This is not a drill. It is, ironically, a pipe.
Bərēʾšiṯ bārāʾ ʾēlohim ʾeṯ hašāmayim wəʾeṯ hāʾārēṣ: Wəhāʾārēṣ hāyəṯāh ṯohu wāḇohu wəḥošēḵə ʿal-pəney ṯəhom wəru[a]ḥ ʾēlohim məraḥēp̄ēṯ ʿal-pəney hamāyim:
Category Archives: Uncategorized
A Pack of Trumps
This was months ago — probably after he declared his candidacy, but back during the period I assumed he wasn’t serious or the party wouldn’t let him get anywhere near shouting distance of the nomination.
I was reading an article about Israel, I can’t remember what but probably something to do with dichotomies (it’s full of them). It included an aside about Benyamin Netanyahu visiting some kind of trade show and waxing rhapsodic about cows. These were no ordinary cows. These were high-tech SmartCows. The finest. Just like everything in Israel. Even the water is electronic. (No quotation marks because I’m paraphrasing from memory what might have been an English translation from Hebrew. But, trust me, it’s a close paraphrase.) And I realized that the voice with which I was reading these statements to myself, in my mind, wasn’t Netanyahu’s sonorous three-quarter Kissinger.
The voice was Donald Trump’s. Continue reading A Pack of Trumps
A Christmas Meditation
We are brought tidings of comfort and joy. We are promised salvation from a peril which is, however drawn from Jewish and other predecessors or transmitted to Islam and other successors, in precise terms only recognized by Christianity in the first place. I leave it to Christians, with my blessing (and heartfelt contrition regarding the relevant predecessors).
We are also promised peace, a much more nearly universal longing and concern. Leaving aside for the moment the question of purely human capacity to achieve a durable global peace (as opposed to divine capacity to provide) consider what a durable global peace means to you. What does it look like? Continue reading A Christmas Meditation
Don’t You Ever Ask Them Why
The unique and unitary key, which you think freed you, is of no similar use to your children. Either they are not prisoned as you were, or you still are.
April
It never lasts. It can’t, and we might miss the magic were it everyday. But for a few weeks every year, Kansas City is a faerie garden. And then the fountains wake to sing of summer.
Tides
There are doubtless wonders I shall never see. But I have stepped from shelter into the open mouth of a hail storm, charged a gantlet of trees — some arrayed in white, red, and new green; some still bare — downhill to a ramp merging with an interstate aimed directly at an iridescent arch receding forever and forever as I drove, the spray flung up by all the traffic lit to fog by the setting sun while forked white spears trumbled the clouds massed overhead, in Kansas, days past Midspring.
The Voice of the Riot
Property is an agreement.
Security is an agreement.
We bear the burden of your
prosperity, your impunity
out of fear, out of habit,
out of misdirected hope.
But we are many and we are
your sisters and your brothers
and there are always other
agreements to be reached.
The Lesson
Life, if selfhood, if identity, is a primary loss: the loss of unity with all other. Love is the dance between confirmation and dissolution of that primary loss. Love is the condition of all secondary losses.
Loss and love are life’s long lessons, however long a life. If life is loss, is love, is loss… then living well is loving well and losing well. And this is as true at life’s end as at any other time, if not more true. The last loss, after all, undoes the first.
Ain’t that a Great Saying
In my town of Prairie Village, where Cherokee Lane completes its winding climb up from Tomahawk Creek to 75th Street, there stands in a median an unintended shrine. Two unnamed goddesses, though I think of them as Demeter and Persephone, flank a large plaque naming the neighborhood behind them (Prairie Hills) all surrounded by a bit of garden. Until yesterday, behind the plaque stood an enormous conical evergreen, which some years someone arranged to have lit for Christmas. Seeing the tree gone, I thought how outliving anything is a mark of longevity but also a notice. The bell tolls for all yall. Continue reading Ain’t that a Great Saying
The Far Shores of the Day
This is the season for weddings. I have been to one this year and will, gods also willing, be to another a month from now: a fit cap to the month named for Juno Pronuba. I have word of others going on around me, and that is well. I also have word of others of the United States (though not yet mine) being told by judges that states may not grant civil marriage recognition to some couples and not others. That too is well. I stand with you, who uniquely yearn, in Love’s House. Continue reading The Far Shores of the Day