I hated the tears.  Hated the helplessness of them. Two weeks after the U.S. election, and they were still coming. And then a friend emailed me saying “I’d love to treat you to a poem just written by a brilliant young woman I know.”

It was signed only with initials: e.c.c.  I had no idea who e.c.c. was. But I knew the moment I saw the first lines that this what I needed. Enough with the tears. This spirited slam poem had me cheering. It’s what got me moving again.

REVENGE

Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war.

I could’ve swung either way, but now I’m definitely spending
the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism;
I’m gonna eat all your guns. Swallow them lock stock and barrel
and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table;

I’ll give birth to an army of mixed-race babies
with fathers from every continent and genders to outnumber the stars
My legion of multiracial babies will be intersectional as fuck
and your swastikas will not be enough to save you,

because real talk, you didn’t stop the future from coming.
You just delayed our coronation.
We have the same deviant haircuts we had yesterday;
we are still getting gay-married like nobody’s business
because it’s still nobody’s business;
there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic
for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing.
And that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it:

we didn’t manifest the mountain by speaking its name,
the buildings here are not on your side just because
you make them spray-painted accomplices.
These walls do not have genders and they all think you suck.
Even the earth found common ground with us in the way
you bootstrap across us both.

Oh yeah: there will be signs, and rainbow-colored drum circles,
and folks arguing ideology until even I want to punch them
but I won’t, because they’re my family,
in that blood-of-the-covenant sense.
If you’ve never loved someone like that
you cannot outwaltz us, we have all the good dancers anyway.

I’ll confess I don’t know if I’m alive right now;
I haven’t heard my heart beat in days,
I keep holding my breath for the moment the plane goes down
and I have to save enough oxygen to get my friends through.
But I finally found the argument against suicide and it’s us.
We’re the effigies that haunt America’s nights harder
the longer they spend burning us,
we are scaring the shit out of people by spreading,
by refusing to die: what are we but a fire?
We know everything we do is so the kids after us
will be able to follow something towards safety;
what can I call us but lighthouse,

Of course I’m terrified. Of course I’m a shroud.
And of course it’s not fair but rest assured,
anxious America, you brought your fists to a glitter fight.
This is a taco truck rally and all you have is cole slaw.
You cannot deport our minds; we won’t
hold funerals for our potential. We have always been
what makes America great.

And who is e.c.c?  She’s Elisa Chavez, co-organizer of the Rain City Slam. Three weeks later, she’d bring down the house at Town Hall Seattle with her performance of this poem, doing for 900 others what she did for me. And yes, I post the poem here with her permission, in the hope that it does for you what it did for me as we move into the New Year: with spirit, with resolve, and dammit, with joy. — Lesley

April 5, 2016 publication.  Riverhead Books.
And already available for pre-order here, here, and here!

The cover of this week’s Charlie Hebdo leaves me speechless, in a good way.  And in tears too.  (And yes, it is indeed deeply Islamic in spirit.)

People experience awe in very different ways. One person’s exhilarating glimpse of something infinitely grand can be another’s nightmare, to be denied, even exiled from consciousness.

This happened some years ago, before the ubiquity of smartphones.  It was dawn, the midsummer sun not yet risen, as I sailed with a friend out of Neah Bay, the small native American township at the northwest tip of the United States. I stood at the helm as my companion huddled over charts down in the cabin, plotting our course across the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca where it opens up into the Pacific. The sea was cutting short and choppy as the incoming ocean swell came up against the outflow of the strait, but I was suffused with a feeling of calm. We were the only boat in sight, the only sounds the water against the hull and an occasional flap of the sail. The world, at that moment, was perfect. And then it became more so.

The sun began to rise over the mountains to the east – a large, fuzzy sun, the color of a white daffodil. Mesmerized by its slow ascent, I waited for the moment when it would detach itself from the mountain ridges and assume a perfect, independent roundness. Except it didn’t. Just when I expected to see clear sky between sun and mountains, there seemed instead to be something beneath the sun, pushing it upward, and I realized that there were now two suns rising — two suns of equal size, conjoined, one on top of the other. “A sun dog!” I shouted.

My friend came running up from below, took one look, and froze. “That shouldn’t be happening. That can’t be happening,” he shouted, adamantly refusing to believe the testimony of his own eyes. “That’s impossible!”

I tried to tell him that somewhere, some time, I had read an account of just such a twinned sunrise (in a novel? a short story? I’ve searched since, but never been able to find it again). But he’d have none of it. Instead, he scrambled down to the cabin to bring up an armful of meteorology books, and with his back resolutely set to the splendor of the sky behind him, started leafing frantically through them. “See!” he said, jabbing at a page. “It can’t be a sun dog. A sun dog is a parhelion, a much smaller mock sun, and they come in pairs, at an angle to the real sun. Not this… this abomination!”

Abomination?  I’d never expected to hear that biblical word from this eminently rational intellectual – a pastor’s son turned insistent atheist. “Can’t you see?” he wailed. “Something awful is happening, against all the laws of nature.” I’m not a hundred percent sure if he used the phrase “end of the world” — surely not, though it seems to me he did, and he trembled as though some form of apocalypse was in progress.

I admit I was no help. “Just look!” I kept saying. But he only dashed back down into the cabin for shelter from the sky, leaving me alone to watch as it became still more extraordinary. The lower sun assumed a deeper color and more definite form as it rose, and as the upper one faded, a thick pillar of white light took shape between the remaining sun – the real sun — and the mountaintops. It occurred to me that it may have been as well that my friend was below deck: a pillar of light was so damn biblical. And then that in turn gave way to a huge double rainbow in an ellipse around the risen sun, and I could only stand there shaking my head and laughing, tears in my eyes, knowing that I would never again witness a sunrise as stunningly eerie and beautiful and grand as this. Not even my companion’s panic could change that.

Long after that friendship’s inevitable dissolution, I occasionally searched meteorology sites online. My companion had been right in that most sun dogs are indeed much smaller images at an angle to the sun, but I did eventually find a couple of photographs of two suns, even if not quite conjoined, and horizontal rather than vertical.  I also found explanations of how the acutely angled light of the sun is refracted when layers of ice crystals form barely visible low-lying fog in the chill early-morning air, acting as a kind of mirror.  I could now explain how come I’d seen what I saw. And yet the explanation did nothing to diminish the splendor of the memory. Or the experience of pure wonder. Or the knowledge that what had delighted me, had terrified another.

If you haven’t yet heard of it, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to the Ravel/Unravel project.  “Unravel your assumptions” is their motto.  And they’re asking you to help them ravel your unraveling into something wonderfully new — “a multimedia exploration of the tapestry of religious and spiritual identities that make up our communities and our world.”  (See the video below.)

Begun a year ago by Project Interfaith in Omaha, Ravel/Unravel is an invitation:  “We’re exploring the tapestry of religious and spiritual identities that make up our communities and the complexities of how we construct and deconstruct identity.  We invite you to view the stories that make up RavelUnravel and add to the movement by sharing your own.”

Close to a thousand people have taken up that invitation so far.  And it’s fun to do.  Just turn on the camera in your phone or your computer, follow the prompts on the website, and upload your answers.  Yes, I’m already there, part of a rainbow gathering of age and gender, ethnicity and nationality, faith and spirituality, including (but not limited to) Christians, Muslims and Jews of all denominations, Hindus and Buddhists and Sikhs, agnostics and atheists and secular humanists, Native Americans and pantheists.

The questions you’re prompted to speak to (reasonably briefly!):

1. What is your first name?

2. What is your religious or spiritual identity and why do you identify as such?

3. What is a stereotype that impacts you based on your religious or spiritual identity?

4. Have you found your community welcoming of your chosen religious or spiritual path? Why or why not?

5. Is there anything else you would like us to know about you and your religion or belief system?

My advice:  don’t overthink it, just do it.  And enjoy it.  As the director of Project Interfaith says here:  “This isn’t about theology;  this is about community.”

–

Here’s my review of Richard Rodriguez’ “Persian carpet of a book” in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Yes, it’s a rave.

No, I’ve never met him.

Yes, I’d love to:

On rare occasion, a writer makes a reviewer’s life hard. Richard Rodriguez’s Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography has to be celebrated as one of those occasions.

The deep pleasures of such a book defy the usual capsule account. Instead you want to read sentences and whole passages aloud as I’ve been doing over cafe and dinner tables the past few weeks – “Listen to this!” You want to press “Darling” on others as a gift of friendship, judiciously picking whom to share it with lest you expose Rodriguez to pedants who can’t fathom the way his mind works.

“I did not intend to write a spiritual autobiography,” he writes in the foreword, and I’m glad to say that despite the subtitle (an editorial addition, I suspect), he hasn’t. This is something infinitely more supple – a rich tapestry, a Persian carpet of a book. True, it’s framed as an exploration of his own Catholicism post-9/11, when he realized that “Christianity, like Judaism, like Islam, is a desert religion, an oriental religion, a Semitic religion, born of sinus-clearing glottal consonants, spit, dust, blinding light,” and began to wonder how he and the “cockpit terrorists” could worship the same Abrahamic God.

But Rodriguez’s faith is light-years away from the deadening dogma of “mitered, bearded, fringed holy men.” As he investigates “the ecologies of the holy desert” – specifically the Judean desert – what he creates instead is more like an ecology of the soul. And unlike the desert, it teems with life.

St. Francis, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, Pope John Paul II, Cesar Chavez, Keats, William Randolph Hearst, Moses, Warhol, Herbert Hoover, Dorothy Day, Shelley – a short list of the roster of personalities jostling shoulders as they wander in and out of the virtual salon of Rodriguez’s mind, where San Francisco is “the mystical, witty, sourdough city,” Las Vegas is “disarmingly innocent,” and Jerusalem’s multiple archaeological layers are “vertiginously sunken – resentments and miracles parfaited.”

His writing is suffused with such little epiphanies, words and images springing to fresh life: His Mexican mother’s ojalá, “God willing,” as a Spanish borrowing from the Muslim inshallah; yellow tulips “closed and as thumpable as drumsticks” outside a Vegas hotel as a friend dies of AIDS in a nearby hospice; Picasso’s division of the female face “into competing arrondissements – one tearful, one tyrannical – like the faces of playing-card Queens.”

But at the heart of this book are women. Rodriguez – gay, Catholic Rodriguez – loves women. Not the way many men say they do, with a sexual twinkle in their eye, but deeply and gratefully. The stand-alone masterpiece of the title chapter starts with that “voluble endearment exchanged between lovers on stage and screen” (Noël Coward‘s “sequined grace notes flying up” like “starlings in a summer sky”), touches among other things on the use of habeebee among Arab men (“In a region of mind without coed irony, where women are draped like Ash Wednesday statues … men, among themselves, have achieved an elegant ease of confraternity and sentimentality”), and builds to the central take on how much the three “desert religions” need women to survive (“Somewhere in its canny old mind, the Church knows this. Every bishop has a mother.”).

Rodriguez depends on women “to protect the Church from its impulse to cleanse itself of me.” It was women who stood against the arid maleness he sensed as a child: “Outside the Rodriguez home, God made covenants with men. Covenants were cut out of the male organ. A miasma of psychological fear – fear of smite, fear of flinty tools, fear of lightning – crackled in God’s wake. Scripture began to smell of anger – a civet smell. Scripture began to smell of blood – of iron, of salt.”

He writes movingly of his schoolteachers, the Sisters of Mercy – movingly, yet with a wry, clear eye. A single sentence evokes a whole Irish immigrant world: “Most of the women who swelled the ranks of missionary orders had left peat-fumed, sour-stomached, skinny-cat childhoods behind.” That wry eye notes their “burqa-like habits” – perfect! – which “lent them protection in the roustabout world, also a bit of romance.” These women in teaching and hospital orders, he writes, were the forerunners of feminism, “the least sequestered women imaginable.”

The specific “darling” here is a newly divorced friend, and the whole chapter is in a way a conversation with her – an extended love letter, really – leading up to this stunning conclusion: “I cannot imagine my freedom as a homosexual man without women in veils. Women in red Chanel. Women in flannel nightgowns. Women in their mirrors. Women saying, Honey-bunny. Women saying, We’ll see. Women saying, If you lay one hand on that child, I swear to God I will kill you. Women in curlers. Women in high heels. Younger sisters, older sisters; women and girls. Without women. Without you.”

Even the most flinty-hearted reviewer could only melt at that.

As Nick Kristof put it, “Malala is defined not by what the Taliban did to her, but by the power of her response.”

This week, she left even Jon Stewart speechless:

I love the fact that yesterday, the day he won the Nobel Prize in physics, Peter Higgs couldn’t be found.  He was off “somewhere in Scotland” with no cell phone, no email, no address.  That, I think, is winning in style.

Higgs is the father, as it were, of the Higgs boson, aka “the God particle.”  As you might suspect, it wasn’t him who gave it so grandiose and eye-catching a nickname.  That was a colleague in search of a selling book title, who later said that what he really wanted to call it was “the goddamn particle.”

Not being a physicist, I’ve had trouble figuring out exactly what this boson is — in fact, what any boson is.  (Not that physicists have had it any easier:  it took ten thousand of them 53 years to follow up on Higgs’ first theoretical paper until they proved the boson’s existence just last year — after sifting 2,000 trillion subatomic fireballs through CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.  Yes, two thousand trillion — that’s why it’s large.)

But then lo and behold, this morning:  epiphany!  Denis Overbye at the NYT described the Higgs boson in terms I can almost grasp, along with a short video he begins this way: “The Higgs boson is not for the faint of heart.  It’s tough stuff, even for physicists.”

Gulp.  But gird up your loins, because this is worth it.  It brims with enticing ideas to play with — a grand portal to the intersection of physics and metaphysics.

The Higgs was the last missing ingredient of the Standard Model, a suite of equations that has ruled particle physics for the last half-century, explaining everything from the smell of a rose to the ping when your computer boots up.

According to this model, the universe brims with energy that acts like a cosmic molasses, imbuing the particles that move through it with mass, the way a bill moving through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming more and more ponderous and controversial.

Cosmic molasses.  Am into that.

Without the Higgs field, many elementary particles, like electrons, would be massless and would zip around at the speed of light. There would be no atoms and no us.

For scientists, the discovery of the Higgs (as physicists call it) affirmed the view of a cosmos ruled by laws of almost diamond-like elegance and simplicity, but in which everything interesting — like us — is a result of lapses or flaws in that elegance.

You can see why I love this.  It’s an intensely esthetic idea — an intensely existential, philosophical and psychological one too — in which flaws and imperfections are exactly what makes life interesting. There’s a touch of kabbala in it (real kabbala, not Madonna red-string theory).  A good dose of Spinoza, perhaps.  And a marvelous challenge to the naive and pernicious idea of human perfectibility.

At the heart of the physicists’ quest, Overby continues, was

an ancient idea, the concept of symmetry, and how it was present in the foundations of physics but hidden in the world as we experience it. In art and nature, something is symmetrical if it looks the same when you move it one way or another, like a snowflake rotated 60 degrees; in science and math, a symmetry is something that does not change when you transform the system, like the length of an arrow when you turn it around or shoot it.

All fundamental forces were the result of nature’s trying to maintain symmetries, physicists realized — for example, the conservation of electric charge in the case of electromagnetism, or the conservation of momentum and energy in the case of Einstein’s gravity. But…

By a process called symmetry breaking, a situation that started out balanced can wind up unbalanced.  Imagine, for example, a pencil standing on its tip; it will eventually fall over and point only one way out of many possibilities. The mass of the boson can be thought of as the energy released when the pencil falls.

“The energy released when a pencil falls.”  There’s poetry here, and I’ve only sampled it, so read the whole article (it’s misleadingly headlined — hello, NYT editors? — so scroll down to paragraph 10 and read on from there), and let the imagination soar…

It’s the 50th anniversary of that powerful, enduring speech, and somehow I want to cry.

There is so much dreaming still to be done.

And so much pressure to abandon those dreams.  To sleep so deep that we forget how to dream.  To wake with no awareness of ever having had one.

Easy to be cynical and say the obvious:  dreams aren’t reality.  But isn’t that just an excuse for inaction?  A different reality is not possible if you cannot imagine it.  If you cannot imagine peace, or friendship, or even simply absence of conflict, you will not act towards it.  You will be a passive bystander in your own life and that of the world around you.  You will accept the status quo, however bad it is.  Your lack of dreams will become your waking nightmare.

In June, I said that if we call something impossible, we act in such a way that we make it so.  I stand by that.  I stand by the vital human ability to defy nightmare and to insist on dreams, on different possibilities.

Even as we know we will never fully achieve them, the very least we can do is try.

Forget cat and dog videos!  Elephant joy is where it’s at.

This has been making me smile all day:

There I was, agnostic Jewish me, eager as a teen music fan to meet an Episcopal bishop at Town Hall Seattle on Monday night, to shake his hand and thank him for his courage.

Then Hurricane Sandy intervened.  The bishop’s flight was canceled, so I went home and read his new book, God Believes in Love:  Straight Talk About Gay Marriage.

Which is how come I can now tell you that if you can read this book and not fall in love with Bishop Gene Robinson, head of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire, then there is something seriously amiss with the state of your soul, let alone your heart and your mind.

Robinson was married – to a woman – for 15 years.  Now he’s married again – to a man.  This second marriage has lasted 25 years, and has led to multiple death threats against him, forcing him at times to wear a bullet-proof vest in public.  It’s also created an absurd rift within the Episcopal church.   And it’s brought out the big guns in his support.  There are only two blurbs on the back of this beautifully lucid book, but both are from Nobel Peace Laureates:  one from a guy called Obama, and the other from a guy called Tutu.

Robinson directly addresses ten FAQs on marriage equality, among them:  “Why should you care about gay marriage if you’re straight?”

His answer, and mine:  “It’s the civil rights issue of our time.”  Why did white activists put themselves in the line of fire in the 1960s?  They weren’t black;  they could always have claimed that it wasn’t “their” battle.  Except of course it was.  As Emma Lazarus put it – she of “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” – “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”

Besides, if you think gay rights don’t affect your straight life, you’re living in as alternative a universe as Mitt Romney.  As Robinson points out, “Orthodox Jews, conservative Muslims, and  fundamentalist Christians are just as likely  to raise a gay son or daughter as any other mother or father.”

Think about that:  Wherever you are as you read this, and no matter what you think about same-sex marriage, chances are that at least one person close to you – someone you know and love and wish everything good for — is gay.  So what do you wish for that person if you call the love they feel for someone else an abomination?  The only abomination involved here is in calling love an abomination.

Still think “This isn’t my fight” because you’re not gay?  Robinson has this to say:

No it isn’t.  Unless you care about the kind of society we have.  Unless you want the society of which you are a part to be a just one.  Unless you believe that a free society, not to mention a godly religion, should fight injustice wherever it is found…  Unless you care about our children.  Unless fairness matters to you.  Unless violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people concerns you.  Unless ‘liberty and justice for all’ is something you believe applies to all citizens.

Are you in love with him yet?

Orchestral flash mob: