Category Archive

How does one show this needlesl’s tiny white dots and squiggles using colored pencil on white paper? With difficulty, and eventually impatience and a quick end to the attempt. Sometimes I’m just too tired to put in the effort, but I’ll have many more opportunities.

I don’t usually do New Year’s resolutions, but I’ve thought of two that would improve my life that I think I can actually carry through for an entire year.

One is to draw a leaf every day of the year. In this I was inspired by my friend Janet, who drew her way through a field guide to butterflies and posted the drawing each day. I like the field-guide approach because it skips right over the choosing. Whatever leaf is next in Audobon’s guide to trees of the western United States, I draw.

The other is to take a tech sabbath, just as Casper ter Kuile describes in his book The Power of Ritual–relevant excerpt here. Phone and computer away on Friday evening, not to be taken back out until Saturday night. I will permit myself exceptions for being on call or on family outings for which I ought to have my phone, but only to use it for necessary calls or texts (you know, the “Where are you? I thought we were meeting at Mission & Hayes at 2” type).

What about you? Do you use New Year’s for resolutions, as a rule? Have you had any particularly successful or unsuccessful ones?

Dear Republicans with a conscience,

I know you’re out there. You don’t like Trump, and you do like a functioning democracy. Your party is going to nominate him again, it seems virtually certain. So, my friends: are you going to get serious about starting a new party? And are you going to put everything you’ve got into teaming up with those of us in any party who want a free, fair election? Because it’s really on you. Without you, we may well lose everything.

I know it is really hard to be a Republican with a conscience right now. Creating a new party will probably split the conservative vote and greatly increase the odds that a Democrat will win the White House again in ’24. Opposing the Trumpers’ efforts to replace election supervisors with people who will declare Trump the winner even when he loses will drive an even deeper wedge between you and the people who were once your partymates. In the short term, it might look like you can’t win.

But look at the alternative. You’ll have to choose between Trump and the Democrat anyway, just as you did in ’20, unless you back a candidate who represents responsible conservatism. And if Trump possibly can, he is going to claim victory and create chaos, just as he did last year but probably more effectively. If he gets into office, do you think he will ever leave? If he dies in office, do you think his successor will be any different than him? We could see the end of the US American experiment in democracy. Two hundred fifty years, then devolution into a corrupt dictatorship.

You can’t afford to think about just the next election. The United States can’t afford for you to do that. The world can’t afford it. History has its eyes on you. And who knows? Maybe the middle will win. Maybe all the Democrats who think Joe Biden is a left-wing firebrand will join you in a coalition of the center. I don’t want that, because I’m an actual left-wing firebrand, but I’m willing to risk it because an election system in the hands of the January 6 apologists is such a grim prospect. What are you willing to risk?

For the love of all that is good about our country, please don’t wait. We need you, and now. Democrats are already doing what they can to stop the nightmare we glimpsed in 2020 from becoming our waking reality. The country needs you to put your muscle into it too. Are you going to do that, or just wring your hands?

In hope,

Another lover of our country

We are in Boston! We woke up yesterday in this beautiful B&B: an immediate immersion in the architecture of Victorian Boston. The skylight is stained glass.

Mookie was wowed by the opposite view. We don’t get many chances to look down stairwells like this at home.

I love the details of the woodwork.

If you’re running in the Boston Marathon, when you pass this house you have one mile to go. They have a guest each year who has run it for 20 years, and they commemorate every race on this wall.

My congregation, in their wisdom, grant me four weeks of study leave each year, during which I’m freed of my other duties (writing, leading services, going to meetings, responding to e-mail, etc.) and asked to focus, instead, on refilling my intellectual and spiritual cup. I take its status as work time seriously. However, I’m also seldom capable of reading, writing, and planning for eight hours straight. A busy study-leave day involved lots of these, interspersed with bouts of pulling weeds, cleaning the kitchen, cooking dinner, practicing the piano. (I am suddenly pondering the difference between “playing the piano” and “practicing the piano.” Hmm.) I think as I weed. Back in the house, I jump from book to book. After 30 pages of one, I turn on the computer and write a bunch of childhood memories, a project I’m undertaking for my parents and any other family members who might be interested one day. Then I go on to another book.

So study leave activity is pretty indistinguishable from reading for pleasure, except that I’m more conscious of my choices, and rereading Agatha Christie is strictly not included. Yesterday, when I was mostly reveling in having a day when I had neither to preach nor to study, I read half of The Anthropocene Reviewed, a book of essays by the novelist John Green. Pure pleasure to read, but also absolutely chock-full of “that’ll preach” nuggets (though this is undercut somewhat by the fact that Green has preached on them first, and beautifully). So: was that a study leave day? Sure. Kind of. Whatever.

Earlier in the day, I read an essay and a half in Keeping an Eye Open, a book about art that I came across while browsing the public library’s online catalog and took out because it’s about art and it’s by Julian Barnes, whose novels I’ve liked. But Barnes and I got off to a bad start when I read his table of contents. White European men, every single one, though he crosses the pond along with his final artist, Claes Oldenburg, who was born in Sweden but emigrated to (gasp!) the United States. No one from the more than half of the world that isn’t male, or the more than 90 percent that isn’t European. Okay, Amy, calm down, I told myself. You’re not going for a comprehensive introduction to art; you’re peeking into one person’s mind, and this mind loves 19th-century French artists. So do you, so chill. It won’t hurt you to dip into Gericault and Bonnard. He’s a good writer. And at least he doesn’t write about Renoir.

I told myself all of that, and then I started reading, and his tone was soooo annoying. Arch, snide, obsessed with rating things as worthy or unworthy. Going back to John Green after that was like hanging out with your best friend, who just happens to be the Dalai Lama, after enduring a forced afternoon tea with your most supercilious high school teacher, where he was commenting dismissively on the outfits of everyone else in the tea shop, and all the scones were sprinkled with caraway seeds. The lovely thing about Green’s book is that, while it is literally a series of reviews, each ending with a one- to five-star rating, he doesn’t seem judgmental at all. He writes with love, humor, and above all that form of honesty that isn’t so much about revealing the truth of things, but revealing the truth about oneself. I guess you’d call it humility.

I’ve been a bit short in the pandemic projects department. Oh, I helped a lot with the art room, but Joy was the project manager. Meanwhile, from what I read, others learned how to bake bread, or organized their houses top to bottom in accordance with what brought them joy. Our diagonal-backyard neighbor has remodeled every room of their house, from the sound of things. Me, I’ve pretty much just kept on doing what I do.

But today I completed one of those long-intended projects. Behold: all of the recipes we’ve clipped from newspapers, printed out from websites, or jotted down on bits of paper over the course of decades, beautifully organized into categories and subcategories. They fill five binders. I feel very accomplished, and also hungry.

My study leave was originally going to begin on Tuesday, three days ago. It has been harder than usual to wrap up my work (and there are still a few loose ends), but today has truly been a study day. I’m quite happy with how I worked self-care into it:

Over breakfast, read The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Patricia Williams

Walked to and from my haircut, listening to a Spanish audiobook (Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal, since reading a book I know very well is excellent listening practice). Exercise, grooming and Spanish practice in one fell swoop! Sadly, my Fitbit is MIA, but it was about four miles.

Picked up a pile of books at the library on the way back. Now reading Unrig, one of two books from World Citizen Comics I borrowed.

Oh right, I also stopped at Dog-Eared Books and bought a book for my dad (he reads this blog so that’s all I’m saying), a Colson Whitehead book I hadn’t heard of (Apex Hides the Hurt) and a book that I have read before but want to reread, How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe by Charles Yu. I listened to it on audiobook but I have wanted to read it again ever since, preferably with the ability to flip back through the pages. The last two might go with me on vacation; they’re fairly light.

And now I’m going to take Unrig out into the back yard and enjoy the garden.

Like many people, we are once again venturing into the world of Travel this summer. We’re fortunate: we’re all vaccinated, and being that we spent little money on camps and none on travel last summer, and aren’t spending any on camps this summer, we can afford a couple of weeks in beautiful places. We’ll be flying to Boston, and after a couple of days there, driving up to Waitsfield, Vermont, for four days, then to Harpswell, Maine, for a week. Then it’s four days in Connecticut before returning to Boston for the flight home. I can’t wait.

I do all the driving in the family, and it will be quite a lot of driving (punctuated by long stretches of doing nothing in a tiny town), but I love this kind of driving, seeing places that, if not actually known to me, are deeply familiar, and very beautiful. New England is my homeland. I know the shapes of the hills, the architecture of the houses, the inimitable green of the trees, and the sounds of the birds. And we’ll take the federal highways and other smaller roads more than the interstates, to make the most of the time on the road and greatly increase the opportunities to stop at roadside attractions. Leominster, Mass.: grave of the man persecuted for his beard! Brattleboro, VT: eat lunch by the West River while checking out the resident sea serpent! Lincoln, NH: state historical marker noting the spot where Barney and Betty Hill were abducted and probed by aliens! (TMI, Barney and Betty.)

But first, a week-plus of study leave. I have a pile of books to read and time in which to read them.

I’m seeing a lot of debate about racial and ethnic representation in In the Heights. I don’t doubt the merits of the arguments, and I can’t judge them until I’ve seen the movie myself. Something I can judge, though, is whether we usually examine racial representation with such immediacy and thoroughness. Here are a few movies that have received considerable praise in the past few years without much public comment about their racial and ethnic representation:

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Director/writer, star, and leading actors all white non-Latinx.

The Irishman. Director, writers, and leading actors all white non-Latinx. (Also mostly men, but that’s another post.)

Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood. Director/writer, leading actors all white non-Latinx.

Downton Abbey. Um, yeah.

And now there’s In the Heights. Director: Asian-American. Writers: Latina and Latino. Stars and leading actors all Latinx and/or African-American. In the trailer I saw, everyone who spoke was a person of color–not a white non-Latinx in the lot. It was exhilarating. I should have known right then that it would come under the microscope.

I’m glad we are asking questions about the colorism and racism in Latinx cultures and how that shows up in the few, oh so few, movies by and about Latinx folks. But I would like to know why movies by and about white people so often get a pass.