Wildflowers (Tom Petty, cover by The Wailin' Jennys)

I first discovered Glennon Doyle (she dropped the Melton a few years ago) in January 2012, when I was doing research for a UU church service I was presenting, based on the theme of my singer-songwriter friend Nick Annis, whose new composition of You Can’t Be the Good Guy If You Do What the Bad Guys Do was my new favorite of his.  Inspired by Nick's musical conundrum, I contemplated exactly what "good guys" do, from ethical buying to considerate interactions to compassionate politics.  I read the story of Ferdinand, I quoted from Dar Williams' song Buzzer (based on the Stanley Milgram Experiment in the early ‘60’s), I mentioned The Paradoxical Commandments by Kent Keith (often falsely attributed to Mother Teresa), and I quoted Martin Niemöller's "When the Nazis came for the communists".

I then went on to say that I was turned on to the coolest blog by none other than Tracey, our former RE Director, and I quoted from the website:

“Although our meeting place is a Momastery (www.momastery.com), we’re no monks. We’re Monkees. And we’re too busy singing to put anybody down.  The Monkees are a group of women with nothing in common other than these beliefs:

1.    We Belong To Each Other
2.    We Can Do Hard Things
3.    Love Wins

We are Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and atheists… but we are kin, so we are kind. Our goals are to be careful with each other… to pay attention and look closely and think hard and pray and feel and wake up and care and connect. So we can become braver and live bigger and truer on this Earth.”

At that point, I was hooked, read each new blog entry as soon as it posted, bought both of her books as soon as they were published, contributed to her Love Flash Mobs (up to a $25 maximum, raising millions of dollars), witnessed her Compassion Collective collaboration with Brené Brown, Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Rob Bell, and even had the chance to see/hear her speak a few years ago.  She's been married and divorced, has three children by her former husband, and is now life-partnered with Abby Wambach, the soccer player.  Glennon continues to face life with humor, wisdom, and compassion, and I could not wait to buy her newest book, Untamed, pre-ordering it months ago through Barnes & Noble so I could get an autographed copy.

Well, even though we moved from our suburban home to our 55+ condo community almost two years ago, I never changed my address through B&N, so the book was sent there last month and then, through a crazy set of well-intentioned circumstances but ultimately life glitches, when I finally figured out why I hadn't received it yet, the book had been sent back.  Oh [three-second pause] well.  I could order another one via Amazon, right?  First world problems.

I was planning to blog about this today anyway, and mid-afternoon yesterday I received a text from my friend Michele, asking if I had the book and, if not, she'd be glad to send me her copy.  Wow.  Synchronicity strikes again, and I am beyond grateful, as well as amazed, that The Universe always seems to have my back.  Thanks, MW.  Can't wait to read it...  💖


SONG:  Wildflowers by Tom Petty (cover by The Wailin' Jennys)

BOOK:  Untamed by Glennon Doyle

POEM:  The Sea by David Whyte

The pull is so strong we will not believe
the drawing tide is meant for us,
I mean the gift, the sea,
the place where all the rivers meet.

Easy to forget,
how the great receiving depth
untamed by what we need
needs only what will flow its way.

Easy to feel so far away
and the body so old
it might not even stand the touch.

But what would that be like
feeling the tide rise
out of the numbness inside
toward the place to which we go
washing over our worries of money,
the illusion of being ahead,
the grief of being behind,
our limbs young
rising from such a depth?

What would that be like
even in this century
driving toward work with the others,
moving down the roads
among the thousands swimming upstream,
as if growing toward arrival,
feeling the currents of the great desire,
carrying time toward tomorrow?

Tomorrow seen today, for itself,
the sea where all the rivers meet, unbound,
unbroken for a thousand miles, the surface
of a great silence, the movement of a moment
left completely to itself, to find ourselves adrift,
safe in our unknowing, our very own,
our great tide, our great receiving, our
wordless, fiery, unspoken,
hardly remembered, gift of true longing.

QUOTE:  "You can be very wild and still be very wise." ~ Yoko Ono

June, 1989 (Nick Annis)

From today's Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1989 that the Chinese troops stormed Beijing's Tiananmen Square to crack down on students conducting pro-democracy demonstrations. The demonstrations had begun months earlier, after the government accused them of planning a coup d'etat. They drew thousands of supporters from three dozen universities and staged hunger strikes and sit-ins. The Chinese government declared martial law, and troops approached the square with tanks in the late evening of June 3.

Ordinary workers had gathered along the nearby roads. They had been demonstrating in support of the students for weeks, and they crowded into the streets to block the advance of the tanks toward the square. Though the event would come to be called the Tianamen Square massacre, almost all the people killed were the ordinary people in the streets outside the square. Violence broke out around midnight on this day in 1989, with some people throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the troops, and the troops responding with gunfire.

The violence continued in and around the square for the rest of the day. The famous photograph of a student staring down a tank was taken by an American Associated Press photographer named Jeff Widener. He went to the top of a hotel near the square and began to take pictures of the tanks clearing the last remnants of people from the streets. Then he saw one man walk up to a tank and stand in its path, refusing to move. He took several photographs and then the man was grabbed by bystanders and pulled out of the tank's path. Widener asked another journalist to hide the film in his underwear to smuggle it out of the country.

The identity of the protester in the photograph is not known with any certainty, but he's been called one of the most influential revolutionaries of the twentieth century.

SONG: June, 1989 by Nick Annis (track 11)

BOOK: The Tiananmen Papers by Liang Zhang, Andrew J. Nathan, Perry Link, Orville Schell

POEM: Requiem (for victims of June Fourth) by Bei Dao (translated by Bonnie McDougall and Chen Maiping)

Not the living but the dead

under the doomsday-purple sky

go in groups

suffering guides forward suffering

at the end of hatred is hatred

the spring has run dry, the conflagration stretches unbroken

the road back is even further away

Not gods but the children

amid the clashing of helmets

say their prayers

mothers breed light

darkness breathes mothers

the stone rolls, the clock runs backwards

the eclipse of the sun has already taken place

Not your bodies but your souls

shall share a common birthday every year

you are all the same age

love has founded for the dead

an everlasting alliance

you embrace each other closely

in the massive register of deaths

QUOTE: "The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution in spirit, the forces which had produced inequities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance, and fear." ~ Aung San Suu Kyi

Workin' (Nick Annis)

From yesterday's Writer's Almanac:

Today is Labor Day, first celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882. The holiday was the idea of the Central Labor Union in New York City, which organized a parade and a picnic featuring speeches by union leaders. It was intended to celebrate labor unions, call for the eight-hour workday, and to recognize the achievements of the American worker.

Many of the labor laws those early activists wanted were passed in the 1930s, including the eight-hour workday and the 40-hour workweek. Most sociologists predicted that in the coming decades Americans would work steadily fewer and fewer hours. But in fact, the opposite has happened. Today, more than 25 million Americans work more than 49 hours each week. And 11 million spend 60 hours or more at work each week. Americans also take fewer vacation days than employees in any other industrialized nation, making Americans the hardest-working (or most overworked) industrialized nation on the planet.

Most writers have worked day jobs at some point in their careers to support their writing, and many have been inspired by those day jobs. Salman Rushdie was an advertising man, and so was Allen Ginsberg. Wallace Stevens worked for an insurance company. Charles Bukowski worked, among other things, as a janitor, a truck driver, and a bouncer for a brothel. Walt Whitman worked for a while as a teacher in series of windowless, poorly heated, one-room schoolhouses for almost no money. While teaching at one school, he wrote to a friend, "How tired and sick I am of this wretched, wretched hole! — ... O, damnation, damnation! Thy other name is school-teaching."

I had the most wonderfully unproductive Monday, basically segueing from my nightgown to my bathing suit and back again - I finished the new Anne Lamott book... and a mix that has been in my head for years (believe it or not, songs showcasing the fiddle, my favorite instrument) finally made it onto a CD, which I then test-drove while I floated in the pool. The 76-minute compilation came to an end just as the dark clouds rolled in - the time was enough to add a layer of pigment to my skin and a newly-discovered calm to my demeanor. With E traveling, we're short-handed again at work this week, so my stress symptoms will soon reappear - however, tomorrow's Hump Day already!

SONG: Workin' by Nick Annis

BOOK: Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Studs Terkel

POEM: The Great Work by Hafiz

Love

Is the great work

Though every heart is first an

Apprentice

That slaves beneath the city of Light.

This wondrous trade,

This magnificent throne your soul

Is destined for-

You should not have to think

Much about it,

Is it not clear

An apprentice needs a teacher

Who himself

Has charmed the universe

To reveal its wonders inside his cup.

Happiness is the great work,

Though every heart must first become

A student

To one

Who really knows

About Love.

QUOTE: "Yield who will to their separation, my object in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation.... Only where love and need are one... is the deed ever really done for Heaven and the future's sakes." ~ Robert Frost

Home Depot (Nick Annis)

SONG: Home Depot by Nick Annis

BOOK: Be Jane's Guide to Home Empowerment: Projects to Change the Way You Live by Heidi Baker and Eden Jarrin

POEM: Ode to Hardware Stores by Barbara Hamby

Where have all the hardware stores gone — dusty, sixty-watt
warrens with the wood floors, cracked linoleum,
poured concrete painted blood red? Where are Eppes, Terry Rossa
Yon's, Flint — low buildings on South Monroe,
Eight Avenue, Gaines Street with their scent of paint thinner,
pesticides, plastic hoses coiled like serpents
in a garden paradisal with screws in buckets or bins
against a brick wall with hand-lettered signs
in ball-point pen — Carriage screws, two dozen for fifty cents —
long vicious dry-wall screws, thick wood screws
like peasants digging potatoes in fields, thin elegant trim
screws— New York dames at a backwoods hick
Sunday School picnic. O universal clevis pins, seven holes
in the shank, like the seven deadly sins.
Where are the men — Mr. Franks, Mr. Piggot, Tyrone, Hank,
Ralph — sunburnt with stomachs and no asses,
men who knew the mythology of nails, Zeuses enthroned
on an Olympus of weak coffee, bad haircuts,
and tin cans of galvanized casting nails, sinker nails, brads,
20-penny common nails, duplex head nails, flooring nails
like railroad spikes, finish nails, fence staples, cotter pins,
roofing nails — flat-headed as Floyd Crawford,
who lived next door to you for years but would never say hi
or make eye contact. What a career in hardware
he could have had, his blue-black hair slicked back with brilliantine,
rolling a toothpick between his teeth while sorting
screw eyes and carpet tacks. Where are the hardware stores,
open Monday through Friday, Saturday till two?
No night hours here, like physicists their universe mathematical
and pure in its way: dinner at six, Rawhide at eight,
lights out at ten, kiss in the dark, up at five for the subatomic world
of toggle bolts, cap screws, hinch-pin clips, split-lock
washers. And the tools — saws, rakes, wrenches, rachets, drills,
chisels, and hose heads, hose couplings, sandpaper
(garnet, production, wet or dry), hinges, wire nails, caulk, nuts,
lag screws, pulleys, vise grips, hexbolts, fender washers
all in a primordial stew of laconic talk about football, baseball,
who'll start for the Dodgers, St. Louis, the Phillies,
the Cubs? Walk around the block today and see their ghosts:
abandoned lots, graffitti'd windows, and tacked
to backroom walls, pin-up calendars almost decorous
in our porn-riddled galaxy of Walmarts, Seven-Elevens,
stripmalls like strip mines or a carrion bird's curved beak
gobbling farms, meadows, wildflowers, drowsy afternoons
of nothing to do but watch dust motes dance through a streak
of sunlight in a darkened room. If there's a second coming,
I want angels called Lem, Nelson, Rodney, and Cletis gathered
around a bin of nails, their silence like hosannahs,
hallelujahs, amens swelling from cinderblock cathedrals
drowning our cries of Bigger, faster, more, more, more.

QUOTE: "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." ~ E.B. White