I had a brush with evil when I was 13. Newly 13. A still playing with stuffed animals 13.
The shape this evil took was the grinning faux-benign variety which hid malicious intent. I didn’t realize the danger until too late. I was small and it had all the power vested in a well-liked man.
I didn’t tell anyone, in part to spare my family the (perceived) shame, in part because I thought I was sparing his family, but mostly because I couldn’t bear to think about let alone talk about what happened. Already an anxious child, my mind turned every more relentlessly to understanding why people were cruel.
It was an ongoing concern. Years earlier I’d asked too many questions about pictures I saw in news magazines. Why troops bombed villages, why pollution was dumped into rivers, why anyone, anywhere, was starving. My parents, realizing there were truly no good answers to repeated “but why” questions, cancelled the magazines.
The year I turned 13 read Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night. His account of surviving the Holocaust gave me a glimpse of how vast evil could be. I embarked on a decades-long quest to understand what caused this largest of evils. I read every Holocaust memoir in the library, initially thinking this had been the only genocide, until I stumbled on other examples in history. Pogroms and holy wars and witch hunts and enslavement and horrors imposed by colonizers. It wasn’t all in the distant past. I read about genocides of the Herero people, the Armenians, the Ukrainians, the Chinese. This led me to horrors still being visited upon people, including by the US. Every book broke me a little bit more on my path from Wiesel’s book to Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.
I’m seeing what I’d describe as evil going on now. The heedless destruction of the very planet that sustains life in order to continue extracting every ounce of profit. The beyond-devastating mayhem and death in Palestine, funded largely by US tax dollars (whose country our current president says he wants to “own“). Empathy mocked as “woke” while measures taken to ensure inclusion and equality are discarded. The people (elected and unelected) currently in US government who are overtly doing everything possible to undermine democracy itself.
But “evil” isn’t a word that helps us understand why.
We humans have been on this planet such a short time, something like 50,000 years (although new evidence shows it may be much longer). We only developed written language around five thousands years ago. Modern capitalism and its attendant ills only emerged in the nineteenth century. Biologically and emotionally, we are still hunter-gatherers. We evolved to be a compassionate and collaborative species. We are still learning how to live in populous cities rather than nomadic tribes of around 60 people. Our technological advancements and our weapons have developed far more quickly than our ethics around their use. We have yet to grasp just how dangerous rigid economic and political systems can be, particularly when war, crisis, and division benefit the powerful.
Currently we live in a system that thrives on fostering divisions — divisions between our daily lives and nature, between our morals and actions, between our minds and bodies, between haves and have-nots, between any perceived differences from one person to another. The result is individuals likely more disconnected than in any time in history, with fragments of authentic community between us, making us much more in need of products to fill that emptiness and work hours to afford those products — good for capitalism, bad for us and the planet.
We ignore the separations between us at our peril. Perhaps even more dangerously, we ignore what is separate within us. Denying the fullness of who we are doesn’t allow us to be whole. When we acknowledge that each of us has the capacity for evil as well as good, for greed as well as generosity, for lies as well as truth—then we can see ourselves and each other more clearly. There’s less need to fall back on blame or fear. We can awaken to the boundless energy in real choices to tell the truth, to act with kindness, to do what’s best for us as a community of beings.
I’m not losing hope. There’s humanity even in the people committing evil. I’m not deluded enough to believe that my phone calls and letters and protests will change things, but I will keep on trying. And I will keep trying to understand all the whys I can. That’s the good I can do right now.
“If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? ” ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
This has been a year of roller coaster ups and downs. Many tender moments and tiny delights in my life. Many heart-wrenching miseries in the larger world, some of them well-funded by our own tax dollars. I’m tempted to elaborate on this, but cannot summon the energy because I am enduring day four of my first-ever bout with covid. This bout did its best to ruin our holidays and we’re still desperately hoping it didn’t infect any of our loved ones. (Sad and guilt-sodden update, it did infect our loved ones.)
Thank goodness for the restorative, mind-stretching, soul-rejuvenating power of books. Here’s a short list of my standout reads from the last 12 months. (Many more on my Goodreads running tally, necessary because I’m not great at remembering titles.) And no, once again I haven’t included poetry books. I’d have to take a week off from actual work to list all my favorites this year, or any year.
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NONFICTION
Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell. Late one night I was in bed reading Amanda Montell’s wonderful book. I often read well into the quiet hours while my sleeps-through-anything spouse snoozes next to me. Until I got to an intriguing and (at 1 am, hilarious) passage quoting UPenn linguist Mark Liberman. I giggled so much that I woke the nonmobile, older, rural male who’d been faintly snoring. The next morning he diplomatically claimed he didn’t recall me calling him Norm. Here’s that passage:
“For decades, linguists have agreed that young, urban females tend to be our linguistic innovators. As South Korea is to beauty products and Silicon Valley is to apps, women in their teens, twenties, and thirties create–and/or incubate–future language trends… ‘It’s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people, and women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males,’ Liberman says. (Fun fact: linguists have also determined that the least innovative language users are nonmobile, older, rural male, which they’ve majestically given the acronym ‘NORMs.’)”
Wilding: Returning Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree. This is a deeply lived and well-researched marvel of a book. It overlaps with quite a few other books I’ve read in the last decade, yet it is singular in its approach and offers all sorts of insights. Here are a few: “They estimate that if organic matter in the world’s farmed soils was increased by as little as 1.6 per cent, the problem of climate change would be solved.” Plus quite logical evidence that grazing animals are healthier themselves and for the planet, including lower methane emissions, when animals graze on common plants and herbs naturally growing in biodiverse pastures. And this,
“Children who spent time in green spaces between the ages of seven and twelve tend to think of nature as magical. As adults they are the people most likely to be indignant about lack of nature protection, while those who have had no such experience tend to regard nature as hostile or irrelevant and are indifferent to its loss. By expurgating nature from children’s lives we are depriving the environment of its champions for the future.”
In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face To Face With The Idea of an Afterlife by Sebastian Junger. The author regularly put his life on the line as a war reporter. But he was at home with his family when he nearly died. That’s when Junger, an atheist, was visited by his dead father. The experience moved the author to go on a scientific, philosophical, and personal examination of what happens after we die. He writes, “Every object is a miracle compared to nothingness and every moment an infinity when correctly understood to be all we’ll ever get.”
The Universe in 100 Colors: Weird and Wondrous Colors from Science and Nature by Tyler Thrasher The images, book design, and succinct passages for each color are all beautifully done. This is one of those books that inspired me to say to whoever was in the room, “You’ve got to hear this” before reading aloud a paragraph or two about Pompeian Red, Earth Aurora Green, Yinmn Blue, or Cystoseira Tamariscifolia. Any book that amplifies how amazing our world is, is a book worth savoring.
The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist by Marcus Rediker. This book intersects with all sorts of my fascinations including pacificism, living up to one’s values, and most particularly how to to tilt history toward greater compassion. I was so taken with Benjamin Lay that I took copious notes while reading in hopes of including it in an essay that I have not (yet) written. Benjamin Lay lived as moral a life as he could, for example refusing to eat animals, ride animals, or tolerate their abuse. Well before other more well-known abolitionists, he did his best to shame those who enslaved people. He convinced his friend Benjamin Franklin to publish his book, one of the first books demanding abolition. He may well have also been the first to make public protest a form of performance art.
“Benjamin was thrice an outsider to mainstream society, as a religious radical, an abolitionist, and a dwarf. His experience as a little person, coupled with commitment of universal love to all peoples, turned compassion into active solidarity. Benjamin’s life as a dwarf was thus another key to his radicalism—a deep source of his empathy with enslaved and other poor people, with animals, and with all of the natural world.”
World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nexhukumatathil. This book is made up of beautifully written essays on the many ways nature has shaped the author’s life and outlook. I was so entranced by one passage that I brought it up for weeks any time I encountered someone I hadn’t already told. Here it is:
“There’s a spot over Lake Superior where migrating butterflies veer sharply. No one understood why they made such a quick turn at that specific place until a geologist finally made the connection: a mountain rose out of the water in that exact location thousands of years ago. These butterflies and their offspring can still remember a mass they’ve never seen.”
The whole book is a marvel. Here’s one more quick excerpt:
“I know I will search for fireflies all the rest of my days, even though they dwindle a little bit more each year. I can’t help it. They blink on and off, a lime glow to the summer night air, as if to say: I am still here, you are still here, I am still here, you are still here, I am, you are, over and over again. Perhaps I can will it to be true. Perhaps I can keep those summer nights with my family inside an empty jam jar, with holes poked in the lid, a twig and a few strands of grass tucked inside. And for those unimaginable nights in the future, when I know I’ll miss my mother the most, I will let that jar’s sweet glow serve as a night-light to cool and cut the air for me.”
Crafting A Better World: Inspiration and DIY Projects for Craftivists by Diana Weymar. I’ve been following the author’s Tiny Pricks Project, which uses the delicate art of embroidery to stitch the most outrageous political quotes. Even when we vote, march, volunteer, and donate it’s easy to feel hopeless. This (like Craftivist books I’ve previously recommended) inspires us to action through creativity. The author has collected projects and ideas from activists including Guerilla Girls, Roz Chast, and Gisele Fetterman. When the outrages become more audacious, our art and our play need to be more audacious too!
The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl. This was a surprise gift from a friend (thank you Martha!) which made each page sweeter. Renkl mixes science and her own life in seamlessly written essays that can’t help but lure readers outside to pay closer attention to all the life that’s going on around them. She writes, “I stand at the window looking out, trying to remember the truths that nature always brings home. That what lies before me is not all there is. That time is ever passing, and not only when I notice. That strife and pain are no more unexpected than pleasure and joy. That merely by breathing I belong to the eternal.” She doesn’t shy away from the very damning changes imposed on the world by industrialized countries. She lives quietly and does what she can and urges us to do the same, eyes open. Here’s another glimpse:
“Even now, with the natural world in so much trouble—even now, with the patterns of my daily life changing in ways I don’t always welcome or understand—radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world. I mean to keep looking every single day until I find them.”
Extreme Birds: The World’s Most Extraordinary and Bizarre Birds by Dominic Couzens. We’ve gotten ever more bird-obsessed since the beginning of lockdown. Some blame goes to the marvelous Merlin Bird ID app from the Cornell Lab, a must for anyone curious about the birds they’re hearing. My husband maintains five different feeders plus, ahem, grain and raw peanuts on the ground for visitors that include many ducks and one pheasant we’ve named Edwin. Back to the book at hand. This volume is arranged in categories like Longest Legs and Widest Wingspan, but those are just a excuse to entice anyone from age 8 to 108. The photos are incredible and each two-page spread includes just enough text to leave you eager to learn more.
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NONFICTION-MEMOIR
Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace. Wallace is a man whose soul is both stirred and stirring. He gives us the forward motion of memoir through the decades while also pausing to let us muse with him over life-sized unanswerable questions. In one gorgeously written passage he begins with a picture of his grandparents and takes us with him as he considers facial characteristics passed down through the family, imagines his fourth great-grandmother as a young woman gazing at the stars, offers her a vision of his children with their “bubbling anarchy of tender ages, their faces unbroken by grief and exhaustion…” and ends with his own struggle to be “far enough away to understand and close enough to grieve.”
Here’s another passage that sings with wisdom:
“To be a man as I learned it was to be contained, held within, under control. Unripped and unbroken. Everything I learned about the body early on was about control and containment. Men were not to leak or make too much noise or express too much or lose a grip on anything. Not on your body. Not on anyone else’s. This makes the world a fundamentally terrifying and destabilizing place for men because what the earth is, at its spiritual core, is a thing uncontained. It is liquid and explosive, the chaos of leaves and rivers, mountains of lava, fecund and overflowing.
To be a man as manhood was taught to me is to be fiercely at odds with the earth, which is to say it is fiercely at odds with the divine. It is to be in battle with the divine because to be a man is to be in control and the divine is the complete opposite of control. This is why men are so violent and angry and destructive to ourselves and to you and to the world. We teach each other to hate what we cannot control, and nothing, literally nothing, can be truly controlled.
Look at the earth, how it insists itself upon our buildings and shopping malls and golf courses and hiking trails. Look at how we have tried for centuries to overwhelm the earth and instead the earth has overwhelmed us, calmly, innocently, and with all the tender savagery of a stream running down a gentle slope. What is a body for in the midst of that kind of simple and inevitable passing?”
We Will Be Jaguars : A Memoir of My Peopleby Nemonte Nenquimo. This is powerful, essential reading. The author tells of her family, her entire people, who are threatened by the ongoing encroachment of Big Oil. What can tribal people do when facing extinction of their way of life and the ecosystems they have long upheld? Seems unimaginable when up against global economic interests and the will of governments, abetted by missionaries and the corrosive effects of commerce. Yet Nenquimo dreamed the way forward. This is not only an account of deep suffering. It is also one of stories, dreams, love, and tremendous victory.
Here’s a quote from one of the final chapters, when the author is in a courtroom standoff.
“I turned my gaze to the judges and realized that if they were to see us, to truly see us, then we must also see them. Not as enemies, not as heartless judges, not as caricatures of conquest but rather as people, like us, capable of love and hate, of joy and grief. As souls that were here on this earth in these bodies for just a momentary flash. Maybe if we showed them that we were capable of seeing them, then they would see us, hear us, learn from us? … Maybe violence is born in the chasms between us, within us? Maybe the conquest, at its root, has always been about that chasm, a pain so lonely, so unbearable, so spiritually numbing that violence becomes the only path, the narrow trail to being human, to feeling something, anything.”
Something In The Woods Loves You by Jarod K. Anderson. One night I went to bed early with this book, meaning to read a chapter or two. I ended up reading the whole book. My lord, do I ever feel understood, even if what I’ve been through is nothing approaching Jarod’s experience. His meaning-making from time in nature is, as I expected, truly inspiring. So too his unexpected meaning-making out of the suicidal impulse itself. There I was sitting up in a tiny circle of lamplight in my dark room at midnight circling wise words about how a culture without whimsy is dangerous and how the air is charged with a kind of aliveness in the presence of a wild animal, wrapped up completely in his words.
A few weeks earlier I’d sent a copy of Something In The Woods Loves You to a dear friend who is enduring another bout of severe depression. I meant to read a library copy first, to assure myself she might find it helpful, as I didn’t want to impose yet another well-meaning “do this and you’ll feel better” sort of gift. My library copy didn’t come in week after week, so I finally had this sent to her home sight unseen out of sheer trust in Jarod after loving his poetry for so long. Thankfully she enjoy reading it. The copy I sat up half the night reading? It was her gift to me. It’s that good.
Lights on a Ground of Darkness: An Evocation of a Place and Time by Ted Kooser. Beautiful writing, as one might expect in a poet’s memoir. This short (72 pages!) memoir evokes a specific Midwestern time and place, all the more poignant for its distance from today. Here’s a passage about his elderly father visiting a relative dying in a nursing home.
“Now, as he rushes through people calling and calling to him, his heart tapping in his ears, he feels how frail and light he may soon become. He wants more gravity, he wants to hold himself down, to keep himself together for a little longer, to cherish the softening muscles wrapped like weights around his bones. How little this skull of thin, translucent bone must weigh. How fragile and infirm (and yet how precious to him) are its tiny sutures, the pearly, polished sockets for the eyes.
He stares past the girl painting her nails at the information desk, past the big windows in the visiting room that open upon beds of white petunias drooping in the heat, past the empty iron benches in the neatly mown grass. The cornfield looks as if it were made of electricity. It has suddenly come upon him that he is seventy years old and incapable of walking in any other direction that straight into the future. Flowered sport shirt; thin, spotted arms.”
They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight for Freedom by Ahed Tamimi. The long struggle of the Palestinian people is made vivid through the author’s experiences as her close-knit family and village stand up (with all they have — songs, chants, and rocks) to the brutality of occupying Israelis. It’s even more heartbreaking to recognize this book was published before the current ongoing genocide began. I read this memoir earlier this week during long afternoon while coughing and shivering with covid. That night her stories came alive in my dreams. Maybe because Ahed is so determined and brave, those dreams were not nightmares.
Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipesby Chantha Nguon. The author shares her experiences as a Cambodian refugee who lost her home, her family, her country in the horrors of the Pol Pot regime. She writes, “When you must flee and can carry only one thing, what will it be? What single seed from your old life will be the most useful in helping you sow a new one?” Nguon relies on her mother’s “slow noodles” approach to healing and to cooking, one that prioritizes time and care over expediency. This a testament to the power of culinary heritage to spark the author’s hope for an authentic life (and includes 20 Khmer recipes). Here’s a taste of her words. “But if there’s one thing I learned from my mother, it’s that losing everything is not the end of the story. She taught me that lost civilizations can be rebuilt from zero, even if the task will require many generations of work.”
The Body Is A Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human by Sophie Strand. I was grateful to get an arc of this book, due out in early March. Sophie Strand senses and understands in ways more whole, more alive, than most writers I have encountered in my decades as an avid reader. She brings this full beingness to all her work and this book is a standout. The Body Is A Doorway has widened and deepened the way I see my own health challenges. Here’s a passage from one of the closing chapters:
“How can we be well inside of an Earth we are actively harming?.. I want to suggest that we are all haunted. Not by flashbacks and memories. But by an imaginary idea of wholeness. By the idea that there is a normal body that renders our body deviant. That there is another version of us — a healthy version… That we must spend our every waking hour, our hard-earned money, our dedicated spiritual and physical focus, striving toward this other us…
For so long I’d viewed comfort and relaxation and ease as the goals that medical and psychological treatment were supposed to provide… I learned that we were supposed to create safe spaces and healthy boundaries…
Trauma does not belong to an individual. It is a web. It is not an object that can be removed. Your body’s innate ability to dance with harm and with discomfort is not always a problem. It is a relational tactic. A nonconsensual opening to both the good and the bad, the human and the nonhuman. .. I finally stopped defending the doorway of my own body. .Let it in. The love. The wonder. The pain. The uncertainty.”
Here’s another bit to give you a sense of her work:
“Every story, like every human body, is an ecosystem of other stories: the virus author that ‘taught’ us mammals how to develop wombs, the ancient ecological pressures that molded us into multicellularity, our pulsing microbiome, our fungi-dusted skin, our metabolic reciprocity with every substance we breathe and drink and eat. Every recombinatory miracle of genetics gave birth not to an individual on a hero’s journey, but to a biodiversity of competing and converging aliveness.”
Breaking Through: My Life in Science by Katalin Karikó. Breaking Through begins as a vivid coming-of-age story in postwar Hungary, showing us how Dr. Karikó developed the resilience and unquenchable curiosity that led to her remarkable breakthroughs. She takes us along through significant career drawbacks that would have daunted most other scientists. Her explanations of the work leading to mRNA is fascinating. She let her own experience demonstrate how innovation is easily stifled in our money and power-focused institutions. I also appreciate what this brave woman is doing for healthcare both now and for our collective futures.
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FICTION
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak In this beautifully written and brilliant novel, the author does with water what Richard Power did with trees – science, history, art, and meaning flow through the underlying theme of water. She writes, “In this land where the stones are ancient and the stories are spoken but rarely written down, it is the rivers that govern the days of our lives. Many kings have come and many kings have gone, and God knows most were ruthless, but here in Mesopotamia, my love, never forget the only true ruler is water.” I can’t wait to read her other books.
Sandwich by Catherine Newman. I would gladly read about everything this family does through the eyes of the main character. Rocky is my kind of wry bittersweet. She and I share the same neuroses, our grown kids are similarly brilliant and funny (even if she has a too-perfect-to-be-true spouse). And I appreciate how well she inserts candid humor into scenes.
Here’s how she describes being examined by a doctor on a the paper-covered exam table: “I sit up so I could feel more like a human woman than like a pile of old ham slices wrapped in deli paper.”
After Rocky’s mother is taken to the hospital, daughter Willa remonstrates her grandmother: “I told you to drink something!” Willa says, because her genetic inheritance includes scolding the people you’re worried about.”
The God Of The Woods by Liz Moore. This immersive, character-rich mystery centers on class divides with all its embedded cruelties. I don’t read many mysteries, so my perspective may be limited, but I definitely did not see it ending the way it did — all the more satisfying.
By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult. Why, when I read 100+ books a year, haven’t I read Jody Picoult’s tremendously popular books? I don’t have any idea. Maybe, subconsciously, I heard her books described (or dismissed) too many times as beach reads, as a typical airport fiction, as chick lit. To me, those dismissals are the fire burning under this wow of a novel.
By Any Other Name is a deeply researched and compelling work that manages to encompass centuries-long misogyny and chronic literary snobbishness in parallel stories—current day Melina Green and sixteenth century Emilia Bassano. Bassano’s story is the stronger of the two and could have been the standalone tale, but I see the need for the current story as a mirror. Probably as a mirror to readers like me who weren’t aware they dismiss too easily. I will never see Shakespeare’s name again without thinking of this book
Night Wherever We Go by Tracey Rose Peyton This is an incredible debut novel packed with humanity and its ugly failings. The author effortlessly lets her readers into the lives of these the enslaved women. And lets us feel the pull of relationship with the beyond-human in passages that stood out for me, like these:
“Some feet ahead, she spotted a chaste tree, its bright purple flowers just beginning to open. She wandered over to it, sensing some vibration calling to her. An unbelievable phenomenon she realized whenever she tried to describe it, but she had known it all her life–this ability to hear plants and trees whispering to her, offering her help.”
“We wanted to be inside the prayer and song, the deep vibration and sweaty fist of it, but couldn’t muster any of the necessary stuff to get up inside it. Some of us understood that these were relationships one remade over and over again. All the time, one was seeking alignment with God, with her Dead, with the trees and animals alike. All these relationships required sun and tending to, but the youngest among us didn’t understand the back-and-forth.”
“She picked up a stick and carried it low, scraping a trail in the dirt. A circle, a pointed arrow, a series of linked curlicues. She was pointing souls now. A whole army of them to nest inside the four walls. And she hoped by the time she got there, a war would be happening between her saints and his. She crossed herself and spun, left then right, as if she was trying to reach some hinge in the air, unlatching some hidden thing where all the otherworldly help could pour out of.”
Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers. It is a reader’s joy to start a book by an author new to her and realize, within a few pages, she’s found another author to love. This is an absorbing and deftly written novel that maintains its excellence all the way through to an unexpectedly redemptive ending. I will be hustling to read Clare Chambers’ other works.
Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips. This is a complex, brutal, and powerfully written work set in the Civil War era. The history itself is fascinating. I was particularly drawn to the character Dearbhla. Night Watch has much to say about trauma and its aftereffects both on individuals and a time period. (For those who appreciate advance warnings, there is a great deal of suffering in these pages.)
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng. This is an essential book for our times. Today’s angry voices denouncing books and the study of history and diversity itself have gotten their way in Celeste Ng’s novel. In some unnamed near-future, economic strife and simmering anti-Asian racism is used to justify the shock doctrine-like creation of a sweeping new law called PACT: Preserving American Culture and Traditions. Free access to books and music is gone. History is censored. People are rewarded for informing on “troublemakers.” The law also prevents the spread of “un-American views” by permanently removing children from families thought to be sympathetic to Asian countries or from parents thought to harbor un-patriotic opinions, even thought to doubt the benefit of PACT itself. In the potentially not-far-off world of Our Missing Hearts we come to know a linguist and poet who have a child named Bird. We come to see the unflagging heroism of librarians. We feel the power of etymology, and folktales, and of symbols that lift from poetry into larger purpose.
Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson. This is a fresh and clever take on the mystery genre (at least in my admittedly limited experience). The narrator’s career centers around teaching others about the craft of writing mysteries, although he has not published one himself. Lots of asides to the reader about rules of mystery writing, very meta, even if a bit murder-y for my taste. I was happy to discover this is the first book in a series of three.
The Golden Spoon by Jessa Maxwell. This is a charming, character focused mystery with a resoundingly positive ending. (Well, not positive for some of them.) I found it a delightful retreat from a chaotic world and I recommend it to anyone needing their own 288 pages of sweet as well as savory escapism.
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You know my yearly book lists are a poorly veiled attempt to hear about your favorite reads. Please comment with some titles you love.
Yesterday a social media post reported that a swan chick was trapped in the ice-covered Tjörnin, a lake in Iceland’s capital city of Reykjavík. Conservationist Kerstin Langenberger saw the post and replied, “I am on my way with the necessary equipment.”
She immediately set off on a rescue mission bringing thermoses of warm water and a surfboard (in case the ice was unstable). She gently poured warm water on the cygnet’s frozen feathers, rubbing away the ice to release him. Although he could easily have died, he was saved by concerned bystanders and a person with the necessary equipment. He flew off without any apparent injury.
We are living in a time of increasing horrors. Just as the stark danger of climate change is apparent in ever-increasing weather extremes and ocean warming —promises to cut down fossil fuel production and subsidies are broken. Just as we learn about the lifelong harm imposed by PFAS, microplastics, and particulate pollution — an incoming administration vows to eliminate regulations necessary to reduce these dangers. The list goes on — intentional harm to our civil liberties, to a sustainable environment, to freedoms considered essential all over the world.
Everyone I talk to feels overwhelmed by all that’s going on and all that’s coming. I think it will help if we focus rather than react to every outrage. If women’s issues or immigration or climate change or the genocide being perpetrated in Palestine are your top concern, hone down to read about and act on that one issue as a priority.
When I look around, I see all sorts of necessary equipment in use. A Dad Hugs shirt worn to Pride parades. Smiles brought by volunteer reading tutors. Handouts used in citizen testimony to stop Ohio’s mandated fracking leases at all state parks. Tea shared between groups from different religions. Paint and brushes brought to create a community mural. Household goods given away through local No Buy groups. Videos taken to document and report abuses. Chainsaws brought to clear trees downed by storms. Typewriters set up in public spaces for free poems written by request. Neighbors out walking to help find a lost dog. Shareable groups formed to create a walking school bus, a regular stranger dinner, and much more.
There are infinite ways we humans reach out to care for the world around us. Our experiences and abilities are exactly the tools needed. Rest up, breathe deeply, keep your pockets full of hope.
“I pin my hopes to quiet processes and small circles, in which vital and transforming events take place.” ~ Rufus Jones
I have taken the day off from work. Not one job on the clock other than (waves hands around) a few essential tasks. I am also not checking the news or listening to dire prognostications or giving in to worry. Yes, I am aware this is an incredible privilege.
I will enjoy watching leaves scatter from trees and clouds curl into blue skies. I will appreciate the ecumenical gathering of birds, ducks, and one friendly groundhog around our daily offering of birdseed and peanuts.
I will excavate nearly a year’s stockpile of gifts to send to beloved ones overseas.
I will make a mélange of what’s left in the garden for my lunch – peppers, tomatillos, onions, beans, and lots of herbs –a lunch I never have to share because no one around here wants such oddities.
I will, most likely, post yet another hope-centric quote like this and this on social media because I can’t not.
I will dig into this paper by Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan–How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis–showing how a world without poverty for anyone anywhere is indeed possible while bringing resource use back within planetary boundaries. As Jason writes when sharing the paper, “If we organized production around well-being, we could immediately end poverty and ensure good living standards for 8.5 billion people. Decent living standards that include housing, universal healthcare, education, transit, heating/cooling, induction stoves, fridge-freezers, washing machines, internet, computers, mobile phones etc — all of this can be provided for 8.5 billion people with only 30% of current global resource and energy use productive capacity. This leaves a substantial surplus for additional consumption, scientific advancement, and other social investments.” (Arts! I add, yelling from the sidelines. And fun!)
I will take a walk with the bundles of enthusiasm named Fergus and Archibald.
I will gear up to pressure President Harris for an immediate end to all military funding which endangers civilian populations, particularly causing the horrific ongoing slaughter of innocent lives in Palestine and Yemen. And for her to take every serious measure to mitigate the incredible damage our industrialized world has done to the climate. More marching, more divestment, more pressure starting day one.
I have no illusions that distraction will only be necessary on election day. Certain very angry people, backed by certain very wealthy people, are planning to disrupt voting, vote counting, and vote certification. Let’s fill up on all the peace we can because we’re going to be busy.
~
SORROWFUL POSTSCRIPT:
ELECTION 2024, MORNING AFTER
When even a giant duck-shaped cloud can’t lift my despair I remind myself to take the farthest distant view.
If gravitational force were a billionth of its strength stronger the universe would have collapsed after the big bang.
If attraction between electrons and atomic nuclei were too strong, atoms couldn’t bond and molecules couldn’t form.
Truly, anything in this marvel of existence, in your marvel of a lifetime, is possible.
I know every civilization eventually falls but damn, it’s hard to watch its own citizens knock down the pillars supporting it.
“It is becoming increasingly clear through research on the brain, as well as in other areas of study, that childhood needs play. Play acts as a forward feed mechanism into courageous, creative, rigorous thinking in adulthood.” ~ Tina Bruce
Nine-year-old Charlotte has one hand slung around a utility pole as she slowly twirls, her head tipped to watch the upper floors of her Cleveland apartment building circle past. Her mother is unloading groceries and chides her daughter, “Stop playing around!”
Charlotte actually has very little time to play. Her days are tightly woven as the dozens of perfectly tended braids in her hair. She’s in the gifted stream at school, participates in swim team and basketball team, takes clarinet lessons, and attends a computer-oriented STEM program on Saturdays.
“I had more of a Little Rascals childhood,” Charlotte’s mother says. “My girlfriends and I would use sheets hanging on the clothesline as curtains to perform Michael Jackson hits or I’d ride bikes with my brothers down dirt piles pretending to be Evel Knievel. It was a lot of fun but Char has more advantages than I could have dreamed of.”
Charlotte’s mom needs to get the groceries unpacked before heading back out. She’ll drop Charlotte off at basketball practice, then buy craft supplies her daughter needs to make a school project. “It’s endless,” she says. “We’re running all the time.”
Although she’s in a hurry, she has more to say about play. “The other day Char had friends over,” she says. “They were whispering and giggling. I felt bad that I had to barge in and tell the girls their playdate was over because we had to leave. I know they need more time to just be silly.”
She’s right.
Most adults don’t hesitate to interrupt play with an activity they assume is more important or to halt play they deem too loud, messy, or rough. And they don’t see a problem with corralling children’s leisure time in ways that remove most aspects of “free” from play. Dismissing what kids do as “just” play also denies what makes us fully ourselves.
There’s no definitive description of free play, but as author and play advocate Bob Hughes wrote back in 1982, it’s behavior that is “freely chosen, personally directed, and intrinsically motivated, i.e. performed for no external goal or reward.”
Psychiatrist Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, expands on this. He says play basics include purposeless, repetitive, pleasurable, spontaneous actions. Play takes many forms. Sometimes this is driven by curiosity and the urge to discover. Sometimes it’s imaginative play driven by an internal narrative. Sometimes it’s rough and tumble play, the kind that necessarily puts the player at risk and involves anti-gravity moves such as jumping, diving, and spinning.
Picture the wildly free play of puppies and kittens as they wrestle and explore; that’s what he is describing. As Dr. Brown writes, “The urge to play is embedded within all humans, and has been generated and refined by nature for over one hundred million years.”
Ever taller stacks of research demonstrate that free play is critical for development. It fosters problem-solving, reduces stress, enhances learning, and boosts happiness.
Make-believe games go a long way toward helping kids develop self-regulation, including reduced aggression, ability to delay gratification, and advancing empathy. One form of make-believe, more common in children who have lots of minimally unsupervised free time, is called worldplay. This is considered the apex of childhood imagination and is linked with lifelong creativity,
Preliminary studies indicate the less structured time in a child’s day, the better their ability to set goals and reach those goals without pressure from adults. Childhood play is even correlated with high levels of social success in adulthood.
And, as if we didn’t already know this, free play generates sheer joy. The BBC series “Child of Our Time” studied play. They found the more children engaged in free play, the more they laughed, particularly when playing outside. The kids who played the most laughed up to 20 times more than kids who played less. This is surely the best reason of all to play.
But then it strikes us. Suddenly, with the same horrified expression mad scientists wear in sci fi movies while uttering the lines, “What have we done?” we realize that we’ve squeezed nearly all the free play out of childhood. If there are monsters in this scenario, they come disguised as tighter safety restrictions, more adult-run activities, insufficient recess at school, and the lure of screens. Since the 1970’s children have 25 percent less time to play, with 50 percent less time in unstructured outdoor play. In the 1980’s, school-aged children spent 40 percent of the day, on average, engaging in free play. By 1997, that average had dwindled to a mere 25 percent and continue to decline. A recent report notes that American kids, on average, spend about four to seven minutes a day playing outside but over seven hours a day in front of screens. Even when kids do have time to play freely, it’s now common for adults to supervise.
This is particularly true in educational settings. Play is a buzzword for educators, but as Elizabeth Braue wrote in a journal article titled “Are We Paving Paradise?” — “What counts as play in many classrooms are highly controlled situations that focus on particular content labeled as ‘choice’ but that are really directed at capturing a specific content-based learning experience, such as number bingo or retelling a story exactly as the teacher told it on a flannel board.” Free play, particularly the more emotionally expressive and physically active forms, are also squeezed out of daycare and afterschool programs in favor of planned activities.
It’s not just a U.S. thing. A structured and heavily supervised childhood is becoming more prevalent globally. When thousands of mothers around the world were asked about their children’s activities, they tended to agree that a lack of free play and experiential learning was eroding childhood. At the same time, they listed their children’s main free-time activity as watching television. This held true for children growing up in North and South American, Europe, Asia, and Africa. The researchers, writing in the American Journal of Play, made clear their surprise at what they called a “homogenization of children’s activities and parents’ attitudes.”
Marketing messages are so ever-present that they’ve reshaped the norms for raising children. Those messages lead us to believe that good parents heavily supervise children, keeping them busy with purchased playthings and pricey programs starting in toddlerhood or earlier. Such opportunities, we’re told, are found in specialized toys, educational apps, adult-run programs and lessons, gym and fitness sessions, organized sports, and extra-curricular activities. This presumes the kind of spending power and free time that’s entirely out of reach for most US parents. The cost is greater than money because they also lose family time, relaxation, and free play.
That’s not to say a child shouldn’t take drum lessons, go to the rock climbing gym, or participate in scouts. The difference between an overscheduled child and a child who’s eager to take on more activities has to do with each child’s unpressured choices, balanced with what’s best for the family as a whole. It’s also worth remembering that shuttling our kids around for enrichment activities is not necessarily correlated with later success.
Play is a constant in the life of young children. When we formalize it with too many activities that turn play into a tool for academic or physical advancement, we lose sight of play for play’s sake.
This is an important consideration, because the short and long-term consequences of too little free play are more serious than most of us imagine. Play deprivation (yes, it’s a term) has been linked to significant problems. At the most extreme is the potential for increased criminal behavior. Dr. Brown has studied the topic for 47 years, conducting something like six thousand individually conducted play histories. He was initially drawn to learn more when he looked for common backgrounds among men convicted of felony drunk driving and men convicted of homicide. To his surprise, he found these individuals shared a background of severe, sustained, long-term play deprivation. More recent studies have identified play deprivation as a factor in violent crimes committed by juveniles.
Overscheduled kids aren’t more likely to commit crimes, by any means. Much more research needs to be done to establish a causal link. But we do know that too little free play is serious problem. Youth mental health continues to worsen—with particularly stark increases in problems among teen girls. Nearly 1 in 3 girls seriously considered attempting suicide—up nearly 60% from a decade ago. Across all racial and ethnic groups teens are experiencing increasing rates of persistent sadness or hopelessness.
Over 20 years ago, David Elkind wrote in The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon, that overscheduled children and teens are more likely to show signs of stress, anxiety, and depression. It’s thought that free play and quality family time are a protective effect, helping children work through and manage such feelings.
Peter Gray finds it logical that a decline in play might result in increased emotional and social disorders. He writes in Free To Learn, “Play is nature’s way of teaching children how to solve their own problems, control their impulses, modulate their emotions, see from others’ perspectives, negotiate differences, and get along with others as equals. There is no substitute for play as a means of learning these skills.”
Physical play is critical in maintaining good mental health and a useful intervention when young people suffer from depression. A recent study found physical activity at least three times a week resulted in a significant reduction in depression symptoms. The effect was greatest “when the physical activity was unsupervised than when it was fully or partially supervised.”
Play is humanity’s spark plug. It connects us to a current that exists within us and around us, an aliveness that runs on fun. This is how we make scientific advances; how we develop products that were once in the realm of fantasy; how we create music, books, movies, games, and art; how we laugh with friends, build community, and come up with solutions. It’s no wonder all of us need more play.
When Charlotte notices her mother is caught up in conversation with me, she runs up the staircase outside their apartment and slides her backpack down the railing, then tries to scurry down the steps fast enough to catch it. When she succeeds on the second try, she boosts the challenge by running down the mulched dirt on the outside of the steps. An elderly man approaches the steps. She pauses, perhaps wary of his disapproval. Instead he playfully slides the backpack back up just as she nears the bottom. Charlotte’s mother turns around when she hears her daughter’s giggle join the older man’s hearty laugh. It’s a lighthearted moment of connection for all four of us, brought into being through playfulness. “That’s the great thing about kids,” she says. “They can turn anything into play.”
So can we all. I don’t think anyone says it better than games expert and play advocate Bernie DeKoven, who wrote inA Playful Path,
“Playfulness is a gift that grants you great power. It allows you to transform the very things that you take seriously into opportunities to shared laughter; the very things that make your heart heavy into things that make you rejoice, it turns junk into toys, toys into art, art into celebration. It turns walking into skipping, skipping into dance. It turns problems into puzzles, puzzles into invitations to wonder.”
“Listen patiently, quietly and reverently to the lessons, one by one, which Mother Nature has to teach, shedding light on that which was before a mystery, so that all who will, may see and know.” ~Luther Burbank
It has been a very hot summer, one that ramps up my concern for this lovely planet’s future. The heat also makes it miserable to do much in our gardens other than admire weeds as they flourish. But, then, co-existence with weeds is the way we do things around here.
We are in full harvest mode, which means wading into the thrum of green toward the bright lure of purple eggplant, red tomatoes, yellow squash, pink grapes, peppers of many hues. Everything is alive and beautiful, weeds included.
I keep finding more squash! So. Many. Cucumbers. Most days I pick three or four. Yesterday I discovered a few giant ones lurking in the weed-enhanced foliage. They were given to the chickens.
I’ve never had much success at conventional gardening with its orderly plantings surrounded by bare soil. Bare soil, in nature, is unnatural. And, honestly, I always felt sorry for the vibrant healthy plants I pulled up simply because I deemed them weeds, like some kind of vegetal colonizer. I often apologized as I did. It eased my conscience a bit to haul these stacks of dying weeds off to feed cows or chickens.
Mostly I’ve avoided pulling up much of anything. That’s why, for years, I tried all sorts of weed suppression ideas.
The strangest was the spring I covered rows by laying down long strips cut from worn out jeans I’d been saving to make a jeans quilt. The sturdy denim fabric held up beautifully through the entire growing season and into the next. Eventually it decayed back into dirt, which is what I’d hoped for, but not without leaving behind long sturdy fibers that could unintentionally trap, injure, or even cause the death of birds and small animals. It was an arduous process to pull them all out. It’s been about 25 years since then and while those fibers are gone I still, on occasion, run across a jeans rivet when I’m planting.
Before that I tried carpet discards, an approach suggested in a long-ago Mother Earth News article. It assured me that decades-old carpet was safe. (I suspect that advice was, well, suspect.) It needed to be pulled up at the end of the growing season and I was troubled by how much biomass was pulled up too, impoverishing rather than helping the soil.
The worst was the year we got leftover landscape “fabric” free from a friend’s market garden business. You’ve seen the stuff: black water-permeable plastic material that’s held down with stakes or clips or mulch. It’s commonly used on all sorts of farms, from small to large, conventional to organic. I pulled it up that year after the last harvest and was appalled to see our normally friable soil hard and dead-looking. We never used it again.
We now know sheet mulches, like the ones I mentioned (as well as astroturf, plastic mulch, and other so-called weed solutions) suppress the development of mycorrhizal fungi so essential to plant health. They also wreck the habitat for beneficial soil-dwelling creatures, overheat the ground, prevent organic matter from being incorporated into the soil, and impede the health of plant roots. Their presence wrecks the necessary carbon dioxide and oxygen exchange between soil and air—essentially suffocating the soil. If that’s not alarming enough, landscape fabric contains petrochemicals which break down into toxic substances including microplastics. (You know, the microplastics known to increase the severity of heart disease, cause arterial damage and strokes, harm hormone and reproductive systems, disrupt gut biome, lower fertility, cause premature births, impair learning and memory,) One analysis shows that three feet of landscape fabric can release hundreds of millions of microplastic particles.
Ironweed sprouts up by the pond and here around our former kiwi arbor, now a swing set. Their bright flowers offer late-season nectar for bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and other creatures.Here’s another swing set volunteer. I haven’t ID’d the plant but trust it has a reason for growing here.
I have since learned how fully the native plants we call weeds improve the soil, support pollinators, and nourish myriad life forms necessary for a balanced ecosystem. Perfect weedless plantings now look wrong to me.
Yes, seedlings need protection from weeds in their earliest weeks of life. I start hundreds of seeds under the fancy grow light table my husband built. These babies, even after hardening off, need space and light in the garden. The system we’ve evolved takes some labor when planting, but is kind to the soil and kind to our backs. Best of all, it frees us to do little more than water and harvest throughout the growing season. There are two main aspects to our method.
One, we leave wide rows where grass, clover, and other green life springs up of its own accord as nature intended. Every now and then my husband runs the push mower along these rows. In narrower patches, he or I run the weed whacker. These plants function as green ground cover. I see them as naturally occurring companion plants. By this time of year we don’t bother mowing them at all, although it would look more tidy. Instead we brave the knee-high jungle to pick flowers and vegetables from amongst their lively blooming weed cohabitators.
Two, we barely disrupt the ground for planting. No rototilling, no hoeing. We move a trowelful or two of dirt for each plant, then we augment the opening with rotted manure or compost. We fold thick overlapping layers of the New York Times (or saved, tape-free cardboard) around each plant after it has been tucked into the soil. Probably a foot or less on all sides. We top this newspaper mulch with well-rotted straw that spent the winter stacked around the chicken coop. (One could use grass clippings or fresh straw instead.) It’s important to water the plant and its surrounding paper/straw immediately not only for the plant’s health but also to prevent any slight breeze from spreading newspaper sections around the neighborhood. (Yes, I’ve been spotting running after newspaper sections gusting across the yard.) The newspaper and straw break down by the end of the growing season, effectively becoming dirt by the next spring when we do the same thing all over again. It also brings me a measure of peace to tuck awful headlines around tender little seedlings, as if something good can come from all that bad news.
A side benefit to our weedy gardens? They’re busy with bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and other pollinators. Plus, we don’t lose a lot of our vegetables to neighborhood rabbits, deer, woodchucks, etc. (Okay, except for the Night of the Marauding Raccoons in our hoop house.) I see rabbits in our side garden every evening, oftentimes they hang out there for hours. They’ve chomped down a few tender shoots of spinach and chard, but they mostly eat what’s most tantalizing to them–weeds!
The biggest relief is how much the garden doesn’t need me. My ministrations are marginal, hardly necessary next to nature’s real magic. Sure, we water pretty diligently in the hot weather. I even pull a few weeds when they’re taking over a plant’s space. But I’m not remotely responsible for the riot of life growing around me. The flowers, vegetables, and every one of the weeds are beautiful.
This appears to be sow thistle, which popped up after I harvested onions. An old herbalist teaching is what we need to heal grows at our feet. Maybe these plants are telling me something. Healthy squash volunteers sprout in one of the compost bins.These plants by our front steps are so full of greenly health that I’ve let them stay. I think they are burnweed, aka as pilewort, which is apparently an aromatic herb also grown for medicinal use. I’m not confident enough in my plant ID to use it, but I do enjoy its cheerful nature.By September having given up on mowing rows, this garden patch is a weed-tastic morass still brimming with harvest-ready produce.
We remove cucumber, melon, and gourd plants as soon as they’re done producing to prevent future plants from dealing with pests and diseases common to cucurbits. But that’s it. I no longer bemoan a messy garden. No longer judge myself for my failure to keep up with standard gardening practices. Perhaps my lazy-forward methods mean I gather a little less produce. (Or maybe not.) But I gather more peace from our feral gardens than I ever did in years of trying to keep up. The appearances-at-all-costs thing feels oppressive to me, whether it refers to our bodies or our possessions or our social status. That doesn’t mean I don’t see the beauty of a fashionably dressed person or a perfectly tended garden, it’s just never been for me.
As autumn folds into winter each year, the weeds remain. It feels right to learn what I can from our plant elders. All winter, I notice birds and other creatures feed on seedheads and dried fruits. I see them find shelter in the dry stalks. I pay attention to the patterns snow and wind make in this gone-wild space. I take heart in the way these plants bend, then lie down as they give what’s left of themselves back to the dirt.
Weed I Won’t Pull
Some hardship curved it into a green ampersand. Tendrils sprout along a resolute stem.
I want to lean close, ask for some photoautotrophic wisdom.
Listen to the soil’s bacterial choir.
Convert to the worship plants have practiced since the Beginning.
I stood at the window of a busy urban medical center the other day after a round of tests, waiting to see a specialist. The facility had landscaped the grounds with a pond and walking path, likely so that staff and patients could enjoy the well-researched benefits of nature. The pond was, like so many, mowed right to the edge and treated with chemicals to eliminate weeds/algae. A grounds crew was weed whacking around the few nearby plantings. (What’s whacked, in my experience, is more likely to belong than the non-native plants considered beautiful.)
I watched a family of Canada geese wandering the edge, pecking at the minimal nourishment of turf grass. I noticed an unusual gull flying in. It had a much wider wingspan and different coloration than those typically seen around Lake Erie. (Looking it up later, I see it might have been a Glaucous gull.) It swooped low around the pond a few times, flapped over two trees near the building, then flew off across the busy highway toward further commerce-clogged miles.
That pond, put there for a serene view of “nature” is of little more value than a parking lot to that bird and those geese. No native plants at the edge full of seeds and blooms. No duckweed or fish in the water. Likely few if any insects. No real nourishment, just a pond for show, largely devoid of nature’s context.
Everything in us is designed to flourish. Yet we’re pressured to be some version of that pond in our culture—accepted within tight margins, meant to perform as expected, confined by limited variables. I want to embrace the messy complexity that doesn’t neatly fit into a barren pond or a narrow theology, isn’t defined by political rigidity or status or possessions. I want my waters awake with invisible and visible lives. I want my edges lush with everything blooming and going to seed and dying –trusting what needs to flourish will come back to life. I want community, cross-pollination, diversity, beauty. Sometimes, in today’s world, I wonder if we are all the tightly mowed lawn as well as the gull seeking more.
What ways have you found to let the wild living waters of your being and your world flourish?
Here’s the pond on our property— lush, overgrown, wildly alive.
“Life as a whole expresses itself as a force that is not to be contained within any one part. . . . The things we call the parts in every living being are so inseparable from the whole that they may be understood only in and with the whole.” ~Goethe
My 83-year-old father and I meet regularly at a quiet small-town eatery. Large windows light up the whole place. After my mother’s long illness and death he remarried, relaxing back into bird watching and church choir.
For years he made lists of things to talk about on the phone or in-person, an eccentric way to handle his shyness, but now we talk easily. While he eats a cherry pastry, I tell him about a biography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I’m reading. “Colors,” Goethe said, “are light’s suffering and joy.” He scoffed at critics who insisted he didn’t understand scientific theories about color and instead asserted that color required both darkness and light. Goethe believed personal observation was more vital than conventional knowledge.
My dad, a retired teacher, disagrees. He says theories must be mastered before making advancements. Goethe would have enjoyed debating that point. As we talk, beveled glass decorations at the windows break light into rainbows that bounce from my father’s face to the walls around him.
I’m grateful things have become close-friend comfortable between us. We talk and laugh companionably, happy to be sitting together rather than separated by the miles of our daily phone call. My father had been ratcheted tight by early adversity but something loosened in him recently.
In the past few weeks he’s begun telling me about his long-unspoken childhood. When my dad was five years old, his own father died after a short illness, leaving behind three small children and a wife with severe asthma.
Relatives told him he was now man of the family. One uncle took him hunting, even though my dad was barely big enough to carry the shotgun. My dad described that gun as a weapon lethal to anything in the direction it was pointed, including saplings. Occasionally, he managed to bring home squirrels for the family table. “But I would have rather had them for my friends,” he said. He described a rabbit he noticed in the yard every day after school. He wanted it to trust him enough to eat from his hand, but also felt the pressure to provide for the family. One day he killed it. Nearly 75 years later he said he still felt he’d betrayed that little creature.
He told me about his mother’s youngest brother, Uncle Arthur, whose every visit was “bad news.” Arthur would talk the young widow into lending him money, giving him her husband’s things, letting her little boy come work for him on day-long labors. He even talked her into handing over the award her husband had earned at work. “That Arthur was a scoundrel,” my father said, “but what a smart guy. He turned a Ford truck into a farm tractor. Never saw anything like it.”
Life insurance money paid out after their father’s death had been tucked safely away in the bank, only to be lost in the Depression’s bank failure. My dad described how his mother took her three children to the steps of the bank, wailing and banging on the front door. It remained locked. He told me about the day she sat her two older children down at the kitchen table and said she wasn’t sure how much longer she could feed them. She warned they might have to go to an orphanage. After that, he and his sister ate less and tried to prove in every possible way that they weren’t a burden. Their toddler brother, whose exuberance lifted the household mood, was too young to understand.
Most of our father/daughter conversations, however, were light-hearted and wide-ranging. On this morning we talk about books, music, science, and family news. After we visit close to two hours, my father says, “I’m sure you’re busy, I don’t want to keep you.” It’s his way of saying he still has a bike ride to go on, brain-training games to do, then dinner before choir practice. The sunny day holds no clue a new prescription is already weakening a malformed vessel inside his brain.
Before we hug goodbye he says, with uncharacteristic urgency, he has waited long enough for great-grandchildren. “There’s plenty of time,” I laugh, “your grandchildren are pretty young to think about having kids.”
A few nights later I have a long, intricate dream. In it I watch a strangely stylized battle between a man in medieval garb and various shadowy opponents amidst swirling greenish gray clouds. There may even have been a dragon. The fight goes on and on. The man struggles mightily, never giving up. I suffer for him. I can’t imagine he can bear much more. In a break from the action I see the object of these battles. It hangs on a decorated chain but, instead of an elaborate medallion or jeweled treasure, it looks like a laminated ID tag with unrecognizable symbols dangling from it.
Finally, the medieval man holds it up in exhausted victory. Startled, I realize the man who has been so wearily battling is a younger version of my father. He sees me, but looks intently beyond me. I turn.
There I see a long table filled with people I don’t recognize. Each one wears a different bright shade of monochrome clothing. No swirling clouds there, only brightness. These people are talking among themselves, completely ignoring the battle that just played out before them.
I address the group indignantly, annoyed they can chat so blithely despite the perilous drama that took place. “Haven’t you seen what just happened,” I sputter, waving my hand toward the scene of the recently concluded battle. Then the younger version of my father, still holding up the ID tag says, “They can’t see me. They’re my descendants.”
A few days later, my father dies.
In my grief I turn back to Goethe. I flip through pages of his book, The Sorrows of Young Werther, immediately impatient with the author’s romanticized portrayal of death. I toss the unread book in a tote bag to return to the library, but miss. It sprawls open. As I pick it up, a single line stands out: “Life is the childhood of our immortality.” I have the sense, just for a moment, that I am a page in some greater book, only faintly aware of my place between those who have gone before me and those who will come after. I more gently place Goethe’s work in the bag, then let the rest of my day come.
A month or so after my daughter was born, I took friends upstairs to see her nursery. She didn’t sleep there yet, instead she slept in my arms or in the bassinet next to our bed, but this space was hers. It was painted pale yellow and the rocking chair was softened by a handmade quilt hung over the back. On the wall was the Lance Hidy poster “Children Ask The World Of Us.” The room had, to my new mom heart, the feel of a sanctuary.
The wife was my oldest friend, her husband was a man who kept us laughing with his stories, and they were expecting their first baby soon. He snorted when he spotted the poster, then brought up a conflict that US politicians were blustering about (and covertly messing with) at the time in the Middle East. He said, “We should just nuke them.”
I wanted him and his poisonous opinions out of my baby’s bedroom. I would have been horrified by any human advocating the use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances, but I was even more resoundingly appalled because this man was the son of Middle Eastern immigrants and had recently qualified as a doctor sworn to heal, yet here he was sanctioning the most unspeakable harm. Even while I was sputtering an angry response, I realized he may well have been mocking my pacifism. I hadn’t been quiet about my views or my activism. I even painted onesies with cheery peace slogans under smiling suns which, in retrospect, may have been a bit too earnest as baby gifts for my non-peacenik friends.
My baby girl is grown now but that moment comes back to me in these calamitous times. The memory also brought up a remarkable antidote to nuclear war that was proposed in all seriousness back in 1981 by a man named Roger Fisher.
Fisher had served in WWII, argued cases before the US Supreme Court, worked as a Harvard law professor specializing in negotiation, and co-authored a popular book Getting To Yes. Throughout his career he was deeply committed to peacemaking. For example, he was involved in the Camp David summit that led to an Israeli–Egyptian peace treaty in 1979, helped negotiate the release of US hostages held in Iran in 1981, and later worked directly to end of South Africa’s apartheid rule. Fisher devised negotiation tactics that ensured all parties were fully represented, including a cooperative interest-based negotiation process now commonly used around the world. The man was no slouch in the hard work of creating a more peaceful world.
Then he took on the utter idiocy of nuclear weapons. Writing March’s 1981 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the entire article is a worthy read) Fisher pointed out that there are no military solutions to the world’s largest problems. “The only means we have available,” Fisher wrote, “is to try to change someone’s mind.” Like any good negotiator, he explains why negotiation must include each side’s interests with full participation in joint problem-solving. And, further, to understand and to care about one another as the only way to lasting peace. His essay includes specific recommendations but my favorite and the most controversial is the following.
There is a person who is required to accompany the president with an attaché case containing the codes needed to authorize firing nuclear weapons. Fisher imagines this person as a young man, perhaps a naval officer named George, who is around the president every day. That person-to-person familiarity is the heart of Fisher’s nuclear deterrence. Because in his proposal, the nuclear codes are not in the case. Here’s how Fisher explains it.
My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, ‘George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.’ He has to look at someone and realize what death is — what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.
When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, “My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.”
Exactly.
We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over with at least nine countries possessing nuclear weapons. The overall stockpile is lower than it was in the Cold War era but, as the Union of Concerned Scientists note, “the warheads on just one US nuclear-armed submarine have seven times the destructive power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan.” And global spending on nuclear weapons increased by thirteen percent in 2023. The strategy of mutual assured destruction means a nuclear attack by one superpower will be met with an overwhelming nuclear counterattack by the target country — leading to complete destruction of both countries and, presumably, the rest of the world. Most of the deployed nuclear-armed weapons held by the US are maintained on prompt-launch status.
And now the unspeakable is being spoken.
Israel’s Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu said in a radio interview from last November that a nuclear option would be “one way” to deal with Gaza. He was suspended from his position, but his remarks may indicate what the far-right ruling coalition considers an option. Mr. Eliyahu repeated his call for striking the Gaza Strip with nuclear weapons again in January. More recently, Senator Lindsey Graham spoke on Meet The Press where he repeatedly brought up the US’s use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations in Japan during WWII.
Graham said. “That was the right decision.”
He added, “Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war. They can’t afford to lose.”
Later in the interview he doubled down. “Why is it OK for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war? Why was it OK for us to do that? I thought it was OK.”
“So, Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state. Whatever you have to do.”
Representative Tim Walberg of Michigan offered similar remarks during a town hall held in March. Israel’s strategy in Gaza, he said, “should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick,” And now NC representative Greg Murphy suggests Israel would be justified in using nuclear weapons against Palestinians.
This sort of “fix a far-off problem with annihilation” is beyond genocidal speech. It’s ecocide speech. We are all inhabitants of the same nursery, Earth. Let it be a sanctuary.
“All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.” Rainer Maria Rilke
I was called a “fidget” and a “wigglewump” when I was growing up. I was told to sit still and pay attention. I had no problem paying attention to library books I picked out, happily swinging my legs from a chair as I read for hours. But sitting in school or worship services made my whole body feel like a coiled spring. I behaved, but it took a lot of effort. This made it even harder to understand what the adult at the front of the room was droning on about. Long car rides were even worse. I thought everyone felt headachy and nauseated while traveling, so it didn’t occur to me to report this to a grown-up. All I knew is that I wanted the car to stop moving so I could be the one to move.
We aren’t a still sort of species. Even in utero our bodies receive changing stimuli constantly. Our mother’s movements rock us in a watery world. Her footsteps send thud-like vibrations through us. Her heartbeat, along with our far faster fetal heartbeat, sets up a percussive syncopation. Her breath, speech, and digestion, plus sounds from outside her body add to this ever-changing symphony. Sound pairs with sensation, over and over, throughout prenatal development linking movement with meaning.
Within seconds of being born, a newborn will reflexively grasp a finger and turn her head to find a nipple. Within a few months she will teach herself to grab objects, roll over, and stand with support. These aren’t just motor skills; each movement builds ever more complex neural pathways in her growing brain. As Hungarian pediatrician Emmi Pikler advocated back in 1946, babies do best when given freedom of movement. In an article titled “Exercise Affects Baby Brains,” Janet Lansbury writes,
[Dr. Pikler] “studied the contrasts between the children who had been taught, propped, positioned and restricted in devices like infant seats, walkers and bouncers, and those who were given freedom of movement and allowed to develop at their own rate. Dr. Pikler found that the natural approach not only affected the quality of motor skills, but also influenced ‘all other areas of growth – social, emotional, cognitive – and even character development.’ Pikler babies, as the children in her practice were known, could be easily distinguished at the parks in Budapest, because they were ‘poised and graceful, alert and friendly, and so confidently independent.’”
Babies expend effort comparable to world-class athletes as they master new abilities. Child development expert Karen Adolph describes, in a journal article titled “What Changes in Infant Walking and Why,” what it takes the average baby to teach himself to walk.
“Walking infants practice keeping balance in upright stance and locomotion for more than 6 accumulated hours per day. They average between 500 and 1,500 walking steps per hour so that by the end of each day, they may have taken 9,000 walking steps and traveled the length of 29 football fields…. Albeit intense, infants’ practice regimen is not like an enforced march of massed practice where walking experiences are concentrated into continuous time blocks. If practice were massed, the sheer amounts of daily practice would be even more astounding (the average cadence for a 14-month-old toddler walking over the laboratory floor, for example, is 190 steps per minute). Rather, infants’ walking experience is distributed throughout their waking day, with short periods of walking separated by longer rest periods where infants stand still or play….”
It seems exhausting, yet this is what natural learning looks like. The same extraordinary level of motivation continues as the growing child teaches herself, on her own timetable and in ways best for her, a whole spectrum of abilities through direct, real world experiences. That is the way we humans learn best.
Our brains evolved to help us confront and solve problems. We can’t separate learning from the rest of the body, or from the context of an individual life, yet that’s how we expect education to work. Despite the most caring and dedicated staff, the very structure of most schools is top-down, so lessons address students’ brains (mostly left brain) rather than their whole beings. This approach rewards only those students who can most easily narrow their full-body need to DO. Replacing traditional instruction with technology doesn’t make school any more physically engaging.
Learning sticks when our emotions and senses are active because, as psychologist Louis Cozolino explains, “visual, semantic, sensory, motor, and emotional neural networks all contain their own memory systems.”
For example, studies show we don’t master a foreign language best by studying grammar and memorizing words, nor by speaking it before we feel comfortable. Instead we learn most easily and effectively when we are interested in the message it conveys, like trying to decipher music lyrics or follow an instructional video in a different language. We learn better when we have IRL experiences to pair it with, like ethnic food eaten with native language speakers. And we learn better when our bodies are active, even more easily remembering foreign words when we learn them while making gestures.
Research shows that movement, even as small as hand movement, helps people unfamiliar with difficult subjects like organic chemistry understand and remember complex topics.
Those of us constitutionally less able to sit still and remain focused on material of little interest to us are pathologized as “suffering” from ADHD. We’re urged to take powerful pharmaceuticals to better help us sit still and focus. This is effective in the short term, which isn’t surprising, as amphetamines have long been used to get through boring tasks. The main long-term result of using such meds in childhood is growing up about an inch shorter than those who were not taking them. People with ADHD tend to be particularly creative. The very things we define as problems are instead vital aspects of human diversity
All of us learn best, from basic skills to academic subjects, when mind, body, and emotions are involved. Such experiences help to inform later understanding. Consider an introductory physics lesson aimed only at the brain. A student is presented with a concept, perhaps on the page or by online tutorial or lecture, and then must complete comprehension questions for a grade. Contrast this with learning that’s encoded through movement, as happens in play. That same student may already have discovered the principle herself, perhaps learning about centripetal force and acceleration by whirling a bucket of water in a full circle fast enough to keep the water contained or by discovering how fast a toy car needs to go around an upside down loop without falling. These play experiences make her much more likely to retain and build on what she has learned, and more likely to understand principles when they are more formally presented.
This kind of learning sticks with us. That’s what neurologist Frank Wilson noticed when he asked people at the top of their careers about their early experiences. Musicians, mathematicians, surgeons, engineers, artists, and architects all talked about formative hands-on experiences in childhood that were entirely unrelated to formal instruction. What they gained through play and doing chores became so integral to their later success that they recalled it many decades afterwards.
The problem is, kids are immobile for much of the school day. They sit through the journey to and from school. They sit doing homework. And many times they sit through what free time they have left. The average child spends just 4-7 minutes in outdoor free-play every day. All this sitting doesn’t help to develop the vestibular system. Muscle sensors (proprioceptors) react to input from this system to tell the body where it is in space. When the vestibular system isn’t developing properly a child may seem uncoordinated, resist trying new things, be afraid of crowds, bump into people, seem inattentive, have difficulty controlling impulses, or have trouble with reading and other academics.
To develop a strong vestibular system, kids need plenty of time every day to run, jump, climb, balance on uneven surfaces, and otherwise happily move their bodies in all directions. This is important. A developed vestibular sense supports spatial awareness, focus, self-regulation, and other abilities necessary for learning. And sports practice or gym class a few times a week isn’t enough, nor do adult-run programs offer the full-body freedom necessary for this development.
Pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom writes in her book Balanced and Barefoot,
“As adults, we may feel that we always know what is best for our children. A child’s neurological system begs to differ. Children with healthy neurological systems naturally seek out the sensory input they need on their own. They determine how much, how fast, and how high works for them at any given time. They do this without even thinking about it. If they are spinning in circles, it is because they need to. If they are jumping off a rock over and over, it is because they are craving that sensory input. They are trying to organize their senses through practice and repetition.”
In an article titled “Why Children Fidget,” Ms. Hanscom writes about observing a fifth grade classroom near the end of their school day. She saw kids so desperate for movement that they were tilting their chairs, rocking their bodies, chewing on pencils, lightly smacking their heads. She tested the kids and found most had poor balance and core strength.
“In fact, we tested a few other classrooms and found that when compared to children from the early 1980s, only one out of twelve children had normal strength and balance. Only one! Oh my goodness,I thought to myself. These children need to move!
Children are going to class with bodies that are less prepared to learn than ever before. With sensory systems not quite working right, they are asked to sit and pay attention. Children naturally start fidgeting in order to get the movement their body so desperately needs and is not getting enough of to ‘turn their brain on.’ What happens when the children start fidgeting? We ask them to sit still and pay attention; therefore, their brain goes back to ‘sleep.’”
Research continues to indicate that movement is intrinsically linked to healthy development and learning in powerful ways.
Vigorous movement stimulates the birth of new neurons and is correlated with greater brain volume in the hippocampus, which plays a part in short and long-term memory.
Exercise boosts neurotransmitters necessary for attention, positive mood, and learning. It also produces proteins necessary for higher thought processes.
Studies show the sweet spot for kids is somewhere between 40 to 70 minutes of active movement a day for improved executive function, focus, and cognitive flexibility.
One study showed that after just two hours of playful activities like climbing trees, balancing on uneven surfaces, and navigating obstacles people temporarily increased their working memory capacity by 50 percent.
Overall, 60 years of research shows physical activity has overwhelmingly positive effects on kids’ mental health, cognitive abilities, and school achievement. The most fit kids are most likely to be the highest academic achievers.
Some kids can sit still and pay attention longer than others, but that’s not how we’re wired to learn best. In fact some educators point to research saying that after 20 minutes of inactivity, the neural communication networks in our brains function less effectively. And an analysis of nine studies indicate that the more time kids spend sitting, the more anxiety they are likely to experience.
Research shows kids actually fidget in order to better focus on complicated intellectual tasks. This is more noticeable in kids said to have ADHD, but it’s likely that foot-tapping and chair-scooting actually helps most kids store and process information. That’s why they are more likely to be restless working on math problems but relaxed while watching a movie or playing video games.
And several studies show that high levels of physical energy, a.k.a psychomotor overexcitability, is not only common but can be expected in highly intelligent children.
Some kids may grow out of the “fidget” and “wigglewump” stage, but I never did. I can’t even easily sit through a restaurant meal without stifling the urge to misbehave. My kids have blackmail-worthy stories about this. (Fortunately we can’t afford many restaurant meals.) Writing this essay required lots of breaks to walk the dogs, make a snack, do barn chores, talk with dear ones, and otherwise distract myself. If only today’s students were equally free to get out of their seats and move.
Laura Grace Weldon 