Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Love and Nonviolence in the Time of Coronavirus

Tuesday, March 17, 2020, CommonDreams

Love and Nonviolence in the Time of Coronavirus

By Ken Butigan

The COVID-19 pandemic has ground the world to a halt.  While Hubei province in China has begun to recover, it has done so by locking down sixty-million people and severely disrupting the patterns of life and work there.  The rest of the world is generally behind the curve in its response, with the number of cases skyrocketing and a few countries courageously taking the same drastic measures that the Chinese did toward containment and mitigation.  The United States has declared a national emergency, but the pivotal strategy of testing is severely lagging. Quite likely, the next weeks will see a dramatic increase in cases and deaths.

How, then, does this crisis sharpen our choice for a culture of active and life-giving nonviolence?  Doesn’t it, instead, point to a future of epidemics, social disruption, economic chaos, and an increase in the politics of fear?

There is no question that the current catastrophe could worsen an already grim trajectory of climate change, poverty, racial injustice and militarism. It could feed the flames of authoritarianism and regimes of surveillance, even as it could drive long-term economic dislocation, with harsh impacts in the lives of people everywhere.

At the same time, however, this crisis is so global, so encompassing, so pervasively universal—touching virtually every person on the planet—that it not only begs for an immediate and comprehensive response, it cracks open the possibility for a long-term cultural and planetary shift toward a more just, peaceful and sustainable order.

"Let us use these coming days and weeks to take steps toward a liberation from the domination system and toward a culture of peace and nonviolence."

It is the magnitude of this cataclysmic predicament that directly confronts us, willingly or not, with the choice Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. specified for humanity half a century ago—nonviolence or nonexistence—and prompts us urgently to discover a way forward drawing on nonviolent methods toward a more nonviolent world.

While combating this pandemic with xenophobia and “us versus them” nationalism has been the reaction of some, the reality is that, if we are to survive this crisis effectively, it will require comprehensively nonviolent cooperation and approaches.  We are already seeing these in action.  When the people of Wuhan and Italy—and now Spain—join in the radical social-distancing of staying home for weeks, they are not only protecting themselves, they are engaging in a powerful, nonviolent action of social responsibility and solidarity. When societies take rapid, extraordinary steps to mitigate the shock of job loss or the expense of testing, they are pursuing nonviolent strategies—nonviolent because they resist the violence of exclusion or indifference while fostering healing and unity.  Even as we find ourselves in the midst of this disorienting and surreal disaster, we are often responding instinctively with empathy and compassion.  No doubt, this nonviolent energy, extended to the entire world, will be increasingly needed as the scale of this catastrophe becomes clearer over the next weeks and months.

Nonviolence is organized love.  A constructive force, an active method, and a powerful way of life, active nonviolence is the power of creative love unleashed to relieve suffering, to struggle for justice, and to nurture a world where everyone counts.  Now more than ever this energy is urgently required to respond to the world of hurt that the COVID-19 tsunami is leaving in its wake—the growing number of people struck down with the virus; the keen grief of those who have suddenly lost loved ones; the overwhelmed health-care systems and providers; but also those caught in its financial wreckage, including minimum wage workers who suddenly have no income; small business owners with raser-thin margins forced to shut down; and, most palpable of all, millions at the margins who have no safety net, no resources, no health care, no recourse.

The present world of pain not only presents an emergency requiring an immediate response, it throws in sharp relief the need for dramatic social change.  We have not built a world that is up to effectively dealing with this challenge. This moment of what we might call “pan-suffering”—agony reaching deeply into the lives and societies across the globe—is revealing the need for societies and systems capable of handling such transnational emergencies while providing for those most impacted by them.

From “War Footing” to “Nonviolent Mobilization”

While the metaphor of “going to war against the virus” crops up in many media reports—“Every college and university is on a war footing about this and are trying to assemble as much information as possible” (LA Times); “New York adopts war footing to ready hospitals for virus surge” (Bloomberg News); “Trump’s national emergency declaration, corporate partnership put U.S. on war footing vs. coronavirus” (Boston Herald)—the strategies in place, and the ones that will succeed, are anything but those of war-fighting.  When the media reach for a term like “war footing,” they are falling lazily into a traditional groove for describing a concerted, society-wide strategy for mobilizing people and resources to solve a monumental problem confronting the nation or the world. 

"The present world of pain not only presents an emergency requiring an immediate response, it throws in sharp relief the need for dramatic social change."

If, in fact, defeating COVID-19 will most effectively happen through nonviolent strategies, it is best to reach for a metaphor that both implies this and minimizes the possibility of violent counter-measures (as in the “war in Iraq” or even policies that have taken on this signifier, like “the war on drugs” or “the war on poverty”).  Rather than the metaphor of war, it is better to take on a metaphor from the world of nonviolence, for example, “nonviolent mobilization”: inviting people across our societies to tap their power for love, mercy, peace and nonviolent change in a comprehensive and collaborative way.  Truly ending this epidemic will require a common vision of, and policies supporting and fostering, unity, cooperation and healing.

The more we take steps now in the spirit of nonviolent transformation, healing and connectedness, the more we will glean lessons for going forward as a society and a planet.

These lessons—for example, that health-care for all lessens the spread of epidemics; that an economic safety-net for all buffers the shocks of such catastrophes; that our limited resources should be poured into meeting the human needs of all instead of military systems that buttress “us versus them” geo-politics—will point us toward and serve as a foundation of a nonviolent shift that our nation and our world desperately needs.

Pace e Bene

While many of us may have long been thinking along these lines, it is in these moments of shock and peril that we can find the gumption to take the concrete steps for making this shift a reality.

In addition to teaching at DePaul University, I work with Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service, a thirty-year-old organization spreading the power of nonviolence. Pace e Bene (“Peace and Good,” a greeting used by St. Francis of Assisi) has long been working for what Joanna Macy calls “the great turning.”  Since 2014, we have been collaborating with a growing community of sisters and brothers in the US and around the world to take steps toward building and nurturing a culture of active nonviolence free from war, poverty, racism and environmental destruction.  Each year since then Campaign Nonviolence has been growing—by organizing Nonviolent Cities, by facilitating trainings and workshops, by publishing books on nonviolence, by encouraging the Catholic Church to spread nonviolence (in our work with Pax Christi International’s Catholic Nonviolence Initiative), and by mobilizing nonviolent actions for a week each September, anchored by the International Day of Peace. (This year, the Campaign Action Week will take place September 19-27.)

In all of this, we have been preparing for a turning point.  Maybe it is here.

This all depends on our choice.

On the Threshold?

We can’t predict what the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will be.  Perhaps, after it passes, we will resume the life we have always known.  There is some evidence that this is what’s happening in China, where the lessening of the coronavirus spread has seen a return to pre-COVID-19 fossil fuel consumption levels.

At the same time, there is the potential for a long-term shift.  In spite of rampant nationalistic tendencies, this disease underscores the inextricable interconnectedness of planet earth. We are all literally in this together, and that togetherness does not stop at national borders.  The healing the earth’s population in the face of this global infection ultimately will hinge on the care for all, not for some. Just as humanity began to reset its self-understanding after Apollo 8’s “earthrise” photo was beamed home in 1968—a startling image that helped us “get” that we are one borderless planet, suspended in the darkness, together—so COVID-19 shocks us into an even deeper awareness: whatever threatens one threatens all.  Our survival depends on one another.  Or, to put it positively, we are being beckoned to, once and for all, outgrow our limiting conceptions of self and nation.  Our full flourishing hinges on transcending the confining cultural and social operating systems that exclude, demonize, and reject. 

"Whatever the outcome, the experience of this current pandemic is likely a rehearsal for the summoning of global resolve to, once and for all, tackle the series of grave 'epidemics' that are mutating and growing all around us."

COVID-19 has deepened our understanding of the Apollo 8 image: we see a planet wounded and needy, one community of communities in need of healing, compassion, and transformation, a sacred reality calling us to the nonviolent turn. Violence will not heal this brokenness and pain. Only nonviolence—purified of violence at its very roots, as Sr, Nancy Shreck, OSF has put it—can relieve this suffering in its comprehensiveness.

Whatever the outcome, the experience of this current pandemic is likely a rehearsal for the summoning of global resolve to, once and for all, tackle the series of grave “epidemics” that are mutating and growing all around us: the epidemic of economic inequality; the epidemic of racism, sexism and homophobia; the epidemic of nationalism and xenophobia; the epidemic of militarist systems and solutions; and the existential epidemic of planetary collapse.  Our current struggle offers us the gift of both seeing the “big picture” in a new way and the invitation to shift our way of life and being in foundational ways in light of that “big picture.”

It is a vivid and compelling invitation to see anew the indivisible reality of life and, consequently, to join and contribute to the global movement for this cultural and planetary shift.

Steps Forward

The immediate question is: How can we make this choice for a nonviolent shift in the midst of the current chaos?

First, within our own lives.  As one nation after another goes into lockdown in order to interrupt the transmission of COVID-19, more and more of us will be staying put at home.  This is an opportunity to prepare ourselves for taking part in this shift. How? Instead of regarding it as a kind of involuntary imprisonment, perhaps we can envision it as a space for transformation.  In the fourth century, the first monks headed to the deserts of Egypt and Palestine to, as Thomas Merton imagined it, jump ship from the Roman Empire, which had begun to co-opt the Church.  Their life of contemplation and self-confinement was a process of being freed from empire, physically but also spiritually.  They sparked a revolution of consciousness that has rippled down to our own day. 

Similarly, let us use these coming days and weeks to take steps toward a liberation from the domination system and toward a culture of peace and nonviolence.  With intentionality, reflection, prayer and community offline and online, we can take steps to challenge scripts of fear and division and to experience healing and transformation in our lives, our relationships and in the global movement for a world where everyone counts.

"Let us commit ourselves to the dramatic, systemic transformation needed now more than ever. "

In this time of anxiety, let us renew our relationship with our loved ones, even if we are in close quarters.

In this time of dislocation, let us nurture the bonds of connection and solidarity.

In this time of disruption, let us find ways to commit our lives to the healing and well-being of all.

In this time of instability, let us imagine what nonviolent practice we can take up and deepen.

A New Movement is Coming

The greatest social movement in human history is coming.  Each of us is called to join it.  It is a global movement, a movement of movements.  It is learning from the history of movements that has been accelerating over the past century.  It is rooted in the blood and tears of millions who have spent their lives throughout history clamoring for justice, working for peace, laboring for a world that works for everyone.

This movement will not appear by magic.  It requires hard work and “acting our way into thinking.”  It will be deeply nonviolent—saying No to injustice and Yes to the humanity of all, including the humanity of our opponents.

In a curious way, COVID-19 is a strange messenger.  It is calling us resolutely to join this planetary movement that is emerging.

Let us join this all-embracing movement.  We can fill our knapsack for the journey ahead by taking nonviolence trainings online, planning for action in September, imagining how your locality could become a nonviolent city—and entering the mystery of nonviolent healing and transformation.  We can ready for humanity’s next step by finding—online, or off—a small group of 4 or 5 people to reflect, study and plan together, supporting one another as catalysts for transformation, as agents of nonviolent change, as advocates for a renewed and revitalized world.

Let us commit ourselves to the dramatic, systemic transformation needed now more than ever.  The vision, principles and strategies of nonviolent movement-building will strengthen our ability and capacity as agents of nonviolent change for a renewed and revitalized world.

We do not know, yet, how the change which is needed will come about. In these days of darkness and decision, let us open ourselves to the new direction to which we are being called.

Let us choose the way of nonviolent love in this time of coronavirus.

Ken Butigan is director of Pace e Bene, a nonprofit organization fostering nonviolent change through education, community and action. He also teaches peace studies at DePaul University and Loyola University in Chicago.

Mary Oliver on her great love, Molly Malone Cook

Maria Popova so often evokes a grateful response from me in her own online journal, BrainPickings. Here she is again, describing the poet Mary Oliver's long love of her partner Molly Malone Cook, in Oliver's book Our World. Oliver says she drew from Molly, "Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter."

"Our World — part memoir, part deeply moving eulogy to a departed soul mate, part celebration of their love for one another through their individual creative loves. Embraced in Oliver’s poetry and prose, Cook’s photographs reveal the intimate thread that brought these two extraordinary women together — a shared sense of deep aliveness and attention to the world, a devotion to making life’s invisibles visible, and above all a profound kindness to everything that exists, within and without.'

"Oliver — who refers to Cook simply as M. in most of her writings — reflects in the opening essay:

'Though you have known someone for more than forty years, though you have worked with them and lived with them, you do not know everything. I do not know everything — but a few things, which I will tell. M. had will and wit and probably too much empathy for others; she was quick in speech and she did not suffer fools. When you knew her she was unconditionally kind. But also, as our friend the Bishop Tom Shaw said at her memorial service, you had to be brave to get to know her.

[…]

'She was style, and she was an old loneliness that nothing could quite wipe away; she was vastly knowledgeable about people, about books, about the mind’s emotions and the heart’s. She lived sometimes in a black box of memories and unanswerable questions, and then would come out and frolic — be feisty, and bold.'

Oliver writes of the affair Cook had in the late 1950s, shortly before they met:

"She had … an affair that struck deeply; I believe she loved totally and was loved totally. I know about it, and I am glad… This love, and the ensuing emptiness of its ending, changed her. Of such events we are always changed — not necessarily badly, but changed. Who doesn’t know this doesn’t know much."

The following year, Cook met Oliver and they remained together, inseparable, for more than four decades. That encounter — which calls to mind the fateful first meetings that occasioned such iconic literary couples as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas or Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes — took place at Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, where Oliver had landed the day after her high school graduation at the age of seventeen and stayed for several years.

One evening in 1959, when Oliver was twenty-four and Cook thirty-four, the young poet returned to the house and found the photographer sitting at the kitchen table with a friend. She describes their encounter with her signature elegance of unpeeling the mundane to reveal the momentous:

"I took one look and fell, hook and tumble. M. took one look at me, and put on her dark glasses, along with an obvious dose of reserve. She denied this to her dying day, but it was true."

Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?

It turned out that Oliver and Cook, in their regular lives beyond Steepletop, lived right across the street from each other in New York’s East Village. So they began to see one another “little by little,” and so their great love story began.

But perhaps the greatest gift of their union was the way in which they shaped each other’s way of seeing and being with the world — the mutually ennobling dialogue between their two capacities for presence:

"It has frequently been remarked, about my own writings, that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer. It was my pleasure to notice such things, it was a good first step. But later, watching M. when she was taking photographs, and watching her in the darkroom, and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely… I was in my late twenties and early thirties, and well filled with a sense of my own thoughts, my own presence. I was eager to address the world of words — to address the world with words. Then M. instilled in me this deeper level of looking and working, of seeing through the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles. I think of this always when I look at her photographs, the images of vitality, hopefulness, endurance, kindness, vulnerability… We each had our separate natures; yet our ideas, our influences upon each other became a rich and abiding confluence.

[…]

"I don’t think I was wrong to be in the world I was in, it was my salvation from my own darkness. Nor have I ever abandoned it — those early signs that so surely lead toward epiphanies. And yet, and yet, she wanted me to enter more fully into the human world also, and to embrace it, as I believe I have. And what a gift [that she] never expressed impatience with my reports of the natural world, the blue and green happiness I found there. Our love was so tight."

To lose the love of one’s life is something few have dared to live in public — the most memorable such bravery being Joan Didion’s — but Oliver brings to death’s darkness her familiar touch of emboldening light:

"The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don’t say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person’s character shines or glooms."

Oliver ends with a breath-stopping prose poem that brings full-circle her opening reflections on never fully knowing even those nearest to us — a beautiful testament to what another wise woman once wrote: “You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.”

 

THE WHISTLER

All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden
I mean that for more than thirty years she had not
whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was
in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and
she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and
cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war-
bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.

Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she
said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can
still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled
through the house, whistling.

I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and an-
kle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too.
And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin
to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with
for thirty years?

This clear, dark, lovely whistler?

 

Parable — Louise Glück

I confess that I am at a loss on the very first line of this fine parable by Louise Glück: I have failed, at least thus far, to divest myself of worldly goods, as I use my computer to maintain this journal and remain in touch with friends and family near and far; and my closets are full. Since argument is a prevailing presence in this parable, however, I can quibble about whether electronic possessions are really worldly, but I would surely lose that argument. Unless... ah, another opening, perhaps a bit more accessible than the first: is it possible that those particular worldly goods do not distract me by gain and loss? Sometimes — right now, in fact — I do not feel such distraction. But truthfully that case feels a slippery slope. I think I'd do OK on the mountain passes.

On the second question, should we have purpose, I am among the pilgrims more than the wanderers, though I partake of both modes. I am more among those who dream, who seek glimmering among the stones. My journey began long ago,  continues to this day and beyond, I expect until I die and perhaps beyond. I am not stuck in continual debate with anyone (that would be tedious and exhausting). I am glad to be among fellow pilgrims as well as fellow wanderers, though more commonly I tend to wander alone. Truth is both elusive and common, and I treasure it alongside its dearest sibling, that is love. 

 

Parable — Louise Glück

 

First divesting ourselves of worldly goods, as St. Francis teaches,
in order that our souls not be distracted
by gain and loss, and in order also
that our bodies be free to move
easily at the mountain passes, we had then to discuss
whither or where we might travel, with the second question being
should we have a purpose, against which
many of us argued fiercely that such purpose
corresponded to worldly goods, meaning a limitation or constriction,
whereas others said it was by this word we were consecrated
pilgrims rather than wanderers: in our minds, the word translated as
a dream, a something-sought, so that by concentrating we might see it
glimmering among the stones, and not
pass blindly by; each
further issue we debated equally fully, the arguments going back and forth,
so that we grew, some said, less flexible and more resigned,
like soldiers in a useless war. And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,
which in time abated — where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,
and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line
so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.
Also rain, also flooding sometimes, also avalanches, in which
some of us were lost, and periodically we would seem
to have achieved an agreement; our canteens
hoisted upon our shoulders, but always that moment passed, so
(after many years) we were still at that first stage, still
preparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;
we could see this in one another; we had changed although
we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling
from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed
in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose
believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free
in order to encounter truth, felt it had been revealed.

 

Glück, Louise. Faithful and Virtuous Night: Poems (pp. 3-4). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

 

Fierce with Reality

Florida Scott-Maxwell (1883-1979), whose striking thought Parker Palmer uses as an epigraph in the short essay below, was a remarkable woman, a
young actress who moved from New York City to Baillieston House, a 17th century home east of Glasgow, Scotland, when she married John Maxwell Scott-Maxwell in 1910. In addition to raising four children, she worked for women's suffrage and as a playwright. Later, living in London as a divorcee, she studied analytical psychology in Zurich with Carl Jung, and afterwards practiced as an analytical psychologist in both England and Scotland. She is best known for The Measure of My Days, an autobiography begun as a private journal about the experience of growing old, published when she was 82. Deeply engaging and insightful, sometimes stark, often with quiet humor, something of the book's spirit can be gleaned from these six passages:

• “I was astonished to find how intensely one lives in one’s eighties. The last years seemed a culmination and by concentrating on them one became more truly oneself. Though old, I felt full of potential life. It pulsed in me even as I was conscious of shrinking into a final form which it was my task and stimulus to complete.
• "Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting, and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age. To my own surprise I burst out with hot conviction. Only a few years ago I enjoyed my tranquility; now I am so disturbed by the outer world and by human quality in general that I want to put things right, as though I still owed a debt to life. I must calm down. I am far too frail to indulge in moral fervor.
• "Life has changed me greatly, but it has also left me practically the same. I cannot spell, I am over-critical, egocentric and vulnerable. I cannot be simple. In my effort to be clear I become complicated. I know my faults so well that I pay them small heed. They are stronger than I am. They are me.
• "Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition.
• "The crucial task of old age is balance: keeping just well enough, just brave enough, just gay and interested and starkly honest enough to remain a sentient human being.
• "It is not easy to be sure that being yourself is worth the trouble, but we do know it is our sacred duty."
  
  

 

Fierce with Reality: Living and Loving Well to the End

 

by Parker J. Palmer

 

"You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done…you are fierce with reality."

—Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days 

 

Florida Scott-Maxwell was 85 when she wrote those words. I first read them when I was half her age, but I knew she was speaking directly to me.

At age 43, I was succeeding and failing as a husband and a father on a daily basis, had done battle with the evils of racism as a community organizer while ignoring the cocoon of white privilege that protected me from them, was alternately laid low and energized by the rejections I received en route to becoming a writer, and had drowned and then surfaced from my first deep-sea dive into clinical depression. I was, in short, a reasonably normal person: a complex and conflicted soul who yearned to be whole.

I wanted a life of personal fulfillment that served others well — a life of love of self and others — and I knew that getting there would require me to be “fierce with reality.” But I devoutly wished for an easier path than the one Scott-Maxwell recommends! At age 43, I didn’t have the courage required to “truly possess all [I had] been and done.”

Today, at age 76, I know Scott-Maxwell got it right: there are no short-cuts to wholeness. The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we’ve shown ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, “I am all of the above.” If we can’t embrace the whole of who we are — embrace it with transformative love — we’ll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and flee from the world’s complex mix of shadow and light.

Of course, naming, claiming, and loving the whole of who we are is easier said than done: honest self-examination is a well-known source of human misery! Yet the alternative is more painful still. In Erik Erikson’s scheme of adult development, he argues that if we can’t accept all that we’ve been and done, we’ll age away from “integrity” toward “despair.”

As I look around at my age-mates in late midlife and beyond, it’s not hard to witness despair and its sad consequences. Some consequences are personal, as people who try to deny their inner darkness carry resentment in their hearts and leave it in their wake. Some consequences are political, as people who fear whatever feels alien in themselves project their fear on “the alien other” — while shameless politicians cynically manipulate that fear to play the divide-and-conquer game.

But if we are willing to move through the pain of honest self-examination toward the grace of compassionate self-acceptance, the rewards are great. When we can say, “I am all of the above,” we become more at ease in our own skin, more at home on the face of this richly diverse earth, more accepting of others who are no more or less flawed than we are, and better able to live as life-givers to the end of our days.

How can we learn to embrace with love the whole of who we are — a task that need not and should not await our elder years? Of course there are tried-and-true aids such as meditation, journaling and therapy, all of which have been helpful to me. Here are three others that I’ve found equally helpful, sometimes even more:

Spend as much time as you can experiencing the natural world. Nature constantly reminds me that everything has a place, that nothing need be excluded. That “mess” on the forest floor — like the mess in my own life — has an amazing harmony and hidden wholeness to it.

 Move toward, not away from, whatever you fear. I try to remember the advice I was given on an Outward Bound course when I froze with fear on a rock face in the middle of a one-hundred-foot rappel: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!” If, for example, you fear diversity, get to know “the other’s” story face-to-face and watch your fear shrink as your empathy expands.

Reach out to the younger generation—not to advise them but to learn from them, gain energy from them, and support them on their way. That’s a life-enhancing act that Erik Erikson called “generativity,” an alternative to the “stagnation” of age that sooner or later leads to despair.

 Wholeness is the goal, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. The sooner we understand this, the better. It’s a truth that can set us free to live well, to love well and, in the end, to die well.

I can’t think of a sadder way to die than with the knowledge that I never showed up in this world as who I really am. I can’t think of a more graced way to die than with the knowledge that, as best I knew how, I showed up here as my true self — able to engage the world in freedom and with love because I had become fierce with reality.

 Here’s a May Sarton poem about the journey toward becoming fierce with reality — and how often being “dissolved and shaken” is required to live into the joy of becoming one’s true self:

 

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song;
Made so and rooted so by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

 

                ~ May Sarton ~

 

T.S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton," the first of his magisterial Four Quartets

 

 

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

 

II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

 

III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
Wtih slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plentitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Dessication of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

 

IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
the black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

 

V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always —
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

 

Two dark stories from this morning's N.Y. Times summary of the news

Quotation of the day

“There’s a massive amount of carbon that’s in the ground, that’s built up slowly over thousands and thousands of years. It’s been in a freezer, and that freezer is now turning into a refrigerator.”

— Max Holmes, deputy director of the Woods Hole Research Center, on the thawing permafrost in Alaska.

Back Story

We often go back in history for our back stories, but today we’re going way back.

Mount Vesuvius erupted on this day in 79 A.D., burying the Roman town of Pompeii under a heap of ash, rocks and pumice.

Casts of victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii, Italy. Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

Most of what we know of the event we owe to Pliny the Younger, who described it in a letter to the Roman historian Tacitus. According to the account, in the early afternoon that day, Pliny’s mother told his uncle, Pliny the Elder, that “a cloud which appeared of a very unusual size and shape” was approaching.

“I cannot give you a more exact description,” Pliny the Younger wrote of the cloud, “than by likening it to that of a pine tree, for it shot up to a great height in the form of a very tall trunk, which spread itself out at the top into a sort of branches.”

Pliny the Elder set off by boat to explore the cloud’s source, encountering “black pieces of burning rock” along the way. Yet he continued onward, reportedly telling his pilot, “Fortune favors the bold.”

The maxim, however — at least that day — proved false.

“He suffocated,” his nephew wrote, “by some gross and noxious vapor.”

 

"Here, take it, it's yours." William Stafford's poem, "The Gift"

Waiting, praying, breathing without pain,

It is called happiness.

Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours."

 

The Gift

Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.

It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come − maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.

It's a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you've been and how people
and weather treated you. It's a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours."


by William Stafford, from My Name is William Tell, 1992

 

A koan from The Book of Serenity − on sanctuary

One day the Buddha was strolling along with his congregation when he pointed to the ground and said, "This spot is a good place to build a sanctuary." Indra [Hindu god] took a blade of grass and stuck it into the ground and said, "The sanctuary is built." The Buddha smiled.

 

As my teacher Lee deBarros writes, koans bring up living questions −

 

What is a sanctuary? Is it a place of personal refuge? Is it a community? A temple? A church? What is your sanctuary? When do we need or want a sanctuary? Is there actually a sanctuary? How does it relate to practice?

As we discussed sanctuary in our lives, members of our meditation group or sangha shared a manifold experience of sanctuary: our twice-weekly sangha itself, its safe, companionable and nourishing silence, and our care for each other when one of us is suffering or ill or departs this earth; The Redwoods, the community in which we live and share diverse experiences; our childhood homes and the homes of our grown children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren; the larger enveloping mystery that is often known as the presence of God in and among us.

I recalled vividly my life as a child, when my parents would come into my room to listen to me say my prayers. I told them that in the prayer that begins, "Now I lay me down to sleep," I was frightened and confused by the lines, "If I should die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul to take." So my father suggested I substitute the lines, "Guard and keep me through the night / and wake me with the morning light." Seventy years later I still say that prayer as I ready for sleep, and remain grateful for my father's gift.

 

Life is so astonishing, it leaves very little time for anything else

Emily Dickinson

 

Meditation can be an act of love, a reawakening, not a means to an end.

 

“Don’t meditate to fix yourself, to heal yourself, to improve yourself, to redeem yourself; rather, do it as an act of love."

 

        − from Bob Sharples,  Meditation: Calming the Mind

RECKONINGS - A brief introduction

Reckonings is a journal focused on human and cultural change, and justice in its range of interactive dimensions - personal, social, political, economic, environmental, poetic.

Attention to such themes is often expository and analytic. But true reckonings include imagery and story, drama, dance, poetry and song, the world of our dreams, shadow as well as light. Wall off or ignore any of these and our exploration of lives and their character risks desiccation and superficiality.

The pages of Reckonings, accumulated over 20 years now, are diverse but not scattershot. The consciousness that informs them is still relatively coherent, still built upon the twin aspirations of integrity and love. A useful reader's or browser's guide might be the archives and categories listed on the right side of this first page and the search box in the same location.

Photo: Blueberries and Granite, by John R. Boettiger (2001)

Now, in 2020 and in northern California, Reckonings is about as old or young as the century in which it abides. I started writing and editing when my wife and I were living deep in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Figuratively and literally I was exploring, breaking and mending wilderness trails. That remains my calling. My vehicles are still words and images, poetry, fiction, memoir, biography, and photography, in addition to shovel, hoe and mattock. (Truthfully, the last three are now a domain of personal history rather than current practice; but I've added meditation in the last eight years, for which I'm deeply grateful.)

My formal training was first that of a political scientist, then a psychologist, but I've never found a way to practice those disciplines straightforwardly. I'm always down a ravine or up a mountain or wandering in a marsh, hyphenated. I've been fortunate in my diverse teachers, sources of inspiration, grace and clarity, sometimes taxing, always enriching. Martin Buber, my mentors Erik and Joan Erikson, my grandparents Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, my poet friend Richard O. Moore, Stanley Kunitz, Joanna Macy, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Alan Jones, Gil Bailie, my wise age-mate Parker Palmer, William Stafford, Jane Kenyon, Wendell Berry, poet and Buddhist priest and scholar Norman Fischer, my sister Ellie and brother Curtis, my parents Anna and John, my children Adam, Sara, Joshua and Paul,  my seven grandchildren and two great-granddaughters.

The more the years, the more I feel blessed.

Justice, hope and history: so inevitably issues of

• meaning and value,
• good and evil,
• sacred and profane,
• body, mind, heart and soul as one integrated, systemic whole,
• the evolution of human consciousness through a lifetime and from one generation to another, to the seventh generation,
• the character and health of our relationships with each other, our roots in family, community and place,
• our membership in the natural world of which we are an interactive part, and for which we bear unique responsibility.

The word reckonings is rich in implication, suggesting the most careful regard, seeking true direction, and (as in "day of reckoning") the consequences of our lives and the mysteries of forgiveness. Our tools and the ways of our work are those common to writer and artist: attention, contemplation, patience, persistence, imagination, conversation, crafting one's learning with as much clarity, truth, and grace as may be found or given.

The subtitle and theme of Reckonings are drawn from poet Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles' play Philoctetes. It has become an obscure play, but Heaney's version, while little performed, has rescued it for continued reflection, and I've written about it here. (See the post "Wounding and Cure.")

The pages of Reckonings change frequently, more in keeping with kairos (the right time, the opportune time) than chronos (chronological or sequential time).* Another useful word, sometimes fortuitously applicable, is the Greek hôrâ, similar to kairos, the seasonal time, the beautiful time when everything comes together. The pages of Reckonings are linear or chronological in the sense that one follows another from day to day, but it may just as well be said that they are circular or elliptical or spiral. Subjects appear, metamorphose, fade, reappear in response to discovery, learning and revision; and in response to that which most needs attention -- the love and wisdom, the neglect and cruelty of those who bear responsibility for the lives of others, ways the first can be nourished, the second transformed and redeemed.

Comments, conversation, sharing, subscription: I welcome communication with anyone who feels a kinship with one or more of the themes of Reckonings. Offer comments on individual posts, or write me directly,

[email protected]

Click on "Comments" at the end of any post to leave a comment; I'll try to understand and respond. Click on "ShareThis" to share a post with friends via email or networking sites. Subscribe to Reckonings by clicking one of the subscription options in the column on the right. (Your email address will never be shared with anyone.)

_______________________

* The contrast of chronos and kairos has been well described by my friend Gil Bailie: "In contrast to the word chronos – which means an interval of time, time as chronology, a sequence of identical units of time – kairos refers to a qualitative, not quantitative, experience of time. It implies a moment pregnant with consequences and demanding a decision, and, more importantly, the present moment, 'the present time.'" 

Attention to such themes is often expository and analytic. But true reckonings include imagery and story, drama, dance, poetry and song, the world of our dreams, shadow as well as light. Wall off or ignore any of these and our exploration of lives and their character risks desiccation and superficiality.

The pages of Reckonings, accumulated over 20 years now, are diverse but not scattershot. The consciousness that informs them is still relatively coherent, still built upon the twin aspirations of integrity and love. A useful reader's or browser's guide might be the archives and categories listed on the right side of this first page and the search box in the same location.

Photo: Blueberries and Granite, by John R. Boettiger (2001)

Now, in 2020 and in northern California, Reckonings is about as old or young as the century in which it abides. I started writing and editing when my wife and I were living deep in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Figuratively and literally I was exploring, breaking and mending wilderness trails. That remains my calling. My vehicles are still words and images, poetry, fiction, memoir, biography, and photography, in addition to shovel, hoe and mattock. (Truthfully, the last three are now a domain of personal history rather than current practice; but I've added meditation in the last eight years, for which I'm deeply grateful.)

My formal training was first that of a political scientist, then a psychologist, but I've never found a way to practice those disciplines straightforwardly. I'm always down a ravine or up a mountain or wandering in a marsh, hyphenated. I've been fortunate in my diverse teachers, sources of inspiration, grace and clarity, sometimes taxing, always enriching. Martin Buber, my mentors Erik and Joan Erikson, my grandparents Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, my poet friend Richard O. Moore, Stanley Kunitz, Joanna Macy, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Alan Jones, Gil Bailie, my wise age-mate Parker Palmer, William Stafford, Jane Kenyon, Wendell Berry, poet and Buddhist priest and scholar Norman Fischer, my sister Ellie and brother Curtis, my parents Anna and John, my children Adam, Sara, Joshua and Paul,  my seven grandchildren and two great-granddaughters.

The more the years, the more I feel blessed.

Justice, hope and history: so inevitably issues of

• meaning and value,
• good and evil,
• sacred and profane,
• body, mind, heart and soul as one integrated, systemic whole,
• the evolution of human consciousness through a lifetime and from one generation to another, to the seventh generation,
• the character and health of our relationships with each other, our roots in family, community and place,
• our membership in the natural world of which we are an interactive part, and for which we bear unique responsibility.

The word reckonings is rich in implication, suggesting the most careful regard, seeking true direction, and (as in "day of reckoning") the consequences of our lives and the mysteries of forgiveness. Our tools and the ways of our work are those common to writer and artist: attention, contemplation, patience, persistence, imagination, conversation, crafting one's learning with as much clarity, truth, and grace as may be found or given.

The subtitle and theme of Reckonings are drawn from poet Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles' play Philoctetes. It has become an obscure play, but Heaney's version, while little performed, has rescued it for continued reflection, and I've written about it here. (See the post "Wounding and Cure.")

The pages of Reckonings change frequently, more in keeping with kairos (the right time, the opportune time) than chronos (chronological or sequential time).* Another useful word, sometimes fortuitously applicable, is the Greek hôrâ, similar to kairos, the seasonal time, the beautiful time when everything comes together. The pages of Reckonings are linear or chronological in the sense that one follows another from day to day, but it may just as well be said that they are circular or elliptical or spiral. Subjects appear, metamorphose, fade, reappear in response to discovery, learning and revision; and in response to that which most needs attention -- the love and wisdom, the neglect and cruelty of those who bear responsibility for the lives of others, ways the first can be nourished, the second transformed and redeemed.

Comments, conversation, sharing, subscription: I welcome communication with anyone who feels a kinship with one or more of the themes of Reckonings. Offer comments on individual posts, or write me directly,

[email protected]

Click on "Comments" at the end of any post to leave a comment; I'll try to understand and respond. Click on "ShareThis" to share a post with friends via email or networking sites. Subscribe to Reckonings by clicking one of the subscription options in the column on the right. (Your email address will never be shared with anyone.)

_______________________

* The contrast of chronos and kairos has been well described by my friend Gil Bailie: "In contrast to the word chronos – which means an interval of time, time as chronology, a sequence of identical units of time – kairos refers to a qualitative, not quantitative, experience of time. It implies a moment pregnant with consequences and demanding a decision, and, more importantly, the present moment, 'the present time.'" 

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

Longfellow's lovely, lyrical poem evokes a moving time of day−dusk, nightfall, twilight, the coming of darkness−as well as the finitude of our lives, in contrast to the ongoing, almost imperceptible movement of the rising and falling tides. A curlew is a large shorebird with a long curved beak perfectly suited to its natural nourishment: the invertebrates under the surface of the sand. A hostler, of course, cares for horses, most often at an inn.

 

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
     And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
     And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
     And the tide rises, the tide falls.

 

                − Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

Pi Day

Just to convey what an enlightened community I live in, at 9:26:53 this morning a group of us, led by our resident mathematician, gathered in the library to celebrate Pi Day, that singular moment in historical time, recurring every 100 years, at which the time-and-date corresponds exactly to the first 10 digits of Pi, or π —

π = 3.141592653.... *

3/14/15 9:26:53

There were, of course, celebrations of Pi Day all over the world; I know at many universities and scientific organizations, as noted by the NY Times and surely other publications. I trust most of them, like ours, consumed pies as well. 

* Pi, I'd forgotten and relearned this morning, is the number derived by dividing the length of the circumference of a circle by the length of its diameter, so π = C/D. 

Tomorrow Is In Our Hands

 

 

 

 

The 2014 Women’s Congress, to be held November 6-9 in Minneapolis, will summon the untapped power of women to ensure a clean and healthy planet for future generations.

Visionary thinkers and activists such as psychologist Mary Pipher, biologist Sandra Steingraber, author Riane Eisler, eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, poet Rachel Bagby and urban organizer Kimberly Wasserman are among the participants offering big-picture strategies and proven social-change tools for making a difference in the world.

The Congress, following up on a successful 2012 event, was conceived by Carolyn Raffensperger, who is interviewed below. “This is not the equal rights of the emerging, early feminism,” she explains. “This is the next stage of claiming responsibility.”

Ann Manning, Initiative Director of Future First, the organization sponsoring the Congress, notes, “One of the key goals of the 2014 Women’s Congress is to see how the constellation of environmental problems is connected to our current economic structures. We can change this by making those connections more visible to people.”

This fits squarely with the work of the commons, says OTC co-director Julie Ristau, one of the Congress organizers and a member of the leadership team. “Looking out for future generations is the core of a commons way of life, and our best, most practical hope.”

Indeed, the “Centrality of the Commons” is one of six key principles to be embraced guiding the Congress: “We recognize that we owe--and future generations deserve--a healthy commons, passed down from each generation to the next. We must take care of the things we share, and we share a lot.”

One of the unique characteristics of our age is that we are suffering Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome-- we know what’s coming. We are witnessing the destruction of the environment for our grandchildren.

“We are all members of a great human orchestra and now it is time to play the Save the World Symphony. You do not have to play a solo, but you do have to know what instrument you hold and find your place in the score.”

                           - Sandra Steingraber, biologist, author, and cancer survivor.

“We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.”
                                                        - Paul Hawken

 

Carolyn Raffensperger, an environmental lawyer and public health advocate,

is one of the America’s leading proponents of the Precautionary Principle. This common sense idea states that when an action is suspected of causing harm to people or the environment, the burden of proof is to demonstrate the action is not harmful before moving forward. The European Union has adopted the Precautionary Principle as a statutory requirement in some areas of law.

Raffensperger, executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN), coined the phrase “ecological medicine” to describe the large role that the natural world plays in health and healing. The focus of her work now is developing new models for governance based on the principles of precaution, the commons and ecological integrity.

These goals spurred her to initiate The Women’s Congress for Future Generations in 2012, which is followed the 2014 Women’s Congress to be held in Minneapolis November 6-9. It is sponsored by Future First, which invites both men and women to stand together to ensure a clean and healthy world for future generations.

On the Commons: What is the purpose of the 2014 Women’s Congress, and why are you holding it at this particular time?

Carolyn Raffensperger: Women’s voices are relatively absent in the political arena, especially in the realms of climate change, sustainability and agriculture. Many women are doing wonderful work yet they have not been the major spokespeople. But today women are rising up to take leadership. Women bring life into the world, and we have a responsibility to make sure the environment is healthy and whole.

The Congress is a place for women to talk about that responsibility and to articulate new places for women’s voices in politics. We invite men to participate too, and we invite them to share the unique responsibilities of this work. This is not meant to leave men out-- but to shift the traditional roles.

In thinking about the kind of world we want to live in, we are summoning our wild and woolly imaginations about governance in our society. Crowdsourcing social innovation is part of what the Congress is about. And one of our examples here is a man-- Benjamin Franklin. He introduced the first public library and created the first fire department. No one had ever heard of such things at that time. Somebody had to have the idea and know how to do it.

We are asking people to bring their full selves to the Congress, not to hide away their hearts and act only out of their brains. This is a place to be happy, full of grief and pissed off as we choose wise ways forward.

One of the unique characteristics of our age is that we are suffering Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome-- we know what’s coming. We are witnessing the destruction of the environment for our grandchildren. Some of us wake up at 3 in the morning and wonder what will become of this world. If we are all alone in our fear and our anxiety, we are in deep trouble.

There’s a real need for people to come together and choose the future we want for ourselves and future generations. There are solutions we can reach toward: social shifts, cultural shifts, working together. But the message we hear most places is that it’s all up to us individually-- go change the lightbulbs you are using.

On the Commons: How does the Congress fit in with work of the climate justice movement, the feminist movement and the commons movement?

Carolyn Raffensperger: The political realm is often so different from how people live their lives. I live in Iowa, and grew up in the Midwest, where people often help out their neighbors by shoveling each other’s walks. On a practical level, social capital is built out of that kind of sharing. That’s one basis to think about a different future.

This can lead to a rising up of women, who often are in charge of the everyday matters in the household, to challenge the structural injustice in society-- including the absence of women’s voices in political decisionmaking, which means we have fewer solutions available.

Look at what people are dealing with in their personal lives. The increase of autism and breast cancer, as just two examples. Women do the majority of the caregiving on these and other diseases caused by a declining environment, but they have no seat at the table where solutions are being decided. And that’s one reason why for so long the focus the economy and jobs are seen as what matters. Conversation about everything else is pushed away.

 On the Commons: What are your hopes for what comes out of the Women’s Congress?

Carolyn Raffensperger: Women around the world are saying enough is enough. We need to discuss the health of our children. We care about clean water, and what’s in the air our kid’s breath. We’ve lost sight of what the economy is really about. We’re told money is security. But the commons is the real foundation of our economy and our security.

This is really about a new set of essential rights--including the idea that future generations have rights. Today the rights of private property largely define our laws and our culture. The commons changes this picture from the rights of individuals to the rights of a group of people-- the rights of a community. A new goal would be to develop basic rights around sharing. This would mean the purpose of government is to protect commonwealth and common health for present and future generations.

The Women’s Congress is predicated on women’s recognition of the dangers to future generations. And we are withdrawing our consent from this situation. We are serious about that--consent is the basis of governance.

So what do we do? We’d like to see all 50 states to enact constitutional amendments to their constitutions that recognize the rights of future generations. That’s the kind of ideas that will come out of the Women’s Congress. I think we’ll all be surprised by the great ideas that have not been thought of until now.

 

KEY CONCEPTS
These are the principles on which we stand.

1. GUARDIANSHIP OF FUTURE GENERATIONS
Future generations have the right to an ecologically healthy environment, a habitable earth where they can thrive. We recognize our responsibility to tend and nurture that healthy environment. We can all become guardians and participate in decisions that impact future generations. We can designate legal guardians to review regulations for their impact on the future, and to audit the commons under our jurisdiction.

2. CENTRALITY OF THE COMMONS
The commons are the environment we all share: air, water, soil, climate, animals, insects, and human culture of music, art, language, dance, and more. We recognize that we owe—and future generations deserve—a healthy commons, passed down from each generation to the next. We must take care of the things we share, and we share a lot. A key role of government is to serve as the trustee or guardian of the common wealth and common health.

3. THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE
Our planet’s future is uncertain. We recognize our responsibility to prevent harm, if possible–to heed early warnings; this is a statement of ethics. As we identify practices that are harmful to our planet, endangering our future, we must hold everyone accountable for their actions today: governments, businesses, communities, and individuals.

4. SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIES
Our planet is a self-sustaining ecosystem and we are part of it. We recognize that we must not take more from the Earth than it can regenerate, or put more into it than it can restore.

5. FREE, PRIOR, AND INFORMED CONSENT
Communities, like individuals, have the right to autonomy and self-determination, especially concerning decisions and actions affecting our commons: i.e., our air, water, soil, and other natural resources. We recognize that communities have the right and responsibility to refuse actions that may damage their environment. We recognize that we can, and must, insist that informed consent of everyone affected is obtained before any action is taken.

6. WITHDRAWING CONSENT
We can withdraw our consent from decisions and actions that threaten and damage the future of our planet. We recognize our responsibility to withdraw our consent from a way of life that endangers our planet’s future. We recognize that when we—the affected, the governed—join together and withdraw our consent from corporate or government actions and practices, those who govern and conduct business have an obligation to respond.

 

See the Declaration of the Rights Held by Future Generations.

 

 

 

Nursery School on Mercer Island, WA, 1943

 

John Roosevelt Boettiger, the grandson of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is the 4-year-old blond-haired boy pictured on the far right in 1943. Boettiger’s parents, John and Anna, resided on the North end at that time. Don Gulliford, a longtime Mercer Island resident, bottom left, remembers attending the Emmanuel Church Nursery School in the old Guild Hall.

“Johnny pulled me out of ‘class’ (we shared a desk) and out we went to meet his grandfather in a snow storm. When Winston Churchill said meeting FDR for the first time was like your first glass of champagne ... he was 100 percent right,” Gulliford said.

by Mercer Island Reporter Staff

Jorge Luis Borges, Susan Sontag, Maria Popova —

Maria Popova, a fine writer and proprietor of the online journal, Brain Pickings, recently wrote about a letter Susan Sontag addressed to Jorge Luis Borges, and an essay Sontag wrote about Borges after his death. Collectively they are powerful literary statements — and resonant of psyche and spirit — expressive, in Sontag's phrase, of “serenity and transcendence of self.”

Jorge Luis Borges and Susan Sontag

Popova begins by introducing the circumstances —

 

"In October of 1982, 83-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, who at that point had been blind for nearly 30 years, gathered sixty of his closest friends and admirers at a special dinner in New York. Susan Sontag was there. Speaking to a reporter covering the event, she captured the enormity of Borges’s spirit and significance with her signature eloquent precision, saying:“There is no writer living today who matters more to other writers than Borges. Many people would say he is the greatest living writer … Very few writers of today have not learned from him or imitated him.”

"Borges died four years later.

"On the 10th anniversary of his death, Sontag revisited her admiration for his work and the enormity of his cultural legacy in a short and beautiful essay titled“Letter to Borges,” penned on June 13, 1996, and included in her 2001 collection, Where the Stress Falls: Essays.

"Sontag begins the letter, the proposition of which she deems not “too odd” since Borges’s literature has always been 'placed under the sign of eternity,' with a sublime paean to his genius and humility:

You were very much the product of your time, your culture, and yet you knew how to transcend your time, your culture, in ways that seem quite magical. This had something to do with the openness and generosity of your attention. You were the least egocentric, the most transparent of writers, as well as the most artful. It also had something to do with a natural purity of spirit. 

You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s. The ordinary ideas of past, present, and future seemed banal under your gaze. You liked to say that every moment of time contains the past and the future, quoting (as I remember) the poet Browning, who wrote something like “the present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.” That, of course, was part of your modesty: your taste for finding your ideas in the ideas of other writers.

 The serenity and the transcendence of self that you found are to me exemplary. You showed that it is not necessary to be unhappy, even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is. Somewhere you said that a writer — delicately you added: all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. (You were speaking of your blindness.)

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.

I’m sorry to have to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species. By books, I also mean the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects. Soon, we are told, we will call up on “bookscreens” any “text” on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, “interact” with it. When books become “texts” that we “interact” with according to criteria of utility, the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality. This is the glorious future being created, and promised to us, as something more “democratic.” Of course, it means nothing less than the death of inwardness — and of the book.

"Sontag signs off by tying the two — the beauty of Borges and the beauty of books — back together with her signature blend of deeply personal reflection and universally resonant insight:

 

Dear Borges, please understand that it gives me no satisfaction to complain. But to whom could such complaints about the fate of books— of reading itself— be better addressed than to you? (Borges, it’s ten years!) All I mean to say is that we miss you. I miss you. You continue to make a difference. The era we are entering now, this twenty-first century, will test the soul in new ways. But, you can be sure, some of us are not going to abandon the Great Library. And you will continue to be our patron and our hero.

 

Editor's note: simply a suggestion. Read it again. Then read Borges, his poems, his stories, his essays. Most of them, thankfully, are available in English, primarily in three companion books in the same format, Collected Fictions, Selected Poems, and Selected Non-Fictions. We are fortunate that the work of Borges has drawn able translators, Robert Fitzgerald, Stephen Kessler, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, John Updike.

Meditation

I meditate, once a week in a group with a fine teacher, and every day in the early morning and early evening, dawn and dusk, those two times I have always thought magic and not to be missed.

The religious traditions of West and East recognize these as sacred time, times of prayer, the fading of dark and the coming of light, sunrise; the fading of light at end of day, sunset, homecoming, the hearth where we tell and listen to stories.

Frederick Buechner, in the following passage, draws a distinction between diffused and focused consciousness, and identifies the latter with his experience of meditation. In my own experience, meditation draws upon both kinds of consciousness, or perhaps better said, upon a range of ways of being in the world. I do enjoy Buechner's likening the mind to a balloon, and the experience of meditation is often as he describes — oneness, pervasive lovingkindness, no watcher, no watched,  all subject, no object. There is only a rose, a fire, and then "the fire and the rose are one."

 

 

 

 

 

Ultimately there is only one, called by many names and none. T.S. Eliot, at the end of his masterpiece, Four Quartets,

Quick now, here, now, always—

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

 

 

Meditation

When not focusing on anything in particular, the mind skitters around mindlessly among whatever thoughts happen to present themselves. To think is to direct the mind in a more or less systematic way along a specific sequence of thoughts toward a specific end. To meditate is to open the mind to a single thought until it fills the mind so completely that there is no room left for anything else. If you compare the mind to a balloon, meditation as a religious technique is the process of inflating it with a single thought to the point where the balloon finally bursts and there is no longer even the thinnest skin between what is inside it and what is outside it. The thinker and the thought become one in much the same way that if you concentrate long enough on watching a fire burn, after a while the distinction between you as the one that is watching and the fire as the one that is being watched disappears, and you yourself burst into flames.

Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations

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All Saints

Shall we turn back the clock on aging?

Do I speak of the Fountain of Youth, for whose elusiveness we should all be deeply grateful? Of Mircea Eliade's myth of eternal return? (Imagine that, if you will: a merry-go round in Dante's Inferno.) Of our culture's pervasive suggestions that aging well is aging less? (Think "84 years young," or simply "less is more.") Of the fact that science marches on? (We live 40 years longer than we would have in 1880, when the first extensive modern sewage system was built in Memphis, Tennessee, and we would probably have died before we celebrated our 40th birthdays.)

In fact, I'm thinking of none of these. More modestly, I have in mind a colleague's account of an amusing and problematic pair of scholarly articles that appeared this year, one in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the other in the journal of Experimental Gerontology. 

Amusing and problematic are my words. My colleague's words are intriguing and fascinating. I shall allow my colleague to remain anonymous so I can run more freely without trodding on or shooting him in the foot.

---

Turning Back the Clock on Aging 27 October 2013 A fascinating article in this month’s health policy journal Health Affairs concludes that by focusing on diseases one at a time—trying to prevent heart disease or cancer or dementia—we are shooting ourselves in the foot. Instead, we should devote greater effort to delaying the aging process altogether. If we could slow aging, we could in principle delay the onset and progression of all fatal and disabling diseases at once. Instead of surviving your heart attack and then going on to suffer from dementia or cancer, you would remain healthy longer, perhaps dying suddenly, as centenarians have been reported to do. But will delaying aging improve the quality of life? And how likely are we actually to postpone aging any time soon? [Excellent questions.] Using a complicated model known as the Future Elderly Model (FEM), the authors predict what will happen to health care spending, functional status, and life expectancy under various scenarios. [I must pause for a moment to take note: not the Past Elderly Model or the Present Elderly Model; the Future Elderly Model. Perhaps we may breath more easily, at least with our own and our parents' and our grandparents' experience of aging. Our children's and grandchildren' aging? There is the rub.] What they find is that decreasing the incidence of heart disease by 25% between 2010 and 2030 wouldn’t do very much for disability rates or overall mortality. Ditto for decreasing the incidence of cancer the same amount [25%] during the same period. In fact, mortality and disability would be much the same as what we can expect if the incidence of cancer and heart disease stayed the same and all that changed is that the number of older people increased, as we can expect when the baby boomers reach old age. [The baby boomers are nearly upon is. We can almost say, pace Pogo, "We have seen the baby boomers and they are us."] Delaying aging, by contrast, would have a dramatic effect on both length and quality of life. These benefits would come at a considerable cost—by 2060, costs would be $295 billion greater in the delayed aging scenario than in the status quo scenario because all those people who live longer would typically qualify for Medicare and Social Security. The good financial news, however, is that changing the age of eligibility for Medicare from 65 to 68 and raising the age of eligibility for Social Security from 67 to 68 would offset the increased costs. [Ah hah. So that's the good financial news. Perhaps good for those of us already receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits, not so good for those who follow us.] All very compelling. But just what are these potential advances that will allow us to delay aging? The Health Affairs authors cite two scientific papers, one in the Journal of Clinical Investigation and one in a journal called Experimental Gerontology, both published this year. The papers are very intriguing. The two papers focus on the fact that aging cells secrete a variety of nasty substances that cause chronic inflammation, at least in mice. These chemicals are collectively referred to as SASP (senescence-associated secretory phenotype). SASP or the cells that make them are potential targets for drugs to delay the aging process. So far so good. But as one of the authors points out, it’s not known if SASP causes chronic age-related disease in people. Moreover, it’s entirely possible that disrupting the processes that cause aging and death will turn on the processes that promote cancer. Finally, as another of the authors argued, actually carrying out clinical research in humans, testing whether a drug (if we had one) has a beneficial effect, will take an estimated 17 years. This would bring us to 2030, the exact date in the Health Affairs article by which all the good effects of delaying aging are assumed to have already happened, according to their model. If we aren’t likely to have any aging-delaying drug available for clinical use before 2030, we can’t plausibly expect any beneficial effect until well after that time. [Well, that certainly clarifies the issue, doesn't it? Let me see if I got it. We all are living and dying, ill or well, before 2030 and after, with or (preferably) without more "anti-aging" drugs, very likely without turning the clock back on aging. I'm glad of that. I'm sorry for the chronically inflamed mice.] So by all means, let’s go ahead and invest in the basic science of aging. Let’s encourage more clinically trained geriatricians to go into this kind of research (reportedly of 7000 board certified geriatricians, only 12 have research grants from the biological division of the National Institute on Aging). But in the mean time, let’s figure out how best to care for the many frail elders who will be with us for years to come. [Yes indeed. We are all for well trained geriatricians, the more the merrier. May they live long and happy lives, even if they are not engaged in research that will help our generation and future generations live a little longer. Practicing good medicine with their patients is challenge enough.]

Mothers Day

A portrait of my mother hangs in the entry hall outside my apartment. It was painted by Elizabeth Shumatoff, the same artist who was painting my grandfather's portrait — "the unfinished portrait" — when he died in Warm Springs, Georgia, on the 12th of April 1945. The nation stopped in disbelief to grieve the only president most of them had ever known: friend, trusted guide in depression and war, "traitor to his class," hero to "the forgotten man." My mother's hero. She treasured his companionship and love. When my father left for the war, she and I moved to The White House.

My mother Anna was a beautiful and gifted woman. Perhaps like most children, I wanted her more for myself. She lived gracefully in the shadow of two larger-than-life parents. She was proudly a Roosevelt through and through, but never only a Roosevelt. She made a life of her own, modeling that accomplishment for my sister, my brother and me, so that we could do the same for ourselves. I am five years older than she was when she died. In May each year, her birthday and Mother's Day, I remember her, miss her, am grateful for her.

For my earlier published writing about my parents and their families, see A Love in Shadow (NY: W.W. Norton, 1978)

 

Eleanor Roosevelt, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, John Roosevelt Boettiger

Mercer Island, Washington, October 1939

Humpback Whales: The Past and Future of Wildlife

Counting Species: What It Says About the Human Toll on Wildlife

By analyzing mitochondrial DNA, scientists now can make more accurate estimates of the numbers of individual species that existed centuries ago. What does it tell us about our impact on the natural world and about our own future?

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

from Yale Environment 360 (www.e360.yale.edu)

 

There is one good thing to be said about 19th-century whaling. It produced a cache of biological data that is unparalleled for its time. Whaling — largely an American industry then — was a truly global scourge, profitable, destructive, obscene, and bloody beyond belief. Yet when it came to the details of the kill — time, location, species — whaling captains were often punctilious, because being punctilious about the ship’s log has always been part of a captain’s duty.

The same year Moby Dick was published, 1851, the great oceanographer Matthew Maury published a global “Whale Chart,” showing the distribution of whale species based on evidence gathered from whaling logs. Maury’s work has been expanded more than once over the years, culminating in a recent study called “Spatial and Seasonal Distribution of American Whaling and Whales in the Age of Sail.” 

By their nature, though, even the earliest whaling logs can’t answer a vital question: How many whales were there before large-scale whaling began?The answer matters for many reasons. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) uses estimates of pre-whaling populations as a basis for regulating whaling. And knowing the pre-whaling numbers is a way of measuring the recovery of whale species. For instance, there are some 17,700 North Atlantic humpbacks now, well up from the mid-twentieth century when there were probably fewer than a thousand individuals. 

But the real measure of recovery depends not on how few but on how many whales there once were. That number is found nowhere in human records. It is found in the DNA of the whales themselves.

By analyzing mitochondrial DNA, scientists in a recent study have been able to use genetic diversity within the humpback population as a way to estimate pre-whaling numbers. The current IWC estimate of the number of pre-whaling North Atlantic humpbacks, using a model based on whaling records and current sightings, is between 20,000 and 46,000. But the new genetic estimate — based on a far more accurate measure — suggests that the long-term population of North Atlantic humpbacks may have been about 112,000. This means that full recovery for humpbacks is much farther off than expected.

A new genetic study indicates the pre-whaling population of humpbacks was far higher than previously estimated.

For a couple of decades now, scientists have been using mitochondrial DNA (and other genetic tools) to sort out questions of speciation and geographical origin. Who is kin to whom? Where did their ancestors come from? These are fascinating questions. But I’m struck by the question this new study asks: How many were there before we thought to count them?

Get that question lodged in your head, and you begin to realize that the history of our awareness of the biological world around us is a history of numerical indeterminacy. How many species are there? Estimates differ by the millions. How many bison were there on this continent before European contact? There is a wide range of estimates — nearly as wide as the range of estimates for the number of Native Americans living in those days. I somehow find myself wondering just how many dodos there once were.

We are the only species that goes about counting itself. As a result, knowing how many humpbacks there once were seems peculiarly important to us — as a measure of an historical industry, as a guide to conservation management and, not incidentally, as an index of our environmental turpitude and righteousness. It matters too that the language we use to speak about whales has changed utterly. To be convinced of that, you need only dip into Moby Dick, where the whale is more than leviathan: It is the dark beast within nature itself. Melville would not have understood the young Italian woman beside me out in a small boat watching humpbacks in Mozambique last summer. Whenever a fluke appeared or a whale breached, she would croon softly, almost maternally, “La balena! La balena!”

To me, the real point in knowing the mitochondrial estimate of a long-ago whale population is what these numbers say about the world itself. Could the North Atlantic now support a population of 112,000 humpback whales? And what’s the difference between a North Atlantic with 46,000 humpbacks in it — to accept the IWC’s highest estimate — and a North Atlantic with 112,000? After all, each humpback is a multiplier of sorts, an occupier of habitat, a utilizer of food resources, breeding opportunities, migratory routes, etc. To imagine a North Atlantic with the number of humpbacks that their DNA suggests must have existed is to imagine an ocean we would be unable to recognize. It would be a richer place than we can conceive.

I would like to know the mitochondrial numbers for the historical population of every species — how many there were before we thought to count them — just as I would like to have a far more accurate fix on the number of species on this planet. The reason is the most basic kind of biological accounting. A baseline is needed to understand the well-being of any species as well as the well-being of the robust yet infinitely delicate interlacing of life on this planet. Scientists have been working hard to establish such a baseline in our time so we can measure the adequacy of our conservation efforts.

But I’m interested in the baseline well before our time, centuries ago yet well within human history. Think of it as a way of discovering one of the real costs of being who we are — or, if you’re an optimist, who we happen to have been. If you go back 160 years to Matthew Maury’s “Whale Chart,” you get a momentary glimpse of the destruction humans brought to a handful of species within a handful of decades. You could construct a similar, if less accurate chart for other megafauna, like the gray wolf or the grizzly bear or the African elephant. But the real cost of the Anthropocene — the era of our dominance — must be measured against the damage done to the collective web of all species, of which ours is only a single one.

Very soon, scientists will be able to extract even more accurate population data from mitochondrial DNA. Through relict populations, we will get a clearer and clearer glimpse of how richly this earth has been inhabited. I would like to believe that these numbers will help guide us toward ambitious new conservation goals. I hope too that they will carry the shock of revelation.

Noah is supposed to have counted the animals two by two as they got on the ark. We face the risking of counting them two by two as they — and we — get off. 

No Going Back

Wendell Berry's poems have been as familiar to me as any writing I know, as are his stories, novels and essays.

This poem is probably the one I know best, the one I have tried to follow most closely, the one I have failed to follow most often.

No Going Back

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

 

~ Wendell Berry ~

 

 

(Collected Poems)

 

I may finally be getting the hang of it.

For many years I admired those words, but I could not believe that every day I had less reason not to give myself away. I had too little reason to give myself away, I thought. I needed more, not less. If I gave any of myself away there would be nothing left, at least nothing of value.

I did not get the point, which should have been obvious but was not. I took close to a lifetime to learn, and I am still learning.

But a turning has occurred: I am celebrating, not mourning loss, nor spending energy listening for signs of leavetaking. I can say "I'm home" without crossing fingers. That is no small change.

Here is the point:

Whenever I give myself away, I am more, not less. When I am fortunate enough to see even a small fragment of my gift in the hands of another, that also is more, not less. I became a psychologist and a teacher. That too is more.

If I had learned these simple facts earlier in my life, I would have caused less hurt to fewer people. That would have been more as well. Much more. 

But there is no going back.

I have always loved trees. As a boy, before I wanted to be anything else, I loved to climb trees. I wanted to be a forest ranger and an architect, a designer of homes. Now perhaps I am 

a sort of tree,

standing over a grave,

standing also beside and among lives that are precious to me. Those two together are why it is more now in my nature to be generous toward each day

that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.

And in the heart.

Wendell Berry has been a farmer all his life. The town of Port William is fictional, but it is not unlike Port Royal in north central Kentucky, where he was born, where his parents farmed, and their parents, for at least five generations. Wendell Berry thus writes in praise of place, knowing whereof he speaks.. His intimate geography is genuine, and genuinely intimate.

 

 

 

My own geography was spread over a much larger map, hither and yon, moving every two or three years, just as I was beginning to feel at home. Willing and unwilling nomad. As a child I was carried or walked with my mother, aware of my resistance but having no capacity to give it effective expression.

Later I used to say (once or twice when  security or beauty beckoned, I would say out loud) , "They'll carry me out of here boots first."

But they did not. I walked out, on my own feet. If  I returned later, as I sometimes did, there was no one home.

Now there appears to be grace and a sense of place to accompany the yearning. Whether that will last or not, I feel more kinship with Wendell Berry, more personally in touch with his writing, more understanding, especially of his Sabbath poems. I am grateful for that, and it is more.

 

 

 

 

Wendell Berry and his great-grandfather

 

 

 

 

 Wendell Berry at home