their rights and their desires,
how none of us are ever safe. And the room

becomes their last surrender while they wait
for me to teach. I say, This is the part where
you wait for me to synthesize your words

then tell you what to do. And every face
grows hopeful, just as we all did the night
before, before we knew what we’ve always

known, that knowing the truth doesn’t save
us. And I take a sip of water and tell them
every true thing that I know — that they are

the power who will save what needs saving,
then answer their next questions with more
and more questions, asking until time is up.

Source: Poetry (June 2017)

Poem - Yes, We Can Talk - Mark Nepo

Having loved enough and lost enough,
I am no longer searching,
just opening.

No longer trying to make sense of pain,
but trying to be a soft and sturdy home
in which real things can land.

These are the irritations that rub into a pearl

So we can talk awhile
but then we must listen,
the way rocks listen to the sea

And we can churn at all that goes wrong
but then we must lay all distractions down,
and water every living seed.

And yes, on nights like tonight
I too feel alone, but seldom do I
face it squarely enough
to see that it is a door
into the endless breath
that has no breather
into the surf that human shells
call god.

Quote - John Gardner

"Life pulls things out of you... You have within you more ... strength than has ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given."

-- John Gardner, "Personal Renewal"

Delivered to McKinsey & Company, Phoenix, AZ
November 10, 1990

domestic poem - Eileen Moeller

nightfall I sink
into dishwash meditation
steaming china prayer wheels
crystalline bells of the lost horizon
crockery mandalas
chanting din and lull of running water
breathing slows
moist heat muscles soften
zen poems drip from silverware
my air humming out
in a cleansing melody
washing the frantic stew of a whole day
down the drain
along with the suds
those transient rainbow things
with the thin skin of
a passing instant.

Poem - Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note - Amiri Baraka

for Kellie Jones, born 16 May 1959

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus...

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night, I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there...
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands.

Poem - There is a Light in Me - Anna Swir

Whether in daytime or in nighttime
I always carry inside
a light.
In the middle of noise and turmoil
I carry silence.
Always
I carry light and silence.

Poem - 2 a.m. - Dorianne Laux

When I came with you that first time 

on the floor of your office, the dirty carpet
under my back, the heel of one foot
propped on your shoulder, I went ahead
and screamed, full-throated, as loud
and as long as my body demanded,
because somewhere, in the back of my mind,
packed in the smallest neurons still capable
of thought, I remembered
we were in a warehouse district
and that no sentient being resided for miles.
Afterwards, when I would unclench
my hands and open my eyes, I looked up.
You were on your knees, your arms
stranded at your sides, so still --
the light from the crooknecked lamp
sculpting each lift and delicate twist,
the lax muscles, the smallest veins
on the backs of your hands. I saw
the ridge of each rib, the blue hollow
pulsing at your throat, all the colors
in your long blunt cut hair which hung
over your face like a raffia curtain
in some south sea island hut.
And as each bright synapse unfurled
and followed its path, I recalled
a story I'd read that explained why women
cry out when they come -- that it's
the call of the conqueror, a siren howl
of possession. So I looked again
and it felt true, your whole body
seemed defeated, owned, having taken on
the aspect of a slave in shackles, the wrists
loosely bound with invisible rope.
And when you finally spoke you didn't
lift your head but simply moaned the word god
on an exhalation of breath -- I knew then
I must be merciful, benevolent,
impossibly kind.

Poem - Last Skin - Barbara Ras

Has anyone described the smell of wishbones drying
on the kitchen sill or the smell of glass, or the bucket of water
lifted from the well we go to when death takes the last thirst
from someone we love?

After my mother died, sometimes
I'd take the one piece of her clothing I'd kept
to bed and bury my face
in her flowered blouse to smell her last skin,
but even from the first it was futile.

What I got was the smell of goneness, the smell of screen
doors where moths have spent their wing powder
beating failingly to reach the light.

My massage therapist said she felt grief
in my body like hard empty boxes.
I felt like I was always handling dough,
never wanting the kneading to be done, never wanting
to bake the bread that meant the end of something having to do
with a mother and daughter in a kitchen.

My mother has been gone for years, and I begin to see,
in the spots on the backs of my hands, in the shelf
my cheekbones make for my cheeks, in the way I hold
my mouth against gravity's pull, that I carry her
with me, my skin, her skin,
her last skin.

Poem - (After God Herself) - Justice Ameer

Adam ate an apple
it got stuck in his throat
and they called him Eve
the progenitor
the creator of all things
the mother of strength
and fortitude
and sadness
Adam ate an apple
choked on it so hard
a rib popped out of his chest
and they called it Eve
the progenitor
the creator of all things
the mother of strength and fortitude
and sadness
it takes the hacking of a body
to make a woman
Adam hacking up a piece of his body
it was just a piece of fruit
they called me fruit once too
they called me fruity
before they called me flaming
before they called me faggot
before they called me woman
i thought i would have
to hack this body into pieces
woman, a name stuck in my throat
right under the apple Adam tried to eat
choked on it for years
waited for my ribs to pop out
my chest to explode
for my Eve to be created
from the fruit i couldn’t swallow
they called me fruit once
until they called me woman
and then they just called me fruitless
as if it took a womb to be
progenitor
creator
mother of all things
strength and fortitude and sadness
they reckon God looked
at the image of herself
and called it Adam
they still don’t call me woman
they still don’t birth me Eve
even though they cast me out
my throat shrunken close
with the fruit still stuck in it
like Adam
before they called him Eve
and suddenly i am a stranger
to Eden
i am a stranger to this body
as if it hadn’t always been mine
i reckon God looked
at the image of herself
and called it me
but i don’t know if that
was before or after the apple
before or after Adam choked
which came first
the progenitor or the mother
the apple or the rib
the strength or the sadness
this body was God’s original creation
but they called it sin
they called it Adam
I reckon God looked
at the image of  herself
and called Adam Eve
after she choked on his name
some fruit that bloomed
in everyone else’s throat
but she could never quite swallow
the fall of man was an apple
hacked up from a fruitless body
a woman learning what evil was
like a man forcing his name upon you
the fall of man was a rib
being torn from a chest
and men calling that violence holy
naming a woman based only
on the body parts she’s made of
the fall of man
was the beginning of Eve
Eve casting out Adam’s name
Eve discovering who she was
the progenitor
the creator of all things
the mother of strength
and fortitude
and sadness
the fall of man
was Eve becoming a woman
with or without Eden’s approval
and now
every time someone
tries to call her Adam
tries to force the apple
of his name down her throat
she laughs
she swallows
she looks at God herself
and she smiles

"Lost is a place, too." - Paula Stone Williams

 In a TedxTalk about being a transgender woman and dealing with sexism. She's a preacher.

Understanding Racism - Allegories - A Gardener's Tale

I keep going back to this video, where the public health researcher Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones tells 4 stories that help explain the different facets and fallacies of racism.

Dr. Jones was recently interviewed for an NPR story about CDC's resistance to examining its own institutional racism as a former employee of 14 years.

Her own work was on racism and public health, and she says she felt thwarted and undermined in her attempts to get the agency to address these issues. She says after a lunchtime presentation she gave on racism, she was asked to remove references to how racism " 'unfairly advantages other individuals and communities' off of my slide because that made white people uncomfortable."

Allegories on race and racism

• Japanese Lanterns: Colored Perceptions (starts at :53)
• Dual Reality: A Restaurant Saga (starts at 3:16)
• Levels of Racism: A Gardener's Tale (starts at 6:59)
• Life on a Conveyor Belt: Moving to Action (starts at 17:17)

Poem - Portrait of a Yo-Yo Artist - Caroline Harvey

He's the kind of man
that loves wide and strong but not often.
I don't know why,
but I hope it's me he chooses to notice next.

Now a stop sign is a large red object that commands
stillness.
The brakes on the car --
moody.
Put those two things together and
you get one missed intersection
combined with the distinct feeling that this night
is about to get real --
symbolic.

Now a yo-yo is a small plastic toy
held together by an inner core
split down the middle and
wrapped with a string.
Slip your finger thru the tiny hole
at the end of the string
and throw the toy away from you
with the intention of pulling it back in.
Much the same way assholes leave their girlfriends
and show up the next day with flowers.

He
is a 6' tall 380 pound man.
Lips like a dam
threatening to break
into the kind of smile that evacuates cities.
It's dangerous when a man like this is happy.

Now peanut butter and jelly
are two things that go together like ham and cheese.
But a yo-yo and a 380 lb man
make about as much sense
as combining the words military and intelligence.
It's as obvious as Peach
and the Giant James
But his name is David.
The undisputed yo-yo king, and he's big.
Absolutely, unbelievably, gigantically big.
Big like overflowing from within big.
Big like full right up to the brim big
and can't do anything but be big big.
Fuck super sized!
He is mad hecka mega sized ocean sized planet sized
the whole solar system got you hypnotized and mesmerized kind of
larger than life-sized. Big!
And I'm small.

But he says
you gotta trust me.
So I do it implicitly
because if a man this big is that great
with something as small as a yo-yo
then I know I'm in good hands.
Even though for most men
I am more than a handful.

We're headed to a club where yo-yo players
as good as David don't pay
and never ask twice for a refill.
And maybe the waitresses don't know it
but there is more to him than a small plastic toy.
He makes me want to do cannonballs into the Bay
just so I can feel like this tiny body
has the power to make waves.
I want to grab the places on him that don't fit into boxes
and steal some of his greatness for myself.
And I  know there are people so small-minded
they would say he's too big
but it's amazing how small the word big is.

As we drive across the bridge
David pops his collar away from his neck
in two two staccato beats.
I can tell this silent monologue
is built into the marrow of his behavior
the way warmth is built into sunshine
and as this detail colors in his broad outlines
my first impression turns from draft to print.

Now, a bridge is an object that spans an obstacle
and connects two different points.
We are two people full to the brim
with what's been left unsaid.
Put those things together
and you get the kind of moment
that the old insist is worth growing old for
just so you can spend your life remembering.
Picture it: a girl leans onto the shoulder of a man
because she can't find words for what's in her heart.

Now a heart is kinda like a small plastic toy
an inner core split down the middle
wrapped with a string.
Kinda like people
held only by heart strings we wrap around fingers
throwing everything we have into a moment
where fear makes us feel like we're about to snap.
And every time we fall
most of us just hope we'll return,
safely wrapped and still in one piece.
Blindly trusting the good hands of a stranger
to spin us toward home.

Song - Amazing Gratitude - Hal Walker

This is one of my favorite songs from UU church right now:

Living Deeply

Today was Alicia Hawkins' memorial on Zoom. I'm watching the postlude now.

What a life well-lived.

Her granddaughter shared that her grandmother's love and equanimity was home. I want to live there!

She taught dozens and dozens of people - a dozen at a time - how to listen and love in covenant.

She worked, bringing value and peace wherever she went. Christine shared a story that she would offer to help people in ways that they wouldn't take as a criticism. She learned offering to do laundry was usually safe! So she did lots and lots of laundry.

I am feeling that I have failed the lesson she was offering me for years - how to live more deeply, listen more deeply, question more deeply.

And in this COVID moment, it's a lesson that I need more than ever. I am approaching middle age feeling very nervous about what I will have to show for my life. Whether I could go out with the grace that Alicia did. Knowing she had tended to all she could. Visited widely. Thought deeply. Loved deeply and well.

May her light shine in all who commit to shining for themselves and others.

Coronavirus: Month 3

We are three months into the coronavirus, and the only thing that's different now than when all this started is that now there are over 2 million cases of coronavirus in the U.S. - and rising steeply - and almost 11,000 cases in New Mexico. And we miss each other.

The kids are antsy and want to see grandparents and friends. I want to see friends, too.

But nothing is any better. Actually, worse than 3 months ago, so what's to justify loosening our stay-at-home strategy? If there's anything worth emerging for, it's Black Lives Matter protests.

Instead, it's lots of walks. Lots and lots of walks. And work. And church. And games. And reading.

Which isn't a bad life. Just small. And scary. And claustrophobic. I'm not feeling brave like other families who are heading out camping and backpacking. That would probably be good. But I barely have the energy to make it from waking up to bedtime. How would camping go?

Hard to have the energy for much more than survival mode. And feeling thankful for that.

Song - Love One Another - words and music by Jason Shelton

Alicia Hawkins - Quote Collections

Alicia Hawkins, beloved community member from First Unitarian in Albuquerque, New Mexico, passed away yesterday.

A year or so ago, Alicia mailed me a collection of quotes that she had been amassing for 15 years or so. She organized the quotes under topics: Perfection, Wounds We Can't Heal, Trust, Shadow...

In thinking of her, and in the spirit of sending out love and light into the world, as Alicia always did, here are a few relevant quotes from her brilliant collection:

Here's one of Alicia's own poems, which she categorized under "Living the Questions."

Don't tell me your answers,
tell me your doubts.
Don't drag out your expertise
tell me what baffles you.
Let me wander around in your realness,
not in your carefully mended mask.

Under "Sorrow/Suffering," these words from Mary Oliver:

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
That this, too, was a gift.

Under "Perseverance and Courage," these words from Jane Hirshfield (who wrote the poem "Optimism" - a real favorite of mine):

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

Under "Letting Go," these words from Christine Robinson:

Practice all the letting go's you can. From letting go of your thoughts in a meditation practice to letting go of your attachments to things and relationships that leave our lives constantly, practice letting go. Every goodbye you say is a practice for the big goodbye. Don't let a day go by without letting go of something!

Under "Death," these words from Rainer Maria Rilke:

The great secret of death, and perhaps its deepest connection with us is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves.

And these from Kahlil Gibran:

When you part from your friend, you grieve not; for that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

And finally, these words from her dear friend and collaborator in three books, Christine Robinson:

The only legacy we leave is the light that shines from our life. 

Song - Comfort Me - words and music by Mimi Bornstein

This recording is from “Not Your Mama’s Hymns” by Unfolding (Laura Weiss and Sarah Jebian)

I Am Legend

I am being haunted by vague memories of this scary movie in which a global pandemic leaves this man living alone in his house with his dog, surviving the best he can while looking for a cure and for other survivors.

• I Am Legend (free withAmazon Prime)
• Plot summary (wikipedia)

I've been thinking of it so much, I figured I needed to just watch it to get it out of my head, like exposure therapy.

I got to the first really scary scene where the dog enters a dark building where you know the infected people must be. The thought of losing his one live contact in the world sent me reeling, and I fled to my balm of choice - Fixer Upper, where the most drama is just how annoyed Joanna will get with Chip's antics, and the most danger is whether they will find mold or pests in an old, old house.

I've heard people have been rewatching Contagion and Outbreak and other pandemic movies, but I hadn't heard I Am Legend mentioned. (One of the Late Night hosts I watch repeatedly used a clip from the end of The Hot Zone where the Julia Margulies character is infected with Ebola through a gap in her containment suit.)

It's unusual that I've seen I Am Legend. I haven't watched the other pandemic films. I avoid them. I Am Legend came out in December 2007. I can't remember whether I saw it in the theater, but that's hard for me to believe. I would have been just recently married, and this isn't the type of movie we would have picked together. Doesn't really matter. I've seen it, and now I can't get it out of my head, but I can't watch it, either.

It's brought a feeling of panic into my daily life that wasn't as on-the-surface before. It's compounding my reaction to Trump wanting the economy to open May 1 and to the conservative tea party extremists rallying to end stay-at-home orders and to the thoughtless hedonists in Florida flocking to the first open beach. Why are these people not scared into hunkering down? Are they really okay with the idea of tens of thousands of deaths? Survival of the fittest? Essential workers as replaceable?

I don't get it. And they scare me more than the virus. I'm scared for my family and my community and tribal communities and communities of color and my country and my world.

One of the scenes in I Am Legend is the Will Smith character hunting deer who have taken to flocking downtown Manhattan. I remember feeling incredulous that deer would pick this of all the other places on earth they could go. But I've been strangely tickled at the stories of wildlife taking back cities around the globe.

• CNN

It's like watching the forest come back around Chernobyl. A reminder that the earth really doesn't need us and doesn't care much whether we live or die. In fact, maybe has a slight preference to life's variety if we all perish, or at least, lose our place on top of the food and resource pyramids. (I've also been hearing the Hugo Weaving character - Agent Smith - ranting to the Laurence Fishbourne character about how humans are a virus, a plague that's taken over the earth.)

• "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."

And what is the countermeasure? 

• The Good News according to John Krasinski
• Zoom services from First Unitarian
• Brene Brown's podcast Unlocking Us (particularly the episode with Glennon Doyle, talking about Untamed)
• Cleaning my house, which I need to stop and do right now

May all things be well. May all measure of things be well. Namaste. Breathe. Be grateful. Don't yell at the children when they're only having fun. Go for a run outside (try not to hyperventilate while wearing the mask). Try not to think that this may not be temporary. Try not to miss hugs quite so much.