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disoriented

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
disoriented

The title of the interview was “The Pleasures of Disorientation”–a phrase that caught my attention. It was another in Conversations with Billy Collins, and from it came these words, in response to the question, “What is it about mystery and disorientation that is so appealing?”:

For disorientation to be a pleasure–an odd concept in the age of the GPS–one has to feel relieved to let go of the helmet of opinions we tend to wear everyday. . . . How refreshing to take a break from always knowing where we are, or at least fooling ourselves into thinking so.–Billy Collins (91)

My first thought went to my favorite coffee shops in the whole world, the trinity of Cocoa Cinnamons in Durham, North Carolina because, in their post this week about the tenth anniversary of their first shop on Geer Street (the shop that was the genesis of my Cocoa Cinnamon cookie), they talked about the tenth anniversary blend they are creating called, “Your Head is Round so You Can Change Your Mind.” The name, I learned, is an adaptation of a quote from artist Francis Picabia, “Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.”

In my sermon last Sunday, I talked about John the Baptist calling on people to repent–to turn around, to go in a new direction if they wanted to understand what life was really about; perhaps we could say he was calling them to disorient their lives.

Orient.

Sixty-six years on and it had never hit me that the word we use to talk about our perspective on life is the ancient word for the East when a definitive article is added, as in The Orient. It turns out, there’s a reason why. The oldest Latin roots mean “the rising, the part of the sky where the sun rises,” which, of course, is the east. Once the European travelers moved that direction, they used themselves as the center of the world and Asia became The Orient.

At its roots, orientation has to do with facing east–facing the sunrise. Our words origin and original share the same “rising” roots of something appearing on the horizon.

Perhaps we don’t make the connection so much anymore because North has become our primary direction–true north, the North Star–or maybe I am just slow to notice. Either way, when it dawned on me (see what I did there?), I went back to Collins’ words about dis-orienting, not so much to think about not looking east but to sit with “how refreshing to take a break from always knowing where we are.”

Not long after we moved to Guilford seven years ago, we were down at the marina at dusk watching a beautiful sunset and then I realized I was standing on the East Coast watching the sun go down. It was disorienting. When we got home, I found a map and realized our slice of the shoreline faces almost due south, even though we are on the eastern edge of the country, so we can see the sun both rise and fall. The explanation is not nearly as rich as the experience of surprise to see the sun set where I did not expect it to do so.

Billy Collins is right: it was a pleasure.

I was on a retreat many years ago and we walked into a room and all the objects in the room had labels on them that gave them new names. The chair had a “lamp” sticker on it; the one on the table said “coaster:” the lamp was a “rug:” and so on around the room. Our instructions were we had to talk about the objects using their new names as a way to disorient us, even though they didn’t use that word. We moved from those objects to philosophical and theological concepts that were the furniture of our thoughts to see what else we could shake loose and send our thoughts in new directions.

The Francis Picabia quote is even stronger to me juxtaposed with Collins saying we have to be willing to take off our “helmet of opinions we tend to wear everyday” because the caroming thoughts are all inside the helmet–not much can protect us from internal disquietude. We were built to be disoriented, to be caught by surprise. Perhaps the hunger for a map is more learned than it is inherent in us. We were made to wonder.

I did not know anything about Picabia before I started writing tonight. One article said, “Like no other artist before him, Picabia created a body of work that defies consistency and categorization, from Impressionist landscapes to abstraction, from Dada to stylized nudes, and from performance and film to poetry and publishing. A primary constant in his career was his vigorous unpredictability.” He appears to have lived most of his life without a helmet.

My friend Donna wrote this week in response to my newsletter and shared words she had heard in a recent sermon: “The opposite of faith is not doubt; it’s certainty!” Yes. Hope means looking at the horizon and finding joy in the fact that anything can happen. Certainty and cynicism are cousins. I write that sentence after I have wondered from a poet to an etymological dictionary to a coffee shop to a painter, making stops at an old retreat and a sunset on the East Coast, and written it all down as though you could see the thoughts changing direction.

Here is where we have ended up. Now, what was the question?

Peace,
Milton

handed-down recipe

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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6
handed-down recipe

I have had a quiet day today marking what would have been my mother’s ninety-first birthday. As I sat down to write, I went back to what I wrote for and read at her memorial service. They seemed like good words to repeat.

When my father died, I adapted a poem I had written for him a few years earlier, which allowed me to tell his story, express my feelings, and get through the whole thing without breaking down here at the podium. To my disadvantage today, I didn’t have a poem on hand for my mother. The memories and stories of her are stuffed in my mind and my heart like the pieces of paper crammed into one of the notebooks we found in her apartment this week, and they are full of emotion. There is so much to tell, so much for which to be grateful. What then shall I say?

My earliest recollections of her are in the kitchen. She loved to cook, and she loved to have people around her table. Both are things she passed on to me. So I thought the best way I could organize the thoughts and stories crammed in my brain would be to offer a recipe for the life of Barbara Cunningham.

Like the best recipes, this one is simple.

First, set the temperature of her life to tenacious. My mother loved being alive as much as anyone I have ever known. She was unflappable in her energy and determination. Whether it was telling first dates at Baylor that if they didn’t want to spend their lives in Africa there would be no second date, or pulling out her Texas drivers license during the Zambia Independence celebrations so that she could pass as a reporter for the Dallas Morning News to get into one of the festivities, or looking at the doctor when he came to visit her in hospice and saying, “If my goal is heaven, what do I need to do?”, she was going to get what she wanted. When he heard her choice to go into hospice, her primary care doctor said, “You have made a choice of courage and hope and not of despair.” Set the temperature on tenacious.

The first ingredient is a contagious faith. She wanted, more than anything, to tell people about Jesus. And she did, right down to the very end. It seemed every time she got on an airplane she came home with another story about someone she had called to faith in Christ. The story never stopped there, however. She had an amazing way of keeping up with those folks whom she had met through chance encounters. She wanted to know what happened after that first meeting, which leads me to my next ingredient: a hunger to connect.

My mother loved connecting with people and then connecting people with one another. One of her visitors in hospice this week was a Baylor student who came with his mother–they had driven all the way from Nashville. Mom found out he was interested in becoming a dentist. A couple of hours later, I came back into the room after stepping out to give her time with others who had stopped by. Mom told me to find her address book and call the young man because she had found him an internship with her dentist who had just left the room.

As I mentioned earlier, her love of cooking grew out of this hunger to connect. The table was a way to bring people together, o there was always room at the table for whomever she could find. Meal time was an event to be celebrated, even if it was just the four of our family eating ham sandwiches. It was also a time to try new things, which points to the next ingredient in this recipe.

A love of learning and a willingness to fail. I know—that’s two things, but I think they are tied together, particularly in my mother’s life. She loved to try new things. One of Dad’s favorite stories was about my mother getting ready for a big dinner party, which was only a day or two away. She was still figuring out the menu. They turned out the light and she said, “What have you ever seen done on top of a chicken?” A party was not the time to pull out old favorites; it was time to make a leap of faith, to go out on a limb, and if people didn’t speak up soon enough she would say, “Isn’t this good?”

And it was.

Around the time she turned eighty, she started taking piano lessons, partly because she regretted not doing it as a child, but also because she just wanted to learn something new. There was always room to grow.

Next we add an adventuresome spirit. When my folks were at Westbury Baptist Church in Houston, there were parents that would buy my mother a season pass to Astroworld so she could take their kids to ride the rollercoasters. One year they built a big new wooden coaster and advertised a free t-shirt if you rode it ten times in one day. Mom took several middle schoolers to the park. About ride number seven one of them said, “You go ahead, Mrs. Cunningham. We’ll just sit here and wait for you.” She got her shirt.

The last ingredient is an extravagant sense of generosity. She not only shared what she had, but she looked for ways to help you share what you had, too. When she realized she was not going to be able to go back to Africa to live out her days working in an orphanage, we all go letters inviting us to help buy blankets and supplies. Over two years she raised almost $60,000. One of the things of which she was most proud is the scholarship fund at Truett Seminary named for her and my father because it was a way to keep on giving and a way to stay involved with missions and with Africa. And if she were here today, she might remind you that you can still contribute so that we can fully fund the scholarship. I’m sure the ushers will be glad to take your checks.

Set the temperature on tenacious and add a contagious faith, a hunger to connect, a love of learning and a willingness to fail, an adventuresome spirit, and an extravagant sense of generosity, and couch them in the love of a lifetime she found in my father and throw in that she was never afraid to both repeat and embellish a story, and you’ve got Barbara Cunningham, a recipe she was always willing to share.

Peace,
Milton

the reading list

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
the reading list

the reading list

I finished reading one of my Christmas books today: The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams. Ginger gave it to me because “it looked like I would like it.” She was right.

The book centers around the relationship between two people: Mukesh, a widower who lives in West London and Aleisha, a student who has a job at the library for the summer holidays. She has her own grief because her mother is dealing with a severe mental illness. The other character is a reading list that Aleisha finds in a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird as she is putting books away. “Just in case you need it,” the list begins and then names To Kill a Mockingbird, Rebecca, The Kite Runner, The Life of Pi, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, Beloved, and A Suitable Boy. I should mention that The Time Traveler’s Wife also plays a role in the book. (I should also say I have not read all of those and the novel still made sense.)

When Mukesh comes into the library looking for a book because he is trying to feel close to his wife who was a voracious reader, Aleisha gives him the first book on the list and also begins reading them herself. The circle of those involved in the story and affected by the books grows as the novel moves along and it is a wonderful journey.

One of the things that struck me was the was the characters’ view of life and even themselves was affected, or even altered, by the book they were reading. Part of the story was what they began to notice because of what they were reading.

Besides inviting me into the lives of several folks I will miss now that I have finished the book, the novel made me think about what books have altered the way I look at the world. The short answer, I suppose, is all of them; isn’t that the point of reading? Then I stepped back to think of novels, in particular–those stories that offer invitations into other worlds so we can get a better view of our own.

I decided to offer my own list tonight. In doing so, I am not claiming this to be a definitive list. These are the books that first came to mind. Also, I went with eight of them because that’s how many were on the list in the book. Last, they are presented in the order they came to mind.

Just in case you need it:

Frankenstein
Mary Shelley was a teenager when she wrote the story in response to a challenge to write the scariest story she could think of. I loved reading it with students when I was a high school teacher. The narration moves from the sea captain so driven to prove himself that he gets his crew stuck in the ice to the doctor so driven to prove himself that he creates a being out of spare human parts to the creature who is desperate to get the approval of his creator, and then it moves back out again. I could talk about this story all day. And into the night. Bring whiskey.

Cry, the Beloved Country
This South African novel was written before apartheid took hold, but the structure was already there. Alan Paton, the author, was a white South African who was an activist and advocate for racial equality. The story is beautiful and heartbreaking. Stephen Kumalo, the pastor whose son is chewed up by the system, may be my favorite character in literature.

A Wrinkle in Time
Ms. Reedy, my fourth grade teacher, read this book to my fourth grade class in Lusaka, Zambia in 1964, a couple of years after it was published. It was the first time I knew that a book could change your life. I still read it from time to time. And Meg Murry is my second favorite character in literature.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
This was the first Anne Tyler novel I read and I found myself in the story because it is about trying to find home. Ezra, a boy who grows up without a sense of home, opens a restaurant and cooks what others are homesick for, hoping to create the home he never knew. Gee, I wonder why this book stayed with me?

The Illusion of Separateness
Simon Van Booy’s novel may be one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. Some of the sentences are breathtaking. The story is one of connection where there seems to be none, as the title implies.

A Mapmaker’s Dream
Fry Mauro is a monk in Venice who dreams of making a perfect map. The thing is, he never leaves his cell. He creates his map based on the stories travelers tell him as they come through town. The more he learns, however, shows him how much he doesn’t know.

The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison’s novel is another I read with high school students. Pecola Breedlove is an eleven year old Black girl who prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be beautiful, so that she will be noticed, and so her world will be something other than it is.

A Prayer for Owen Meany
The first time I read John Irving’s book, it was my subway book when I was on the T in Boston. I had to read it at home because I would get so involved that I missed my stops repeatedly. It is laugh out loud funny and ugly cry sad as well.

As I said, the list is not definitive nor exhaustive, but they are stories that have helped to shape me in various ways. I’d love to know what stories have shaped you.

Peace,
Milton

bread and water

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1
bread and water

The sermon below is one I preached for a church on the other side of New Haven to candidate to be their Bridge Pastor for the next five or six months. I started not to post it because it is kind of “teachy” (as I described it to Ginger) and, therefore, felt like it might not have much reach beyond those in the room Sunday, or on their Facebook feed. I came across an article—“Here Be Sermons”—written by a non-church person who saw a sermon as saw the audience as a community. He contrasted them this way:

Suppose you and I are listening to a physics lecture. Although we share the same goal — learning physics — we’re pursuing it more or less independently from one another (and from all other students in the lecture). If you happen to fail the class, it’s no real skin off my nose, and vice versa.

In contrast, suppose we’re listening to a sermon — on the virtue of kindness, say. In this case, I do have a stake in whether you learn the lesson, because unlike physics, if you fail at kindness, I’m going to suffer. Put differently, there are positive externalities to the act of listening to a sermon. When you internalize a sermon’s message, I stand to benefit, and vice versa.

The other reason I started not to post it is I’ve said pretty much all of it before. Then I read a Billy Collins interview where he said the most important thing about teaching is repetition. Even though a sermon and a lecture are different, I think what he is saying still applies. I know you’ve heard this before, but it’s good to hear it again: we are wonderfully and uniquely made in the image of God and worthy to be loved—and we’re all in this together.

Shoot, now you don’t need to read the sermon.

__________________________

We don’t know how long John had been baptizing people when Jesus showed up. All we are told is that John was at a part of the Jordan River that felt like it was out in the middle of nowhere–some twenty miles from Jerusalem–telling people it was time for a change. A big change. If they wanted to be a part of that change, they could demonstrate it by being baptized. “Repent” is the word he used: turn around, go in a new direction. He was a person literally and figuratively on the fringe of society telling people that business as usual was not the way God wanted them to live their lives.

In Matthew’s description, John comes across as rather righteously indignant. He goes hard after those who supported the political and religious establishments. John was talking not only about personal change but also, and perhaps more importantly, systemic change. When we think of what it means to repent–to go in a new direction–we think first about personal changes and decisions we can make individually, but we are also called to explore the choices we make together.

We can infer that John had been out there for a good while when Jesus showed up wanting to be baptized. We can also infer that this is not the first time they had met. John recognized Jesus and his understanding of Jesus made him hesitant to baptize, but Jesus said, “We need to do this to bring about God’s justice in the world.” So, John walked with Jesus into the river and baptized him. It was an act of consecration and an act of solidarity. It mattered to Jesus that he was baptized. He was making a public statement about who he was in the world.

Many years ago, I got to visit Israel and Palestine. I stood on the bank of the Jordan River with a group of UCC folks from a church in Massachusetts. We knelt at the water’s edge to “remember our baptism” as the ministers sprinkled water from the river on our foreheads. In the middle of our quiet, reflective moment a bus pulled up and from it flowed a group of Pentecostal folks in white robes who came running down the hill led by their pastor who was shouting, “Gloria a Dios!” over and over at the top of his lungs. When he reached the small landing at the water’s edge, he didn’t stop. He took a flying leap and belly flopped into the water, robe and all, closely followed by pretty much everyone else behind him. They splashed in the water as they sang and laughed and cried. I think I can speak for many in our group when I say we looked over and wished that was the way it felt to remember our baptism.

Jesus didn’t jump into the river shouting, but he was making a bold public statement. Alongside of that, his baptism was also a personal affirmation. Matthew says Jesus experienced the Holy Spirit like a dove landing on him and he heard a voice say, “This is my dearly loved son in whom I delight.” It does not appear that anyone else heard the voice or saw the dove. John went on baptizing, people kept coming, and Jesus went further out into the wilderness to fast for forty days.

We mark Jesus’ baptism as the beginning of his public ministry. The event is so significant that it has become one of the two sacraments of our denomination, along with Communion, which grows out of the last meal Jesus had with his disciples before his execution. The two sacraments are bookends to his time on earth, in a way. Today, thanks to New Year’s Day falling on a Sunday and pushing our monthly observance of Communion back a week, we get to look at the two of them together.

Baptism, for us, has taken on a different look than what Jesus experienced. John didn’t sprinkle water on Jesus; he dunked him. Over the centuries, the sense of blessing and affirmation that Jesus received has been translated to baptizing infants as a way of affirming that we are all wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. Likewise, our Communion table is open to anyone who wants to share in the meal as another way of affirming that God’s love does not require prerequisites.

Both sacraments are communal acts—things we do together as tangible reminders of something we need to hear again and again: nothing can separate us from the love of God.

Over the centuries, our sense of the magnitude of both things has led us to make them formal and solemn, when neither of them were, in their inception. Jesus waded out into a river in the desert and was baptized by a guy who wore animal skins and ate bugs. He shared the bread and the cup from the meal he was eating with his disciples that last night. It was more improvised than instituted.

When we come to the table together in a few minutes you will hear me talk about re-membering, as in putting ourselves back together in Jesus’ name, following Jesus’ words, “As often as you do this, remember me.” One way to hear the words “as often as you do this” is that he was talking about any time we sit down to eat. Similarly, I read one person this week who said they take the daily act of washing their face as a chance to remember their baptism and to remember they are God’s beloved child. I thought about that as I walked in the rain on Friday and the water hit my face.

We don’t observe the sacraments as a way of being more holy or more worthy of God’s presence. We don’t follow these rites because the form has some sort of magical power that protects us, or because they are some kind of initiation ritual. We reenact these scenes as tangible reminders to us that we are God’s beloved ones and as tangible promises to God that our lives will reflect God’s presence.

It’s a bit puzzling to think that Jesus somehow needed to go into the water and then hear that God delighted in him. He wasn’t just going through the motions of joining the club, he was aligning himself with John’s call to live into God’s justice and inclusion. At the end of Matthew’s gospel, just before the meal, Jesus talked about how those who followed him would be recognizable: “I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was naked and you clothed me. I was imprisoned and you visited me.” Another set of bookends, this time with words. At the end of his ministry, he was saying the same things he heard John say at the beginning.

The sacraments of baptism and Communion pull us into the middle of each other’s lives and the lives of those around us to find any way we can to remind each other that we are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and oh, so worthy to be loved.

We may not be jumping in the river this morning, but that doesn’t mean we can’t come to the table full of joy as we re-member Christ in the waters of our baptism and in the meal that is before us. Jesus said the bread represented his body; the apostle Paul used the Body of Christ as his favorite metaphor for who we are together. In the middle of a world that feels torn apart, let us move to the table to re-member ourselves in Jesus’ name—to put the Body of Christ back together again. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Thanks for reading. I write a free weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors that comes out every Tuesday. I would love for you to subscribe. If you would like to support my writing, you can become a sustaining member or buy me a cup of coffee.

meal prep

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1
meal prep

meal prep

the boxes of dried pasta
in my pantry are harbingers
invitations to improvisation
promises that dinner can
be something even on nights
when I don’t know what to cook

set a pot of water to boil
and then open the fridge and
find what wants to be cooked
leftovers whose time has come
mushrooms garlic baby spinach
last night’s chicken some peppers

salt the water drop the noodles
heat a sauté pan on another burner
as the pasta softens the sauce
turns fragrant and promising
the last of the white wine and
a little butter brings it home

I learned to drain the pasta and
add it to the sauce while it’s still
in the skillet and let it all sit
so the noodles can soak up the
sauce and everything meld
all that’s left is to get a big spoon

the way to get ready for a good
meal is never leave the pasta aisle
empty-handed to shop without
a list and listen to the foods that
know you that will wait for the
chance to make dinner a memory

Peace,
Milton

piece work

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
piece work

The afternoon that they moved my mother into hospice her doctor came to check on her. Although we all knew she would never leave the hospital, her death was not imminent. She looked at the doctor and said, “If my goal is heaven, what do I have to do?”

He smiled and said, “Stop eating and drinking.” And then he said, “I want you to know you have made a decision of courage and hope and not despair.”

By the time we got to January 8, 2013 she was beginning to tire, but she was also just four days away from her eighty-fourth birthday. She never said out loud that she wanted to live until then, but that’s how it felt as I sat in the room with her. On January 12 we sang to her and she had some cake, which was the last thing she ate. After that night, she didn’t drink anything. She died on January 15.

Aș we prepare to mark the seventh anniversary of her death, I have found solace in doing some of her favorite things. One of those, of course, is cooking. Saturday, I made her version of Taco Salad, which comes with its own story.

My mother was willing to give up lots of things to move ten thousand miles away from her Texas home and live in Africa, but I think the thing she missed most were Fritos corn chips. After three or four years, she wrote the president of Frito-Lay, which was headquartered in Dallas, and said who she was and where she was and then asked what it would take to get Fritos to Zambia. A few weeks later we  received two big boxes that contained twenty-four vacuum-packed tins (think coffee cans) of Fritos.

She gave two each to my dad, my brother, and me for our personal consumption and kept the rest in the kitchen to make Taco Salad, which we had every Saturday until the chips ran out.

When we moved back to Houston for good, we had it every Saturday.

The recipe is not hard: ground beef seasoned with taco seasoning, kidney beans, cheddar cheese, shredded lettuce, ranch dressing, and Fritos. I made it Saturday and we ate it all.

The other thing I have done this past week is puzzle. My mother liked jigsaw puzzles so much she made it a verb. Ginger gave me a puzzle of a VW bus for Christmas that came in a tin shaped like a VW bus because I have always wanted one. I did that puzzle last week. When I posted it on Facebook, a church member brought me a couple of others. Last night we started working on a puzzle of the doors of Paris–1,000 pieces–and I finished it tonight.

The two puzzles brought back memories of the card table in our den in Houston that always had a puzzle working. I can remember coming in at night after being out with friends and then staying up way to late because I would get pulled in to trying to find just one more piece. Sometimes, Mom would join me. Both the kitchen and the card table were places where she met me and I felt at home.

I wrote a poem last week saying that a puzzle is not a good metaphor for life because there is more to living that getting all the pieces to fit. When I finished the VW puzzle, I rethought my poem because one piece was missing. I didn’t lose it. It was never in the box. I finished the puzzle and had to live with it being incomplete. I thought, “Maybe sometimes life is like a puzzle.”

But the puzzles this week have not been metaphors; they have been a way to live with my grief that has led to gratitude along with the sadness; in their own way, I suppose, an act of hope and not despair.

Peace,
Milton

send in the clown

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4
send in the clown

For the last seven years the first two weeks of January have belonged to my mother. She went into hospice just after New Year’s Day 2016 and died on January 15, three days after her eighty-fourth birthday. I got to spend all of those days with her.

Tonight, this story came back to find me.

In the summer of 1971, we came back to Fort Worth, Texas on leave from Africa. I was going into the tenth grade. My ninth grade year had been my favorite year of school to date because of the friends I had made and also because of the “folk group,” as we called it–a bunch of us who got together to play guitars and sing. That fall, I went to Paschal High School (Go, Panthers!) and became a part of the youth group at University Baptist Church. The group was welcoming and vibrant and pulled me in like I had been there the whole time. I loved being a part of it because I felt kind of lost.

Once I learned to name my depression, I look back to that year and can see it was with me then. For all of the good things happening, I can remember sitting on the edge of my bed and looking in the mirror and wishing I was anyone else but me.

That October they had a Halloween party at church, which meant costumes. My mother went all in on things like parties and costumes. She said she’d help me figure out a great costume. She had the sewing chops to make it, too. I decided I wanted to be a clown. We found some fabric to make a good outfit, a nose, and some makeup as well, but we couldn’t find a wig. Since I was a teenaged boy in 1971, I had long hair. Mom said, “We’ll just curl yours.”

And so we did.

Early that Saturday afternoon, she took a whole bunch of little rollers and put them all over my head. I couldn’t really go anywhere, so I sat on the couch to watch football with my dad, as we had done most Saturdays that fall. Dad was fidgety and kind of grumpy. It was weird–and I took it personally. I got up and went into the kitchen, where Mom usually was. I was visually upset. When she asked what was wrong, I said, “I don’t think this is masculine enough for Dad.”

I knew it wasn’t. We already were at odds over my hair. Now I was wearing curlers and already carried my own sense that I was enough, period.

Mom rolled her eyes. “Listen,” she said. “You don’t have to be masculine enough for him. This is a great costume. You’re going to be great. Ignore him and go have fun.”

I made it through the afternoon, got dressed and went to the party. My hair looked like a clown wig. The makeup completely disguised me. Mom dropped me off around the corner so no would recognize the car, and I decided not to speak and see how long it was before anyone recognized me. Nobody did. I finally spoke up after a half hour or so, excited because I had pulled it off. When I got home and told Mom, she was elated.

None of us ever revisited that afternoon because that was not our family way. As I have often said, we talked about our feelings every fifteen years or so, whether we needed to or not. The sense that I wasn’t the man Dad wanted me to be didn’t begin that afternoon. Over time I learned to see at as different perspectives on what masculinity meant. At different times I was also aware of expectations that my mother had that I didn’t fulfill, but the woman who taught me to cook and curled my hair one October afternoon helped to give me a sense of myself that I have not forgotten.

Peace,
Milton

camelless

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
camelless

On this Twelfth Night, this Epiphany Eve, i found myself going back through some old posts and poems. I wrote the first version of the poem below when we lived in Marshfield, Massachusetts in a house 660 feet from Cape Cod Bay. Walking the beach at low tide was a regular part of our lives. I am a long way from those shores, but I spent some time with the words again, made a few changes, and felt like it was a good word for tonight.

camelless

the Christmas tide is going out
the waves of wonder that crashed
against the sea wall of my heart
are receding, reminding me that
tides come and go, neap and spring
such is the rhythm of redemption

in my mind’s eye I still see the
Magi meandering, starry-eyed
along the now silent sands
the newly exposed beach is not
a breach, but an opening an
epiphany: Greek for “I get it now!”

come, let us walk along the shore,
wandering and wondering our
way between wall and water
between Herod and hope to
write our names in the sand
and see how long they last

The last two lines gave me pause when I think of so many people I love whose names the tide has taken away. Grief, it seems has its own epiphany. I get it now.

Peace,
Milton

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a digressive amplitude

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4
a digressive amplitude

In my newsletter yesterday, I leaned into a quote from Kieran Setiya. The last sentence reads,

Don’t let the lure of the dramatic arc distract you from the digressive amplitude of being alive.

I have been dealing with the article for a couple of days, but I didn’t notice the phrase “digressive amplitude” until I say down to write tonight. I had to look up definitions of both words to get what he was saying.

digressive: tending to depart from the subject
amplitude: breadth, range, or magnitude
digressive amplitude: the magnitude that tends to depart from the subject.

Hold that thought.

When I woke this morning, the day appeared to offer the promise of sunshine, so I set off for my periodic Costco run in hopes that the afternoon would be as bright as the temperature was unseasonably warm. By the time I crossed the Connecticut River, the fog had rolled back in. The return trip home was a journey into a deepening gray horizon. Something about the day made me question myself, an existential exercise I can fall into too easily. I could feel the pull to escape the weight of the day by sleeping through it.

I was determined not to give in. I took the Schnauzers for a walk around the Green, but was still fading when we got back. Finally, I told Ginger I was going to see who needed rides instead of giving into the Nap Monster awaiting me on the couch. At least, I thought to myself, I can be useful and help someone get where they’re going. Lyft encouraged me with some bonus offers if I drove during certain hours, so off I went to New Haven.

I have learned that Union Station is a good place to start. I was about three minutes away when I received a request to pick someone up there and take them to East Haven–about a ten minute drive. He had ridden the train from Virginia, where he had spent two weeks with family. He looked like he had hiked for two weeks–and loved it. In the course of our conversation, I found out his dad has a friend in Guilford who makes wine in his basement.

The next passenger was a young woman with a small baby who went from one house to another without saying much, other than wishing me well. Then I picked up a young woman and took her to a strip center in Woodbridge and dropped her off at a store called Clay Time. She stayed silent for most of the trip. After she got out of the car, I pulled into a parking place to answer a few text messages. I got a request for a ride about two minutes later and it was the same person going back to where I had picked her up.

She smiled when I pulled up. Turns out she was just picking up a project she had completed. Something about our brief familiarity created space for conversation. I asked if she was a potter and she said she was learning. As we talked, I made some comment about putting the batter on the wheel (meaning the clay) and said something about my days in the kitchen making me think in cooking terms. She asked if I was a chef and that took things a whole different direction. I then asked what kind of work she did only to find out she was in high school and worked part time at a daycare center. She talked about how much she liked the people she worked with and then she said, “It seems like whatever you do is okay if you like the people you work with.” I agreed.

The address for the next pickup was a 7-Eleven. When I pulled in, two young men in Orthodox Jewish attire got in the car. They were talkative from the moment we left the parking lot. I learned there is a Jewish boarding school in New Haven. One of the guys had come from Tampa and the other from just outside Worcester, Massachusetts. At one point, the younger one called somebody to tell them he had gotten posters for something. The person on the other end must have been surprised at how quickly it had happened because the guy in the car said, “How did I do it so quickly? Because I have a great Lyft driver, that’s how.”

I was about ready to call it an evening when one more alert came up. Someone needed a ride from the CVS next to the New Haven Green to the Lulu Lemon store about a mile away. The woman who got in the car had left her headband that covered her ears on the train and Lulu Lemon had the replacement. By this time it had started to rain a bit. I asked if she was going to need a ride home after her shopping and she said she would. I told her I would wait, so she added the stop to her ride, bought her head band, and we kept going, as did our conversation. By the time I dropped her off at her apartment, we had found connections in Puerto Rico, teaching high school English, Yale Divinity School, and the love of Schnauzers.

Now back to the quote. Here is a larger piece of it:

Whatever story you tell about yourself, however simple and straightforward, there is endlessly more to your actual life. As Joe Moran insists: “To call any life a failure, or a success, is to miss the infinite granularity, the inexhaustible miscellany of all lives … A life can’t really succeed or fail at all; it can only be lived.” . . . The more you appreciate the sheer abundance of incident, the more you’ll see any life as an assortment of small successes and small failures, and the less prone you will be to say, despairingly, “I’m a loser”—or with misplaced bravado, “I’m a winner!” Don’t let the lure of the dramatic arc distract you from the digressive amplitude of being alive.

This time around, I can also see “infinite granularity” and “inexhaustible miscellany.” In my personal exhaustion, I drove around in the inexhaustible miscellany of the lives I helped get from station to home, store to store, all of it happening within a five mile radius of downtown New Haven. The digressive amplitude–the magnitude of miscellany,–pulled me out of my sad story and into “the sheer abundance of incident,” as Setiya calls it, that makes life, well, life.

And, when I got home, Ginger and I had spaghetti for dinner. It is, after all, National Spaghetti Day.

Peace,
Milton

you say you want a resolution

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
you say you want a resolution

All this week (wait–it’s only Tuesday!) I have been reading different takes on resolutions for the year ahead. A couple of them stood out to me. One was this picture of Woody Guthrie’s “New Year’s Rulin’s” from 1943. My favorites were 17-20:

17. don’t get lonesome
18. stay glad
19. keep hoping machine alive
20. dream good

Another is a list of resolutions by Jacob Zweig from 2018, but it showed up in no less than five places for me. A couple that stood out:

Never try to get other people to change their minds without first trying to understand why they think the way they do. Never do that without being open to the possibility that the mind that might need to change the most could be your own.

Work harder at making the familiar strange. Walk or drive a different route than your daily routine; work away from your desk; read something flamboyantly irrelevant; call someone you don’t need to call; look up at the sky instead of the concrete. When you turn back to your routine, it will feel freshened.

Befriend someone at least 20 years younger than you, and someone at least 20 years older than you. Each of you will make the other smarter and better.

The deepest roots of the word resolution go back to the fourteenth century: “a breaking or reducing into parts; process of reducing things into simpler forms.” The word resolve breaks down into re (again) and solve (to loosen, untie, release, explain). The roots are interesting to me because when people talk about making New Year’s resolutions I can feel my body stiffen. They feel like extra pressure, extra complications, extra obligations–not breaking things into simpler forms.

My point here is not to trash resolutions as a practice. We all need moments to reset and re-solve our lives, figure out again who we are and who we hope to be in the world. If the beginning of a new year is a mark that works for you, then work it. What I am listening to is the invitation to to reduce things into simpler forms. I am an excellent complicator. I want to lose weight, get in shape, play my guitar more, write everyday, learn how to bake bread, and play pickle ball all at once.

All of those things need my attention. What is the simpler form? How can I live in a way that sets me free rather than binds me up?

Woody had a pretty good sense of it, I think. Look back at his list. It revolves around daily tasks, personal and professional habits, and, of course, fighting fascism. The prophet Micah pared it down to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly, though I don’t know that he had any sense of what New Year’s Day was about. I like Micah’s big brush alongside of Woody’s sense of the impact of little things and small measures. They make quite a team.

One draft of this post ended with a list of simple things for the year ahead, but I deleted it (from the post, not from my thoughts) because my reason for writing was not to post my intentions for the days to come. I’m still sorting out what life is going to look like for more reasons than the change of year, and, as I said, resolutions are not usually part of my practice.

Instead, I want to sit with the idea of making life simpler, breaking it down to its essence: How do I stay true to what matters most to me? That feels so simple that it will take a year to answer.

Peace,
Milton

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