e e cummings

my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height

this motionless forgetful where
turned at his glance to shining here;
that if(so timid air is firm)
under his eyes would stir and squirm

newly as from unburied which
floats the first who,his april touch
drove sleeping selves to swarm their fates
woke dreamers to their ghostly roots

and should some why completely weep
my father's fingers brought her sleep:
vainly no smallest voice might cry
for he could feel the mountains grow.

lifting the valleys of the sea
my father moved through griefs of joy;
praising a forehead called the moon
singing desire into begin

joy was his song and joy so pure
a heart of star by him could steer
and pure so now and now so yes
the wrists of twilight would rejoice

keen as midsummer's keen beyond
conceiving mind of sun will stand,
so strictly(over utmost him
so hugely) stood my father's dream

his flesh was flesh his blood was blood:
no hungry man but wished him food;
no cripple wouldn't creep one mile
uphill to only see him smile.

scorning the Pomp of must and shall
my father moved through dooms of feel;
his anger was as right as rain
his pity was as green as grain

septembering arms of year extend
yes humbly wealth to foe and friend
than he to foolish and to wise
offered immeasurable is

proudly and(by octobering flame
beckoned)as earth will downward climb,
so naked for immortal work
his shoulders marched against the dark

his sorrow was as true as bread:
no liar looked him in the head;
if every friend became his foe
he'd laugh and build a world with snow.

my father moved through theys of we,
singing each new leaf out of each tree
(and every child was sure that spring
danced when she heard my father sing)

then let men kill which cannot share,
let blood and flesh be mud and mire,
scheming imagine,passion willed,
freedom a drug that's bought and sold

giving to steal and cruel kind,
a heart to fear,to doubt a mind,
to differ a disease of same,
conform the pinnacle of am

though dull were all we taste as bright,
bitter all utterly things sweet,
maggoty minus and dumb death
all we inherit,all bequeath

and nothing quite so least as truth
–i say though hate were why men breathe–
because my Father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all

Blossoming Cherries and Burning Flesh

I should be asleep... getting enough rest to be bright-eyed for tomorrow's sunrise over the cherry blossoms, Inshallah. BUT I just read a response to the question that's been fraying the edges of my soul today, and I needed to process.

Mallie and I call days like today Sadness of the World days (when the weight of minor and mass evils haunt and pierce, and the mundane life-as-usual day seems to have a menacing soundtrack. i.e. My mom didn't get abducted out of our kitchen when I was four. But my friend Spencer's did, and today I couldn't stop thinking about it. About how when we were kids his sister couldn't drive past a cemetery without hiding her face in her shirt. I haven't thought about them in years. But today I couldn't stop grieving for their family.) I decided this morning that a day like this should be called a skin-inside-out day. (I've been reading The Hunger Games trilogy which is tres violent. And I watched an episode of House over dinner which involved a burn victim. And it's true that the slightest brush of story against my skin, on a day like this, makes me wince at the pain another person or a people is faced with.) The demanding refrain of the day, Why are we alive? What is the point of all this? How can I live meaningfully into the awful-earth realities I might otherwise close my eyes and ears to for the sake of bliss? Enter Henri Nouwen.

"The more I think about the human suffering in the world and my desire to offer a healing response, the more I realize how crucial it is not to allow myself to become paralyzed by feelings of impotence and guilt. More important than ever is to be very faithful to my vocation to do well in the few things I am called to do and hold on to the joy and peace they bring me. I must resist the temptation to let the forces of darkness pull me into despair and make me one more of their many victims...

I know of few people who have seen as much suffering as the Dalai Lama... Still I know of few people who radiate as much peace and joy.... How is it possible that a man who has been subjected to such persecution is not filled with anger and a desire for revenge? When asked that question the Dalai Lama explains how, in his meditation, he allows all the suffering of his people and their oppressors to enter into the depth of his heart, and there to be transformed into compassion."

While this doesn't solve problems of minor or mass evil, this does offer a strategy for me to use when I feel like I can't bear the burn of a skin-inside-out day. I mean for prayer and meditation to be a more instinctive response, a replacement for the churning of my empathic imagination. And, really, I'm just grateful to have opened a book sitting on at the coffee table tonight that spoke to me as if it had heard my question and didn't want me to go to sleep without an echo from the void. That is grace.

And now I will go to sleep with a cherry blossom scented smile on my lips.

What to Do with Feathered Things?

"Hope" is the thing with feathers

254

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.

Emily Dickinson

From "Uncertainty Identity Theory" by Michael Hogg

The key premise is that feelings of uncertainty 

about oneself and one’s perceptions, attitudes, val- 

ues, and behaviors that reflect on one’s identity and 

sense of self are “aversive” and motivate attempts 

at resolution. Where one believes one has sufficient 

resources to reduce the uncertainty, self-uncertainty 

is experienced as a challenge that sponsors pro- 

motive or approach behaviors; where the resources 

are considered insufficient, self-uncertainty is expe- 

rienced as a threat that sponsors more protective 

or avoidant behaviors (cf. Blascovich & Tomaka, 

1996). 

Not only can the subjective experience of self- 

uncertainty vary to sponsor different general behav- 

ioral orientations toward its resolution, but the general 

path taken and the underlying psychological mecha- 

nism can also differ. UIT focuses on group identifi- 

cation through self-categorization (e.g., Turner, Hogg, 

Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987), which it considers 

perhaps the most effective way to reduce and protect 

from self-uncertainty. Uncertainty-reduction is consid- 

ered a core motive for social identity processes (Hogg, 

2006). 

Fictional Apocalyptic Poetry Series - Part 1

With the wisdom of a toddler who

imagines the world is and isn't

when his eyes open and shut,

I imagine - I've been ready for this,

and the timing is good... As if my proclivities pertain

to this matter. Matters of this sort.

A Sun Turned Black. A Sea Made Blood. A Sky Run Dry.

I'd considered these matters in depth

in ninth grade, when I was looking for distraction

from my changing body and my shy lust. Ran my fingers

across the spines of books that worked my nerves.

Whispered my eyes across titles so

charged I could almost feel electricity pumping my heart.

Whore of Babylon. A Holy Remnant. The Beast and the Lamb.

Synthesizing theologies, scanning news for false prophets,

searching myself for certainty; I spun my theories and I spun

my wheels with no where to go - never buying books,

but reading them in store. Five hundred dollars

wouldn't have paid for the volumes my appetite lavished

on me, cross-legged and curious on the carpet.

Postmillenialist. The Thousand Year Reign. Iron Scepter of

the Antichrist.

The Antichrist.

The Antichrist.

In the corner of the Family Bookstore

I trained my mind, refining my ability to recognize

this man (?) who would conduct a symphony

of slaughter while the world shattered, sure I would be sentient

to his origin before his first appearance onscreen.

It's not as clear as I hoped it would be, though. If this is really 
the first of the last days.

The Great Tribulation. The Last Battle. God's Wrath.

But I'm ready to figure this thing out. I have to believe

the year I spent in the stacks will count for something. I'm ready

for tomorrow to be worse than today. And the next

seven years to kill me and mine more likely than not. Because after -

AFTER the wounds of heaven mar the Earth to its core -

I will hear what "sounds like a great multitude,

like the roar of rushing waters and like loud

peals of thunder, shouting: Hallelujah!

For our Lord God Almighty reigns.

Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory!

For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready."

Beef, It's What's for Dinner

A gem on Pandora today... I think this song is a beautiful homage to the fragility of woman, and a gentle reminder that strength must be woven with vulnerability for the tapestry to be whole.


Be Careful
by Patti Griffin


All the girls in the Paris night
All the girls in the pale moonlight
All the girls with the shopping bags
All the girls with the washing rags

All the girls on the telephone
All the girls standing all alone
All the girls sitting on the wire
One by one fly into the fire 

Be careful how you bend me
Be careful where you send me
Careful how you end me
Be careful with me 

All the girls standing by your beds
All the girls standing on their heads
All the girls with the broken arms
All the girls with the deadly charms

All the girls in the restaurant
Pretending to be nonchalant
Funny girls on the TV shows
Close your eyes and they turn to snow

Be careful how you bend me
Be careful where you send me
Careful how you end me
Be careful with me

All the girls working overtime
Telling you everything is fine
All the girls in the beauty shops
Girls, tongues catching the raindrops

All the girls that you never see
Forever a mystery
All the girls with their secret ways
All the girls who have gone astray

Be careful how you bend me
Be careful where you send me
Careful how you end me
Be careful with me

Be careful how you bend me
Be careful with me

Love alone makes death feel less like theft

You never met them - Marie, Retha, Bill or Carl depending. But what does it matter - you don't like old people anyway. It's safer not to, I suppose. Old people are just waiting to stab you in the back - they all go and die after you got used to them being around.

Bubby was the first in my life. I was nine. The ache that that found me was the sound of my dad sobbing in the parlor. No one ever sat in the parlor - arch-backed chairs with stiff upholstery. It was an alien sound coming from an unfamiliar room.  And I could see my mom through the slatted door, seated next to him, hands comforting, the portable phone in their lap. It was odd to see my mom holding not one of her children, but this frail and shaking wreck of a man. I knew what had happened from the sounds he was making. That Bubby died. It was resigned weeping - not like the sounds he would make if a young person had been killed unexpectedly. Bubby was 98 years old.

She had intimidated me. (Though not on family visits. Those were fine, mom allowing me to cling to her skirts no doubt.) Once I was supposed to be spending the weekend with her, but after riding the bus to the grocer's, returning to her studio in a high rise for the elderly, and learning from her veiny and wrinkled hands how to form plum dumplings... I insisted on calling my mom to come pick me up. No thank you, I didn't want to stay the night. To this day I have no idea why. Was she speaking unintelligibly in Czech? Did she boss me around? Was the smell of age so noxious? I wish I could go back and spend the weekend with her. Play checkers and watch soap operas. I regret my failure to squirrel away as many moments with this woman as I could. She was more of a mother to my dad than Grandma, and his face glows when he tells stories about his boyhood with her. That means something - a person like her is important to a person like me. She stopped existing, though. And I didn't really know that could happen. But I suspected as much.

Death made herself known to me since I was too young to understand the rules of probability. She whispered to me late at night when I was 7, 8, 9, face toward the window under the canopy of the antique bed Nana had given me as a birthday present. The voice whispered, "Your mom will be driving home from late tonight. After midnight. So dark. Those curvy Auburn roads. Drunk drivers common on a Friday. The odds are not good - especially because she makes this treacherous drive home from work (surely exhausted) every second weekend. That makes her more likely to... die. On the road. The more one drives the more likely one is to crash - it's only a matter of time for her." [Even as I write this, the old familiar nerves tingle. The irony that I could be invoking disaster by using this condescending tone to name the ancient fear childish.] I worked this fear late at night like a rosary, finding some kind of solace in worry. Preparing for the worst seemed safer than being surprised.

But a fear is different from an event. Insidious whispers different from soundlessness. A death can be like becoming deaf to a sound you once knew. Losing a color. This - a death - is a violent reordering of the insides. A crushing and rebuilding of What Is. 

The ripple was even greater when Papa stopped being. He was like home base - as safe as a human presence could be. Like a plant, he consumed all the carbon dioxide of a situation, easily oxygenating the room and making it possible for anyone to thrive. After he was gone, the polarizing personalities in the extended family clashed so much that I eventually reconfigured my holidays to avoid the day before and the day after. But fuck the holidays. What changed was that... well, if I could stop knowing someone I knew as intimately and enduringly as I knew him, maybe there was no God. Maybe my relationship with this God that I had grown up with (who's laughter I had never heard, bear hugs I had not felt, proud gaze I had not enjoyed), maybe that was just as fictional as this dead man now was. The memories of Papa - they were short stories and films. Not a living person. And if something as real as Bill Newell could stop being, then it seemed likely there was nothing Real. Just encounters. Fluidity. Brain chemistry. Days.

Four years later when his wife finally followed him, after she spent years of striving to keep on keeping on, and then years of pining for their reunion... the possibility of a living Reality had managed to reassert itself on me. Nihilism, atheism hadn't made a compelling enough case. And, now guided by the sense that Nana is no less real now that her body was buried, I have been accepting her exit with more grace than I could have asked for. She, who was the Last Unicorn to me - the narrator of my life's direction from birth - the wicked witch whose henchman I loved to be - the blessed woman who took me to pierce my ears when my parents refused to allow it. I suppose I just don't know how to believe she is no more. 

At first, I was furious with her. My entire life, she'd never prepared me for the possibility that she would leave - painted herself as a survivor who'd endured the Depression, been thrown from a bull onto a barbed wire fence, fallen out of a second story window, been hit by a car 3x, cancer 4x, a broken back, and surely more threats I am forgetting. Death was not in the cards for her, she intimated religiously. But she left me after all - ME! How could she?????? Why does death feel like such a betrayal? 

Ultimately, my anger has relaxed into peace. It must be the conviction that I loved her as well as I could and gave her as much joy that a granddaughter might, that is allowing me to release her. Unlike the ruinous regret of my failures to lavish enough affection on Bubby and Papa. Regrets are what haunt. If I ever loved someone, I know it was Nana. Probably to the detriment of my bonds with other grandparents. And my many acts of treason against her, they elude my memory kindly. I see them there, lurking in the corners, but they are decidedly meager in the looming shadow of our fierce bond.

Each death, I've experienced so differently. But the ache - that is consistent. It's strange that my childhood death fantasies were always about my parents or siblings, never the old people. I didn't know that they would leave such craters in the surface of my heart.  It seemed natural that the grandparents would die eventually - only horrifying if someone living in my house were to disappear before their time - but it's not natural at all. Ever. Even if medical miracles have showered on us dozens of years and thousands of memories after someone's natural time of death. Papa had an extra 30 years. Nana, 25. Bubby, who knows? Still it's not natural for them to go. 

I almost unconditionally love change, surprise, adjustment, a fresh perspective - for better and worse. But the elimination of a human being is not well with my soul. It is an irreparable emptiness that only faith can calm. I dread the next funeral I'll attend but have desisted in fearing specific deaths now, knowing that preparedness helps none. Only love. Love alone makes death feel less like theft.