Connie Lim, who performs as MILCK, co-wrote “Quiet” ten years ago. It was a very personal song in response to sexual assault and abuse she experienced in her teens. She sang it, along with a cappella singers, at the Women’s March in 2017. Their performance, captured on a phone, still brings tears to my eyes.
I was there at the march (late, because our bus broke down) along with a half million other marchers. There were military vehicles parked on street corners to deal with what the new administration assumed would be violence but, of course, it was an entirely peaceful rally. Many homeowners had welcome signs on their lawns, some put out offerings of water bottles and snacks. Everywhere we went our fellow marchers as well as DC businesses were gracious and helpful. After the march was over it took hours for thousands of buses to load up and head out from the parking lots, returning marchers to all parts of the country. On that dark January night they looked like ribbons of light pulling out onto the roads.
Recently, Ms. Lim was asked by a woman if she, as a Republican, could also sing “Quiet.” On her Instagram page, Ms. Lim wrote,
“As a musician, a woman, and survivor of domestic violence, I felt grief to know that politics would create division to the point that someone would wonder if a song of survival could be for her, too. What if we can looked beyond… and wonder about what we have in common? I want to offer bridges through art. To create innovative coalitions that rise above the illusions of categories. We are entering a time where we must resist binary thinking. To seek the river beneath the river.”
We are not as polarized as we’re said to be here in America. Hear me out! I know there are vast differences in the spectrum from left to right. But in poll after poll, it’s clear we want stronger practices in place to keep our our water clean, our food safety assured, our roads and bridges maintained. We want decent workplaces and the best possible lives for our children.
Whatever our partisan affiliation, most humans want the same things. An affordable home, access to good food, meaningful work, quality healthcare, and enough time outside of work to do what brings us joy. We also want the rights assured by law including due process, equal protection under the law, the right to worship as we choose, to protest, and to vote in fair elections. Nearly all of us want our tax dollars do some good for actual people rather than giving it to big corporations and billionaires.
A recent Pew report showed 86% of Americans believe small businesses have a positive effect on this country. Only 29% believe the same about large corporations. A Navigator study found 7 out of 10 Americans say big corporations and the ultra rich are more responsible for the amount of taxes they pay than poor Americans who don’t pay taxes. And Americans are not doing well, financially. Overall, 76 percent of people in households making less than 100K describe themselves as struggling to make ends meet or unable to make ends meet.
New research shows striking bipartisan consensus on the challenges facing the next generation and the solutions to address them. When asked if the federal government should prioritize policies that benefit young people 88% of Republicans, 83% of Democrats, and 75% of independents agreed. Across parties, three-quarters or more of parents say a paid family, parental, and medical leave program for workers who need to provide short-term care for family members would make the lives of American children better, as well as more tax credits for programs that support families, and more government funding to help parents afford child care and after-school programs.
A recent Gallup poll showed 48 percent of Americans see climate change as a serious threat and 37 percent say they have been personally affected by an extreme weather event in their area within the past two years. The majority of people polled in 2024 agree climate change is human-driven. Three-quarters of Americans, regardless of where they live, say they experienced unusually hot or cold days this year. About half experienced extreme storms, 43 percent experienced flooding, 35 percent experienced droughts and water shortages, and a quarter experienced a wildfire. To avoid these extreme climate events, 1 in 5 Americans say they would consider moving. Six out of 10 Americans say they would support wind turbines and solar farms being built in their communities — that number includes over half of Republicans.
A sweeping majority of Americans, including Republicans, oppose cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Sixty-two percent of U.S. adults, the highest percentage in more than a decade, say it is the federal government’s responsibility to ensure all Americans have healthcare coverage.
Let’s just take the well-being of children as an example. However people voted, it’s hard for me to imagine most of us really want the FDA to suspend quality control testing of milk, while also suspending programs ensuring accurate testing for bird flu and pathogens in dairy products. I don’t think we want to halt research on environmental hazards faced by children, including exposure to wildfire smoke, effects of pesticide exposure, and preventing forever chemicals like PFAS from contaminating the food supply. I don’t believe most of us want funding indefinitely withdrawn that covers: investigations of child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children; response to reports of missing children; and preventing youth violence. I don’t think we want the farm-to-school grants cancelled—the ones buying fresh food from small local farmers for healthier school lunches. And there’s talk of eliminating Head Start programs altogether. These are just a few examples—from this week!— of the vicious cuts that stand in counterpoint to the lavish benefits afforded to the super rich as well as the largest corporations.
(I am still unable to imagine why anyone wants our tax dollars—somewhere in the region of 25 billion so far—to finance the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Currently the number of unique and precious lives lost is 50,810 Palestinian and 1,706 Israeli human beings. Maybe my imagination is faulty.)
We are told, lectured, screamed at that the “other side” is out to get us. A majority of Americans polled say that legislators, pundits, and TV news personalities increase division in the country. At the same time, one in three Americans get most of their political information from friends both in real life and on social media. When our social circles are a monoculture of opinion we don’t learn from the stories and life experiences of people whose beliefs and opinions differ from ours. This not only diminishes mutual understanding, it fosters increasingly extreme viewpoints.
For many decades, Americans got their news from mostly local newspapers along with national news broadcasts hosted by folks like Walter Cronkite. It gave each community a closer look at what was happening around them— house fires, crimes, high school sports, city council votes— as well as a common national narrative that made some space for different opinions. Now people have different opinions based on different “facts.” Deliberately false stories and memes spread with a force too fast for fact checkers. And many refuse to believe fact checkers when lies are exposed. Despite jibes against “left-learning” and “mainstream media,” when the audience size of popular online shows — podcasts, streams, and other long-form content–is assessed for right-leaning or left-leaning ideological bent, it turns out conservative shows dominate the ecosystem. That holds true even when the content is not explicitly political but oriented to comedy, sports, gaming, or entertainment. Historian Anne Applebaum writes in her book, Twilight of Democracy,
“The issue is not merely one of false stories, incorrect facts, or even the election campaigns and spin doctors: the social media algorithms themselves encourage false perceptions of the world. People click on the news they want to hear; Facebook, YouTube, and Google then show them more of whatever it is that they already favor, whether it is a certain brand of soap or a particular form of politics. The algorithms radicalize those who use them too…
Because they have been designed to keep you online, the algorithms also favor emotions, especially anger and fear. And because the sites are addictive, they affect people in ways they don’t expect. Anger becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal. [Online content] already helps shape how politicians and journalists interpret the world and portray it. Polarization has moved from the online world into reality.”
Our nervous systems can easily become accustomed to daily, hourly, even minute-by-minute doses of anger. As an emotion, anger feels energizing. It stomps the brakes on moral and rational perspectives because it originates from the more primordial parts of our brain. It may provide a rush, similar to thrill-seeking activities that trigger dopamine releases— the way gambling might do for someone addicted to betting on poker. Anger can actually serve as a comfort zone, connecting us with other like-minded people and distracting us from uncertainty, emptiness, or fear.
My wise and entirely charming friend Michael said, at our recent book group meeting, “Hate is the new energy drink.” Except it’s not new. Those with wealth and power have long fostered hatred to achieve their own aims. People screaming about immigration or immunizations or who is using what bathroom are distracted while the elite grab more and more for themselves. More of your rights, your security, your future.
This needs to stop. Instead we need to talk to each other, person to person. We need to truly listen and hear the stories behind the anger.
Open dialogue with the very people she condemned is what inspired Megan Phelps-Roper to renounce her membership in the extremist Westboro Baptist Church. It’s what led neo-Nazi skinhead Christian Picciolini to stop spreading hate and work to lead others away from such ideologies. It’s how Daryl Davis, as an African American, befriends Ku Klux Klan members in hopes they will have a change of heart.
“Our struggles connect us. We relate to the challenges of other people much more than we relate to their victories. We empathize with pain much more than joy. The moment we truly see ourselves in another person is when we realize that we’ve felt the exact same pain…. Maybe pain is the most universal feeling. Maybe there’s an invisible, connective thread that runs between the loneliness of an old man and the hunger of an impoverished child. Maybe pain isn’t divisible… Recognizing pain in another person is the primary driver of empathy. It’s the beginning of compassion.”
Dorothy was the oldest, over 70. Ann almost that. Then Betty, the most eccentric person I’d met up to that point. Marge, mother of four, who was the kindest manager ever. And on down in age to me in college, all of us working at the JoAnn Fabrics store in Lakewood, Ohio where our hands constantly lifted, measured, smoothed oceans of fabric we unrolled to sail our scissors across.
I started working there at 18, newly married, attending college full time but still keeping up volunteer hours in my field plus my 25 to 30 hours a week work schedule. The store was on busy Detroit Avenue where shopkeepers helped each other out. Where a young Downs Syndrome man rode his bicycle to visit stores up and down the street, his friends the clerks. And where people of all sorts came to dream up projects of all sorts—puppet theater curtains, wedding dresses, a giant stuffed dragon, a sling to carry a crippled dog, stage props and costumes, elaborate quilts, holiday gifts, Halloween outfits, and the one lady who so loved a particular upholstery fabric that she spent hundreds buying enough yardage to staple to her wall.
We spent long hours on our feet, often skipping breaks during big sales to keep from abandoning coworkers to a crowd of customers. We calculated yardage and price on paper receipts, consulting a ragged chart to determine discount percentages until the math became automatic. It was a place made magic by the endless enthusiasm of crafting something new. As we worked we talked, singing of possibilities to customers, singing of our lives to one another. In spare moments we rerolled bolts and priced remnants and filed patterns in this place of women’s voices. When men came in we sang a jostling tune, calling out merry asides while they plotted unfamiliar projects. They, women-splained, laughed back.
Like many companies, there weren’t enough employee hours to keep products perfectly stocked, deliveries unpacked, paperwork done, sales targets met. But there were perks. At the time, employees could buy a pattern along with the fabric and necessary notions for half off if they were willing to let the store use the finished item as a display for a few weeks. I remember Fiona’s gorgeous tailored work, tiny to fit her petite self and precisely made as designer clothes. I remember Marge’s baby quilts and Jean’s soft flowered tops. In my third year working there, one of my half-off projects was a lined wool blazer in dark heathered purple along with a patterned wool blend skirt. I made both to wear on job interviews for my upcoming graduation. Even at half off, the fabric was pricey for me. It hung as a store display while I waited for those interviews. My degree was in social work, a field which a new conservative administration was busy defunding. The grant I was offered to get a masters was defunded too. Not long after, my new husband helpfully did the laundry and shrunk the blazer I’d made to what seemed like a doll’s size, its lining hanging out like a cow’s prolapse. It didn’t matter, the jobs I applied for didn’t materialize.
I recently read that JoAnn Fabrics has declared bankruptcy. This Ohio-based company is closing all of its 800 stores. Any of us who sew find this strange since their stores are always busy. When there’s a big sale they are crowded with long lines where a “what are you making?” camaraderie develops among those holding stacks of material.
This once small Ohio chain grew through business practices standard in unchecked capitalism. It drove small fabric stores out of business, bought up smaller chains, competed heavily with art supply stores, and eventually dived deep into the craft market to compete there too. I was much less interested in what they carried after the majority of their ever-larger stores sold cheap holiday items, stinky candles, craft kits, and tacky imported décor but, still, could rely on them for any color of thread I needed and a huge array of fabrics to choose from.
The ambition that expanded the company also took it down, starting when it sold out to a private equity firm. Hedge funds and private equity are well-practiced in cannibalizing a company by loading it with debt, destroying its credit, and extracting value while paying themselves handsomely even as the business succumbs. A company’s purchase by private equity in a leveraged buyout is simply destruction for profit. We’ve seen this happen over and over. That’s what killed Sears, Kmart, Toys R Us, Red Lobster, TGI Fridays and many other longstanding companies. Private equity is rapidly acquiring healthcare concerns including dialysis centers, nursing homes, optometrist practices, dental practices, clinics, medical labs, urgent care centers, and entire hospital systems. They are buying up daycare centers, veterinary practices, and automotive service companies. They also own companies familiar to most of us including Neiman Marcus, Del Monte Foods, Dell, PetSmart, Staples, Hertz, Century 21 Real Estate, Coldwell Banker, Petco, Yankee Candle, David’s Bridal, Barnes and Noble, Beech-Nut, Evenflo, Snapple, Bob Evans, Sealy, and various dollar store chains. Private equity portfolio companies are about 10 times more likely to go bankrupt than non-private equity-owned companies.
At the same time, the vulture capitalists are not held personally responsible for what they are doing to the workers or their pension funds, let alone to the people these companies exist to serve. Here’s an example from Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage Americaby Brendan Ballou.
“Consider the pillaging of HCR ManorCare, once the second-largest nursing home chain in America. In 2007, a private equity firm, the Carlyle Group, bought ManorCare for a little over $6 billion, most of which was borrowed money that ManorCare, not Carlyle, would have to pay back. As the nursing home chain’s new owner, Carlyle sold nearly all of ManorCare’s real estate and quickly recovered the money it put into the purchase. But the move forced ManorCare to pay nearly half a billion dollars a year in rent to occupy buildings it once owned. Moreover, Carlyle extracted over $80 million in transaction and advisory fees that ManorCare paid for the privilege of being bought and sold by Carlyle. These payments made Carlyle’s founders billionaires many times over. But they drained ManorCare of the money it needed to operate and care for its residents. As a result of these financial machinations, ManorCare was forced to lay off hundreds of workers and institute various cost-cutting programs. Health code violations spiked. An unknowable number of residents suffered. …. Such cost cutting eviscerated the business and in 2018 the company filed for bankruptcy with over $7 billion in dept. Yet despite the bankruptcy, the deal was almost certainly profitable for Carlyle… That the business itself collapsed was, in a sense, immaterial to Carlyle.”
Ballou goes on to note that Carlyle avoided legal liability for its actions. Residents’ families who sued Carlyle for wrongful deaths had their cases dismissed, since as a private equity firm Carlyle didn’t technically “own” ManorCare. The three main private equity firms, together, are the third, fourth, and fifth largest employers in America after Walmart and Amazon.
I know I’ve strayed far enough, and return now to my tale of working at JoAnns. Even when our store was crowded, my coworkers and I made it a cheery place. Except those hours when regional managers invaded. These humorless middle management types in cheap polyester suits insisted we greet each customer with whatever slogan had been mandated by the main office, which we never did when they weren’t present. We saw no reason to recite some impersonal words rather than greeting regular customers by name and asking how work was going on the prom dress or shower curtain they’d been making last time we saw them.
While these men were there our merriment paused, our voices stilted as we did their bidding — move tables, hang new ceiling signs, change the fabric displays to whatever polka-dot or animal print theme was directed, carry deliveries left at the front door, grunting and sweating while they sat consulting clipboarded sheets from the main office and never, ever got up to help.
I was learning to speak up. Or, more accurately, I was freer to speak up because I didn’t need the job as badly as my coworkers. When these men called us girls no matter our ages, I started to sing back women! though they pretended not to hear. I wrote down their most outrageous quotes under cartoons I drew and posted them in the back room. They pretended not to notice.
One day I hung the arm of an unused mannequin over our sole employee toilet, the one they spattered with pee while facing a toilet tank topped with tampons and tissues. The arm held a gracefully draped fabric remnant on which I’d written put the seat down. They said nothing but put the seat down and when they left our laughter was music sewn into the space we took back.
This morning I noticed a downy woodpecker hanging from the side of our porch rail, unmoving. I kept an eye on it as I made a second cup of coffee, fed the dogs, and stirred some flour into Vern (our sourdough starter). It was still there, puffed up in the cold, when I rinsed sprouting beans and defrosted some tomatillos from last autumn’s garden. I needed to get to my desk. Editing deadlines do not stretch well. But I couldn’t stop watching this little beauty who may have been in trouble. Maybe he had suffered a blow to the head from hitting a window? Maybe been attacked by a cat? Maybe gotten into the poison some people in our rural community (very unwisely) leave out to control rodents in their barns?
Mark and I both ended up at the window, just watching. Mark keeps multiple feeders stocked with seed, suet, and raw peanuts. It’s a ridiculous cost, but then we don’t buy fast food or go on vacation, rarely even go to restaurants. This is the main line item in our entertainment spending.*
When I was a kid I lovedThe Tough Winter by Robert Lawson. In it the animals endure a harsh, nearly unsurvivable winter but the rabbits, field mice, deer, and others rely on each other until the “folks” come back home to resume leaving out winter offerings of hay, apples, nuts, grain, and more. As a nine-year-old, I cherished the inner candlelight feeling this generosity gave me. Behind my childhood home there was a small forest. There, well away from the sight of houses was my special place, a little rise of ground between two trees, where I liked to sit quietly. Sometimes I’d filch a bit of limp iceberg lettuce or a wizened apple from our family fridge to leave there. But when I checked the next day, there was never even a nibble taken from my offerings.
Now the whole area around our birdfeeders has become a communion table where–depending on the time of year–ducks, geese, groundhogs, raccoons, rabbits, skunks, and opossums gather on their own schedules: dawn to dusk and beyond, feeding on the dropped seed as well as whatever else we scatter for them. It’s an evening ritual here to briefly turn on a single backyard light to see what creatures are in attendance. In that light we’ve seen mother opossums with their babies clinging to them, mother skunks with a little line of distinctly marked kits wobbling behind, and baby raccoons tumbling around each other while their mother eats.
On and off, for close to an hour, Mark and I kept stopping by the window to check on the little woodpecker. Finally he moved as if waking up. He looked around, then lifted into flight. It seems he’d only been napping! His presence gave us a wondrous reprieve, letting our concerns narrow to this one precious life. We didn’t dwell on our fears for this climate, this democracy, this world. We just watched and cared. Thank you, little downy woodpecker. You helped restore our spirits.
*Yes, I understand there are reasons to avoid feeding wildlife.
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.
~
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.
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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.
Laura Grace Weldon 