sun setting

Bare ankles damp with evening dew

shiver. Chills spread like moss

across summer skin.

Stirring in the blue-orange night,

a hint of pale-scented morning light...

stillness comes alive

in the midst of change.

mind over marshmallow

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

We wish to inform you...

I’ve been reading a book called We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. Quite a title, huh? It’s about the Rwandan genocide and the factors and national history that precipitated it.

I think the book is showing me how naïve I am, and how much I take for granted. Every time I read the dates of critical events leading to the genocide– 1963, 1973, 1992, 1994 – I’m stunned that they’re so recent. Didn’t crazy things like this happen a long time ago (meaning—how could they have happened so close to now)? Outspoken dissidents dying mysteriously? Leaders’ families filling the highest echelons of government? Propaganda baldly stating that an entire ethnic group should be exterminated? Illegitimate governments boasting 99% approval ratings and pretending to support multi-party systems? Didn’t that kind of thing happen when people weren’t so educated and culturally aware and tuned in and stuff?

Then yesterday morning I listened to a report on NPR about a settlement the Securities and Exchange Commission negotiated with Bank of America, which had misled its shareholders by neglecting to disclose the $5.8 billion in bonuses it approved to Merrill Lynch execs (after said company merged with BoA).

Usually federal judges who are called to review such cases end up approving the settlements. But this time, the judge who read the settlement rejected it. Further, he issued a statement calling the settlement “a contrivance, designed to provide the SEC with the façade of enforcement and the management of the bank with a quick resolution of an embarrassing inquiry, all at the expense of shareholders.”

So one man was able not only to reject but also to issue a stinging rebuke of a document issued by a government agency on behalf of one of the most prominent banks in the nation.
The only thing going through my head as I heard this story was, Wow. In Rwanda, and probably in maaaany other countries, the covert legal and economic power-holding networks of would have “silenced” a dissident voice like that with no regard to justice, either for the judge himself or for the misled shareholders. Things like that happen still...probably more often than we know. But we live in a country where one person is allowed to poll only himself, a network of one, and stand firmly for the ethical responses of his own heart and mind. With no fear of covert or fatal retribution.

How fortunate are we?

25 short stories

I've kept putting undue pressure on myself to write a post for my 25th birthday, which was a little while ago...so here it is. Twenty-five short "stories" (I use the term loosely) about time, this time in life, and these past few days and years. I know it's long...don't be intimidated.

--

25. My dad celebrated his 25th birthday in Vietnam.

He and a friend were "celebrating" outside their hootch ("getting lit," as he tells it) when they suddenly heard tracer rounds firing outside their camp. My dad told his friend to get down, grabbed his machine gun and leapt toward a pile of sandbags, which, being more like clay than sand, threw his body sideways into a barbed wire fence. He extracted himself and his gun from the fence while spitting swear words, and ran to the mess hall to protect his unarmed friends. He cleared them out of the hall, then stood at the mouth to the camp, ready to shoot whomever walked through the gates. A tall silhouette ran toward him through the dust and the dark...and he hesitated.

The hesitation alone could have cost him his life. But as his commander's face appeared atop the stranger's body, he was pretty glad he had trusted his instincts.

24. From the brutal to the beautiful...life never shows what's coming. I'm so grateful for people who've run, walked, and stayed with me so far along the way.

23.

Cicadas' buzz in summertime hums

a fine-tuned frenzy under

voices of family and friends, shouting funny

stories to each other above the humid

din, and murmuring within

me, silent marvel

at these normal nights

turned magical.

22. Friend #1, at dinner on the deck: "If you listen to the cicadas really closely, you can hear them singing Happy Birthday."

Friend #2: "In Spanish. [long pause] Feliz cumpleaños..."

21. In Brazil, people pull on your earlobe the number of years you're turning. In certain places, like my house, people throw coins.

20. On the evening of my birthday, I arrive home to a friendly "Happy Birthday!"greeting from my roommate and her boyfriend in the kitchen. I say thanks and smile and walk to where I can see them both.
"He wanted to throw quarters at you," my roommate says.

19. Thank you, my friends who feel like family.

18. Standing in line at the Sheridan's in the new Kauffman stadium, I notice an employee scooping 1/2-cup hemispheres of cookie dough into baseball-sized mounds. My mind starts to race. "What is he making those for?? Are they going to dip those in chocolate? Do they sell chocolate-dipped balls of cookie dough?! Maybe it's for portion control, so they put a whole ball of dough into the concretes they make. Is that possible?"

I decide to halt my internal debate and just ask the guy. "What is that dough for?" He looks mildly confused. "For those?" he says, pointing toward the register and the tray of cookies I can't see. "Oh, like to put in concretes?" I ask. "Nooo...they turn out like that," he says, pointing behind him to a tray with cookies the size of my face on it.

My heart sinks.

17. Sometimes revelations come when you least expect them-- like the knowledge that I'd pay good money for a baseball-sized hunk of cookie dough dipped in chocolate.

16. Thank you to my friends who don't just indulge my imagination, but play in it with me.

15. "Do I have anything in my teeth?" I ask, stepping over 8 or so pairs of shoes in my friend's entryway. "I just scarfed down some dinner on my way over."

"Yeah," my friend says after a quick glance at my bared lips. "I can get you some floss." I walk into the bathroom to check out the damage, certain that the focal, perhaps only, perpetrator is between my front two teeth.

Grin -- hmm.

Yeah, or there's stuff between all my teeth.

Lessons in humility. And what to carry in my purse (floss).

14. A woman asked herself

if she might like some company,

to talk over dreams and disappointments

and such, to become better acquainted.

"No, thank you," her amicable self replied.

"I spend enough time with myself

as it is. I've long since moved along,

my dear,

to more important things."

13. "Pride is a deep, insatiable need for unreality, an exorbitant demand that others believe the lie we have made ourselves believe about ourselves. It is a stubborn insistence on being what we are not and never were intended to be." - Thomas Merton

12. Thank you to my friends who give me grace...in more than just the little things.

11. "There's a dose of reality you get in your 20's that no one tells you about," my friend says at dinner. She and I look firmly in each other's eyes across the table and nod. "It's like life just...took the gloves off."

10. As Maya Angelou said... "The job of being a human is so hard, and it is the only job there is left--though we keep on pretending otherwise."

9.

"how you survived the war" - the weepies

8. My life cannot be about my surviving and thriving as one person, alone. "No. It doesn't please me to do so."

7. "Real power is usually unspectacular, a simple setting aside of fear that allows the free flow of love. But it changes everything." - Martha Beck

6. Thank you, my strong, clear-sighted counselors.

5. In high school, my brother painted a picture of a white rowboat on the shore of Cape Cod. A decade later, the brightly shadowed image still breathes true. He wrapped our memories in oil paints, signed and dated them, and gave them to me. I feel at home in the painting propped against my wall.

4. "He worked hard on those!" my mom says as I open the first homemade card in a stack my dad hands over. It's the first course of all our birthday dinners, when we laugh and groan over old tucked-away photos that he turned into greeting cards. There's a side of people you'd never know if you didn't see what they create.  So much of my dad's love comes through laughter.

3. My mom wore a sorbet green blouse to dinner. When she wears it, she often stretches her arm across the table with a secret smile and bends her hand so I'll look at her wrist. There it is, on her elegant arm, the bracelet I made probably 20 years ago with a string of plastic flower beads. She shows it off to me every time she wears it, and every time I feel so loved.

2. Thank you, my family who loves me better than I can understand.

1. There's something defining about being elsewhere. Finding what you're made of. Being away from your accumulated self and your self of the moment. Examining your "usual" self from a distance, when change doesn't feel so difficult. Coming to know your vulnerable self up-close. Feeling separate from, and more deeply aware of, the love of those who make you who(m?) you are.

The times in my life when I have felt so unguarded and loved shine out at me like stars. Being in France was one of them.  Thank you for each of these special gifts, for the wisdom of another year, and for all these people in my life.