Find a heart that will love you at your worst, and arms that will hold you at your weakest.
Anonymous

All the way into town, Griffin cried. “I don’t want to go, Grandma. I really don’t want to go.” We were making the 9-mile journey into town to meet his mother who would take him to the dentist. His upper lip was swollen, and through the rearview mirror, I cringed at his duck-like profile. Though he had not complained, the fact that he’d eaten only two bites of pancake and his forehead felt warm to the touch gave him away. Something was wrong.

“But I don’t want to go. I really, really, really don’t want to go,” he insisted. Over and over again, like a mantra, he pleaded. As we pulled into the parking lot where we would meet his mom, he crawled from the backseat over the console into my lap. I wrapped my arms around him and let him cry. I had exhausted any words of comfort. There was nothing more I could say. Words were cheap; arms were better.

We rely on words for comfort, particularly with boys. Big boys don’t cry. Big boys are brave. Big boys muscle through. Personally, I like words and have relied heavily on them to carry me through most situations. I suppose I have believed that if I just kept talking, if I could find the right words, I could fix things, heal hurts, and solve problems. Yet the older I get, the more I have become painfully aware that, too often, words fall short.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood writes:

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings . . . but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.

I, too, want a real body to put my arms around. Sitting there in my car with my arms wrapped as tightly as I dared around Griffin, I was embodied, weighted with purpose, tethered to someone and something so much greater than myself. Arms are better–for those being held and for those doing the holding. Arms provide tangible means of comforting and of being comforted. Words may be good, but arms are so much better.

In his novel, Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin writes:

She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.

There have been so many times when I have held a friend or family member’s baby and felt the poignant absence of my own babies whom I held long after they had fallen asleep. In the middle of the night when the moon shone through the window, a sleeping baby in my arms, peace washed over and through me. When we fit someone into our arms, it’s often this way. We relish the gush of love and peace, while we simultaneously feel an emptiness born from absence. Still, who would trade those exquisite moments when we meld with another, when our arms pull another into the sanctuary of love.

As a young college instructor, I once took a coed to my home over the lunch hour. In her essay, she had confessed that she had been sexually abused by her father and her brothers for much of her adolescence. Anguished, I reread her words, honest, clear words that reeked with fear and pain. How could I bring her into the cubicle of the office I shared with four others? How could we talk about her experiences in such a public place where only a bulletin board provided us with some sense of privacy? Naively, but with the best intentions, I offered to make lunch for her in my home. My children would be at school, and my husband was at work. We would be alone and free to talk–and to cry. There, I would be free to put my arms around her as she wept.

When I returned to school, a colleague asked where I had gone during lunch. Without revealing much, I admitted that I had taken a student to my home to discuss some private issues she had painfully revealed in her latest essay. You took her to your house? And you were alone with her? Taken aback, I could only affirm that I had done just that. As a seasoned educator who was legally savvy, she warned: You don’t want to be alone with students. You don’t know what they might accuse you of later, and you have to protect yourself at all times.

I understand that some educators, coaches, employers, and others in power abuse the healing nature of appropriate touch. Their arms are not safe refuges; their intent is not to comfort. Regrettably, because of their abuse, it is now too risky to put your hand on another’s shoulder or your arm around them. Arms may be the right remedy–perhaps the only remedy–but they must remain passively at our sides while we offer what words of comfort and assurance we can muster. The world we now live in is not always arms-friendly.

Imagine all the wondrous things your arms might embrace if they weren’t wrapped so tightly around your struggles, writes author Sheila M. Burke. Sadly, I confess to having lived too much of my life with my arms wrapped tightly around my own struggles. Even my body language often gives me away. My arms encircle my frame, as if to hold myself together, as if to keep my struggles from showing their ugly faces. There are certainly so many wondrous things that I might have embraced. But I didn’t. My arms were too full of myself to take in anything or anyone else. There were other willing arms to take in all my pain, doubt, and fear. I turned inward, though, sadly proud of my willingness to tough it out on my own. When I might have stepped into God’s loving arms, I rationalized that such comfort was for others but not for me. If I had not had my arms wrapped so tightly around my own pain, I might have walked blessedly into the arms of mercy.

In her book of poetry, Turquoise Silence, Indian poet and freelance writer, Sanober Khan writes of the refuge that is found in a mother’s arms:

i want to
stay curled and cosied
and chocolated….forever
in my mother’s arms.

Curled and cosied and chocolated in your mother’s arms? Yes, please! In foxholes, at work and at rest, in board rooms and bedrooms, there is probably not one of us who has longed to curl into our mother’s arms. If only for a moment, we dream of the comfort that only these arms can bring us. If just for a second, we project our wearied souls into arms that offer–as Robert Frost once described poetry–a momentary stay against confusion.

As I held my grandson in the car that day, I realized that I was but a substitute for his mother who would soon scoop him into her arms and who would, without saying a word, bring solace to his weary six-year old soul. Though the dentist would later pull his three front teeth and Griffin would arch in fear against any attempts to administer the “happy gas,” even in the midst of such trauma, he understood that his mom was there with open arms that would take him home.

There is sanctuary, indeed, in arms that will hold you at your weakest. As I find myself increasingly at a loss for words, I plan to use my arms more–to love, to comfort, to offer a momentary stay against confusion. And I know one boy who fits into them perfectly, and always will.

What if there were truly opportunities to learn? For its own sake, for the sheer joy of it, for something other than for earning a score, a win, or for performing or promoting something. What if you could send your daughter to learn ballet for its own glorious sake? The arabesques, pliés, grande jetés—all danced in a simple black leotard with others who marvel that their arms and legs can take on such exquisite lives of their own. What if you could send your son to learn football for the joy of playing it? Running, kicking, carrying the ball—or not—all amidst teammates who fall into breathless, spent heaps at the end of each play.

What if your daughter didn’t have to buy multiple (expensive) costumes for the end-of-year recital, the recital which is the driving force behind every practice from the very first day, the recital which is the be-all- and-end-all? What if your son didn’t have to worry about the game in which some would show off what they’d learned and could do, while others (many others) would sit the bench, their hands in their laps, their dreams on hold?

Don’t get me wrong: there is surely a time and place for performance and competition. And clearly there are those who take lessons or attend practices because they want to take the stage or the field. But there are also those who do not. They would like nothing more than to learn for the sake of learning. To revel in the process. To purely enjoy the experience and the people sharing it.

When I was in elementary school, I wanted to learn to play the piano, so that I could sit by myself and play the songs I loved. I could think of nothing better than holing up in our music/sewing room where I could sing and play the entire Sound of Music repertoire to my heart’s end.  When I learned that there would be a recital—gasp—at the end of the school year, my dream began to wither. During weeks to come, I agonized over every practice piece as if it could be the piece, the recital piece. At night, I had previously imagined my fingers floating over the keys as if they knew instinctively where to go to make beautiful music. But now, I could only see visions of recital disasters to come: I would trip as I made my way to the piano; I would forget the very first note and would sit in dumb fear as the audience awkwardly looked on; I would fly through my piece, my fingers congealing in a tangled, sweaty mess of disharmony. When I realized that performance was the end goal, things sadly changed for me.

As I watch my grandchildren navigate their way through childhood, I am even more painfully aware that there are few—if any—opportunities to learn for the sake of learning. The performance is the thing. The game is the real goal. I have found myself thinking about where a child could go to learn to dance, to play music or sports without the expectation of performing or competing? Is there such a place? Are there such people who offer these opportunities? Perhaps not. Sadly, most parents want to see the finished product, to get something for their time and money. They want a public showing with costumes and uniforms, accolades and talk of artistic and athletic futures. Many want to live vicariously through their children who may or may not want what their parents so desperately want for them.

If someone were to advertise lessons or practices during which kids could learn new skills, practice them for an hour with other like-minded peers, then pack up and go home, would this “sell”? Or would people scoff and declare these people crazy for thinking such programs would actually succeed?

And what about academic learning? It, too, is largely geared with the end in mind: the test, the final paper or project. After all, educators must measure student learning, must evaluate who has learned what and when. If I had a dollar for every student who said, “will this be on the test?” I would be a very, very rich woman today.  Because in their eyes, the test is all that matters. For the most part, learning is superfluous. And they have come by this belief naturally, for to a great degree, we have instilled it into them since they first entered the school doors.

Consider the eager kindergartener who has nervously but excitedly anticipated the start of school. During the second week, she is tested and found “behind” already. The phone call goes home offering (actually requesting permission for) special services for a child who has been determined at-risk. Before she could even begin to learn how to read, she has been tested and found wanting. She performed poorly, and the test verifies this. And so it begins: years of learning measured by tests.

Again, I understand the necessity of measuring learning. Having taught for 41 years, I spent more hours than I care to remember with a red pen in hand, head bent over a stack of student essays. There were so many occasions, however, when I desperately wished that I could put down the pen, push the writing rubric aside, and simply read for the sake of reading what another had written. I couldn’t help but wondering how my student writers felt. Were their essays truly the products of all they had learned or were they merely attempts to produce what they believed was expected? I knew the answer, but it wasn’t the one I wanted it to be.

In my years as an educator, I read and heard professionals and peers mourn the passing of curiosity, the death of any genuine desire to learn. Truthfully, most of my students had held funeral services for such things long before they left elementary school. Since then, they were merely complying. Learning for its own sake was a luxury they simply couldn’t afford. They set their sights, as they must, on accruing credits, maintaining or raising GPAs, and making acceptable (or in some cases, exceptional) scores on standardized tests.

Years ago when one of my daughters was a preschooler, I stood behind a one-way mirror and watched her learning in her Montessori classroom. For days when I quizzed her about what she had learned at preschool, she answered matter-of-factly, “I washed the baby.” Really, I thought. No tracing letters on worksheets? No counting to 20? But there in front of me was living proof of her claims. She walked to a shelf and removed a tray that held a small plastic tub, a baby doll, a pitcher, and a sponge. As other children chose their own activities, she carried the tray to a table, took the pitcher to a small sink, filled it to the designated line, carried it back to the table, poured it into the tub, and submerged the baby into the water. Then she proceeded to wash the baby. I stood amazed as she washed and washed and washed, fully intent upon scrubbing until she was satisfied that the baby was clean. Wholly absorbed in her work, she took no notice of her peers who were busily sorting colored beads, building towers, and pouring navy beans from one container to another. And then she was done. She carried the tub to the sink, poured out the bath water, placed the tub on the tray, and returned everything to its rightful spot on the shelf.

Dr. Maria Montessori, an Italian physician, opened her first school, Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House) in 1907. She was a passionate advocate of child-led, hands-on learning, much of which took place during long, uninterrupted periods of time. This “freedom within limits” is a trademark of the Montessori method. Dr. Montessori argued that children could sustain their focus on learning and practicing a task if they were given choices, relevant tasks, and time. Even as I write this, I cringe as I think of many teachers and coaches who are now rolling their eyes and muttering, “Yeah, right. If your kid washes the baby for days, this will really teach her how to read and do math. And get into a good college? Forget it.”

I am acutely aware that our current educational systems, as well as our athletic and artistic programs, are designed to reflect what we believe is most efficient, practical, and necessary for success in today’s world. Kids must get a leg-up before kindergarten, so they enter with an early skill set, so they’ve mastered letter and number recognition, can write their name, sit and listen without disrupting others, and generally function as good classmates. If they are interested in sports or the arts, they must learn to practice and perform, to take criticism early, to be selected—or not. And all of this training, testing, and performing on stages, athletic fields, and tests goes on and on and on. A seemingly endless progression of proving oneself before a jury of their peers, their teachers and coaches.

We do it this way because we believe it works. We believe that it produces the best dancers and football players, the best readers and problem-solvers. What if we were to seriously rethink our systems? What if there were ways to authentically differentiate learning by offering better and more choices? What if competition and performance were choices, not expectations for all? I understand that most teachers and coaches are doing their very best within the systems and programs they’ve inherited and are expected to use. But common-sense dictates that no one—and I mean NO ONE—can meet the intellectual, emotional, and physical needs of every child in a one-size-fits-all system with one-size-fits-all expectations. Almost every school or program has a mission statement that reads something like, Meeting the needs of every child, every day. Nice words that are often sadly nothing more than lipstick on a pig.

I wish that I lived in a world in which 6-year-olds could choose to participate in a flag football program that allows them to learn the skills and rules of the game without expecting them to already know them and without expecting them to compete. These types of programs would not be for everybody, I know. Still, they would be wonderful alternatives for those who dream of learning to play for its own sake. And if their parents wanted to see if they were getting their money’s worth? Well then, they could sit on the sidelines with a good cup of coffee and watch their kids learn–running and falling and giggling as they go.

In a recent Monster Mike video (my grandson’s favorite YouTube fishing celebrity), he and his fishing partner attached a GoPro (with a chip clip, no less!) to a shark’s fin. Griffin and I watched as the shark swam and the camera recorded as far as the fishing line would allow. We didn’t get to see much of anything but aquatic plants, yet the whole idea of a GoPro attached with a chip clip was pretty cool.

Coincidentally, a day later, I saw a photo of a turn-of-the-century pigeon with a miniature camera attached to its breast. Was this a hoax? I knew that pigeons were used to carry messages during war, but photographs? I investigated and found that the photo was historically accurate and that there were, indeed, camera pigeons.

Dr. Julius Neubronner, a German apothecary, submitted a patent for a new invention in 1907, a few years after the Wright brothers made their famous flight at Kittyhawk. His invention? The pigeon camera: a small, lightweight camera fitted with a harness and a timer, so that photos could be taken during flight. His invention featured a pneumatic timing mechanism which would go off at regular intervals in puffs of compressed air that would trigger the exposure. Generally, the pigeons flew in a 60-mile range, so this allowed Neubronner to collect many photos from a relatively large area.

Initially, Neubronner created the camera for his own purposes of tracking his flock of pigeons. He quickly discovered the possible commercial and espionage benefits of his invention, though, and he began showing it and selling postcards of his birds’ aerial photography at expositions all over the world.

Some have claimed that the pigeon camera was our first drone. The photos are wholly dependent on the pigeons’ flight routes and are often random, with angles awry and wing feathers framing shots. Still, in addition to photos from kites and hot air balloons, they are some of our earliest aerial photos. Neubronner’s camera pigeons gathered surveillance photos at the battles of Verdun and Somme during WWI. In the Washington D. C. Spy Museum, these birds and their early technology have their own room. Airplanes–and later drones–and their ability to take targeted aerial photos would quickly replace the camera pigeon, but for a short time, this invention allowed military forces to see behind enemy lines without leaving their positions. Some sources claim that the CIA used this technology even as late as the 1970s.

As one whose father raised and raced homing pigeons, I admit that I had never heard of Dr. Julius Neubronner and the camera pigeon. His turn-of-the-century technology rivals the GoPro attached with a chip clip to a shark fin. Griffin and I watched the Monster Mike video, waiting for another creature–a shark, squid, or octopus maybe–to appear and wow us. But for three minutes, the shark swam along the ocean floor capturing footage of plants and a few tiny (and I mean you had to look really closely to see them at all) fish.

Photographing from pigeons or sharks is a crap shoot. In the end, photographers strap expensive pieces of technology onto birds or fish who have no clue that their special mission is to find and capture specific images. In contrast to drone photography, there is something wonderfully wild about these pictures. It’s like putting your quarter into one of those toy machines with little plastic rings, key chains, and assorted small figures and hoping beyond hope that you will actually get the prize of your desire–and not another smiley face sticker. In these moments of expectation and waiting, you can imagine what you will receive. In your mind’s eye, it’s even more glorious with each re-imagining. And even if you did receive another smiley face sticker, you convince yourself that there’s always a next time. I wonder if Julius Neubronner felt this way each time he strapped a little camera onto one of his pigeons and released him or her. I like to think that he did.

I have no pigeons or sharks. Nor do I have an actual camera, save my cell phone. Just fifty yards from my house, however, there is a pen of seven chickens who have been known to escape and canvas the area. And I do have a new roll of duct tape just itching to be used. I could tape my phone onto the chest of one of these hens and see what incredible photos I could get. . . or not.

 
 Goldenrod
  
 Goldenrod takes the fields
 who wave their happy hands
 like parade queens.
 It’s all in the wrist, they say.
 A turn to the east
 and back to the west,
 a maized rhythm made certain
 by the metronome of wind.
  
 In late September, 
 I feel all my honeyed years 
 bend in the breeze--this way, 
 then that.
  
 For a moment, I slow--
 my ragged breath a sharp reminder
 of age.
 But in the next, I walk as a school girl,
 open and golden,
 the day, a gift to be unwrapped. 
 Present then past,
 this way, then that.
  
 It’s all in the wrist, 
 I say to the flaxen fields before me
 and wave my honeyed years 
 for all they’re worth. 

“Then a severe frost succeeds which prepares it to receive the voluminous coat of snow which is soon to follow; though it is often preceded by a short interval of smoke and mildness, called the Indian Summer.” Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur

Jean de Crèvecoeur, a French-American soldier who later became a farmer, first recorded the term Indian summer in his 1778 Letters From an American Farmer. We continue to use the term to describe unseasonably warm, summer-like weather that precedes the frost of winter. A short interval of smoke and mildness. For me, sometimes this interval is as good as it gets.

As I was walking the rural roads of southern Iowa last week, I noticed the recent roadside mowing. The county crews had been out for one last job, and as I walked, I plowed through thick piles of grass clippings. I couldn’t help but mourn summer’s roadside bounty: wild chicory, trefoil, Queen Anne’s Lace, tiger lilies, foxtails. Until today, when I came out of mourning and rejoiced. Summer wasn’t giving up. Summer was still showing up. God bless Indian Summer.

 
Last Mowing
  
 After the last mowing,
 the grasses shorn nearly to the earth along Mink Road,
 the wild chicory and Queen Anne’s Lace bloom quickly.
 Their slender stems hold blue violet heads and bridal bonnets
 on doll-sized versions of their summer selves.
 At three or four inches, they are no less lovely
 than they were in late June.  
 In the early days of September,
 they refuse to give in, refuse to welcome the autumn
 that is sure to come.
  
 I walk with my head lowered.
 I can’t get enough of these tiny soldiers
 who muscle through grass clippings and roadside waste.
 These are September’s heroes who have forgotten their place,
 who insist on singing even as the cottonwoods and maples
 drop their leaves.
  
 Today is not a good day to die, they say.
 Today, the world is not enough without us.
 Today, we sing. 

Sometimes, my book worlds collide, and the collision is more splendid than I could ever have imagined. Recently I bought two books: Lost Words, the only coffee table book I’ll ever own, and The Overstory, the 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestseller. Lost Words, written by Robert Macfarlane and exquisitely illustrated by Jacki Morris , celebrates—and mourns—the passing of 20 words from the natural world: acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker, dandelion, fern, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, magpie, newt, otter, raven, starling, weasel, willow, and wren. Macfarlane calls his book a spellbook for conjuring back these lost words, words that he most fears are disappearing from the language of children.

After I could open the book without being wholly consumed by the illustrations, I began to seriously consider the words that Macfarlane identifies as lost. I recall holding the book in my hands, paging from word to word, and thinking No way! Acorn??? Dandelion??? Heron??? Willow??? Living in rural Iowa, these are some of the coolest words I know and use. I have read lists of words that we are losing or have lost, words such as gallivant, kerfluffle, and hootenanny. And I admit that I could lose these words and sleep soundly. But ivy and wren? I would fight for these words, and if they succumbed to those who put them to early deaths, I would write their eulogies and lay flowers on their graves.

Conker, however, made me pause. I scrutinized the illustration of what resembled a buckeye-type nut with a prickly casing. I read the accompanying poem for clues. In the end, I googled it and discovered that conker is the seed of the horse chestnut tree (not to be confused with the sweet chestnut tree which supplies edible nuts). I admit that I have never used the word conker nor heard anyone else use it. And sadly, I admit that I rarely–if ever–use the word chestnut unless I am singing along with Nat King Cole: Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your toes. . .

The Overstory, written by Richard Powers, contains interlocking stories of 12 people who learn to truly see and value trees as ecologically and spiritually indispensable. Most of the characters become activists of some sort, and like Powers himself revealed in a Guardian profile, all find their place in a system of meaning that doesn’t begin and end with humans. The opening story centers on the American chestnut tree and the blight that destroyed the 4 billion trees that grew in the eastern U.S. At the turn of the 20th century, the American chestnut was destroyed within 40 years. Today, there is one surviving giant (recently discovered in Maine) that is 115 feet tall, the tallest known tree in North America. The tree is not technically extinct; the species has survived by sending up sprouts from stumps, but these sprouts eventually succumb to the blight, die, and return to the ground.

The American chestnut was distinctive not only for its height but for its value. Its wood was strong and rot-resistant, perfect for log cabins, posts, poles, flooring, and railroad ties. The nuts fed birds, wild animals, hogs, cattle, and people. Some have called the American chestnut the perfect tree. Until Cryphonectria parasitica, a parasitic fungus native to South East Asia, was accidentally introduced to North America. The American Chestnut Foundation claims that this blight was the greatest ecological disaster to strike the world’s forests in all of history.

So when my books worlds collided, there in the dust lay the coupling of Macfarlane’s conker and Powers’ fictional account of a lone surviving American chestnut tree (in Iowa no less). Sadly, conker may go the way of the American chestnut tree: something we remember–for a time–and seasonally celebrate in song. Both are essentially lost, and this loss may be more costly than we can imagine. This, of course, is Powers’ admonition in The Overstory. In a New York Times review of this novel, novelist Barbara Kingsolver writes that this novel intends to tell us that in fact we’re not much more than a sneeze to a bristlecone pine and that the contest for the world’s forests is every bit as important as the struggles between people.

As I walked the other morning, I speculated about the loss of words–and trees–that are an integral part of my life. If we lose the word acorn, will the oak tree be far behind? And what about willow, such a lovely word and even lovelier tree? What would my world be without oak and willow trees? Quite simply, it would be less. Less lovely and less alive.

I concede that some words should gracefully fade into that place where dying words go. Giglet, a merry, light-hearted girl, disappeared from our language (and I, for one, am eternally grateful). As did scurryfunge, a quick tidying of your house between the time you see your neighbor and the time she knocks on the door (I mean who really bothers to quickly tidy up?) Giglet and scurryfunge have left our lexicon–thankfully–and there have been few, if any, mourners.

But consider these 15 words that are used most often today:

Email
Internet
Google
YouTube
Website
Twitter
Texted
iPhone
iPad

I’d hate to think that Twitter edges out kingfisher or that YouTube replaces heather. Our language and our lives are so much richer when the words that name our flora and fauna are living, just as their species are.

Richard Powers told the Chicago Review of Books that writing The Overstory quite literally changed my life, starting with where and how I live. Powers moved from Palo Alto, California to the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee where he could live deep in the woods. Today, he admits that walking a trail has become as important to me as writing. And Powers’ new life in the woods is, no doubt, rich with growing things and the language to talk about it.

At the end of Macfarlane’s poem, “Conker”, he writes:

  Realize this (said the Cabinet-maker, the King and
  the Engineer together), conker cannot be made,
  however you ask it, whatever word or tool you use,
  regardless of decree. Only one thing can conjure
  conker--and that thing is tree. 

And so it is with acorns and buckeyes, with so many things we use and lose. Only one thing can conjure them: trees.  

 Flameleaf Sumac
 
 The county crews have poisoned the sumac.
 Around each utility pole, it makes a last stand:
 an army of scarlet fury
 amidst the season’s last green.
 The roadside is ablaze with autumn
 come too soon.
 Summer’s arteries have burst, 
 spilling its life-blood through the land.
  
 I drive to town 
 and cannot keep my eyes on the road.
 To my right and left, carmine and crimson,
 garnet and currant fill the ditches.
 There is such beauty in this dying.
 If you roll down your windows, 
 you can hear the song of sumac,
 a bright, expectant elegy that soars across the fields. 
  
 Here among the sumac, 
 I would like to make my last stand:
 a fiery finish glorious enough
 to stop traffic.
   

 Photo Shoot
 
 Your pink tulle skirt catches
 in the late summer grass
 and for a moment,
 the prairie holds you captive.
 As if a sleeping seed awakened,
 sliding, shooting upward, breaking
 the earth’s skin and standing tall,
 one honey-haired blossom
 among the wild chicory and blue stem.
  
 Your mother moves towards you 
 pressing her eye to the camera.
 Surely she sees what I do—
 your childhood untethering here,
 each gossamer piece catching the breeze
 and escaping, petal by petal,
 into this sacristy of late July.
  
 I long to frame this legacy of loveliness:
 a mother’s soft eyes,
 a daughter’s well-kept heart, 
 both eager to unfurl themselves into time
 forever backlit by a golden and forgiving sun.
  
 But even as I try to hold the moment,
 I see the light casting long shadows from the tree line,
 burnishing pink to mauve.
 And so I vow to celebrate the evening,
 the hour in which you bloomed so brightly
 that I could not mourn the child 
 you were. 

We are separated from one another by an unbridgeable gulf of otherness and strangeness which resists all our attempts to overcome it by means of natural association or emotional or spiritual union. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A wave of otherness crashed into me when the children of Bambur, Nigeria shouted baturi as my fellow mission workers and I entered their village. In the local language of Hausa, baturi translates as white man. Some children were fascinated and clamored to touch my pale skin. Some were wary and peered at me from behind trees and the dependable skirts of their mothers. Others fled, terrified at the intrusion of such an otherness.

I stood transfixed at the scene before me. I wanted to shout, But wait! I am one of you! See, I have two arms, two legs, a heart that beats just like yours! And yet, even in the throes of my deep and genuine longing to connect, I was painfully aware of the fact that, intentions aside, I was the other. I was a stranger with skin too white, eyes too blue, and a belly much too well-fed.

Author and pastor Jamie Arpin-Ricci write:

It is critical to note that our biases against the other are empowered less by our assumptions of their otherness and more by our assumptions about our own normality. 

In the weeks I spent in Nigeria, my colleagues and I found ourselves sometimes humored and sometimes aghast at what we saw and experienced. We may not have spoken the words, but our quizzical expressions and nervous chuckles barely contained the question we were dying to ask each other: Is this normal? We discovered what appeared to be hundreds of locusts floating in a plastic pail of water, locusts we were told that were intended to be eaten. Normal? We learned that the woman who cooked for us was the only working member in a family of six adults. Normal? We encountered many young girls who carried their infant brothers or sisters on their backs for entire days. Normal? As much as I wanted to convince myself that I didn’t regard my new Nigerian friends as other, my bias was fueled, as Arpin-Ricci suggests, by my assumptions about my own normality. Consciously and unconsciously, I was looking at this new world through a view-finder with an American normal default setting. And if I wanted to see the Nigerians of Jalingo, Bambur, and Jos, this clearly required the other setting.

We live with a multicultural worldview that has spawned new university courses and specialties, solicited literature from around the world to remove the white bias from prevailing anthologies, insisted on inclusion as the answer to all classrooms, neighborhoods, and institutions, and repopulated the former white casts of television series and movies. All this (and more) as a means of eradicating otherness once and for all.

This worldview has also charged that we identify and appreciate those languages, traditions, and customs that make otherness unique. Enter almost any classroom during February (Black History month), and you will find students celebrating the lives and works of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as other influential men and women of color. Two months later, you may find American students decorating their classrooms with balloons, flowers and streamers to commemorate Cinco de Mayo. And what mother–or father–hasn’t prepared some customary food or constructed a traditional costume as a part of a their children’s school project featuring another country?

Like many, I often struggle to successfully live this paradox: I should see no otherness/ I should see and value others’ uniqueness. It’s ironic that our well-intentioned desires to acknowledge and celebrate others’ uniqueness are also declarations of otherness. In rural Nigeria, it’s not uncommon for toddlers to live in orphanages until they can responsibly care for themselves and their younger siblings. This is unique yet so far from the normal we know. How do we keep a precious tension between uniqueness and otherness, so that they compliment each other and live easily in a world that is more either/or than both/and?

For lest we believe that the homogeneous nature of our lives will shield us from the problem of otherness, we should remember that it has so many forms. Consider the words of writer Donald Hall:

[O]ver the years I traveled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying–in the supermarket, these old ladies won’t get out of my way–but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.

The problem of otherness is never defined by race alone. We can be alien and other if we are older, younger, richer, poorer, more educated, less educated, urban or rural. Change the setting on the view- finder, and anyone who can’t be seen within the comfortable range of normal is other. Through my grandson’s eyes, there is something increasingly other about my refusal to do a cartwheel and my barely stifled gasps as he drives me around the yard on the four-wheeler. I’m fast becoming an extraterrestrial other who lives in the distant galaxy called OLD.

I can remember hearing my younger brother sing along with the cast of Sesame Street: One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong. . . In truth, we are taught to distinguish what is different. This is standard stuff for kindergarteners who spend countless hours bent over worksheets that direct them to circle what is different in a group of shapes, animals, numbers, things. Identifying same and different is a discrete skill we teach early and well.

In third grade, my son, who is black, had a best friend, a pale, ginger-freckled boy. When his friend’s mother asked how she would recognize Quinn at the choral concert, he replied: Oh, you’ll know him when you see him. He’s got really black hair. He may not have identified Quinn’s skin color as other, but he did identify a trait that distinguished his friend from the group and made him different. One of these things is not like the other.

In truth, there are no quick, easy solutions to the problem of otherness. It is our nature to make distinctions, to discern what is similar and what is different. Likewise, it is our nature to belong, to join a tribe of those like us. And herein lies the heart of the problem: the limits of our human natures. Holocaust victim and writer Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this all too well:

However loving and sympathetic we try to be, however sound our psychology, however frank and open our behavior, we cannot penetrate the incognito of the other man, for there no direct relationships, not even between soul and soul. Christ stands between us, and we can only get into touch with our neighbors through Him.

In Galations 5:14, we read: For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” In spite of our natures–or perhaps because of them–we are called to love our neighbors in all their otherness. Bonhoeffer knows that the only real conduit between one soul and another is Christ. In the end, all our programs and initiatives, all our best intentions and efforts will fall woefully short. And this is both bad news and good news. Our political and social systems may be destined to flounder, perhaps even to fail, but Christ offers a better way.

Others, like poet Mary Oliver, find a conduit from soul to soul and soul to world by willing entering the mystery and beauty of otherness:

I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything—other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion—that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

Like all humans before us, we will continue to struggle with the problem of otherness. We will create new programs, institute new, more inclusive language, and mandate new rules and laws as solutions. Still, I take heart that there are, indeed, better ways. But these ways require surrender to a love and a mystery that take us far beyond the limits of our own natures. In a culture where surrender is most often a sign of weakness and defeat, those who live and promote a better way will undoubtedly be cast as others.

It’s a great art to saunter! Henry David Thoreau

In the early mornings, I walk along a rural road near our house. At times, I’ve embarked upon my walks as exercise, tried to pick up the pace and power walk my way to a healthy elevated heart-rate. As the sun rose, I pumped my arms and moved with purpose. A conqueror of the road, each step an accomplishment in its own right. But on most days, I’ve failed. I’m not a power walker. I’m a saunterer.

To know that I’m in good company–perhaps the greatest company–gives me courage and inspiration. I imagine myself learning the great art of sauntering from the likes of Thoreau, my father, and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who writes:

Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts.

This is it exactly: to walk yourself into a state of well-being, into your best thoughts. Like the great saunterers before me, and those that will inevitably come after me, I’ve learned that there is a mysterious and undeniable connection between my feet and my brain. Interestingly enough, executive editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly studied ants and discovered that when it comes to walking, most of the ant’s thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It’s distributed. It’s in its legs. I’ve long thought that my thinking and decision-making may be as much in my legs as in my brain. For as I’ve walked, as I’ve heard and felt the rhythm of my feet on gravel, I’ve come to simply be. And during these times of simple being, words, images, and sometimes complete thoughts have washed over and through me. These are gifts of immeasurable worth, mysteries of great sauntering.

Father of Virginia Woolf, English author and mountaineer Leslie Stephen writes:

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season.

As a saunterer, I like the idea of turning my intellect out to play for a season. Too often, I feel constricted by an intellect at work. I long to play, long to throw syllogisms and every analytical compulsion to the wind. Loosed then, I could walk and send my intellect into the fields that have been overtaken by sunflowers. Here, amidst thousands of bright blooms, one can do some serious playing.

Naturalist John Muir saw the holiness of sauntering. He writes:

I don’t like either the word [hike] or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not ‘hike!’ Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre’, ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.

Mountains or plains, forests or fields, we ought to saunter through them reverently. Sauntering is walking on holy ground. A single thrush, a stand of Queen Anne’s Lace, a copse of willows–all sing the abiding songs of creation. Each morning, I pilgrimage To the Holy Land and count my blessings as the road unfolds before me.

Backpacker and writer Colin Fletcher is best known for his book The Complete Walker. In it, he writes:

Frankly, I fail to see how going for a six-month, thousand-mile walk through deserts and mountains can be judged less real than spending six months working eight hours a day, five days a week, in order to earn enough money to be able to come back to a comfortable home in the evening and sit in front of a TV screen and watch the two-dimensional image of some guy talking about a book he has written on a six-month, thousand-mile walk through deserts and mountains.

I confess that I have often regarded my morning walks with the prospect of productivity. After I walk, I say to myself, I will accomplish something: clean the house, write a poem, something, anything. Foolishly, I have regarded walking as a warm-up, a preamble to something productive. But Fletcher’s words humble me, for the walk itself is no less valuable or worthy of my time than writing about it later. The walk is the thing, the only thing. Sauntering for its own sake is golden.

Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility. Poet Gary Snyder celebrates the balance of heartiness and soul, spirit and humility that great saunterers may experience. My hair unwashed, my eyes rimmed with yesterday’s mascara, I often put my most humble self on the road each morning. Stripped of most pretenses, I walk and sweat. Unadorned and alone, I saunter unabashedly into the day. I like to think that this sauntering self is my best self and that early morning meditations are my best prayers.

Thoreau understood the great art of sauntering and claimed to have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who have understood the art of Walking, that is of taking walks,–who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.

Some mornings, I feel as though his eyes are upon me, the master saunterer looking fondly down on his fledgling. I plan to be a saunterer worthy of Thoreau’s classification of genius. And if I begin to power walk or plan my week, I’ll slow to a saunter, humbled and inspired by all those who walk for its own glorious sake.