At the very end of my sister’s life, I sometimes sat in the chair next to her bed and watched her sleep. In those paper-thin hours, I’d try to airlift myself to the place I knew was coming – my life with her gone. Maybe I could get ready for it.

My guess was that the high-wire, hyper-competence I’d onboarded for the two plus years of her dying would finally buckle. This would be due to what everyone called ‘grief’. I pictured Netflix, meds, depression, sleep, therapy, skipping therapy and uncontrollable crying.

But none of those ended up being very accurate. I had a couple of crazy crying jags. Sure. But only a few. My immediate reaction tracked much more closely with what one might call a post-traumatic-stress response than it did to what we typically think of as grief or deep sadness.

The last thing I would have expected to be a solace in that dumbstruck wilderness: baking. But baking and cooking seemed eminently sane to me in my addled, amped-up state, the recipes like friends.

Death Was Trending

This was me then: when I left my safehouse (the kitchen), I’d be walking past a couple arguing in the street and feel sure one of them would end up dead. At the Gristedes, I’d note impassively the Post’s headline - Massive Earthquake! Hundreds suspected dead! And think to myself: Of course. They’re all dying. They’re buried alive. They can’t breathe... Then, I’d take my change wordlessly from the cashier and walk out the sliding glass doors onto Broadway, scanning the buildings for which one was mine. And remember: Oh, that’s right. I live on West End.

You can’t airlift yourself to this place. You’re dropped there without a clue.

The unexpected consolation I found back in my kitchen was partially due to the fact it was brand new. In what I initially assumed was a twist of very unfortunate timing, a long-planned renovation to our apartment ended up happening the very year my mom and sister died. So it was, that I went directly from my sister’s graveside to my spanking new white kitchen with a marble backsplash.

Of course, I could protest that this was wildly disconsonant to me. That I was way too bereft to even notice that all the appliances were better and bigger, the paint clean and fresh, every seam and corner of every counter and cabinet perfectly aligned. But that would be a lie.

It was, in fact, very reassuring — the space, the sheen, the view from the new windows. All of it felt ready and inviting and beautiful. It was not falling apart. Like my sister had.

And since I was certain I was losing my mind, this lovely place appeared to deflect suspicion. So, I stayed put there and cooled my heels in my exceedingly low-functioning state for the better part of a year.

Kitchen Counter > Life Raft

I produced rounds of chocolate almond muffins, batches of homemade yogurt, bone broths that simmered away, Bolognese with garlic bread, gingerbread with whipped cream. On and on it went. Anything that said steady, that said home, that said life. If I wasn’t slicing or dicing, I was grating or stirring or checking the oven or cleaning up for another round. For the next day. And the day after that.

I think I might have held out some hope that the aromas would rise up and reach Lis. Maybe they could summon her back. I could explain to her then that it wasn’t working. She’d appear at my front door with her open tote slung over her shoulder and that wide open smile, like a frontier. She’d be pulling an overnight bag behind her, because she planned to stay. In some way, all that cooking may have been a kind of séance.

But Lis never showed. And I kept cooking.

Elizabeth Eliot, twice a widow and an outsized figure in the 20^th Century Christian world, spoke from personal experience about how one might survive and function when the mind and spirit are crushed. In the aftermath of her first husband’s murder, she came upon an obscure, 19^th century poem, often cited as Ye Nexte Thynge.

Eliot was deeply moved by the poet’s hearkening to focus on the immediate, small, necessary next task. In it she found a ministry to the bereaved and would go on to speak and write about this simple idea for the rest of her life. It was a ready mantra we all knew:

Do-the-next-thing. Or sometimes you’d hear it: Do-the-next-right-thing.

Workshopping Elisabeth Eliot

I’d known about Eliot for years when my sister died, read her books, and knew of this oft-repeated watchword. But it never once occurred to me that what I’d done in my kitchen that year was to reverse engineer it. I’d unwittingly created a Do-the-next-thing atelier.

Almost a decade later and my heart hovers over those two words with an ache of recognition and gratitude: do and thing. They saved me. The marriage of movement and task: small, simple, sequential, success. (And by ‘success’ let’s keep our expectations modest. I mean: add an egg.)

A therapist might smartly suggest something more pointed: counseling, a grief group, medication. Yes. I did all that. Later. But I wasn’t capable of those things that first year. I was capable of muffins.

We know now that in trauma our left brain, in charge of higher order thinking and more complex reasoning, essentially goes off-line. It’s reduced to a low hum. What’s actually working in acute grief is your right brain: touch and feel, friendship and sunshine, fresh air and art, smell, taste, beauty and memory. A bike, a beach, a roller coaster, a scream.

I’ll say it straight, friends. After all my earnest studying, all the research and books and workshops and science, when this puzzle piece snapped into place, I was immediately returned to the smells and sounds of that kitchen. I found myself back at the beginning, kneading and whisking and rolling through the days.

We’re all the way back at banana bread.

I’m so curious. Please do tell if you’ve had you’re own Do-the-next-thing season. What task or activity did you do? I love hearing how different people make it through.

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The File
Joan Didion- The Year of Magical Thinking

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy...

Trauma Brain Chart
Banana Bread recipe
Kitchen Dancing: Dire Straits, Skateaway

Why sans birds?

The curious name of my Substack came from my sister. While she was dying, she received dozens of kind letters from friends and family. But the ones that had birds on them, she summarily tossed. She so wished she could fly away. But that was impossible. The card she actually stuck on her fridge said:

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

If I had to summarize the ethos of those years, it might just be that.

This is how it unfolded:

While my three boys were still in elementary and middle school — playing soccer and horn instruments and making science fair projects that spread out over three rooms — my mom, who lived across the hall, started losing her mind (Alzheimer’s). And in the midst of that, my younger sister, Lis, a single mom, was diagnosed with a rare form of sarcoma. It was stage 4. Now she was dying too.

What happened over the next two and a half years as they died together was grisly — heartbreaking, hollowing, and logistically impossible. My mom and my sister eventually died six months apart in 2016.

The Aftermath

I staggered through what everyone was calling “grief.” Which, by the way, turned out to be about 8% deep sadness and 92% things like numbness, hyper-vigilance, insomnia, confusion, isolation, agoraphobia, physical pain, an immune system that went loco and an old-fashioned hitch to red wine to make it all feel survivable. (Bad idea.)

Not sure what else to do, I began to read. A lot.

First memoirs — other people’s stories helped me find a language amidst the shattered questions that ran amok in my own heart and head. Some were written by Christians, plenty were not. I found anyone’s journey through that terrible terrain both compelling and a balm to my soul.

I also returned to the power of art and its ability to reach places that words and arguments simply could not. Slowly, and with lots of help, I was able to trust God again with my messy, confused and unfinished faith.

The File

One thing I did right in all this was to keep a record of it 一 a file. Anything that rang of truth — passages from books, prayers, poetry, philosophy, sermons, paintings and scripture — I threw in there. It’s filled to bursting with wisdom from many faith traditions, the science around suffering and grief as well as the myriad connections between physical and mental health.

I recently moved from New York City after many years and when I came upon the boxes that held my file, I had to hold back tears. I was so grateful for all those words and the people who wrote them. I realized I couldn’t toss out this brain trust, nor bury it again in sturdier boxes or new cabinetry.

Instead, I decided to share it with you.

Why I’m Writing to You

It’s my prayer that these letters and stories from the file will do for you even half of what they did for me: encourage you, remind you that you’re not crazy and help you keep going.

Because underneath all my wrestling, I feel certain that life is a wildly difficult gift. And more than ever, I’m convinced that God intends something truly extraordinary for us — in the end, that is. He says it straight in scripture and we know it deep down: we’re on the dark side of the moon.

So join me, my friend. Let’s keep the lights on. And keep going. Together.

Welcome to sans birds.

’Tis a fearful thing
to love
what death can touch.¹

You know how, when you were just a wee thing, you’d return to school in January with rosy cheeks and chapped lips—but instead of a warm, smiley welcome, your formerly cheerful fifth-grade teacher would return to class all amped up like a cheap appliance?

The change had a single source --- formidable urgency she had about her curriculum which she had every intention of putting on a luge and speeding straight at all of us eleven-year-olds at two hundred miles per hour between January 3rd and March 31st. She knew what we knew: come April, we’d all stop caring simultaneously. On mission was Miss Barsom. And so are we.

Here at Coming to the Nuisance, they’ll be no more fun and games. No more hiking, hunting or otherwise dawdling or delaying. I’m at the starting ramp and we’re about to go hard at some of the more difficult things in my file.

You see, over the holidays, I had a simple revelation about these materials. I realized they all fell into two main categories: good news and bad news. And somehow a logjam broke. These letters are almost assembling themselves!

Now, since I’m of Irish descent, I thought I would go with the bad news first. We tend to circle around it like moth to flame. So, today I want to share one of the most troubling pieces of bad news: in acute grief, there’s an excruciating aspect that, in a technical, practical sense…

there’s actually nothing for it.

These words were hard to write. They’re even harder to say. But I mean them as comfort, not provocation. Because there’s a way in which this is true. You’ll see. And my hope would be that it dignifies how disorienting the beginning is.

Let me illustrate what I mean. Stories here are better than statements.

I recently heard one of the most popular grief gurus in the country on a podcast. His name is David Kessler and he’s written several bestselling books on the subject. Not someone I’d heard of or follow; he’s a secular guy I took it, but a deep kind of thinker.

He’d had some profound losses in his life; in particular, I think he lost his mom when he was a teenager or young adult, and that was what drew him into the work to begin with. But the interviewer asked him about a more recent loss: his son.

He said that after his son’s death, when he finally dragged himself months later to a grief group, he sat there totally mute, unable to open his mouth or even look up from the floor at the other grievers. No one at the group knew who he was, a well-known grief writer.

And he described how he sat there, five feet from a table piled high with books he’d written. And he said the only cogent thought that came to him then was this desire suddenly to call all the people he’d counseled over the many years, the hundreds, who’d lost children, and say to them: I am so sorry. I had no idea.

And I guess this is what I believe about vertiginous, terrifying loss. I think that in that first season, we just have no idea. Words won’t reach it --- even they know to run off across the grass toward the woodline.

There will be lots of caveats as we traverse this grief territory, and here comes numero uno: you might be tempted to remind me that yes—this entire Substack is, in some way, dedicated to what might be for it. Some of what might help in grief. That art and stories can be a call and response with grief. And isn’t God with us in grief? How can it be that there’s nothing for it or we have no idea when this whole project is partly my tiny contribution to exactly that?

Just trust me, friends—both can be true and are true in some sense. There’s so much tension and contradiction in grief; we’ll see our fair share in just this letter. And we’ll have to hold opposed ideas in our minds at the same time. Grief will ask this of us over and over.

Here’s another truth-with-tension that helps launch us deeper into the file:

Do you remember last July when I pulled Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament for a Son off the shelf in the aftermath of the Texas floods? As I was writing that piece, sans birds, I came across an interview in which Wolterstorff blithely offered one of the most stunning insights about acute grief I’ve ever seen.

He said:

My problem was not Grief with a capital “G”; my problem was that Eric was dead.

That’s it. Right there. It’s totally tautological. The problem with death is, um, death. Not some abstract therapeutic pedagogy you’re supposed to dutifully check through as the assigned griever.

I remember so actively, passionately trying to accomplish this grief thing after my mom and sister died: Someone! Please! Tell me! Give me the list! Let me start checking it off! So I can get from where I am to literally anywhere else!

But it turns out the only real solution to the problem of death would be a full-blown Lazarus redux, like resurrection. Not grief. Not birds.

It just so happens the human brain does not like this puzzle one bit either. That’s essentially how the brain sees death: a problem it cannot seem to solve.

Thankfully, scientists and researchers have been quietly studying the brain’s response to grief for the past few decades. From the file this month comes a book recently published called The Grieving Brain by one of those researchers, Mary-Frances O’Connor (told ya, Irish), founder of the Grief, Loss & Social Stress Lab (GLASS) at the University of Arizona.

Her research offers insight into the monumental struggle the brain has in comprehending this sudden absence—even in those whose loved ones had lengthy illnesses.

O’Connor explains:

The idea that a person is simply no longer in this dimensional world is not a logical answer to their absence, as far as the brain is concerned.

You see, there’s a part of our brains that’s almost frighteningly neutral. Not the meaning-making parts, they’re more nuanced -- - what we might call our hearts and souls and minds. But there’s also a no-nonsense functionary in there: a problem-solving machine trying to make sure you get what it believes you need, ASAP. (Put a pin in that for when we get to substance use—the operative and hair-raising phrase being: what it believes you need.)

We can understand the brain’s confusion better when O’Connor lays out how it sees our worlds and organizes them to achieve survival.

O’Connor says the brain uses “maps” of our worlds, like Google Maps in our heads, to navigate the pathways to resources—food, water, shelter—and, as mammals evolved, those resources expanded to include protection, caregiving, and love.

Once the map is built, the brain can then return to what it’s really good at: patterns, predictions, and habits. In short, it can stop thinking so much. Which is perfect because this part of the brain doesn’t actually fancy thinking. It’s always on a pretty ruthless “econ” setting.

Because the brain excels at prediction, it often just fills in information that isn’t actually there. It completes the picture it expects to see. Which means it just keeps placing the missing person into the map, because their absence reads like a violation.

When the brain is forced, finally, to face the missing piece, researchers can see a measurable signature of that mismatch in brain activity. Like a zap that reads on an EEG.

Low and behold, other mammals also use these virtual maps, so researchers have been able to conduct animals studies where they’ve identified the set of neurons that fire when the critters arrive at one of their resources. They called them ‘object cells’.

To their amazement, they found a separate set of neurons that fire when the animal approaches a place along their route where a resource used to be. They called these “object trace cells”. I cried when I read that. I think a few years of my life could be explained by that one word: trace.

O’Connor summarizes:

Grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives and making a new, revised cartography.

The reason she says she wrote the book at all was to get one simple idea out to the public:

…the process of grieving in the end is a form of learning.

The brain must practice and learn death. So time does, in fact, heal. But it’s not the time that’s helping, exactly. It’s the practice. For the brain, death is an acquired skill—like serving an ace in tennis, or playing a Rachmaninoff concerto, or kicking a 65-foot-long field goal.

Let’s close with one more thing from the file. It’s a tough passage from a grief memoir called Humanity Is Trying by Jason Gots, who lost his sister in mid-life. It haunted me when I first read it, but I so appreciated that he was brave enough not to tie things up at the end. I could picture the publisher bristling.

It was years ago when I threw this in, and at the time I connected with it. I don’t resonate with it as much now. Thank God. But for a couple years, I’d say it captured something of my experience.

He writes:

I don’t know what closure is. Or mourning, either, to be honest. Here I am, years later, still looking for—something. It’s like wandering around a vast and vaguely familiar mansion in a dream, rattling every doorknob on some urgent but undefined mission…

For a long time, I consoled myself with the thought that I had learned something important from her death—something about the preciousness of life… But people don’t die for the benefit of our personal growth. There’s no lesson here. No neat binding into which the story will fit. No way, finally, to bring her back to life or to let her go, either.

Jason Gots, Humanity Is Trying: Experiments in Living with Grief, Finding Connection and Resisting Easy Answers

I’ll close with this today because it seems to me such a real place—and pure sans birds—and it feels right to honor it as we begin in earnest this journey to the heart of the file. I promised hard today, and this is hard.

I’m grateful to report I didn’t get stuck in the place he describes although I recognize it. I moved on and so did my file. So take from this whatever might be helpful and toss the rest off your snowmobile.

I’ll see you guys next month and play some MC Hammer and dance around your kitchen to shake it off.

Truth: Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. —Psalm 139:8

Tip: MC Hammer Can’t Touch This, lyrics, from my new playlist, Funk You.

Tote: Obsessed with Chai this winter. My fave tea place: Jenway.

I’m always so grateful to hear from my readers! Please feel warmly invited to leave a comment for me on Substack. xok

¹ Epigraph: Chaim Stern, “’Tis a Fearful Thing.”

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I was in Israel a little over a decade ago when we went to see the place they surmise Jesus was born, in Bethlehem, about six miles outside Jerusalem.

Archaeologists and historians do not know with complete certainty where many of the locations that mark the highpoints in Jesus’ life and ministry were located. Instead, they have close approximations. How our tour guide referred to those sites was ‘traditional’, which word in this context seemed to mean alternately ‘in the vicinity of’ or ‘what’s been agreed upon’.

By contrast, the site where I was that day, the Church of the Nativity, that one they’ve pretty much got. That’s partly because the earliest Christians had been worshipping there since Jesus’ death and it was venerated only two hundred years later. Constantine’s mother, Helena, who was a convert, built the cathedral there in 326 A.D. and by some stroke of luck, over the centuries, the site remained safe from political upheaval and depopulation. Additionally, unlike other sites from Jesus’ life where competing views muddy the water, no outside group, entity or individual has ever claimed a rival view about this one. It’s almost certainly where Jesus arrived on earth.

I’m just now finishing a year-long Bible reading plan that took me through the whole of the Old and New Testaments, the entire Bible, chronologically. The books of the Bible are not arranged that way and so the ancient history can get muddled or confusing if you read the books as they appear rather than moving through them historically. The plan also included historical analysis and biblical commentary, so it was a sizable undertaking for me and a serious commitment of time and energy.

So I thought as I send out my final letter for the year here at Coming to the Nuisance, I would celebrate what feels to me like a mammoth personal achievement by sharing a few of the details I’ve learned about Jesus’ birth.

Let’s start with Joseph and Mary and the trip to Bethlehem: they were almost certainly not traveling alone --- they would have been traveling in a large group of extended family as everyone had to be registered in that census and the trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem was a week-long, ninety-mile journey along a somewhat dangerous route.

There was no camel, by the way. I know they look cool on the cover of books, but they couldn’t have afforded one. Joseph worked construction. He’s a laborer which is what Jesus would later become. Neither one was a carpenter or a fine craftsman. When the King James Bible was first published, they had trouble translating the Aramaic word for what they did into English and the English word carpenter came closest. But Joseph and Mary were poor, working-class people. They may have been traveling with a donkey, but we can disappear the camel.

Also, the whole narrative about there being ‘no room at the inn’ is inaccurate. There was no Inn, no barn and no stable. They would have planned to stay with relatives and friends in Bethlehem but it’s likely that due to Mary’s being so pregnant, the two of them were at the tail end of this long family caravan.

As they finally rolled into town late that night, all the extra little nooks and rooms in the homes of their family and friends were likely already taken. That’s almost surely why they ended up essentially in someone’s basement.

Residential dwellings back then in that part of Israel would have been stone structures which were often placed right over caves that functioned like cellars basically ---- used for extra storage and at night, they tended to house the family’s animals.

So, this would be much like visiting faraway friends and family and you arrive last from the airport because your luggage got lost. So instead of staying in your uncle’s guest room or office, you’re in your second cousin’s neighbor’s basement on a blow-up. Just transfer that whole concept to ancient times and you get the picture.

Keep in mind too, that although Mary’s very pregnant, these two are also very young – Mary’s somewhere between thirteen and sixteen (this was ancient Jewish marital custom). Joseph is older but probably between eighteen and twenty-five. Many historians have speculated that Joseph might have been a widower. But so very little is known about him. Anyway, they’re just kids. That would be another reason they got the ‘basement-blow-up’.

Not incidentally, the census would almost certainly have been conducted in the warmer months when travel was much easier and roads predictably passable. Shepherds, too, would not have been ‘abiding in the fields’ at night in the winter. Again, that would be spring or summer.

So, most historians agree that Jesus of Nazareth was born between April and October and most likely between June and August. His December birthday, which we might refer to again as ‘traditional’, was picked centuries later, as it was thought to align better with the liturgical calendar and more poetically I think with the winter solstice.

So, this Christmas, to tip my hat to the real Jesus, for dessert I’ll be making a blackberry-raspberry cobbler. (I’ll pop the recipe in Tips.)

I can feel myself becoming a real geek about this biblical history stuff. I think the drive to steep myself in it might in part be a reaction to having to endure the years of what I would characterize as a complete Jesus-Freeze-Out at my kids’ New York City high school. Not a mention of the guy that I can remember. (Then again, teenage boys are not known for their forthcoming nature!)

I did recently come across some of their old high school history notes in a cabinet I was clearing out which related to the Renaissance and I saw that Christianity got a mention. But of the man, nothing —- who he said he was and what people claimed he did.

Just for fun, before I sat down to write this letter, I asked AI who were the three most influential people ever to walk the face of the earth —- I used the words change-makers and disruptors as qualifiers. And Jesus was in the top three, along with Muhammad and Newton. And Jesus came in first.

You can’t white him out. That’s just silly.

At the college level, of course, they know this so what they tend to do is a bit trickier --- they offer classes about the Bible or Christianity or Judaism but most often taught by scholars (secular). This is what they did even when I was at NYU many moons ago.

The problem with that is that the Bible is not an academic book about the biblical characters and their mostly disastrous, messy lives. It’s about God and divinely by God and relays the story of Him and his reckless, miraculous love for all He’s made.

I promise you, if you tried to take the protagonist out of any other story – Lear out of King Lear, Jane out of Jane Eyre — they too would scarcely make sense.

We’ll do a deeper dive on all this later this Spring. For now, let’s get back to that day a decade ago when I was in Israel with my family.

So, there I am. I have the three boys circling around, who’d just told us the day before that they were officially “churched-out”. See, in the Holy Land, over the centuries they’ve built a church or cathedral at every single ‘traditional’ site where Jesus did his amazing stuff --- water into wine, sermon on the mount, fed the five thousand. So, a Holy Land tour for us was actually a week-long journey through crowded cathedrals where huge tour buses idled in parking lots.

You might have guessed that we didn’t have a clear beat on this going into the trip. If you pictured that I pictured that my boys would be running on mountain tops (where Elijah and Moses appeared) or exploring sparse desert landscapes (where Jesus might have fasted for forty days) or sprinting barefoot on beaches (where Jesus told the ocean to calm down), you would have pictured right. Instead, we’re a churched-out crew in a crowded church.

And let’s add a little more color here on me: first, I’ll tell you that I love, love, love Middle Eastern cuisine so my foodie-self was out in spades. And back then I drank too – especially on vacations --- because my little governor liked to take a break then too. The joie de vivre of the holiday was the perfect excuse to have a few glasses of wine with dinner (let’s round up to 3). And I may or may not have also had a negroni straight-up please at cocktail hour because….well, what else does one do at cocktail hour?

This naughty habit would have wrecked all my sleep. Keep in mind, at that point in the trip we were staying in East Jerusalem which meant I was awakened an hour and a half before sunrise by the Muslim call to prayer (on a few occasions it was so beautiful it made me cry and I couldn’t get back to sleep because I groggily wondered if this might mean I was a tiny bit Muslim…).

So, here I am at the grotto-cathedral-place keeping one puffy-eye on the three boys who need some clear attending ‘cause they’re just about as restless at this point as a Texas two-step, I’m tired and let’s just call the balls and strikes --- hungover.

And we start descending into this cave structure which is directly under the church and seems at first like just a too-narrow staircase I could have found anywhere in New England but then quickly morphs into cold storage, like an ancient cellar, which is exactly what it is, which I only remember now as being very dark and smelling like dirt. I also remember being annoyed by an unhelpfully loud group of holy enthusiasts from Ohio.

We turn a corner, all of us walking in a dark line, and then I forget about the three boys, I forget I have three boys, because I see it, the place, this kind of hole really, around a corner I turn and see it, the place they say he was born and laid in a feed trough which is unbelievably unremarkable. Except what I feel right then which I can only describe as like the whole world taking a massive galactic breath, an enormous, cosmic inhaling gasp. I almost thought I heard it.

Not even three seconds later, I have another sensation like the corners and frames holding the world together just break away and fly off, toward infinity, I guess.

I can only compare this second experience to a dream I once had where I saw the sky lift away from the earth and disappear, revealing to me the real universe and its infinite nature, which had no sky, just endless, endless non-sky space, from which I awakened absolutely exhilarated, wonder-struck and terrified, my heart beating out of my chest.

So, my sweet, sweet friends and readers, in honor of Fake Christmastime (cause the real one happened closer to Fourth of July…) and all our totally inaccurate nativity scenes and creches set in shivery barns that are like three-dimensional misnomers and also in honor of that wild, fleeting sensory unraveling I once had alongside the Ohioans that I can only dimly, dimly capture in words, I thought this month I’d pull an emerald-cut diamond from my files, a wondrous passage indeed, as good as your favorite carol at least.

Here is the inimitable and singular Annie Dillard on frames and what happens when they break away:

You have seen photographs of the sun taken during a total eclipse. The corona fills the print. All of those photographs were taken through telescopes. The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience. Lenses enlarge the sight, omit its context, and make of it a pretty and sensible picture, like something on a Christmas card. I can assure you, if you send any shepherds a Christmas card on which is printed a three by five photograph of the angel of the Lord, the glory of the Lord, and a multitude of the heavenly host, they will not be sore afraid.

“Total Eclipse”, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Happy Holidays and New Year, my loves! I’ll see you guys in 2026 with more stories, more questions and the art that echoes them both.

Truth – Christianity, when properly understood, is not technically another religion. I believe Jesus came to dismantle religion. It’s the only faith in which the known gap between man and the divine is God Himself. He actually builds the bridge to man, not the other way around. And then He crosses it! He just comes to get us —- like bails us out, whisks us off the sinking ship and puts a crown on our heads. It’s insane.

The longer I believe it, though, the more I actually struggle to comprehend such a wild, profligate Crazy-Tearaway-Love.

But that’s Christmas. In a nutshell.

Tip – Link to cobbler (an old recipe I got from my friend Brittany who texted it to me or gave it to me out of her head. Excuse my messy handwriting, link to GF cobbler (My sister Lis was GF. So I have GF versions of some things. And this one I liked.)

Tote – Best Christmas album EVER: Immanuel, Melanie Penn. I love every single song. I love every single word. Each track is the Christmas story told from a different perspective: Gabriel, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the Star of Bethlehem, the Magi. It’s gorgeous. Mary’s song is my favorite. Listen now on Spotify.

For the beautiful person on your list, you can make a donation to International Justice Mission in their name and provide a survivor of human trafficking with needed therapy for healing. Thank you IJM for not just rescuing but restoring.

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If you prefer to listen to this piece- click below.

…A borough shuttled

between breath and demolition…

Brooklyn Antediluvian, Patrick Rosal

Williamsburg, the year 2000

It was a cold morning in a tough little part of Brooklyn, and I was heading out alone. The city was a mean cold that winter --- ice hung onto everything in thin invisible sheets. Every small thing was cold -- cab door handles, metal window frames, even the broken doorknob of the row house where I lived with my roommate Cathy.

It was early December and not a single green leaf was left blowing in the wind. All I could see was grey like cement and I ran toward the L train with most of what I owned in the world on my back.

I rarely thought of myself as poor. I loved what I did. I was a choreographer and having just finished an MFA, I’d launched a dance company and was in the blush of assembling my first New York season. My work would bring me into large, empty sunny studios for hours and hours, many solitary, and time would just disappear. I knew a life in the arts would be humble --- not even people at the very top in modern dance were making any real money. But it was a purity I secretly respected.

I loved the life of an artist too. While the world raged and everyone seemed to be striving and suffering against it, there was a calm almost sacred distance to a life in the arts that I deeply appreciated. I liked being a listener and then speaking something back. As I child I was a dreamer and more often than not, lost in my thoughts.

Although I relished my work, something uneasy was stirring in me as those mornings got colder and my train turned in the screeching dark under the East River. A worrying feeling had taken root in my gut. Yes, part of it was the cold; I’ve always hated the cold. But it might be more accurate to say that what concerned me most was not the cold outside but inside ----- the heat didn’t work reliably in my apartment. And that was contributing to a sense of being too far out, too far from some shore.

Cathy and I were alternately calling our landlord, Robert, begging him to fix it. I used to have to take the phone out of her hand when it was her turn to call because she had this modest, British way of apologizing for it ---- If you wouldn’t mind… If it’s possible? Could you check? It’s gone off-track again -- which ramblings incensed me. Not at her, of course, but at him.

Cath had arrived in the States from England on a Fulbright to study choreography. She’d finished school a year before me and was now overstaying her visa to make work in New York. But she was way out of her depth dealing with a slum lord. She grew up on the Isle of White. I was a loudmouth from New Jersey.

I used to have to grab the receiver from her (which was attached to the wall!) and scream, “Robert! Get over here! It’s freezing! I can see my breath! Get over here and fix it or I’m calling the police!”

The calls to Robert though usually only brought us a week or so of banging, leaking wet heat. We were practically squatting. Except that we were paying! When my sister, Lis, came to visit me there, she cried when she stepped foot in the place. That was a red flag day.

Our third floor flat was in East Williamsburg on Grand Street where it dead ends at the elevated Brooklyn Queens Expressway — part of a cluster of old tenements built in the frenzy of newcomers to New York’s shores almost a hundred years before. But the neighborhood never ascended or prospered and its buildings stood, cracked and tired, as evidence.

Our place was cartoonishly dumpy —- screaming apart. You would go to wash a dish, and the faucet would pull off the sink. When it rained, even lightly, the ceiling tiles in my bedroom would collapse onto my bed because of a leak in the roof that Robert could not seem to fix. He did try. Our building was waving good-bye as it collapsed into the Brooklyn water table --- while we slept, while we worked.

Once when I’d really had it, I called the housing authority and there was a rigmarole I had to go through — paperwork I had to fill out and then they gave me a date where I had to sit home all day waiting for the inspection, a bizarre errand because I usually only slept there.

Occasionally, Cathy and I would cross by chance in the evening, grabbing take-out and drinking cheap wine or bourbon that we’d bought down the street from the man behind the bulletproof glass. We’d discuss our dances and their glitches and try to solve one another’s choreography. I have happy memories of those nights —- some of the happiest from that time.

It was then that Brooklyn felt to me like an enormous proscenium — every beating heart out there knit into the story it was trying to tell that day. As dark came on the borough, Cath and I would be lit, by moon and fluorescence in equal measure, we too in it, of it, our silhouettes turning on the cracked linoleum in the tiny kitchen as snippets of Spanish and quarrels, backfiring trucks and music, floated up from the street or came through our paper thin walls.

Other than those nights, though, I considered my real home to be the regular places I met people for coffee or dinner in town. And the studios where I worked — with sprung floors and nice bathrooms and showers for my dancers. This was one of the ways I justified living in such a place.

On the appointed day I sat there for hours, Cathy joining me after class. The two of us waiting together, eager to see if we could borrow the power to get Robert back.

Finally, these two guys arrived – tall and slender in their blue jumpers, both Black. They were a reassuring presence, warm and kind to us right off, and immediately confirmed that there were dozens of violations. Some on the outside too, the taller one said. We’ll have to get a city engineer to come out for that.

I remember this part like it was yesterday though: the taller fellow tucks his clipboard under his elbow and steps into my room where Cathy and I sat perfectly still on my fluffy white comforter, framed by the doorway and cracked plaster, he settles his stance, taking up more weight on his feet, and like a gentle giant, his eyes smiling, looks right at us and says: Where you ladies from?

The question hung in the air for a bit and then, almost like magic, landed somewhere inside of me and started to tick away like a clock. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t after our hometown tales. He wanted a ‘why’. I believe the real question he was asking was --- how did you two end up here, in this place not suitable for human habitation? —- probably in mind of uncovering a newcomer’s error, like having just arrived in town from rural Alabama with three hundred dollars cash and a subway map.

His query stung – more for me I think than it did for Cathy. I was older than she, my early thirties. I went to NYU. I was not a beginner —- at New York or urban life or being an artist. But I didn’t have an answer for this nice man.

I’d sat there waiting all day for these guys to set things right but my plan went seriously awry. What happened instead was that the housing authority ---- New York City itself -- was explaining back to me that yes, my fully adult life, was in a state of utter collapse. Suddenly, in a single afternoon I’d lost the thread on my own meta-narrative. And with it, my grip on the future.

I’d thought it all made sense --- the amazing dancers, the New York season coming up, the reviews I would get and then the grant money would follow. But his little question made me realize that my ‘plan’ assumed a bunch of things --- first, that this long string of things would actually happen. And now I could see a sort of gap between the wish for it and the chances of it actually materializing.

Then, and much more importantly I think, it assumed that my strategy would bring me into some kind of promised land --- a land of meaning, of purpose, of peace really. And here’s the thing: I had thought my life as an artist was distant from all that striving and suffering. And it was initially, for sure, safe from that I think --- poised, calm, speaking something back.

But now I realized that I too was striving and suffering. I’d somehow unwittingly adopted a kind of careerism without realizing it. And I knew it would pollute my work. And my heart.

That was another red flag day.

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And so it was —- a time of stirring and flags —- on that freezing cold morning, as I headed into the stinging cold wind, running late, running toward the L.

I was picking up the pace toward the train that would take me to work and thinking how happy I’d be to arrive at my desk and the predictable warmth of the office where I worked. The job awaiting me was not usually a comfort. It was a part-time gig doing business writing for one of the department heads at the Fashion Institute of Technology. But in this season, it took on a mantle of comfort. And heat.

Blown-bleak Brooklyn as my backdrop, I was hurrying through the stiffening cold, past the little bodegas and tiny storefronts with candies inside and flowers outside and the slightly tattered awnings of my mostly Hasidic-Hispanic neighborhood, jumping over half-frozen litter with my backpack. I was undoubtedly in jeans and beaten-up black leather boots and an un-sensible jacket. I couldn’t afford a real coat back then.

As I approached the corner of Metropolitan and Lorimer, I slipped past a clutch of chatty teenagers onto an open space where I could really move as I rushed through the crowded landing to get the Manhattan-bound train I could hear approaching the station. Go!, I shouted to myself as I crested the top of the stairs.

The next second, Holy Lord of Heaven and Brooklyn, I will never forget that weightless, split-second I was nearly airborne before the fall began. I’d slipped at the very top of the stairs on the thinnest layer of ice and was swept into slow-motion suspension for what seemed a mini-eternity.

I guess there are some moments in life when you’re in absolute free fall and your single job then is just to wait for the hit.

It came: a shearing of human joints and bones against a congregation of freezing cold corners of metal and cement. I went headlong, careening down the staircase like a frozen black package.

It’s the metal I remember most though. To this day when I eye that strip of metal that runs horizontally across the subway stairs, it still sends a miniature thrill through my body. I have to half-salute that bastard metal, remembering viscerally this day, this thing, this horribly hard metal thing I landed on -------- no hands free in time to break the fall, coming down onto that single square inch of my body, the patella, that one inch taking the mammoth, unmitigated blow.

It’s way too passive to say I fell down those stairs. It was more like I flew and crash-landed down the stairs -- like a human catapult. It was an obscene, firebrand blow to that knee.

When I had an emergency C-section years later with my firstborn son, in the aftermath of it I thought to myself — Well, I guess that went pretty hard left. But at least it wasn’t as bad as my knee.

By the time I found myself in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, a small crowd had gathered --- onlookers, well-meaners, some just curious (is she drunk? Is she dead?) --- I believe I had begun to go into shock. I started sweating and trembling and had trouble talking. I think my lips were moving but no sound came out.

I was aware of two things primarily – first, that my mind seemed ok – that I must not have hit my head because my thoughts were proceeding in a way that made sense to me, considering the situation – Oh my God, Oh my God. My leg. Oh my God. My knee. Like that.

The second thing was that I was also just aware of pain --- physical pain like I had never felt in my life --- blinding, blunting, delirious pain.

Someone called out something about an ambulance. I was mute. Someone shouted, “Get her some water!” All the while I was conscious and trying to communicate but words wouldn’t come. A lady ran to tell the attendant and shouted at her through the plexi. I looked on --- still, impassive, now chilled.

When I tried to hoist myself up, shaking my head No (to the ambulance), I realized my right leg was off-line. Communication from my brain to my leg had shut down. I sat there in a pile, my mind racing: how was I gonna get out of here? how was I gonna get home?...

Thirsty, cold and panicked, I heard from the muffled commotion above me, a familiar voice:

Kara?

I looked up --- scanning the crowd.

Then again, I heard it, Kara?

There, from among the faces of strangers, a sea of humanity, stood Doug Parry, an old acquaintance of mine from many years before, my Seattle days. I hadn’t seen him in at least six or seven years. I blinked to check my eyes (am I hallucinating?).

He was still there. It had been a lifetime since I’d seen him. On another coast. 2200 miles away.

Kara, are you ok?

Doug? Doug! (I can talk, I thought.. I can talk!)

Oh my God, Doug, help me up. I fell. Down the stairs. Can you help me get up? I can’t feel my leg. This leg. It’s not moving. I can’t feel it.

Doug was a painter. He was all about painting. And back in my Seattle days, it may have been customary for him to have a rocks glass nearby too. We’d worked together in restaurants – I a waitress and Doug a bartender. He and his friends were socially central somehow. I’d admired them.

Doug was a big guy -- six foot two or three and broad-shouldered. He had a strong jaw, pale blue eyes and light brown tousled hair. He was handsome. He’d played football at the University of Washington. If you’d told me back in my twenties that one day Doug Parry would come upon me injured and in distress and single-handedly lift me up and carry me home, I would have been delighted, I think.

And that’s exactly what happened. He just reached down and scooped me up off the cold, dirty floor and cradled me, like a baby, the onlookers almost disbelieving (they erupted into applause) and he carried me home --- first, up into the sunlight as we stepped out of the dungeon of the subway and then the three and half long blocks home ---- under the tattered awnings, back through the half-frozen garbage and past the bodegas selling candy and flowers.

We tried to start a few conversations in the cold along the way– yes, he was still painting --- he was finishing an MFA at Pratt. He had a show coming up, his final thesis. And yes, I was still dancing, choreographing now actually. Had a season coming up next Fall. I’ll send you a flyer, I said. But it was so cold, and it was hard to for him to talk and carry me and my backpack at the same time. So mostly we were quiet as we walked.

When we arrived, he somehow managed to get my key from me and put it in the broken doorknob while holding me steady and step by step, carried me up the three flights of crumbling row house stairs and into my flat.

But on that morning my apartment felt suddenly and briefly beautiful to me. I looked out the kitchen window to the east at the sunlit water towers of Brooklyn and all the way to the river. Safe, bright, home.

When Doug set me in my kitchen chair, one leg bent and relaxed and the other stiff, straight, alien – I’d offered him coffee, water, did he want to stay for a second and I could order breakfast from a diner, (what diner? I lived in a slum...) But he was running a little late, he said, and smiled and had to run if that was cool. You ok?, he asked.

Yes, yes, yes, I’m good, Oh my God, Doug, I’m good. I said. Thank you so, so much I kept saying. Thank you.

I never saw Doug Parry again. When his show came up five or six weeks later, I still wasn’t walking on that leg. Eventually I got my insurance to heel, and some doctor diagnosed the problem. It appeared the impact to my patella was so severe that the muscles on either side of it had simply shut down to protect the area. I was truly (but only temporarily) paralyzed in that leg.

About a month after the fall they started electrical stim to those muscles and I began to regain feeling. Physical therapy followed and, in the meantime, I used a cane to walk. After another few months, I was back in the studio, slowly returning to work. But it would be many months before I returned to class. The whole ordeal gave me a ton of time to think.

As Doug left, I heard the broken front door echo half-shut up the stairwell and I sat in the quiet kitchen by myself for a very long time. The heat had kicked on. Thank you, God. I sat listening to the loud buzz of the fridge and looked out the kitchen window again at the towers that one day I’d counted but no longer remembered the total.

A flood of gratitude came over me then. For the sun. For my apartment. For my life. And for Brooklyn -- all its perennially unfinished business. Inchoate Brooklyn – tired, restless, beautiful Brooklyn. A place with someplace else to go. A place with something on the tip of its tongue --- aiming, hoping and only half-having. All the neighborhoods loosely arranged by different kinds of wanting, that ran underneath them all like that water table.

I wasn’t thinking so much as I sat there but just seeing things, regarding them, just as they were. And I had a new and strange gladness for everything; it was gentle but unassailable. I watched as the light moved slowly across the broken lines of roofs and felt my body. Breathing.

Soon, this shelter of quiet evaporated and I began to hear a louder, more concrete dialogue with myself take shape: I’m disabled, I thought. I can’t walk. I can’t dance. How am I even gonna get down those stairs? How will I work? What about my season? I needed to talk to someone.

My sister Jenny lived in Hong Kong; it was evening there. She’ll be home, I thought.

Jen? I said, when she answered the phone. And then I started to cry.

That day was another red flag.

I had a place I put the red flags. I put them in with my bath salts. And after I talked to Jenny that’s what I did. I hopped down the hall on my good leg and started running a very hot bath. My go-to thing back then. Still is in many ways.

I used to run the bath, light a candle and turn off the lights so I couldn’t really see the bathroom which was exceptionally decrepit. And I’d bring my boom box in there too -- that tiny, windowless space -- and play Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, good and loud so it blasted through my neurology. I’d always wanted to choreograph to it but was too scared to try.

The water and salts would steam and the scent of rose or citrus would fill the room or eucalyptus if I was sore from class or rehearsal.

I didn’t understand the German words firing through the speakers, nor did I understand then or believe exactly whatever was being said, about God or man or Christ or anything else. But I knew the mass sounded like a real emergency and somehow, I began to sense it running alongside my own emergency. And catching up.

In that long, cold winter that followed as I hobbled around the freezing city with my cane, I was finally able to admit to myself that I needed something desperately I could not get or buy or make.

And I started to summon the guts to admit that deep inside this crazy striving had darkened my door —- I was desperate to achieve, to succeed really. That was the thing. I had to succeed. And if that were the case, wasn’t it in the end just like chasing anything else ---- money or fame or love or attention or any other kind of validation? I wanted to be an artist but wasn’t my heart divided —- in some way covertly turned toward something else?

What do I do, I thought. Start over? Go back to school? Move to Africa? Adopt a baby? I didn’t know. But I knew I didn’t know. And that’s when it started --- my leg slowly began to wake up and my life began to turn.

When I lay in the salty bubbles over the ensuing months in Brooklyn, something strong seemed to slip under my feet while I listened to that mass. The effect was a sense that I was standing and reclining at the very same time.

I can still vividly remember the smell of that dank room, the damp walls with the wallpaper peeling away, the whole rack and ruin row house. And the feeling I had that somehow the rose and citrus were rising up and winning out against the filth and rot.

—————————————————————————————————————————————

Truth, Tip, Tote

Truth: Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, Kyrie.

Tip: Brooklyn Poetry. With AI it’s so easy to find poetry about specific people, places and things. Here are some extraordinary excerpts:

Tote: Doug Parry. It appears he’s still painting. Thank you, Doug! For carrying me home. Attempts to ping him before the the posting of this piece fell short. But I found so many gems in his instagram reel. Including this beauty.

This letter is for Cath and Brooklyn. Still love you both. And for all the dancers who live there. We are, in fact, knit into a great story.

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I haven’t forgotten for a minute about grief and trauma, the difference between the two or the shimmerings that help bring us back from the edge. While I work diligently on the related letters for you, though, I offer this month a quick story about my trip to London last spring to visit my sister, Jenny, as well as a side trip to the Highlands of Scotland “for some hiking” which my niece Neala assiduously planned for the three of us. Turned out Scotland had life lessons for me under every moss-covered rock.

Here’s that story:

On our first morning in Skye, Neala’s itinerary called for a big breakfast at break of day for the sustenance needed to ascend Old Man Storr, a 55 meter-high pinnacle of basalt rock not far from the hotel.

The ride to the trailhead was gorgeous – that rugged, muscular landscape, clear cut and rocky and a shape-shifting green, as far as the eye could see. It doesn’t get old.

When we arrived at the trailhead, I noticed that the rain had grown a bit more pelt-y and looked around to try to get a sense from what direction the storm was tracking. But I couldn’t quite tell. It seemed to be almost loitering —— like teenagers at a gas station. This was my first inkling that the weather there was just different, both as empirical fact but later I would realize it’s also in how it’s conceived of --- in the public imagination and in the public square.

We passed through an old gate at Storr’s base and the landscape changed; everywhere we looked the earth was punctuated by clumped green grass and deep purple ground cover. The beauty of it for some reason reminded the three of us of Maeve, Neala’s older sister, who was back in the States. We shared our observations lightly but it got colder fast as we bent ourselves uphill and into the gathering wind.

It turned out Neala had the explicit intent of scaling the Trottemish Ridge, created 60 million years ago by a massive landslip. Ok, I thought. I was a little jet-lagged but a vigorous walk would likely help, I assured myself. The problem was that the higher we went, the greater the wind and the fiercer the rain. We trudged on, soon socked in by heavy fog. A few evergreens lay around felled.

I’m frankly not sure how to describe the next part or the overall experience except by telling you what it was not --- it was not a walk, it was not a hike, it wasn’t even ‘trekking’ as it were. It wasn’t long before it lost the pleasure of the voluntary and took on the drive of compulsion. It felt like we three were all marching under orders from some outside authority. Solzhenitsyn popped to mind. Then my mind went back further; it was closer to World War I in feel. Eventually, all three of us did look like cold, wet Russian soldiers. Chaingangers.

Next my mind wandered to movies I’d seen of plane crashes at high elevations, stranding a few survivors.

After about an hour, the wind took on Master and Commander strength. We were near capsizing, each of us our own dingy. A few times we had to stop and get low to the ground for fear of being picked up and thrown down or just swept away. Right off that mountain.

At some point I must have considered suggesting we turn back. But deep inside I really needed to be the cool aunt. Even if I had to die trying. And I didn’t want to lose to Jenny either.

Has anyone ever done the math on this? Like how many people a year die trying to save face?

I believe we did end up reaching that Tottering Ridge, whatever it was, but the fog was so thick, and we were so haggard that we just sat down on the far side of a volcanic rock and had a few sips of water. By the grace of God (or whatever god He lets run that mountain…), getting back down was far faster and easier.

When we returned to the parking lot though I was gob smacked to discover that it was just exactly as we had left it. I saw no hikers laid out on stretchers; no emergency vehicles ready to organize search parties. I spotted a few young people in the gift shop browsing scarves. Strangely too, the gusts had died down so dramatically that it seemed like a Hollywood wind machine had just been shut off.

When we returned to our rooms back in Portree it took me seventeen minutes to regain feeling in my feet. Also, back at hotel-twilight-zone, not one single person was trading stories at lunch about the extraordinarily inclement situation going on outside, even when I tried to talk about what happened to us in a stage voice so that people would overhear. Everyone was just sitting in their afternoon slacks sipping scotch with their spouse of forty years. Our storm had not made news.

I forced the subject a final time with our waiter that night at dinner, but he just smiled with jolly condescension about our tale and said that he’d also got ‘caught’ a few weeks earlier on that very ‘walk’ in ‘a little hail’.

Wha?? The idea of Storr as a ‘walk’ was an insane misnomer. Did his neck warmer not get so sopping wet and gale-force blown that it hung down his chest like a necklace? I’m telling the truth --- Storr was an emergency. But “windy day” was all I ever heard anyone say about that morning.

That evening as I lay awake in bed, I became convinced that all the locals had signed an NDA about what happens outdoors. But who had them cornered? The clouds?

I’d strained my hamstring during the hike, so I had a decent excuse to chill out the next morning in my room. While hanging out there with my leg up on a pillow, I became obsessed with watching repeated weather reports, something BBC in Scotland, and then staring out the window to see if it matched.

This is when I realized I might have stumbled onto a hard news story. The reporters are IN on this whole weather hoax! I decided. Their part was pretending the weather is like a metaphorical experience, poetry basically, instead of science, and they spin their reports Yates-style so you have no idea what’s really going.

The weather guy would say things like ‘we’ll likely see more general rain’. General rain? Tell us about the specific rain, you crazy cult leader! He also talked about high pressure ‘retreating’, ‘starting to ‘slip away…’, which sounded plaintiff to me. What is this? The Romantic weather period?

Oh yeah, and I almost forgot, half the maps look like abstract art.

But really the central thing is that they perseverate non-stop about the rain --- offering meteorological concepts like tropes, that refer back to themselves or else relate in time to a prior but also ill-defined event:

‘the best of the day’s sunshine’

‘sporadic spells of rain might burst out’

‘a bit less misty into evening’

What is less? What is best?

And the alliteration: misty, murky, close and clammy! Do they think the weather is a rap?

Case closed. Right? I was being gaslit and called bollocks on their metaphor-weather.

Well, not so fast, my dearest reader-friends.

Months later, July 4^th to be exact, I’m at a picnic at my beach club and I’m seated at a table next to this kindly man, mid-seventies I’d day. He’s from a small, coal mining village in the very north of England right over the border from…hmmm…Scotland. We chat about his family and children, his businesses, past and present. I try to airlift him quickly over my twenty-two years of flipping something in a fry pan and running laundry. A successful man I gathered and a great storyteller too – especially about the gritty, working-class village he was from with the miners and the long, dark tunnels under the North Sea where all manner of things could go wrong and did.

I like the guy. I decide to tell him – everything: Scaling Storr, the storm, the blank looks at the hotel, the condescending waiter, BBC-man who appeared to be part of the, well, conspiracy. What do you think? I asked him straight. Is that weather normal? I mean I felt totally gaslit by the whole thing, I say.

Well, he sipped his cocktail in the plastic cup with stars and stripes as his lips slid toward a smile – decorous but thick with pluck. He was an American like me but dang if he hadn’t left his heart in those Isles.

First, he confirmed that we’d traveled to ‘Northern Europe’ in ‘Early Spring’ and then a pregnant pause came which I should have heeded as warning.

Then --- Then he launched into the most air-tight, polite and withering take-down of me and my ‘impressions’ as might have been humanly possible. His meticulous explication mentioned constant chatter about the weather not being necessary there because they don’t suffer an obsession with meteorology, as do Americans --- as if every plan need depend on advanced detailed warning of precipitation totals.

We tend toward the day, not slavish anxiety about it, which words he loaded like drill bits into the jaws of a chuck.

I sat perfectly dumb with a half a blue cupcake in my mouth. Only later would I realize that it was kind of the summa, black belt version of the waiter’s Jolly Condescension. Sir British Isles blew out his final bit of scorched earth like birthday candles exactly as our shared American fireworks hit the sky.

Well, friends, I know when I’m beat, and I was beat. It was such a rout I can’t even remember all of it. I believe my nerve system collapsed. I tried my best to remember how he formed his elegant argument but like any great performance, you had to be there. He was the master. And if ever there was a rap, it was his.

Mr. UK was right, people. One must contend with the weather as one contends with, well, everything. Life.

To contend --- from the Latin root contendere: to stretch, to strive, with or against.

Ahh. With or Against. We’ll need wisdom for that part.

Instead, when I wake up in the morning, I do a body scan and begin my list of complaints in order of interest and feigned urgency. There was a lesson in this for me; deeper than UK knew. But lessons sometimes come in threes and can be wrapped in very different packages.

My second lesson, another meditation on the nature of nature, arrived our final night in Skye when Jenny treated us to the meal of a lifetime -- my birthday dinner, in fact. It was an incredible, indelible meal. Not farm to table, dears --- this was Foraged and Found. Gorgeous --- fish, fungi, flowers, bushes, seeds, gelatin that had been squeezed from untamed leaves.

It was the flip side of Storr’s School of Hard Knocks. The beauty and abundance blew my anxious little mind. There’s So Much we can eat that we might actually step on by mistake! And sometimes it extends to us exactly like a miracle --- so, so far beyond need.

Why does God do it? I wondered that night as we walked the cold cobblestone back up the hill —- this intermittent pouring forth. This Givenness. Is it for pleasure? His or ours? To hold our hand across the fierce divide? To say to us, I love you this much, without breaking the fourth wall? So that we can agree with Him and practice agreeing? For our souls, to hold up on this wrecking, sinking ship?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. And especially that last one:

For our souls to hold up on this sinking, wrecking ship.

My perennial mistake is being so surprised all the darn-damn time, so taken off-guard by the same exact stuff. The stuff I must Go with. Or against.

On my honor, I promise to do like the Brits in the Blitz:

Keep Calm and Carry On.

Oh, the lessons you taught me, dear Scotland! I love you! I do. Despite our big misunderstanding. And the NDA I’m convinced y’all signed. And the agony of defeat at my beach club. Despite it all, I’d come again in a heartbeat. (With a stiffer upper lip and some very decent gear…)

TIP –No on Northern Europe in Early Spring.

TOTE – But if we do go, I can almost hear UK leaning over to me to whisper sound counsel --- Go to eBay, lass, and get a good price on one of those foot-thick Canadian parkas.

TRUTH - This is a 1.5 minute snippet of our Ride to the North Sea. Link to film. One note on this little gem: the magic here is that Neala was DJ-ing. She DJ-ed throughout the trip, in fact. I’m sorry to brag but I must say here that she has a serious preternatural gift for getting the song exactly right for the mood…sometimes with, sometimes against. I’ve realized recently that this a very great skill, indeed. In some ways it’s related to a similar ability outlined by the venerable Welsh theologian D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones in his essay on Spiritual Depression -- he aptly calls this ‘preaching to your own soul’. I need to practice this and learn it! We must DJ ourselves through this crazy life (and not let the world do it for us). This is because, according to Lloyd-Jones, there is usually a negative rambling voice already there (!), slighted, selfish and afraid, that we must speak up and back to — truth, hope, life and beauty. We must come to that nuisance. Or it wins the day.

In closing and until next time, I love every one of you. For real. And especially you two, Jenny and Neala. This one’s for you!

Happy Birthday, you crazy fools!!

Very Very Special Thanks to Peter Cross and Emerson Delmonte!

Peter Cross (To the North Sea, music LCD Soundsystem, Dance Yrself Clean)

Emerson DelMonte (October Reel! music Lumineers, Ho Hey)

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Happy Fall Friends! I’m squeaking out a September letter despite only just getting back to things --- back to my desk, back to the mess, back to all the impossible, intractable unsolvables!

The excellent part is being back in my cedar closet. It occurred to me that it’s high time I give you all a preliminary report on the ongoing project here concerning ‘the file’ because, although I’m having a smash-up time digging for treasure, I have to admit to being a tad overwhelmed by the organizational aspect of this task. Indeed, I struggle with all forms of organization – my physical space, my mental processes and it’s as if an asteroid hit my time management. I got the genes for messy, confused and late! That said, I’m still hopeful I can unpack this stuff and arrange it somehow without having to halt for two years to get a master’s degree in library science.

For any newcomers, first a warmest welcome to you! I’m so grateful for every one of you, my dear readers. And let me quickly summarize for you what this file is all about: it’s something I wrote about in my first letter (Come Cont’d) and is nothing less than the inspiration for this Substack.

‘The file’ is a place I put everything I learned during the impossible years --- when my mom was losing her mind, and my sister was dying and then in the aftermath of their deaths a handful of months apart in 2016. You can think of it as an archive really, a collection of wisdom ---- a place where art and faith and pain meet and speak.

My plan was that as I unpacked it here in my sleepy beach town (I moved here last year from NYC…), I would read it all again, relish it all again and thank it all too, from the bottom of my heart, and then turn the best stuff into letters for you.

You may have noticed that in advance of having it all unpacked and sorted, I’ve published a handful of stories. Don’t get your knickers in a twist, sweethearts. All roads lead back to the file. There’s no real daylight between me and it. Some of what I write here at Coming to the Nuisance will be pulled directly from the file and some will be simply breathed from the archival air. The file, c’est moi.

I remember in the aftermath of my mom and sister’s deaths, sitting on my grief counselor’s tiny couch in her midtown office, my head bent forward in those shaking kind of sobs saying, “I’m down to the studs, Natasha…I’m down to the studs...” It did feel like I was undergoing some kind of wild gut renovation, of my whole person, of my life. Only the supporting beams remained of the original me.

I also remember how desperately I wished to negate what was happening inside of me; I assumed I’d be very sad but not revved up like a spinning top intent on making homemade yogurt with a clenched jaw. A numb, hyper vigilant, hungover Julia Child I was.

This was the kicker --- in my mind’s eye, I could picture a Poised-Version-of-Me in a parallel universe who was doing quite well under the circumstances --- suffering, yes, but nobly, prayerfully. She drank hibiscus tea and read the psalms. She did not have four cups of coffee in the morning and three (huge) glasses of wine every night. This irritating avatar stalked my conscience and invariably made the real me feel extra-miserable —— she had perspective and was well aware that most of the world suffers much worse stuff than you do. I tried in vain to course correct, to hawk some poise, to get myself ‘in order’. But attempts to do that only increased my shame and that tended to increase all the other unhelpful behaviors too.

I’ll say two quick things here about this difficult portrait of me: the first is that grief and trauma are not the same thing, and I’d only accounted for the former.

The second and maybe more important thing is this: the actual truth was that I was a wreck and it’s utterly pointless to do anything about the truth except to turn toward it. Let me pause here briefly to discuss this because it’s honestly so central to any good endeavor.

When I think of the word truth a handful of things pop to mind: God, of course, first. But then a random list pops to mind --- bird migration, Meryl Streep, olives and apples, Everest, a perfectly cooked egg, War and Peace, Tom Petty, Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl. A few menacing ones follow: prison, riptides, North Korea, Pompeii.

You can try to outrun the true things. You can argue or shrink back. But you’re only wasting time and life.

However maddening, discomfiting, exasperating and terrifying the truth might be to us matters not one tiny purple potato. Arguing about the truth is like arguing with bedrock. Or wildfire. The truth will not be sacked. It survives all the outside pressure and conflict and denial and human insanity and misery absolutely intact. Truth is never hysterical or smug or self-congratulatory either. It doesn’t have to be!

It always feels to me when I finally relinquish my side show of other lesser ideas and turn, that the truth was patiently waiting for me all along, as if sipping an Arnold Palmer on a porch swing reading a paperback. Addicts will attest that it sometimes runs after you. The fact is, like love, the truth is patient and kind. It will wait your whole life for you to turn.

This simple idea runs through the file like a river about to overflow its banks. We will return to it again and again like farmers returning to their fields, their seed, their harvest. And so, it was not until I truly accepted that I did not know how to move forward with my life without my sister, that I began to actually heal.

Now back to my file —- there’s one final thing about it that I want you to know. For now, let’s just put a pin in this because frankly, it needs to be the subject of a whole other letter. (and that’s the case for trauma too…)

What I need you to know is that the file is…how do I say this exactly? It’s kind of alive. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, at some point I realized, by golly, the stuff in there was real.

I bring this up here just so you know that the file shimmers. And as humans, I believe that one of our main jobs here on earth is to identify all the stuff that shimmers. To collect those things and share them around. And mostly to try ourselves to become a shimmering.

Now you’re probably thinking —- Ok. But can you define ‘shimmering’?

Ah. So sorry! Yes! I mean No! I wish I could! It’s subjective, you see. And it depends too on your ‘theory of the case’. Since I’m a Christian (my theory of the case being, in a word, Jesus), the things that shimmer for me are the things that make me feel like A. they reveal or reiterate that theory or B. they talk back to the lies Or C. if something functions like roast chicken or banana bread - that shimmers too. If it gets me out of flight/fright/freeze, it’s a shimmering.

If you’re familiar with the story of the servant girl Hagar in Genesis, who escapes into the wilderness frightened and alone, a shimmering makes me feel deep in my soul like she did when she said:

I see the God who sees me. (Genesis 16:13)

Now that you know a little bit more about the file, you can easily intuit from here my belief that --- yes, we all have a file. Mine might just be a little more messy than yours and maybe more of an active preoccupation.

With that said, let’s dig in and pluck something from my little living museum of hope. And it might surprise you what I pull here. It’s practically hiding in plain sight. I decided to kick us off here with a passage from a memoir that was published in 2012 and turned into a major motion picture with a release in December of 2014 --- Wild, by Cheryl Strayed.

Although some of what’s in the file may be a tad more esoteric or theological, this hails straight from Hollywood. Don’t be a snob, though. It was a great memoir! And it holds a special place in the file partly because of the timing of the movie release which was in the months directly after my sister’s diagnosis. Her old life had just died, and my old life had just died, when we found ourselves alone in her kitchen one terrifying morning, Strayed’s hike and the movie the subject of a meandering conversation about the upcoming weekend.

We were standing there, Lis in the t-shirt she’d slept in. She’d just done her first round of meds and her stupid blood thinner injection which was necessary because of some side effect of the chemo. I heard the hollow plastic echo of the spent needle hitting the medical disposal container which sound always briefly made me wish I were dead.

I think Wild was showing that weekend in the neighboring town and Lis wondered aloud if her son Jack, just fourteen, might want to see it. Might be too much of a chick flick for him, she said half to herself as she got two mugs down for coffee.

Lis stood at the counter, her bald head tilted as she thought about Strayed’s now-famous hike, and she said as she poured the coffee, You’re literally the only person I know who’s crazy enough to do something like that.

She was wrong, of course. I could no more hike that Pacific Crest Trail than I could solve the remaining issues surrounding Einstein’s relativity. But there was some part of it that was true -- simply in that she said it to me, and it stuck in my mind. Especially in those years when she was dying, Lis’ words could hit my heart like an arrow. I immediately and most desperately wished to live up to such a statement. To be crazy stupid brave.

The passage I’m sharing here is the final passage of Strayed’s book. And I suppose it means much more if you’ve read the whole story up until that point and you know all the grief she’s suffered herself in losing her mom, the scattering of her family and siblings in the wake of it, a painful divorce and a frightening addiction.

Of course, on the hike she’d also overcome one impossible wilderness obstacle after another and met all these souls out there, they too all looking for the shimmerings, and read her favorite book of poetry at night in her one-woman tent with her headlight, burning the pages as she read, to lighten her pack as she moved on through the days and the landscapes.

She seemed to admit to herself on the journey that she’d also been brought down to the studs. Maybe Strayed built herself back up with the PCT in the way that I built myself back with my file.

In any event, here’s the passage. It’s from the day she finished the hike and she’s grappling with what the whole thing might ultimately mean. Now and again, I would pull it out of the file and read this passage, during the impossible years and even now. It always gives me peace and a kind of power, and invariably brings me back to the porch. It helps me to turn. And it helps me to remember too that life, in itself, is a shimmering and chief among them:

It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn’t need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life ---like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.

How wild it was, to let it be.

Truth: Not only do I think we all have a file. I think we all have a PCT. Little did I know when Lis said those words to me that morning in her kitchen that I was already on mine. And she on hers.

Tip: Occasionally, I’d have an issue waking up one of my boys in the morning for high school. If it dragged on, I would stride into his room holding a speaker and cranking an iconic song from my youth. My all-time fave for this exercise: Mary Jane’s Last Dance (live), Tom Petty. What a way to start the day. For both of us. I miss it.

Tote: Hibiscus tea

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I was in Paris last fall to visit my middle son, Peter, who was studying there. His class schedule was packed, and my hotel room was tiny, so much of the short trip was a self-led walking tour around the Left Bank. Not a bad gig.

On my first full day there, I walked to the Luxembourg Gardens, where Peter had tried to take me the night before, but Daylight Saving Time had surprised us, and the park was closed early. After a perfect breakfast the following morning --- espresso, chocolate, bread, cured ham --- I ventured out toward the gates alone.

The formal entryway gave way to rows of gardens where I watched a handful of older men playing pétanque and kids sitting around smoking and kissing. Then I strolled further along the stone paths where gardeners turned over the beds. It was a damp day and overcast, but the clouds were bright.

I wandered into an open promenade and ahead of me saw a fountain surrounded by an octagonal pool of perfectly still water and I froze in place. I’d stepped into the exact spot of an old family photo, almost as if I’d stepped through some tear in the fabric of time. It was like déjà vu but more visceral than that --- a soul-level double take.

It’s a little misleading to call it a family photo – my family and I were not in the picture. We were all just there when it was taken, and I think of it as a family photo because it ended up in the album from that trip. It was a photograph my mother took of a little French girl, maybe two and a half or three, wearing a nice dress and proper shoes, playing near the fountain. Back then, my father worked as a marketing executive for Pan Am, and my family flew for free. We were in Paris for a long weekend. I’d just turned thirteen.

I’ve been to Paris a couple times since – once again as a teenager on a trip offered through my high school and later when we took the boys about ten years ago. But I had not been back to this fountain since that very day.

When my mother died nine years ago, this was one of the photos I’d stopped at and even studied --- that I thought to myself, as I sat on the floor going through the boxes of her albums and negatives, was objectively good. I decided then that although she spent countless hours painting, her gift might have resided more in her photography; it was more nuanced and heavier in the right way.

Some of her photos were wonderfully poignant --- flowers up so close that they edged toward the surreal, their blooms flaming out, some of the petal edges ripped. She captured highly energetic landscapes too, with layered, sometimes cryptic or ruptured backgrounds, but everything always attenuated by beautiful color and classical composition. And there were many photos where what came across most strongly was a shared hush between seen and seer: a kind of stealth quiescence in her witness that suggested a deep respect for all of life and nature and people.

And that squared with who she was. Although my mom was quite private and did not speak often of her faith, it occurred to me recently —— as I’ve wandered through her world again and even showed my boys —- that what rang through the corpus felt almost like a prayer, or a form of worship, and strangely like an assurance to me too, sent through time.

That day in early summer of 2016, only weeks after she died, as I sat with her work on the floor all around me, I texted my sister Jenny with the revelation: Mom was such a good photographer! I remember also being sad then that I hadn’t discerned such an important thing in her lifetime. All to say, the portrait of the little girl at the fountain had some history and resonance beyond just a snapshot from a family vacation forty-three years ago.

What was especially wild to me was that I’d entered the scene at exactly the spot where my mother stood that day. I was seeing through her lens, decades later.

Reflexively, of course, I started to look for the little girl. But I quickly remembered that she would be old enough now to be a mother herself. In fact, if she had any kids, they’d likely be too old to be playing at a fountain in the middle of the day. If they existed at all, they were probably in middle school somewhere in the Paris that stretched out beyond me, low and long, honed and pale yellow in every direction.

I stood there for a good while, a crowded field of feelings scrambling for space and voice. Of the group of us there that day, standing just outside my mom’s frame, only Jenny and I remain.

I was jostled from the trance by squeals of laughter: two little boys, about six or seven, came running toward me, almost crashing into me. One was trying to catch the other, and they were laughing. The present clapped back, winning me out of a past I couldn’t quite inhabit or hold, and woke me up to Now --- which can sometimes feel almost frighteningly impervious and neutral to me, but when it clapped that day, it felt solid, like it was calling me with an open hand. I was thankful for the boys that way.

What those adorable boys prompted in me was a posture --- life was moving forward and I had eyes to see it. Where the girl once was, there were boys running, buds had blossomed even in the damp and cold, gardeners were working the beds and European cities were hosting long-traveled visits. The world was undeniably prospering itself in some mysterious, ineffable way.

The memory of the little girl at the fountain, though, ended up being a kind of portal because I spent the remainder of that day, after shopping chocolate and hitting a bookstore, before an early dinner with Peter, recalling to myself the details surrounding the assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan. You see, it happened on the same day my mother snapped that picture. It all came back.

I remembered my family being told by another American in our small hotel (a Taylor brother from Taylor Wine --- my dad had reported to us delightedly after they’d met by chance at check-in): Reagan’s been shot. And the next morning, all of us waiting with Mr. Taylor-Wine for the delivery of the New York Times to the hotel -- to get the facts. Who was the assassin? What was the motive? By then, we’d heard through the front desk that Reagan was expected to live.

Back at my present-day tiny hotel room waiting for my son to be ready for dinner, after a quick Wiki search, I got the exact date, March 30, 1981 --- the day the two shootings took place. From there I also learned that in 2011 a Washington Post reporter wrote an exposé to decent reviews – Rawhide Down. ('Rawhide' was Reagan’s code name.)

I ordered the book when I got home to burn off the jet lag but had to wait a while for it to get good, because the poor author, in laying the groundwork, had to wade through a bunch of personal histories —- including that of John Hinckley Jr. and his criminal obsession with Jodie Foster. Even in its crafted retelling, delusions like that tend to be emotionally airless —- inward and recursive. A closed circuit.

But I have to admit, when I finally got through all the context and backgrounds to the actual assassination attempt, on page eighty-something, when I got to that morning, and the event I was primarily curious about — the unnamed girl in the dress at Luxembourg and my mother’s interest in her — was being placed in time, at last, right next to Hinckley’s gun going off, Brady collapsing, Reagan being shoved into the limo, struggling to breathe, I was strangely moved. It was the reason I ordered the book, of course. I wanted to get the two things properly oriented. I wanted to introduce them.

I avoided my own delusions throughout the exercise. I knew the two events weren’t actually connected. But they were layered in time, superimposed as it were. And it was supremely satisfying to be allowed to relate to the facts in this way --- to hold Reagan and the girl next to each other --- slide them closer together in my mind and then tease them apart. And marvel generally at what happens in a single day on Earth.

My mentor from graduate school, Viola Farber, used to say to us: Somewhere in the world, an elephant is walking in the forest. She liked being enigmatic and had a look to match. My guess is that she said it so that while we got granular about our choreography and exhausted ourselves with our projects, we would remember the point of it all —- how deserving of our attention, translation and wonder this vast world is —- and recall to ourselves why we were artists in the first place. Because --- somewhere in the world, an elephant is walking in the forest.

And somewhere else someone is pulling out a gun, and somewhere else someone is playing in a dress. And somewhere else someone is standing nearby and thinks it’s beautiful. And takes a picture.

TIP – Off to the top of my head, Paris in Springtime instead.

TOTE – Chocolate Stateside: The Chocolate room, Brooklyn, NY. The best.

TRUTH – Time is not impervious or neutral. It’s Given -- in love, for love. But fallen.

For my Mom,

In her August birthday month when so many blooms go bust and start again.

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I’ve switched out this month’s scheduled Substack for a letter to acknowledge the heart rending tragedy in Texas.

But what words could meet it? When I sat down in my cedar office to write, what came to mind was simply space --- the gap between paragraphs getting wider and wider. Two-dimensional silence.

When disaster strikes, I think sans birds. It refers to my sister’s painful reflection that the cards she received in the mail when she was dying with pictures of birds on them were particularly unhelpful. She so wished she could fly away. But she could not. The card she actually stuck on her fridge said: If you’re going through hell, keep going.

Words do not work very well for this kind of terror. My kids were taught by a top teacher at their very fine New York City high school that every single word in their essays ‘has to hold water’. But this is precisely what words cannot do now. They cannot hold: cannot hold down, cannot hold up, cannot hold on.

The only words that feel apt, like they could stand in, are words about the space itself --- the sudden, spinning nothing.

I pulled Lament for a Son off my book shelf this past week, a gorgeous witness of grief by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale theologian and philosopher, whose son, Eric, died tragically at twenty-five while mountain climbing in Europe. I read it in my own season of grief, but when I started to flip back through it, I realized I had no memory of what appeared to be its deliberately punctuated layout.

Space. So much negative space – half and three-quarters of pages appeared to just be missing. Tears started rolling before I re-read a single sentence.

It’s oft repeated by Christians that the Spirit groans on our behalf, when, in deep grief, words won’t come. But for some reason, all these years, I’ve been reading that piece of scripture wrong. It didn’t occur to me until this past week that Paul does not say we’ll groan because we have no words. What he says is that in our wild, obliterative state, even our groan will have to be provided. Given. We will have nothing of ourselves. Not even that.

The following sentence is the whole of page 41 from Lament for Son:

What does it mean, Eric dead, removed from our presence, covered with earth, inert? Or is such a shattering of love beyond meaning for us, the breaking of meaning ----mystery, terrible mystery.

Earlier in the book Wolterstorff returns to the library where his son was completing his master’s thesis; it, like he, would be left unfinished:

I stand before the library, where he spent so many days of his last months. He’s walking up these steps, through those doors, to the desk, asking for a book, receiving it, sitting down at a table ---- which one? ---- copying out these notes I have.

No, I see nothing; no form at all, not even a trace. All bone and muscle gone, the steps swept clear --- no smile, no sturdy step, no bright intelligence, no silhouette…Where he should be, I stare straight through.

Turn it back. Stop the clock and turn it back, back to that last Friday, that last Saturday. Let him do it over: get up late this time, too late to climb, read a book, wait for his brother. Let him do it right this time. Let us all do it right.

The cresting of his lament continues: It won’t stop; it keeps going, unforgiving, unrelenting. The gears and breaks are gone…Is there no one who can slow it down, make it stop, turn it back?

Is there no one? I don’t like that question. But it’s a fair one. As Christians we ask it and wrestle. This is where the pat answers and bad theology might come rolling out on squeaky wheels dressed in cheap linen. Here are the birds.

Sans birds I say. Silence is better. Horror more honest. The mystery too very terrible.

What stopped me at the library scene though was strangely the question he asks about the table, his son’s choosing: …which one? Yes. Which one? Which table? Where will he sit down to work? Where will he study? And write? And finish?

And then my mind turns back to Camp Mystic and keeps going: Which bunk? Which bed? Which girl? Which pillow and blanket from home? Which hand to hold? When will she awake then? With the sun? Where will she want to go?

Lord, God, we pray you would be with the crushed in spirit and those directly loving and serving them. Amen, Amen, Amen.

We’ll continue storytelling next time. Until then and beyond. Xo k

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My friend Mandy and I lit upon the idea of python hunting as a manifestly excellent way to celebrate the final drop-off of our youngest kids at college. I guess this was our version of “me time”? Another thing got floated too --- that it might be cathartic for us. We’d both experienced a fair amount of loss and grief in the past decade and wondered if facing the terror of monster-snake-wrangling might help us conquer it somehow --- deliver it back to the swamp. But that was a flyover idea. I think we really just felt it would be a net-net positive to catch a big snake.

This is what brought us last September into an empty parking lot near the entrance to the vast 1.5-million-acre sawgrass marsh known as the Everglades where we met Amy Siewe, a licensed hunter, and her fiancée and driver, Dave. I knew from Amy’s Instagram feed that she was cute -- blond-haired and blue-eyed with an outdoorsy, midwestern look. But her hair was up in a baseball cap, and she was injured, in a brace recovering from knee surgery. So cute maybe wasn’t the first thing that came across. My first impression was more tomboy --- like the spirit of Huck Finn had been replanted inside a modern-day woman from Fort Myers. Today Amy’s second in the state for catches and runs a successful business as a guide.

It was in 2019 that Amy first heard about the disaster unfolding in the swamp -- Burmese pythons that had escaped into the wild were propagating, destroying its delicate ecological balance. The State of Florida had instituted a cash for catch program and Amy went to check it out, her first night grabbing a nine-footer with her bare hands. Right then, she says, she was hooked and returned home to Indiana to sell her successful real estate business so she could move to the Sunshine State.

This part fascinated me. I pictured her in Fort Myers alone. And thinking what? Thinking to herself, I’m a python-hunter…I’m just temporarily stuck in the body of a regular unemployed person…

It was there in the parking lot after quick introductions that we got our very cursory lesson, like two minutes long, on how to hunt these Brobdingnagian snakes: you’re gonna grab ‘em with your hands right behind the head, she explained. Don’t let them get away! OK, we said. Got it! (We’d been practicing all afternoon in the hotel with a pool noodle…).

Amy suggested if it got complicated, to just execute a ‘smash and grab’ where you step on their head and then snatch them up while they’re too stunned to be pissed off. What if it bites us?, we asked while we clamored into the truck bed and onto the “snake deck”, an extra metal platform kitted-out with kick-butt flood lights. I have anti-bac wipes in the cab, Amy asserted straight-faced from the front passenger seat, motioning to Dave where to turn.

Mandy and I secured our protective eyewear (for the bugs) and got on our fitted gloves (for the catch) and took our stances on either side of the snake deck. I was so nervous my knees were shaking slightly like they had this one time when I went to my local congressman’s office to discuss a human rights bill and every other single person who was supposed to show up for the meeting canceled last minute. Well, Charles Rangel signed that bill a couple days later and Mandy and I, We Were PYTHON-HUNTING!!!

The first hour or two of the hunt were fantastically exciting, beautiful and weird. First, you need to know that however pumped you might be to find yourself on a python hunt, the gestalt of it is strangely like an active meditation. We were riding along on the snake deck watching the sun set over this vast, steamy swamp, alive with frog, bug and bird sounds, Dave moving at a crawl of about five miles per hour as the huge, flat, hot sky above us appeared to become elliptic and lift away with the heat. It was as if we had stumbled inside the earth’s own sigh.

After sunset, Amy kept us entertained by recounting the stories of her greatest catches. In this she was strategic --- legends of great python hunts were revealed by chance exactly where we happened to be driving at that moment. And Mandy and I cooperated as the perfect audience: relishing details, gasping at the good parts, ready to become an indelible part of it all.

I appreciated that although Amy kept us wrapped around her finger, she managed to do it without hawking her actual, physical person, if that makes sense. She had a native, disinterested self-possession and was not prone to affectation or anything mannered. Like a filly she was — had a way of moving evenly and athletically but slipped quickly into playful diversion. In the age of our phones and the constant preening and posing, it felt so rare, especially for an attractive woman, to be so present and natural. I still remember how contagious it felt. And an encouragement for me too --- to drop my own act.

If Amy flirted at all, it certainly wasn’t with us or even with Dave; it was with the night, the swamp and all the reptiles out there. She claimed to love the pythons in particular actually, and hated having to kill them, said it was necessary, and that part was delivered emphatically. It sounded right to our ears but scarcely concealed her bloodlust.

The first few hours I was filled with frantic excitement, like a nine-year-old-rolling-up to Disney with only an id and that having been doused in cheap lighter fluid. I was piqued and pumped and on that snake deck, wall-to-wall poised, ready for God Himself to call my name. But it was Amy’s voice I was listening for. And I was trash-talking to myself in my head about the snakes to keep up my nerve, all beck and call for Amy. Anything that chick asked me to do, I felt an updraft of readiness.

This is the work of python-hunting. It’s not trudging knee-deep in dark swamp waters. It’s peering into the roadside grass and the first few feet of foliage for anything that glints or reflects, like snakeskin or a python’s eye, as hard and as long as you can, until both your brain and eyes are spent so sideways that all you can do is wish you were back at the motel with the remote in your hand.

We floated along Highway 41 like that, a two-laner that bisects the park, in the tricked-out truck, seeing if any of the snakes had actually slithered straight to us. (They tend toward the hot asphalt.) Which makes it not that different from bird-watching I guess. (...except for the trash-talking and lighter fluid…).

This could only work, of course, if the huge, subtropical wetlands were literally overcome with pythons. And they are. It’s estimated that in the last thirty years their numbers have climbed from some handful that were released by a few eleven-year-olds a couple weeks after Christmas to upwards of half a million.

Some believe it was Hurricane Andrew in 1992 that gave the pythons their edge; that as many as three hundred eggs at a breeding facility leveled by the storm miraculously survived intact and low and behold, starting hatching right there, amidst the rubble. And then those hatchlings did like baby pythons do in Burma – they set off to hunt their first meal.

Fourteen years later, a naturalist with the state hiking in the park stumbled across the first known nest --- pythons were breeding in the wild. A study conducted in 2012 to track the dwindling populations of mammals in the park (since 1997) showed the following: prevalence of raccoons had declined by 99.3%, opossums 98.9%, bobcats 87.5%. Marsh rabbits, cottontails and foxes had effectively disappeared.

It’s FT folks, full-time — for the Everglades, for the ecosystem, for the cottontails. It’s curtains. Unless scientists can figure out how to stem the tide. (There is apparently talk in academic circles of trying to sterilize the boy snakes...) That said, it wasn’t the end of the story for Amy being fixed in my psyche as a heroine and my zest for life being renewed and then redoubled.

I’m sad to report that we didn’t catch a python that night. However, we did come upon another successful hunt involving another licensed guide and a couple of young influencers from Miami, I’m not kidding ---- the young lady wearing expensive lip gloss and one of those cut-off tops. In the dark. In a swamp. I saw her astonishingly white midriff. (I’ve now spent some more time in South Florida and that whole part makes a little more sense.) Anyway, they kindly and briefly shared their five-footer with us which afforded us a photo-op and the sense of a dreamscape too.

Although initially crestfallen, we cheered up the next morning at the Starbucks after like four espressos in the vast retail mall where our motel was located by repeating to ourselves in various iterations that we could still call ourselves python-hunters. Fishermen don’t always make a catch, we told ourselves, but they still get to call themselves fishermen.

In the meantime, though, here are my surprising take-aways from that night that have absolutely nothing to do with snakes and a fair amount to do with Amy and the Almighty:

1. Amazing Amy: Amy’s amazing to me but it’s not necessarily because she wrestles monster snakes for a living --- not even because she took down a seventeen-footer by herself (the state of Florida found a doe and two fawns in that one…). It’s not the snake part. What most impressed me was 2019-Amy. It’s the picture I have of her in a rental in Fort Myers, sitting on a couch in front of a turned-off TV, alone, before Dave has even arrived with his stuff, before she got her license to catch, before the fancy truck and the logo. It’s so unflinching and excellent. I just wish it all weren’t so rare --- when affinity, opportunity and ability line up like that, alongside serious, old-fashioned guts. To my boys, my nieces and nephews, take note: careful not to treat life like a continuous to-do list. It will surely turn into one. Don’t forget that, at heart, it’s an adventure story.

2. The Universe: There was something about what Mandy looked like when she held up that snake in the air for a picture. I could hardly believe my eyes. She looked Young. And I don’t mean like thirty or even forty. I mean some spunky, lionhearted thing sped across her face that made her look like she was in the second grade with a hint of twenty-eight thrown in. I met her back in kindergarten so this is a data-driven observation, not a poetic one. I mean she looked really YOUNG. I honestly think it was the spirit of the essence of Mandy from the center of the earth that came alive and inhabited her for a fleeting second--- something of her very self and soul. I’ll honestly never forget it.

In thinking about why this gem of Mandy’s creation would choose to pop out just then, during a (failed) snake hunt in South Florida, I can only shake my head in wonder. I don’t rightly know.

But I’ve worked out some possible theories and I’ll share them here:

Theory A. The absurd --- After all the years of being genuinely wrapped up in our steadfast, purpose-driven mission of raising our kids, that night we were doing something instead that was patently absurd. Totally un-self-serious. Way out-of-network. Somehow the thought keeps occurring to me ---- maybe the universe deeply appreciates the absurd, the lark, something totally silly. Maybe the universe likes it and likes us to like it too.

Maybe, in fact, if we asked the universe, we would find out it prefers ballroom dancing to the World Economic Forum or fried chicken to poached salmon. It wants a frisbee not a meeting. And that night it was saying it prefers us to be python-hunting once in a while rather than having a constant phantom-grip on the household calendar.

It stands to reason, at the very least, that God immensely enjoys seeing His children at play. I suppose I should preface this by reminding you that I’m a Christian and so begin intellectually with the premise that God created the universe and its people. The most recent article I read about this, how we got here, the scientist-author divined the infinitesimally tiny statistical chance that life on earth could have happened by accident or without supernatural input, an Unmoved Mover. And if that’s true, didn’t that Mover then make the makers of lollipops, waterslides, paintball, cookie dough and roller coasters? Didn’t He make snowy mountains we could slip down and big waves we could dive in or ride cowboy-style on a boogie board? I’m just interrogating the evidence.

All I know is that Mandy’s flash of exuberance struck me as almost transcendent. Or eternal. It was fruit and seed. I’ll leave it there and we can wonder.

Theory B: Being a kid again --- Related but not the same. We were like the kids in this scenario. Dave and Amy sat in the front seat, and they brought the water and granola bars and told us what to do and how and when to do it. They were in charge of everything. We even had to let them know when we needed to tinkle. Maybe this was it? For a split second, I saw a flicker of something I might call radical-adult-adapted-innocence --- freedom from having any power or control over any outcomes. And maybe that was deeply good – some kind of shortcut to soul-joy?

Theory C: Flirting --- In some sense you could say Mandy and I were flirting that night too. But not with the swamp or the snakes. Nor with Dave or Amy. We were sort of flirting with life. And time. With the world. We were sort of laughing at it all and with it. Not in a mocking way but not totally mirthfully either. It was more the laugh of a happy warrior. But if it had any edge to it, we’d jumped off of it. For that one night we spoke the language of the swamp. We were Wonder Women Snake Warriors come to free all the little mammals.

Hey life! Look at us! we said. We’re in a truck bed! We’ve got goggles on! We’re on a snake deck! We’re with Amy!!

And what if life wished to say back to us this:

Finally, you two!! I’ve been desperate for you to come out and play! Come hither to this crazy gift! Kiss the Whole World on its cheek and play hard to get! Chase me and I’ll chase you!

It seemed like we fell through some kind of crack that night. We entered swamp-time and none of the usual stuff from the prior twenty-two plus years --- the shaping of days and modeling of behaviors, the nutritious menu planning, the plodding and plotting, the outcomes for summers and schools, all the endless totes stuffed full to mitigate all the nuisances, were relevant. Like those hatchlings after Andrew, we’d been released into the wild.

All I know for sure is —

Life smiled back at us that night through Mandy.

And said something like – Yes!

Truth- God comes to us disguised as our life.

Richard Rohr

Tip- Plan something absurd for yourself. Or consider python hunting! Every python they catch saves dozens of sweet rabbits, foxes and birds. Amy Siewe @thepythonhuntress. Thank me later.

Tote- Amy makes Cobalt blue Apple python watches Buying these bracelets supports Amy and the Everglades.

Also, to celebrate SUMMER, I’ll throw a few fun seasonal things your way:

Makoto Dressings. So good. I use these dressings on a mixed green salad with fresh cucumber and mint or as a marinade before you toss something on your grill. Also, to drink while you watch your chicken thighs sizzling, I adore this botanical mixer: Ghia. It has notes of citrus, bitter herbs and rosemary. My sister Jenny turned me on to it. You add to club soda, pellegrino or ginger ale. No added sugar. No alcohol. So you can wake up fresh as a daisy and ready to catch a snake!

Happy Summer Dear Friends!!! XOk

Nat Geo Short Video to learn more about pythons. They truly are beautiful and fascinating. My heart aches for the problem. It’s not their fault. It’s ours.

Florida Everglades Sunset Montage

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A few years ago, I got really sick after the New Year --- a viral coughing thing that hung on for weeks and weeks. My doc was convinced by the telehealth where I could hardly speak and so called in four different scripts. But nothing helped. It would be more than two months before my bloodwork returned to normal.

In the midst of it, everything in the apartment stopped on a dime. Half-done things were scattered all around --- bags and little piles lay on surfaces everywhere, frozen in place like Pompei. But something crazy happened then and it pierced those long, languid days like an ancient spear.

I was sitting in our upholstered chair in my sweats and the t-shirt I’d slept in with a cup of coffee in my hand just staring into space when my eyes happened to run across something half-wrapped at the top of a bag by the back door. What is that? I thought. Is that an ornament? I finally walked across the foyer and pulled it out so I could see.

Oh! The horses! For Christmas I’d been given by my mother-in-law, Barbara, this little piece of art, maybe six by four inches, a pen and ink drawing on a lovely off-white, rough-hewn surface. Mounted on cork, it was lighter than it looked, and I turned it over a few times in my hands as I made my way back to the chair.

I see then that the drawing is not of horses exactly; the drawing is of two quietly magnificent young impalas or gazelles, walking in what looks like a procession, in a single flat plane. And it was only then that I actually identified its genre ----- cave art.

I knew nothing about cave art. In fact, I’ve always lamented the two gorgeous art history survey classes I never took in college. Still staring at it, I walked over to the desktop and the googling commenced: “cave art”, “early human art”, “ancient art”, “first human drawings” and over and over as I hopscotched past all the commentaries to images, images, more images.

I didn’t care so much about the commentaries because, frankly, I knew the archeologists, scientists and historians would not be able to answer the most pressing question I had --- Why? What prompted these early humans to draw and paint? How was it that these Paleolithic people could go from a brute, animal-like existence (It was the Ice Age!) to this incredibly elevated pursuit of art?

I was right --- experts still can’t really answer this. The paintings pre-date written language so we can only guess about the internal promptings of these, the first human artists. It seems what they’ve uncovered about the paintings has only drawn the phenomena into deeper mystery.

This is what we know: the first paintings appear quite spontaneously. There was no real onramp to them ---- like sketches or studies. They go pretty much full-bore, from not painting at all to suddenly covering entire cave walls with grand, gorgeous, magnificent paintings.

The other incredible thing is that this happens in various locations across four different continents separated by vast distances. It suggests a very wild synchronicity – not an inspiration from a single source that’s then diffused or carried but instead a somewhat miraculous shared cognitive leap, impossible to source.

Consider with me the size and scope of this leap: without language to describe to themselves what they were doing (even in their own minds), without art school or museums, without ever having even seen a piece of actual art or even art supplies for that matter, from someplace deep inside themselves and deep inside those caves, sprang a desire so fierce that it surely competed with matters of their own survival. And it won.

As far as I’m concerned, Jobs, Gates, Musk and Franklin together have nothing on these cave people. To me, it’s for humans like the mastery of fire.

The word person comes from an old French word per-sonare, which literally means sounding through.1 This is exactly what was happening here --- they were miraculously sounding through, from brute survival ---- the cold, the earth, the dust, the wind, their thirst, their hunger --- to something utterly new and different, the ability to think abstractly, to wonder, not just in search of meaning but suddenly knowing there was such a thing.

They come to understand that they are in possession of something new and wholly precious. But it did not function a wit like all the other elements in their world – the things they consumed, like food or water, the things they feared, like the animals they hunted or that hunted them. Nor was it something they would have to master or mitigate, like weather or wind. It wasn’t transactional in any sense. What they had that was new was something to say about all those other things. What they had, in short, was a story. And as they told it, they quite literally became human.

Daniel Nayeri said in his memoir Everything Sad is Untrue : every story is the sound of the storyteller begging to stay alive. What Nayeri meant by it exactly I’m not sure but he’s clearly rounding on a fierce connection between narrative and life, story and the will to live.

This all washed over me as absolute revelation that day. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was filled with curiosity and compassion for my new friends, my fellow sojourners. I couldn’t wait for someone to get home so I could start showing them the images. I forgot all about my CF Seasonal Support drops, my zinc lozenges and my walk around the block before I went down for a nap. I forgot everything. I had entered the caves, and their strangely beautiful, two-dimensional world. I was, like them, suddenly seeing it: life and the mystery of myself.

Months later it hits me: I realize that my new short, hairy friends – well, they were the first. They were the first humans to come to the nuisance! They’re the honorary mamas and papas of my newsletter. They were the first to know ---- that there was something about this life that’s both intractably impossible and persistently beautiful. They were the first to know and send up a flare.

I found the loveliest response to these mysterious cave people from Sister Wendy in a short video I found on YouTube called charmingly The Mists of Time. I’m wild-guessing you’re familiar with the sweet, older nun who became semi-famous in the nineties for a BBC television series about the history of art? They’re worth every minute. (I’ll link to a few.)

First of all, her vibe is pitch-perfect. She sustains this awe-inspired, hushed tone throughout the video that I so think the artists and the paintings deserve. The video was shot at the Lascaux caves in France, and she moves through its cavernous tunnels like an elder Joan of Arc, reminding us all the while how cold it was back then and how dark, her habit swooshing dramatically behind her as she turns.

She definitively sets aside the work of earlier historians who’d suggested the paintings might be evidence of some kind of ritual around hunting. It turns out the only animal they hunted for food in France at that time were reindeer and there were literally no depictions of those. She insists the pieces are not a tit for tat. It was profligate. It was art.

She makes particular mention of a painting of a Mongolian horse --- her favorite --- noting the “inspired black calligraphy of the legs”, “the great sway of its belly”. It doesn’t really look like that, Sister Wendy turns to the camera to say, something playful and conspiratorial playing across her face. The cave artists actually enhanced the look of the horse, she explains; they painted what they wished it to be.

It’s, dare I say it, an impressionistic horse. Her body is leaning forward here, her palms outstretched and then returning to her, clasping at her heart.

But before she wraps on the cave people to move to the coming dark age (the next 15,000 years when art completely and mysteriously disappears again), she returns to the question that keeps us guessing -- Why. Why did they do it? Why did they paint? What were they thinking? And she makes an incredibly poignant guess:

How humankind must have yearned to be strong, beautiful,
free and innocent.
All the things they were not.
And we are not.

Oh, Sister Wendy. Yes! You’re a poet.

Inside this great yearning, two new but opposing ideas grew up inside them – a sudden recognition of the value of themselves and of life itself and then this other thing, a shadow thing, a knowing that they could not possibly live up to it. They would fall short.

And they knew another thing too: the only logical response was not to try to solve it.

But to tell it.

1 Spiritual Formation, Henri Nowen, p. 11.

Tip(s) – Good Summer Read: Big Magic – This is such a great work of non-fiction about the creative call. The entire thing, cover to cover, is just one massive encouragement. It’s so generous and a very inspired look at the creative forces at work in the universe and how to participate in them. I loved it. And I don’t think it really got the proper notice outside the folks who were already following Gibert’s work (which I wasn’t). A good summer book for a beach or porch swing. Not because it’s thin or pulpy. It’s substantive and requires a pinch of space to process.

The Aforementioned Adorable and Wise Sister Wendy, RIP:

Mists of Time – Cave art

The Age of Genius (Renaissance in Florence)

Careful, she’s addictive!

Finally, is it the case that we sound-through better in the state called Flow? Probably! Here’s a Ted Talk on that.

Truth – I recently came across this book by Henri Nowen, Spirtual Formation, while putting together this letter. I found it a couple of weeks ago in an old carry-on where I’m guessing it’d been for some years. What a sweet surprise! And so too were all the notes and underlined passages from my very well-loved copy. (A gift from my friend Ashley.) This is where I found the concept of sounding through. Here’s Henri on being human from a chapter called Opaqueness to Transparency:

As persons we sound through a love greater than we ourselves can grasp, a truth deeper than we ourselves can articulate, and a beauty richer than we ourselves can contain.

Trudat.

Tote – This one time I’m going to make a suggestion on what Not to take in your tote! And as promised, I’m ripping off someone here who’s way smarter than I: Arthur Brooks. I recently had the pleasure of hearing Brooks speak. He’s a Harvard Business School Professor (and major voice in the study of human happiness which sounds vapid but it’s not). His recent book, From Strength to Strength, is really great. Highly recommend. More for mid-lifers. I’ll pass on here this one piece of advice for mental health and happiness that he really impressed on the attendant crowd: Once a week, for a full 24 hours, put your phone away. Get a safe. Put it in the bread box. Whatever. This one act radically changes your brain chemistry somehow and the workings of your mind. (Artie also said once a year, sayonara the cell for a whole week!) Yup. I know. Everyone and their brother is saying this now. Nothing new. But the science he shared to back it up was really compelling. Suffice it to say, the phones are having a deleterious effect on our minds – specifically our ability to sound through!

I hope to finally make the leap myself this summer. Will report back on how I do.

Happy Summertime Friends! XO k

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III

You see, what happened during the impossible years was an old-fashioned plot twist. When my Mom and my sister were both dying, I tripped over a very obvious thing. It must have been hiding in plain sight all along.

First, I should establish, that my mother and sister’s journeys through illness, their dying, were exactly the kind of nuisances those Brits with the big white hair were warning us about. Dying is obviously terrible! It’s the most menacing kind of hole. It can be very painful physically (as it was for my sister) and anguishing mentally (it was for both of them) and excruciating too to be its witness. It was wall to wall bad.

But, and this is a big But, so big is this But that it changed everything. Here it is --- my heart was strangely satisfied when I was intermittently, occasionally, mercifully able to draw near to them in their suffering, to help hold it with them or for them. Or when I was able to simply walk with them wherever they were, to come close enough to their holes that yeah, sometimes I fell in. And what was even more impressive to me was the absolute nuclear power of watching as other people came close too, drawing near to their pain. *There was an unrelenting, unquenchable beauty in it. This was like narrative whiplash – this plot twist made landfall at a full 180 degrees. And here I thought I was supposed to avoid the holes!

How ‘coming to the nuisance’, the idea of this dark and dangerous trench I’d first imagined, eventually transformed, first in my mind and then in my heart, to be a place of actual refreshment, a place of rest and even hope, and how a simple warning --- to use your noodle, assess your risk, hone skills of logic and discipline and self-control -- became instead an invitation to something much better, much stronger, a credible peace for my scattered soul, this is the question that keeps drawing me back and drawing me back.

I suppose I should admit that my acceptance of all this is halting and fleeting. It grows ever so slowly. Daily it seems I need to remind myself that coming to the nuisance might be the very reason we’re even here, that we’re born into this absurd cauldron and confusion, born onto this sinking ship.

But here’s the truth -- what I learned during those years when my Mom and my sister were dying is this: it might just be the case that our primary, overriding nuisance here on this blue-green ball hurtling thru space, is, quite simply…

Love.

And this might be why I felt compelled to turn a cedar closet into an office and throw up a shingle that says “Welcome”. (And then I throw that one away and get another one that just says, “Come”.)

So there we are ---- Love. That’s essentially the backstory. And that means that our purpose is also our nuisance.

IV Conclusione

(that’s Italian)

So, now, in closing, it’s time for my first editorial correction. I need to repudiate an earlier thing I said, in this very first newsletter. It was about the years my Mom and sister were so sick. This is what I said: ‘there was nothing for me to put in the tote for this’.

Well, while it’s true that I did not know then what I could possibly put in my tote for that situation, other than a California Bordeaux blend, I know more now. And many of those things are in my overstuffed files still at my desk in New York City. There’s some serious wisdom in those files. Not mine, other people’s! The work of great writers and thinkers, theologians and pastors, poets and healers and the Good Lord Himself.

My humble hope is that as I unpack all the files from my desk in New York and open them here in my cedar office and tinker away on my laptop over the next year or so, I might re-discover some of those nuggets of truth and beauty for this very wild ride --- that we can take with us as we go.

So, Come.

xok

P.S. Friends! One last thing!

Each newsletter will end with any cool links that the story might have generated as well as some tangible take-aways I’ve rustled up: one truth, one tip and one little thing for your tote. Why? Because I was a stay-at-home mom for twenty-two years. If I can’t hand you something at the door that’s practical to take away, well, I give up! In the end, life rolls out in moments and days. I, myself, need practical ideas for how to live the time —- well or beautifully or humbly or truthfully. Something good. So I’ll try to send you off properly too. Please, feel free to give some tips back to me in the comments. I need them!

Tip - Hanna Andersson PJ’s. Yes, they cost a million dollars. My mom friends and I would wait for the summer sale and then pull down several pair. They’re worth it! Why? They last forever. Through three boys. And dang. When the little rascals refuse to get in their beds, at least they look adorable and Swedish. Hanna Andersson

Magnatiles. Oh, the hours and days we whiled away on these! Get Magnatiles

Truth - Indeed, the greatest, most stunning example of anyone’s coming was God Himself, who did not pass by this dumpster fire (that was me, that was we, that was this…that was all the dying, hurting, needing and wanting, all the thirst and hunger and disease and shin splints) and accomplished the most dazzling rescue in the history of the universe, flipping the whole script and making everything sad come untrue. The truth is – it was He who Came to Me. I have placed you before an open door that no one can shut. Revelation 3:7

Tote – This is important, so stop scrolling your political blogs and listen up! If you’re someone currently experiencing deep grief or you’re just feeling depressed, skip the Bordeaux blend. You’ll just miserably delay everything, all the work and the healing too. I’m not being judgy or churchy. It’s just the deal. (I have more in my files on substance use for a future letter.) For now, try these instead, my new N/A faves:

Gruvi Red Wine Blend and Gruvi Sangria I mix them!

H20 Soft Sonoma Seltzer if you like bubbly white and light. Neither are cheap. But compared to a substance use issue!? That costs you, well, everything.

A TikTok that ended up on the family thread—-on a ludicrously capacious tote

*My very first newsletter is dedicated to Helene Cashin, Lucy Duffy, Jane Kelly and Eileen Olsen as well as Mary McKinney and Tracy Staines who cared for my mother and sister at the end of their lives and forever changed mine.

I

I plucked the phrase coming to the nuisance from the annuls of English common law. The principle first emerged in land use disputes during the Industrial Revolution when regular folks, I picture gentlemen farmers with messy English gardens, started complaining about the smoke and noise (fair). The plaintiffs were the homeowners and the defendants were the owners of the new factories belching out the black soot and clanging all night long, interrupting dreams of clotted cream.

Common law established precedent on both sides of the argument actually. But it was when the court thought that the plaintiffs should have seen it coming, should have assessed things more carefully and assumed some risk associated with these new neighborhood entities (and not bought property right next to them!), that they would adjust those curly white wigs they had to wear and send their gavels down for the defendants. This is when they would turn to the plaintiffs, explaining that they had simply ‘come to the nuisance’. Those Brits can be stern, no? Like a tough-nut mom at the playground!

But I’m no lawyer. I heard about ‘coming to the nuisance’ because I married one and then had three boys in rapid succession. It got rowdy --- fast. Various kinds of interventions were necessary and my husband, James, regularly leaned into the philosophical underpinnings of law when solving disputes among the brood. They might still be teething on one of those tiny square books as he waxed poetic in rhetorical reverie. Strangely, it was quite effective.

Here's a memory plucked from the early, blurry days:

I see my boys with wet hair after baths and their perfect little square bare feet and Hanna Andersson cotton pajamas. A small skirmish has erupted during Fish Cup ---- a longstanding, almost nightly indoor soccer tournament that took place in our living room --- the fireplace and open kitchen French doors were the two goals.

Fish Cup focused on winning a wooden fish on a dowel that my oldest, also James but we called him Jamesy, had painted a spotted black and white, like a Dalmatian, in art class. For years the small wooden structure sat as a coveted prize, half fish/half dog, on the mantle, representing the ongoing cup. But that night during Fish Cup, one of the boys decides to play the ball up the right side, near the dining table, and the ball sails through. Goal!! But as it does, it hits a large magnatile structure one of the kids had built the day before. It’s leveled. Great cries erupt. I can’t believe I can remember all this!

Big James just then walks in from work. He’s keeping the calm and standing alongside the boys in his Brooks Brothers pin-stripe suit near the fireplace, as they listen, rapt, for a call on both the unlikely goal and the fallen tower.

I was busying turning out near-constant meals and snacks, so I’m otherwise occupied but when I hear him say the words I walk over to the open French doors, my dish gloves dripping.

What did you just say? I asked.

And that was the beginning of my love affair with coming to the nuisance.

II

If I remember correctly, initially my husband didn’t go into the 19^th Century land use stuff when he first described the principle of ‘coming to the nuisance’ to the boys. Maybe it was too close to bedtime for tort. Instead, he made up a proxy story about a backyard hole and a neighborhood boy to get the idea across. The story-boy gets curious and wanders over to the hole, breeches the tape and fence the neighbors had erected around it and he falls in, breaking his foot!

My firstborn, Jamesy, is staring right at his Dad with laser focus as he spins the tale; my second, Peter, is looking off into the middle distance, seeing the story-boy and the backyard hole in his mind’s eye; my youngest, JJ, is staring directly at his two older brothers. They’re all eating their Fagé at our round, scratched Crate and Barrel kitchen table with a schmear of either strawberry jam or ketchup on it.

Whose fault do you think it is? Dad asks them. Is it the neighbor’s fault that the boy broke his foot ---- for having that hole in their backyard? Or….do you think it’s the boy’s fault for trespassing —— breaching the tape and fence?

I don’t remember if there was any real discussion. But I remember that they decide together if fault is to be assigned, it should probably hover over the boy for breaching the tape and fence. Their Dad thoughtfully nods and says that a real-life judge would likely agree. Because the boy had, you guessed it, come to the nuisance.

Now that he’d laid the logic down, Dad was ready to make a gentle ruling on the goal and the fallen tower --- The goal stands, he advised them. And if you guys want to build a tower, just remember, it might not last that long if you build it on the pitch.

Whew! Dispute resolved.

Yogurt snack, check. Jurisprudence, check. Teeth brushed, check. Nighttime prayers, lifted heavenward. Lights out. Another day. Exhausting? Yes. It staggers me how much I miss them though.

But this is what I wanted to get to: the story-boy and his dilemma --- it stuck with me. In those early years, I took it as a solemn duty of motherhood to consider from my post in between the sink and the fridge, in between turning out chicken tenders and the over-cooked broccoli and something with peanut butter on it, how I might translate the deeper lessons of the neighbor boy and the backyard hole: how would I teach my own boys to identify a true nuisance from afar, how could I show them not to be caught flat-footed in its gravitational realm, how might they learn not to be tricked or seduced by their own desires or impulses, not be overtaken by feelings and emotions but learn to use their budding sense of reason and logic and exercise self-control. The lesson for me centered on those two rocks of enlightenment philosophy: reason and self-control.

But as time wore on, life itself seemed almost a stress test for the idea that nuisances could really be avoided. Even a simple mid-morning soccer tournament would be a massive nuisance mitigation effort. Inside one of those enormous open totes I used to carry, I’d have packed in the bag for the day: snacks for a handful of half-times (nuisance: hunger), water for everyone in the car (nuisance: thirst, dehydration), nike slides for right after the games (nuisance: wearing cleats on the pavement causes some bad thing to happen to your shins…), antibac’ wipes (nuisance: invisible bacteria on surfaces everywhere including your own hands), sometimes I’d pack bug spray too (nuisance: bugs – mosquitos might have West Nile; but check for tics too! nuisance: Lyme), first aid stuff like Advil (nuisance: pain) and band-aids (nuisance: abrasions, a definite at a tourney), sunscreen (nuisance: UV rays from the sun = sunburn, also, what about cancer?! nuisance: melanoma.). But don’t forget, if you cover up your kids too much with sunscreen, they won’t get enough Vit D. (nuisance: vit D deficiency. JJ, my youngest, got that and it causes gobs of other diseases and syndromes which, along with their symptoms, are also all nuisances!). My head was spinning.

I think you get my point --- the nuisances were everywhere. For crying out loud, even the air and the sun were a problem. Then, when we’d arrive home from the tourney, if I’d mitigated all of those ---- there were dishes, laundry, dinner, email. I began to see that in many of our most basic human activities, we’re all coming to the nuisance all the time. When I woke up in the morning, I’d already come.

Then real trouble came. I went through a season of deep trial when both my mom and sister were very ill. There was nothing for me to put in the tote for this. The boys were still pretty little then --- now in elementary and middle school. For a period of two and half years as my boys grew and played soccer and horn instruments and studied science and read Harry Potter, my mom and my sister were dying together. In April of 2016, my Mom finally passed away; six months later, a week after Thanksgiving, my younger sister died too.

On a frigid, gray day, standing absolutely shocked in a tailored black dress and heels on a patch of frozen grass a stone’s throw from the Hudson River, we buried my sister a few feet from the still upturned earth where we’d laid my Mom.

I wasn’t sure then how I’d survive it. I can tell you this: it wasn’t pretty. I guess I did not have the gene for poise-in-grief. In the aftermath of it, I crashed around like a pinball from one numbing, avoidant habit to another. I was mentally batty and suffered various forms of physical illness too. I had a Texas-sized crisis of faith, made worse for my inability to fess up to it. These are all topics I’d like to return to in more depth from my new cedar walk-in closet-office. But in emerging from that absurdly long season of grief and perplexity, I find myself, more gently now, back at this simple concept and question with a heart that almost burns to understand --- when should we come and when should we run?

Continue to Part 2

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When I came down the stairs and turned, I saw it for the first time. It had a swelling, sweeping, overtaking air. I must have let out a little gasp in my alarm as I got closer to the windows, because my husband, James, turned from his marsh-facing post on our new living room swivel chairs and looked back at my pie eyes. It appeared as though rising water might be about to breech our bulkhead and march toward us through the backyard. We’d be helpless then to stop it from pouring into our newly renovated home along the Intercoastal Waterway —- our new sleepy beach town life turning into fodder for the Weather Channel.

When I got closer I could see our dock more clearly where we, for sport, watchfully measure the tides as they rise and fall —- an amazing seventy-two inches in an average cycle down here. The water that morning was feet higher than it normally was even at the highest part of high tide, even in a storm. What’s going on? I blurted out. James answered me as he swiveled back to keep watch: It’s a king tide, he said. Isn’t it beautiful?

This is normal course in our house. I tend to be generally on-guard for a potential apocalypse, and he tends to think everything is great and gorgeous. Indeed, it seemed much more lovely to me once I knew what it was --- that it had a name and was apparently locally ‘a thing’ and it followed then that like all tides, it would come and it would go and it would not apocalypse us.

I remember thinking to myself then that this king tide was a fitting backdrop ---- its quietly terrifying beauty and awesomeness and fleetingness had an emotional synergy with the task at hand that day: packing up my youngest son to be dropped off at college. “Tomorrow”, which word had never felt so bloated, so pitched.

Tomorrow:

I was about to let my final boy go and this would set us both sailing, into new lives.

A king tide is a relatively unusual phenomenon. It happens when the moon is full or new and closest to the earth in its elliptical thirty-day orbit (perigree) and at exactly the same time, the earth in its three hundred and sixty-five-day elliptical orbit around the sun, is also closest to it (perihelion) and finally, these two things have to coincide with a regular high tide. I think it’s usually an annual-ish occurrence around here. The word originated in Australia but is now regularly used in North America, especially in Florida apparently for some reason that I couldn’t quite decipher on wikipedia, where I obtain my limited understanding of most things.

The wiki entry I read actually begins as such: King tides are natural, predictable events. And maybe I should have taken that simple fact as consolation for my aching heart ----- that my new metaphor for change was teaching me that, even celestially, it’s the way of the world. The way things go is away. It’s natural and predictable, like an orbit and a tide, kids grow up. They eventually grow into those two big front teeth they had in second grade when they were practicing penmanship, they eventually do not crawl into bed with you after a bad dream, they do not any longer ask to “go outside” or “stay outside” or go “back outside”.

They have deodorant and carry their own passports and don’t think you’re particularly that clever. I have come to refer to the feeling my three boys give me now --- when wild love smashes up against the nauseous knowing that they’re on the loose in a broken and uncontrollable world – the act and fact of them becoming men and mirrors to me at the same time: adult children vertigo.

But I wanted to say something to you three in light of all this, the final launch. First, I’m sorry, boys. I’m sorry that I always, always read the parenting book I needed to read at least eleven months too late. I’m also sorry that I came to the game fabulously unfinished myself --- certainly misinformed about wide swaths of stuff and in so many ways, unarrived, in mind and spirit.

Whoops! See, even if your parents are only a degree or two off (I’m not in that group…), overtime you’ll end up in a tunturi, a vast frozen, treeless plain, (the tundra!), instead of Paris. The big problem was and remains this -- I was supposed to teach you guys life but some of its central aspects remain a mystery to me…still.

Despite it all, you three came out as if gems from a gem tumbler. And tumble we did. Upon reflection, it occurred to me that the whole journey started with terror (pregnant with Jamesy when the towers came down on 9/11), and it began to wrap up with our first launch at the dawn of a global pandemic. Maybe early on you learned that crucial life lesson ---- to hold onto the good you could find around you and release the rest. What an awesome adventure it all was —- Gate to Gate to Gate.

So, Yes! Take whatever I had to give or teach that was worthy or decent or edifying (start with Jesus and my marinades…) and toss the rest out of an open window and keep going. Careful out there of all the time and truth-stealers. And, Lord help us all, with the ever-present super-striving.

Dr. Timothy Keller said it so well here: You know that thing you’re after? Well, it’s after you.

Trudat, boys.

In other words, the world and its things will never, ever satisfy the deepest parts of you. And when you flip that coin on its head, what it says is this:

You are already and always enough.

Amen and Amen. But to really believe it --- (sigh and smile) --- is a life’s work.

My parting thought for now ——

Go Gunners!!! North London Forever.

I love you three so,

Mama

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