Existential Troublemaker

2010-01-02T23:32:00.001-05:00

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Tip Toeing Toward Faith

2009-12-11T22:28:00.001-05:00

I’m becoming a lapsed atheist. On top of mounting frustration that I can’t quite stick with anything (even disbelief), I am coping with a terrifying self-admission: I wouldn’t mind being a believer again.

The road to godlessness was difficult for me. Having grown up in the church, I ascribed to the usual childhood theology where the flood was cool (because it ended with a rainbow), Jesus was better (because he brought Christmas presents and chocolate bunnies), and God was a somewhat vengeful guy in the sky who could strike me with lightening if ever I fibbed to my mother. But as I grew older, my pantheon absorbed a few eastern notions of religion that I picked up through library books. I not only did not bother with the cognitive dissonances of my belief system, I was hardly aware of them.

Despite the fact that my rejection of religion was such a transformative experience, I have trouble pinpointing the moment I turned away. It may have been the last time someone laid hands on me and thought they saved my soul (from what?). It may have been actually reading the Bible, whereupon I was forced to question the literalism I’d been taught was divine. More than likely, it was when I dealt with death for the first time in a real way.

My uncle, then my grandmother, died, but then young friends were lost in three separate accidents. I could not fathom a world under the command of any supreme being where chance and misstep meant life, such young promise-filled life, was snuffed short. If God existed, he was unjust. I wouldn’t accept that. So, God must be dead.

Ironically, life is drawing me back into belief. My son was born months ago and though I don’t have words or thought to explain it, I feel something permanent to him. Some part of him is more than the small frame I hold and tend to. Here, I’m not talking about God, a soul maybe, but that intangible thing is shattering my safe, post-religious worldview.

I can say this much, faith hurts. Losing it the last time around left an ache that made me resent believers and, to be entirely honest, hate those who I felt had backed me into a corner. Their too-tight definitions of God could not stand, and so the word ceased to carry meaning. The center could not hold, and when pushed into the crisis of mourning, my spiritual world collapsed.

Now I’ve got this watery sense of more, of being, of life that is somehow a constant and far realer than the hollow peace atheism has offered. And at that, it’s petrifying me. Will admitting there could be more make me again the target of well-meaning evangelicals who will make me loath religion, and then them? Can this fledgling sense of moreness survive my skepticism?

I remember something I read years ago, Kierkegaard’s description a leap of faith, a leap to faith really. In his understanding, Christ (and I’m not even going to go there) represented utter paradox, being entirely divine and human. Logic screams when faced with this idea, and so faith is thrusting oneself into the paradox, faith is believing from within the paradox.

When I first read that, I couldn’t help but picture a faceless Christian plunging himself into a vast void, hanging there, safe. When I’d picture myself attempting the leap, I’d plummet.

Now again, here I am facing abstractions that are larger than my understanding. I dread the leap, but nonetheless feel myself wandering dangerously close to belief.

These Hands

2009-08-18T06:43:00.002-04:00

When my son was born, I noticed his chubby cheeks, his lips, his overbite—they were mine. The mystery that had been kicking and tumbling inside of me for months had also performed that most beautiful genetic miracle: my son looked like me.

Over that first day, I studied him carefully, wondering whether he would keep breathing if I looked away, how someone so small could possibly cry so loudly. I also kept watch to see if his hands might tremble or if his voice would quake like mine. Though I will love him just as much, perhaps more, if he shares my neurological disorder, there is a dark pit inside of me that fears it. In my imagination, I see this baby become a little boy and not understand why he can’t run as fast as the other children. I see him being teased for a funny voice that he can’t control. My heart breaks over and over for these tiny fictions, and I understand why my own mother so frequently apologizes for giving me the condition that I’ve got.

I love my own mother no less for her genetic gifts. It’s a mixed pot of bad nerves and good temperament. As I age, I recognize with that everyday horror that I am very much turning into my mother—with her silliness, her rages, and her shaky hands.

A few years ago at my grandmother’s funeral, I really noticed for the first time how alike our hands were. From the shape of our palms, the length of our fingers, to the long curve of our fingertips. Packed into the rec room at my great uncle’s farm, another uncle, a former priest, led the small family memorial. Most who knew my grandmother were long dead and so this tiny wake with her remaining family seemed a reasonable tribute. More practically, her closest living family member, her brother, needed to be there. He was for the most part bed-ridden at the time, and so in folding chairs and at his bedside, we gathered to tell stories and look at long-faded pictures. We sang hymns that the older generation knew by heart.

As a wavering hymn rose from our ranks, my great uncle’s eyes began to well up with tears. Sitting next to him on the edge of his home hospital bed, I also felt the clanging supports of the bed’s frame began to shake. His weeping was quiet, respectful. But as the rest of him filled with emotion, his legs began to tremble uncontrollably. I recognized the symptom—when under strain, my already unstable nerves give way as well. I loved him more for our shared weakness.

The hymns grew louder, mournful. I glanced to my right where my mother was sitting. Over the previous five years, she had magicked a reserve of strength I hardly understood as she cared for her disappearing mother. Grandma had first broken hips, but then as the dementia set in, forgotten my mother completely, lost the ability to speak, and finally been reduced to that most unforgiving state—a barely functioning body, eyes open, but no one home. Grandma was gone long before she had died.

And all that time, my mother was a force. With stubborn compassion, she was stalwartly there. Here then, finally, at this tiny memorial, I saw her begin to break at the edges.

Her hands never stop moving, but as we sang, her arms began to jump as if marionette’s strings were being plucked. I saw her grief in her waves of uncontrollable, jerky gesticulations.

This is when I recognized my own hands in hers, really saw how the minor differences, the lines of age, were what tied us together even more. I glanced down at my own clasped fingers, and noticed with bemused surprise, that they rested tremulously atop a leg that was keeping its own time.

There we were, in vibrating togetherness—all awash in life’s commonest tragedy—and with the signs of our inheritance most apparent, undeniably connected. This was it. This was family.

Our son has my husband’s hands, they are meaty, shaped for work, all the way down to the fingertips, but then, they are mine. They are my mother’s. And that little sign, that slope between father and mother might mean the difference for him. I touch those delicate fingers with mine and know he is ours. And with a ghostly recognition, know that years from now when my own mother is gone, I will see her in his fingertips. I will see the shadow of a strong and quiet legacy. They will be his, and they will be ours, whether his hands come to move at his will or on their own.

Goodbye Kenneth

2009-04-11T16:59:00.004-04:00

Being from a small town, I relish the level of anonymity that living and working in a larger city can offer. There’s no forced obligation to get to know your neighbors—you can smile and wave over the fence without becoming enmeshed in one another’s lives. Choice, rather than circumstance, can become what binds you to people.

That said, in my very habitual way, I have peopled my life with a cast of strangers whose own consistency has fit them into my daily routine. There’s my morning bus driver, a stoic Sikh man who is predictably off-schedule. He may be extremely early. He may be twenty minutes late. While admittedly inconvenient, I find something so poetic about a bus driver who is incapable of following a timetable, that I have grown quite fond of him from a distance.

In the neighborhood where I work, I am slightly unsettled if one of our rotation of street musicians is missing, or if the kind cashier at the corner deli is not at her morning post. She asks me about my pregnancy in a lilting, Caribbean-sounding accent, and frequently reminds me that my health and the baby’s is a result of a solid fact: “God is good.”

In between the bus and the deli, my commute has given me the frequent, passing privilege of a casual morning blessing from Kenneth.

The Washington Post, like a handful of other large papers, issues a free tabloid version of the news each morning. This diet Post is distributed through corner boxes and by a modern-day crop of middle-aged and elderly newsies at Metro stations across the city. While most of these paper men and women range from half-hearted proselytizers to something akin to carnival barkers, Kenneth rules his station with charm and a healthy range of warm greetings: “There she is!” “Good morning, beautiful people!” and when you take one of his free papers, “I do love you for that!”

Commuters are, generally speaking, not happy people. They stomp down the sidewalk toward the station with their brief cases, iPods, and skirt suits matched with commuters’ sneakers (the pumps are in the bag). Marching off to work, there’s little smiling, no eye contact, and then as each nears the station and gets within Kenneth’s range, something magical happens. Their humanity returns.

I’ve heard that people bring Kenneth baked goods. His frustrated competitor from the city’s other paper watches with angry eyes as people step around him for a word with Kenneth. My boss has said that it’s as though Kenneth is a minister and we are his congregation. He’s more like Willy Wonka or Santa Claus.

As I’ve grown increasingly gravid with child, Kenneth has started spotting me farther and farther back along my trek to the station gates. “There she is! Number One Mother!”

I rarely take the paper, because I usually have a library book in my bag, but Kenneth doesn’t discriminate. I tell him to have a great day, and I know he will. The man seems to have an internal font of happiness that just radiates out to the rest of us. As I waddle into the station, Kenneth usually shouts after me, “And don’t you do a damn thing today. You deserve it!” Tired, swollen, hugely pregnant, I promise him I’ll try to take it easy, and turn into the gate.

Yesterday, I realized that my bus driver has been replaced. I thought he might be off sick this week with a cold, or that he was just running so late or early that I was catching the bus that comes before or after him. But he’s gone (likely the result of complaints from less imaginative bus riders). The new driver comes right according to the schedule. It’s admittedly easier to plan around, but lacks a certain sort of enchantment.

Mourning the loss of my erratic driver, I realized how much I’ve come to depend upon these strangers whose lives overlap daily with mine. If habit is comforting, then there’s a deeper solace in the stories we tell ourselves about the minor characters who dependably fill our lives.

As I reflected upon this and made my way toward the train station, I noted that Kenneth’s moody competition seemed to be in a rather friendly mood. He even teased me that I ought not go into labor at the train station. Before I could express just how unamusing I considered that comment, I noticed that Kenneth was uncharacteristically in serious conversation with a suit-clad commuter. As I drifted closer, the man gave Kenneth a very formal handshake and headed into the station.

“Ah, Number One Mother,” Kenneth began without his usual gusto. I had forgotten my book and asked if I could please have paper. Drawing one from the pile, Kenneth told me, “Actually today is my last day.”

I must have looked shattered. “But, why??”

Evidently The Washington Express (the Post’s little brother) doesn’t pay their distributors according to any kind of schedule.

“They say it will be every two weeks, but sometimes it’s three… sometimes, I just wait. I mean, I have my retirement, but I need a little something-something.” I nodded, of course he did.

All this time, I had thought that Kenneth did his job as a sort of public service. Not that I think people should not be paid for using their natural gifts, but I simply never considered that this was also a job for him. Would a grey-haired man, no matter how extraverted, really desire to spend every winter morning outside, handing out papers and mingling with strangers? I had assumed so.

I told Kenneth I would miss seeing him. We had a big hug goodbye and I wished him well. I didn’t get my usual benediction—no injunction not to do a damn thing today. Instead he told me to take good care of that baby of mine, and turned back to the small group of people who were curiously gathering around him.

Like me, these commuters wore the expression of people who had learned of a loss—the loss of something they hadn’t properly recognized that they had come to rely upon. I gazed backward as he solemnly shook hands and passed out his final batch of papers. The steady march of commuters which daily steps past construction, homeless people, and one another without taking any notice, one after another halted.

In a small town, there certainly wouldn’t be as many people whose mornings were touched by the simple, friendly warmth of a man like Kenneth. But in a small town, more than a handful would also have gotten to really know him. The pace of life and the steady flood of others moving through the station left me valuing the daily interaction for its semi-anonymous, personal benefit. It made me think of Kenneth as a minor, though lovable, character in the great film of my own life. I never thought to really get to know him as his own person until it was time for him to leave.

On Monday, I wonder how his absence will affect the steady flow of us who will charge through the station gates. Will people pause and look around for him? Will some fail to notice that their morning paper was imparted by an unfamiliar face? When habit is all that binds us, these threads of circumstance leave us only loosely tied, and then in a very lonely way. At that, I wonder if “loss” can properly be applied to what so many commuters seemed to be feeling about Kenneth’s departure. Or if rather all I’ve really spotted is a particular kind of failure—that of a kind of selfish blindness, the sort that makes a person appreciate anonymity rather than the richness of its alternative.

A Shower Scene

2009-04-04T11:46:00.002-04:00

About once a year I find myself suddenly splayed out on a sidewalk somewhere, not having realized I’d lost my balance until, in a pitiable heap, I hit the concrete. This time was different in that I was alone—typically my falls attract the attention of surprised passersby who wonder how in the world I managed to so gracelessly trip over nothing at all. Occasionally, my swan dives will muster a few chuckles from strangers who I know will replay my spontaneous belly flop in their minds throughout the day. This time though, I stood naked in the shower, eight months pregnant, studying my bottle of conditioner, when as my father would say “tit over tea cup” my feet went out from under me.

One foot went so far out from under me, it wedged into our shower drain. The rest of me fell backwards, slammed into the edge of the tub, bounced, and landed hard against the tile wall.

Because I typically fall in front of an unsuspecting audience, my modus operandi is a usual quick mental check for broken bones and a slightly teary, but good-natured laugh at myself, inviting those around me to join in. No need to worry yourselves, folks, we’ve got a pro on our hands.

Here, alone, pregnant, all my comedic training escaped me. I sat trembling, gripping the sides of the tub fearful of somehow falling again. The shower was still running and washing blood from my foot as I extracted mangled toes from the drain. I looked down at my wet, unmoving belly, felt my head shaking a silent NO back and forth, back and forth. Choking with a sort of animal sob, I kicked the shower off with my good foot, and gingerly half-crawled, half-slid out of the tub.

In a matter of about a minute my stunned panic transitioned into a tear around the house, searching for the phone, paging my husband, searching our linen closet for band aids—swearing, wondering how someone so accident-prone could live in a house without bandages. I hobbled to bed, still soaking wet, wrapping some Kleenex around my still bleeding foot, one hand on my stomach saying, “Come on baby, please move baby.”

My husband returned his page and convinced me to lay still. He can be maddeningly calm in what I perceive to be emergencies, but I was in no state to argue. He kept an even tone and asked me to describe what I had done to myself. By the time I had finished describing the fall, I felt a soft, but reassuring kick somewhere behind my belly button. Both relieved, we hung up our phones.

Slowly accepting that I hadn’t smashed my baby, it started to also dawn on me that I was still naked, my foot, still poorly wrapped and bleeding, my beach ball of a stomach still rather pinning me to my bed. Whether it was a break in anxiety or merely force of habit kicking in, I began to laugh at myself.

I picked up the phone, and did what many of us still do when we fall down, when our egos are bruised, and when we need to talk to someone who is equally prone to sudden tumbles—I called my mother.

Of course, when I heard her voice, my laughter died. I described the fall and heard the worry enter her own voice, and I started to cry a bit. With growing uneasiness, I wondered why the baby hadn’t kicked again.

My mother’s reaction was not the typical maternal response—she didn’t panic, didn’t chide me into rushing off to the hospital. She latched on to what was probably the least significant part of my story—our lack of band aids—and launched into reminiscence.

“We never had band aids when I was a kid. They were too expensive. But, oh, it used to make me so mad! Your grandmother never wanted to admit that we couldn’t afford them, and if someone was over to the house and needed one she would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I guess the kids got into them. We don’t seem to have any.’”

I remembered my grandmother, having lived through the depression but too proud to admit to any sort of poverty.

“She’d say it right in front of us, and we were expected not to say anything!”

I could easily picture the burning anger I learned early to recognize in my mother’s eyes, filling those of an innocent child, wrongly accused of wasting non-existent band aids.

“Then when I got older and moved out, and she worked for the city, she could finally afford band aids and I couldn’t. Well, that was just infuriating!”

I chucked a little, knowing the bounds of my mother’s righteous rage had only ever been extended to a few people in her life. Her mother was one of them. I imagined my mother finding a new box of band aids in my grandmother’s medicine cabinet, feeling her own poverty, and quietly glowering over the injustice of it all.

“Oh, and when we were kids everyone would just believe her. You know how kids are, they actually do love to stick those things all over themselves. They even make commercials with kids covered in band aids. Whenever I see one with band aids stuck all over them, I just want to smack them right across the face!” She sounded like she might smack them, spit in their eye, and smack them again.

Now I burst out laughing. My mother, one of the least violent human beings I know, laughed as well.

The baby started to roll about, and with a few sharp kicks, confirmed that all was well.

The mental picture of a child covered in cartoon-print bandages, being bludgeoned by my mother evaporated, and sweet, calming relief filled the void. I told my mother that the baby had started moving normally again.

She said that she figured I just needed to calm down a bit, that the baby might have been a little stunned.

As I hung up the phone, I held onto the thought of my mother smacking a child for wasting his good fortune and adhering band aids all over his body. It was an idea that was singularly amusing because my mother is so passive, and would never smack anyone, let alone a child. The hatred in her voice when she talked about her own mother—expecting her children to lie about band aids, living high on the hog with boxes of the things once her children were grown—those emotions were real.

Mothers and children. Until I felt the threat of my own not moving, going still, I had only conceived of him as a sort of magical, moving lump. Between us, and for the rest of our lives, we will carry the things that we each do to scar and heal one another. I worry that I will expect him to help me cover over my own frailties. I hope that in moments when you can either laugh or cry, I can manage to make him laugh.

I glance down at my still unclotted foot. Despite the inflexibility caused by my rounded belly, I manage again to get it close enough to better tie some tissues around the worst of the damage. It’s a pathetic job, what I’ve done there. Briefly, I envision myself attempting to tourniquet a childhood wound with Kleenex and feel profoundly unprepared. At the very least, I really do need to get a first aid kit before we have a kid running around the house.

Failure

2009-03-15T18:34:00.004-04:00

When god closes a door, he opens a window. My mental impression of this motivational slogan has always been an image of myself, frantic, trapped in a burning building, about to escape the flames when woosh the hand of God slams closed the door I was just about to climb through. Thanks, you jerk. You say there’s a window open somewhere here? Smoke clouds my eyes, and I charge the door. It’s a no-go. The thing is sealed with the protoplasmic superglue of divinity. Come on you omnipotent bastard! What’d you have to close the door for? And what’s this about opening a window? A WINDOW! If I do escape the fires of my imaginary inferno, it’s because the fire itself damages the structure so severely, that by chance (or perhaps a burst of my own herculean strength) a wall is blown cleanly from the side of the building.

Feeling trapped by life? Go poking around for a window. Bah!

There are certainly other platitudes about god and disappointment that get my gall, but generally, few things charge my bile like the suggestion that one ought to be pleased, a little thankful even, for things working out contrary to plan. I have the same mixture of pride and awe that others do for those “failure” stories about Abe Lincoln—failed business; couldn’t get into law school; engaged, but sweetheart died; ran for state legislature, lost; ran for Congress, lost; ran for Senate, lost; sought VP nod—got less than 100 votes; gangly, and generally a bit tough on the eyes… Poor old, Abe. But he went ahead and got himself elected president, wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and was one of the world’s great leaders. That said, old Abe certainly took his time beating around the house for an open window, and if I imagine facing down his considerable line of defeats, I wonder if I might not have just found a new line of work.

Well, you madam, are no Abraham Lincoln.

I find myself considering burning buildings and Abraham Lincoln this week, wondering whether I am blind to the proverbial escape hatch, or simply failing to show the proper fortitude that ought to be inspired by our sixteenth president. In my early twenties, I had a doey-eyed belief that long-term planning didn’t suit me, and that I would end up doing meaningful, earth-changing work, if I just followed my rather fickle impulses. It worked for a few years, but also resulted in changing jobs every year or so, being denied entrance to PhD programs twice, and a sinking feeling that my big chance had been missed. Stubbornness, bad judgment, and a certain level of poor self-awareness seemed to have sealed the doors and windows.

These are things I wanted to do, but couldn’t. When I am feeling frustrated, it’s rather nice to have this litany to dwell upon. But when I am ready to give myself the good swift kick deserved by such self-pity, I recognize that my loss at what I really ought to do with myself may be a result of far-too-reasonably placed expectations. My ingrained childhood goals included not getting pregnant before the end of high school, going to college, not ending up living in a dead, rust-belt town on welfare. Well, I shot for the moon, my friend, and ended up rather disconsolate about my life’s purpose from the point after which those goals were met.

If I am honest with myself, I must recognize that if doors were closed to me, it was my own doing. I seriously disliked graduate school the first time around, and have found far more fulfillment out in the world, working with and for people and causes I believe in. Why, then this impression that I must continue bullying my way against locked doors? Why is my sense of self so bleary that all I can recognize is that where I am is never quite right, and that I must try, try again, for something… something else?

Old Abe at least knew what he wanted. His failures, though certainly public and rather constant for a while there, fell along a trajectory. I suppose a benefit to so much failure is also a crystallizing effect. If a person really didn’t desperately, blindingly want something, they would quickly lose the initiative to pull themselves back up—gangly arms and all—and try again. While, extending my metaphor one more time, I have flounced against far too many doors, the Abe Lincoln of my imagination stayed focused on just one, until through sheer force of will (and, yeah, uncommon talent), he took the thing off its hinges.

So the lesson of failure for today seems to be this: we have options, perhaps not sissy little windows nudged open by god, but realistic options. Monomaniacal obsession, which if one is exceptional enough, may result in getting you where you want to be. Treating failure as a yardstick, one to clarify and measure how deeply our desires run. But gratitude? Feeling grateful for those closed doors appears to require a certain stretch of time, some distance from the sting of wounded pride. It seems doubtful that in such a short life as we have, there is nearly enough time to tend both to one’s emotional wounds and get on with things before the smoke fills our eyes.

Just Some Revolution

2009-03-09T20:06:00.002-04:00

On the train ride home today, I was finishing reading Che Guevara’s journal (what has come to be known as The Motorcycle Diaries). The story of his journey across Latin America read like I bet my own journals read—a chronicle of mostly foolhardy adventures, occasionally interspersed with short bursts of serious reflection. It took until the end to really recognize a change had occurred, that a glimmer of the future revolutionary had been stirred by staying among lepers, eating with peasants, traveling alongside striking workers. As he later came to recognize, we are, all of us, children of our environments. Stepping off into the world, I suppose he became a new kind of child.

At the tail end of the book, there is an excerpt from a speech he gave eight years out from his trip. And as I read the last few paragraphs, I started to see how in hindsight, the injustices he had witnessed had become the fuel for his eventual radicalism. Whatever one makes of the man (secular saint, guerrilla, or t-shirt and coffee mug caricature), he knew revolution. I’m going to quote one section in full here:

“I was telling you that to be a revolutionary requires having a revolution. We already have it. And a revolutionary must also know the people with whom he or she is to work. I think we still don’t know one another well. I think we still have to travel awhile along that road… [Yet] if we know the goals, if we know the enemy, and if we know the direction in which we have to travel, then the only thing left for us is to know the daily stretch of the road and to take it. Nobody can point out that stretch; the stretch is the personal road of each individual; it is what he or she will do every day, what he or she will gain from their individual experience, and what he or she will give of themselves in practicing their profession, dedicated to the people’s well-being.”

I began daydreaming of what that feeling might be like, solid recognition that the revolution had happened—whatever its nature might be. Immediately, I thought of election night, which had felt like the dawning of something new. The Bush/Cheney regime would be over, along with all the blanket justifications for torture, wiretapping, preemptive war, and general dodginess. More than that, there had been an uprising of people who shared a common belief, maybe a belief in Obama, maybe a belief that life could be better, that America could be better.

That the people had moved, idealistically perhaps, but in so many ways together, and that power had shifted bloodlessly was beautiful, powerful, and at least seemed to recapitulate the spirit of the founding generation. Representative democracy worked, a power-hungry and inept ruler had been overthrown. If not revolution, then something fairly damned close.

And with the same spirit that gives America its exceptionalism (or at least its constant, charging thrust toward the next horizon), those moments that brought tears to old, tired eyes and droves to Lincoln Park and the National Mall, have evaporated quickly as we impatiently await a miraculous improvement to our diminishing national straights.

Revolution or not, I wonder whether we might truly call it bloodless. I wonder if we’d ever have gotten this close to something so hopeful and honest if we hadn’t also just watched as others spilt their lives in numbers that have become absolutely mundane. Soldiers, contract workers, Iraqi and Afghani civilians, children… how many in Sudan while we were busy elsewhere? They are distant—if we are lucky, not our kin. It’s hard, abstract, to feel pain for so many bloody, blasted, bombed out strangers. But these—and the kids swearing and thugging on the corner—are the people for whom a true revolutionary would have to work. Yet we still don’t know each other very well.

We’ve stepped ahead a piece, but though the wicked witch is vanquished and has gone back to Crawford, if those who called for change truly seek to achieve it, our hope and idealism will be for not without the sweat of each of us. There is a road, etched and coursing out before us that will measure good intention versus action. The enemy still is that which allowed the last administration to swim happily into the quicksand of corruption and vicious self-service: a public so complacent as to let it happen. Now again, I see the attraction of that trap, a complacency that now waits for our new hope to fix it all, save us.

The true cost of this recession is so often measured in unemployment rates and home foreclosures, but imagine those numbers multiplied by the emotional loss, the feeling of entrapment, the fear of a life whipping out of control. If we don’t know what that feels like, we are among the very fortunate. But those who fail to empathize, who hear the daily, crushing financial analysis, but don’t conceive of the flesh and meat of this mess, those are the counterrevolutionaries. Theirs is the spirit that can easily, quietly justify the callus, thoughtless profit-driven mindset that got us here in the first place.

I think to protect one another, to remake this country in the image of all the hope and possibility that marked the election, we must again travel the road back toward one another. The day’s work should not be considered done until the life of someone in hardship is made a bit better, safer. As children of this tenuous environment, we have the truly revolutionary opportunity to tap into our better angels. There is, indeed, a clear and better road stretching out in front of us here. I wonder according to what measures we might be compelled to take it.

Our Fortunes

2009-03-01T17:52:00.006-05:00

Years ago at a party, a friend of mine and I were comparing our palm reading abilities. I had some vague knowledge of lifelines and the complications implied by having your heart line too wrapped up with your head, but really I tended to make things up. My friend giggled at my forecasts. It was all right with me, believing most of what I was saying to be hogwash as well—but these are the things people sometimes find themselves doing at parties. Looking at my palm he laughed and said that according to Indian palm reading, I had a very lucky set of fortunes. Whether dirt poor or wealthy, I would always be taken care of, there would somehow be enough. And then with a wink (that showed he knew how much his next comment would irritate me), he told me I would marry rich. Playing my part, I withdrew my hand, put it on my hip and stuck out my tongue.

His evaluation of my palm has been weighing on my mind lately, not because I expect its veracity, but because, to this point, the predictions have borne out. When I was a child, despite living well below the poverty line, my mother had a knack for survival and though we never had extra, we had enough. When we lost our home, her charm—the sort that comes from a gentle kindness people immediately respond to—resulted in finding a forgiving landlord who would occasionally go months without asking for the rent. She did her best, and in turn, a good number of people did their best for her. The end result was that a somewhat unstable life was spared from becoming more so.

Living on my own, I’ve flitted rather irresponsibly from one low-paying job to the next, my bleeding heart generally leading me ahead. I’ve been out of the country multiple times with an empty bank account and somehow still managed (often due to the interest-bearing love and care of my credit card). Still, my financial silliness has yet to seriously blow up in my face.

After college, I moved out of state with the man who would eventually be my husband. I had an AmeriCorps stipend (a sweet $9,000 a year salary), and he still had not found his first post-college job. We stressed. We coupon-cut. But we made it until he found work, and we relived that anxiety and relief each time we moved or I moved on from a job.

I think about all of this now, because despite the fact that I’ve quite well adapted to living on little, I can readily find a way to adapt to living on much more, so that I am never quite responsible with money, never quite concerned with paying off debt, and save only if my account is set up to automatically hide money from me in a savings account. Good fortune is the only explanation for my current situation, when so many more responsible people are watching the bottom drop out.

We have friends who have stuck with the same, seemingly stable job, since college. They have a certain level of seniority, but are being laid off. We have friends who have never left a balance on their credit card from month to month, who bought houses well within their budgets, who now can’t afford their bills. I often joke that with our combined student debt, my husband and I could buy a really nice house. Somehow that joke is becoming far less funny.

The economic decline is showing how fickle fortune is. For far too many people that we care about, its icy reality is a mix of panic and tragedy, as well-made plans fracture around them. Worse still, than not knowing where the money for next months’ bills will come from is the fact that so many people’s dreams for themselves are being wiped out. To work for years toward a career goal and find something meaningful—to know what it’s like to be a teacher, a firefighter, an environmental engineer, to have an identity wrapped up in one’s good work, and lose it… well, that’s just too much.

In the face of that, my own history of money woes and, certainly, my inability to settle on a career path seem nothing short of childish. I am witnessing loss in my friends’ lives that is nothing but horrible and cruel. And worse yet, things are only going to get worse, at least for all but the wealthiest. The market, the beast whose moods analysts assess daily (with about as much legitimacy as my palm reading), does not look ready to cooperate. The economy is dropping, dropping away. And if it could be graphed alongside it, the hope and general welfare of too many good people is also sloping off toward zero.

Dear Mr. President

2008-09-20T19:40:00.009-04:00

Last week, I got the chance to hear the president speak in person. To be honest, I have never to this point had any interest in being within spitting distance of George Bush (unless, perhaps, that access offered unfettered opportunity for loogie launching). But the speech was at the White House, which, sullied by his term or not, is still the White House. I mumbled something about respecting the office, not the man, as I cruised through the security gate.

I had little time to further my illusion. In the swamp-like humidity of a burning September DC day, I wormed my way through similarly excited people and edged about ten rows back from the president.

On a few occasions, I’ve brushed close to celebrity—shook hands with Michelle Obama, cornered poor Anthony Hopkins and made him sign an autograph, squinted bloodshot eyes at David Schwimmer in an airport. On all occasions, I have had the composure you might expect from a small-town Ohioian.

If I weren’t, by nature, such a silly person, it would be embarrassing.

So when I got to go to the White House, I assumed that regardless of who was standing at the podium, I would be riddled with nervous energy and some degree of excitement.

Instead, I was simply surprised by how small he looked.

Our president never spoke with the conviction of true leadership, never emboldened the best in people with the strength of his own character. Even at his height of popularity, he charged the country toward action (regardless of its moral justification or potential for disaster)—but he never inspired.

Now, when he is openly hated by so many; when the economy is crumbling and even the wealthy wonder what we’ve gotten ourselves into; when the war rolls on with some success (measured in drops in casualty rates, not the bribes we pay to keep it that way); when collectively, we hold our breath to be rid of him, finally, he looks as broken as he has made all of us feel.

The president’s speech itself was unarousing and included a brief mention of his dog Barney that only delivered pitiable laughs after an uncomfortably prolonged pause, with the president desperately, expectantly, awaiting approval.

When the speech fluttered near policy recommendation, his pleas for federal funding of faith-based organizations left my head light as my boiling blood drained into a familiar knot of anger in my stomach. The speech ended with a blunted, mis-delivered conclusion, and then Michael W. Smith took the stage and strains of his Christian brand of easy listening music echoed across the White House lawn.

As those standing around me broke collectively into the wavering chords of “Friends are friends forever, if the Lord’s the Lord of them,” I recognized that my special day of political revelry could quickly disintegrate into an alter-call. I disentangled from the crowd to pace uncomfortably in heels across an empty section of the lawn.

Everything has been so focused recently on the election that up til now I have tried to black out the reality of George Bush. My years of rage have simmered, then cooled into a solid space of disappointment.

But George W. Bush deserves much more than that.

Tonight I happened upon a song written by Pink and sung with the Indigo Girls. I’d not before recognized Pink as possessing what you might call a prophetic voice. But the song “Dear Mr. President” caught me. Stopped me.

It reminded me of the absolute and justifiable rage we all should still be feeling.

I imagine that if I had scooted 10 rows forward that day at the White House, had even gotten to look the president in the eye, that I still couldn’t have stomached speaking to him. He looks so damaged, and I hope that this is a result of remorse for the breadth of his bad decisions. But I recognize that unpopularity can have a similar draining effect on those who focus their best insight on personal needs.

Not to mince words here, the president’s speech pissed me off and Michael W. Smith irked me bad. Admittedly, I have a certain sensitivity for public displays of religion. Despite my discomfort, Bush’s blending of the fundamentalist and political spheres has been the least of our problems.

School children can’t read and the standardized testing system is forcing more of them behind. Those who make it to high school then give up, drop out and often go to jail. The good ones struggle with minimum wage jobs, and spend the rest of their lives squeezed by poverty, wringing dimes paycheck to paycheck.

Abroad, our troops and thousands and thousands of innocent people die in a boondoggle that will forever spiral between chaos and disaster.

Our land of liberty sanctions torture.

Our people end up homeless, broken, sick and go untreated, while every promise of a great nation is dangled before us. The dream is still there, but only actualized for those who could get there on their own.

And as of late, we’ve let politics become reduced to squabbles about silly analogies and what it means to put lipstick on pigs.

Well, as a nation, we have certainly painted over the ugliness of this one. In broad strokes that really measure how desperate we are to move on, we talk change. It is as though so often hearing “we need change” has had a certain sort of numbing effect. Thirsting for new leadership, we’ve forgotten the moral drought that got us here.

We’ve not yet stared down the dark nature our president has come to personify, or what it means that he has represented us without an overwhelming protest.

Rather than oust or even debate, we have resorted to ignoring Bush into the cobwebs of those histories we’d rather forget.

And the details, the gory mess of his time in the White House may well be forgotten. But for the families who have lost young soldiers in their prime, the people who have been criminalized for their Muslim faith, those whose city flooded and were left to starve, others who have lost homes to foreclosure, and the rest of us who have come to sink into the reality of collective guilt and culpability—his legacy will live on. Bush will be remembered in the lasting damage he’s left in his wake.

The Bush Doctrine, for all its recent press, deserves a bit more reflection than its puzzling of Sarah Palin. Attack first, think through the consequences later is a dangerous MO in war. But the president’s blind storming of the globe deserves a proper postmortem. With the tragedy of Bush’s reign awash on all our hands, I would love to spray a bit back into his dull, lost eyes.

Hipster Armageddon

2008-08-03T10:08:00.005-04:00

Self-righteous voices of true counterculture have begun the mantra “kill the hipster!” Beware! They are the bohemian undead; they are zombies; they will claim your ultracool sub-culture trash, reprint it with soy ink on an American Apparel shirt, and make you feel old. Today, I read a disturbing prophecy—that the hipster (as an archetype and mode of living) represents the end of Western civilization. Rather than a Visigoth-like breed of invader, the vapid, shoulder-shrugging attitude of the hipster is about to slink our way of life thoughtlessly, but fashionably, to the brink of destruction.

Yet another silent killer. First hydrogenated oil, now this.

Sadly, or perhaps fortunately, my Midwestern upbringing instilled in me a rather vague understanding of cultural stereotypes. In the US, I knew there were Californians, East Coast Types, and Midwesterners. These categories recapitulated in a roughly parallel way at my high school consisting in jocks, the rich kids, and the rest of us. I knew that historically speaking there were some other general categories of people. My teachers encouraged us to wear black and snap our fingers on poetry day (harkening back to beatniks). I became aware of hippies by way of beanbags, school notebook covers that read “Flower Power” and after a certain point, when our local Kmart only seemed to sell bellbottoms. When the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air communicated rap to our very hip-hop free town, my brother got a box haircut, and my mother allowed me to save up for Hammer pants. Alas, when grunge became cool, I was surprised to have been ahead of the curve. It was a happy coincidence that a limited income and thrift stores had early-on outfitted me in old men’s flannel and tired looking jeans.

But all of these tokens of nonconformity were fakes. I wasn’t beat, hippie, remotely hip-hop in my flower print Hammer pants, nor was I properly grunge. Perhaps, at best, I was a bit untidy.

The death march of the hipster, then, has taken me completely by surprise. Certainly, there are young professionals who pay far too much for stupid haircuts and buy second-hand looking punk clothes at full price. Recently I noticed that JC Penny has ripped off The Breakfast Club and sells Nirvana T shirts to tweeners. But there have always been people far too willing to blow good money to look foolish, and The Breakfast Club wasn’t so much countercultural as a profitable, popularity fairytale. Twelve-year-old kids are just about as Seattle grunge as I was when I wore their shirt to DARE meetings and bought Teen Spirit deodorant.

As my father might suggest, it’s all the same crap with a new price tag.

The great threat of hipsters is said to be the group’s willingness to buy into subversive style, but failure to reject the mainstream. They hold down good jobs; they do drugs but not as a symbol of any deeper, radical agenda; they look messy, but really shower. They buy according to labels, but reject the moniker of “hipster.” I can’t say I blame them. If asked to define myself as “drug seeking, consumeristic, apocalyptic jerk,” I might admit to some hesitation.

Their most dire sin, then, is unoriginality. Sure, hipsters simply replicate cool, without the subversive attitudes that normally predicate genuine coolness. They are shopping to fit the part, whatever part has been best advertised to them. But these hipsters are doing what most of the country has done for a very long time—except rather than Midwesterners replicating the trends on the coasts, a population of New Yorkers went hipster, crowding the place with fake cool. I grant this must be annoying, but not the downfall of human civilization (Western or otherwise).

Despite possessing rather pathetic habits and an unappealing group name, hipsters did not arrive on the planet, fully formed, and straight out of the book of Revelation. Rather, the hipster naysayers might do well to warn of themselves.

It seems we may have become too easily inclined to scan clothing habits for revolutionaries. Finding a population wearing iconic clothing but lacking a real agenda, it has somehow become reasonable to assume human society will meet its doom. There are no beats/hippies/punks/rappers/grungers to keep us honest. We’re therefore done for.

It’s surprising how greatly subversion depends upon a uniform.

I will for now accept the premise that unbounded consumer culture is functionally a failed system (in a world of limited resources, growing population, and far too many people with whom those resources are not already being shared). If we take that point as given, should we really waste time bemoaning the hipster? Granted, the love of new tights and non-prescription glasses is regrettable, but should we assume such silliness is our last hope? Or that a counterculture to consumption would be best identified by their snazzy outfits?

A group of people who ape mainstream cultural values (no matter how dorky they dress), do not a countercultural movement make. Social critics who look no deeper than fashion trends are likely not the best equipped to make sound predictions concerning anything much, except perhaps next season’s chicest colors.

In an age in which the impact of our way of life has become so powerfully clear, it is not the hipster zombie who is to be feared. It’s the shopper zombie, the journalist zombie, the broad-categorization-zombie that is worrisome. Triviality wraps itself in any number of suits. And an agenda of thoughtful responsibility does not require a new haircut.

If our way of life is threatened (and I would contend, threatening), the last thing we all need is to solder, sew or buy new duds to do the work. Although lacking the ease of external identification, evaluation of internal cultural dialogue should hopefully require a level of insight and depth beyond a brief glance at clothing and kitsch.

Your Own Virtual Jesus

2008-07-28T21:25:00.008-04:00

When I was a child, my mental portrait of God began at the feet, great, gnarly, besandaled feet, much like those of the giant at the top of Jack’s beanstalk. Vaguely, as if emerging from mist, the feet stretched out from under a white robe that disappeared into a fog of clouds. Though I assumed his countenance was surely grandfatherly, I respectfully obeyed the injunction to create no image for the face of God (even imaginatively). When I recited my nightly “Now I lay me down to sleep,” I fancied my prayers drifting upward from these feet, then slipping through a dense obstruction of cloud before falling vaguely onto an undefined ear.

This child’s notion of an anthropomorphic God was largely informed by cartoons, snatches of Sunday school lessons, and a dread fear of upsetting said deity by inadvertently breaking commandments. (Strangely, I assumed picturing God’s feet and ankles would not count as mental graven image-making, while imagining his face would.)

I found it exceedingly difficult to conceive of God without picturing some part of him. Praying to a vast oneness was beyond me. Even as my Sunday school teachers showed us storybook paintings of Jesus and my children’s Bible illustrated the (also sandal-wearing) sage, I was unnerved that there were no drawings of God. I needed something to visualize if I were going to hold down my part of the conversation. Interestingly, I did not feel similarly compelled to fill in the sound of God or the smell of God. He could be mute, odorless, even faceless, but at the very least, he had to have toes.

This observation has become particularly interesting to me as I work my way through Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. While Postman’s central task is uncovering the cultural epistemology created by the MTV era, he spends considerable time supporting the premise that a culture’s modes of communication create the framework for knowledge and define the forms of thought within that culture. The Second Commandment is particularly revelatory for Postman. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth. Sure, opting out of graven images would functionally distance the Hebrews from golden calf worshipping, Ba’al celebrants. But the Hebrews weren’t just commanded to step back from these image-driven cults, they were required to cease and desist in the creation of any images of their world, symbolic or otherwise.

Marked as chosen by an abstract, universal God, this sect was forbidden to make their faithful imaginings concrete. As Postman writes, “The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter culture.” Basically, living in a world that pictures God would have left people incapable of making the intellectual leap toward a God that cannot be pictured.

Whether this was the pragmatic function of the Commandment within early Jewish culture, Postman’s observation makes sense. Living in a visually dominated world teaches individuals to think in images. Existing in a textually dominated world instills abstract thinking. If that is the case, what sort of thinking precipitates from our current modes of communication? If I spend hours a day, rapidly flicking between computer windows, scrolling (not reading) text, skimming with the Control + F shortcut, and bouncing from link to link, what patterns of thought will I learn? If information floods my senses through TV, internet, cell phone and, less frequently, radio and print media, which structures will become my trusted methods for discerning truth?

Seeing is believing may have once been a measure of reliability. There seems to have been a time (roughly somewhere between Plato and the Enlightenment) during which reason could be trusted to drive a person toward truth. Now, when the usefulness of information is a measure of its hit rank on Google and the attractiveness of its layout, belief is the result of a popularity contest and truth is a function of mass appeal. More than becoming relative, truth and knowledge are becoming consumable goods—those assertions with the best ad-buy win.

If we accept that the bounds of human understanding are trained in cultural media, what forms of knowledge can flow from a blogreading, Facebooking, podcasting society? I wonder if my disenchantment with my childhood religion has been nurtured by the hit and miss nature of these structures. I am no longer patient picturing the cartoon feet of God, the paintings of Jesus, or clinging to the literalism my church tried to instill. There is far too much information out there to become cozy in a single worldview. But rather than being the product of healthy skepticism, is my theology merely colored by a glut of competing, unsatisfactory truths?

Does my conception of reality have proverbial hyperlinks?

For individuals seeking Truth (capital T intentional), the impact of culture on thought is troubling. Frankly, I am not lucky enough to have landed conveniently in a time and space with its thumb on the pulse of reality—and so I am left to sift through the way society has taught me to think and, alternatively, attempt to conceive of a reality that is beyond my untrained faculties.

Reality (whether consisting in God, some innocuous god, physicality only, or some other option) is only a word. Its referent, whether Word or an object, seems to be darting far too quickly for my flickering grasp.

IBS

2008-07-20T18:09:00.007-04:00

Hear the sound of stomach acid churning, popping, boiling guts with angry, acrid force. A fist, my fist, plunges quietly, in a nonchalant-seeming maneuver, to gently punch my stomach into obeisance. I cross my legs, lean forward interestedly, and further dig my fist into my blaspheming abdomen.

Irritable bowels.

Medical terminology normally lacks poetics, but “irritable bowels” both apt and descriptive, hits the mark. Wake them up too early, they are cranky, and in fits and starts will growl and moan about meeting the day. Give them food that is too spicy, too dairy, too food-like in quality, they become cross at your audacity. (A lady should be treated like a lady after all.) Challenge their temper, with either a melancholy mood, a loud voice, coffee too late or food too early, and they gurgle in punishment. If I knew a person as irritable, I would quickly distance myself. But as in many cases in our lives, those whom we would avoid in any other context, tend often to be those to whom our lives are inextricably linked. There can be no divorce from one’s bowels, no matter how bitchy they might become with age.

Significant moments in my life have been matched by significant altercations with my temperamental tummy. My break-up with my first boyfriend was precipitated by my raging gut. Now, to be fair, I had been coaxed into betraying my teenage vegetarianism and crossed rapidly back into carnivorism by way of a Burger King double cheeseburger. The boyfriend was ill-equipped to deal with the full-on rage of my doubled-over-in-pain intestinal reaction. Cross my belly, shame on me. Fail to coddle said belly, adios hombre.

Years ago, I found myself sitting stiffly at the funeral of a college friend. Often, in silent, inappropriate places like this, deep harmonics will begin suffusing from my abdomen. That day, the tragedy itself, seemed to have silenced the anti-social behavior of even my stomach. As tears streamed down my face, I was, for once, not focused on hushing my mid-region. Later, after the funeral, my husband and I walked along the college campus, took time to sit under a tree, then wandered into his old department. Once there, he stopped in to speak with a former professor and instead met a new faculty member. As we were introduced, my gut took this opportunity to unfold and introduced itself instead to the professor with a loud “GGRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrppp” that erupted from somewhere near my belly-button. Deep, sonorous noises and lonely, plaintive sounds growled and popped from in and around my rib cage. Having observed the somber moments of the funeral, now my digestive tract was keening.

The professor gave a surprised and sporting laugh. My husband was horrified. He has been reasonably patient with my various stomach ailments in the past, but was understandably shocked by the animalistic sounds I began creating for this professor of science. Testing and surpassing all biological knowledge on their parts, my gut continued keening like a strangled, angry buffalo. I excused myself to get some water, took ten minutes at a fountain on the other end of the building, trying to drink and talk my stomach into a sedate quiet. Eventually, it relented. That is, until I rounded the corner to my husband and team of college faculty, at which, the prima donna, ever aware of an audience, once again began a fiercesome impersonation of dying beached whales, the sound somehow amplified by the ocean of water I had recently downed. This was not gas—a mere phase of matter could not produce these sounds. This was sheer gastrointestinal willpower.

My husband, having long ago learned when my stomach has won, steered us away saying he wanted to visit the music faculty as well. The professor thanked him for stopping by, and for introducing him to his wife with the musical stomach, asking if perhaps I had been a music major. Clearly, it takes training to develop an instrument such as mine.

Last week, I had a job interview. Initially, I was mildly interested in the job, but did not feel that it would be my best fit. As I began talking, I heard a familiar rumble from below the table. As my fist automatically shoved its way into my belly (with the casual gesture I have perfected), I realized, puzzled, that the beast was sleeping. As I glanced across the table (still professionally answering the posed question), I noticed the interviewer in a mirrored pose, her fist in her stomach. Sensing a kindred spirit, my own grumblly nemesis awoke, cooed irreverently, and located the same pitch as my interviewer’s IBS. The interviewer smiled slightly embarrassedly, seeming to think that her growler had just now increased in volume, unaware that I had taken up the low harmonics.

And thus, I may have found my match. Cranky stomach issues aside, I sense that working with someone with similar somatic concerns (and a same failed control over simple digestion) will prove beneficial for me. More than possessing the shared awkwardness of inappropriate bowels, there is a certain kind of affability that comes from frequent and well-timed humiliation. Job descriptions and pay scales aside, I’d much prefer to work for someone who can balance slavish bowels with grace.

Synchronicity

2008-07-15T18:57:00.002-04:00

Today, July 15, is the birthday of Jacques Derrida and Iris Murdoch.

The two share some basic qualities: penetrating minds and a penchant for philosophical thought (to put things mildly). Derrida, the dark horseman of the post-modern apocalypse, responsible for taking the wind out of the very wind-baggy enlightenment and making all of us look at people, places and, tiresomely, books, as texts. Prompting much cranky-old-man-harrumphing and young scholars’ piercing analysis—his works may only be recognized as “fun” in certain circles (the sort I’d personally rather not party with)—but Derrida made an impact.

Iris Murdoch, perhaps less appreciated by some, is among my favorite philosophers and novelists. A philosopher who somehow retained the ability to write well, she is admittedly an anomaly. Murdoch wrote deeply about good and evil, was brilliant and actually funny. (Lovers of wisdom are usually not good for a laugh.)

July 15, what a day.

July 15 is also the birthday of Arianna Huffington (of the Huffington Post). Maybe not a perfect match, but she seems to have a fairly big brain.

Certainly, it’s only a coincidence, but upon hearing that these great minds share a birthday, my knee-jerk response was a mild astonishment. I’d like to compare their birth charts.

The world is a fascinating and beautiful mystery.

When I was in high school, I became obsessed with the number three. Like so many hopeless nerds, I was disinterested in music, magazines and clothes. I dug the number three.

It was everywhere.

Deaths happen in threes.

The holy trinity…three again.

The Hindu godhead (Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma).

Good, evil, and, um, the rest of us?

Like most teenagers, I though Carl Jung was deep (okay, I really didn’t date much). Synchronicity made sense—the world is richly connected in ways we can’t explain. Whenever I would find a cluster of threes in the world, I imagined my mind, the universe, and a triumvirate god coinciding in a little “hello, here we are!”

Derrida, Murdoch, and Huffington. July 15 blinks hello universe!

Ok, Jesse Ventura was also born on July 15.

Damn.

A lot of other people were born on July 15.

The trick about meaningful coincidences is that the person observing the coincidence also gets to decipher the meaning. If two people happen to die around the same time, believers in superstition tend to start looking for number three, and if you look hard enough for something, you tend to find it (or at least cling to the closest fit).

Our glimpses at the divine, the mundane, and the mental landscape that draws the two together—these are each to a person, one’s own. Whether a person looks for threes, karmic retribution, the whispering voice of god, the vision and rhythm of meaning is private. It may not be reasonable, but this does not make subjective meaning weak or silly. Some of the things we choose to find meaning in might be peculiar, but in the end, whatever grips a person momentarily and makes her look anew at the world has some significance. Like good art, such moments pull us from our daily lives, if only for a moment, to look at, and occasionally for, something bigger.

So, July 15 and its children are a coincidence of questionable significance, but it is also a reminder to look deeper: into texts, goodness, our news, and the ever-surprising soul of a professional wrestler. Today seems like a pretty good day to learn a thing or two from Carl Jung and the fine voters of Minnesota.

Why Those Bush/Cheney 1984 Bumper Stickers Aren't Funny

2008-07-13T12:17:00.008-04:00

Months ago, I found myself parked on the couch, watching my husband sleep through another News Hour with Jim Lehrer. I’m rapidly developing the gnat-like attention span of chronic multi-taskers everywhere and am usually loathe to gain my news in detailed, intelligent, 10 minute segments. Say it fast, and with plenty of links, my friend.

But parked on my couch with computer on lap and Judy Woodruff in the background, I was only half-listening as I heard the correspondent begin rattling off names of other news networks… “And for the record, we invited Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and NBC to participate, but they declined our offer or did not respond." And later Woodruff added (with a tone of irony that could baffle only the likes of Katie Couric) "We've been talking to the Pentagon since Monday about participating in this segment, but when we finally scheduled it today, they were unable to supply a guest on short notice."

And so began my education.

I am not a daily New York Times reader, and so I had missed the first real mainstream media nod to the pentagon pundits’ scandal. (Is a scandal a scandal, really, if few talk about it and the media vultures go mum?)

The Cliff’s Notes version is this: the pentagon (under the rule of Donald Rumsfeld) quietly recruited, groomed, scripted and injected military analysts (so-called) into mainstream media outlets. When newscasters and groups like Amnesty International started questioning the administration’s tactics, these insiders echoed the administration’s language on the war and Guantanamo. Most have business ties to the contract companies currently making a bundle rebuilding in the wake of the war. As the pundits spoke up on TV, applauded our war, our torture, our former Secretary of Defense, the White House quoted them back to reporters as examples of public support for their policies.

I imagine a ventriloquist feigning surprise at the cheerful banter of his puppet.

Since the story broke, there’s been little public outcry and the press seems racked by a case of fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, well… let’s not talk about that. We’ve been had, over and shamelessly over again in this country. My knee-jerk sense of injustice notwithstanding, it’s gotten exhausting being so indignant.

But I can’t imagine that sheer exhaustion is what has kept the 24-newscycle quiet. I don’t think the alternative Jeramiah Wright story was as fascinating as its coverage would suggest.

There is egg, big juicy, blood and guts, Journalism 101 egg dripping down the proverbial face of CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, ETC. ETC. ETC. Check your sources. What does your source have to gain by giving this story? Who are they in bed with? Who’s signing their checks, taking them out to drinks and dinner; who’s flying them around on private jets?

Is this news? Is the news true? Are our partners in truth-seeking so embarrassed that now they too will have a hand in burying the truth? All’s quiet on the western front, or at least on cable.

The story’s reach may now only be carried on feeble legs (teetering on the limited bravery of mainstream media). I’ve been waiting for more on this, and angry Huffington Post and a lone wolf PBS segment have nearly marked the boundaries of the story’s coverage.

In a world large with deception, I think we are often too tired for conspiracy hunting. But when deception has been so carefully orchestrated, I’d like to know whose blood I have on my hands—and how much. Without the help of real journalism, I’m unsure whether to measure our collective guilt by the dollar, the gallon, or in lives lost.

Courage

2008-06-28T20:25:00.002-04:00

Having been to the Dalai Lama’s compound in Dharamsala and having seen the transplanted home of Tibetan Buddhism, I am awestruck by the sheer nerve it takes to give up one’s home in order to freely practice one’s religion. Certainly the Dalai Lama fled for his life as well. But the thousands who remain in Tibet and face China’s violent suppression, the hundreds of monks who joined the Dalai Lama, who daily pray, chant and survive with him, who rebuilt their temple, who take the traditional vows of monastic life to this farthest extreme—they live their faith and assumablly, the conviction of that faith gives them the strength to continue their resistance.

Faith like this is awesome (in its truest sense) and is terrifying. I wonder if the Dalai Lama ever asks himself if dharma is a joke, if his personal holiness, a miscalculation. I wonder if this much faith leaves that much space for self-doubt.

Perhaps that’s the point. Faith speaks to a part of ourselves that is beyond ego, that is bigger than our fears of smallness.

There is a difference between being an atheist (not believing in a deity) and lacking faith in the unseen. One is a rejection—the other still leaves room for some other reality, keeps the ego in check. I am not confident enough in my own sense experience (or even the collective experience of all people) to believe that all we see, hear, and know is all that is.

Not to diminish our physical reality—the world we know is considerable. On a sun-lit balcony in India, I see trees, birds, a dramatically mist-filled sky, mountains, children playing, and a beggar who just tired of his post and moved on for more shade. Just this world is enough to fill one’s time and concern.

So why look for anything else? For some, the search is a pursuit of safety and assurance. For some, it is the most reasonable answer.

There—right there, is what is. And this thing that is, that changes and lives and breathes and dies seems so tenuously supported by all that’s around it, that we tend to look for its true support. (The world of being, beneath this world of becoming.)

We know we are short-lived and want to know the greater sense of life, widely understood. When we fall away, it is better (more comfortable) to believe we fall into greater being, rather than nothingness.

This is something like Kierkegaard’s paradox—staring side-long into a description of reality that makes no sense (that cannot make sense to us in this world), looking below into nothingness, and daring to allow the unseen to save you from spiritual destruction.

But without faith, how do you dare throw yourself off a cliff into nothingness? You must have some inkling you’ll be caught to dare the leap.

Defined this way, faith seems to be the other side of spiritual suicide. It is a means of choosing a second life—one apart from one’s everyday physical existence. And the exercise of this—the creation and sustaining of one’s most personal, vital life—is a freedom that may be threatened, squeezed but must never relent, must never be allowed to perish, even at the hand of equally real state power. In such circumstances, it seems the alternative of faith is both the reason for the leap, and our survival of the leap, the impetus for fighting to preserve the right to freely bridge two worlds. It is a move that both requires and fosters great courage. In this, we can measure the magnitude of the great unseen—gods, being, what have you, along with the breadth of human conviction and the might of our desire for real freedom.

Caretaker of Small Things

2008-05-24T20:13:00.002-04:00

Delhi thus far has been a city of countless heartbreaks. Between the beggars, the trash-picking children, the hordes of malnourished street dogs, and the awareness of my own opulence, I fluctuate between emotionally steeling myself and being rocked by waves of helplessness and sorrow.

There is so much to take in here—each moment is a new inundation of movement, noise, oppressive heat, small and large injustices. Each time I step into a temple and walk into miraculous quiet, I nearly fool myself into believing my sense of empathy can stand another day of walking these streets.

I do not want to be hard hearted, but it is very much a pick-your battles, pick-your-heartache kind of place. Sitting under a tree at the Red Fort yesterday, seeking shade and respite from the blistering heat, I found myself torn between enjoying the amazing compound and feeling sorrow for a street dog that sauntered in. With ribs popping, an open wound, panting, the dog found his own piece of shade and rested. After about ten minutes, he started wandering through the enclosed garden, approaching, but never completely coming to the families similarly finding space in the shade. He nosed around like any friendly, abused, domesticated dog would, looking for attention, but warily remote, knowing better than to come too close.

It was just a dog. Street dogs and people seem to be in equal numbers here. But feeling I could really do nothing for this half-starved, street-wild, lonesome dog stung me. I can do nothing lasting here—while short-term fixes risk dog bites, theft, or other threats to personal safety. I may momentarily salve my conscience with a handout, but I can’t give the garbage-picking children health or an education. I can’t mend the feet of the shoeless beggars I pass daily. The magnitude of this place breaks me, and it happens with each sad situation I see, that I am helpless to resolve.

I wonder how people live amongst daily tragedy and sustain any compassion. The god of small things seems to even be failing at that here. Nevertheless, we find people who are gentle, despite the aggressive pace of this city; who are kind when self-preservation would seem to require one be hard.

As we meandered through a Jain temple yesterday, shoeless in religious observance, we wandered haphazardly into the temple’s avian hospital. Barefoot and acutely aware of air and foot-borne disease, we were welcomed into a cage-lined room where the smell of ammonia and bird shit was only matched by the clatter of the patients. Mangled, injured and malformed birds that otherwise would meet certain death squawked and flopped in their cages. A few, with impossible birth defects made me momentarily wonder what Darwin might think of caring for the weakest of the species.

On the floor, along the second row of cages, sat a man spoon-feeding a soggy-downed hatchling. He had wisely and more hygienically retained his sandals for this part of the temple complex, but I could see his feet were calloused, cracked and grey, like so many people in this city who have enough, but still tolerate discomfort that most Americans would find intolerable.

He was Jain, of course, the sort who really do use brooms to spare insects from dying underfoot. Relative to most, he was bound to be careful with life. But he needn’t spend the afternoon painstakingly saving that baby bird. In a place of so many horrors, he chose to mend a tiny life.

There are so many small sorrows that could numb a person, but there are also minor miracles—and patient souls create them.While I am unsure where god is in all this, it is the moral weight of simple human activity that can allow a person to face her own smallness and powerlessness intact.

Dancing without God

2008-03-30T10:17:00.007-04:00

I woke up early this Sunday morning, and with a new dress hanging in my closet, I felt a peculiar echo of my Protestant upbringing. Sans any new-found religious stirrings, I nonetheless discovered a latent impulse to go to church. Having spent last Sunday begrudgingly attending an Easter service with my in-laws, as always, politely skipping communion, it’s admittedly incongruous that today I have an interest (if still the queasy sort) in filing into a pew.

I am not on speaking terms with God (or even the less demanding, generic god), but recently I have become aware of a certain feeling of absence, a lack of community, a deadened spiritual sense, that religious gathering tends to mend. While last weekend I found myself twitchy during hymns and spoken prayers (careful not to mouth the words of creeds to which I do not subscribe), today I feel lonely and untended to. Reticent though I am in a Christian congregation, I am an active mental participant. I read along with the Biblical passages (ticking off failings in contextualization, pronunciation, and divine ill-humor). I find myself sweating nervously when the minister mentions salvation, and I salivate at the thought of grape juice and a good loaf of French bread. Pre-transubstantiation, this is an excellent mid-morning snack. Post-ritual, it becomes something I can’t swallow. My lack of belief excludes me, and I still have enough respect for believers to exclude my unbelieving cynicism from their ranks.

Yet I still feel like there is somewhere I should be right now. This could easily be blamed on my mother’s training me to be a church-goer from infancy. Despite her own stolid agnosticism, she insisted we attend church each week. Like brussels sprouts and safe-sex talks, church was good for me and I was going to have to accept it, no matter how uncomfortable it made me. But as a child I enjoyed church—as an acolyte, I was allowed to play with matches (something I could never do at home), my Bible was a very large book with pictures, and if I sat quietly through the service, I was often rewarded with a Happy Meal for lunch. Until my teenage years, a time of much proselytizing, hell-fire, brimstone, and anxiety, church had just been another place to sit (and play with fire). Once I discovered church as a spiritual outlet and place to fit, a community, it became home.

Without this sense of home, the tragedy of my falling out with God would not have been such a betrayal. Actually reading the Bible (instead of scanning illustrations and taking isolated passages a bit too literally) transformed me. Campus crusaders for Christ managed to kill my faith and make me antagonistic to the entire religious scene. I felt empty, angry, and slowly accepted that there was no One to blame (let us all not forget either the god of lower case letters).

Like believers, there are various kinds of atheists. There are the intellectual sort who insist there is no god—who cannot prove a negative, but are pissed off, wear black, and worship their own dark imaginings instead. There are atheists who claim disbelief, but are truly angry at God, loath God, avow no-God, but in turning their backs forever feel the presence of something rejected, lurking behind them. There are sad atheists, who (like me) would find things much easier if reason, or feeling, or faith could incline them toward belief. It is this sort that pepper Unitarian churches on sporadic Sunday mornings.

And I have attended those Unitarian services, but I leave feeling emptier. Metaphysical nonalignment is one thing, but weekly celebration of non-commitment is something else altogether. Toying with religion friendly to the unbeliever has never been satisfying. During my last craving for spiritual togetherness, I found myself in a suburban Buddhist temple, in lotus position, trying to ignore the fact that my foot had fallen asleep. We had three hours of meditation in which I alternated between finding myself and my surroundings to be ridiculous. In a room full of new agey white folks and friendly Black Muslim converts, we stumbled over Japanese and Tibetan syllables that meant nothing. I hobbled (with sleeping foot) during the walking meditation, but as the prayer leader asked us solemnly to repeat the holy word “Mu” my Buddhist wonderings bubbled into stifled giggles. I understand Buddhism. Things change. Things are impermanent. But a girl (and a divine fat guy) have to laugh at a roomful of Ohioans lumbering around a temple mooing.

While I don’t have the nerve to go to church today, I somehow lack the energy to sit still for hours, even if it ends in a whole-hearted moooooooooooooooooooo.

So what remains for the atheist? Are we alone and left darkly in this world? I’ve got no divine text, no testament to get me through dark nights (or Sunday mornings) of the soul. Lacking this, I’ve found a magician as prophet for a kinder, gentler atheism.

Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame, is oafish, crass, and offered one of the smartest submissions I’ve heard on NPR’s This I Believe series. In the essay, entitled, "There Is No God," the Dancing with the Stars reject works out the most inspiring description of atheism I have encountered, or rather something beyond atheism. The belief that there is no God is freeing—without looking for more than this world, we find that we have just that—this whole world.

There are mooing Buddhists, Hare Krishnas, well-behaved Methodists, family, limited time, a fragile Earth and if there is loneliness, there is no God to be blamed. We are here, and there may be no good answer to the infernal question why???, but alive we are. Days are short, precious, and communities can be made wherever we are lucky enough to find them. Happenstance may be unsatisfying, but there is no omniscient being to offer satisfying answers, and so when a person manages to affirm anything on his or her own, this is fortunate, if not something miraculous.

So on Sunday morning, as I sit on my couch with curtains closed (still weary of the well-meaning Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses who frequent our neighborhood), I get solace from an internet link. That words can soothe, even those of a clownish behemoth like Penn Jillette, proves the serendipitous nature of a world filled with randomness, chaos, and creatures that can so often be thoughtful and caring. We exist here, tenuously and necessarily bound to one another. And that, my friend, is something worth mooing about.

Just a seven letter word

2008-03-10T21:22:00.005-04:00

This morning I opened our web browser and the usual news page began scrolling the day’s headlines. I expected the usual montage of he-said-she-said election updates. Instead I got a photograph of activists in baseball caps waterboarding a volunteer.

My immediate reaction was visceral—I felt tricked and betrayed, disgusted, my delicate disposition robbed of the option to look away. It’s been unnerving, these last few years, never knowing if an innocent glance at the news might result in witnessing a beheading, an execution, or torture. I suppose it is a good thing, this bearing collective witness to atrocity. At least we cannot claim ignorance, even if we do not accept collective responsibility.

This morning, I only glimpsed a bit of torture, a drama of torture really. The voluntary nature of the situation seems to make it something different. If a person allows someone to nearly drown him to make a statement, well, that is one thing. Being pinned down by strangers, not knowing when they will stop the flow of water is another thing altogether. Torture is physical certainly, but it is also psychological. It is about power. Torture, if we suppose that it can be effective, is so because people’s wills are broken.

My country breaks people.

It is policy. For those of you who wish to limit this policy, my president has a veto.

My argument against torture is largely based upon a vague sense of repulsion—certainly not the sort of claim that could bear much weight in a serious ethical argument. Practically speaking, I know that torture is largely ineffectual. Experts (is it unsurprising that there are experts in such a thing?) have argued publicly that tortured individuals often tell their captors what they think they want to hear. The end result is a broken suspect, and information, but not necessarily truth.

President Bush argues that we cannot ban acts such as waterboarding because in the past such practices have prevented attacks. Granting this as accurate (which I do hesitantly), and putting aside the logic that says past performance is a predictor for future occurrences, I cannot imagine that torture is so vital to our national security—in fact, it seems counterproductive.

People brutalize one another most easily when they lose sense of one another’s humanity—in war the enemy becomes a caricature, is given a slur instead of a name, and destroyed as a monolith. We call our enemies terrorists both because they create terror, but also because the term reduces their activities to the horrible bloodshed. Various cells have countless claims against American economic and political policy—but conventional wisdom tells us that the claims of monsters ought not be legitimized.

Among the many things I fear, it is being painted with the same brush.

On the scale of things terrible, I am unsure where to place information-seeking torture along side traditional war, bombings, or using mentally handicapped individuals to deliver bombs. All along this spectrum of cruelty, people harm others for a perceived greater good. But “they’ve got their reasons, we’ve got ours” is a weak response. Even the most wicked people have reasons for the things they do. Justifications abound. But brutality has a double vector—it destroys the victim and the brutalizer.

In honesty, my shock this morning was not a sadness for the CIA operatives who will be asked to torture. I may have been a bit ambivalent about the protestors objecting to torture by play-acting waterboarding, but I suppose my greatest misgivings centered upon the veto itself. As a member of a representative democracy, I am, in fact part of something broader, and I submit myself to representation by my officials. This morning, the president acted against my will (nothing much unusual), justified the unjustifiable, but also gave the argument a mark of finality.

The terrorists blow people up. Americans torture—when we have to.

It all comes down to such simple categories—and it tarnishes all of us.

In the last seven years I’ve learned to talk with candor about impossible brutality. I have never experienced any of this violence directly, but through slow but constant inundation, I am learning to see the agony of others differently, with indifference.

I play-act too. I begin writing paragraphs describing my own shock and disgust, but I am mostly angry with the president. I am only passingly unnerved by the image of partial drowning.

The exceptionality of terrorism has almost been lost by many Americans. Torture is becoming something academic, just another seven letter word to be discussed, sussed out. We argue over its definition, and the horror softens to a twinge.

This, then, is why the veto is so alarming. A people can be defined by what it does, but also by what it refuses to accept. When the unthinkable ceases to be taboo, it’s difficult to know what we will not do or approve under the right circumstances.

I recognize the slippery slope here—but looking back, I recognize how far we’ve already slid.

The Pep Rally

2008-03-05T20:33:00.007-05:00

I am fairly certain I will never understand school spirit. My high school class, clustered together by chance, was supposed to understand a special sense of unity, an ethos of history.

I never learned the alma mater, and I thought the gym smelled bad.

Inevitably, I would feel myself becoming embarrassingly jealous of the cheerleaders and their mini skirts, their starring role in the assembly. I would comment on the offensiveness of our Indian mascot--but no one wants to be PC when you've got a school sanctioned reason to skip fifth period. So I crossed my arms, played with the pins on my backpack, and tried to look bored.

But the clapping and stomping portion of the rally was most unfortunate for me. Awkward and a bit shy, I felt as though the entire gymnasium was really secretly there to catch a glimpse of the hopelessly arrhythmic. I would half-heartedly try to clap along if my friends were moved to participate (conscientious objection can only go so far). But I never knew when to clap, and if I did manage to catch the beat, it was the off-beat, and my miracle of clapping coordination would happen just as the crowd quieted. It was a cruel talent of the school spirited—knowing when the crowd should hush for a few words from the coach. Hopelessly unaware, mine were the last set of hands, clap-clap, clapclapclap, clapping when the speech had started.

Ten years past high school, I had nearly forgotten this particular set of anxieties. Then last Friday, I walked into Antioch Baptist Church for what I thought would be an informational meeting about the Obama campaign. I walked alone, into the church (the sort of place that normally sets my nerves on edge anyway)—and found the sanctuary packed with a shouting, clapping, sign-waving crowd. Up front, where the cheerleaders ought to be, there was a smartly dressed city councilwoman, a county commissioner, a rabbi and a minister. I put on my Obama pin and allowed myself to be ushered into one of the empty seats in the balcony.

I ended up squeezing between a middle aged man and a bus driver in her thirties. As the first speaker took her spot at the lectern (and was simulcast onto the jumbotron screen behind it), I started to get excited. Ohio mattered in this election. Our poverty, our housing crisis and our unemployment was going to get national attention. My vote for Barack Obama was going to be part of a movement—my vote could change the course of history.

At first, I stood with the rest of the crowd out of politeness. I clapped a bit when moved to, but I understood quickly that there was no wrong time to clap. People were seemingly afflicted with unprovoked outbursts of clapping, shouting. I mumbled a few “Yes, WE CAN’s” when the room really got noisy, but I mostly kept quiet. I was raised Methodist, after all.

Finally, the church’s minister took the pulpit. He held up an old document wrapped in a plastic sleeve and started to tell a story. Soon, I understood what makes people yell amen.

The document was his great uncle’s death certificate. On November 4, 1930, his uncle was shot and killed in Kentucky, on his way to vote. He just wanted to vote.

Now, his great nephew, a minister from Cleveland, was going to serve as a delegate at the Democratic convention—and cast a vote for the man who could be our first black president.

That’s when the magnitude of this election really hit me. I’ve heard the fact that Barack Obama might be our first black president so many times that it barely fazes me. He could be lime green, and although I might be bit alarmed by that hue, I’d still vote for him. But just eighty years ago, some white people were so threatened by the idea of black voters that they would kill. Just eighty years ago, there were people who valued voting so dearly that they died trying.

In that noisy Baptist church, I still may not have found God, but I found a faith in America that I’d never before understood. The pledge of allegiance was something you did because your teacher asked you to; people stand for the national anthem because it’s rude to sit. The declaration of independence, those self-evident truths—these were just the words of wise but distant characters. Patriotism always struck me as a farce.

I suppose that I have never felt involved in the course of American history. I would do the pledge and stand at attention with the same forced spirit I felt at meaningless rituals like high school pep rallies. But now, I recognize that a single vote does matter, that the spirit of an age can change lives.

My vote in the coming week will be significant—not because Ohio is now valuable primary territory, but because the heartfelt decisions of individuals do matter. This country was founded upon certain principles—and though the founding generation failed to grant it at the time—we are bound together in protection of these principles. The last seven years nearly convinced me that my life is small, that the popular vote is secondary, that the constitution can be ignored when convenient, that Americans are small, scared people.

In all the talk about hope, Obama is slowly reminding us that we are no different from the rest of the world. That even in America, people can come together to solve problems, to ensure a better world for all of our children.

Today, I will attend my fourth rally in little over a week. It’s strange, but I think I am starting to understand why people go to church each week. There is something nourishing about this process. It is healing to hear a room full of people stand and cheer about closing Guantanamo, restoring habeas corpus, and knowing that a country’s greatness is not a measure of its leader. It is measured in the actions of everyday people—those who manage to demand more than manipulation, fear, and the lowest common intellectual denominator. For this, I jump to my feet, clap my hands, yell, and cry a little. For me, these are rallies for natural rights and human potential, and for that, I cannot sit back quietly any longer.

Absences and the heart

2008-02-13T23:54:00.004-05:00

There is an inane and horrible little book that has become popular in certain Christian circles called I Kissed Dating Goodbye. I hate to dignify the text, to increase any sort of readership (even those who will gladly loath and mock it)—but I am finding its main premise particularly troubling tonight.

The book, lacking in any real subtlety, suggests that dating is detrimental, that coupling with multiple partners over time (not only sexually, but also coveting in thought, holding hands, etc.) will slice and dice the heart into tatters. It seems that to the author the range of our love is finite, with each experience of intimacy cutting away at the soul until we are left with only remnants. Those who love too easily will only have broken shards to offer to their future mates.

Tonight I celebrate the absences.

Having found my match, my partner for life, I am fortunate to experience the fullness of constancy, the ubiquity of love. Having cared before did not mar me, having loved others did not turn my heart into a sieve. I recognize the completeness of this experience—and it is filled in more resolutely by the holes left by others.

The empty moments I have felt as friends, family, ex-boyfriends melted away into memory, vanished, and sometimes died—these fragile, beautiful human beings formed a heart that could care through pain. There have been times when the permanence of real loss, of death and resolute absence nearly crippled me. I’ve choked on sobs. I’ve screamed vengeance upon the heavens. I’ve whispered a name late at night, when I had given up on sleep.

There are spaces between joy and sorrow that come to define who we are. Between the gentle warmth of love and the suffocating grip of love lost, there are memories, moments and soft glimpses at those who people our lives. We are so much more than the person who cares and loves now—the damage, the grief, and the healing we’ve endured create the texture of the soul.

A few months before her death, a friend of mine read one of Mark Strand’s poems as part of her convocation speech.

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.

Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

The world is made up of so many absences—and it is made whole by our living in it. The heart may suffer absence, but it is held intact by bravely suffering emptiness and continuing with care.

Fearing brokenness, one may coddle the heart, and step gingerly toward love. But caring is an unsafe practice, and antipathy to grief stunts the heart. We need grief, and the scars we mend are to be lauded.

Tonight, as I remember those who have been lost to this world, tears burn in my eyes; I feel a terrible, swelling pain in my chest, and I know that they are simply, irrevocably, gone. But memory binds the heart back together. With a muddle of remembered loss and maturing love, we move on and hold on. We become whole within and because of the absences.

The Guest Room

2008-02-11T22:45:00.001-05:00

A few years ago, I was wandering the blustery winter streets of Washington, D.C. as night fell. I was an out of towner—a rather naïve Midwesterner on break from my college in Amish country. The pace, the unfriendly city faces, the insensible drive around Dupont Circle, all of it had created a pit of anxiety in my stomach, and I had rapidly come to the conclusion that city life defied the natural progression of the species.

Capitol Hill types in suits intimidated me, cars with tinted windows seemed a ludicrous precaution, and the sheer haughtiness of Georgetown struck me as impossibly beautiful, affluent and elitist. Of course, I did not put words to this, but scoffed at the rigid figures who darted between stores, cell phone to ear, eyes fixed not on the people around them, but flicking back and forth over the crowded sidewalk, looking for the quickest path through.

As night drew dark, I began window shopping with the friend who joined me on the trip. We glanced into storefronts, getting a glimpse of merchandise so far beyond our means that we couldn’t bring ourselves to actually enter the shops. As we strolled along, I grew increasingly aware of the homeless who were packing up their garbage bags and mats, heading off to sleep at missions, under bridges, wherever it was that they went. The shoppers who also milled the streets failed to cast a glance at the men and women who woefully gave their donation cans a few last needful shakes. The bright lights of the stores easily captured their attention, but the dinginess of the hard to look at seemed to escape interest.

This had bothered me throughout the day. Having grown up in a small town, I was unaccustomed to large numbers of street people, and even more unfamiliar with the practice of passing others on the street without acknowledgement. For the power-suited crowd, empathetic impulses appeared to be dead.

Eventually, I strayed. My attention was drawn to a closed furniture store. Stopping in front of the window, I watched the staff cleaning up for the night. They swept the softly lit hardwood floors, fluffed sofa pillows, and took great care to ready the emptying store for the next day.

It took a few moments before I realized that a man had joined me at the window. I watched his reflection in the backlit glass and saw this disheveled, clearly homeless man observe salespeople caring for a room full of other people’s furniture. His shy almost furtive expression soon softened, and he appeared to drift into memory. Looking in on the rooms belonging to no one, I could see the impression of his old home in his eyes. It could have been a childhood home, a first apartment, I have no idea—but this was a man who knew what home felt like, who had tended to things, had cared for his own place in the world.

Now he was a vagrant, locked outside, viewing an imperfect facsimile, a home that was not home. He blinked. His focus shifted away from the furniture and to the surface of the reflective window. Seeing me watching him, he coughed gruffly, looked away and in a moment, was gone.

I had caught him in a private moment, and with his guard down, the man revealed to me the irony of our world. We nurture empty spaces, create worlds of warmth and light for the sake of retail, while human beings suffer on the outside, hungry, uncared for, locked out of our clean, safe places.

For years, I’ve clung to this moment as a telling example of our cultural brokenness, of the callousness of the rich. I even used this story as part of my graduate school applications—it allowed me to show my sensitivity to others, my disgust with the status quo.

(It is, of course, very un-status quo to go to graduate school.)

Wanting to remain true to my roots, aware of economic disparity, I still like to view myself as a thoughtful outsider, an observer of the system, but somehow apart from its inherent injustice. I talk a good game about poverty, but now that for the first time, I live with a sense of financial security, I feel only dread about returning to that state. I could give up quite a bit and return to a more precarious situation (in my childhood we flirted with, but never quite managed to become entirely homeless). I feel guilt for what I have, this lovely apartment with carefully cared for furniture. I wonder if someone with less looked into my window, would they think of home? Would they wonder if all of my things keep me happy and warm? Would they see the guilt round my eyes as I pulled the curtain closed on them?

My husband wants to buy a bed for the spare bedroom, and I protest fiercely with no real argument to support my objection. Exasperated, he told me yesterday he understands why I am so bothered by the thought of having a real guest room, a bed that frequently goes empty when there are people who need beds. I suppose that must be part of the reason why the guest room sickens me. The empty bed would be a reminder that I have become a fraud.

I am caught up in truisms about rich men failing to pass through the heads of needles. I grant that a vow of poverty is a difficult thing, but once there, it seems just so much easier to be good. Vaguely, it seems as though poverty simplifies the decision making process—you have so little that you give to others what you can, but your own basic needs are justifiably given first priority. I idealize giving until it hurts, but having just reached this glorious feeling of middle class stability, I’d rather my pocket book not hurt for a while. And so I litter my world with tchotchkes from Target and salve my conscience with T shirts from the local fair trade store. With so many options, I find it easy, oh so easy, to wander from store to store, finding little trinkets for my nest. And I find that my new way of living might be even more abhorrent than that of the D.C. power shoppers I condemned. I have yet to develop the ability to see through the impoverished as though they were invisible. I still see the ramshackle needy outside. I simply step around them as I enter the store.

Immediacy and Horror

2008-01-07T22:25:00.001-05:00

I had a nightmare this morning. Most of the details are unimportant, except for these: my parents were hiding the town’s children in their house, bad men wanted to take and harm the children, and my parents’ home was transplanted to Africa. At some point in the dream, my mother and I realized that the bad men recognized that our house was the safe-house and we began shuttling the children out. Eventually, the only person who remained in the house was my father, who stayed for a short time to maintain the illusion of normalcy. In the dream, my mother and I watched through binoculars, waiting for some sign that the bad men knew we had left, searching outside the safe-house for my father.

Suddenly, the men waiting outside the house turned, pointed at the house, one laughed, and they opened fire. My father, hearing the popping sounds, ran outside toward the gunfire. He was immediately shot, and quick, red blood burst across his body, ran down his face, over his ribs. I screamed, “Daddy!” My brother screamed, “Daddy!” We kept screaming.

Eventually the bad men stormed the house, and once they were inside, my father stood, stumbled down the street toward the safe-house. Yards from the front gate, he was tackled. He was held down by other parents, other townspeople who didn’t want him to give away the hidden location of the children. It was too late. My family, in horror, fled the house and ran into the street, screaming for him. Now his pursuers fell away and he crawled, slid toward the gate, but could not get through. Soon we were all sprayed with bullets, and I watched him fall to the ground.

I woke up sobbing. My husband told me over and over “It’s not real.” Silly enough, I believed it for a second. Of course, my own father was not brutally killed this morning. But I think it’s no mistake that my subconscious put that dream in Africa. That’s where horrific things happen, where children watch their fathers die, where parents watch their children raped and murdered. It’s distant, unreal, and it does not rip at your insides like watching your own father riddled with bullets.

I wonder why.

Reading history, I often find myself shocked by the detached behavior of those in power, of the common folk living in the wealthier nations—those who heard stories of unbelievable violence, took a moment to intellectualize it, and moved on. Here in the US, and at the UN, people debate the application of the terms torture and genocide. Empathetic creatures cannot reduce atrocity to a dialogue concerning the proper application of a term. Human beings with souls cannot hear about mass murder and do nothing.

We must have no souls.

There is something so distant about Darfur, about AIDS in Africa. God, yes, it’s here, but not like it is there…and so we can buy a T-shirt at the Gap to prove our care, but does a damn T-shirt prove anything other than another new marketing ploy has been effective with America’s monster-consumers?

I watched the New Hampshire debates this weekend, and what failed to shock me at the time, but what now has me stunned, is the moral authority with which the candidates spoke about giving tough love to the Iraqi people—and their inability to deal with terrorism with any comment more nuanced than, “I would seek them out and end them.” What are we that this has become an acceptable way of speaking in public? Why can’t we understand the Iraqi government’s ineffectual predicament as anything other than a natural response to horror? Every day people are EXPLODED in the streets. This has been happening for years. Brutality is commonplace, and even though I recognize that our American response to news of this brutality has been a careful stomaching of the truly terrible, those without distance surely cannot swallow so much. The Iraqis cannot do very much for themselves because they are busy watching one another die—fearing for their families. We let the violence in Darfur roll along merrily (pretending to debate sanctions on China, threatening to protest the Olympics because the Chinese support the murderous regimes in the Sudan—but we all know we won’t. God love synchronized swimming).

I am left wondering why seeing my father blood-soaked in a dream (an unreality) rattled me, when countless photos of others dead in heaps does not anymore. Surely my father matters a great deal to me, but why don’t these other people? Last night I re-watched footage of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination—saw shots fired and, I know, human beings blowing up. And I munched potato chips while I viewed the carnage.

I wonder if all human beings cannot help but be like this, if it’s just me, or if I can safely blame my culture for making me this way. I have volition; perhaps I could have chosen to better fight the directive to numb myself to others’ misery. It must be better to feel it though—that at least, is real.

My own reflections on Michael Walzer’s Dirty Hands

2007-11-30T22:50:00.000-05:00

As the 2008 Presidential Election already begins ramping up like a campaign financier’s opiate dream, I look at the contenders and feel a strange satisfaction. Among the bizarre (the Vegan), the knavish (another son from Hope), and the quietly charmed (the Mormon), I note an alarming trend. Rather than straightforward politicians, in this primary’s field, I am seeing human beings with clear moral principles, and maybe, just maybe, the personal fortitude to stick to their guns on the issues. There is a smooth-talking New Yorker, who loves New York for all the right reasons. There’s the boy who grew up in poverty, who is driven to reshape policy and create some kind of economic equity. There’s the woman who stands for gumption, and resilience—who knows what she believes and cannot be quieted. There is a man who suffered as a prisoner of war, whose legacy includes a protection of all people, particularly soldiers, when they are defenseless and in the hands of the enemy. Then there is Obama.

Obama nearly shimmers on screen. In person, he is honest (seeming), passionate, distressingly charismatic, and speaks about hope like a wonderful hybrid of Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Moses. Sun-beams effervesce from his smile (God bless the orthodontists, the make-up artists, the photographers). Brilliance drips from his rhetoric. And, in the ill-timed (and questionably worded) terms of his opponents, that Obama—he certainly is clean.

Here, this term is not meant as an assessment of race relations, or of black politicians. The shimmering Colgate clean of Obama is a qualifier few others (no matter their situation, place in history, or dental hygiene) could muster. He does not strike the average citizen as a typical politician. We expect, for better or worse, that our political leaders from time to time find themselves between a rock and a legislative hard place. They back-room deal; they lie; they swindle; they cheat and backstab—but they do it all for us. So long as they do not seem to enjoy all of that necessary evil, we shake their dirty hands, let them kiss our babies, and thank them for their time.

Whether or not Obama’s soul is as astringently clean as it appears, what he represents is an anomaly. The good politician. He’s Jimmy Carter…He’s old what’s his name with the apple tree. He must either be sweet but ineffectual, or a mythical beast from our national imagination. If the usual standards hold, it will only be a matter of time.

Looking more to what a character like Obama will likely face, imagine the idealistic, moralistic political leader. Sooner or later the backbone of the moral politician is broken. He will be faced with a dilemma. The dilemmas of states’ craft being what they are, this will be no simple lesser-of-two-evils situation. The good politician will have to choose between his own moral standards (kill only in self-defense, for example) and the protection of the people he serves. If he is too good (and clings to his own moral standards), he fails us. If he becomes too lax with his morality, we learn to loath him, fear him, and bless the day when we can be rid of him. The only path is that of reasonable guilt. He must dirty his hands. He must know when to bend and do what he knows is wrong, what as a citizen he would never do, and bear the weight of that evil, for he is our (civil) servant.

If he remains too good, his morality makes him selfish, and he is condemned. If he loses his goodness, we shall condemn him moreover. If he does what he must, he condemns himself.

Of all the political crimes charged against George Bush in the last few unpopular months, the most heinous for most of us is this: his moralism got in the way. Bush’s ideals about terror, the axis of evil, about what was right—this became more important to him than what we felt was necessary for us. According to his own code of ethics, he was willing to do whatever he must for what he felt was right—he was too good, in his own way. He dirtied our hands for his own morality—thus inverting the trajectory to which we have grown accustomed.

I think ahead to spring, and then November. I consider this field of worthy souls (many reasonably good human beings on both sides)—and I worry about my culpability as a voter. What am I really willing upon the candidate that I select?

You who shine with hope, with brilliant policies, with valiant pasts and plans for our tomorrows—do you realize the weight of what you will undertake? There will be days when each one of us will hate you, tolerate you, perhaps some will love you—but none of us can forgive you for being too principled. None of us can allow for your hands to be clean. You are running your conscience on this ticket—and we, those who bother to show up, will decide if you are worthy of being both good and bad enough.

Workaholic

2007-10-13T09:12:00.001-04:00

I remember as a child growing up in the eighties, that haggard, self-obsessed, workaholic parents began to people serious evening television. Thirtysomethings who had lost their way and who were about to lose their families, would struggle to recapture the balance they once had in life.

As the child of people who were far from yuppies, I found these television characters to be hateful, selfish monsters—clearly pure fiction. Who would allow work (of all things) to dominate one’s home life? When you grow up in a blue-collar home (or sometimes no-collar home), it is difficult to grasp how a person might have trouble leaving work at work. Bus drivers don’t frequently sit at the dinner table, moaning on about the day’s stressors, checking traffic reports and multitasking between Blackberry, newspaper, and kids. Typists don’t usually drift away from family conversation to strategically plan the coming week, corporate intrigue, or ways to capitalize on concrete deliverables. Unemployed men may sit in a recliner, figure lottery numbers—and obsessions with gambling and alcohol may take over. But addiction to whiskey, cigarettes, and betting on the horses is understandable—compulsion to fixate on work’s daily tasks—that is inconceivable.

Working merely to earn money for survival can be a hollow thing. You fear your supervisor—you toil, and toil well because losing your job would mean losing your home, your ability to buy groceries. For the working-poor, work certainly is something to take pride in—and it is a step less stressful than poverty from unemployment. But you always have a pit in your stomach. You are a step away from losing it all.

I sense that for most middle class workers (those in cubicles, those who don’t love their jobs, but who don’t hate them), work is a weekday necessity, but it does not define them. They do what they must for eight hours each day, make friends with co-workers who are seated near them, find a like-minded individual to eat lunch with each day. Then at five o’clock, they go home and live. Home has family and other goals—work is merely a means to support the rest of life.

Donning a white collar for the first time, I have a new kind of monster curling its tail around my belly at night. I know we have enough—enough money to pay bills and perhaps buy some nice things (if I had time to waste shopping). But I have ulcers which seem fed by thought—worried thoughts about fiscal stability (at work), about pressures I feel to perform, about the quiet strain I feel attempting to fill a position once held by two (down-sizing), and the crippling sense that I can’t make a mistake. They are depending on me.

That’s job number one. The second job, the night-job, the thing I do which I truly love has suffered because my mind is infected by worried thoughts from the day. I cannot free myself of work, and so I cannot function when my time is my own (and not on the company clock).

Finally, when I’m home, I talk about work. I continue doing my work. I obsessively sit in the corner tapping into my laptop. Work grows exponentially to fill every gap in time I’ve got left. It pours into my mornings, drifts over my sleep and makes me wrestle though paperwork in my dreams.

I cease to see what is in front of me—a man whom I love, who is dear to me, more dear to me than the daily deposits and potential shortfalls—but because I know he loves me, I feel free to love him later.

I want children, but I can’t imagine juggling them with work. Frighteningly, I actually think children are a thing to be juggled. I imagine tossing baby, briefcase, and laptop through the air. If I lost this syncretic battle, this artful show of timing and skill, which would I choose to catch? The kid would heal—but god, everything is on that laptop.

Working in this way has made me a caricature.

Human beings seem to have a need to labor—something that can fulfill us, rather than the curse from god that Adam’s children were meant to suffer. But our culture’s new forms of work can make us beholden to a larger system, a world of faster, faster, faster. It wears a time-clock that measures efficiency rather than happiness. We’ve redefined a principled life. Being conscientious means never being five minutes late—rather than never being cruel. We are measured by our success in truly trivial things.

And passively, quietly, between all of the rushing between deadlines, we have chosen this for ourselves.

Work can be a sickness. The workaholic may be the worst kind of addict, because that to which you are beholden is merely a twisted measure of your own failing self-worth. I’m not rich enough, I work more. I’m seeking approval, I work more. I have lost my way and don’t really know who I am anymore…and in working more, I stumble further into the darkness.

Collectively, we have created wealth (though not shared) which generates emptiness. We have learned a certain kind of blindness. Moving so fast, we fail to see one another, and like the worst kind of sitcom parody, we fail again and again to learn life’s lessons. We hardly do unto others—we move so fast we can barely see them. Rather than the man who blindly pursues riches, stepping on everyone who gets in his way; the truly sick among us pursue labor for labor’s sake, multiplying our duties to work, and forgetting our duties to one another.

It is doubtful that the workaholic can be a truly moral creature. Her sense of obligation has been bent away from the rest of humanity. Her mind, her goals, have become twisted in on themselves, and in fearful blindness, she continues plugging away at her meaningless tasks. Work, rather than a discrete part of life, thus becomes a maze.

A Death in the Family

2007-09-20T07:53:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I attended my great uncle’s funeral. As we walked into the funeral home, my mother was greeted by a number of relatives whom she had not seen since childhood. These nearly forgotten cousins quickly regrouped, telling stories about their uncle, reminiscing about a childhood on his farm, helping pluck eggs from temperamental hens and learning the hard way that my uncle was adept at using a cow’s utters as a squirt gun.

It was beautiful to remember my uncle this way, fun-loving, a consummate practical joker, a simple man who loved family and the earth. This seemed like a fitting tribute.

As we shuffled into the funeral home for the service, an uncomfortable-looking man emerged from the camouflage of a wall lined with shyer relatives. He took the podium and began to eulogize. This man, this minister, read my uncle’s obituary aloud (seemingly for the first time), stumbled through unfamiliar names and latched onto details that seemed to encapsulate all the insignificant parts of my uncle’s life. Yes, he played to accordion—but that was fifty years ago, he did not particularly enjoy it, and few in attendance had memory of that. Yes, he was a faithful man, who loved to sing in the choir, but he was a believer in a simpler kind of religion—he was not, as the minister asserted, one who had formally accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savoir. He was a believer, not a convert.

As the minister waxed on, inserting his own interpretation of my uncle’s life, I couldn’t help but wonder where my uncle had gone in all of this. There was a casket, there was his eerily sleeping body—he looked asleep, not absent—but where was he in these stories? Where was the kind man who dressed up as Santa Claus, created life from seeds, ran a farm, raised a family, and made life extraordinary by dwelling in its simple beauty?

Finally, the minister asked the congregation to offer their own memories of my uncle. People stood, one at a time, and gave memories of the living man, but each closed by reaffirming that he was in a better place, that now he was in heaven, that he had gone on a journey, that he was with the angels, with his family, that he was looking down. Slowly, collectively, each stood to convince themselves and one another that his soul was fine, though his broken, amputated body lie visible to all.

When the family memorial ended, the minister began again, saying that now my uncle was walking, running, dancing, singing in heaven. He was singing more beautifully than any of us had ever heard him sing, more beautifully than we could imagine. The idea made me feel better.

But was it true?

After the funeral, my mother and I talked about the minister, how he seemed to have been missing some salient facts about who our uncle really was. The man he summarized did not measure up to the man we knew. My mother commented sadly, that surely the preacher had never heard our uncle sing. If he had, he never would have said that it was possible for him to sing more beautifully, even in heaven.

I recognize that in the face of death, we all need comfort. The loss of a loved person is not as harsh, as bitter if we can believe that the person is not really lost—just missing, temporarily, and better off somewhere else. But my wishing for this, our collective hoping for this, does not make it so.

The power of my will is such that I can hardly control the activities of my own life. How could I conceivably concoct another reality through the sheer force of my hopeful assertions? Damn, I’d love a peaceful world—my desperate hope for that has not made it a reality.

My hope for life does not raise the dead.

And so I am left feeling emptier. Not only is my uncle gone, not only am I the sort who intellectualizes grief, not only am I incapable of understanding faith, now also, I feel the utter helplessness of our situation.

We can have hopes, but what are they but comfortable fabrications? Hopes are not truth, no matter how lovely they might be.