“Dear Laura. If it were just the two of us again, sitting together at the kitchen table late at night, I would probably just call this document an apology.” -Amity Gaige, Shroder
                “i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)” -E. E. Cummings

                Shroder is the story of families, broken and made whole by love’s dimness and fullness. It’s told from a father’s perspective as he tries to apologize to his soon-to-be ex-wife, Laura. In the midst of their divorce, he took their daughter to New England without telling anyone. Kidnapping, the police call it. I don’t want to defend him. I don’t want to attack him. Perhaps, at some point, we have to choose one of those, and sort out the consequences: the changes we’ll make in our lives. Shroder, I think, comes before that. It’s a book about how often we hurt and are hurt by those we love. It’s about apologies and (perhaps) forgiveness, and it dreams of how our connections might survive.
                Are there things we do that are unforgivable? That’s an interesting word–for (perhaps meaning “completely” ) with give. It once meant ‘to give up one’s right to punish.’ In that case, it is an action from the one who forgives, isn’t it? You do not “earn” forgiveness. You do now “owe” forgiveness. It is given, and like all gifts, it is not made in reference to what is deserved or required. “Give” is from the old English “giefan,” which also means “devote, entrust.” Trust, an act we do: our own special breed of lovely insanity. I trust you. I choose to.
                “Apology.” In Greek, it means a legal defense speech, the kind of thing you give at a trial. (That meaning hangs over Schroder: the hurts in his family are large enough to bring in judges and prisons). But we use apology differently, now; it’s an expression of regret. I call myself responsible, and I am sorry. I don’t know another word for that: to make amends? But “amends” means to make right, and so much of what I apologize for I can never make right. Our words don’t make cuts close up again. Atonement? I didn’t think of that one at first, because it feels religious–but the root, here, is simply “at one.” To atone is to become one with others, after being fractured apart. How can I ask for that, knowing I am imperfect, and will hurt you again? How can I offer that, having been hurt? What word do we have for the action of asking to remember love after pain, to return to a time when it was “just the two of us […], sitting together at the kitchen table late at night”? How can I ask for that, without defense or justification? I do not know a word that powerful. But I have meant it.
                In reading Shroder, I hope that his daughter forgives him for what he’s done. I hope his wife does, and I hope he forgives her. (There are hurts on all sides). Perhaps we cannot always become one again, but we can protect connections instead of barriers. I can remember that, within everything else, you were trying to do the work of loving, of caring. I was trying. I fell short, and I’ll fall short again, but if we could find our way back to a time when we were sitting together and listening to each other, I would say I am sorry. I would mean it. And in that place, I think perhaps I could hear you, no matter what you’d done. Could you hear me?
                I’m glad, in the Acknowledgements at the back of the book, to hear Amity Gaige thank her husband for his “love” and “wonder.” She’s captured a family that couldn’t hold itself together. Not all can, or should; sometimes there are so many recurring wounds, and you must stop yourself from being cut. I’m glad that she can write out all this pain, and help us sort through it; and I’m glad that, in those few words, she also gives us the example of a family knit by “love” and “wonder.” I think, perhaps, there must be some forgiveness there, too, heart-full and freely given.

“All the world’s a stage.” -Our own Billy Shakes, As You Like It

“The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” -Walt Whitman

                Today, in my class, is Theater Day. It’s one of my favorite activities all year. Here’s what we do: first off, we give Mr. Gillmore, who is in charge of the theater, a really, really, really big smile, so that he clears off all the saws and ladders and impact drivers, and lets us use the stage. (Our stage is also our scene shop, because we don’t have a scene shop: so the buildings and backdrops grow where they’ll live. All in all, a magical place, to be sure). Mr. Gillmore is also susceptible to take-out Chinese food. It’s good to know. 
                Next, I walk my class over, and step onto the stage to explain what we’re doing. As I do, I feel the space itself. The space says, something’s happening.  The space says, look here. It’s like the whiteness around the poem, the silence before a symphony; the breath you take (you have to take) before some really good cheesecake. The stage says, listen. It says, we’re about to grow, become. As I said, it’s a magical place. 
                I start, each time, with Shakespeare’s line: “all the world’s a stage.” How many of us struggle to say what we truly mean? How many of us struggle to feel our own emotions, to know our lines, and to step into our role? How many of us see the whales and dolphins of our ideas go dashing by, and reach out a hand to point, only to find ourselves spitting sea spray instead of saying clearly the direction of those thoughts–or the joy of their movement–or even, perhaps, where they’re headed? Today, this is our stage, and today we’re going to try. 
                I give the students a paper with prompts on it. The prompts each put them in an imaginary scenario, and ask, “What would you say?” One by one the students walk up on stage; they climb to a place that says, pause, here, and breathe, and try to speak. And then they raise their voice. 
                Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they find poetry. Almost always they pause, and stumble, and then move forward with a rush, and watching, we realize that stumbling and flowing forward are equally important. The pauses say as much as the words, when both are meant. I’ve had a student, wise and determined, who planned everything out–and then realized, as he watched his friend cry and feel and try, that he’d somehow missed his chance. He’d charted a course. She’d stepped into the unknown, where all possibilities swirl and wait, washed by the raw stuff of living. 
                The prompts put us in imagined circumstances, but in imagined circumstances we find our own hearts–our hopes, our fears. In imagined circumstances we find our connections. So I wanted to share a few of my prompts (in the comments), and to invite you all, today, to walk up on stage, breathe, and speak–not just for yourself, but for us all. 
                “All the world’s a stage.” 
                “The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”

                “We fight. We try not to be killed. Sometimes we are. That’s all.” –All Quiet On the Western Front

                “Surely her cockiness, her optimism and energy, her pizzazz, will get her out of this. She will think of something. But I know this isn’t true.” -Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

                The Handmaid’s Tale is the chilling portrait of a fallen United States, where fundamentalist religion has become government and people have once again become property. Atwood gives us two powerful figures: a wild, resourceful friend, and a cocky, loud, energetic mother. Reading, we want these people to change things. We want them to turn into heroes. Atwood gives us moments of hope, but moment by moment, page by page, most hope breaks in the America she’s envisioned.  Why does she do that?
                We like stories about those who beat the odds and “win,” or about those who die on their feet rather than live on their knees; about heroes who turned their suffering into something grand, something important, something shining. Maybe wars don’t look like that. Torture doesn’t work like that. That is a kind of alchemy we cannot do. As much as we like a story about a homeless person who turns their struggle into brilliance and wisdom, the truth is, going hungry is cruel, it’s lessening. It breaks you apart. We can heal afterwards, we can try to make something good with the ashes, but wood burns. No matter how solid it’s grown, no matter how firm its heart, no matter how tall it stands, wood burns. History has proved that bodies do, too. Atwood won’t let us forget the horror of that.
                There is something beautiful, even here in Atwood’s horror. There is something to hope for. These days, many of the moments that break us and others are at least in part man made. We engineer them. And if we do that, that means we don’t have to. The trick isn’t to practice courage so that we can face our torturer with a witty quip and an unbreakable will. The fight happens before that. The fight isn’t even a fight: it’s law, it’s practice, is the slow creation day by day of a society that refuses torture. The trick is not to kill and be untouched by killing. The trick is not to battle victoriously. Atwood’s truth comes before that. It comes when we will not let our garden become a place for tanks and drones, cruelty and hate. When we fight, we’re hurt. Sometimes when we’re hurt we heal. But we can fight less. We can.
                We should be careful, breathlessly, intensely careful, about what we ask our troops to do. I don’t think I’m a pacifist. I believe there can be just war. I admire those who are willing to fight it. But the fighting itself is not pretty. It is not good.  As a culture, I think we need less tales about those who took horror and would not be broken, and more gardeners who give their plants the daily water with which they grow, and let them feel the sun. We need days, not moments; we need lives, not gestures.We can like the unbreakable Man of Steel, but we do not have the many chances he has, and our minds, torn, may not regrow. Perhaps sometimes, instead of hoping for heroism, we can work to be humane.

                While talking about the year after his mother’s death: “To try to tell it is like trying to tell the passage of a sleepless night. Nothing happens. One thinks, and dreams briefly, and wakes again; fears loom and pass, and ideas won’t come clear, and meaningless words haunt the mind, and the shudder of nightmare brushes by, and time seems not to move, and it’s dark, and nothing happens.” -Orrec in Gifts, by Ursula K. Le Guin

                I’ve had a bit of a funny connection with Le Guin’s books. I started by not reading them–I picked up the Earthsea cycle when I was fifteen, and got bored, and stopped. Later I picked them up again, and it was like picking up a fire, or a seed that grew and grew until it was an oak I held, an oak that was holding me. Occasionally I still find myself bored by one of her pages, and yet her books are among the most powerful stories to ever sit down beside me, tap my eyes, and remind me that I can see. Why is that?
                I think there’s a theory of literature somewhere in here, and within it, a theory of being alive. Lots of modern writers write go go go. We get a series of events and twists. (Before the credits, before everything but the music, James Bond shoots the audience). We’ve asked for stories with a hook, and they have hooks, and we’re reeled along from line one. “One of the worst mistakes writers make,’ a professor once told me, ‘Is thinking they have time. You have no time.’ He’s right–depending on what you’re writing. Or reading.
                Le Guin has all the time in the world. She sits, and stares, and walks. “Nothing happens.” When we talk about sadness, it’s easy, it’s tempting, to tell it in turning points: he picks up his mother’s comb, and cries, awash in loss; he picks up her pen, and realizes he can continue the stories she wrote. But Le Guin says that doesn’t happen. That’s not true. “Nothing happens.” Sorrows and lives spell themselves out in shades and dappled light, not clear cut letters. If we want to understand where we stand, who we are, then we need to be willing to read those quiet signs. Le Guin insists on it.
                Some of my students say that Gifts moves slowly. The truth is, sometimes it does. The truth is, why not. Life isn’t a series of happenings. The truth is, nothing happens–nothing but moments, ages long and overlapping, and we can choose to stand in them. When we do, we find a moment of presence. When we do, we mourn for our loved ones. When we do, we fall in love again.
                How did we fall in love?
                Who can say? How can we know? After all,
                            –nothing happened–
                                            and what poignant, beautiful, heart-filling nothing it was, there in the moments I cannot say.

        “The time has come,” the Walrus said,
        “To talk of many things:
        Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
        Of cabbages–and kings–”
                -Lewis Carroll, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”

        There’s a sound to words, but there’s also a rhythm, a feel, and a taste. Carroll’s lines are simply a delight to say. Go ahead, say them. Purr them. Feel them dance in your fingers. If these words were in a language I didn’t know, I’d think, while I listened, that they were some charm being cast. And there are so many things to talk about.
        It reminds me of a story: an art critic is taking a train through Europe. When he gets to his seat, he realizes he’s beside a famous painter. The painter’s next to the window. He seems entranced: outside, some power lines run along the tracks, and beyond them are rolling hills, a river slipping in and out of view, and little villages.
        The critic has always admired this painter: his work shows a clear eye for what’s there, for light and shadow, movement and stillness. The critic wants to say something–he’ll never get a chance like this again! He looks out the window, too, trying to find something to comment on. Eventually he goes with the obvious:
        ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ He says
        ‘Yes,’ says the painter. ‘The way a powerline go on and on, mile after mile, a single sweeping stroke…’

        There are so many different things to see. When I was eight or so, I was getting into the car with my dad for a seven hour drive. “I don’t even have a toy to play with,” I said. He looked around, and picked up a piece of dried tar from the road–at least, I think that’s what it was. It was black, and it had been liquidy once, though now it was hard to the touch.
        “How about this?” he asked.
        I didn’t play with it at all during the drive–I tried to, and didn’t see how. I was a stubborn kid. Perhaps part of me didn’t want this thing to be a toy, because I’d wanted some other toy. Then again, looking back, I’ve thought about that piece of tar as much as some of my favorite childhood toys. Perhaps I knew, even then, there was a mystery inside it, a mystery I was missing.
        At my grandpa’s funeral, one of his friends stood up to say something. I don’t know the man’s name, but he started with: “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said…”
        ‘Me and Jack,’ he went on, ‘We never knew which one of us was the Walrus, and which one wasn’t. I don’t know who wrote those lines, but we decided a long time ago they were at least a bit about us. We talked about a lot.’ Later that day, I told him who’d written the lines. He told me something better. Apparently, if an old man’s to be trusted, talking to a walrus (or being one) is quite enough to make a life.

        This week isn’t a quote: it’s an idea Professor Kim Townsend gave me, and I want to give it to you. After all, ideas belong to those who need them.
        I sometimes wonder, while writing these, “Why am I so dang dark? Lighten up! Make jokes!” I wonder the same thing when I write fiction: it can be pretty heavy, and sometimes I think, “Come on now, where’s the humor, the gentle, playful connection? Where’s the bounce?” And I think those things are good–and I think you can practice them. Looking back over these posts, I see some darkness and I see some light, I see some play and I see some pain. And I want to tell a story.
        When I was nineteen I walked into Professor Townsend’s office. I wanted to ask something, though I didn’t know how to say it. Looking back, I wanted to ask whether there was something wrong with me. I loved being in college, but I also had hard times: times when I left my dorm room, running and crying. Times when moments pulled tight around me, and I felt myself crushed to something small by the pressing need of the world, by the pressure I put on myself, by the seeming impossibility of doing something. I tried to explain that to Townsend. Was there something wrong with me? Was I broken?
        Townsend is one of the warmest, kindest, wildest, most willing teachers I’ve ever had. He used to say things you’re just not allowed to say, but that needed to be said, and he shook many of us out of our sleepwalking. In this moment, he listened carefully, thought for a long time, and then answered, gently, with a metaphor.
        In order to pump blood through your body, he said, your heart goes through two phases. Diastole is when your heart expands, bringing in new blood; systole is when your heart contracts, pushing blood through your body. Our hearts do both of those: systolic motion, contracting, tightening, confining; diastolic motion, an exuberant release, a forward rush, a new discovery. And that’s not a problem. The problem comes if you get stuck in one of these: that’s a heart attack. That’s death.
        Townsend told me to see the cycle, instead of focusing on one side. He said our emotional lives can beat like our hearts, and we need both phases: if all my moments were emotionally diastolic, I would drain myself away as power seeped out in all directions. If all my movements were systolic, I’d clench my heart tight and tighter until I’d wrung the life from my body like blood from a cloth.
        “But as long as you have both, Azlan,” he told me, “as long as that pressure finds its movement, and your movements find their pause, I think you’re okay.”
        Over the next years, we talked a lot. I learned a lot. I know my teacher had his pains, and I know he gave to the world. We wondered and laughed and shared meals. Sometimes the world gathered in, and sometimes it opened up: a beating heart, alive within its cycle.

“A Request”
        Ursula K. Le Guin

Should my tongue be tied by stroke
listen to me as if I spoke

and said to you, “My dear, my friend,
stay here a while and take my hand;

my voice is hindered by this clot,
but silence says what I cannot,

and you can answer as you please
such undemanding words as these.

Or let our conversation be
as mute as patient amity,

sitting, all the words bygone,
like a stone beside a stone.

It takes a while to learn to talk
the long language of the rock.”

        When I think of kindness and connection, I sometimes think of a man I met in Vietnam. I don’t remember his name. I called him chú. We never said more than two words to each other, and they were always the same two words. He would shake my hand with a warm, supportive strength, he’d smile at me with a loose affection, bottomless as the sea, and I’ll remember him forever.
        It was in Hue, halfway down the Vietnamese coast. I was traveling alone, and one of my stepfather’s friends sent an email to a family who lived there. The parents didn’t speak any English, and they let their two teenage children (a daughter who was a little younger than I was, and a son who was a little older) speak for the family. I didn’t speak any Vietnamese.
        Sitting in front of their house, they started to teach me. “Chào em,” they said. I repeated it: “Chào em.” I asked the daughter what it meant, and she said, “Hello.”
        Then the daughter said, “Chào ahn.” We played, laughing, until I could pronounce the new sounds well enough.
        “What’s it mean?” I asked.
        “Hello,” she said. And her brother started teaching me: “Chào chú,” he said. I practiced, and asked what that meant; “Hello,” he said. I was confused for a little while. Then I understood. In Vietnamese, “hello” changes depending on who you are talking to. So they weren’t just teaching me “Hello.” They were teaching me to say, “Hello little sister,” “Hello big brother,” “Hello aunt” and “Hello uncle.” They were teaching me to be part of the family. Every time I came back to the house, the father would hold out his hand and smile, and I would say, Chào chú. We wouldn’t say anything else to each other for the rest of the evening, but I would see the smile in his eye, and I’d feel his kindness, his consideration, his quiet, well-meaning company.
        Le Guin’s poem has a darkness to it, a sense for the kind of loss that leaves us unable to talk. When she wrote this she was getting older, and I can feel death behind the lines; but she doesn’t seem to fear death. The poem isn’t about death or the dying. There is something in the mute silence of “patient amity,” even for the young and the wild. Looking back, I wonder if chú was teaching me a little of “the long language of the rock.” While I can talk, I’ll talk, while I can listen I’ll listen; while I can look, I’ll look. But if it were all I had, I think simply sitting side by side with you would be enough, once I learned to do it.

        “When you pour out your strength to help, there must be a result, whether you can see it or not.”
                -J. Krishnamurti, At The Feet of the Master

        How wonderful would it be to believe that? Here’s my image: I see a man pouring the water that is his love into the world, but he’s standing in a desert and the water seeps away through the sand. After a few minutes, the sand isn’t even wet anymore. There is no sign of what he’s done. But Krishnamurti insists that he has done something: your “strength to help” has a result. It must, just like fire must warm and water must run downhill. The water you poured out travels somewhere beneath the sand. There are roots. There are seeds. Sooner or later, somewhere, what you have done will help them.
        I often find it hard to believe that. I often feel like I haven’t done enough, or that what I’ve done wasn’t clever enough, so it won’t have an effect. And then Krishnamurti stands and smiles, somewhere just beyond the light of the little campfire I’ve made, and whispers there is something there, “whether you can see it or not.”
        Sometimes, when I feel as though others don’t care or notice that I’m working, when I feel the grinding pain of telling myself I haven’t done enough, Krishnamurti’s thought can wash away that hurt. It is easier to work, then, and sweat, and rest for a while, and smile. The water that evaporates, that seems to disappear, is moisture somewhere, and somewhere it falls as rain.

“Nowadays I’m concerned to be right rather than righteous.” -Stephen Hawking, My Brief History

        I don’t know what Hawking means, here. (That’s an experience, by the way, for which I’m very grateful: near the end of My Brief History, there’s a chapter that ran laughing circles around my head until I thought the floor might be the ceiling, and I stood up into it. That was frustrating: but it was also wonderful to come face to floor with something I just didn’t understand). In context, Hawking’s talking (hehehe–say that out loud) about one of his early books, and how the book is “highly technical” because he was “trying to be as rigorous as a pure mathematician.” In writing this book ‘rigorously,’ he was trying to prove that his study was a worthwhile study, that he Was Excellent. Now, he says, he’s trying a new approach. And maybe that’s the distinction he’s making: the difference between things that try to prove themselves, and things that try to be themselves.
        That reminds me of two stories. First, there’s an old, wonderful story about the Baal Shem Tov, an 18th century Jewish rabbi and mystic. One day the Baal Shem Tov steps down from a carriage on his way to teach. He’s old, so his students stand on either side to help him. The town drunk, sitting in the gutter beside the road, looks up and recognizes this famous teacher:
        “You!” yells the drunk. “You’re the Baal Shem Tov.”
        The drunk struggles to pull himself up to standing. The students are offended that this wreck of a man would dare speak to their teacher, and speak to him so rudely, but the old, wizened Baal Shem Tov waves them back when they step towards the drunk. So the drunk goes on, slurring his words and barely keeping himself on his feet:
        “Teach me all of the Torah while standing on one foot.”
        The Torah, of course, isn’t an easy thing to learn or teach. It’s been carefully read and pondered and argued about for thousands of years. The students are offended. The Baal Shem Tov leans on his walking stick. After all, he’s an old man. But he motions to one of his students, and hands the stick over. He tries to lift one foot off the ground, stumbles, and falls back to both feet. He almost falls over entirely. He tries to lift one foot off the ground again. For a moment he stands, frail, his weight shifting from side to side,  and he looks at the man and he smiles:
        “Try to be kind to people,” says the Baal Shem Tov. “The rest is commentary.”
        One of the joys of telling that story is getting to stand on one foot, barely managing it, and another joy is getting to talk in the loud, slurred voice of the drunkard. And telling it now, I realize for the first time that they’re both people struggling to stand.
        The other story comes from Superman. I like having Superman and the Baal Shem Tov so close together, and I think that they (at least, the better versions of Superman; there are so many) would like it, too. In any case, a great warrior comes to earth to search for Superman. He’s heard how strong the Man of Steel is, and he wants to prove himself by beating Superman in a duel. When he finds our hero in Metropolis, he says hello by tackling Superman into a building.
        Superman tries to ask what’s going on, but the alien warrior isn’t interested in talking. They fight. They’re pretty evenly matched, and most of the comic book deals with these two titans, slugging it out across the skyline, pummeling each other into the landscape–and leaving wrecked streets and buildings behind them.
        And then Superman figures it out: the alien warrior wants to win. He wants to prove that he’s the toughest. So Superman drops his guard a little bit, and the alien catches him a good one on the chin. The Man of Steel goes down like a meteor, breaking the street below him. The other warrior feels proud and goes away.
        “Ouch,” says Superman, and after a minute he pulls himself up.
        “Righteous” comes from the Old English rihtwis. Riht means “right” (as in just, good, and fitting). Wis means “learned” (as in wise; as in “wizard;” Gandalf!), but it also means “way,” “manner,” “appearance,” or “form,” as in “clockwise” and “likewise.” So righteous can mean ‘learned in what is right,’ but it could also mean trying for the appearance of what is right. The first is concerned with being right; the second is concerned with looking right: wearing right’s clothes, imitating right’s accent. Taking right’s prescription glasses and looking serious serious in them.
        Perhaps we don’t need to prove our strength: instead, we can step into it, learn it, share it when we can, and let it be what it is. If we did that, perhaps, like Stephen Hawking, we’d end up more interested in being “right rather than righteous.”

        “But I care about you, Bam,” Ned told him. “That’s what I’ve been teaching all the time–I care about you.” -Ernest Gaines, The Autobiography of Jane Pittman

        Ned’s a teacher in The Autobiography, and I wonder if this is the one lesson that, at heart, all teachers are trying to share. “I care about you.” You matter, to me; your life is your own, but your life reaches out past you. It reaches at least to me. Speaking of me looks like shifting the focus away from you, and I don’t want to do that: caring lets me see you as you, value you as you, not as what I want you to be, not as what you’ll give me, not as what you’ll do for others. In caring for a plant, we give it the water and the space it needs to grow. In caring for another, we give them the space they need to become themselves.
        Caring, as far as I can tell, is always something of a grand leap–I cannot know you, cannot understand you, cannot fathom you. There are haunts inside your head, and there are heavens; but caring for you doesn’t ask to see them. It is a gift given, without any thought of a return. It is standing, respectful, heart open, and looking in your direction, ready to see something that is not me or mine, something that I do not fully understand, something that I witness and am choosing to love.
        Caring looks toward you, looks carefully and intently, but in the end it shifts the focus away from you. It has to. No plant grows without reaching its roots down or its branches up. All healthy roots touch something, and all branches give off a little shade. No person grows without connecting to something larger than themselves: science or music, art or social justice, or cooking a perfect s’more. For once we are ourselves, we can be something for another. When we were not really in the world, when we doubted our own reality, then we had nothing to offer others; but when, perhaps supported by a caring gaze, we choose to see ourselves as real, then we realize that there are listeners outside us, and that our voice (and our silence) speaks. We have grown into ourselves. And in growing, we have learned that our lives reach beyond ourselves.
        The Autobiography follows the lives of freed Southern slaves and their children. They are surrounded by a world of hate, ignorance and violence, but they learn and share (and try to learn and share, and, human, stumble) this lesson there. Gaines insists that this awareness, this connection, grows in and between our hearts. Perhaps that means we can grow it on any ground, in any climate, though it can be difficult to cultivate.
        I think we all need this connection. I think we all can offer it to anyone. Offering this might even be the fundamental human act: the most wondrous magic we practice: the simple truth of caring.