Tag Archives: courage
In Memoriam
They were names I didn’t recognize, names I’d never heard: Alice Herz, Norman Morrison, Roger Allen LaPorte, Florence Beaumont, George Winne, Jr. Five Americans who, between 1965 and 1970, publicly self-immolated — set themselves fatally afire — to protest the Vietnam War. I am thinking of them on Memorial Day, when we traditionally commemorate Americans who gave their lives in […]
Courage
The January 31, 1955 cover of Sports Illustrated featured a fresh-faced young skier, blonde curls falling languidly over her sun-and-snow tanned forehead, blue eyes meeting the photographer’s lens with a seriousness that belied her exuberant personality. Her name was Jill Kinmont, and at 18, she was the national slalom champion and a likely medal contender in […]
Cabbage white in autumn
Today we induct into the Hall of Heroes a cabbage white, its wingspan little wider than a half-dollar, an artifact you may or may not remember: cool in the palm, serrated edges, the sharply embossed portrait of a young president whose life would likewise be truncated by the weather of the world. (On the coin, he still […]
Increments
The devil deals in increments, small and sinuous seductions gradually transacted in the space you made without realizing one soul may be sold in many lots, and every clasp of that sleight of hand makes the next easier, your frog skin luxuriating: How lovely, at first, the warming water. Having missed the inobvious horns — […]
Courage
The January 31, 1955 cover of Sports Illustrated featured a fresh-faced young skier, blonde curls falling languidly over her sun-and-snow tanned forehead, blue eyes meeting the photographer’s lens with a seriousness that belied her exuberant personality. Her name was Jill Kinmont, and at 18, she was the national slalom champion and a likely medal contender in […]
Tolerance
It’s not true, what they say. God often gives you more than you can handle, then stands back and observes as you adapt. Or perish, like the infinite others who were given more than they could handle and are no longer here to say so. God is not cruel, just curious, like a researcher whose […]
In praise of dead fathers,
the clarity of their absence. Does enough of you remain to shoulder the dulled implement, excavate some shard of horror at your disappeared life? No. Your fluid, nimble brain has gone porous and brittle, and what can you see in the attenuating dark? This is you now, slumped in the wheel chair, confused and compliant, a […]
In Memoriam
They were names I didn’t recognize, names I’d never heard: Alice Herz, Norman Morrison, Roger Allen LaPorte, Florence Beaumont, George Winne, Jr. Five Americans who, between 1965 and 1970, publicly self-immolated — set themselves fatally afire — to protest the Vietnam War. I am thinking of them on Memorial Day, when we traditionally commemorate Americans who gave their lives in […]
Extension
Consider Father Damien’s right hand beneath the earth at Kalaupapa where the rotting flesh of outcast lepers defiled living bone their spit falling from ruined mouths how he offered that hand to them joined their suffering would not let them die alone until his own flesh decayed on living bone now crumbled to dust in […]
Knowing it would end
did I ghost my life, indentured to some lesser master, determined not to breathe too gladly, and was I afraid of my body’s fierce appetites, how it loved food, needed water, wanted you, how in the same moments it longed to be free, and caught, as if paradox were its natural disposition, the skeleton on […]
Meditatio Ephemera 