If I still lived in Boston
I would see spring blooms
inside — at the Flower Show –
here in Carolina the daffodils
are well into their parade
the peach tree has budded . . .
I like the feel of the sun
on my neck and, yes, I miss
the prospect of snow on
Easter Sunday Morning
followed by the flowers
Creation’s resonance to
God’s emphatic YES.
Peace,
Milton
On February 5, 1989, I took Ginger to see Lyle Lovett at the Caravan of Dreams in downtown Fort Worth. The club was small and we sat on the front row. Tonight, I took Ginger to see Lyle Lovett for the twenty-third time in our twenty-three years together – and we sat on the front row. Lyle shared the stage for an acoustic evening of song swapping with John Hiatt. I have much to say about it, but not all tonight. This evening, I offer this poem.
admission
one of the things that has always made her smile
is my collection of ticket stubs stashed away
in random places around the house, remnants
of evenings spent listening and singing along.
they are torn paper portals of time travel
back to the night I was in the room when . . .
tokens of thanksgiving for the chance
to have been there when it happened –
the importance of a piece of paper
to remind me I am capable of tearing
open my heart and clearing my ears
to remember life is a live performance
Peace,
Milton
“Study the faces of the new tyrants,” Berger says has he begins the last section of his book, Bento’s Sketchbook: How Does the Impulse to Draw Something Begin? What follows is a series of incisive descriptions:
They are impeccably dressed and their tailoring is reassuring, like the silhouette of high-security delivery vans.
They have foreheads with many horizontal creases. Not furrows ploughed by thought but rather lines of incessant passing information.
Small, swift eyes which examine everything and contemplate nothing. Ears extensive as a database, but incapable of listening.
They are familiar only with their own impressions of their own rackets. Hence their paranoia and, generated by the paranoia, their repeated energy. Their repeated article of faith is: There is no alternative. (147)
Not just tyrants, I thought as I read, he’s describing most of our politicians. And then I wrote in the margin, “This is antithetical to hope.” Faith as well. We were breathed into being by a God of endless possibilities, a God who has yet to quit slinging stars into the night sky, a God who inhabits the joy of laughing children and the smell of new puppies as fully as layered lavishness of a Texas sunset and the comforting power of the waves crashing on a New England shoreline. To say there is no alternative is not an article of faith but a declaration of vapid cynicism.
I listen to Santorum and his ilk define all there is to be afraid of, listing everything from presidents to birth control pills, as though the best working metaphor for the faithful is that of the warrior, the protector, the good soldier who holds the line against the raging enemy. Even though I know it’s not original on his part and I grew up singing “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,” I don’t want anything to do with it. To see oneself as a soldier means to live looking for the enemy, which means the energy gets spent on building walls and weapons. Those are not articles of faith.
“Love your enemies.” Quick – who said that?
We are not soldiers. We are artists, creatives made in the image of our Creator.
Drawing is anyway an exercise in orientation and as such may be accompanied with other processes of orientation which take place in nature.
When I’m drawing I feel a little closer to the way birds navigate when flying, or to hares finding shelter when pursued, or to fish knowing where to spawn, or trees finding a way to the light, or bees constructing their cells.
I’m aware of a distant, silent company. Almost as distant as the stars. Company nevertheless. Not because we are in the same universe, but because we are involved – each according to his own mode – in a comparable manner of searching. (150)
An exercise in orientation. What comes to mind first is an encounter I had in the parking lot of the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. Ginger and I were checking out of the hotel and I was carrying bags out to the car about nine in the morning. The two men in front of me were still living the night before. Both were in cut off jeans and Hawaiian shirts.
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” said the first with great emphasis and volume, “there’s two things you’ve got to know in life: where you’re at and where you’re going.”
“Well, hell,” said the other, “I always know where I’m at, but I ain’t never knowed where I was going.”
I want to sing a new song: “Onward, Christian artists . . .” Forget about marching, about defending, about protecting. Create. Search. Remember. Remember we are not searching to discover God’s plan, we are searching for God. We are searching for every way we can find to connect with one another, to include one another, to love one another. The trees find their way to the light and we find our way together. We find our way to the God of Many Alternatives.
onward, christian artists
drawing close to God
searching for connection
the faithful and the flawedfear’s fomenters crumble
while all creation sings
of our divine alternatives
as our hope takes wingonward christian artists
drawing us to God
stars and saints are cheering
and the trees applaud
Peace,
Milton
One of the writers who has befriended me through her words is Naomi Shihab Nye. We have never met, though I imagine being in San Antonio sometime and knocking on her door as though we are both used to my doing that and having her answer and inviting me in for tamales and poetry. One of the things I love about her work is the way in which she infuses meaning into words we think we already know. She polishes them softly and then offers back what seemed mundane and pedantic and sparkling and vital. On this night, as my allergies are taking me down, I offer the words of this friend I have never met with hopes that will not always be the case.
Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.
Valentine for Ernest Mann
You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.
Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,
write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.
So I’ll tell you a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.
Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn’t understand why she was crying.
“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.
Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.
Thanks, Naomi.
Peace,
Milton
Not long after we moved into our school building last year, Borders went broke and sold everything in their stores including the fixtures. The tables in my room are the very ones that held stacks of books for customers’ perusal and my walls are lined with the book shelves that made corridors of what are now giant empty brick and mortar boxes. One of the parents showed up one day with boxes of books that belonged to her father, who is quite a reader it seems, to fill up the shelves so the room looked learned in. Last week, one book caught my eye tucked away on the bottom shelf in the corner: a first edition hardback copy of A Circle of Quiet, one of my favorites of Madeleine L’Engle’s nonfiction work.
Needless to say, the book doesn’t live on that shelf anymore.
Our regular staff meeting was cancelled this afternoon, which meant I left school for the computer store and my evening shift earlier than usual, which meant I had time to read a bit when I got there. Berger, of course, who has laid patiently for several days. He told a wonderful story of a woman who had escaped from Kampuchea (now Cambodia) as the Khmer Rouge took hold. Berger described the Kampuchean people of that time as people who were
on the point of being tyrannized and massacred by their own political visionaries, who transformed them into fanatics so that they could inflict vengeance on reality itself, so they could reduce reality to a single dimension. Such reduction brings with it as many pains as there are cells in a heart. (127)
In the margin I wrote, “our politicians.”
I know it’s an overstatement in the sense that none of our national figures come close to resembling Pol Pot or have any intention of unleashing the kind of wholesale violence inflicted by the Khmer Rouge, yet what resonated in the quote was the note about reducing reality to a single dimension and leaving us with nothing but polarities from which to choose. As I read, I remembered words Madeleine had written about the dangers of reducing our vocabulary, so I went looking for them when I got home.
The more limited our language is, the more limited we are; the more limited the literature we give our children, the more limited their capacity to respond, and therefore, in their turn, to create. The more our vocabulary is controlled, the less we will be able to think for ourselves. We do think in words, and the fewer words we know, the more restricted our thoughts. As our vocabulary expands, so does our power to think. Try to comprehend an abstract idea without words: we may be able to imagine a turkey dinner. But try something more complicated; try to ask questions, to look for meaning: without words we don’t get very far. If we limit and distort language, we limit and distort personality. (149)
When we reduce our political discussion to who’s red and who’s blue, when our primary word for describing any foreigner we don’t understand is terrorist, when we live in such a sound bite culture that most every news story headline is almost a brand name by the time it is repeated verbatim by most every news outlet, we are left without the depth or nuance it takes to be human to and with one another. The tenor of the recent debates has been Orwellian: “Two legs bad, four legs good.” And, as the pigs in Animal Farm knew, if you get the sheep to shout the slogans loud enough you can control the discourse and rob everyone of their freedom.
Our state, North Carolina, is a good example.
In May, we are voting on a constitutional amendment that, when allowed to be stated in the limited vocabulary of our limited legislature, is designed to “defend marriage” by banning equal marriage. Those who are promoting the amendment have reduced the discussion to the single dimension Berger described, fomenting fear of gays and lesbians as if they were dead set on destroying society. What they don’t talk about the parts of the amendment beyond its obvious discrimination of gays and lesbians that take away rights from any domestic partnership – those who share in adoption, or share their lives at all. They won’t even have legal standing to visit each other in the hospital. Our draconian politicians promoting the amendment don’t do much more than shout “Straight legs good, gay legs bad,” and hope that limiting the discussion will do the trick. They are lying through their teeth.
I have several words for them, trust me, but before I let my anger get the best of me I want to find the words to try and get them or anyone else to see that their reduction the discussion “brings with it as many pains as there are cells in a heart.” They are not doing their jobs, they are not doing God’s job; they are doing damage – deep, hurtful, who-know-how-long-it-will-take-to-undo damage. Their amendment is not about protecting marriage or promoting morality; it is about preserving power. They want to keep things the way they are because that means the straight white men get to keep running things. Gentlemen – and it is a room packed with men, from one straight white guy to another, those days are over. Thank God.
What I love about Jesus’ vocabulary was his words were expansive. He didn’t reduce large ideas into controllable slogans, instead he took simple ideas and blew the roof off. When he told us to “consider the lilies,” he called us to contentment with who we are and put us in touch with our mortality in the same sentence. The lilies bloom and don’t worry about what’s next and they bloom for about three weeks and they die. He ate with sinners and the One Percent, the prostitutes and the Pharisees. He talked about the poor more than he did the powerful. And he welcomed people every chance he got.
Time is too short and this matters too much to let the discussion around the amendment be reduced to one that comes disguised as sanctified and entrenched morality. Amendment One is draconian and destructive. It robs people of rights they already have and promises to inflict deep pain on any number of North Carolina families. We cannot allow ourselves to constitutionalize discrimination. Let’s defeat the amendment and choose better words that invite and include.
Peace,
Milton
Durham is the most encouraging place I have ever lived.
This is a city full of people who pull for each other, which is good because it’s also a city full of people with dreams and things they want to see happen. In our town of about a quarter of a million people we had a Food Truck Rodeo this afternoon and there were twenty-nine trucks from around the area, each one a dream on wheels. One of vehicles in the bunch is not motorized: Bike Coffee.
That’s right. Coffee – hand ground, fresh poured, awesome coffee – served from a bike. The purveyors, Areli and Leon, are peddling their way to a dream of opening a brick and mortar shop right here in our neighborhood that will be called Cocoa Cinnamon because along with their coffees they have chocolate, spices, and teas.
More later about tour opportunities for you to come and visit Durham, but first I want to use my space tonight to offer encouragement of my own because I believe in what my neighbors are doing. They have begun a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money they need to open their shop. It will be in this building. It will be the neighborhood coffee shop we have been hoping for. It will be where you will be able to find Ginger writing sermons most any afternoon once it opens and where I stop on my way to work in the mornings. It will be awesome.
Here is how Areli and Leon describe what they do:
So What is Cocoa Cinnamon all about? Here’s how we think of it: Craft. Create. Engage. Impact.
CRAFT – excellence in preparation of coffee, espresso, chocolate and tea.
CREATE – a creative nexus of people, places, and ideas; this includes making all sorts of people smile!
ENGAGE – a place for all people to be with family, friends, together or alone in diversity, health and relaxation.
IMPACT – a dynamic community space that strives towards and embodies sustainability, peace, democracy and human flourishing.
They have a great video on their Kickstarter page explaining more about what they want to do. What I hope you will do, if you can, is help them out.
And then come to Durham and I’ll take you to coffee.
Peace,
Milton
sometime in the night I will be
robbed of an hour of sleep in
order that we might save daylight
the thieves will leave nothing but
the promise the hour will be saved
kept safely and returned in the fall
still — what if this was the night
I was to sleep deep enough to wake
truly rested and somehow relieved
or I was to dream of a sheltering sky
over that single day at the seaside
with just you and me walking along . . .
or perhaps of a night when I walked
into the Hopper painting before daylight
and took my place behind the counter
Peace,
Milton
A couple of nights ago, I posted what has come to be known as the Kony 2012 Video as my blog post. I learned of it through my eleventh graders. One of them was in a documentary studies class I taught last year in which we watched “Ghosts of Rwanda,” a Frontline piece looking at the Rwandan genocide ten years later and “The Devil Came on Horseback,” which is about the human tragedy in Darfur. They know I grew up in Africa and that I am moved by stories of a continent with which I identify; they were moved by what we saw last year. And so, instead of the work I had planned, we watched Kony. They had lots of questions, not the least of which was, “Why don’t we do something to be a part of this? It seems important.”
I came home and made it my blog post on the basis of the residual sadness and anger I carry because Africa does not really matter to Americans as a general rule (as demonstrated in Rwanda and Darfur and mostly because our media have chosen to make connecting us to Africa less important than most anything) and because of the emotion I shared with my students in class. I had heard of Invisible Children but had not done any research on the organization. I knew of Joseph Kony, but not in any current sense. I was moved. I responded – just as the folks who made the video wanted me to do.
This morning, one of the folks I work with at the computer store posted this graphic
with the caption,
For all of you who posted the Kony video, rather those about to post the video…
Then, from a number of sources, I began to read insight from folks who had also been moved by the video but who didn’t allow their emotion to control their first move. They asked good questions and looked beyond the well crafted call to immediate and specific action. Some of the questions were about the organization, some were about the veracity of the information, some were about the perspective from which the story was being told, some were about the choice of solution being offered. I offer three perspectives that are speaking to me today, all of whom are seeking to do more than criticize or cast suspicion and all of whom have personal ties to Africa.
I was pulled, in particular, by this video of a Ugandan woman who challenged those who would tell a story that is not their own:
Ethan Zuckerman writes at “My Heart’s in Accra”:
I’m starting to wonder if this is a fundamental limit to attention-based advocacy. If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? Or to propose only the simplest of solutions?
As someone who believes that the ability to create and share media is an important form of power, the Invisible Children story presents a difficult paradox. If we want people to pay attention to the issues we care about, do we need to oversimplify them? And if we do, do our simplistic framings do more unintentional harm than intentional good? Or is the wave of pushback against this campaign from Invisible Children evidence that we’re learning to read and write complex narratives online, and that a college student with doubts about a campaign’s value and validity can find an audience? Will Invisible Children’s campaign continue unchanged, or will it engage with critics and design a more complex and nuanced response.
That’s a story worth watching.
Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay writes,
Most people don’t want to feel like they are being rescued. That can be humiliating. So… what do we do with a movement that does not work toward dignity?
Do we simply applaud it for the marketing genius that it is? Do we buy into it and support the cause even if it turns out to be misguided or misinformed because we don’t want to be the poop in the punch bowl?
In closing, I do applaud the western world for looking at this situation in the world. It is far beyond our backyards and it does not encroach on our drive into work, or our gaming, or general lives… We have shown in our immediacy that we do have pulses and hearts. We have shown that our reflex toward justice is still strong. What we should do is match our passion for justice with wisdom and humility. It was Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, who told me, “ Justice without mercy is tyranny.”
Thank Invisible Children for bringing this issue into the public conscience. Please take a breath and walk humbly into the realm of action.
How do we keep the work from hurting more than helping? These are the questions that we must ask. These are the questions that I wish Invisible Children was asking before they launched this campaign to coincide with our election year. It is a good marketing idea. It just isn’t a great and dignifying form of action.
Loving kindness, doing justice, and walking humbly with our God calls for us to live in the creative tension between immediate response and thoughtful action; it also calls us to learn how to let listening be our primary posture. (You realize, I hope, I’m talking mostly to myself here.) I’ve written recently about wondering what Jesus would ask; I wonder, in this case, if the questions might include
Who is telling the story? and
To whom does the story belong?
Then I can ask — ask them and ask God, “What is my role in their story?” and become a part of the cast.
Peace,
Milton
“The difference between
joy and despair,” she said,
“has little to do with
circumstances and
everything to do with
what you choose to see.”
“You’re making that up,”
he replied.
She took his face
between her hands
and stared into his eyes
as if they held galaxies.
“I love you,” she said,
“with all of my heart.”
And he believed her.
Peace,
Milton
I don’t want you to read today. Watch instead. Then do something: Kony 2012.
Peace,
Milton