A dose of RoundUp for the weeds of my psyche

Apology and regret have been on my mind the last few months. Partly a result of noodling on aging and taking stock, partly because of an incident that happened earlier this year. Without too much detail so the guilty are protected, I was in a meeting during which one person said something intended as a joke, but it was stupid and insensitive and offended most of us who were there. It was a “did they really just say that?!” moment. Once called out, the offender wanted to decide if their behavior was really hurtful, despite having been told as much. After a couple of weeks, they had not apologized, lost their credibility with this group, and were asked to leave.

I have talked to a handful of people about this. One whose age, gender, and race are about the same as the offender’s said that if the intent wasn’t malicious, they have nothing to apologize for. So if we make a mistake or hurt is collateral damage, no apology required – only intentional acts require an apology? I call BS on that. Intentional hurtful acts may be worse than ignorant ones, and we’re accountable for both.

As part of processing that meeting and its aftermath, and my own stock-taking, I’ve also been thinking about the times I’ve said hurtful things. I am a frequent flier in the land of apology, though my hurtful words are almost always the result of not thinking before I open my mouth – stupid mistakes, not malicious intention. The few times I’ve intentionally said something nasty, mostly when I was a snotty teenager, have stayed with me for decades.

When I was working through forgiveness some years ago, I decided – based on Desmond Tutu’s writings about the Truth and Reconciliation commissions in South Africa — that before I could move on, I needed to see remorse from the person who wronged me. Why should I forgive someone who doesn’t understand or feel regret for hurting me? I disagree with the idea that forgiveness would set me free. I am capable of living with unforgiven hurts. On the contrary, it felt like I was releasing the other person from accountability. I was granting them freedom, not myself. But we don’t always get closure or hear remorse from those who’ve hurt us, and some of those hurts take root like rank and sturdy weeds.

As a fan of ritual and a bit of a chicken, I developed a plan earlier this year to apologize and ask for cosmic forgiveness for several stupid things I’ve said or done to people so I don’t have to send them Facebook messages reminding them of my transgressions. The kid I insulted in 1978 has probably forgotten, but I had not yet forgiven myself. I’ve got remorse to burn. I’ve owned m s**t and then some. It was time to kick my own butt and then forgive myself. And I needed to spray the RoundUp of forgiveness on those rank and sturdy weeds of old hurts.

Sunset from my room at New Camaldoli

I process things by writing. It helps me organize my thoughts and sometimes call BS on myself. I knew writing would need to be part of a forgiveness plan. Since my ability to focus for sustained periods is impeded by external distractions, I would need to be away from home, electronics, people, dogs, grocery stores, cleaning supplies, chocolate, and garden tools. But then what? I didn’t want to just write down all the garbage I’ve carried for decades and toss it in a drawer. I needed more closure. I flirted with the idea of a wailing wall in my yard, into which I would put little notes of forgiveness and apology, but I didn’t want to be constantly in the presence of my inner landfill. I decided Step 2 would be to literally leave my junk behind, to keep the notes somewhere I was unlikely to return to.

A few years ago I heard a Pico Iyer interview in which he talked about a monastery south of Big Sur, California, and the peace he found there. The monks host people in silent retreat and provide their meals and a simple dorm room. There is no internet or cell service, no programs to attend other than optional religious services, no chit chat or socializing. Perfect for sorting through all my junk, getting it on paper, and leaving it behind me.

So in March I spent five days on a silent retreat at the New Camaldoli Benedictine monastery. I dredged up old hurts I’ve experienced and perpetrated and wrote out my apologies and notes of forgiveness on small slips of paper. By the last full day, I’d had enough of being in my head, processing old garbage and beating myself up, so I put on my earbuds and my Attitude Adjustment music playlist and danced it out. Then I walked to the edge of a cliff with a view of the ocean, lifted up a rock, and left my slips of paper under it. I left the next morning, considerably lighter.

I spent another five days wandering around a favorite spot, Point Reyes, looking for whales and watching the tides. No heavy stuff, just walks and books and takeout food. A good visit with an old friend and good conversation with a new one.

This is the trail on Point Reyes where I met Joe. Copyright Joe Cressman.

Now more than three months later, those regrettable comments sometimes pop back up, and I remind myself that I have shown remorse, asked for forgiveness, and I show myself some grace. Maybe some of those who hurt me are in the same place and have asked for cosmic forgiveness. I forgave them too, as much as I could.

As a blog that is in theory about places and how they affect us, I will loop this back to the intersection of places and our psyches. Could I have done this emotional dumping in my living room? With better discipline, of course. But there was nothing demanding or distracting about the monastery, so I could focus on the challenge of the task I needed to do, and several days of undemanding recovery time in a beautiful place helped me transition back to my real day-to-day world.  

Bonus Material

A “rank and sturdy weed” is taken from a Barbara Holland quote:

“Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.”

Photo by Joe Cressman

Top eleven dance-it-out tunes from the Attitude Adjustment playlist, in no particular order. Click on the song title for your own dance party.

Uptown Funk (Mark Ronson

Love Shack (B-52s)

Only the Good Die Young (Billy Joel)

Sing a Song (Earth, Wind and Fire)

ABC (Jackson 5)

Testify (Davie)

Good as Hell (Lizzo)

Music for a Sushi Restaurant (Harry Styles)

Hallelujah (Sweet Water Warblers)

Como Se Baila (The Latin Mambo Orchestra)

Lebanese Blonde (Thievery Corporation)

I made a new friend in Point Reyes. A fellow solo traveler, Joe, and I struck up a conversation on a trail and have stayed in touch by email. Joe takes lovely photos and permitted me use a couple from his trip to Point Reyes for this post. Thank you, Joe! You can see more of his work on his Instagram page.

#NewCamaldoli

Weddings in the Beloved Community

“Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation*, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” bell hooks

I was honored to be invited to two weddings this fall. The first wedding was between a woman and a transgender man, and the second between two women – marriages that just half a dozen years ago were not legal in many states, including here in Michigan, where voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2004 banning same sex marriages. Both weddings were typical bride-in-a-white-gown, reception-with-a-DJ events, remarkable in their un-remarkableness.

The honor comes from not knowing either couple well, but still being invited to witness validation of their relationships. Maybe because we were all aware of the fragility of their right to marry, the love vibe seemed stronger than other weddings I’ve attended. My heart was full.

The morning before the second wedding, I was at a coffee shop with a small group of friends, all intelligent, informed, and not afraid to voice an opinion. It was a week after the nationwide protests against Texas’ recent restrictions on abortion. We talked about activism: what are we willing to do for a cause? The three of us still at the table for this conversation ranged in age from late 50s to 70-something. We all admitted with some regret we were not sign carriers, marchers, or chain-ourselves-to-a-nuke-plant-ers. Too many people, too much anxiety, too old. Instead, we’re NPR listeners, check- and letter-writers, boycotters, and petition signers.

Not long after the weddings, I had dinner with a beloved friend whose adult stepchild, A, is not following a traditional gendered path. My friend and her husband don’t approve of A’s actions, so A has broken off communications with my friend and her husband. My heart breaks for all of them.

It did not occur to me until I was at the second wedding that being present for these events was a quiet activism. Visible to only a few, we were supporting people who are still outsiders, who don’t always feel safe to be who they are, who may be judged or rejected even by some of their close family members. We guests are part of their beloved community.

I ran this by my in-house LGBTQ counsel, Brilliant Daughter, who thinks that normalization of everyday events like weddings of transgender and gay people may be more important than public activism. We’re affirming our friends and working for the hearts and minds of those whose affirmation comes with conditions or reservations. I don’t think our conversation helped change my friend’s heart or mind but I hope it gave her a more nuanced view of A. Affirmation takes time.

*af·firm·a·tion

/ˌafərˈmāSH(ə)n/

noun

1.      the action or process of affirming something or being affirmed. "He nodded in affirmation."

2.      emotional support or encouragement. "The lack of one or both parents' affirmation leaves some children emotionally crippled."

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On Loss

Mike, a friend of almost 25 years, passed away several days ago. When we lived in the same town, we were coworkers and occasional bike buddies, he and his wife were friends, we attended the same church, and his daughter babysat for mine. We had not kept in touch – he moved two hours south of our old town to follow his wife in her second career as an Episcopal priest and I moved an hour northwest, so I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. I didn’t know he had pancreatic cancer; I was shocked when a friend emailed that he had died.

That same friend and I went to Mike’s memorial service. The church was packed and people were standing in the back. Mike was a good one, and had been part of many communities – environmental, church, music, kids. The service was led by a priest who seemed to know him well; she spoke of him in the same way I experienced Mike: modest, grateful, smart, funny, and most of all, loving.

I was disappointed though that she led with platitudes about how we were all “there” for his family (a use of that word I dislike for its vagueness), then she talked about Mike which, she acknowledged, he had specifically asked her not to do. I felt she missed an opportunity to talk about how we support those who are more deeply grieving than we are, while still grieving ourselves.

I would describe myself as Christian-ish. I attend an Episcopal church – in fact, Mike is responsible for that. Churches are great at celebrations. But I think Christian churches fail their followers with a lack of support for people who are grieving. I felt that failure very deeply when I was getting divorced. I felt it again on Saturday at Mike’s service. I’ve heard from disappointed friends who felt abandoned by their churches during the pandemic. Most of us have grieved for beloved people we have lost, whether by death or broken relationships. I think this is relevant as we enter another round of COVID loss and weariness. We are all hurting.  What does it mean to support each other when we ourselves are barely standing?

The Jewish faith, as I understand it, does a much better job at grief. The rituals around a death are timed according to Biblical traditions but closely correspond to our emotional processing. The family is left alone for several days to make burial arrangements, with no visits while they attend to the details of a loss. After the burial, a supportive community falls into place. Shiva begins, a week of intense and quiet mourning by close family members. The mourners are not expected to do anything but grieve. During shiva, the mourners don’t leave home, so the congregation comes to them for Kaddish, a short prayer that is said twice a day with a minimum of ten other people. Friends can visit and bring food. Then a thirty-day shloshim when the grieving begin their return to work and life, but not to celebratory events or entertainment. There are protocols for attending worship services during those thirty days. The first week, the whole congregation prays for consolation for the grieving family. The second week, the mourners do not sit in their usual places to signify that they remain unsettled. For a full year after the death, the mourners say Kaddish twice a day, still with at least ten others. Other private and communal rituals mark the one year anniversary of the death.

I think these traditions do two things. First, they recognize the real and long duration of grief, while the Christian church’s official relationship with the mourner ends after the memorial service and burial. The community that sends cards and casseroles moves on, and the congregation may or may not notice whether the grieving person is there. Second, they give structure to a grieving person who can barely put one foot in front of the other and tells a community of people who don’t know how to help, how to help. The Jewish traditions make sure the mourning one knows you are there for them by actually showing up, grieving with them. That is a faith community.

So how will I – three hours away from his wife, more from his kids – be “there” for them, and how will I mark my own sadness that Mike no longer exists in the world? How do I better attend to my relationships with beloved people in my community?  That’s what I continue to think through during this first week of my own grief and my private shloshim in the next month.

Extras

Sorry for the radio silence for this entire year! It’s been a tough one for many, me included. I hope to be a more frequent correspondent in the coming months.

If you are interested in a short overview of some differences between Christian and Jewish practices, I recommend a short book called Mudhouse Sabbath, by Lauren Winner. She converted from Judaism to Christianity and describes some of the Jewish rituals missing from Christian churches. That’s where I got the information I condensed above about Jewish rituals after a death.

“Discovering more joy does not, I’m sorry to say, save us from the inevitability of hardships and heartbreaks. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu

What’s on your mind? How are you weathering the ongoing storms? As always, thanks for reading.

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Season's Greetings

Hello friends. I’ve been quiet for several months now since I haven’t felt like I needed to add to the mass of hand wringing that’s dominated media the last few months. Since this blog is (supposed to be) about place and community, it seemed like a good time to back-burner it.

Many resist returning to indoor life as fall becomes winter and we wait out the pandemic, but I’m looking forward to a slower pace, a chance to rest. Because I am employed, can pay my bills and buy stuff I want, because I have not lost anyone close to me, I have the luxury of complaining only about the micro-disruptions to my routines and lost opportunities to enjoy live music and restaurants. I’ve finally moved into my new permanent home after several impermanent situations. I spent November unpacking artwork and books I haven’t seen in over a year. My favorite reading chair is next to my bookshelves and the gas fireplace (remote controlled fire?! The luxury!). I adopted a good used dog who snores adorably (Charlotte, in the center of the photo above). Books, a comfy chair, a warm fire, a dog… it’s a good life.

I wish you all good health and good fortune, a peaceful holiday season, and a happy new year.

To Name Something

In response to my post When Grace Looks Like a Homeless Guy, a reader named Nancy left a comment that broadened my perspective about being at home. She said we are “being cloistered, not quarantined.” I spent a day afterwards thinking how much I liked cloistered, and its implications, better than quarantined. Cloistered is safe, which continues to be comforting as COVID marches on. By renaming it, Nancy reframed the whole experience.

Then within two days of Nancy’s comment, once while reading and and another time watching a PBS program, naming things came up again.

I was reading Padraig O’Tuama’s book In the Shelter: Finding a home in the world, in which he writes: “To name something is to begin a relationship with it. … To be named is to be summoned into being, and to name is to participate in this project of living.”

Then I was watching an episode of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS show Finding Your Roots in which actress S. Epatha Merkerson’s ancestry was researched. When she turned the page to see her family tree, including her enslaved ancestors, she looked up in amazement and said “They have names. That’s amazing. They have names.” They were summoned into being, no longer abstractions, when they had names.

Giving a name to something helps me get my head around it and manage my relationship with it. This has served me well lately. It’s helped me understand and manage my expectations of certain appliances (naming something a “cheap POS” instead of a dishwasher, for example) and people. We like to name relationships we have with people – my bestie, my boss, my ex. Names define boundaries, and sometimes I need to be reminded of those boundaries.

People who don’t want to be defined as one of only two choices are summoning their true selves into being, participating in the project of living, by naming themselves with different pronouns or genders or a mix of both. About two years ago, my beloved and brilliant child came out as transgender. While her outward appearance is transformed and she changed her pronoun, she has chosen to keep the name her father and I gave her (it is an unusual name and she tries to keep a low profile, so I’m not using it here). She feels connected to it and hasn’t found anything she feels describes who she is more than the name we chose for her. And I am grateful. We chose well.

Some deny that she has a right to choose the name that describes her. She has nonbinary friends who use one name or gender with some people, and a different name or gender with others, depending on the level of acceptance among each. Some won’t use her or her friends’ preferred pronouns – it’s not a matter of an occasional slip. I was recently asked by a person who will not use her preferred pronoun why it mattered. Because a deliberate non-use of her preferred pronoun is denying her a right to define her own identity and make her own choices; it is denying her the respect she deserves as a human.

To name something is to claim ownership of it. To name our circumstances, our relationships, and ourselves gives us ownership and control. We begin our relationship, as O’Tuama wrote, but even more than that, we assert our place in that relationship.

As always, thanks for reading and please get in touch or leave a comment if you want to join the conversation. Nancy, thanks for sharing the seed that grew into this post.

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Ordinary Virtue of the Week: Patience

I have blog ideas on little slips of paper I leave all over my house. On one, I’ve written patience. When I sat down to think about what I wanted to say about patience, the first word that came into my head was rest. I remembered a poem I found during a particularly difficult time in my life and it seems like a good one for life as we start to move around again, but without so many of the things that make us human.

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

by Dan Albergotti

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.

Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires

with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.

Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.

Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way

for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review

each of your life's ten million choices. Endure moments

of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.

Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound

of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.

Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,

where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all

the things you did and could have done. Remember

treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes

pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

My biggest struggle right now is seeing all the things I love about summer in northern Michigan cancelled. Since I write grant applications for arts and cultural organizations, I’ve written many times how music and art and theater and literature are essential to our humanness. It’s one of those things I know intellectually. But now I’m feeling it, deeply. I continue to watch some Zoom events. But. After several months without live music and museums, and now no Shakespeare in the woods and no outdoor concerts and no art fairs for who knows how long, I feel more isolated, more adrift. And so I will notch the long days, look up at the blue sky, and be thankful that I have been swallowed with all hope.

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The Dan Albergotti poem is used totally without permission as I would prefer to ask for forgiveness. The photo, by my friend Jeff Wier, is used with his permission. Please see his website for other wonderful work. I know that he has great photos that are not on the website (including this one), so if you don’t see what you want but have an idea, he may have something you’d love tucked away. See his photos at www.pointnorthphotography.com.

When grace looks like a homeless guy

This morning, after a month of near total isolation, bouts of grief and sadness and sometimes fear, joy and grace came to me from a surprising source.

I am currently house- and cat-sitting in Traverse City’s Central Neighborhood, less than a mile south of downtown. Homes here were built between the 1920s and 1940s and are on small urban lots with garages in back off an alley, sidewalks in front, and big old oak and maple trees, still bare. A small wooded area is about a block away on the campus of the former Traverse City State Hospital, now transitioning to a condo, retail, and office development. The sprawling campus of Munson Medical Center, the big regional hospital, is five blocks northwest. It’s made-for-TV Middle America.

Last week I moved my workspace from the dining room table, which has a view of the side of a neighbor’s house about 15 feet away, to the living room, where I use a small table as a desk and look out to the sidewalks and street and have lots of daylight. Directly across the street is a house with a big picture window, two parents, one tween-aged daughter, and an adorable dog who gets on the furniture and looks out the window. Next to them is a woman who looks to be well into her 80s. We are properly isolated from each other and have not met.

This affluent neighborhood’s proximity to Munson and the grove of trees where some of Traverse City’s homeless congregate makes for some diverse foot traffic. My friend Kevin, who owns the house and the cat, was woken up late one February night by a guy wearing only his underwear and looking for help; he had walked away from Munson and the police were looking for him. Men I assume are homeless and sheltering in the woods go by a couple of times a day. And I see the nice couple walking their adorable dog, their tween outside doodling on the sidewalk with her colored chalk, and the elderly lady getting her mail. Other neighbors walk or bike or jog by.

Earlier today I was sitting at my little table working. A scruffy guy, probably one of the homeless men from the woods, was on the sidewalk across the street. He was wearing big boots, dirty jeans, and layers of coats and sweatshirts. His hair and beard were long and not in a groovy hipster way. He stopped in front of the elderly lady’s house for a minute, and I watched with the kind of suspicion that privileged white ladies have toward potentially creepy homeless people. He walked down the street out of my view, then back in, and stopped again in front of the elderly lady’s house. I watched.

And he started to hopscotch.

The tween had made a chalk hopscotch game on the sidewalk from her house to the elderly lady’s and across the street on the next block. At the end of the hopscotch game was a spiral where players are to spin around. After he ran the hopscotch gauntlet, the scruffy homeless guy spun a couple of times and went on his way down the street toward the woods. I smiled and laughed more than I have at almost anything in the last month, with genuine joy you can’t get from even the best cat video.

I wish you your own moments of joy and grace this week.

As always, thanks for reading. Please get in touch at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com and let me know if you have comments or blog ideas, or just to let me know how you’re doing. If you don’t subscribe and you’d like to, please go to www.ordinaryvirtues.com and sign up at the bottom of any page.

Community in the time of Corona

I started this blog in part to consider how places contribute to community, but in my “About” page, I said “physical assets alone don’t make a desirable place. People are the heart and soul of a community.”  Now that places are substantially unavailable to us, I’m watching with interest, and a lot of emotions, what community looks like without places.

Right now, it looks like a computer screen. My Facebook cup overfloweth. Email is full of webinars and what to do’s and how to stay sane. There are so many people and places begging for my attention and offering help that it’s made me more anxious than reading the news. You’ve likely seen museums, concert venues, libraries, and other arts and cultural places are taking to social media like a house afire. I’ve seen tours, virtual galleries, story time, interviews, staff pet photos, and anything else they can think of to stay relevant and visible. There are so many great live concerts online you could tune in to one (or ten) every evening. Churches have moved to to Facebook Live. Closed stores and newly take-out-only restaurants are begging for business with sales, emails, social media posts, and toilet paper giveaways.

What will museums, live music, parks, downtowns, stores, and restaurants look like when we’re released back into the world? A celebrity chef interviewed by the New York Times predicted that this is the end of restaurants as we know them – which I thought was unnecessarily dramatic until he pointed out how many businesses have been categorized as “unnecessary.” Which reminded me of how arts and humanities became unnecessary in many schools in favor of more math and science. Lots of unnecessary arts organizations and small businesses were already struggling and we will surely lose some of the places we love. This weekend’s New York Times Magazine features a small panel of health, science, and ethics leaders a discussing the ethical considerations of returning to work and school. They believe we will keep social distancing well into 2021.

One of the real-time concerts (“live” performance doesn’t quite fit here) I watched this week was a singer named Jeffrey Foucault. I was joined online by 850-ish people. Jeffrey was talking into the camera, not interacting anyone, and mentioned the absence of energy in the room. Every performer I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks said the same thing. Watching alone at the dining room table (aside from a brief visit from James Brown the cat), I missed that energy and emotional connection with the audience and the performer too, and talking about the show afterward over dinner with my friends, and yet was grateful that at least I could tune in electronically. I just don’t want that to be the new normal.

We will go back to what we know when we can, or back to whatever is safely close to what we know. Familiarity brings comfort. And we need other people. There’s a reason drive-in churches were a brief and unsuccessful experiment. We want the energy, the connection, the in-person experience that depends on being together in the same physical space – the holy communion of people and place. Certainly some things will not come back as we know them and I’m trying to remember that they could come back better (like restaurants could be less noisy). We need to act to keep the places we love, to rebuild the communities we want to live in. We are their caretakers. Do what you can, look forward, and be hopeful, friends.

As always, thanks for reading. If you’re not a subscriber and you’d like to be, please sign up at the bottom of any page at www.ordinaryvirtues.com. If you want to share your thoughts, you can leave a comment on the web page, or email me at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com.

This week's short post, featuring funny-not funny

I’ve been working on a grant application for an exhibit about the 19th amendment to the US Constitution, which is 100 years old this year (the amendment, not the Constitution) and gave women the right to vote. The research and information processing and articulating goals and so on for the exhibit has been really interesting. This, combined with other stuff that comes in and out of my field of vision, has made me reflect on recent history. Or what is recent to me at age 56.

-        Women could not vote until 43 years before I was born. My grandma was a teenager in 1920 when the 19th amendment passed.

-        When I was a child, women still had to get permission from a man to get a bank loan or credit card and they could be sent home from work for wearing pants.

-        When I was a child, black people and white people could not marry each other in some states. Black people were still prohibited from some hotels, drinking fountains, and the front of the bus.

-        When I was in college, I had an internship in a state government office where smoking in the office was still allowed.

-       Stress prison seemed like a good idea until about two weeks ago, when it became pandemic prison and happened.

Finally, it’s our time!

There’s no shortage of websites and Facebook links to videos and entertainment of all kinds and I promise not to over share, but this. Is. Ridiculously. Cool. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has live cams for many of its critters – there’s a sea otter cam, a moon jelly cam, a penguin cam, and others.  The moon jellies are the best.

“It Never Entered My Mind” is not a well-known Miles Davis cover, but it should be. He recorded at least two versions; this one is my favorite, one of my desert island songs. It brings me peace like nothing else. So listen to this with the moon jellyfish cam running. It’s better than almost anything, and definitely better than the music in the moon jelly background.

Anne Lamott said “Laughter is carbonated holiness.” I hope you find something to laugh about this week. Be well!

Cartoons stolen from The New Yorker.

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First in a series of short posts

If you are like me, more or less home-bound and looking obsessively at a computer screen for something that looks like normal life, you could use a distraction. I decided this morning that I would send out some very short, more frequent blog posts – mostly to distract myself, and with hope that you will also get a moment away from news. So for a while, I’ll send out an email a week or so, just a few lines while I’m working on my usual quarterly-ish longer post. Please comment, send ideas, and be thankful for the people still working at grocery stores. Send them good vibes and good vibes too to those who’ve been laid off or whose businesses are closed and will struggle to pay bills. May they find some peace.

This is adapted from Sylvia Boorstein.

May you feel protected and safe.

May you feel contented and pleased.

May your physical body support you with strength.

May your life unfold smoothly and with ease.

Best,

Susan

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Why authenticity matters

VanGogh’s olive trees

Authenticity, the mother of Artisanal and Craft, is still having a moment.

There’s good authentic and not so good. Sometimes living authentically means cleaning up dog barf. Good authentic is satisfying, joyful, sometimes even thrilling – a word I rarely use without sarcasm. Good authentic is why I love museums. The sensation of standing close enough to touch the connective tissue between me and the most amazing people in history. I sat on Thomas Jefferson’s pew at Christ Church in Philadelphia. I saw Van Gogh’s paint palette and could imagine it in his hand as he sat among the olive trees in my favorite painting. When my own brilliant child was about six years old, I stood in a little French local history museum in front of a toddler-sized footprint preserved in an ancient Roman clay floor tile and felt instantly connected to the parents who, 2,000 years before, made that memento of their joy.

I have mentioned once or twice in prior blog posts that the best bookstore ever was the original Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate, used a subsidy from her family to open the English language bookstore 100 years ago, in November 1919. Sylvia was a feisty lesbian who wasn’t about to be married off to some respectable man, so sending her to Paris with enough money to stay awhile probably seemed like a good idea to her mother and Presbyterian minister father.

Sylvia in her upstairs apartment with the contents of Shakespeare and Company. This was taken after her time in a Nazi internment camp. Note the in-your-face-Nazi-scum American flag hanging up outside. Badass.

Paris between the wars was a cheap place to live and drew writers, artists, and musicians like Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Picasso, Dali, Cole Porter, and Josephine Baker. Her shop became the writers’ clubhouse and Sylvia was the mother figure who took them in, gave them a meal or a few francs, and let them crash on her couch. She sold their books, built a lending library, and collected mail for itinerant writers. She was Joyce’s publisher when his work was too obscene for any other publisher to touch. According to legend, when she refused to sell a Nazi her last copy of Finnegan’s Wake during the Occupation, he threatened to shut her down, so that night she moved her books, light fixtures, everything, to her attic apartment and had the sign painted over. In return, the Germans sent her to an internment camp for six months. Hemingway talks about her with reverence in A Moveable Feast. Rebecca West thought she was a snob. Whatever. Sylvia was a badass.

I am not generally a collector of things but a year or two ago I started collecting books that had been part of the Shakespeare and Company lending library. The reason I chose to collect these particular books is because of what Michael Witmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, calls “the shiver of proximity. The sense that a living person or a community is nearby.” Author Walter Benjamin calls it the “aura” of original things (art, in his case) that can’t be replicated in photos. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” When I have a book in my hands that was touched by Sylvia herself, and in the hands or just the same room with the authors and painters and musicians in Paris during those glory days, that history becomes mine too. The place is gone, but I have a tangible piece of it in my hands.

This is in the back of each of my Shakespeare and Company books.

You may be aware that there is still a Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Sylvia’s store never reopened, but she gave her blessing to a fanboy, George Whitman, to rename his bookstore Shakespeare and Company. He waited until after her death to change the name. His store attracted a new generation of authors – the Beats, Richard Wright, and others. Whitman’s daughter Sylvia (not a coincidence) now owns the store. I’ve made several trips to Paris, walked past it, but I can’t bring myself to go in. It’s not the real one.

What’s a place that feels authentic to you? Or that makes you feel like your most authentic self? Do stories give you the same vibe of proximity that a physical piece of history does? Next time I’ll write about what we lose when authentic places disappear. I’d like to hear your thoughts about it.

Bonus material:

The Michael Witmore quote comes from a New Yorker article about getting DNA samples from old books. It’s absolutely fascinating and highly recommended. The Folger website’s much shorter article about the project is in the library’s link above.

View fullsize

Chez Bricktop in Paris

 If you have an hour to spare, this podcast from Radiolab – which, coincidentally, came out the day I finished writing this post – talks about the importance of things in our lives, both those in proximity to historical people or places and those that represent our own experiences. Host Robert Krulwich sees magic in almost everything, while his wife doesn’t connect through things. I’m in the middle. The connection to history is a thrill, but I don’t save things like ticket stubs or greeting cards, because those experiences and feelings are in my head. I don’t need the physical reminder. What about you?

Sylvia’s contemporary in Paris, vaudeville singer and dancer Ada “Bricktop” Smith, helped introduce Parisians to jazz. She smoked cigars and owned Chez Bricktop, a jazz club that was like Shakespeare and Company for musicians. Fitzgerald mentions Chez Bricktop in one of his stories. Cole Porter wrote Miss Otis Regrets for her. Django Rinehardt performed regularly at Bricktop with the Hot Club Quintent and wrote a song called Brick Top. The Hot Club Quintent was broadcast live from Chez Bricktop on CBS radio in 1938 – listening to the recording gives me the shiver of proximity too. And here is the divine Miss Bricktop in 1970 singing St. Louis Blues.

As always, thanks for reading! If you are not a blog subscriber and wish to be, please scroll to the bottom of any page and sign up.

Wishing you a happy new year!

Disappearing places: in praise of department store restaurants

I went to Chicago over Veterans Day weekend, to get away and to catch the Andy Warhol exhibit at the Art Institute. Macy’s was not on the list, not on the radar, not anywhere, and one of the best hours I spent in Chicago was at Macy’s. Life is full of surprises.

We were looking for a place to eat breakfast Saturday morning and stopped at an information desk on State Street to ask for a recommendation. A shopper standing near the desk suggested The Walnut Room, just across the street at Macy’s, which now owns the old Marshall Field’s flagship downtown Chicago store. I would never have thought to eat at Macy’s. I don’t even like Macy’s. And yet I found my holiday happy place there.

The tree at the entrance is a screaming Mimi, but once you get past that, the restaurant is old school in a good way.

 We boldly (and hungrily) traversed the Macy’s cosmetics department on Saturday in search of elevators, dodging perfume counters and holiday shoppers literally buying into the gifting-palooza. When we reached Macy’s seventh floor, what we saw would normally give me something between an anxiety attack and a major eye roll. A gigantic Christmas tree plastered with red and silver sparkly stuff. A buffet. A gaggle of red-shirted hostesses congregated at the restaurant entrance.

Away from the massive tree. The wall on the far left of the photo is all windows.

We were there late for breakfast and early for lunch, so were able to sit away from the blinding glow of the Christmas tree. We were next to a window looking on the green roof of the building with the information desk, and another building with window washers rappelling from window to window. Unlike most urban restaurants, there was a lot of space between tables and we didn’t have to out-volume multiple other conversations. The room was lovely in an old dark wood way; I sat next to an original working iron heat register. It was festive but hushed, not screaming “SPEND LOTS OF MONEY HERE!!!” Just after we sat down, my favorite version of my Christmas song (Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas) came on. The food was comforting and surprisingly good. Our server, Olivia, was lovely and thoughtful. The Walnut Room introduced holiday crazy warmly, rather than with dread.

They don’t make them like this anymore. A great place to sit on a cold Chicago day.

I am old enough to remember shopping and lunch at nice old department stores before they went into malls and lost their dining rooms or closed altogether. I have vague memories of the Detroit Hudson’s and Marshall Field’s in Chicago and Jacobson’s in Birmingham, with animatronic elves in holiday window displays. Shopping then was an all-day thing with my mom and sometimes my grandma, who worked for another department store, Bonwit Teller. Those trips would mean lunch out, new clothes, and time with mom and grandma and without my younger sister. They were good days.

So Macy’s brought back good memories, but it wasn’t all about that. It was cozy, a comfortable urban oasis without blaring music and loud conversations. It was old school in a good way, a way that I haven’t experienced in I don’t know how many years. It turns out The Walnut Room in Chicago was the first department store restaurant, open since 1905.

The future seems dire for department stores (Marshall Field’s, Bonwit Teller, Jacobson’s, and Hudson’s all went out of business years ago). Though I tend not to grieve for things that are replaced by easier, more accessible, modern options, I would be sad if this place, and the feeling it still creates, disappeared. I left Chicago with visions of sugarplums dancing in my head.

 What disappearing places do you miss? Leave a note in the comments or drop me a note at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com.

 Bonus material:

Macy’s has quite a history of Christmas magic: the classic holiday movie “Miracle on 34th Street” prominently features Macy’s and its Santa Claus. AND… Natalie Wood’s character, the little girl who wonders whether the Macy’s Santa is the real thing, is named Susan. Coincidence? I think not!

I’ve been one poor correspondent, as America would say, which is due in part to having one crazy year. I’m currently between homes, since I sold my house of 22 years and moved out in September. My stuff is scattered between friends and storage units. Despite not living with most of my stuff, it has taken more energy to maintain it than when I had it with me all the time. At any rate, I’m house hunting and expect a few more months in transition before things settle down. My hope, though, is to spend more time writing for fun, which this is. And I’m taking requests. Anything you’d like to see here? You can leave a comment or email me at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com.

 As always, thanks for reading! If you’re not a subscriber and you’d like to be, please sign up at www.ordinaryvirtues.com at the bottom of any page.

Ordinary Virtue of the Week: Trust

I’ve written posts about the social contract and leading with love in the context of community. It occurred to me later that the root of love (in my 2/9/16 post) and the social contract (2/12/16) is trust. Like the five kinds of love, there are different kinds of trust. And like love, trust is a word that is too small to express all the things it represents.

Our society functions in a very substantial way on trust. Trust – the social contract kind – lets me drive to work in the morning and assume that no one will run a red light. Trust lets me put my credit card number into a website and assume that my identity won’t be stolen and that I’ll get a new pair of shoes in return.

Good relationships, whether with our kids, partners, friends, or colleagues, are built on trust. Trust lets me expose my vulnerabilities, tell the truth when someone asks “how are you?” and hear the truth in response when I ask the same, and know that I can depend on someone to have my back or help me bury a body. How can we love without trust?

I’ve been reading a book about a week that the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu spent together talking about life, death, and the joy of it all. The Dalai Lama says in it, “How do you develop trust? It’s simple: You show your genuine sense of concern for [another’s] well-being. Then trust will come. But if behind an artificial smile, or a big banquet, is a self-centered attitude deep inside of you, then there will never be trust. … As soon as I wake up, I remember Buddha’s teaching: the importance of kindness and compassion, wishing something good for others.”

Trust is part empathy, part discretion, part love, and part respect. According to cognitive theory, trust is one of the first things we learn in life. But how do we learn to be trustworthy?

As the cliché says, once trust is broken, it’s hard to make it whole again. Like most grownups, I’ve been undone by lost and misplaced trust, and put back together by love, compassion, courage, and truth.

The photo in this post – the first time the Dalai Lama danced, thanks to peer pressure from Archbishop Tutu – comes from this article about that week together.

As always, please comment below or send me your thoughts at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com. If you are not a subscriber and would like to get my very occasional posts by email, scroll to the bottom of any page to sign up. Thanks for reading!

Corporate giants versus historic buildings, small businesses, and taxpayers

The Strand is one of the last great bookstores. It has been owned by the same family for three generations and has 18 miles of books. The store is in a lovely old building on Broadway in New York City. So lovely and old, in fact, that the city’s historic commission wants to designate the Strand Bookstore building a historic landmark.

 Bookstore and building owner Nancy Bass Wyden wants nothing to do with it. Old buildings are already more expensive to own than new ones. Insuring a historic landmark costs more than a not-landmark, and repairs must be approved by the landmarks commission. The extra expense associated with owning a landmark building threatens the viability of the bookstore, which, she argues, is a more important part of New York’s urban fabric than the bricks and mortar around it. And yes, interesting architecture is part of what makes our places unique. But a really cool empty building, or one housing a Walgreen’s, only goes so far toward making a vibrant neighborhood.

Sylvia Beach in front of the Best Bookstore Ever, the original Shakespeare and Company at 12, Rue de l’Odeon in Paris

 At about the same time Wyden started her campaign in opposition to the landmark designation, Amazon – every bookstore’s public enemy #1 - announced that thanks to New York’s offer of a $3 billion subsidy, it would locate part of its corporate HQ in Queens. Wyden pointed out the stark contrast between the extra burden that would be placed on her business by the landmark designation, while Amazon, the largest public company in the world by market value (estimated at $797 billion), would benefit from New York’s generous distribution of taxpayer dollars. (Amazon subsequently pulled out when New Yorkers opposed to the deal made them feel unwelcome.) As far as I know, none of the $3 billion New York put on the table for Amazon has been offered to Wyden or other owners of expensive-to-maintain landmark buildings.

Sylvia Beach and Hemingway in front of Shakespeare and Company

Also in the news lately, from the What’ll They Think of Next Department, Walmart and other big box stores have figured out a novel way to reduce their local property taxes. It’s called “dark store theory” and is a tax loophole in a few states’ laws, including Michigan. The theory is that a big box store, when it closes, is essentially worthless real estate because it’s not suited for any other user (and then the owner puts on deed restrictions so the property can’t be sold to a competitor, sealing the deal). So because their building is theoretically obsolete the day it opens, Walmart argues it should be taxed as if the store was vacant – even though it isn’t – while the store’s customers, workers, and delivery vehicles still use public roads and water and sewer services and schools that those taxes are supposed to pay for. Because why shouldn’t Walmart, the world’s largest company by revenue and the world’s largest private employer, develop a piece of property, make it worthless for anything other than a Walmart, then get even more taxpayer subsidies than it already does? According to the Michigan Municipal League, property taxes on Michigan big-box stores averaged $55/square foot before they figured out dark store taxation theory. Based on dark store rates, Walmart and Sam’s Clubs in Michigan now pay an average of $25.68/square foot – less than half their previous rate. Genius, right?

 After my stunned reaction to this extraordinary level of naked corporate greed, I was also struck by how eager we are to subsidize giant corporations that clearly don’t need help, while small businesses we love for placemaking and local color and all the rest get hung out to dry. These are policy decisions our leaders make to privilege big corporations over the mom-and-pop businesses they profess to treasure. How can a small business compete when policy-makers stack the deck so obviously in favor of corporate giants?

James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, and her partner Adrienne Monnier inside Shakespeare and Company.

 If we really want to preserve a place’s culture, we need to protect the experiences (like browsing in bookstores and eating good food outside) that make places where we want to live and visit, while we also protect building façades. Traverse City’s Downtown Development Authority has always understood this and has successfully kept all but two chain stores out of downtown (and as Yogi Berra said, nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded). We need to reevaluate our economic development policy when public dollars subsidize bazillion dollar corporations at the expense of local business, schools, and roads. We need to speak up when giant companies leverage states or cities against each other to get the best deal. Do we really want to incent and support businesses that are out to suck what they can from a community, rather than supporting it? Why?

Bonus material:

I heard Maya Angelou say this in an interview with Krista Tippet (On Being): “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can’t be consistently fair or kind or generous or forgiving – any of those – without courage.” I have finally started to figure this out myself and made “be brave” one of my own commandments.  

My beloved friend Ann and her husband Art used to own a cool old building on Lake Street in Grand Rapids. It now houses a CVS (photo from Rapid Growth Media). I would much prefer their uber-cool Prisms design store in that space, and it would be a much better complement to the hip Easttown neighborhood (this is just down the street from a restaurant named The Electric Cheetah, for context). I guess CVS is better than a… hmmmm… very tiny Walmart.

 When eye candy and brain candy have a love child, you get this: the world’s most beautiful bookstores.

 Most of the photos in this post are of my all-time favorite bookstore, the original, one true Shakespeare and Company, owned by the couragous and brilliant Sylvia Beach. I paid homage to it on a trip to Paris, even though it closed well before I was born.

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#strandbooks #darkstoretheory #shakespeareandcompany #historiclandmarks #ordinaryvirtues #placemaking

In Praise of Maps

I recently listened to an interview on one of my favorite podcasts, On Being, with artist/writer Maira Kalman. (This link has both the audio interview and a written transcript.) Kalman talked about a map of the United States her immigrant mother, Sara Berman, drew (below). It is clearly not an accurate representation of the US.

Sara Berman’s map of the US. Kind of. Don’t you love “Sorry, the rest unknown. Thank you”?

I also have a favorite short story about map-making, The Mappist, by Barry Lopez. The mappist of the story, Corlis Benefideo, is the opposite of Sara Berman. His maps show minutely detailed layers of information and history, from a Tokyo map showing the point of view of each of Hiroshige’s One Hundred Views paintings, to how topsoil composition in North Dakota was changed by German and Scandinavian farmers.

 But there are similarities between Berman and Benefideo: their maps are ultimately about people. Berman’s map is about the impact of places on one person, while Benefideo’s measure the impact of humans on places. Benefideo says “This information is what we need, you know. This shows history and how people fit the places they occupy. It’s about what gets erased and what comes to replace it. These maps reveal the foundations beneath the ephemera.” Berman’s map is all about epherma. For Kalman it represents imagination instead of facts, experience over knowledge, moments instead of history.

Because nothing says groovy like a pair of crinkle patent stretch vinyl granny boots.

The podcast got me thinking about what I would map if I was going to draw a map of my world. Maybe I would draw a food map. That would include Costa Rica, where I had the best banana pancakes ever because the bananas were grown right there. And the best smoothie ever after a long, hot boat ride to a sea turtle sanctuary that was not accessible by road. Incredibly, surprisingly good food in Amsterdam (including risotto at the Cafe George, top photo). The ice cream stand in Paris where I first tasted salted caramel ice cream. Pesto in Italy and olives in southern France. Peaches from my favorite farmer at Cadillac’s farmers market. Almost every meal I’ve ever eaten outside. So much ice cream when I was pregnant that I named one large butt cheek Ben and the other Jerry. And my short stay in Thailand in the Peace Corps, where a café across the street from the volunteers’ hotel served nasty pizza and heavenly coconut ice cream.

I could make a shoe map! Starting with the shiny blue boots I got for Christmas in the 1970s, very much like the ones in the photo, and I rocked those babies at 10 or 11 years old. My college collection of Tretorn sneakers in perky 80s colors, and which I still collect but now in gray and black. The time my luggage got lost on the way to Paris and I had only the Clarks I wore on the plane, which gave me a quarter-sized blister after my long city walks. The shoes I got in Paris to replace the Clarks, which fit my swollen feet at the time but are really too big. The pointy-toed girl shoes I love and can’t wear on my bunion-y old lady feet any longer, especially the metallic bronze pair with the kitten heels.

 Or would I make a map of my heart, with the people and dogs who’ve taught me unconditional love, friends and strangers who’ve shown me kindness, my people who put up with my crazy and still love me? It would have to include the heartbreaks and losses, disappointments, the relationships that ended without closure and forgiveness. And grace, so much grace.

 What about your map: what would it look like? Please share if you like, either in the comments below or you can email me at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com.

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#mairakalman #sarabermanmap #ordinaryvirtues #themappist

 BONUS MATERIAL:

 This is another favorite map I could have drawn. If, you know, I had any artistic talent.

The stories our places tell

Here’s a challenge: find a town of any reasonable size that doesn’t have a hip brew pub making local beer with a clever place-related name. Find a tourist town that doesn’t have a store selling high-end outdoorsy-wear. Find a town big enough to have a stoplight that doesn’t have a McDonald’s or a Subway.

Why go anywhere when everywhere looks the same?

Because places have unique stories told by their public spaces, architecture, museums, music. Detroit’s story is told by Motown and Joe Louis’s giant fist and Henry Ford’s first assembly line plant. Grand Rapids’ design story is an Alexander Calder sculpture, a fitting symbol for the world’s best mid-century furniture design (GR is the home of Herman Miller). Kalkaska, a destination for anglers (and not much else), has a dorky giant trout on its main street. Almost every town has a local history museum, usually in a treasured old house or public building like Cadillac’s Carnegie library. Towns along northeast Michigan’s US-23 highway corridor are connected and promoted with stories about places along the historic route.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain

Northwest lower Michigan’s highway M-22 has become a symbol of Pure Michigan, partly for the Lake Michigan resort towns it connects like a strand of liquid blue pearls, and partly due to marketing hubris. Seriously, who makes bajillions for marketing a state highway sign? A promotional genius, apparently. An otherwise unremarkable two-lane highway, M-22 became a brand representing the idea of Up North. Michigan’s Department of Transportation stopped replacing stolen M-22 road signs after someone started selling t-shirts and refrigerator magnets featuring the M-22 design. Instead of representing a single place, M-22 is an invitation to us to create our own Up North stories.

Starchitect-designed buildings (flashy contemporary public buildings designed by big-name architects) are used by un-notable cities to create an identity, typically as a national or international cultural center. The Bilbao (Spain) Guggenheim Museum put Bilbao on Important Art’s A-List, but it doesn’t tell a story about Bilbao, it brands it. The Sydney (Australia) Opera House is iconic architecture and revitalized Sydney’s waterfront… but it’s not Sydney’s story. Starchitecture isn’t used to represent a story – like a Kardashian’s plastic surgery, it’s made to be noticed.

The Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, Michigan, which makes me think of…

This guy from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I am not a fan of most starchitecture. The Bilbao Guggenheim (above) looks like an industrial accident and the Broad Art Museum in East Lansing could have been created by Monty Python’s illustrator. It is so aggressively unwelcoming it was used as bad guy Lex Luthor’s house in a Superman movie.  (Well-known starchitect structures I like are the pyramid at the Louvre in Paris and New York’s Guggenheim. Both places were already cultural centers, so didn’t need these buildings to put them on the map.) The Broad, Bilbao Guggenheim, and Sydney Opera House are unique symbols of their places, but they’re not identities and they weren’t made to be part of the local fabric. They’re brands.

Side note: Not long ago, and to much public outcry, advertising for a horse race was projected on the Sydney Opera House’s sail-shaped roof. One group wanted to protect the iconic building from crass commercialism. The other side cried elitism. Protests ensued. Note that advertising had been projected onto the Opera House before this – but only for cultural events. So commercializing the city’s symbol is ok, as long as it’s not the crass kind.

The Sydney Opera House with a cultural projection on its usually-white facade.

The point being, there’s a difference between a place with a symbol that tells or invites a story, and one with a symbol that just says Look At Me, Aren’t I Fabulous. A city’s signature edifice might be iconic, but not have much in the way of substance, as though it were a building made of silicone.

As always, thanks for reading! You can share your thoughts in the comments box here or by dropping me a note at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com. If you would like to get blog posts by email, please sign up at the bottom of any page on www.ordinaryvirtues.com.

Bonus material:

Rhode Island tried to create a branding campaign to attract people to the state. It went so very wrong.

A New York Magazine writer has a more cynical description of the sameness of cities than I do.

More on the Sydney Opera House controversy.

Why we need heroes

OrdinaryVirtues.com’s home page subheading “small but significant” comes from this 2003 speech by Bruce Cole, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Cole said, “Citizenship is a quiet patriotism; it is the habit of ordinary virtues -- the small but significant, the unheralded but heroic acts of service done without fanfare or headlines or pats on the back.”

What makes a hero has been an occasional interest since the mid-1980s when I spent a year living in Sacramento.  I was fresh out of college and felt lonely, disconnected, that I’d left my tribe. I had a new friend there who was a seismologist / volcanologist, and we joined a bunch of his seismologist friends for dinner one night and had the most wonderful conversation about heroism. I don’t remember any details of the conversation, but I know that I felt back in my element. It was a joyful night. It comes back to me every few years.

I haven’t heard many people referred to as heroes. Usually it’s someone who has risked their own safety for another person or a cause.  What would make, for example, an athlete a hero? Especially in the last few years as more scandals than heroic acts are associated with athletes.  But an athlete made me want to write about heroes when I started this blog post, and a brave, nerdy professor made me want to finish it.

Colin Kaepernick, before he was fired for taking a stand against police violence

Football player Colin Kaepernick was back in the news a couple of weeks ago. Kaepernick was the first athlete to take a knee at a game during the national anthem to protest police violence against African-Americans. His quiet act of citizenship on a national platform generated plenty of headlines. Kaepernick was deliberate when he planned his protest. He consulted with military service members to ensure respect. And yet many consider him anti-American, anti-military, and anti-flag, and he lost his job.

And then Christine Blasey Ford told the world that our miscreant president’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, had assaulted her. Kavanaugh and the Republicans, mindful of Anita Hill, tried to reframe Blasey’s action— without belittling her claim — as “trying to ruin his life.” Well no, that wasn’t actually the point. No one would put her own or her family members’ lives at risk to call someone a sexual predator. It was a courageous act to give us a complete picture of a nominee who would exercise significant control over the law in this country for the next 30 years.

I’m writing this the week after Blasey’s testimony and Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and I’m angry. I’m angry at the men who seriously thought Ford ruined Kavanaugh’s life, when he got a Supreme Court seat and she got death threats. I’m angry that there are so few consequences for men who use their power against women. That some men think sexual innuendos or groping a woman are always good for a laugh, no harm done. I’m angry about all the #metoo moments I’ve had, and every woman’s had, when we didn’t report anything, because who would we report it to?

And I’m angry that a football player who quietly and respectfully protests police racism is pilloried. I’m angry that in 2018 he still needs to protest police racism. I’m angry that in 2018 we still need to have any conversation about racism.

The always-wise, suddenly fashionable Fred Rogers said "We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It's easy to say ‘It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes." Like Kaepernick and Blasey. They had everything to lose, and nothing to gain by speaking out.

Do we need heroes? Oh hell yes. Kaepernick’s and Blasey’s heroic acts aren’t without headlines, but we need public heroes too. They remind us what bravery looks like, and that taking a stand matters.

Irreverent bonus material: This is even worse than I remembered.  Please remember that forgiveness is an ordinary virtue.

Angry chick bonus material: speaking of taking a stand at the expense of a career, this is what I listened to the weekend of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, after Blasey’s testimony that gave so many of us flashbacks.

Of people, places, and stability

I recently read that Benedictine monks take a vow of stability, a promise to stay in place. The idea is that this makes Benedictines commit to their community. It is essentially a marriage, for better or for worse, to the community’s members and physical space. The Benedictines’ vow is a choice to grow their faith, serve, and flourish where they are, in an unchanging community.

Those of us who are not monks fortunately do not need to make such a commitment to our physical space or the people in it. But the idea of connecting stability to staying in one place with one small group of individuals sent me spinning into overthinking mode.  

When I was in college and moving in and out of apartments and dorm rooms, home was where my stuff was. Friends and apartments came and went from my life and it was hard to grow deep connections to either places or people. Stability was the books and posters and clothes that could fit in the back of a Subaru, and my parents who helped fix crises that threw me off balance.

Stability now is rooted in my routines, my circle of beloved and trusted people, and my peaceful home. Stability is an income I can depend on, a car that starts every morning and evening, food in the pantry, and the knowledge that I have or can get nearly everything I need and want. As I’ve aged, I’ve mellowed and that too is part of my stability. And it’s in the gratitude that comes from knowing that my comfort is a privilege. Stability lets us return some of the good fortune we’ve been given. External stability helps create internal stability.

Change and stability can be compatible – in fact, I think stability facilitates change. When we have a stable physical and emotional infrastructure, we have the freedom and energy to grow, take more risks, because we have a safety net. I trust that my people are my people regardless of where my place is (thank you, my people!). When we feel stable, we can try new places, new ideas, and new relationships more easily. We can be generous.

This idea that stability supports risk-taking is true for places as well as people. A community can evolve and grow when it’s stable. The economic and social safety net gives local governments and the private sector confidence to invest in a new farmer’s market structure or downtown restaurant.  A community without stability struggles to provide the basics. It can’t afford to take risks, there’s little confidence that a big investment will be sustainable, and without that, growth is hard. They need baby steps first to build stability.

In my professional life I’ve worked with a few communities with great potential but that just couldn’t get it together. Community leaders were smart and committed but couldn’t get everyone on board with a plan. Or the communities couldn’t overcome their negative reputations. Or leaders were inexperienced and either didn’t know where to start, or how to manage a big sparkly thing that fell in their lap. One banked on a huge private project to help pay for significant public investment, then the private investment didn’t happen and the town has a big public park it can’t afford to maintain. Its risk was too much, too soon, taken based on misplaced trust, and it made the town less stable than before. The safety net wasn’t big enough to absorb the risk.

Like the Benedictines, communities are bound by physical space and people that are not easily changed, and they have to work with those limits to grow. Without a safety net, almost everything is a risk. But without some risks, nothing changes and they will just tread water forever. The risks need to be in proportion to the safety net.

If there’s an upside to instability, it’s resilience. When our stability is shaken, we either learn from it and rebuild smarter and stronger, or we remain vulnerable when the next earthquake comes. What doesn’t kill us, after all. Some people in this economically unstable community choose to stay, even when it makes them vulnerable. They choose one kind of stability over another – the stability of staying in place, with their people, through the earthquake. Like the Benedictines, they've committed to the community, both place and people. When forced to choose between economic stability and their community, they chose community.

And the downside of stability is complacency. We want change, but sometimes we just don’t seem to make it happen. Is it that we don’t trust the safety net, or can’t get too far away from it? Is it about our ability to recover from a period of instability? Is it just less work to stay where we are? Or timing? But sometimes you just have to take the leap.

Have you made a leap? Tell me about it in the comments below, or email me at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com.

BONUS MATERIAL:

Can the safety net be too big, too safe? This is a fascinating article about my hometown, Kalamazoo, where philanthropists are paying for some of the city’s operations, like filling potholes. Will the city’s resilience suffer? And how will private money influence city policy and the risks it takes?

The Internet Rabbit Hole for this post started with Thomas Merton, a 20th century Benedictine monk and prolific writer, then moved to St. Benedict’s Rules. Here are two short pieces about Benedictine vows.

http://www.stmarysmonastery.org/benedictine_vows.html

http://www.lynnebaab.com/blog/benedictine-spirituality-the-first-vow-s

The photo at the top of the page is one I took at a New York gallery I can't remember the name of. The artist is El Anatsui, a native of Ghana who makes sculptures from metal scraps and bottle caps and other bits. Cool stuff.

Thanks as always for reading! If you don't subscribe to the blog and you'd like to, please use the sign up box at the bottom of any page at www.ordinaryvirtues.com.

#benedictines #vowofstability #ordinaryvirtues

The purpose and practice of ordinary virtues

I recently ran across a book called The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World, by Michael Ignatieff. A quite fabulous title for a book I didn’t write, don’t you think? Ignatieff went in search of the moral values that regular people all over the world hold in common – our ordinary virtues – to determine whether there is such a thing as a “single global ethic.” To my great relief, the global ordinary virtues he identified through his conversations are quite similar to mine: “trust, tolerance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and resilience.” While we aren’t always consistent in our practice of ordinary virtues, he finds they are hopeful, personal, “not an abstraction but just what you do and how you live, and that displaying the virtues, as best you can, is the point and purpose of a human life.” Exactly.

Ignatieff says that when our world was much smaller, we were insulated from other moral and ethical belief systems, and that allowed us to have moral certainty. But in our more globalized world, where we’re exposed to lots of different beliefs (religious and otherwise), “we do not have the luxury of moral closure.”

Triptych from the Mark Rothko chapel

In Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, Krista Tippett echoes this, at least for faith-based belief systems.  “I honor the integrity and necessity of doctrine and theologies that have emerged in conversation across generations and across time. But so many of our categories, defined and wrapped in forms and institutions that no longer quite work, had become too narrow. Certain kinds of religiosity turned themselves into boxes into which too little light and air could enter or escape. So did certain kinds of nonbelief. Dogmatic atheism is no more intellectually credible than dogmatic faith. Both presume a certainty in things unproven that a spirit of inquiry, a virtue of investigation, inclines to nuance.”

I heard someone say not long ago that our values are our identity. Our values are our identity. Without the structure of virtues defined by theology, we are left to choose our values from a buffet of moral options – from religion, the social contract, the golden rule, or a potentially dark source. If we choose our values, then we choose our moral grounding, our belief system, the substance of our identity. What does it mean for our individual and community identities – what we do and how we live – when our choices are unbound and ethical systems compete for our attention? What do we do with that kind of power? Because it is a powerful thing to consider and choose.

I facilitated a values conversation last week and while thinking about my follow up, I decided that “our values are our identity” needs broadening. It’s not much of a sound bite, but how about: our purpose plus our values plus our talents are our identity. What are values without action or purpose? If we don’t actively practice our values, do they matter? In other words, if the tree of kindness falls in the woods and no one is on the receiving end, does it matter? Are values without purpose and action worth having?

Henry Moore sculpture, Yorkshire

So it isn’t just choosing and holding values or ordinary virtues. It’s wisely choosing virtues from the morality buffet, then putting them into practice toward a purpose, as consistently as we can. This is true for individuals, businesses, organizations, and communities. Sanctuary cities have made a choice about their identity and purpose. Churches that accept all people with love and without judgment have made a choice about their identity and purpose. Places that restrict access to military weapons have made a choice about their identity (big shout-out to Dick’s Sporting Goods, Walmart, Delta, and other businesses that are putting their values ahead of weapon sales and the NRA). Places that leave up or take down statues of racist figures have made choices from the morality buffet. States that limit adoption to heterosexual couples have made a choice. Businesses that don’t pay for contraception under their employees’ health coverage have made a choice. The NRA people with their tinfoil hats who think that restricting automatic weapons is the top of a slippery slope toward the hellfires of facism have made a choice and their purpose is extreme personal freedom over social responsibility, over being their brothers' keepers.

And we choose the purpose to which we direct our values, and our choices and actions define us. Active practice of our ordinary virtues, the point and purpose of a human life. We may not have moral certainty, but we have a sense of right and wrong. Our choices matter.

The sculpture at the top of the page is by Jaume Plensa, a favorite. I love that thought and language make the structure of a genderless, colorless human figure. He makes similar human sculptures with music notes.

As always, thanks for reading, and please leave your thoughts in the comments or send them to me at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com. 

#kristatippett #michaelignatieff #theordinaryvirtues #ordinaryvirtues

A community language

I have been thinking a lot lately about community. A community can be just a collection of people in a geographic area, or it can be a group with shared values or interests. Do we choose our communities? Or do we exist in them without actively choosing to join? What are barriers to joining? Is there an opt-out for the ones we don’t really want to be in? Can someone be located physically in a community, but not of it?

Until I started thinking about community for this post, I hadn’t really thought of how language can bind a community, or be a barrier.

Author James Baldwin went to Paris in 1948 hoping to find a community without the racism and homophobia he’d experienced in the United States. When he got there, he found a barrier not related to his race or his sexuality. The barrier was language. “The necessity of mastering a foreign language forced me into a new relationship to my own. My quarrel with the English language has been that the language reflected none of my experience. But now I began to see the matter in quite another way. If the language was not my own, it might be the fault of the language; but it might also be my fault. … What I began to see — especially since, as I say, I was living and speaking in French — is that it is experience which shapes a language; and it is language which controls an experience….” For Baldwin, French language revealed French experiences that were to an extent unknowable by non-French people – an unavoidable barrier to being fully immersed in a French community.

He goes on to say that the English he knew was the English of his own African-American experience and community. “The language with which I had grown up had certainly not been the King's English. An immense experience had forged this language; it had been (and remains) one of the tools of a people's survival, and it revealed expectations which no white American could easily entertain. The authority of this language was in its candor, its irony, its density, and its beat: this was the authority of the language which produced me…. My relationship, then, to … language … revealed itself as nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past.” (From “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” excerpted from The Cross of Redemption by James Baldwin.)

Walt Whitman

The idea of language controlling experience and experience shaping language really drew me in. Our ability to understand and process an experience may be controlled by our ability to put it into words. When the words don’t exist, language evolves to help us describe the experience. #MeToo has united a community of women with a common experience and allowed us to put into five letters – five letters! -- what may be so raw and violent that even if the language exists, we still can’t put words together in a way that releases us from the experience, or helps men understand it. #MeToo is becoming shorthand for our resilience. As Walt Whitman says of the English language in his prelude to Leaves of Grass, “It is the chosen tongue to express growth faith self-esteem freedom justice equality friendliness amplitude prudence decision and courage. It is the medium that shall well nigh express the inexpressible.” It’s just taken a while for the language to evolve. (#MeToo, incidentally, and likely every woman you know.)

While language can bind us as a community of humans with some shared experiences, we can be divided by a common language. #MeToo has cast a sharp light on men – even the well-intentioned -- who can’t understand because it isn’t their own experience. African-Americans, 70 years after Baldwin’s quote above, still need a language as a tool of survival that I can’t begin to comprehend.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If language controls experience, a shared language – including a non-verbal one -  can go a long way to creating a community. Today I ran across this Dietrich Bonhoeffer quote: “The person who is in love with their version of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go.” Love is about both words and actions. It’s Rev. Martin Luther King’s “beloved community,” where language and actions express ordinary virtues like respect, kindness, connection to each other, and a common good. A community without a language (verbal or otherwise) to express a common good or shared values, or where the language lacks empathy and respect, may be a collection of individuals, a community of sorts. But if it doesn’t talk the talk, it probably doesn’t walk the walk either. And when members lack connection and ownership, the community is only about self-interest. We may still be in the community because of geographic or other circumstances, but we opt out by not caring, not contributing, and in that way we are in the community but not of it.

What do you think? Please post a comment or email me at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com.

Bonus Material: After all that heavy stuff, we need 10 Extremely Precise Words for Emotions You Didn’t Even Know You Had.

Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady

And a blog post without music is incomprehensible! This is from the best movie ever about language controlling experience.

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