Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 167

Looking Forward to Labor Day

by Bill McKibben and Sue Halpern

We used to think we worked pretty hard, but that was before we agreed to help out this week in Andrew’s absence. As Dish guest-bloggers we were each doing three posts a day, and the pressure seemed unrelenting – we’d sigh the minute one went up on the site because it felt like the countdown clock was ticking already. It felt like Lucy on that chocolate assembly line. We’ve always admired this place, but now we’re in a kind of awe: we have no idea how the staff and the proprietor keep it up day after day (and we think Maureen Dowd et al are living the high life – I mean, once every three days? Come on.)

We realized, too, that though we’ve always thought of ourselves as opinionated, there are actually vast swaths of current events on which we have no useful thought at all. Vladimir Putin is clearly a bad guy, but God knows what we should do about him. Ditto Libya. There are other questions, happily, where we can subcontract our opinion-forming to each other: anything to do with computers and internets, for instance, is Sue’s domain, for instance. Ditto butterflies, dogs, and how the brain works. Bill, as you may have noticed, is good on climate change and also climate change. But that leaves a little uncovered; which is why the crowd wisdom that comes with a Dish subscription seems like such a good value.

The one other thing we both know a little about is journalism.

We’ve written for pretty much everyone there is to write for over the years. It’s an honor to have added the Dish to that list: there’s good work going on here, and in quantity. We always knew Andrew was remarkable; now we have a sense of the depth of the bench. Thanks to them for making this week so smooth for us.

Since we’re good Vermonters, we’ll conclude with a small going away present, our very own (and very simple) granola recipe, which we make each and every week. Since soon the days will start to cool, you might want to make it too:

Preheat oven to 250

In big bowl, mix 10 cups oats with a cup or two or even three of chopped pecans and cashews

Mix in 1/2 cup oil, 1 cup maple syrup, and 1/2 cup water

Spread over two lightly greased cookie sheets

Bake 30 minutes, turn over with a spatula

Return to over for 30 minutes and then, when the timer goes off, simply turn off the heat and let it sit in the over for a few hours till it cools

In our experience, if you eat this, you will start to favor single-payer health insurance, despise big oil companies, and hope Bernie Sanders runs for president. It’s our second-favorite morning Dish.

(Photo by Robert S. Donovan)

Lessons From A Long-Time Loner

by Dish Staff

Christopher Knight spent nearly three decades living alone in the woods of Maine, earning him the nickname “the North Pond Hermit,” before getting caught for theft and sentenced to prison. Michael Finkel asked Knight about what he learned from a solitary, hardscrabble existence:

Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: “dilettante.”

True hermits, according to Chris, do not write books, do not have friends, and do not answer questions. I asked why he didn’t at least keep a journal in the woods. Chris scoffed. “I expected to die out there. Who would read my journal? You? I’d rather take it to my grave.” The only reason he was talking to me now, he said, is because he was locked in jail and needed practice interacting with others.

“But you must have thought about things,” I said. “About your life, about the human condition.”

Chris became surprisingly introspective.

“I did examine myself,” he said. “Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”

That was nice. But still, I pressed on, there must have been some grand insight revealed to him in the wild. He returned to silence. Whether he was thinking or fuming or both, I couldn’t tell. Though he did arrive at an answer. I felt like some great mystic was about to reveal the Meaning of Life.

“Get enough sleep.”

He set his jaw in a way that conveyed he wouldn’t be saying more. This is what he’d learned. I accepted it as truth.

(Photo by Flickr user Ctd 2005)

He Worshipped His Way

by Dish Staff

Frank Sinatra discussed his approach to faith in a 1963 interview with Playboy:

Playboy: All right, let’s start with the most basic question there is: Are you a religious man? Do you believe in God?

Sinatra: Well, that’ll do for openers. I think I can sum up my religious feelings in a couple of paragraphs. First: I believe in you and me. I’m like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life—in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God. But I don’t believe in a personal God to whom I look for comfort or for a natural on the next roll of the dice. I’m not unmindful of man’s seeming need for faith; I’m for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. But to me religion is a deeply personal thing in which man and God go it alone together, without the witch doctor in the middle. The witch doctor tries to convince us that we have to ask God for help, to spell out to him what we need, even to bribe him with prayer or cash on the line. Well, I believe that God knows what each of us wants and needs. It’s not necessary for us to make it to church on Sunday to reach Him. You can find Him anyplace. And if that sounds heretical, my source is pretty good: Matthew, Five to Seven, The Sermon on the Mount.

Playboy: You haven’t found any answers for yourself in organized religion?

Sinatra: There are things about organized religion which I resent. Christ is revered as the Prince of Peace, but more blood has been shed in His name than any other figure in history. You show me one step forward in the name of religion and I’ll show you a hundred retrogressions.

Update from a reader:

Kitty Kelly, in “His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra,” claims the interview (questions and answers) was written by Mike Shore, Sinatra’s friend and an executive with Reprise Records; however, Sinatra did sign off on it against the advice of people who feared the effect it may have on his career, so good for Frank. The interview is getting a lot of play on the Internets today – I was initially surprised by (and then suspicious of) Sinatra’s eloquence, but I’ll defer to James Phalen, over at Why Evolution is True, who offered the clearest skeptical eye regarding the interview’s authorship: “Only Steven Pinker (and Hitch before him) speaks (or spoke) in complete paragraphs.”

(Hat Tip: 3QD)

Return To Pangaea

by Dish Staff

Morgan Meis meditates on the symbolic meaning of the Panama Canal, which officially opened 100 years ago this month:

[F]or all this talk of progress and accumulated knowledge of the continents and seas, there is also something prehistoric about the desire to bring all the continents closer together. That’s because they were all together once. … On Pangaea, what we now know as Africa was nestled in the crook between North and South America, almost like a baby. Eurasia was connected to the top of North America. Then, over millions of years, the land mass began to break up, due to motion of the tectonic plates. The continents separated from one another. The oceans filled up the spaces in between. What was one, split into many.

Unknowingly, unconsciously, the engineers of the Panama Canal were acting as agents of the ancient supercontinent of Pangaea. Bring it all back together. Shorten the distances. Heal the wounds, maybe, from the terrible splitting that tore the world out of its oneness hundreds of millions of years ago. That is how it can seem, anyway, when you take the long view, when you look at it from a geological perspective. It is like an old dream of continental unity that we never knew we had. It is like the crust beneath the earth found a way to influence the minds of the men who crawl upon the surface. “Bring us back together.” You can hear it whispered from the cracks and crevices and fault lines that go down into the dark places beneath.

(Image of the Panama Canal as seen from space via Wikimedia Commons)

Poems From The Country Parson

by Dish Staff

Reviewing John Drury’s Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, Mark Jarman traces the distinctiveness of Herbert’s religious vision to his years as a priest in a country parish – a situation quite different from that of his contemporary John Donne:

I don’t think we can ignore this dimension of George Herbert’s career, even as it seems to be the mirror opposite of John Donne’s. Where Herbert forsook the aspiration of a career at court for a life in the country, Donne extricated himself from his country exile and got himself installed in a big urban church. … Herbert got his taste of worldliness at Cambridge, and as the son of his remarkable mother, and the rest from observing and living among and serving the good country people of his parishes. Increasingly, I think it is helpful to understand how George Herbert lived and believed in order to appreciate fully the beauty of his poetry. So much of the poetry acknowledges an ordinary human ambivalence with regard to faith. With John Donne, I recognize something else, something more dramatic, especially in his religious poetry—and that is the lineaments of ambition thrown into relief by apprehension and anxiety about the grace of God and the fear both that he may not be worthy of it and that he may not believe in it. I do not mean to imply that Herbert by contrast is more complacent, but he is more aware of the subtlety of belief, especially in its daily practices and encounters with God.

Recent Dish on Herbert here. We featured his poetry Easter weekend here, here, and here.

(Photo of stained glass depicting Herbert at Saint Andrew’s church in Bemerton, Wiltshire, where he was a rector, by Flickr user Granpic)

The View From Your Window

by Dish Staff

Montefino, Italy, 4.00 pm

Get Your Drone On – In Church!

by Dish Staff

Believe it or not, Pastor Ed Young of Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, thought it would be a great idea to run the above ad in Dallas-area movie theaters earlier this month to publicize a sermon series he was about to start. Matthew Gault offers the cringe-inducing details, expressing disappointment that Young “equates God with a weapon of war”:

Young sermonized drones over three consecutive Sundays in the middle of August at his Grapevine megachurch. Fellowship Church recorded the sermons and simulcast them at its nine satellite locations. Most of the churches are in Texas, a few in Florida and one in far away London. Videos of all three sermons are on YouTube.

The sermons begin with a slick video of a drone flying over a city. A live band plays in the background. A huge model drone looms on stage. Smoke billows from underneath it. Young emerges—a grin on his face—to explain his thinking on killer robots.

“Drones are everywhere,” Young says. “They can see things we never thought possible. Well, God makes a drone seem like a drone doesn’t know a thing.”

Young explains that he first encountered drones while filming a reality TV series. While sitting on the back of a boat, he heard a strange noise and looked up to see a buzzing camera drone belonging to the film crew. “This would be a pretty cool series—drones,” Young says. “Love them or leave them, they’re everywhere. I immediately thought about God.”

Scripture Is Overrated

by Dish Staff

Or so Razib Khan suspects:

[O]n an individual level religious belief and practice does not seem rooted at all in texts. Though one can make broad correspondences and draw arrows of causality, with an understanding at a lower and more fine-grained scale this model has as much validity as Galenic medicine. It captures fragments of reality and presents it before us in a persuasive fashion, but at a deeper level of inspection it fails to explain the basic mechanics of religious belief. …

Like the coffee table book that one proudly displays, the value of scriptures is that is a visible marker and a common point of reference, as opposed to an instruction manual. In Theological Incorrectness the author explores the reality that religious people don’t even seem to believe what they say they believe on a deep level. For example, monotheists and polytheists seem to have the same internal model of the supernatural world, despite their explicit verbal scripts being very different. To put this in another context, many people who espouse views which deny the existence of the supernatural still get “spooked” in a dark cemetery. Why? They are sincere in their belief that there are no ghosts and demons in the dark, but in the deep recesses of their minds reflexive intuitions honed over evolutionary time remain at the ready, alert for any sign of danger in the darkness. Similarly, most religious people may believe sincerely in a glorious afterlife, but when there is a gun to their head they may soil themselves nonetheless.

Camera-Free Moviemaking

by Dish Staff

Storm de Hirsch’s 1965 experimental short Peyote Queen is NSFW:

Amber Frost looks at De Hirsch’s legacy as “the woman who made movies without a camera“:

De Hirsch was actually a published poet before transitioning to film, and as such didn’t have ready access to a camera early on. Her first improvisational techniques were innovative manipulations of whatever film was just lying around at the time, making her as much a “sculptor” of celluloid as a filmmaker. The results of her experiments are now recognized as foundational films in avant-garde cinema. In an interview with [filmmaker Jonas Mekas], she spoke of her early work, like Peyote Queen, saying:

I wanted badly to make an animated short, but I had no camera available. I did have some old, unused film stock and several rolls of 16mm sound tape. So I used that—plus a variety of discarded surgical instruments and the sharp edge of a screwdriver — by cutting, etching, and painting directly on both film and [sound] tape.

Andrew Rosinski concluded that “it’s quite apparent that De Hirsch was somewhat inebriated while filming the sequence”:

Eventually the images flicker to technicolored hieroglyphs and what appears to be tiger (or some other big cat) claw scratch patterns. This is one of the strongest moments of the film; this queues spacey, reverb-drowned basement music. Soon the technicolor tiger claw scratches melt into dancing, human-like lines, and this is intercut with the progressive symbolism of the glyphs — breasts, fish, water, stars, the moon, female lips, seemingly a sailboat — De Hirsch represents these prehistoric glyphs by painting directly on the film stock. Unique, psychedelic motifs such as these certify Peyote Queen as an avant-garde gem.

Reading Your Way Through Life: One More Round Of Responses

by Matthew Sitman

Readers continue to tell us about the books, stories, and poems, that have meant the most to them in their lives, and a number of you have asked us to keep the thread going. So here’s another round, beginning with this reader’s appreciation of a classic novel by Alan Paton:

I appreciate Cry, the Beloved Country as I suspect only a Christian – maybe even only a quasi- postmillennial Calvinist – can. There is much that could and should be said about it as social commentary and criticism and the like, and this does somewhat to make it sweet to me. The lyricism of much of the language is also a cup to be savored and delighted in. There is, I suppose, much else that could be lodged against it as objectionable because of the empowerment it denies to the blacks of South Africa in themselves, but this is not a view I think of often and I think it would have been dishonest for Paton to have attempted it. But what I chiefly remember is the day I finished it, sitting on our apartment balcony on a sunny Sunday afternoon, weeping at the beauty of its content and the boundless hope of its eschatology: all is not saved (though much is), but all is safe, because all is in the hand of God. Injustice may be at hand, and much evil may remain to run its course, but faith will help us to persevere in their despite. Pain is real, suffering is real, and there is no pretending they are not. But God is real, His knowledge and guidance of all the intricacies and the final end of all things is real, and there is likewise no pretending they are not.

Another shares a story about how reading can reveal who we are:

Permit a little spin on the theme, “Reading Your Way Through Life.” I’m a clinical social worker, and in therapy sessions with clients (I work in a public mental health agency, so most of them are poor and poorly educated), I routinely ask, “What have you read lately?” I ask that of any client, regardless of age. Most clients will report they’ve read something – for teens, maybe a textbook that they struggled through; for kids, maybe only a comic book. Adults may have read a romance novel, or a magazine in a doctor’s office. Whatever they report reading, I ask, “What in it appealed to you?” The answer may be profound, or may seem cursory; but the point is, it’s the client’s answer, because it’s the client’s life – and I glean something that may help him. Perhaps the client identifies an interest that’s worth exploring, or a hope she wants fulfilled; a child reading a Harry Potter book – her eyes light up describing a character she likes. Some therapists engage in bibliotherapy, inviting clients to read books (novels, not only self-help) that have a therapeutic theme (many of the book your readers have described fit this). For me, whatever the client is reading invites me to learn something about them – and, if I do my job well, if we talk about it, they might learn something about themselves, too, that can help them in their present struggle.

This reader shares a favorite poem:

“Among School Children,” W.B. Yeats

This has been a favorite poem of mine for many years and I had the privilege of talking about it for many years. I love the richness of Yeats’s fine mind listening to itself, the interiority, the intertwining of memory and learning reaching towards understanding.

The first stanza ends:

“the children’s eyes

In momentary wonder stare upon

A sixty-year-old smiling public man.”

The second begins, “I dream of a Ledaean body,”

My favorite stanza break ever. As he stands smiling before the children, he falls into his deepest self as longing for his lost love breaks over him. His heart feels the gulf between his public image and his private inwardness. And at the end of the last stanza, – a riddle that is an answer: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

I taught this poem for many years. One day I looked around the classroom and realized I was a “sixty year old smiling man.” Now, I’ve outlived Yeats, that great poet of old age.

Another poetry selection:

Stanley Kunitz, “The Testing Tree”

A story before the poem. I went to see him read at Harvard, it was a tour for his newest book on turning 90. After the reading, those of us who wanted to buy his book stood in line to purchase it and have him sign it. I stood there in line chatting for quite a while with the guy in front of me as we were the last two in line. As we approached the table, there were nine books left, and this guy in front of me grabbed all nine! I asked him if I couldn’t have just one, and he refused. Mr. Kunitz and those surrounding him were in disbelief, as was I . After signing all those nine copies for this jerk, Mr. Kunitz started to rise from his chair, but I was clutching probably his most famous poetry book, a book which had become an anthem for me. I asked if he wouldn’t mind signing it, and he obliged. He knew who the real fan was.

The last nine lines are the real anthem – so important to me still. And how perfect the number nine!

“The Testing-Tree”

1

On my way home from school

up tribal Providence Hill

past the Academy ballpark

where I could never hope to play

I scuffed in the drainage ditch

among the sodden seethe of leaves

hunting for perfect stones

rolled out of glacial time

into my pitcher’s hand;

then sprinted lickety-

split on my magic Keds

from a crouching start,

scarcely touching the ground

with my flying skin

as I poured it on

for the prize of the mastery

over that stretch of road,

with no one no where to deny

when I flung myself down

that on the given course

I was the world’s fastest human.

2

Around the bend

that tried to loop me home

dawdling came natural

across a nettled field

riddled with rabbit-life

where the bees sank sugar-wells

in the trunks of the maples

and a stringy old lilac

more than two stories tall

blazing with mildew

remembered a door in the

long teeth of the woods.

All of it happened slow:

brushing the stickseed off,

wading through jewelweed

strangled by angel’s hair,

spotting the print of the deer

and the red fox’s scats.

Once I owned the key

to an umbrageous trail

thickened with mosses

where flickering presences

gave me right of passage

as I followed in the steps

of straight-backed Massassoit

soundlessly heel-and-toe

practicing my Indian walk.

3

Past the abandoned quarry

where the pale sun bobbed

in the sump of the granite,

past copperhead ledge,

where the ferns gave foothold,

I walked, deliberate,

on to the clearing,

with the stones in my pocket

changing to oracles

and my coiled ear tuned

to the slightest leaf-stir.

I had kept my appointment.

There I stood in the shadow,

at fifty measured paces,

of the inexhaustible oak,

tyrant and target,

Jehovah of acorns,

watchtower of the thunders,

that locked King Philip’s War

in its annulated core

under the cut of my name.

Father wherever you are

I have only three throws

bless my good right arm.

In the haze of afternoon,

while the air flowed saffron,

I played my game for keeps–

for love, for poetry,

and for eternal life–

after the trials of summer.

4

In the recurring dream

my mother stands

in her bridal gown

under the burning lilac,

with Bernard Shaw and Bertie

Russell kissing her hands;

the house behind her is in ruins;

she is wearing an owl’s face

and makes barking noises.

Her minatory finger points.

I pass through the cardboard doorway

askew in the field

and peer down a well

where an albino walrus huffs.

He has the gentlest eyes.

If the dirt keeps sifting in,

staining the water yellow,

why should I be blamed?

Never try to explain.

That single Model A

sputtering up the grade

unfurled a highway behind

where the tanks maneuver,

revolving their turrets.

In a murderous time

the heart breaks and breaks

and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go

through dark and deeper dark

and not to turn.

I am looking for the trail.

Where is my testing-tree?

Give me back my stones!

This reader appreciates a poet we featured recently:

Thanks for this thread. Reading about why specific books matter to different readers is incredibly interesting. My contribution to the thread is a poet you recently featured: Ron Padgett. What always makes me return to his work is the way he makes the most mundane aspects of life seem so interesting and beautiful. His poems are filled with found objects, overlooked phrases, forgotten expression that he turns sideways and upside-down and juxtaposes to almost anything else. I don’t want to say that he breathes new life into them so much as that he finds the life that was always there but we got tired of seeing. Padgett is a master of defamiliarization with a great sense of cornball humor. The other thing that impresses me is the way many of his poems unfold the way the mind unfolds and you watch it stumble upon a great discovery or insight that was never looked for, but there it is. His aesthetic and influences are very French, but his outlook and language is fully American. Here is a prose poem of his (my apologies if it is one of the ones you published earlier; but even if they are, Padgett is always worth returning to):

Prose Poem

The morning coffee. I’m not sure why I drink it. Maybe it’s the ritual of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the day on. It’s something to do between being asleep and being awake. Surely there’s something better to do, though, than to drink a cup of instant coffee. Such as meditate? About what? About having a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee whose first drink is too hot and whose last drink is too cool, but whose many in-between drinks are, like Baby Bear’s porridge, just right. Papa Bear looks disgruntled. He removes his spectacles and swivels his eyes onto the cup that sits before Baby Bear, and then, after a discrete cough, reaches over and picks it up. Baby Bear doesn’t understand this disruption of the morning routine. Paper Bear brings the cup close to his face and peers at it intently. The cup shatters in his paw, explodes actually, sending fragments and brown liquid all over the room. In a way, it’s good that Mama Bear isn’t there. Better that she rest in her grave beyond the garden, unaware of what has happened to the world.

Another reader notes a much-loved essay discovered through the Dish:

If you’re still taking posts about this, I thought I’d recommend the incredible essay, “Some Thoughts on Mercy,” by Ross Gay, which appeared in the July 2013 issue of The Sun. Gay’s meditations on bee keeping and race make this a must-read for anyone interested in how personal essay can tackle the big issues.

For the past year, I’ve taught this essay to my incoming first-year students in my sections of a Introduction to College Writing course. I’ll teach it again this year with an even firmer belief in its resonance and relevance in the wake of Ferguson. Gay says at the end of the essay, when describing a panic attack when facing the bees of his new hive:

“…the possibility of the hive turning on me was all I could feel. I saw myself pouring gasoline on this hive that I loved and torching it. And I saw a billowing, and I felt such relief at their being no more. I saw cinders of the box and the sooty concrete blocks it sat on and the charred patch of grass beneath smoldering and the few bees not inside lost and circling in wider and wider loops. I saw myself standing with the pack of matches in my hand and the red fuel canister at my feet.”

These words came back to me as I watched news footage of the protests and looting after Michael Brown’s murder, all the smoke and fire and rage of those weeks. What it must feel like for the citizens to be penned in by he fear and suspicion of others, the at-once terrifying and preposterous notion that just being a young black man is akin to being armed with a deadly weapon. The rage with which you might want to greet the world and the rage with which it would greet you back, no matter how you’d acted, no matter how restrained because it is acceptable for law enforcement in your community look at you and “see murder.”

In Gay’s essay, the bees feel some agitation but manage to rely most on what’s before them–Gay’ actual actions, not his fear– and they do not attack him. He says with relief and awe that they “knew inside me was a truth other than murder.”

Ross pleads in the essay when describing the racial profiling he’s endured: “Look how this has made me.” I want my students to see this, too. That we make each other through our interactions. I want them to make a better world for each other, and to have for themselves the role model of Gay and especially his bees.

It seems pitifully small, to ask that we look at each other and not see murder and considering the magnitude of the problem (how it encodes our voting laws, housing policies, legislation, even how preschool teachers discipline black students), nowhere near enough, but as Gay points out, this is the first step to actually seeing each other, the first step towards mercy, and. “When we have mercy, deep and abiding change might happen. The corrupt imagination might become visible. Inequalities might become visible. Violence might become visible. Terror might become visible. And the things we’ve been doing to each other, despite the fact that we don’t want to do such things to each other, might become visible.”

I’m indebted to The Dish for finding this essay. You linked to it last summer. Since then, I’ve read it at least six times and will read it many more in the year ahead to prepare for teaching but also to marvel at Gay’s gifts as a writer, the sense of kindness that emanates from his words even as he illustrates the maddening mental work required to see himself as good in a world that repeatedly wants to write him off as bad.

Another reader mentions a treasured passage from a novel:

From The Lost Scrapbook by Evan Dara:

“…but still, I continued on, looking for the bathroom; passing doors, and swatches of wall, and a mail chute; then walking still further; yet I couldn’t seem to find it, the bathroom; I wasn’t even in a place where a bathroom seemed likely to be; so I decided to turn down another hallway, which led to a quiet area ­thinking that I would have better luck in that direction; and so I wandered into a darker stretch of the building, and I continued searching doors for the appropriate emblem; but I only came across signs offering Dubbing, and Post-Produc­tion; and then, without forewarning, I saw Chomsky, standing in a shadowy recess in the wall; he was just standing there, facing away from the corridor, in towards a dense stack of cardboard boxes; they were empties that were waiting to be thrown out, I believe; but Chomsky was just tucked in there among them, alone in the dark recess, holding his glasses in his left hand; and with his posture somewhat bent-so I touched his sleeve, and he turned around rapidly, and said Oh; and then he emerged from the recess, while putting his glasses back on; and then he quickly gathered himself together, he became himself again; Here, he then said, while looking down the hallway; Here: I think what you may be looking for is over here; though when I heard the wavery tone in his voice a part of me dissolved; in silence I let him walk me on; and point out the door; very graciously; then he turned away when I went in; and then, when I was finished, there were no more paper towels by the sinks, so I couldn’t dry my hands…”

Another appreciates all the poems this thread has featured:

Just loving the gifts of moving poetry. I laid in bed for an hour this morning remembering passages, one after the other. So many… the floodgates are open!

Beloved literature is a thread that runs way back through my family. My father could recite long passages from hundreds of favorites til the end of his life.

He gave each of his five grandsons, my boys, a copy of 101 Famous Poems when they could barely read. The connection lives on..

When my youngest was homeschooling we memorized what appealed to us, from Lakota speeches to Tennyson; he’s studying neurobiology in grad school now – and has a love for and way with words.

I’m sending one more favorite.

“Reverse Living”

Life is tough,

It takes a lot of your time,

All your weekends,

And what do you get at the end of it?

Death, a great reward.

I think that the life cycle is all backwards.

You should die first, get it out of the way.

Then you live twenty years in an old age home.

You’re kicked out when you’re too young.

You get a gold watch, you go to work.

You work forty hears until you’re

Young enough to enjoy your retirement.

You go to college,

And you party until you’re ready for high school.

You become a little kid, you play,

You have no responsibilities,

You become a little boy or girl,

You go back into the womb,

You spend your last nine months floating.

And you finish off as a gleam in someone’s eye.

This is from Jack Kornfield’s excellent book, After the Ecstasy the Laundry.

And one last poem:

“The Cowpath” by Samuel Walter Foss! It always makes me understand ‘where we are at’ in any situation. And it also makes me lighthearted about it. Think about it: you can apply this to the Gaza mess, the Iraq mess, the Ferguson mess, the mess in my house, the mess in my marriage – a one size fits all explanation:

One day thru the primeval wood

A calf walked home, as good calves should,

But made a trail all bent askew,

A crooked trail, as all calves do.

Since then three hundred years have fled,

And I infer, the calf is dead;

But still behind he left his trail,

And thereon hangs my mortal tale.

The trail was taken up next day

By a lone dog that passed that way,

And then a wise bell-weather sheep

Sliding into a rut now deep,

Pursued that trail over hill and glade

Thru those old woods a path was made.

And many men wound in and out,

And dodged and turned and bent about,

and uttered words of righteous wrath

Because “twas such a crooked path”

But still they follow-do not laugh-

The first migrations of that calf.

The forest became a lane

That bent and turned and turned again;

This crooked lane became a road

where many a poor horse with his load

Toiled on beneath the burning sun,

And traveled some three miles in one.

The years passed on in swiftness fleet,

The village road became a street,

And this, before the men were aware,

A city’s crowded thoroughfare.

And soon a central street was this

In a renowned metropolis;

And men two centuries and a half

Followed the wanderings of this calf.

Each day a hundred thousand strong

Followed this zigzag calf along;

And over his crooked journey went

The traffic of a continent.

A hundred thousand men were led

By one poor calf, three centuries dead.

For just such reverence is lent

To well established precedent.

A moral lesson this might teach

Were I ordained and called to preach.

For men are prone to go it blind

Along the calf paths of the mind;

And work away from sun to sun

To do what other men have done.

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