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. What’s missed here is the fact that 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.’”
Difficulty focusing on mental task for long periods isn’t a problem, it’s biology. When our bodies are stationary while we’re concentrating, at any age, neurons in the brain area you are using (to respond to messages, calculate a budget, or work on an assignment, for example) fire more frequently. These neurons then need more oxygen and more glucose — which we’re not replacing with deep breaths or a few restorative calories. If we force ourselves, and our kids, to continue working on this mental task the neurons keep firing, requiring more oxygen and more glucose. Instead, we do the opposite. We tend to take fewer and more shallow breaths when scrolling, typing, or watching screens. We’re also typically seated, meaning our legs are folded and don’t as efficiently circulate blood. All of this means decreased focus, increased stress, and more difficulty making effective decisions. We expect students as well as adult employees to push themselves, work harder, force themselves to focus when our biology requires us to take breaks, move, enliven.
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.
It’s dusk. I am in a line of traffic slowed to five mph. There are easily several hundred of us inching along, brake lights ever more noticeable as night gathers around us. We’re all aware it’s bad by how many emergency lights flash ahead on the right.
Surely some in this line of cars are praying for whoever is having the worst night or last night of their lives. Surely some are complaining about the delay, already stressed and tired and late for wherever they’re going in their gas-hungry boxes. Surely some use the slowdown to change a playlist or answer a text or turn around to comfort a crying baby strapped in the back seat.
Behind several eighteen-wheelers, I can’t see what’s happening till I’m right there at the accident’s jarring tableau.
A woman prone on the pavement.
A uniformed man reaching into ruckled car.
Medics leaping from orderly ambulances into chaos.
I’m still moving at three mph, but a different slow motion takes over. For what must be only a moment it seems I see past and future slide into now. I can’t explain it.
Some glitch in the filter between what we can know and cannot know shows me the injured woman already recovered. I hear her say, improbably, the accident turned her life around.
I see the cop who is waving us along with an orange-nosed flashlight recognize, much later, he will train to be a paramedic. He shakes his head at all the schooling it will take to save lives yet earn half as much. I even see arguments about this with a wife, who holds a small child between them like a wall. I look right in his eyes as I pass and see somewhere in him he already knows this too.
I recognize whoever is trapped in the car has left his body long enough to see Beyond before coming back. It changes him.
Something like an incomprehensible geometry shimmers over the whole scene, illuminating patterns too large and complex for me to comprehend.
This all happens in the seconds it takes me to drive past. Did that really happen? Are these possible futures? Already it seems unreal.
Drivers accelerate, normal traffic flow resumes. I don’t know what to make of any of it. Maybe every second we pass a tableau. Every second we are the tableau.
My dentist’s office plays nonstop HGTV in the waiting room and treatment rooms. You may have access to this channel or be familiar with the type of show that I only see on (too-frequent!) dental occasions. From my limited exposure there always seem be two presenters, both with blazingly over-whitened teeth and amphetamine-like energy levels, who host home makeovers in shows that should all be titled What Throwing Money At A House Can Do.
These hosts wield a crowbar or carry materials, narrating as they pretend to work, while the real crew behind them gets the job done. Even though I’ve only seen samples of such shows, I’m already weary of the word pop as used in “pop of color” when they wallpaper the ceiling or “now that wall really pops” when they cover gorgeous old bricks with paint.
What confuses me more comes near the close of each show, when before photos are contrasted with after photos. It seems strange how much more attention is given to frippery than structural or functional changes. I particularly wonder about the designer’s insistence on filling the home with new furniture, new art on the walls, new dishes on the table, new baubles on the shelves. Sometimes there’s a bespoke touch, like a whimsical picture of the family dog framed over the sofa or a giant letters hanging on the wall with whatever word the homeowners said was their personal motto.
Meanwhile I’m wondering happened to the rocking chair and family photos from the before pictures. Who played the piano the designer decided didn’t fit the repurposed space? Where are all the toys from messy bedrooms of actual kids? Where are the books now that the old shelves have been ripped out? Where’s the antique umbrella stand that held ostrich feathers from a family vacation? During the big reveal, the home’s occupants almost always shriek something like “I can’t believe this is the same place” or “I don’t recognize a thing.” Is that a positive?
It’s not like we become better versions of ourselves when we wear the newest fashions or drive the flashiest car or use the latest tech. Of course that’s what our consumer culture has been telling us from the time we were toddlers—spending creates happiness! Yet, more materialistic people, from childhood on, are not happier. According to research cited in The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser, people who hold materialistic values are more likely to suffer from a whole dumpster load of problems. This includes aggressive behavior, insecurity, depression, low self-esteem, narcissism, even physical maladies. And when people place high value on material goals, they’re prone to have trouble with interpersonal relationships and intimacy. Materialism is also related to less independent thinking and lower value placed on being “true to oneself.”
In fact, people living in small-scale societies considered, by industrial world standards, to be living in subsistence poverty are among the happiest in the world, expressing greater life satisfaction than Finns or Danes who media reports tell us are the happiest people in the world.
I look around at my resoundingly not-fashionable home and yes, I’d like to replace the peeling linoleum and the falling-apart kitchen cupboards. I’d like to finally get the molding nailed in place instead of stacked in the basement. But I can’t imagine tossing out the memories embedded in the furniture, the art, the books, the dishes, even the Pyrex measuring cup so old its markings are no longer visible.
The things that mean something to us are uniquely embedded in our memories.
These shelves my sister designed and made have long been used to hold a gloriously messy assortment of kid books.
This ancient wooden bowl came to us from generations back. It has always held fruit on the counter.
This is the tiny rocking chair my dad and his sibs rocked on, played with, and teethed on. It was used by countless cousins till it came to us.
This admittedly worn but sturdy chair belonged to my Great-Aunt Mildred, which means it’s at least 70 or 80 years old. It probably needs to be recovered, but I don’t mind it as it is. Paired with a floor lamp from my parent’s home and footstool with crewel work by my grandmother and this corner of my bedroom is perfect for reading into the middle of the night when insomnia has me in its grip.
My husband made this substantial bathroom vanity from an old chest of drawers.
And art, oh art, every piece of art we have has a story. I’ll share only a few pics.
This gorgeous piece is by our friend, ceramics artist Stephen Bures. Years ago we put in our first and only claim on our homeowner’s insurance after our roof sustained storm damage. We bought this piece with the settlement and fixed the roof ourselves. #priorities
This unsigned work was made by a resident of the Medina County Home. He carved the figures from lumber cut-offs, used cotton left over from medication bottles for the hair, and painted it with materials from the home’s activities department. It’s a depiction of a music group his brother formed during the Great Depression. The drum reads TED MACHLES ALL-GIRL ORCHESTRA. He was tickled that we considered it art.
This sweet little wombat was made by my daughter when she was around 11 years old.
And this sculptural piece was made by my middle son when he was 8 or 9 by hammering and mounting copper wire. (I have a much more elaborate copper mobile he made hanging from the ceiling but I’m not photographing it due to its heavy decor of dust.)
There’s too much to show you, but I’ll close by telling you about the spectacular nose at the start of this piece. It was carved by my brother when he was 13 or 14. It has always hung in my kitchen and is one of the things I’d save if there was a house fire.
In a world of crass materialism, appreciating what we have isn’t just about frugality or simplicity. It’s about quiet satisfaction found in meaning and memory. Things made with “wakened hands,” as D.H. Lawrence wrote, “are awake with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years.”
Today I’m making food for tomorrow’s family gathering. Cooking for people I cherish is a deep pleasure. I hope love transfers into the dough I knead, the sauces I stir, the spices I grind. Outside the rain is relentless, rain I wish came to us instead as the soft snow we might expect in February. But then, these are not normal times.
I am in a warm house on a quiet day aware of the suffering in Yemen, Syria, Darfur, the Congo, and what clutches me most of late, Gaza. How is it possible the children I adore are safe when children just as beautiful and just as precious are exiled, starved, shot, bombed, buried under rubble? Many survivors are left with the world’s newest horrific acronym WCNSF: wounded child no surviving family. I know a moment’s trauma can take a lifetime to heal. I cannot imagine the relentless ongoing trauma for people in Gaza.
I am fortunate to host family Sundays here. Each week I plan out the day’s breakfast and lunch, making as many dishes as possible in advance so I can play with children and follow conversations on the day itself. This week I’m using beans I canned in September and the remaining potatoes harvested in October. I’m using pear sugar I made last summer and hot sauce I made last fall. I use eggs from our chickens, jam from our elderberries, tomatoes canned from our garden. There’s deep satisfaction in nourishing others with the food we’ve grown. Food, in nearly every spiritual tradition, is sacred and meant to be shared. Yet legacy olive groves are relentlessly bulldozed in Gaza. (Since 1967, more than eight hundred thousand Palestinian olive trees have been illegally uprooted by Israeli authorities and settlers.) Gaza’s orchards, greenhouses, crops, and fishing fleets are intentionally destroyed. And the nourishment lost, too, when libraries, universities, and museums are bombed into dust.
One child suffering is too much. The news that over 12,660 Palestinian children have been killed and more than one million displaced from their homes is impossible to imagine. The suffering too, of the 36 Israeli children killed by Hamas and the child hostages Hamas still imprisons. Each number represents a whole person, as unique and amazing as a child you love, as the child you yourself once were.
This month I’m beginning to pull together the mess from a file marked “taxes.” I work for myself as a writer, book editor, and educator in what’s lightly called the “gig economy’ –a term that encompasses all of us who work without an employer paying our healthcare, social security, or any benefits at all. This means I fully fund my taxes. My taxes pay for the bombs dropping on Gaza. (As of last month a reported 65,000 tons of munitions) My taxes finance weapons used to shoot civilians fleeing an endangered hospital, wandering sheep, ambulance drivers, journalists, fathers seeking safe passage for their families.
Armed conflict and war massively increase profits for a whole slew of companies. In my country, courts have ruled that money is free speech and that corporations deserve some of the same rights as people.
My country has repeatedly been the lone vote againsta ceasefire in this ongoing colonizer vs colonized struggle — a struggle that resounds down through the centuries into today as if we must replay our ancestors’ traumas until we finally wake up to our oneness on this beautiful endangered planet.
Not one of my sputtering letters to legislators, no vigil I’ve attended, no boycott I follow or money I donate makes a molecule’s worth of difference for the people who are right now being bombed in the places where they were told to seek refuge.
Tomorrow my children and their children will come to eat the food I’m making, to talk and laugh and relax together. This is a joy every family deserves, everywhere. More than a joy. It’s a right that none of us have the right to take away.
Laura Grace Weldon 