Taking Responsibility - A Lesson in Freedom
January 31, 2020

    So much goes unsaid in the story about Jesus healing the paralytic man.  In all three accounts – a version of the story appears in all three of the synoptic gospels – the focus is more on Jesus's interaction with the Pharisees than on the man, almost as if the man (and even the miracle) is merely an occasion to illustrate the ratcheting tension between Jesus and the religious establishment.  All three versions of the story expressly indicate that Jesus is keenly attuned to the reactions of these members of the religious vanguard to his work, "perceiving their thoughts," – that he was a "blasphemer."  All three versions portray Jesus practically goading these religious elites to indignance, openly, almost gleefully, challenging their assumptions about the permissible boundaries of his ministry.  From a narrative-craft perspective, the vignette tees up the showdown to come.

    So what got them all riled up?  Jesus told the guy, "Your sins are forgiven."

    (Gasp!) 

   Now, I've got to admit, the statement does seem a little weird.  It probably doesn't warrant the death penalty – but it's definitely not the first thing I would have thought to say to a paralyzed person if I had the ability to heal them.

    What sins?  Was the man's paralysis the result of immoral action?  The story doesn't say.  Was his sin the failure to seek Jesus out?  We don‛t know.  In all three gospel accounts, when the man comes into contact with Jesus, he is being carried on a bed by others.  In two of the versions, in fact, the guys carrying him can't get into the house where Jesus is teaching because of the crowd, so they take the man up onto the roof of the house, pull back some tiles, and lower him down in front of Jesus.  (The text doesn't say whether these guys were the man's friends, but they certainly went to great lengths to get him help.  That seems pretty friendly – gracious, in fact.)  Was the guy protesting the whole time?  Did he not want to make such a scene?  Was he embarrassed?  Is that why Jesus told him his sins were forgiven?  None of the stories give us any of these details.

   What they do, instead, is show Jesus turning to the Pharisees, who are righteously grumbling amidst the crowd, and saying, "Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier to say,  'Your sins are forgiven you,' or 'Rise up and walk'?  But so you know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins," – then Jesus turns to the man again, and continues – "I say to you, stand up and take your bed and go to your home."  

    What is going on here?  Clearly, Jesus is taking issue with the Pharisees' stifling self-righteousness – and their corresponding efforts to put him in a box they think they control.  But he's not letting the paralyzed man off the hook either.  The gospel writers give us no hints whatsoever about the nature of the sins for which Jesus extends forgiveness.  So we have to assume that the particular sins are unimportant.  What the authors do give us is a connection: Jesus declares the paralyzed man in some way responsible for his condition, and thus makes him able to respond to his condition – to "stand up and take [his] bed and go to [his] home".  It is a word of empowerment, not of judgment.  In the story, it makes no difference whether there is a causal link between the man's sins and his paralysis.  All that matters is that he come to understand himself as someone who is responsible – i.e., someone who is capable of responding to grace, who has been set free to take up a charge.  

    Stand up.  Take your bed.  Go to your home.

There, But for the Luck of the Draw . . . and Photons
January 30, 2020

    If you need a secular equivalent for "There, but for the grace of God, go I," try the title of this meditation.  It retains, and perhaps sharpens, the moral essence of the saying.

    The origins of the more theological version of the sentiment are unclear.  It has been attributed to a preacher of the English Reformation movement, John Bradford, who was said to have made the comment upon seeing others led to the gallows for execution.  Ultimately, Bradford was himself imprisoned for his Reformationist views (which constituted crimes against the English Crown) and was burned at the stake in 1555, during the reign of Mary Tudor.

    Grace of God, indeed.

   Historians lack the evidence to definitively confirm the attribution of the original phrase to the "Martyr Bradford" (as one later minister referred to him, over 250 years after his death).  And many people today are similarly skeptical that any given instance of avoiding tragedy constitutes evidence of the hand of God intervening in human affairs.

    But that is not the heart of the matter, from my perspective.  The heart of the matter is two-fold: first is the recognition that our circumstances – good or bad – are not entirely (or even mostly) of our own making, certainly not when we start out, in any case.  As I used to tell my Attucks kids, you didn‛t choose the cards you were dealt.  The second part is that you have to make the best use you can of what you have received – trade in a few of the bad cards, if you can, and use your wits with the ones you can't.  You possess some degree of power in how you play your hand.

   And know this: whatever power you wield here on earth traces back, in a very literal, material sense, to the sun.  So if you're playing your hand well, there is little room to brag, for you, O Man, did not make the sun.  And if you need to play your hand better, you have a ceaseless supply of real energy – photons! – by which to do so.  So rise up and walk! 
 

The Marks of Grace: A Top Five
January 29, 2020

    Top Five, Top 10, Top 25 lists – they're all the rage these days.  Here‛s the kind of thing that shows up in my social media feed: "Top Five Must-Have Cast Iron Cookware Pieces"; "Top Ten Places to Hike with Your Kids"; "Five Reasons Why You Need Goats on Your Small Farm"; "Top 25 Plants to Attract Pollinators".  The algorithms have me pegged.  

    So I'll get in on the game, with a Top Five list of my own: "Top Five Qualities of a Grace-Filled Life" . . . . or something like that.  Here's how you spot someone who has internalized grace, or the clues that you're catching the bug yourself:

    1.  Humility.  We've already discussed the first two of these, but they're worth revisiting.  Humility is the only response commensurate with the understanding that the good things in your life – or, at least the conditions that give rise to those good things, and your life itself -- are, at bottom, free gifts of the universe and not the result of your efforts.  If you look at people less fortunate than you, and your response is anything other than, "There, but for the grace of God, go I" (or a secular equivalent), then you have not yet acquainted yourself with the humility that existence demands of you.

    Of course, a proper humility is not inconsistent with being a Bad Ass Ninja Warrior – at least to the extent that you use your bad-assery to combat the very real malevolence, the evil,  that is afoot in the world (including in yourself).  In other words, let us not confuse humility with cowardice.  See Number 5 below.  In fact, cowardice is a sure sign of a person's failure to realize that their power comes from a greater source than themselves.  So practice your bad-ass arts – the world needs you to do so – but do it from a place of humility.

    2.   Gratitude.  The second mark of grace is closely linked to the first.  When you realize that your gifts are ultimately just that – gifts – the only logical response is to give thanks.  And when you realize how utterly thorough-going the gifts really are, then thanksgiving should become so constant, such a habitual practice, that it constitutes your modus operandi.  Is your heart beating?  Give thanks.  Did you just take a breath?  Give thanks.  Give thanks in all things – literally – until you keel.  A person who has understood grace is a thankful person, and that gratitude opens the door of generosity by which more grace flows into the world.  So be grateful.

    3.  Curiosity.  There is far more to say about this one than can be said today, but let me start here: cultivating an attitude of humble thanksgiving – i.e., internalizing the first two marks of grace – should foster in you a desire to know more about the world.  This desire should encompass both the world within you (your own desires, fears, aspirations, moral capacities, etc.) and the world around you (your family, neighbors, community, the planet, the solar system, etc.).  Curiosity begins with making yourself susceptible to awe and it grows into an adventure, or many of them.  Start with what makes your brain light up or sets your heart on fire and follow it in all its details as far as it takes you.  One path may take you a lifetime, so start now.

    And know this: a person who is not curious – who closes themselves off from new information, acting as if they already know everything they need to know to make their way in the world – is a person unacquainted with grace.  Mark it.

    4.  Tenacity.  A person whose life has been marked by grace is persistent, dogged, tenacious, unflagging in the pursuit of a grace-filled life.  They do not give up.  The going is and will be hard – really hard – but there's no substitute for the slog, the trudge, the plod, the slow march.  Keep going.  Keep swimming.

    5.  Courage.  This is where we circle back to the Bad Ass Ninja Warrior part again. In a universe subject to the law of entropy, it takes tremendous work – and thus tremendous energy – just to maintain order, let alone create more of it.  It is very nearly miraculous, if not entirely so,  that any order exists in the world at all, given how easy it is to just let things slide.  And if we let things slide long enough – even if we just miss the mark by a little, but we do it over and over and over again – we find ourselves in the grip of evil.  It is not the disorder itself that is evil, but the failure to address or transform it – or worse, the tendency to affirmatively multiply or exploit it in a way that may benefit a few (in the short run) but increases the suffering of many.  

    So we need people to take on this evil, to combat it, resist it, stare it down.  The people capable of doing this are humble, grateful, curious, and tenacious.  They also know how to tap the wellspring of courage necessary for the effort.  It is not that they are fearless – courage is not the absence of fear.  It is rather that, by grace, they have summoned the ability to act in spite of the fear.

    * * *

    May we seek to live lives that bear these marks of grace.

On Becoming an Agent of Grace
January 28, 2020

     So Keats was right: things fall apart.  But if I have resources at my disposal by which I can stem the tide – i.e., I have received some grace – do I have a duty to do so?  In a universe governed by entropy, does grace make such an a priori claim on our lives? 

      If I wish to live at all, then the answer must be yes.  

     We don't ask to be born.  We didn't have a hand or a say in the matter.  And yet, "here," as Annie Dillard puts it, "we so incontrovertably are."  So what are we supposed to do with that?  If we're lucky in our early days – and most of us are lucky enough – it's all done for us.  Helpless and mewling, human infants require heaps of additional grace from the get-go.  The feeding, the bathing, the rocking, the safeguarding from this danger or that.  We grow, in open defiance of entropy, by any grace that our parents and other caregivers can channel, plus the grace that sustains them.  You could  define parenthood (and perhaps motherhood especially) as an extended exercise in making oneself an agent of grace.  Undoubtedly, some pull it off better than others, but most pull it off.

     Then, at some point – again, if we are generally lucky (and most of us are lucky enough) – we have received enough grace in the form of provision, protection, and instruction, that we can begin to access and make use of grace ourselves.  We can, but we could choose not to.  We are free not to preserve the fruits of grace (ourselves).  But if I am, to any degree, interested in self-preservation – and, by grace, the instinct is usually strong – then I am obliged to act in a manner consistent with that goal.  I must learn to feed and clothe myself, and if I cannot do this alone (and I cannot, in any meaningful, long-term sense), then I must learn how to live in and contribute to a community of cooperators who will help me do so.  This is the duty to which grace calls me. 

    But then the question becomes: how gracious is my community?   How well do we manage the resources by which we resist the tide of entropy, together?  And how well am I contributing to the effort?

Embracing Chaos  - Entropy, Part 3
January 27, 2020

     It might seem that chaos is getting a bad rap here.  Let me correct that impression by saying this: chaos is not synonymous with evil.  Chaos – i.e., entropy, disorder, decay, death – is simply a background fact of the universe.  It undoubtedly entails some suffering for sentient beings, but  suffering is not synonymous with evil either.  Chaos, and perhaps suffering as well, is morally neutral.  It is the lion that kills and eats the gazelle.  It is the star that grows to a red giant and burns up the planets in its path.  

   My working definition of evil, by contrast, is this: evil is any act or omission by a human being that increases the suffering of another sentient being above the baseline, background level that would occur in the absence of such act or omission.  This provisional definition might need to be further qualified as follows: "Evil is any act or omission by a human being that, without sufficient moral justification, increases the suffering of another sentient being above the baseline, background level that would occur in the absence of such act or omission."  The definition, whether with or without the added qualifier, presents all sorts of questions and problems to explore – including the degree to which humans can unwittingly participate in evil acts – which is why I consider this a "working" or "provisional" definition only.  It is a starting place.

     But the point, for now, is that, in any case, chaos and evil are not the same thing.  Evil certainly uses chaos to its advantage, amplifying it, multiplying it.  But chaos also gives rise to things that we unquestionably recognize as good.  Chief among these things: creativity.  Creativity calls for some degree of chaos – sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the project – since an overly rigid order stifles creativity.  I could not have made homemade cinnamon rolls yesterday (an early birthday present to myself) without accepting that the process was going to involve some chaos.  Baking is messy.

     So is raising kids.  So is gardening and raising small livestock.  So is leaving a secure corporate job for an entrepreneurial venture.  

    Chaos can feel like stepping over the edge of a cliff.  It can feel like you're losing yourself, like you're dissolving into the needs of another or the demands of a dream.  It can feel threatening.  And it cannot be one's constant state of being; it absolutely must be balanced with some sense of order, direction, and purpose.  But it is not to be feared or resisted absolutely.  Embrace it for what it can make possible.

    Above my writing space in my house, I keep a card that was handmade by a dear friend.  It  features a manger with flowers spilling over its sides, captioned with a verse from the Hebrew Proverbs: "Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but by the strength of the ox comes abundant harvest." (Proverbs 14:4)  Amen.

On Joining the Resistance - Entropy, Part 2
January 26, 2020

   The universe blasts forth – Bang! – gushing out matter and setting it spinning with an incomprehensible energy.  Was this, too, grace?  Let us assume so, for now, since it was, as far as we know, a wholly gratuitous event – and one, moreover, that unleashed the possibility of our being.  And let us further assume, for now, that being is preferable to non-being.

     How soon after that initial blast did the decay set in?  If the second law of thermodynamics is truly a law – operative at all times under all conditions in the universe – then I suppose it must have gotten to work immediately.  For that matter, perhaps it was (is) implicit in that original unleashing itself; once poured out, the marbles won‛t ever go back in the box by themselves.

     Perhaps.  But I am no scientist, so I am ill-prepared to contemplate – let alone come to conclusions about – when and how the laws of physics took effect.  Did the universe have a ‟honeymoon‟ period, all hot and fiery, before entropy began to cool things off a bit?  I don‛t know.  But I do know, if only in a mediated way, that the universe as a whole is now subject to the law of entropy.  Dissolution, cooling, disarray, chaos, decay, and death are universal constants.

   Of course, there is still a tremendous amount of energy left over from that first moment of Creation.  The sun, our local star, is just one example.  Comprising just a tiny bit of the right kind of debris from the first blast, our sun generates its energy by fusing the nuclei of hydrogen atoms into helium, producing helium to the tune of over 600 million metric tons per second.  And scientists estimate that the sun has roughly another five billion years‛ worth of raw material (hydrogen) stored up to continue this process, business as usual, before it transitions to the red giant phase of starlife, in which it will expand and cool and eventually collapse into a white dwarf.  

     So death by entropy is the ultimate fate of our star – and, by extension, ours.  But in the meantime, we "live and move and have our being" by virtue of the energy we receive from that left over ember of Creation. In scientific terms, earth is an "open energy system" because we have this external energy source to draw upon.  This mutes the effects of entropy on earth, enabling work that can reverse the entropic force.  

    This raises a question in my mind: if sunlight makes it possible, here on earth, to resist entropy, how well are we making use of the resource?  I'm assuming, of course, that, for humans at least, resistance to entropy is preferable to acquiescence – and I realize that some people might take issue with that assumption.  But in any case, I think it is a sound assumption, even if I haven‛t yet worked out a compelling reason why that should be so.  So assuming order is generally preferable to chaos, I ask myself the next logical question: Am I really part of the resistance – or am I unwittingly participating in, contributing to, or even hastening the death march? 

On Entropy - Part 1
January 25, 2020

     Lest anyone (myself included) think I‛m peddling some sort of secular version of a health and wealth gospel here, I have one word: entropy.

     The second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of entropy, states that a closed energy system – i.e., a system without an external source of energy – will always increase in disorder until all of its energy is spent (until it reaches a state of "equilibrium").  Order cannot spontaneously arise in a closed system.  This means that, absent an injection of external energy, any order that is created in a closed system comes at a cost: a corresponding amount of disorder elsewhere in the system.  In the end, Chaos is King.

     This, my friends, is a sobering thought.

 * * *

     I yearn for order.  I crave it, like a pregnant woman craves pickles or ice cream (pickles and ice cream?) – or, in my case, really high-quality marinara.  I need order.  

     When I was in college, my roomates knew they could drive me crazy if they came in my room while I was out, and moved any of my stuff.  I was one of "those" people, the kind who kept things in such a state of order that I could tell if someone had moved something a few inches or swapped out one small decorative item for another.  My junior high friends were worse.  For some reason, my mom never locked the laundry room entryway door to our house.  So when we were gone, a few of my close  friends would sneak into the house (did their parents bring them?), disgorge the contents of my sock and underwear drawers, and fling hosiery and such all over the room.  I don't know how many times I came home late in the evening, exhausted from a long horseback riding lesson or some other regular excursion, flipped on the light in my bedroom, and found pantyhose strung from my light fixture to my bedposts and bras and underwear strewn hither and yon.  My friends were ruthless, underwear leprechauns that they were.  They thought it was hilarious.  It infuriated me every time. 

     My tolerance for chaos has increased dramatically since those days.  I married a giant leprechaun, and together we have made a little tribe of small leprechauns.  These days, it is the contents of the kids' various toy boxes that get disgorged and flung all over the house.  And because we're building a small working farm here, the floor of our house usually features a thin layer of straw bits and grit.  I ferociously enforce a no-wearing-shoes-in-the-house policy, but it barely stems the tide.  

     It's safe to say I‛ve relaxed my standards a bit, if only to avoid outright insanity.  Straw bits are just farm glitter, I tell myself.  (But I hate actual glitter, I retort.)  Nonetheless, I still crave order.  I just have to get my fix in shorter bursts, more discrete units.  After several years in which I rarely made the bed – infants, housekeeping, and the practice of law don‛t lend themselves to such serenity – I now try to make it as often as possible, which usually means about 50% of the time.  And I luxuriate in the roughly twenty minutes per week when my kitchen is clean and my floors are vacuumed.  I have to take my bliss where I can get it.  

    So when I started thinking seriously about entropy last year, it very nearly plunged me into depression.  So you're telling me, I argued with the invisible scientists, that every time I do a load of laundry – thus increasing the level of order in my own household – I'm actually contributing to the disorder of the broader world?  

     The answer is yes – but that‛s not the end of the story, I learned.  More to come. 

 * * *

     The cost of finishing this post: one of the dogs just peed on the floor.  He's a leprechaun too.

Live It Up
January 24, 2020

     In an important sense, we cannot ever be "worthy" of our blessings.  Blessings are specific expressions or instances of grace, and grace, by definition, cannot be earned.  Grace precedes and gives rise to our lives – indeed, constitutes a fundamental precondition of our lives.  It is the soil from which we grow.  So if you're thinking you have to get your shit together before you will receive blessings, you have it exactly backwards.  The fact of your existence – and the universal conspiracy that gave rise to it, before you ever lifted a finger – is the one inestimable blessing out of which all others unfold.

     But once you see this – and seeing is a function of the practice of humble thanksgiving – then you can, in another sense, seek to be worthy of your blessings.  We commonly say that someone is or is not "living up" to her or his potential.  So we intuitively understand that people have a sort of maximum capacity for expressing their gifts in the world.  And even if we can‛t say with precision what that capacity is, in either scope or substance, we nonetheless sense when a person is falling far short of it, when we ourselves are falling far short of it.  We know when we‛re not living up to our blessings or leaning into our potential.

     So you don't have a clue what your blessings are?  You don't know what gifts you're bearing within you?  You don‛t have any inkling of your potential? 

      Is your heart beating?  Give thanks.  That‛s where you start.  Then give thanks for the breath you just took.  And then give thanks for whatever else in your body seems to be working – even if much of it is not.  Then move out from there.  Do you have clothes on?  Give thanks.  Do you have some kind of roof over your head?  Give thanks.  Will you have access to food and water today?  Give thanks.

     Give thanks for anything and everything that enables you to make your next move, even if that move is simply to get out of bed to go to the bathroom – or to call for someone to help you.  Ignore the obstacles for now and only take stock of your resources, no matter how seemingly insignificant.  Pile them up.  And keep piling them on.  You can only use what you see, and you can only see what you name.  So give thanks and see where it takes you. 

What I‛m Thankful For
January 23, 2020

     I could devote an entire blog site just to naming all the things I have to be thankful for everyday.  Some things are constant, so there would be some repetition, but many things are fresh and new everyday, if I learn to see them.  And even the constants show variations from day to day.  It could be done.

     But for now, a quick inventory seems appropriate, even if it is only (and necessarily) partial.  It is good to take stock of one‛s blessings.

 * * *

     Koen‛s infectious belly laugh when Brad tickles him, and the way he‛s started spontaeously hugging me.  Madeline‛s pride in her artwork, and how she insists on showing us each and every piece of paper from school.  The way Emma can turn a phrase.

     I‛m thankful for all the things I don‛t even know to be thankful for – and I ask to learn how to see them, and thus to enlarge my compass of gratitude.  I am thankful for all the things I only understand dimly, like electricity and all that it enables.  I am thankful for creature comforts – my fleece robe, warm tea, and hot showers, for example – and I ask to be mindful of their costs, even as I enjoy them.

  

     I‛m thankful that Brad and I are able to generate income for our household.  I‛m thankful that we are learning to grow some of our own food.  I‛m thankful to have health insurance and reliable transportation.  I‛m thankful for our general health and all the miracles that our bodies comprise and make possible.  May we use our bodies wisely and keep them strong.

     I‛m thankful for the eggs our chickens lay and the rest of the potatoes and butternut squash that we‛re still enjoying from last year‛s harvest.  I‛m thankful for my vision, the doctors who saved it, and all the scientists whose dogged attention to detail down through the decades made that saving possible.

     I am thankful for rain and sunshine and seasons and the way the earthworms beneath the surface of our pasture are preparing the soil, right now, for the new fruit trees we will plant this year.  I‛m thankful for a warm bed, a cozy house, clean water, and the chance to help make my community a place where my grandchildren‛s grandchildren can flourish.  

     I am thankful for Brad, for our partnership and the crazy dreams it is bringing to life.  We have it good.  May we live worthy of these blessings.

More Than We Can Say Grace Over
January 22, 2020

     So the first lesson of this solar life is, Be thou humble, earthling.  Thy life is a gift.  Or, for more modern sensibilities: We live in a state of grace, so carry yourself with humility.

      And the second lesson is this: Give thanks.

     * * *

     We‛ve already learned that the amount of energy falling to earth from the sun in a single hour is comparable to the amount of energy that modern humans collectively consume in a year.  According to MIT scientist David L. Chandler, 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strike the earth‛s surface at any given moment.  That‛s 173 with fifteen zeros after it, or 173,000,000,000,000,000!

    So grace abounds.  It comes to us, says the Carpenter of Nazareth, "in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over." 

 What should we do with all this abundance?  While we don‛t have all the answers yet, this much is clear: we have more than we can even say grace over. So let us give thanks. Let us walk through this day and every other in a spirit of humble thanksgiving.  We are far less likely to ignore, hoard, or destroy that which we have named and for which we are grateful.  So let us give thanks.  We are already rich, and we are far more likely to learn what it is we are to do with our riches -- and to use them without poisoning the air with entitlement -- when we practice gratitute.  So let us give thanks.

The First Lesson
January 21, 2020

     The sun also gives life.  This too is grace.

     * * *

    Here on the blue-green planet, we absolutely depend on the sun.  We orbit our local star in a Goldilocks Zone, where we are neither too hot nor too cold, and we are further protected from the excesses of solar energy by Earth‛s magnetic field and the ozone layer.  

      But what energy comes to us makes all things possible.  

    In physics, "work" is the transfer of energy that occurs when external force is used to move an object.  We humans do lots of work.  We‛ve been busying ourselves for millenia, moving this and that around – all with energy that first came to us from the sun.  If you‛re going to tick down through your to-do list today, then you‛ll need to gird yourself with the solar energy captured in your breakfast through the miracle of photosynthesis.  

    In the last couple of centuries, we humans have greatly accellerated our ability to do work by tapping the Earth‛s stored sunlight reserves: coal, oil, natural gas – those highly concentrated energy packets we somewhat misleadingly call ‟fossil fuels‟.  And we‛ve been spending down the trust fund with great abandon.  It is worth asking whether we will apply enough of the ingenuity enabled by that trust fund to learn – perhaps to re-learn in some ways – how to live off the energy of the sun in something much closer to real time.  We cannot act like trust fund babies forever.

     But that is not my point, at least not now.  My point is – and this is so obvious I hesitate to even write it – we humans did not make the sun.  We did not merit its presence.  We did not earn its  energy.  We cannot congratulate ourselves for it.  We are – and we do and we make – because it was there first.  

     So, by all means, work.  Pull up on those bootstraps.  But don‛t forget: it is by grace that you do so. 

     This is the first lesson.

A Matter of Grace
January 20, 2020

     I was raised in a Southern Baptist church.  This was in the days before large swaths of theologically conservative evangelicals traded in the teachings of Jesus for the power of contemporary political conservatism.  The tide was turning during my teenage years (even before), but it happened slowly enough that I was able to experience what community centered on the Jesus of the Gospels felt like.  It was good, mostly – good enough to make my estrangement from the faith community of my childhood a long, drawn-out affair.

     One of the lessons was this: grace is the unmerited favor of God.  It is unmerited in the sense that there is nothing you can do to earn it.  You can't deserve it or work toward it.  The most you can do is put yourself in its path, and even that's debatable.  The concept of grace was usually contrasted with mercy, the shorthand definition of which was the withholding of some deserved punishment.  "The wages of sin is death," we read in the letter to the Romans, "but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."  The Son gives life.  This is grace.

 * * *

     My life bears the marks of grace.  I've been dealt some good cards: a few extra IQ points than the average bear, the generosity of scholarship donors at the schools where I earned my degrees, the efforts of legions of women in the decades before my birth to clear paths for my education and expression of my gifts despite my lack of a Y chromosome.  

     I hold some lesser cards as well, and maybe my hand is incomplete.  Some might argue that I should give myself credit for how I've played my hand, all things considered.  Perhaps, but that too may be a matter of grace.

On Incarnation
January 19, 2020

     Try this: tie a washer or some similar small weight to the end of a string and hold the opposite end of the string between your thumb and index finger.  Prop the elbow of the same arm on a table and let the weighted end of the string hang down.  Still the weight with your opposite hand, but then, having let go with that hand but without moving your arm or the fingers holding the end of the string, begin to rapidly repeat an instruction in your mind, such as "up-down" or "left-right" or "circle right" or "circle left" or "stop".  Do not say the instruction out loud, but repeat it over and over in your head.  And again, don"t move your arm, hand, or fingers.

     The weight will follow your instructions – slowly at first, but it works.  You can even take it through a series of instructions.  I like to put it through some paces, seeing how long the washer takes to transition from one instruction to the next.  Calisthenics for small hardware.

     I think I was in fifth grade when I was first introduced to this trick by the teacher of an art and science enrichment program I was enrolled in.  At first, I thought it was magic, the eerie, ouija-board kind.  It freaked me out a little.

     I still think it's magic, just not the supernatural kind.  It's more the isn't-the-world-amazing kind of magic, or the Bill-Nye-the-Science-Guy kind of magic.  Turns out, the trick works because of a phenomenon called the "ideomotor effect", which describes various motions that we make without perceiving or intending them, and what triggers them.  Apparently, most of the focus of research on the ideomotor effect is on motions unconsciously made, tiny imperceptible shifts within us made in response to exposure to an idea, mental image, or verbal suggestion.  For example, if I told you to imagine yourself sucking a lemon, your mouth will almost certainly secrete a little extra saliva in your mouth.  (Didn't it?)  And if I told you to imagine yourself standing out in a cold wind, you would most likely curl your body forward and pull your arms in closer to your torso, even if only just a tiny bit. 

     The ideomotor effect figures prominently in studies of hypnosis and in the psychology of body language, particularly the science of facial expressions, which are unconscious to a large degree.  

     The washer-on-a-string trick raises the question of how our mental processes generally, whether conscious or unconscious, affect the world around us.   In one sense, this is utterly mundane.  We experience our day-to-day lives as a series of decisions to take actions, followed by the actions.  We decide to get out of bed, then we get out of bed.  We decide to have a bowl of cereal, then we find ourselves in front of the pantry, granola box in hand.  The electro-chemical neural pathways that express the process have been well outlined by scientists, even if their implications are not yet well understood.  So the fact that a weighted string moves to the beat of a series of brain signals coursing down my neurons, in a way I cannot perceive or detect with my unaided senses, is perhaps not particularly mysterious.

     But in another sense, the fact that our thoughts take physical form in the world – that they are, and are becoming, incarnate – is awe-inspiring, perhaps even "miraculous" in a way.  There is doubtless much about the process that we don‛t yet understand, including whether our perception that our thoughts "cause" our actions is an accurate way of conceptualizing what actually happens.  And for non-scientists like me, wrestling with these questions is something we can only do vicariously, dependent as we are on those who are directly observing, testing, and analyzing the pertinent phenomena.  

    But the potential philosophical implications can be glimpsed and explored by those outside the scientific priesthood.  If I can move a weight on a string with no apparent physical effort, what else can I move?  

     Mountains?

Poker Face
January 18, 2020

     By temperment, whether inborn or acquired through early childhood experience, I am rather risk-averse.  There are costs and benefits to this mode of moving through the world, so to mitigate the costs, and as a matter of personal growth, I try to take on healthy risks, in spite of my default mode.  (And "healthy" does not mean "safe".)  I don't always get it right, but I think I've had enough luck to understand the value of pushing beyond my default settings.

   One thing I don't do, however, is gamble, at least not with money for the purpose of  entertainment.  Also, I don't bluff well, or . . . at all – a fact that might constitute an occupational hazard for an attorney.  I just don't do bullshit.  It takes too much energy.  I can't pull it off.  

     Or can I?

     * * *

   When I was leading the Life Skills classes at Attucks Alternative Academy, a school that exclusively served teenage students deemed "at-risk", one of the ideas I tried to impress on them was that they had the power to change their circumstances – or at least enough of their circumstances to get themselves unstuck from whatever they were mired in.  My go-to metaphor was a poker game, specifically Texas Hold 'Em.  You can't control the cards you‛re dealt in life, I told them, but you can control two things: (1) how you play your cards ("fake it 'till you make it"), and (2) what cards you choose to make a part of your hand.  I even took it a step further and suggested that sometimes, unlike in a poker game, you might even get to trade in one or more of the shitty cards that Life originally dealt you.  You just have to have your eyes open to the possibilities.

     I know the image sank in with at least a few of them.  Many months (perhaps even a few years) after I started using the poker metaphor in those homespun group therapy sessions with the Attucks kids, a parent of a couple of the students told me how much my "card game analogy" had helped her kids, especially her daughter, cope with some of their challenges.  I also continue to keep tabs on some of my most beloved students from those days, so I know that several of them have, in fact, traded in their shitty cards for some darn good ones.  They're great parents now, with beautiful, strong, smart kids of their own (kids they conceived, in some cases, while they were in high school – hence, the "at-risk" label).  They‛re living productive, meaningful lives – lives I'm glad that Attucks, and the school system and society more broadly, took a gamble on.

 * * * 

     And just for the record: I still don't do bullshit.  It's not my style.  Candor and a solid command of the relevant law and facts are more my speed.   I know it works for some attorneys, and I appreciate its utility in many circumstances.  I understand it is an art form that can be compelling, and thus effective, when done well.  But that card's just not in my hand.

A Place Among Misfits
January 17, 2020

     My first teaching job was technically not a teaching job at all.  Toward the end of my English-only semester at Missouri Southern, I learned – I don‛t recall how – that a "counseling" position had come open at an ‟alternative school‟ in a neighboring town.  I can‛t remember if I reached out to the principal about it, or if he reached out to me, but in any case, I explained that I wouldn't be available until after I finished my final exams.  Not a problem, he assured me.  We also discussed how I would complete the requirements for non-traditional teacher certification over the ensuing months so that, if I continued with the school the following academic year, I could do so as a certified teacher (with the attendant increase in pay over the "counseling" position).

     I started in December of 2001, a week after finals and a week before this alternative school was set to begin winter break.  It was just enough time to meet the students and get my feet wet.

    The school was Attucks Alternative Academy in Vinita, Oklahoma.  It was one of a network of "alternative" school programs that school districts around the state had been developing over the preceding decade to assist junior high and high school age kids who, for a variety of reasons (mostly socio-economic), were not faring well in traditional school settings.  Much of the impetus behind these schools was to address and curb drop-out rates.  Attucks served all the districts in the county, taking students who were deemed at highest risk of dropping out of school altogether.  At any given time, approximately 45 students were enrolled in the program.

     So we were all misfits, these kids and me.  They didn't fit in at their schools of origin, and  I did not fit the Oklahoma Department of Education's idea of a teacher.  And, frankly, I had not fit in particularly well in high school either.  Although my academic experience had been very different from theirs, I deeply empathized with their discomfort in the traditional public school setting.  I too had tried to get out as quickly as I could.  My "alternative" school had been the local community college in my hometown, where I started taking concurrent classes as a junior in high school.  Of course, my path had been marked, at least outwardly, by social acceptability (even praise), while theirs carried stains of reprobation.  Yet I sensed some kinship in the inward struggle of not fitting in.

     I tried to make something of that.  I don't recall what my official title was that school year, but my primary duty was to lead the twice-a-day group therapy sessions that the school required.  Now, if I was not qualified to teach, I was far less qualified  – and perhaps distinctly unqualified – to conduct group therapy.  But I did my best, focusing on fostering stimulating conversation about healthy ways to grapple with the challenges the kids were facing.

     It was an education for all of us.

The Glow of a Luminous Mind
January 16, 2020

     Some of the reading during my "inter-degree" years was forced, in a sense.  I had graduated from Harvard in June of 2001 with a bachelor‛s degree in the Comparative Study of Religion.  But that degree did not fit neatly (or at all) into any of the categories then recognized by the Oklahoma Department of Education as appropriate preparatory programs for prospective public school teachers.  So when I originally applied for non-traditional certification to teach, despite submitting my undergraduate transcript – which reflected significant writing-intensive coursework, much of it at the graduate level (I took about half a dozen courses at Harvard Divinity School) -- I was advised that I ‟lacked sufficient subject-matter hours‟ to teach English in Oklahoma secondary schools.   This was in the heady days before having a pulse seemed to become the chief qualification for alternative or "emergency" teaching certification for people lacking formal teaching degrees in Oklahoma.

     A little annoyed, but otherwise undeterred, I enrolled in an entire semester of English classes at a nearby four-year college, Missouri Southern State College, in Joplin, Missouri, only about half and hour from my home.  

     It turned out to be a magical interlude.  I took a class on the Short Story, an American Literature survey course, an advanced composition course, and a class devoted entirely to Shakespeare's plays.  Twelve credit hours in all – which was enough to satisfy the folks at the Oklahoma Department of Education.

     Each of the classes was a delight in its own way, but the Shakespeare course was a real gift.  I don't remember the professor's name, but I do recall that he was relatively young, newly transplanted to fly-over country from New York City.  Toward the end of the semester, he hosted a party at his house and made homemade pizzas with dough he had conjured from scratch.  That dough was amazing – light and soft, striking just the right balance between crispy and chewy.  I still aspire to making pizza dough that good.

    I similarly aspire to a mind as light, nimble, and capacious as the Bard's.  Perhaps "aspire" is not the right word, since that kind of genius is largely, I think, a free gift of the universe  – not something one can exactly work toward if one is not born with it.  That said, I do think one can almost always enlarge one's mental scope – our chronic underuse of our cognitive faculties has been well documented – and the output of great minds like Shakespeare's can light a path in that direction.

     The best part about the Shakespeare class for me – even better than the end-of-semester pizza -- was the opportunity to immerse myself in the plays, in the way one immerses oneself in a foreign language or culture.  Aside from reading some extended excerpts of Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet in high school, along with a smattering of the Sonnets, I had never read Shakespeare. Let me say that again:  I had never read Shakespeare.  So I was (am) grateful for this chance to really read about twelve or fifteen of the plays in their entirety.  And I was surprised to find that, with a little practice, I could read one in just a little over two hours.  (This makes sense, of course, since that is about how long a play-goer in Shakespeare‛s day would have spent watching it in the theater.)  It was a matter of allowing my brain to slip into Shakespeare's language, like slipping into a dream.  Once in, it just flowed.

     Several years later, when I was teaching advanced ninth-grade English at my hometown high school, I tried to teach this Jedi mind-trick to my students, having them practice "Shakespeare translation" exercises, transposing excerpts from Romeo & Juliet into modern English and seeing who could capture the most sense most clearly.  To this day, I'm not sure how many of them grasped just how bawdy Juliet‛s Nurse really is – but I think they generally got the idea.  And I hope that, like me, they felt, and perhaps still carry with them, some of the heat and glow from that luminous mind.

Beware of Skewing Small
January 15, 2020

     I am a chronic list maker, mostly of to-do lists.  I make one every day for my law practice – although I rarely get more than half the items done in a single day.  C‛est la vie.  I often make one (or two) for the home and farm on the weekends.  Perhaps somewhat ironically, one of the ways I know I‛ve got too much going on and need to step back a bit is when I don‛t even have time to make a to-do list – when something (or some constellation of somethings) is so urgent that it overrides the habit.

    I started making to-do lists in high school.  I didn‛t really use them or need them regularly before my senior year, but as that year marched on and college loomed, the press of deadlines and the juggle of my various commitments and goals sent me searching for a coping strategy.  One of my guidance counselors suggested that I write down everything that I needed to get done, then break each large task into the smallest sub-bits that I could imagine.  As you complete each and every sub-bit, she advised, reward yourself with a checkmark.  With each checkmark, you‛ll gain momentum toward completing the larger goal.

     She was right, of course, and those lists of mini-tasks have propelled me through many a difficult project over the last nearly quarter-century.  I have basically turned myself into a regular dopamine junkie, getting my fix checkmark by checkmark. 

     I suppose it‛s better than drug-induced dopamine hits, but it‛s not to say the strategy is entirely without risk.  The potential danger in focusing on micro-tasks is that over time your larger goals will skew toward the small, toward the achieveable, toward those things that are easily broken down into sub-bits – and away from worthy and important goals that don‛t so easily lend themselves to this process.  Long-term goals that depend heavily on collaboration with others can, if not specially tended, be jettisoned in favor of goals with a shorter shelf life and fewer potential relationship issues.

     I do not want to skew small.  And while I do not believe that big, important goals are necessarily incompatible with the micro-tasking strategy, I‛m trying to understand how to adapt the strategy in the service of worthy goals that take shape over long periods of time and require the cooperation of others.  It is no small task.

Just Start
January 14, 2020

     Starting is the hardest part.  Of course it is.  That is the very nature of things.

     The first law of classical Newtonian physics is the law of inertia: unless acted upon by some force, a body at rest will stay at rest, and a body in motion will stay in motion, continuing in a straight line at an unchanging speed.  Newton himself described inertia as the "innate force of matter . . . to preserve its present state."  It is literally resistance to change.

     So you see what we're up against.  To start is to depart from the status quo – whether that status quo is rest or motion.  And to start requires some other force, sufficient to overcome the "innate force of matter . . . to preserve its present state."  

     What forces can we muster or otherwise avail ourselves of, if we wish to resist inertial resistance – that is, if we wish to make a new start?  There is the force of gravity.  That one seems dubious, albeit unavoidable for we earthlings, so perhaps we can make use of it. There is the force of will and the force of habit, the force of desire and the force of fear.  There is collective force,  brute force, the force of hope, bodily force.  

     There is the force that water exerts as it runs over rock, cleaving over time that which seems utterly solid.

     May the force be with you. 

A Good Start
January 13, 2020

     If I were going to start a religion, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek would be one of its foundational texts.  

     It was (is) the most important book I read in those special years between college and law school – and remains atop my list of favorite / most influential books.  I had to read the whole thing three times before I had a decent grasp of what Annie Dillard was doing with the book, mostly because its prose veers as close to poetry as prose can.  Reformat some of the paragraphs, and the bards of old could sing them.  It‛s that rich.  

     It is a clarion call to attention, to attendance, to tending to one‛s sight, to cultivating the tenderness to be awestruck by the Creation, in all its many forms.  

     It is also a demonstration.  Dillard invites the reader to join her for a year beside the creek, during which she aims to "somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what‛s going on here.  Then," she continues, "we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or if it comes to that, choir the proper praise."  She reels between the infinitely small and the cosmic, with the audacity of a child who has not yet learned the mental guard rails of adulthood.  Indeed, her project is to blast through the guard rails, throw off the blinders, and see what happens.

     And so it is also a travel log.  It is a record of what happens.  Like Thoreau before her, she takes a particular place as her point of departure and return, her anchor and doorway to the mystery, terror, beauty, and power of the universe.  

    For the last several years, usually in January, I have re-read Pilgirm at Tinker Creek in the way one reads a religious text – that is, for guidance and instruction, in search of some answer to the essential religious question: How shall we then live?  

     It is a good start.

The Reading Life, Without Books
January 12, 2020

     I don‛t read much these days, at least not in the traditional sense of sitting down with a physical book for significant stretches of time and reading with my eyes.  The thought of having that kind of uninterrupted time now, with small children, small livestock, and a small-town law practice is pretty comical.  The day may come when I have that kind of time again – but I rather doubt it.  And in any case, I can‛t wait around for that.  There are far too many books I need to read.  And the clock is ticking.

     Not long after I gave birth to Emma, my oldest, I subscribed to Audible.com.  Arguably, that's the best $15.00 per month I‛ve ever spent – and one of the reasons I am grateful for modern technology.  (Potential future essay topic: ‟Why I am not a Luddite‟.)  Turns out, breastfeeding lends itself nicely to reading by listening – as do many other activities.  I now ‟read‟ while feeding the chickens, walking the dogs, washing my face, and making the beds.  I try to maintain a balanced reading diet, rotating among history & biography, classic fiction (the literary ‟canon,‟ broadly defined), science, new fiction (tracking close to Pulitzer and National Book award finalist lists), political & social science (including economics), and some business / self-improvement titles.  A notable exception: so far, most of my farming books are in hard copy.  I can read them in short spurts over a bowl of cereal – though not with great consistency.  Overall, I average about two or three books a month, depending on the length of a given book.  This is not a lot by some people‛s standards, but it‛s better than nothing.  Twenty-five or thirty books a year adds up to a fair amount of books.  Not bad for someone who doesn‛t have time to read.

     This count includes a number of books that I re-read.  Last year, I got to the end of Admiral William McRaven‛s motivational book Make Your Bed and immediately dialed right back to the beginning and listened again.  I likewise listened to A Room of One‛s Own, by Virginia Woolf, three times in a row last year.  I had read that one in college, but felt the need to revisit it in my current phase of life.  I will be revisiting it yet again.

     So far, there is only one book that I re-read annually,  as a quasi-religious rite: Annie Dillard‛s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  I started it again yesterday.  More on that tomorrow. 

Reading List: On Self-Education
January 11, 2020

     My first career was in teaching, although "career" may be too strong a word.  Let‛s say I had the opportunity to teach for a few years after college, before I decided to go to law school.  It ended up being a six-year stint altogether, which is why it almost veers into "career" territory.  

     It was a good opportunity, indeed, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the education I gave myself during those years.  The reading I was able to do in the years between college and law school was nothing short of magical, building on and rounding out my undergraduate education with a richness I am still spending.

     It was during those formative years that I finally read Jane Eyre and Middlemarch.  Pure bliss, both of them. On the political theory front, I read Allan Bloom‛s The Closing of the American Mind, Michael Sandel‛s Democracy‛s Discontent, Benjamin Barber‛s Consumed, and Francis Fukuyama‛s End of History and the Last Man.  I read Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin and learned why Lincoln was perhaps a once-in-a-millenium leader.  And I traveled out to the west coast and back with Lewis and Clark, in Stephen Ambrose‛s Undaunted Courage.  I read The Handmaid‛s Tale, Crime and Punishment, and a history of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester, entitled The Meaning of Everything.  (Don‛t laugh.  It was awesome – and a satisfying coda to the  time I spent reading the dictionary during bible study as a teenager.  I was a bond fide rebel.)   I read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, followed by his environmental warning, in Collapse.  I read Tim O‛Brien‛s The Things They Carried and Marilyn Robinson‛s Housekeeping.  And the summer before starting law school, I read Barbara Kingsolver‛s  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – which might have planted the seed that has become our small farming life today.

 * * *

     So by the time I went to law school, I think I understood that epic line from Good Will Hunting:  ‟You dropped $150 grand on a [***] education you coulda got for $1.50 in late charges at the public library.‟  

     Okay, maybe that goes little too far.  I am absolutely certain that my undergraduate education – an embarassment of riches in an of itself – prepared the fertile intellectual ground in which my post-college reading program blossomed.  In fact, perhaps this reading list (which is not exhaustive, by the way) illustrates what the very best education is supposed to do: set you on a journey that lasts the rest of your life.  I may be a homebody now, but I love this traveling life. 

Ready to Receive a Free Gift?
January 10, 2020

     Energy scientists have calculated that the amount of energy striking the earth‛s surface in the form of sunlight in a single hour is roughly equivalent to the amount of energy we modern humans collectively consume in a year from all other sources (fossil fuels, nuclear, hydroelectric, etc.) combined.  

     Think about it: all that free energy falling on us like grace, and we‛re not (yet) prepared to receive it, at least not efficiently.  Unlike plants, we humans cannot run directly on the sun‛s energy.  Alas, we do not photosynthesize.  As a result, our very existence is dependent on those things that do.  We need plants to mediate for us – to stand between us and the sun and convert its energy to something we can use.

* * *

     A note on photosynthesis, by the way: it‛s a bloody miracle.  You remember how it works from fourth grade science class, right?  A plant captures sunlight in its leaves or blades, in little pockets called chloroplasts, then combines the sunlight with air, water, and soil nutrients – and turns it into food for itself.  We might as well call it Transubstantiation.

* * *

     So one of the great challenges of our time – arguably the great challenge of our time – is how to make ourselves better recipients of sunshine, the free gift of the solar system.  There are scientists working on the high-tech end of the project, of course, with the development of solar panels and battery storage technology.  There are also scientists like Allan Savory and Dr. Allen Williams, and a host of others, who are working on more low-tech (but still scalable) strategies that involve orchestrating the movement of ruminant animals to increase the solar-capture capacity of earth‛s grasslands, which account for 20% to 40% of the world‛s land surface depending on how they are defined.  The data collected to date suggest that these animal-based strategies (alternately referred to as management-intensive grazing, holistic planned grazing, or adaptive grazing), can turn grasslands into massive sites for sequestration of atmospheric carbon, thus mitigating the effects of climate change while simultaneously improving soil health and fertility (which, ironically, increase with the addition of carbon).  And those are just the first-line benefits.

     We‛re not there yet, though.  The scientists must continue their important work, on both the high-tech and low-tech ends of the spectrum, and everywhere in between.  But the rest of us don‛t have to wait around to get in the game.  I, for one, am fascinated – indeed, perhaps obsessed – with putting myself as close as I can to the beginning of the sun‛s energy chain.  If I can‛t photosynthesize, then I need to work on getting my energy as directly as I can from the real-time photosynthesizers.  This is no small task, but one worth some serious thought and action.  How do I make myself more ready and able to receive the free gift that surrounds me?

The Cost of Attention
January 9, 2020

     Attention.  To pay attention is first to attend.  It is to show up, reach out, lean in, be present. The down payment on attention is attendance.

     To attend is first to tend.  It is to care for, to look after, to watch over, to stand by – and to form the habit of doing so over time.  We tend gardens, campfires, sick kids and aging parents.  In Middle English, the word was tenden, meaning to stretch, spread, or direct oneself in a particular direction.  It‛s where we get our word "tendency" today – a pattern of repeated action.  The Middle English usage hearkened back to the Latin tendere, meaning to extend and stretch oneself purposely and with aim.  And to stretch oneself in this way requires the suppleness implied in the Latin root for all of these words, tener, meaning "soft."

     So to tend – and thus to attend and pay due attention – is to practice and to preserve in oneself a certain tenderness, literally.  It is to be curious, receptive, open, pliable, susceptible to new information, responsive to new circumstances.  At bottom, it is to be vulnerable, both to wonder, mystery, joy and love, and to change, to pain, to loss, to grief.

     No wonder we don‛t want to pay attention these days.  It comes at a high cost.

What I Worry About - Part 2
January 8, 2020

     I worry about my eyesight.  I worry about my ongoing struggle with acne.  I worry about soil erosion, loss of soil fertility, and the nutrient density of food.  I worry about biodiversity and the preservation of wild spaces on the earth.  I worry about planning this year‛s hike for Emma‛s Scouts group.

      I worry about nuclear weapons and the spectre of nuclear holocaust.  I worry about planting more fruit trees on our farm.  I worry about the plastic in the oceans and the casual moral indifference that put it there.  I worry about how indifference can morph into malevolence, especially when it is borne on a tide of entitlement.  

     I worry about runaway consumerism and the blindness and helplessness it breeds.  I worry about how I will teach my children to look at difficult and interesting and beautiful things, to see the grandeur of creation despite the dulling effects of consumerism.  

     I worry about seeing the truth and telling the truth.  I worry about my tendency to look away.  I worry about missing the boat, missing the mark, missing the chance to get it right.  I worry about the student debt load that Brad and I still carry and how to give my children the opportunity to shoulder different burdens than that one.  

     I worry about running out of time.  I worry about spring planting and this year‛s growing season.  I worry about whether we‛ll get the blueberries planted this year.  I worry about my kids being bitten by snakes or falling into the pond.  I worry about the time they spend watching TV.  I worry about whether I‛m really paying due attention.

What I Worry About - Part 1
January 7, 2020

     In no particular order - no sorting, categorizing, commenting, or judgment.  Just a list, in fifteen minutes:

     Making the monthly mortgage payment, whether the kids are getting enough sleep, whether I‛m getting enough sleep, whether Brad‛s getting enough sleep.  Brad‛s heart and overall health.  Feeding the chickens, walking the dogs.  Whether I should try to kick the caffeine habit.  My carbon footprint.  The carbon miles of my food.  Bees.

     Having enough money to pay for the kids‛ college.  Whether we‛re reading enough to the kids.  How I will help them with homework when that starts.  Whether they‛re having a magical childhood.  How we will teach them responsibility and healthy risk-taking.  How they will navigate the social media landscape.  How they will navigate the social landscape.  How we‛ll pay for the goats and pigs we want to get for them.

     Flat tires on my car (we live on a dirt road).  My professional reputation.  My long-term contribution to my community.  The electric grid.  Vladimir Putin.  Oligarchs.  The long-term viability of the American experiment with self-governance.  Revitalizing self-governance at the local level, in/through both public and private organizations.  The series of unfortunate events that leads to a single shoe sitting in the middle of a heavily trafficked street.

     Entropy.  And whether I have what it takes to resist it. 

     Making the beds.  Potty training Koen.  Madeline‛s speech.  Emma.

Worth the Worry
January 6, 2020

     In one sense, I am a professional worrier.  As an attorney, I get paid to think about details.  I not only read the fine print, I research how the fine print has been interpreted in specific situations.  And when I am drafting or negotiating a new contract, I am the one creating the fine print.  In my estate planning work, I help my clients think through details and contingencies surrounding their death or incapacitation that they didn‛t even know to think about.  And when I‛m working on a contested matter or one in outright litigation, I think in great detail about the strengths and weaknesses of my opponent‛s position, in order to identify potential paths to resolution.  Sometimes there are multiple parties involved, and in those cases, it‛s like playing multiple chess games at once – lots of variables, many moving parts.  

     In short, it‛s my job to sweat the small stuff.

     But in general, I do not consider myself an anxious person.  I was fortunate as a student never to really suffer from test anxiety – perhaps in part as a function of my basic personality, perhaps also because I usually studied enough to mitigate the negative effects of anxiety.  In other words, I worried just enough to deal with the underlying source of the worry, without letting it overwhelm me.  Even today, with all my committments, responsibilities, and projects, I don‛t find myself racked with worry most of the time.  I find action to be a fairly hearty antidote to anxiety, particularly action based on sound values identified through wise counsel.  And somehow, I usually manage to find wise counsel.

     But this is not to say that my life is worry-free.  There are many things I worry about, some worth the mental, emotional, and physical cost of worrying, some not.  And just because I don‛t typically find myself paralyzed with worry over these things does not mean they are not worth examining.

     Last year, I had a series of dreams – maybe three or four of them – that all ended with me falling into a body of water, usually in circumstances where it would be difficult for me to escape.  In at least two of them, I was in a moving vehicle with other people, and the vehicle went off a bridge into the water below.  Each time, I woke up shortly after coming in contact with the water.  And in each case, I remember thinking upon waking that my subconscious must be really worried about something.  I assumed that my subconscious was just feeling the collective toll of some of my particularly thorny cases, coupled with concern over several of my community projects.  And as I  made progress or reached breakthroughs in some of those matters, these dreams subsided.

     But I had a similar one two nights ago.  No engulfing bodies of water this time, but instead a frantic attempt to get into an airport, thwarted by the fact that my belongings were unorganized, strewn all over the car I was in.  That was stressful enough, but then the driver of my vehicle started the car and left the airport.  Next thing I knew, we were on a bridge (there‛s a bridge again) that was partially under repair and only allowed one lane of traffic at a time.  To my horror, my driver aimed the car right into the oncoming line of traffic.  Fortunately, the opposing car line was nearly at a standstill, so there was no dramatic crash.  But the first few cars in the oncoming line had to peel over to let my car pass through.  Not surprisingly, we didn‛t make it very far before reaching an impasse.  Somehow, in the mildly miraculous manner of dreams, my driver turned the vehicle around and started crawling with the traffic, only to find our line met with the opposing line of traffic just a few vehicles ahead of us, at a point about two-thirds of the way across the bridge.  The lead car in my line (not my vehicle this time) again pressed into the oncoming traffic, with the nearly stationary oncoming cars peeling over as far as possible to accomodate.  The situation was frustrating certainly, but then took a darker turn.  The last thing I saw was a man in a van or bus a few vehicles ahead of me about to get crushed into the concrete side rail of the bridge as another vehicle tried to peel over for the lead car in my line.  I woke up just before that happened – but not soon enough to avoid feeling a sense of guilt about the situation, like somehow I was partially responsible for what was about to happen.

     Now, I have no special knowledge or beliefs about dream interpretation, and I am generally skeptical about claims from pop culture sources about ‟decoding‟ dreams.  But at a minimum, I find the images and emotions of this dream sufficiently startling, particularly the sense of guilt/responsibility at the end, to justify some exploration.  I‛m no psychologist, so I hesitate to try to unpack the details of this particular dream with any great deal of granularity – although that may be called for at some point.  For now, what the dream has suggested to me is a more general reflection on feelings of worry, anxiety, guilt, and responsibility.  It gives rise to this question for me:  What is worth worrying about?  This may take some time to sort out.

2020: The Year of the Microhabit

Or, The 1% Difference

January 5, 2020

     In the creative / personal growth area of my life, I have declared 2020 the Year of the Microhabit: ten minutes of yoga per day, ten minutes of meditation, ten minutes of journaling, and a microessay.  These are morning practices, which together make up Phase 1 of my overall morning routine.  (Yes, there are multiple phases.  We have a lot going on around here.)

    Brad and I are also working very hard to get the kids in bed earlier than had become our previous habit – a pattern that is taking some time to change.  But we seem to be having some real success.  I am trying, at the same time, to make sure that this bedtime routine includes reading at least two books with the little kids, who have not enjoyed as many bedtime stories (with the attendant cuddles) as Emma had by their ages.  This too is a microhabit, and a highly important one at that.  The data on the long-term benefits of reading to small children are overwhelming.

     The idea behind a ‟microhabit‟ is to harness the power of very small changes that extend and accumulate over time. If you set out to walk a mile and you diverge from your initial path at the outset by only 1%, you will find yourself over 3,730 feet away from your original path, or approximately seven-tenths of a mile, by the time you‛ve walked a full mile on your new path.  

     Of course, this is just a linear calculation, keeping constant the rate of divergence from the original path.  But most people are also familiar, at least vaguely, with the even more dramatic difference made by small but compounding changes.  If you start with a dollar and add a penny to it on Day 1 and 1% every day after that, including the previous day‛s 1% when calculating how much to add each subsequent day, your dollar will have become $37.78 by the end of a year.  And if you did the same thing with an initial starting amount of $100.00, adding a dollar the first day, $1.01 the second day, $1.02 the third day, and so on using the formula for compounding interest, you will have grown your initial $100.00 to $3,778.34 by the end of the year.  

     Now, to be fair, no one in the real world gets a daily 1% return on their investments – or at least not consistently (I suppose jumps like that may happen occasionally).  But that‛s not the point.  The point is to illustrate the power of a small change over time.  Both linear and compounding changes are profound.

     So think about this: if I have 1000 waking minutes per day (24 hours x 60 minutes = 1440 minutes, of which 440 are devoted to sleep), then ten minutes is 1% of my waking day.  Considering the difference 1% makes, what will I do with the next ten minutes?

Move Over, Odysseus
January 4, 2020

     I am a voyager, indeed.  At my latitude, 36.87̊ N, the ground under my feet is spinning around the earth‛s axis at over 800 miles per hour.  The earth, in turn, is traveling around the sun at the pace of about 1.6 million miles per day – that‛s over 66,000 miles an hour!  And if I really want to blow my mind, I think about this: our sun in orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy at an average speed over 500,000 miles an hour.  

     No wonder it feels like life goes fast – it is!  My tiny corner of the universe is careening through space at a rate I can barely comprehend, covering territory about which I know essentially nothing.

  

     But this much is clear: I am in motion.  Whether I realize it or not, whether I take stock of it or not, whether I learn from it or not, I am moving.  I move and live and breathe among the stars. I am traveling in and through space and time – and the array of possible experiences, encounters, and explorations to be had along the way is effectively infinite.  So why not take some notes and try to understand something about the journey?  

     Move over, Odysseus.  New girl just got with the program.

On Pilgrimage
January 3, 2020

     Or maybe this is a travel log.  I am on a journey, after all – a journey to discover my best self and bring forth her gifts.

   Perhaps this journey could take place anywhere.  And perhaps it will, from time to time, be augmented or engergized by travel to places far from home.  But for the most part, this is an inward journey.  Or perhaps more accurately, it is a journey unfolding in and from a particular place: our farm on the edge of Miami, Oklahoma, located in Ottawa County, the very northeast corner of this state.  The eastern edge of our farm literally abuts the city limit line.

     So, like Annie Dillard, I have anchored myself to a ceaseless flow of life, mystery, discovery – this town, these neighbors, my law practice.  All just down the hill and across the river. This is my Tinker Creek.  This is my Walden Pond.

My Yoga Retreat
January 2, 2019

     This is not a travel log.  I have not gone on a yoga retreat, and it‛s unlikely that I will do so this year – at least in the sense of some kind of yoga-centered vacation, a la Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love.  Not in the cards.  Not for this #mommylawyer.

     But I have started doing ten minutes of yoga a day.  It‛s been about three weeks since I started this regular morning practice, and I‛m starting to feel some positive effects – (re)discovering muscle groups neglected for far too long and (re)developing a stronger sense of groundedness, centered-ness, mental clarity.

     And it costs me ten minutes a day.  

     Over the course of a year, if I only stick to that amount of time (already, I‛m wanting to do more), it would add up to 3,650 minutes of yoga – or, actually 3,660 since this is a leap year!  And if I divide those 3,660 minutes by the 1,000 non-sleep minutes I have each day, that‛s over three and a half days of nothing but yoga and sleep.  That‛s starting to sound more like a retreat.

     Maybe.  But who wants to only practice yoga and sleep?  Okay, some people.  But I like to eat and read and go for walks and write, so my retreat needs something a little less daunting than yoga every waking minute. 

    If I figure, instead, on six hours of daily yoga on my hypothetical retreat, that would be 360 minutes of yoga per day.  This means that I‛m giving myself the equivalent of a ten-day yoga retreat this year, with an hour to spare! 

     That sounds well worth my ten minutes a day.