she told us
she spells her name
with an exclamation point
by the way she dances
and flails her tail
any time we call her
she is an
off-the-chart extrovert
(I should know)
who wants to meet
everyone she sees except
the riddle of small children
most mornings
after breakfast and some after-
noons she takes time to sit
in the chair or on the back
patio in the summertime
and pay attention
she is not
bored or pining or asleep
she is attending to the world
a small schnoodle monk
soaking up the sounds and
sights for as long as it takes
an exclamation
point is used to show emphasis
she assumes the posture of
the punctation to soak up
the world not shout at it
then she goes back to dancing
It is the top drawer of an old Singer spool cabinet that sits on top of a table that used to hold a Singer sewing machine. Both were handed down from my mother’s parents. They have traveled with Ginger and me to every house we have lived in and they have always held the passports.
Since both of us are ENFPs, details and organization are not our strong suits. We have a lot of stacks of things and drawers with stuff in them. The passports were different. We knew we needed to be able to find them.
Yesterday–a week ahead of our trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland for a peace and justice retreat (that we were supposed to do in 2020, but you know the story), I opened the drawer to get the passports, proud of myself for thinking ahead, and they were not there. Well, there were passports in the drawer, but they had expired before the last time we had been out of the country in 2018. The valid documents were somewhere in the house, but not in the drawer–the drawer we had not needed to open for four years.
We began two processes this morning: One was to start looking in every drawer and closet and on every shelf to see if we could find them, and the other was to call the US Passport Office to see if we could get a new one as a result of a “travel emergency.”
I dialed the number around 9 o’clock and followed the instructions, pressing numbers when asked to do so. Well, first I dialed in four times only to be told the call volume was too high and to call back at another time. Then I got a voice that told me to press numbers, which led to another voice that told me to hold on for the next available operator, and then another voice that said, “Your wait time is more than two and a half hours.”
My hearing aids have a bluetooth feature that allows my phone to connect directly, so all of this was happening in my head, including the switch from the voice to classical music–a tune I recognized and got to know even better because it was about a three minute loop and I had been told I was going to wait far longer than that. (I would tell you the name of the piece, but I have since blocked it out.)
The website was clear that we could not walk into the passport office in Stamford without an appointment, but we thought we would drive down there just in case someone answered and we could get in line. The trip down to Stamford took about an hour. I have Apple Car Play in my CRV, so I was able to move the music out of my ears and on to the car speakers, but the music never changed. About the time we got to Stamford, the voice told me the wait time was “more than two hours” and then it dropped to “more than an hour and a half.”
I dropped Ginger off in front of the office and went to park. I had barely gotten out of the car when she sent a text that said, “Don’t hang up! Come back and get me but don’t hang up.”
I did as I was told.
By now it was a little after 11:30. We started driving back and ran into heavy traffic, so we made a signature B-C move in such a situation: we got off the highway and found a diner. The Silver Star Diner in South Norwalk. We had lunch and then went across the street to REI to see if I could find a rain jacket for our trip–a small gesture of hope as the music continued to loop in my ears.
As we checked out, the voice said the wait was down to “more than twenty minutes,” then, as we pulled out of the parking lot, a human voice said, “US Passport Office. How may I help you?” We pulled into the next parking lot so we could pay attention.
We laid out the situation and answered all the questions the way the website had instructed. The person asked for our zip code and then said, “We don’t have anything in the Eastern US. I can get you an appointment in El Paso, Tucson, LA, or Hawaii.”
She was serious and she was kind. She just didn’t have anything else to offer. As hard as our day had been, I tried to imagine theirs. For all the time I had waited, they had been talking to people who needed help. Who needed appointments. People who didn’t live in El Paso or Hawaii. She had nothing to offer, but she still had to keep answering the calls of people asking for what she could not give. I thanked her for trying.
As we hung up, I looked at the length of the call: three hours and fifty-seven minutes. Then I realized I forgot to thank them for making the music stop.
As we drove back, Ginger reached out to a couple of our local officials who are a part of our church and they put us in touch with the office of our state representative, Rosa DeLauro. The folks there are trying hard to get us a shot at making our flight on Monday. They too, have been kind.
Sunday we had a guest preacher at the church where I am bridge pastor–a “neutral pulpit” for a search committee for another church. The preacher followed the lectionary, talking about Jesus’ parable that we call “The Friend at Midnight” in Luke 11. I learned the the word as persistence (“I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything out of friendship, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.”) is better understood as shamelessness, as in the guy knew it was late, but he also knew friends are willing to be taken advantage of, so he asked shamelessly and his friend got up and helped him.
That’s how I have felt today: shameless. Yes, I wish we had kept up with the passports, but as exhausting as the day has been, I am grateful that Ginger and I have not blamed each other or ourselves, have worked hard to turn the house over looking for the passports (and ended up throwing a bunch of stuff out–bonus!), and we have called and waited and driven and asked and then turned to people we trust to see what they can do. And they got up and are trying to help.
I am mindful tonight of the gift of people in our lives of whom we can ask shamelessly. I am humbled, hopeful, and grateful.
Tomato season in New England runs a little later than other parts of the country. Ours are just beginning to come in–at least, the cherry tomatoes are starting to ripen–but most wait for August. The good news is we keep harvesting tomatoes well into the fall.
I would love to tell you we are going to have a bumper crop this year, but our tomatoes are having a hard time. They are still growing and there is fruit on the vine, but not in the quantities we had hoped, so the picture is from last year. Still, it’s a good time to talk about tomatoes.
A fair number of our cherry tomatoes get eaten as we pick them. They are like little pieces of candy on a hot summer afternoon, and then a good number of them get eaten fresh on, well, pretty much anything I can think to put them on. And still there are more. I have found two ways to cook them that make them last and taste even better; both of them take a little time, but not a lot of attention.
tomato confit
The traditional meaning of confit has to do with slow-roasting meat in its own fat (like duck confit), but the idea has expanded to include vegetables as well. As one article I read put it, confit is to deep frying what smoking is to grilling: low and slow versus fast and furious.
Here’s what you need:
enough cherry tomatoes to cover the bottom of a 9×13 baking dish
enough olive oil to come up about half way on the tomatoes
unpeeled cloves of garlic
fresh herbs (rosemary, thyme, basil)
salt and pepper
You can also add:
sliced jalapeños
peeled shallots cut in half longwise
Preheat the oven to 275°.
Cover the bottom of the dish with whole cherry tomatoes, then add the garlic, jalapeños, and shallots. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and lay the fresh herbs over the top. You don’t need to take anything off of their stems. Drizzle the olive oil over everything until it comes up a little over halfway on the tomatoes.
Roast for about 2 hours, until the tomatoes look wrinkled but are not bursting. Set the pan aside and let it cool. Squeeze the garlic out of its peel and put it back in the confit.
Put in top of everything from pasta to steaks to chicken to you name it.
I store mine in pint-sized mason jars and keep them in the fridge. Use the oil from the pan to cover them when you put them in jars.
Here’s the second variation.
oven-roasted tomatoes
The two biggest differences between this recipe and the one above are the temperature and the amount of oil you use. Oh–and you cut the tomatoes this time. My recipe is adapted from this one (and if you don’t know Smitten Kitchen, you need to.)
The ingredient list is similar to the recipe above.
enough cherry tomatoes to cover a baking sheet when halved
olive oil
fresh herbs (rosemary, thyme, basil)
salt and peper
Preheat the oven to 225°.
Line a baking sheet with parchment. Cut the tomatoes in half longwise (slice where then stem was) and arrange them on the baking sheet so they are close together. Get as many in there as you can. Drizzle with olive oil (you don’t want to drown these) and sprinkle with salt and pepper. If you want a little kick to them, add some crushed red pepper. Lay the herbs across the top. One again, you don’t need to pull them off of their stems.
Roast them in the oven for at least three hours. I use the cook timer on my stove, set if for three hours, and then forget about it so that they cool in the oven. They will resemble sun-dried tomatoes, but will have a little juice still left in them.
They make a great pizza topping, are wonderful on salads, and taste pretty damn good all on their own. You can also put these in pint-sized mason jars, or other airtight containers. If you do, cover the top with oil. You don’t want to drown them, but a little bit of oil will help them last. Refrigerate them once they cool, if you haven’t eaten them all.
I am a couple of days away from marking ten months since my second knee replacement and three years and three months since my first. As you can see, I have the scars to prove it.
Though they got me up hours after I came out of recovery to start walking and had me climbing stairs the next day, the recovery from the surgery is hard work and takes a long time. Everyone who had knowledge about the surgery gave me the same advice: go to physical therapy and do everything they tell you to do. I did and it both helped and hurt. I had a new understanding of Jesus’ question to the man who had sat beside the pool at Bethsaida waiting to be healed–“Do you want to get well?”
Healing, often, is not for the faint of heart.
And, sometimes, healing happens when you don’t know it.
The first week of July I went to Youth Camp with the folks from Wilshire Baptist Church, Dallas, a group of folks I love and who love me. Camp is one of my happy places, and Wilshire’s camp has been my home for something like twenty summers. We were at a campground in Arkansas, a little west of Little Rock, and it was hot and humid despite the rolling hills and tall trees.
Last summer at camp, I was two months away from the surgery and had a fair amount of consistent pain. My room was in a building about a quarter of a mile from the meeting room, and up hill; I struggled to get back and forth. This year, retracing those steps gave me a visceral understanding of how the surgery had helped because it didn’t hurt to walk.
After my first surgery, my doctor told me to expect to make good progress, but to understand that it would take a year before I forgot I had had the surgery. He was right almost to the day. My second knee seemed to respond more quickly, but it still stiffened up when I sat or stood too long, and bending my knees to reach something on the floor or a low shelf remained challenging.
Because the afternoons at camp were so hot, I stayed at the pool, as did a fair number of the kids and adults. I also spent a good deal of time just sitting in the water talking with those around me. The second afternoon I realized I was crouched down in the water, which was about four feet deep, almost sitting on my haunches and I felt no pain. The next afternoon, I made a point of doing deep knee bends and squatting down some more.
What I remembered was that being in the water was a kind of no-gravity situation; I could bend my knees without resistance. I had waded into healing waters without knowing that was what I was doing. I was just looking for relief from the heat.
When I got the invitation to go to camp I had already given my notice at work. My last day was on a Thursday and by Sunday night I was in Arkansas. The timing felt providential. I went not only hoping to offer something to the kids there but also hoping for healing since camp is mostly about reminding ourselves that we are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. I knew I needed the message as much as they did. Maybe more.
I also gained a greater range of movement.
In the story of the man at the pool, the whole set up is that everyone gathered around the water waiting for an angel to “stir up the water” and then whoever hit the pool first was healed. The man Jesus encountered had been there for thirty-eight years and had never managed to get in first.
I don’t know how many people were there on a daily basis, but I am struck by the fact that they were together but all alone. No one was helping anyone else, they were caught up in pushing their way to the front. Imagine if they had had the wherewithal to say, “Let’s line up and we will help each other in, one at a time, day after day.” Yes, some would have had to wait longer than others, but no one would have waited thirty-eight years. And, as they worked together, they might have been surprised at the other things in their lives that were healed.
This summer marks the first summer I have been able to work in the garden and get up and down without groaning loudly. Most every time I bend my knee is an exercise in gratitude, for my surgeon, for Ginger, for my physical therapists, for others who cared me, and for those who sat and talked to me in the pool at camp where we disturbed the waters and was healed by surprise.
Ginger and I went to dinner with some folks and I turned on the Red Sox game when we got home, as I am wont to do on a summer evening, to find that the score was 14-3 in favor of the Toronto Blue Jays. And it was only the bottom of the fourth inning. Since it wasn’t close, I went upstairs to do a couple of things and when I came back down one inning later it was 25-3–at the halfway point of the game. By the time the game finally ended, it was 28-5.
The scale of the loss broke a ninety-nine-year-old club record.
But the thing about baseball–and life–is you have to play again tomorrow. Last night was the first game of a three-game series with the Blue Jays, so they all showed up again this afternoon and the Sox lost once more, this time only 4-1.
The Sox have played ninety-five games and have lost forty-seven of them. They have faced a whole lot of days when they just had to get back out there, but last night came on the heels of two losses right before the All Star Break, 14-1 and 13-2, both to the Yankees.
The oldest roots of the word loss have to do with “ruin” and “destruction;” the oldest roots of the word defeat mean “to not perform.” The Sox leaned into both of those roots last night.
As epic a loss as it was, the game ended. The destruction endured for only nine innings. Same with the loss this afternoon. Tomorrow a new game begins at 0-0. Game to game, the scoring is not cumulative. Life will go on. They will play again tomorrow and the days after that, both winning and losing until this season fades into the next. All of that is true. And they will from now on be the team that lost 28-5. They have to live with that loss. As a fan–and I will always be a Red Sox fan–I get to live with it, too.
But the losses add up. Boston has won one more game than they have lost this year, which puts them in fourth place in our division and makes us a long shot for the playoffs. Living with losses does have a cumulative effect. Each day starts new, but it doesn’t always feel like the score is 0-0. We have debts that weigh heavily, obligations that have already spoken for our time, things that need to be done and left undone. In many ways we live in the aftermath of destruction and with the consequences of not performing.
And still, there is grace. Grace to live with and through and, perhaps, beyond our losses.
I grew up with a father who thought sports were the quintessential metaphor for life. As one who was and continues to be an amazingly mediocre athlete, I remain wary of drawing too straight a line from competition to circumstance. Life and sports are not analogous because life is not divided between winning and losing.
After the game on Friday, manager Alex Cora said, “I would like to say that this happens, but it doesn’t happen often. We’ve just got to turn the page and get ready for tomorrow. That’s the only way you can attack the next one.”
I know of too many specific things happening in the lives of people I know and love that make me want to state emphatically that life’s pages don’t always turn that easily. We live through moments and events that create a Before and an After, that alter who we are and what choices we can make. The page we turn to is not blank, and it does not erase the story that has already been written. Cora’s right: those things don’t happen often, but they happen and we have to live with them.
And we do. We live with them, through them, beyond them. And we don’t get over them. We are the sum of our losses, but they are not all of who we are.
A couple of weeks ago, I got an email telling me I could sign up for a lottery tog et a link to buy tickets to one of the concerts on Bruce Springsteen’s upcoming tour. The date closest to me is in March 2023 at a relatively small arena, compared to some of the places I have seen him play.
I love the Boss. I am ready to see him again. His live shows with the E Street Band are something to behold. So, I signed up and got a text a couple of nights ago telling me I could log in with a special code this morning at ten to buy tickets, which I did, only to find that the cheapest seat in the house was $450 before Ticketmaster added their fees. Floor seats were $1250.
I guess “tramps like us” means people with a lot of disposable income.
In December of 2021, Bruce sold his song catalog to Sony for $550 million. Who knows how much he has made on records and his other tours. I know it’s not cheap to tour. Next week, Ginger and I are going to see Lyle Lovett and are going to sit on the second row for $150 each, and Lyle is not going hungry.
Needless to say, I have seen my last Springsteen concert. To deal with my frustration and sadness, I wrote new lyrics to “A Letter for You,” a song off of his last record. I don’t imagine he will ever see it, but who knows.
A Ticket to You
‘Neath a crown of hopeful fans I joined that bothersome queue Sat down in my chair Clicked the link so I’d get through To hear the songs that my heart finds true And get myself a ticket to you
Songs I’ve loved through hard times and good You wrote ’em all out in ink and blood They speak to my soul because they ring so true And hoped to get a ticket to you
Just a ticket to you And take all my fears and doubts Yes, a ticket to you But the hard thing I found out Is a ticket to you Is too much for me to do I can’t afford a ticket to you
Five hundred bucks to just get in the door A thousand more to get down on the floor Your cashing in and your fans are getting screwed If they want a ticket to you If they want a ticket to you
For a ticket to you I shouldn’t have to get a loan And that ticket to you Means my trust in you is blown With a ticket to you I wouldn’t see the guy I knew I’m not gonna get a ticket to you I’m not gonna get a ticket to you
It’s only Thursday night and it has already been a long week.
I feel fairly safe saying I think I speak for a majority of people and not just for the way things feel at our house. As I said last night, life is hard right now. One of the advantages of living on the Shoreline, as folks call it around here, is that we are close to the water and close to restaurants that look out over the water, so Ginger and I drove down to Lenny’s in Branford, the next town over, to sit on their deck and enjoy the late afternoon.
We were talking on the way and I made a comment about an article from The Atlantic that I posted today that said–well, it’s titled “America’s Self-Obsession Is Killing Its Democracy.” The feel good read of the summer, I assure you, and worth your time. In response, Ginger said, “I need someone to write something hopeful.”
“I’ve been writing something hopeful,” I replied.
“Have you been reading your blog posts?” she said with a laugh.
We both laughed. And I started thinking about what hopeful thing I could say tonight, which made me start thinking about recipes.
Last night we had a chance to have dinner with friends who were only in town for a couple of days. We didn’t decide to eat together until kind of the last minute and it was too hot to want to cook a big meal, so I decided to do a variety of salads and dips, hoping to use stuff I had on hand. I had made hummus a couple of days ago; I had a couple of avocados and had just picked some cherry tomatoes and jalapeños from our garden, so I made guacamole as well. I roasted some zucchini from the garden also, and a a smoked trout dip (smoked trout, capers, celery, creme fraiche, lemon zest) but the main thing I made was chicken salad.
I love my chicken salad, in part because the recipe grew from stuff Ginger likes.
As I have said before, I learned how to cook from my mother. Not only that, I learned how to think about cooking from her. I learned how to open the fridge and see possibilities, how to adapt when you don’t have time to get more stuff, and how to see a recipe as a suggestion rather than a demand.
There is no one way to make chicken salad. I found a great article on the history of chicken salad, only to learn that it has been a rather interesting culinary journey to the variations we have now–and that the deli that claimed to be the first to serve it the way we Americans have come to expect was just up the road in Wakefield, Rhode Island.
I have called my recipe “gigi’s chicken salad” because it started with the fact that she is allergic to onions and doesn’t like “green stuff” in her salad (celery, herbs). What she does like are Granny Smith apples and dried cranberries. Over the years, rather than using roasted chicken, I started cooking the chicken breasts in a cast iron skillet first so they had good flavor and some crunch on the outside. Like any good salad (other than a tossed one), it’s better on the second or third day. It has become something I make on the fly, as I did last night, and that I also make on purpose, whether it goes on a sandwich or is accompanied by a sleeve of Ritz crackers.
For the purposes of this blog post, I am renaming it “hopeful chicken salad.”
hopeful chicken salad
(the amounts are not prescriptive; make as much as you want)
2 full boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 Granny Smith apple
1/2 cup dried cranberries
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/2 cup Duke’s mayonnaise
salt and pepper to taste
Cook the chicken the way you like it. I like to put it in a really hot skillet with just a little bit of oil so it has that grilled taste. Let it cool and then dice it in small chunks and put it in a big bowl.
Dice the apple in chunks about the same size as the chicken and add it to the bowl. Add the cranberries and toss everything to mix it well. Add the mustard, mayonnaise, and lemon juice and mix with a spatula until everything is coated. I add the mayonnaise a 1/4 cup at a time so I can get the right feel to the salad. Season with salt and pepper.
It’s nothing fancy, but it tastes good, you know, like hope.
Last week as Ginger and I walked around the Guilford Green, I noticed the flag was at half mast. I wondered out loud who it was for, in part because I had not paid attention to the news for a day or two, but also because the recent spate of shootings gave me pause to think it could be for quite a number of folks. Turns out that day it was to mark the life of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe who was assassinated.
When we got back home, I spent some time researching the tradition of lowering our flags as a sign of mourning and respect. The tradition goes back a little over four hundred years, as best anyone can tell, when the captain of the British ship Heart’s Ease died on a journey to Canada. When the ship returned to London, it was flying its flag at half-mast to honor the departed captain.
The flag was flown exactly one flag’s width lower than its customary position to make room for the “invisible flag of death.”
Over the last four centuries, the rules and traditions around flying the flag at half mast (or half staff, as it is sometimes called) have taken different shapes from country to country. For instance, Title 4, Chapter 1, Section 7 of the United States Code outlines strict guidelines for how long the flag is flown at half-staff following the deaths of various members of the government.
I found one website that lists all the half mast alerts across the country. Some are for nationwide remembrances and some are more local. I learned that last week in Connecticut, our flag was lowered to honor the life of Sandy Hook Fire Chief William Halstead who died in the line of duty.
Just reading the name Sandy Hook made my heart ache for that community because they live with such grief. Today I also read about those who died because of extreme heat, about raging fires in Europe and in the western US, along with the continued horror of all that is happening in Ukraine, in Somalia, in Sudan–the list is unending, and we haven’t even begun to talk about the ground level grief we carry that never makes the news.
The truth is there has never been a day when we did not need to make room for the invisible flag of death. We live half mast lives, lives acquainted with grief, no matter what we say we can see by the dawn’s early light.
Everything hurts, Our hearts shadowed and strange, Minds made muddied and mute. We carry tragedy, terrifying and true. And yet none of it is new; We knew it as home, As horror, As heritage. Even our children Cannot be children, Cannot be.
Everything hurts. It’s a hard time to be alive, And even harder to stay that way. We’re burdened to live out these days, While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.
This alarm is how we know We must be altered — That we must differ or die, That we must triumph or try. Thus while hate cannot be terminated, It can be transformed Into a love that lets us live.
May we not just grieve, but give: May we not just ache, but act; May our signed right to bear arms Never blind our sight from shared harm; May we choose our children over chaos. May another innocent never be lost.
Maybe everything hurts, Our hearts shadowed & strange. But only when everything hurts May everything change.
It is a hard time to be alive. We don’t need to qualify that statement to decide if it is the hardest; let us just take it as it is: it is a hard time to be alive. Gorman is right: we are both burdened and blessed to be here.
Let us raise the invisible flag of death and claim it as our own, not as a sign of invasion or occupation, but as a banner of our humanity, our courage, our compassion, our sadness, and even our hope. Whatever flag flies below it is colored by conflicting allegiances. We will not find our unity there. But to see see the invisible flag is to know our days are numbered.
A friend from Texas called yesterday and asked how I was and I said I was hot, and then I said I knew the irony of statement talking to him since the high yesterday in Guilford was only three degrees warmer than the low in Houston.
A heat wave in New England is three days in a row with a high above 90. Two weeks ago I was at a youth camp outside of Little Rock and the temperature was 100 with a heat index of 114 because of the humidity on top of the heat. For more than three days. People there call it summer.
One thing we in Connecticut do share with Arkansas is we have had a few weeks without significant rainfall. I don’t know what the official length of a dry spell has to be, but people began using the word drought around here. And it has been dry. The vegetable garden is suffering. I watered almost everyday last week trying to help things along and, as i did, I thought about the articles I have seen about the epic drought our west.The pictures of what is left of Lead Mead are shocking.
My garden buddy Tom and I were talking about all of these things over the weekend as we worked to keep our garden growing. We were harvesting garlic, which I did for the first time last year. I didn’t know how long garlic took to grow before that. We planted the cloves in early November. They rest through the winter, produce garlic scapes in the spring (which are edible), and then the single cloves each offer a full bulb of goodness in mid-July. We will dry them out and they will last us until the spring–well, they can last that long. I’ll use them up before then. I mean, we only harvested sixty bulbs.
But knowing how long it takes for them to mature, I marvel at the abundance of garlic in the grocery store. It takes a lot of time and land and who knows what to keep those piles of bulbs in the produces sections of our stores. Since we are cut off from the knowledge of what all it takes, we don’t contemplate whether we can actually afford the luxury.
And that brings me back to water.
I live in a state with an abundance of water: rivers, ponds, lakes, ocean. Yet, even here, we talk about drought. As we stood in the garden, Tom pulled out his phone and pulled up an article written by Tiokasin Ghosthorse, a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation and an activist.
“Sit down and read this,” Tom said. “It will only take a few minutes.”
So I sat down on the makeshift benches we made, next to the cucumber vines and the volunteer sunflowers and read.
Mni is a Lakota word for Water and goes beyond any translatable word in the English language. The fragmenting of Mni into simple English nouns would provide a rough translation and lose most of the word’s true meaning and essential idea of “Water as a Being.” So I will attempt to explain Mni in a way that might make some sense in English. . . .
Water is the time and space understood by Mother Earth as she holds the womb of all creation within her: oceans, rivers, lakes, ponds, creeks, streams, rains, floods, waves, humidity, wetness, dampness, hurricanes, tornadoes, rainbows, and the teardrops of babies.
“Water as a Being” creates with the sun, moon, stars, winds, earth, fire, and the life of all living beings sentient or that which is thought of as non-sentient. The Lakota have always known the connection of Mni and have encoded the living meanings of things seen and unseen by the delicate and fragile human eye.
I like to say, “Water is a cup of the stars. When you put that cup of Water to your mouth and drink, you are drinking a cup of the stars. You see the glimmering lights and reflections of the sun on the waters of the earth.”
As Tom and I continued our conversation in the garden, he said, “Water is not a resource; it’s a being–like we are human beings.”
I flashed back to my recent exit interview when I said, “I have finally learned that when you say ‘human resources’ you don’t mean resources for humans but humans as raw materials for production.”
The interviewer winced but didn’t correct me.
I am not a resource to be used up, nor are you. We, too, are stardust. And, if you remember from middle school science class (I think that’s where I learned it) we are about sixty percent water. Our blood is ninety percent water.
We are not here to simply be used up. Neither is the water around us. Ghosthorse says,
Water is the time and space understood by Mother Earth as she holds the womb of all creation within her: oceans, rivers, lakes, ponds, creeks, streams, rains, floods, waves, humidity, wetness, dampness, hurricanes, tornadoes, rainbows, and the teardrops of babies.
We, too, are water. We are a cup of stars.
I can’t write that without returning to the new images coming from the James Webb Space Telescope, giving us a chance to see more of the universe that holds us. Even with our
Stephan’s Quintet
expanding technology, we are only seeing a small part of what we belong to. Among the things we have to learn from what we can see is that we are connected, bonded, related to all of it. Yea re not something other than creation, we are a part of it. We are here to belong and to care, not to consume and exhaust.
That lesson is not new. And we have yet to learn it.
Ghosthorse closes his essay with these words:
I ask permission before I drink water. Water gives me the language and responsibility to carry the message of life. Water is not a noun, but a loving, moving, growing, cleansing, and powerful living being. So I drink this cup of stars called Water while thinking, speaking, and wanting all things to live fully, rather than purely exist within the lonely world where too many of us have found ourselves—an anthropocentric world that has disconnected us from the Being of Water and caused us to take so much for granted.
In spite of the weather forecast, it rained yesterday. A good, soft, enduring rain that added up to about three-quarters of an inch. The thirty gallon trash cans we have lined up along the back of the barn to catch the water coming off the roof filled up over halfway. The sunflowers seemed to stand taller this morning. Everything glowed with gratitude, even in our New England heat wave, all of us having drunk our cup of stars.
I got up early this morning, thanks to our middle Schnauzer Lila, made the coffee and sat down to write my Morning Pages for the first time in two months. It felt good.
For those who are not familiar with them, Morning Pages are a practice I learned from The Artist’s Way by Julie Cameron. Her instructions are to get up and write three pages first thing in the morning. It doesn’t matter what you write. Just write.
I first read the book and started the pages in 2001 as I began to come to terms with my depression. To say they have saved my life is not an exaggeration. I would love to say I have written every morning over the last twenty-one years, but there have a been several gaps along the way, such that my opening sentence this morning was
It’s Monday morning and I’m back to my morning pages for the first time in a while (how many times have I written that sentence?).
The parentheses in my journal brought back a memory of editing Denial Is My Spiritual Practice and Other Failures of Faith by Rachel Hackenberg and Martha Spong–still one of my favorite projects. Both women are good writers and thinkers. I had just finished Joe Moran’s First You Write a Sentence, where he raises a red flag about the way parentheses break the flow of good writing and I took them out wherever I could find them. During one editorial round, Rachel left a comment asking, “May I have just this one?”
When I commented to authors about parentheses (I wasn’t just picking on Martha and Rachel) my rationale was that they broke the flow of the text for the reader. They were a distraction. But maybe that is not always a bad thing. Sometimes the flow needs to be broken, interrupted, both in books and in life.
Since I grew up going to school in Africa, I was first introduced to parentheses by their English name: brackets, a word that has an architectural root as a means of support or even protection. The Greek word from which parentheses grew means “a putting in beside.” The sense is that what is in the brackets could be left out and everything else would make sense, but it belongs as well; things are better with it there–or at least better understood.
Sometimes the flow needs to be broken by a related thought that syncopates what is going on in the regular rhythm of things. That statement offers grace when I think about the gaps in my rituals of life as parentheses (no Morning Pages since May 19) rather than failures or weaknesses. I have not stopped thinking or feeling or being or living, I just haven’t bracketed the time to write and life has flowed on. My Morning Pages parentheses reminded me the flow needs to be broken, much life the brackets of my blog posts give me time to breathe, to reflect, to connect, to digest at least some of what is flowing by and through and around me.
I spent some time this morning chasing parenthetical rabbits set loose by a search for “a parenthetical life.” One of the best bunnies was an article by Christopher Benfrey called “Pain and Parentheses,” which was published in The New York Review in 2014. He mentions “the most famous parenthesis in postwar literature,” which comes from Nabokov (and also provides the title for one of Billy Collins’ books of poetry:
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory.
And then Belfry says,
I found myself wondering how many other parentheses like this there were: windows in a wall of verse or prose that suddenly opened on an expanse of personal pain. Masquerading as mere asides, they might hold more punch than parentheses are usually expected to hold, more even than the surrounding sentences, and have all the more impact for their disguise as throwaways. Were such parentheses common, I wondered, and if so, why?
The answer to the first question would appear to be yes.
He goes on to weave together bracketed remarks by Elizabeth Bishop, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others. In the middle of it all he asks,
But is it possible to imagine a life without such parentheses—not a life of unrelieved happiness, whatever that might be, but rather a life in which suffering and loss are part of our ordinary existence, not bracketed off from it, not, as we say, “compartmentalized,” but part of our mentality, momentary squalls in the ordinary weather of our shifting and evanescent moods?
His question sends me back to Rachel and Martha’s book. They wrote alternating chapters, each one telling a story of pain that was not bracketed off from existence, but was taken to be the stuff life is made of, the stuff we have to live through and live with. I have my own book that points to grief as one of life’s primary colors.
Our early understanding of the pandemic was to see it as parenthetical and it has become the heart of our global narrative over the past two years. A decade or two from now we may read these years as an insertion that has a beginning and an end, much like we look back on wars and catastrophes, but here in the middle of it all how are we to know or to feel that this is something other than real life?
nothingness in store cry not-all end in that place you were there before
Someone called aprina.14 commented,
overall a pretty solid construction. The second line though feels a bit displaced. Like it doesn’t quite fit in, meter and meaning a year ago
and Heaney replied,
I thought a bit more about this. You’re probably too young to know the painter Bob Ross. He would have a slip of the hand and then turn a mistake into an important part of his art. He called them happy little accidents. As I thought about this haiku and your feedback (to which I agree), I thought to myself that middle line represents my life. On either side is the nothingness before death that knew no beginning and the nothingness after death that knows no end. I think that I quite agree with you about that second line…the line that between the parentheses of nothingness representing my life, it does not quite fit in. And I sure don’t know the meaning.
and added,
I agree. I forced this 5-7-5 haiku a bit. I’m going to revisit the message from a different place. Thanks for your feedback.
I started to close by saying I am a couple of weeks away on closing the parentheses on the job that allowed me the honor of being Martha and Rachel’s editor, but the six years I spent there are not something that can be left out of my story. One of the meaningful things about editing is the space to take things out and then, sometimes, put them back. Perhaps in the stories of our lives the brackets can come and go; we can use them when we need them to break the flow, to draw attention, to offer a respite, or raise a question. Then, when the time is right, we take them out and let the words fall into the flow.
