i'll let you know when i get there

In Vancouver, we stopped to look around near a one thousand year old tree in Stanley Park.  Visitors could walk beneath the hollowed area at the base of the historic tree.  I watched in horror as a grown man, with a woman and child in tow, took out a knife and began to carve into the underbelly of the tree.  I said nothing. A few weeks later, my silence haunts me.  When I was young, I had no problem calling out adults decades older for acting unfairly or inappropriately.  I can think of a handful of occasions without effort. Why is it that I find myself so timid, now that they're my peers? Rather than confront the man, I walked away so I wouldn't have to witness the abuse.  Complicit.  Was I afraid of how he would react?  Maybe.  But I think maybe the root of my inaction is more despair than fear.  So I somehow prevent the man from desecrating the tree...  There are a hundred ancient trees lining this road that his blade coul...

In my first years of college I was home for winter break, looking through a box of high school letters and photos.  I was newly Christian at the time, and looked at my "old life" with curious speculation.  I don't remember what prompted the advice, but my mom suggested I just get rid the pictures of my on-again-off-again high school boyfriend and I.  What was the point of keeping them around, anyway?  Besides, what if someday they brought pain or discomfort to my future husband?  Easier to just throw them out.  I woke up the other night suddenly with the memory of a small lock diary in my mind.  The diary that contained the narrative of some of my first experiences with men.  Thoughts and feelings and lists.  Aches and resolve.  Glimpses into my forming heart.  Now just nebulous mysteries, really; it did not survive the cut.  Those sixteen-seventeen year old words were thrown out, along with piles of pictures, in a sanctimoni...

The truly terrible cacophony of smells and noises. You try finishing your dinner with someone across the curtain shitting the bed. Someone in the hallway on the phone, crying.  "There's nothing else they can do for her." That was the third floor. On the seventh floor, a man with green socks gets to walk laps around the hall all day.  There's the obese man.  The young man.  Nurse Joan with a beard and venom toward Hillary Clinton.  Chatty nurses.  The nurses who zone out to your TV for awhile without really saying a word.  Packs of visitors who travel in a cloud of stale cigarette smells.  An endless ricochet of beeping IVs.  The neighbor needs help going to the bathroom for the fifteenth time since I've been there.  Wants to tell the nurse a joke. There's a look of desperation on everyone's faces, and not just here.  On the highways too.  No one's seen the sun in months.  Not really.  It's just a hurried shuffl...

Ash Wednesday.  Sitting on a bench outside the cathedral (historic but unimpressive). Even after Mardi Gras discourse I will assert with confidence that there is no God, not here not anywhere and I'm no worse off for knowing it. There is a magic to it all. Some unnamed connection between the details of every day and one. Some pull toward a city or repulsion from. Energy and exhaustion. And yes, even love. But let's not shout about knowing. Let's not lean in to italicize the greatness of our truth. Let's not give it names or dogmas or presume to know the facts of an abstract. Let's not. Why would we? "Even with all we understand about the world, there are still things that cannot be explained by science." Why presume humans are capable of understanding everything about everything? Isn't that the height of hubris? We humans, self-crowned animals that, evolutionary speaking, are barely a blip on the radar. Like America in re...

Five hours into her hospital stay, she begins to run a fever.  Ice packs come out.  Two more bags drip fluid. It's funny how much effort goes into avoiding the fragility of it all.  They talk about starting her on antibiotics.  "That doesn't sound good," she says softly, but goes no further. Funny how often we live with that terror in the room.  When is a sign a sign?  What is normal about any feeling at all?  The unthinkable stretch between 0 and 10.  When the baby is born, at last, isn't that only the beginning?