The new citizens’ faces suggest every other part of the world, yet as they recite, all the accents blend into a single voice—that sounds American. Which feels almost eerie until I remember the unity this nation was supposed to make possible.
(Shutterstock) https://commonreader.washu.edu/app/uploads/2024/04/empathy.mp3 A heart willing to welcome someone else’s pain inside. A brain with the superpower of unlocking other psyches. Skin so tender, anybody’s mood will brush against yours—then penetrate. Empathy seems a noble trait, potent and generous, an instant cure for injustice and xenophobia. I watch…
The tensions that wire our lives do not go dead. Every time I try to look away, they crop up again, disguised or insidious. But Sylvia Plimack Mangold fixed her gaze and stared them down.
Totality. Just the word feels like an exhale. The reassurance of awe, of completion. The promise of grasping an immensity whole, rather than contenting oneself with the usual sliver.
This is a concept country, like one of those cool demo cars that never get made because they are too flawed to be practical. Except, the nation did get made. We are still figuring out how to punctuate that reality.
Nature is red in tooth and claw, I mutter to myself. But how could our gentle dog be so cruel?
Our sensual imagination has gone abstract, need-based, overclever, and devoid of substance.
Professional landscapers haul in huge loads. And a shrugging “More compost for us!” is not fair to the folks who have to wrangle all that detritus, grinding a tangle of branches into mulch for our gardens. Still, the taped loop feels eerie.
Silences that close us off, refusing connection, shoring up the ego at others’ expense—those are dead silences. But the letting-go sort, the silences that hold space or keep vigil for someone else? They are alive.
Only now is it clear that genes network like busybodies, responding to every possible influence and turning one another on and off as the situation demands.
Here is what made the difference for me: they take vows, and secretly, they take their work seriously, offering the same combination of ministry, nurture, and social justice activism to the queer and trans communities that traditional nuns offer to the rest of us.
In Eric von Schrader’s books, St. Louis remains a colossus of bricks, careful not to destroy its solid and elegant legacy. And Cahokia! It has been rebuilt by a pair of archaeologists, one Osage, the other White, who were fired from Washington University for their absurd insistence on the site’s significance.