Lifeboats. Summer. Bridges. Helpers.

77% Weekly Newsletter

Lifeboats. Summer. Bridges. Helpers.

Lifeboats. Summer. Bridges. Helpers.

The rapid succession of a toddler-drunk-on-power messes is overwhelming.

I’m exhausted by the sheer number of (what seem to me) reprehensible acts.

My country is sickening me.

  • federal agents shooting at (and killing) civilians
  • actions against immigrants, federal workers, the environment, reproductive rights
  • invading a sovereign nation and abducting its leader
  • pardoning people who committed reprehensible acts
  • terrorizing Brown-skinned people
  • terrorizing transfolk
  • Black Lives Matter, but don’t

All of these things.

Hate is spreading.

And hope is faint.

These are gut-punch times.

✧✧✧

Then we all have our personal shit shows.

My heart is breaking as I watch a loved one disappear.

Alzheimer’s is slowly (and quickly) taking her cogency and her memories and unraveling her.

(Fuck.)

✧✧✧

I’m looking for comfort.

Always.
And, in all ways.

The following four quotes might comfort.

(After each quote I present will be my thinking about it)

✧✧✧

Voltaire’s lifeboat voluntary band

Comptez que le monde est un grand naufrage, et que la devise des hommes est, sauve qui peut.

Life is a shipwreck.
Save yourself if you can.
Do not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

✧✧✧

Honestly?
Singing in lifeboats feels too upbeat today.

✧✧✧

Image of a child doing a shoulder ride.

Wastefully

  Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong would answer the question “how shall we express love?” with a single word: “Wastefully.”    ✧✧✧   We don’t express love wastefully. A story and then some thinking about why.   ✧✧✧   It’s 2006. I’m in NYC to—among other things—celebrate the fifth birthday of my first niece, Maya.  I wait outside her school

Read More »

“I love you” x 3

For reasons a team of psychoanalysts might have been able to crack, my dad couldn’t get the three-word phrase “I love you” to come out of his mouth. I knew he loved us. It’s just he couldn’t say it. I rationalized that I didn’t need to hear those three words, but it hurt anyway. This is the story about how

Read More »

Truth Matters

I am standing in Kenya, with my left foot in the Northern Hemisphere and my right foot in the Southern. A line on the ground indicates the equator. Young men—asking for nothing, but hoping for tips—entertain and educate tourists, like me, about the Coriolis effect. They pour water into bowls with small holes at the bottom and let the water

Read More »
77% Weekly Newsletter
77% Weekly Newsletter