176 days ago - Rueters. "8000
massacred in Libyan rebel uprising."
25 days ago - PBS. "30
Americans killed in Chinook helicopter crash."
4 days ago - CNN. "35
killed in series of attacks across Iraq."
Today. "I
reached inside a drawer and sliced my finger across thin paper.
It took a short moment for the long crease to well
blood but when it did, thick red dripped down the white wood drawer."
Yes I understand but -
it's just a drawer.
Robert McNamara calls this the "Fog of War" and -
I believe him.
We say a million times
"I can't even imagine," yet -
You just did.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
S is for Story
Addy and I were reading a book tonight called "A is for Africa" and when we turned to the Q page there was a young woman, sitting tall, wrapped in what looked like a large black and yellow and red striped blanket, a black turban wrapped upon her head and heavy red shell beads around her neck, the kind you might find these days hanging at an H&M jewelry aisle for $22. And she was barefoot, ten toes covered in red silt earth.
"She doesn't have glass slippers, does she?" I asked. Addy shook her head no. "See, queens and princesses come in all different kinds of colors and shapes and wear all different things."
Thinking, she said finally, "But do you think she's not as beautiful?" I was struck for a moment. I could feel the molding weight of my daughter's perception of beauty slipping in like a breeze through her night window.
"Look at her eyes. Do you see? She is telling us a thousand beautiful stories with her eyes. That is where beauty lies. We can see beauty when we look into someone's eyes and hear the stories they are trying to tell us." Addy looked at the woman on the page, the soft mystery in her gaze, a dark dove from a far away land. And then, she looked up at me. I saw her piecing my words together. In a strange way, between her and I, silence has become our tacit language of understanding, that the long pause between thoughts is itself a thought, light wings landing if given enough space.
She looked at me one more time before I turned the page to R to see that I hold in my eyes enough stories to fill a thousand bedtime nights.
After we finished the book, I kissed her goodnight and turned off the light, and against her open window I tried to trace the lingering shadow of the cool breeze into my memory. Remember, I told myself - look into her eyes every day and ask her to tell you all the beautiful stories you see in her, because it is what we see in others that they will see in themselves.
Tonight, that is what my daughter told me like a story in her eyes.
"She doesn't have glass slippers, does she?" I asked. Addy shook her head no. "See, queens and princesses come in all different kinds of colors and shapes and wear all different things."
Thinking, she said finally, "But do you think she's not as beautiful?" I was struck for a moment. I could feel the molding weight of my daughter's perception of beauty slipping in like a breeze through her night window.
"Look at her eyes. Do you see? She is telling us a thousand beautiful stories with her eyes. That is where beauty lies. We can see beauty when we look into someone's eyes and hear the stories they are trying to tell us." Addy looked at the woman on the page, the soft mystery in her gaze, a dark dove from a far away land. And then, she looked up at me. I saw her piecing my words together. In a strange way, between her and I, silence has become our tacit language of understanding, that the long pause between thoughts is itself a thought, light wings landing if given enough space.
She looked at me one more time before I turned the page to R to see that I hold in my eyes enough stories to fill a thousand bedtime nights.
After we finished the book, I kissed her goodnight and turned off the light, and against her open window I tried to trace the lingering shadow of the cool breeze into my memory. Remember, I told myself - look into her eyes every day and ask her to tell you all the beautiful stories you see in her, because it is what we see in others that they will see in themselves.
Tonight, that is what my daughter told me like a story in her eyes.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
That Heartbeat Thing
Our hearts pump miracle life laps every single second
Without us pausing once to wonder how it even happens
That happening of being...you know...alive
That glinting, just once in forever time span we're given called life
That thing we break up into days and awkward grades and stages
That ongoing everyday book of ours where we rip out whole pages
That tend to cameo in later chapters as our excuses or sages
Yes, life -
That heartbeat thing we're just trying to get through today
So by this time tomorrow we'll be 24 hours further away
From yesterday's sorrow
Or 24 hours closer to
who we're trying too hard to be
Or to how we ought to live or
to that damn epiphany -
When's it gonna happen?
Our heart beating arteries bleeding cell seeping
cardio-pulmonary system is so bleeping amazing, literally
Inexplicably amazing
But we don't think about how many things in our life are
so amazing that we can't even begin to explain them
So we answer all the easy questions then complain how much we hate them
I mean, really, I don't know about you but I'm complaining all the time
Like drinking a glass of clean clear water is not a gift but just my right
Like everything else I have or own or
every person whose personhood has intersected with mine
Well it's all just luck or coincidence and not at all divine, right?
Do I really have too much pride to admit how little control I have over my life?
How much more control do you have over the sea as I have to stop my heart from
Living in spite of me?
I mean, isn't that how I'm living my life?
Feet dragging head sagging task list nagging one day I'll catch my breath
But something inside is pounding loudly at the door of my regret
Because it knows every second catches me and begs me to live in it
Not with guilt or shame or pride
But with love spilling out from the torn flesh of
His side.
What can we expect to know about our destiny,
What can we realistically expect to control
When the biophysical operation of our basic flesh and bones
Is a completely mezmerizing God run circus
Of blood and veins and muscles and nerves?
Why is it that God allows us to completely unrecognize Him
For the every moment miracle of our involuntary wiring?
Why does He allow us to, at any given second
slouch with an unwillingness to find anything beautiful or blessed
Or anything miraculous or good beneath our skin
where the Holy Spirit pumps blood of Christ to refill us from within?
Maybe it's just that He gave us our cardiovascular design
as a masterful correlate to our sin
Then gives us an average of 78 humble reminders per minute
To remember that we can't even provide the simplest answer
To how we just breathed our last breath in.
Without us pausing once to wonder how it even happens
That happening of being...you know...alive
That glinting, just once in forever time span we're given called life
That thing we break up into days and awkward grades and stages
That ongoing everyday book of ours where we rip out whole pages
That tend to cameo in later chapters as our excuses or sages
Yes, life -
That heartbeat thing we're just trying to get through today
So by this time tomorrow we'll be 24 hours further away
From yesterday's sorrow
Or 24 hours closer to
who we're trying too hard to be
Or to how we ought to live or
to that damn epiphany -
When's it gonna happen?
Our heart beating arteries bleeding cell seeping
cardio-pulmonary system is so bleeping amazing, literally
Inexplicably amazing
But we don't think about how many things in our life are
so amazing that we can't even begin to explain them
So we answer all the easy questions then complain how much we hate them
I mean, really, I don't know about you but I'm complaining all the time
Like drinking a glass of clean clear water is not a gift but just my right
Like everything else I have or own or
every person whose personhood has intersected with mine
Well it's all just luck or coincidence and not at all divine, right?
Do I really have too much pride to admit how little control I have over my life?
How much more control do you have over the sea as I have to stop my heart from
Living in spite of me?
I mean, isn't that how I'm living my life?
Feet dragging head sagging task list nagging one day I'll catch my breath
But something inside is pounding loudly at the door of my regret
Because it knows every second catches me and begs me to live in it
Not with guilt or shame or pride
But with love spilling out from the torn flesh of
His side.
What can we expect to know about our destiny,
What can we realistically expect to control
When the biophysical operation of our basic flesh and bones
Is a completely mezmerizing God run circus
Of blood and veins and muscles and nerves?
Why is it that God allows us to completely unrecognize Him
For the every moment miracle of our involuntary wiring?
Why does He allow us to, at any given second
slouch with an unwillingness to find anything beautiful or blessed
Or anything miraculous or good beneath our skin
where the Holy Spirit pumps blood of Christ to refill us from within?
Maybe it's just that He gave us our cardiovascular design
as a masterful correlate to our sin
Then gives us an average of 78 humble reminders per minute
To remember that we can't even provide the simplest answer
To how we just breathed our last breath in.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Footsteps Changing
You are never the same when the footprint of a city steps into you, or you upon it. Whether you know it or like it is beside the point. Experience reaches through the invisible you and grabs you for as long as you'll stay and always gives a little something too; unfamiliar Atlantic air and glimpses into hard working bootstrap sidewalk city life and walking trails through history and centuries gone by and East coast corner Brazilian pastry shops when you didn't know a week ago that Brazilians lived in Boston or even what they ate, let alone - puff pastries. Experience happens whether you expect it or not.
Every person, like every city and pastry shop, is her own corner of the universe - a sole mecca surviving only because of the lives that inhabit her, who drop change into buckets or sit still long enough to notice the cracks - jagged lines of invitation to remember we are all strangers at some point, even to our children, even our parents to us, but life is carved into our backs and history? Well history is a stranger to no one; I can't remember the eyes of a woman mine met last week but history will never forget the dark creases of her name. Life exists before you came and will exist after you leave but history is never the same because you, absolutely, were alive, because you touched every corner you stumbled into and fumbled past, including - mine. That is what places and people whisper to each other, that we are flint and we are fire and change each others' compositions as our lives brush against each others', for a moment on the street or in a house for 15 years, but the flicker of what we speak aloud is quieter and less courageous than the sound our trailing footsteps leave behind as we exit a room down the escape route from our fears. From entire lives, even.
That is the invisible collision between us, that we stumble into and out of different lives and different times, across each others' borders and through apartment walls and city lines, and we can so easily forget the impressions we've made, or have been made upon us, and then we one day wake up thinking about yesterday's years and wonder what we did to pass the short days, how many doors we knocked on and who we opened ourselves up to or invited inside to stay. At some point it all seems incalculable. But really, it doesn't matter, the facts and figures that is, because we're each the shop and the customer, the city and the citizen, because we spend our days asking others to pay a premium for what we have to offer only to realize that all we have to offer is what others have given to us. Our feet take no steps without the ground; the ground makes no sound without our feet. That is the symbiotic nature of life happening as it sticks unnoticed to the soles of our own lack of appreciation as we pound our everydays into the streets.
That the sound of our life is really just the echo of the footsteps before us; that we cannot hear our own history because we move at the speed of life and change happens at the speed of sound and so often history is silent until long after it is made, and by that time we are moving full speed towards a new change, which means, perhaps - we ought to be thankful for cliffs of change before change falls into our lives just to believe in the fragility of the moment as it passes beneath us or passes us by, entirely. That every step we take upon the earth is a million lives deep. That, we don't have to know someone's name to know they are alive, to know somewhere their life matters to someone as much as mine..as much as mine matters to those who know me by my name.
My earth now is Somerville and this whole region and all these people I haven't met or do not know a thing about. The fascination is not in making a strange city my friend, or becoming fast friends with new strangers. It is that we do so everywhere we go, that without our knowledge or permission, we live amongst each other and together our history creates itself another layer of memory, around every corner - a new sidewalk of possibility. And if we sit still long enough, we can hear the footsteps echoing from a past we have yet to understand, our own footsteps from a future dream that we are already living.
Every person, like every city and pastry shop, is her own corner of the universe - a sole mecca surviving only because of the lives that inhabit her, who drop change into buckets or sit still long enough to notice the cracks - jagged lines of invitation to remember we are all strangers at some point, even to our children, even our parents to us, but life is carved into our backs and history? Well history is a stranger to no one; I can't remember the eyes of a woman mine met last week but history will never forget the dark creases of her name. Life exists before you came and will exist after you leave but history is never the same because you, absolutely, were alive, because you touched every corner you stumbled into and fumbled past, including - mine. That is what places and people whisper to each other, that we are flint and we are fire and change each others' compositions as our lives brush against each others', for a moment on the street or in a house for 15 years, but the flicker of what we speak aloud is quieter and less courageous than the sound our trailing footsteps leave behind as we exit a room down the escape route from our fears. From entire lives, even.
That is the invisible collision between us, that we stumble into and out of different lives and different times, across each others' borders and through apartment walls and city lines, and we can so easily forget the impressions we've made, or have been made upon us, and then we one day wake up thinking about yesterday's years and wonder what we did to pass the short days, how many doors we knocked on and who we opened ourselves up to or invited inside to stay. At some point it all seems incalculable. But really, it doesn't matter, the facts and figures that is, because we're each the shop and the customer, the city and the citizen, because we spend our days asking others to pay a premium for what we have to offer only to realize that all we have to offer is what others have given to us. Our feet take no steps without the ground; the ground makes no sound without our feet. That is the symbiotic nature of life happening as it sticks unnoticed to the soles of our own lack of appreciation as we pound our everydays into the streets.
That the sound of our life is really just the echo of the footsteps before us; that we cannot hear our own history because we move at the speed of life and change happens at the speed of sound and so often history is silent until long after it is made, and by that time we are moving full speed towards a new change, which means, perhaps - we ought to be thankful for cliffs of change before change falls into our lives just to believe in the fragility of the moment as it passes beneath us or passes us by, entirely. That every step we take upon the earth is a million lives deep. That, we don't have to know someone's name to know they are alive, to know somewhere their life matters to someone as much as mine..as much as mine matters to those who know me by my name.
My earth now is Somerville and this whole region and all these people I haven't met or do not know a thing about. The fascination is not in making a strange city my friend, or becoming fast friends with new strangers. It is that we do so everywhere we go, that without our knowledge or permission, we live amongst each other and together our history creates itself another layer of memory, around every corner - a new sidewalk of possibility. And if we sit still long enough, we can hear the footsteps echoing from a past we have yet to understand, our own footsteps from a future dream that we are already living.
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