A letter from Maine

Today is my mom’s birthday. I’m spending it with my sister in Maine, but we did talk on the phone today with the dear woman who gave us life. My mom is currently a Methodist pastor, but she has also worked as a neonatal nurse and a lactation consultant. She has taught me, through her life, to care deeply. When I was growing up, she often told me about the essays she wrote in her head. She became a pastor at the age of 60 and her weekly sermons are her opportunities to write and share. Her head-essays inspired me to make time to write.

A year ago, I thought I might go to seminary, so I bought a plane ticket for an open-house to a low residency program that caught my interest. Then, I got terribly sick with the flu the week I planned on travelling. I was able to get a doctor’s note to cancel the flight and hold on to the credit. As the year progressed, I decided to let that particular idea sit on the back burner, but I still had a plane ticket. My sister, Coretta, convinced me to come to her house in mid-coast Maine for a week-long writing retreat. It was not a hard sell.

My flight landed Sunday at noon. Coretta treated me to seafood paella at Local 188 in Portland, a hike to a magical hidden beach near Papum Beach, Oysters and ribs at Primo in Rockland and a ferry ride to Vinalhaven. I found a copy of Kiese Laymon’s novel, Long Division, at the island’s only used book store. Southern writers have a long reach!

It’s Wednesday, and I leave next Monday. I’ve written a poem, talked with an editor to start work on a piece that will come out next summer, redesigned my website and worked on some other projects that I am very excited about but not quite ready to share. I’ve also done sticker books, yoga and a dance party with my niece, Gina, who just turned seven. She even let me French braid her hair. It’s the first time I’ve been able to really focus on being her auntie without my own children vying for attention. It makes my heart swell and ache to just sit beside this little person on the couch and be her aunt.

Atatiana Jefferson was just sitting on the couch, being an aunt. She was playing video games with her eight year old nephew, the door left ajar to let in the cool autumn air, when she was shot by a Fort Worth police officer. My heart aches for her family and for our nation.

I came here to write, so that is what I will do, wrapping all the beauty and pain into words that I hope might bring some healing.

My sister had a cucumber that she got from a friend’s garden and she wanted to throw out because the skin was so bitter it made your mouth pucker. I put it in a jar with some hot pepper flakes, salt, white vinegar, a clove of garlic, a bay leaf, peppercorns and dill. We let it sit for a day. It got better, delicious, even. Maybe our bitterness needs some good company, salty tears, and time. Things are bad. We have a choice to see how to make things around us a little better and to not let the ugly in the world ruin us.

I’ve had a few things published in the past couple months so I wanted to share that as well:

  • Everyone Carries” Fourth Genre fall 2019. I wrote this essay in response to a piece called “Still Life with Guns,” Fourth Genre 2018. Last January, my friend Patrice Gopo invited me to take an online writing workshop with Lisa Ohlen Harris. Lisa is a wonderful teacher. We read “Still Life with Guns,” its a strong essay. But I was so surprised and agitated that the author grew up across the river from me in Northern Virginia around the same time that I was growing up in Washington, DC when it was known as the “murder capital of the world” but it seemed as though we came from entirely different worlds. My friend DeShauna had recently sent me a Spotify mix a friend of hers curated and called “Women’s Retreat” and Kendrick Lamar’s Sing About Me, Dying of Thirst and Alice Smith Shot were on heavy rotation as I wrote. I shared the piece with the class and Lisa suggested that I offer it to Fourth Genre. It was accepted! It is only available in print, but I hope you can read it. Michael texted me a photo of copy of my author copies which are waiting patiently at home in Georgia. I can’t wait to get home and read the whole issue!

  • “Walking without Sidewalks” About Place Journal: Infinite Country, October 2019. This essay gives a glimpse of homegrown rural activism. I wrote about the day of the first Women’s March in 2017 when I walked in the pouring rain with a dozen friends to the center of our tiny town.

  • I wrote about one of my favorite children’s books authors Patricia Polacco and her book Chicken Sunday for The Christian Century Books Issue. This also includes a review of my friend Britney Winn Lee’s new book The Boy with Big, Big Feelings She read that poem at our little airport poetry reading in April 2018 and now its a book that you can buy and read to your kids!

  • I published my interview with the author Jemar Tisby on the Christian Century Website. Its hard to condense a one hour conversation into a few hundred words. Listen to the whole interview here:

I’ve also done some work in our town with my friend Jennifer Drago Smith at the New Neighbor’s Network. With the support of a grant from the Georgia Council on Disabilities we hosted a couple of community conversations about immigration and citizenship. I wrote about them for our local paper, The Madison County Journal.

As always, thanks so much for reading and doing what you can to bring some joy and healing into your heart and the deeply flawed and beautiful world around you.

I went from Minnesota to Mississippi and I'm glad to be back home in Georgia

In April when I was putting little seedlings in the ground.  Now old cucumber vines are baking in the August heat, the kitchen counter is overflowing with figs, tomatoes, and okra, and the fruit flies insist that I attend to the harvest. I will get back to jam making, chopping, and pickling. But, the best place to be right now is in the air-conditioned dining room, thinking back on the summer and looking forward to autumn.

AUGUST

At the beginning of August, I took a trip to Mississippi. I used up every last drop of my Louisville Institute study grant to pay for gas and a writing retreat with the Southern Foodways Alliance.  It was such an honor to meet and work with John T. Edge and Sara Camp Milam and the other 5 writers who are exploring intersections of food, race, history, farming, migration, economics and culture through the lens of southern food.  I worked on a piece about growing Purple Kingsessing beans in my Georgia garden and all the memories it conjured up about the years I lived in the Kingsessing neighborhood of Philadelphia. I think the piece will be another chapter in my book which I might name South Facing: Memories of Reverse Migration or South Facing: Seeds of Love and Healing in a Divided Land (Let me know what you think about titles in the comments)

On my way to the Southern Foodways workshop, I stopped off at the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford and interviewed Jemar Tisby about his new book The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church's Complicity in Racism. I'm working on writing that up and will share the interview once it's published. It was such a gift to begin that time in Mississippi with a conversation about history that was so deeply connected to current events.  I have been following Tisby's work with The Witness for a few years, and I'm glad we could sit down and talk in person. The convergence of the ICE raids in the chicken plants in Mississippi, the anniversary of the killing of Mike Brown, Emmett Till's murder and Toni Morrison's passing hung so heavy in the August air.  My dad also reminded me that enslaved members of our Bailey family from Eastern shore Maryland were forcibly displaced to Mississippi in the 1800s, and we never heard from them again.

I also wrote up these two interviews with women who crossed into the United States in recent years. They wanted their stories told to counter the fear and hatred, especially from people who claim to be following Jesus. https://www.evangelicalsforsocialaction.org/tag/josina-guess/

JULY

I wrote  this book review for Sojourners Magazine on Jennifer Berry Hawes' book Grace Will Lead Us Home: The Charleston Church Massacre and the Hard, Inspiring Journey to Forgiveness,

Alice Walker turned 75 and came back to Georgia for a birthday celebration in Eatonton, Georgia.  I felt a little overwhelmed by the convergence of talented people that gathered in that space and incredibly thankful to be writing and living in Georgia.

JUNE

The summer started with a workshop in June at Collegeville Institute called Identity and (dis)Belonging with Enuma Okoro.  We talked about essays by James Baldwin, Adrienne Rich and this piece called The Ungrateful Refugee which I wish were required reading for anyone who has done work with refugee resettlement. I left refreshed, challenged and thankful for that space and the 12 brilliant women who shared that experience.

I also drove up and down to Ohio twice to see my parents, visit my grandmother's grave and keep my kids connected with their cousins and the joy of rolling in northern green grass.  When we drove into my parents' town the kids all noticed the particular green smell of their hilly Ohio Valley home.

I wouldn't have been able to do any of those trips without dear my dear husband, friends, neighbors and family members keeping up with our children and chickens. I love our extended village.

Upcoming Projects:

This fall I'll begin conducting Oral History interviews about refugee resettlement in Georgia for the Richard B Russell Special Collections Library at the University of Georgia.  Please contact me if you have suggestions of people to contact in Georgia.  I've been here eight years now and I'm thankful for all the connections I already have made, and I plan to build on those, but I'm always eager to meet more people who have a good story.

I'm also working with my friend and neighbor Jennifer Drago Smith with the Comer New Neighbor's Network to curate a few conversations on immigration and citizenship.  The Georgia Council on Disabilities is nurturing the

Real Communities

project.  It's a very simple and beautiful concept that our communities can be healthier and become more inclusive if we start by having conversations with one another.

Pull Up a Chair

So where are you from, originally?

You can find me at the intersection of race and poverty, urban and rural.

I was born in a trailer in Alabama, grew up in Washington, DC and studied Art at Earlham College in Richmon, Indiana. I lived more than a decade in Philadelphia and now my roots are in the red clay hills of Northeast Georgia. I'm writing a book called South Facing about my journey toward healing, wholeness and home.

I have limited availability to speak, preach or lead workshops or retreats on healing racism, building community, making poetry, sustaining faith and being an artist while parenting.  

Prayers as seeds

A friend of mine was working with preschoolers at a public school in the South when the announcement came on, as it always does, for a moment of silence. It's a nice calming ritual which allows people to pray in their hearts, or just to empty their minds and breathe deep, without it being a big deal about praying or not praying in school.

One small boy knelt forward, face to the colorful rug, arms outstretched when a teacher reached for him and commanded that he sit up straight and not "pray like a Muslim."  He complied, not understanding the wounding depth of the teacher's words.  This is how the seeds of xenophobia and religious intolerance are planted from one generation to the next.  This is how children lose touch with a natural impulse to pray with their whole bodies. I wonder what it will take to bring us all back to that childlike and humble place with our arms outstretched.

We need one another's stories more than we need debate, we need to learn how to be welcomed as strangers into one another's communities and to find God already at work.  My hope is that we can love one another and find God in that space beyond fear. Every Lent I stumble toward Easter doubting and mumbling all the way.  And every Easter, I join in proclaiming that the power that raised Jesus from the dead is at work and accessible, able to transform and heal us all. It's such a huge and crazy miracle to believe in the resurrection, but what can I say, I'm a sucker for a good story.

This spring I decided to stop hoarding all the old seeds I have collected over the years and just plant them.  I threw some ten and twenty year-old tomato and pepper seeds into some dirt and added water, leaving them in the light of my bedroom window, expecting nothing. Glory be, they all came up!  I knew a pastor who said that we shouldn't call things like birth and life a miracle because it takes away from the "true" miracles.  Now I wish I'd had the courage to say to him, "What if we treated every single bursting, blooming, death-defying life that bends toward the sun as the miracle that it truly is?" I think our eyes would be tuned in to noticed the bigger miracles too.

My heart is heavy for the people of Sri Lanka and New Zealand and for so many people and places in the world shaken by violence.  I was just talking with a friend about PTSD.  You don't have to have been beaten unconscious to be a survivor of abuse, or to have witnessed a murder to be affected by gun violence.  We often try to minimize our pain and trauma in comparison to larger tragedies.  There are no small tragedies.

 I want to share a few pieces of conversations from friends that responded to what I wrote about praying for peace

One friend wrote a question of how to stop hate to which another responded:

I've stopped looking to stop hate because I am powerless to do so. Instead, I look for ways to increase love around me. Love is the only antidote I know for hate.

Then a friend in Nicaragua responded:

La oracion en el mundo de muchas personas...por muchas situaciones diciles, transforma y da PAZ.

(Rough Translation: The prayers of people around the world...for many difficult situations bring transformation and gives peace.)

I didn't realize until this week that the only two pieces I have had published on-line during this season were bookends for Lent and they both had mass shootings as an underlying theme.   I wrote

 this piece about Ash Wednesday for Bearings Online

 ( Also, did I mention that I love the Collegeville Institute and I'm so excited to be returning to Minnesota in June for a Writing workshop there on Identity and (dis) Belonging in the Personal Essay led by Enuma Okoro. Check out their wonderful and fully funded workshops!)

And then I wrote 

A Call To Prayer

 for the Ruminate Blog about my first time praying in a mosque. 

 A few months ago my friend Britney Winn Lee asked me to contribute to a collection of prayers she is editing and I wrote a liturgy for a community to pray over a garden.  That prayer along with prayers from contributors from across the country whose lives and work meet at the intersection of faith and justice are being put together in a book called 

Rally: For Lovers of God and Neighbor

 which will release this June in 2019 (Upper Room Press).  I'm inspired by Britney's enthusiasm and ways of bringing people together and I think this book will be a timely contribution to a world and church that seems to be pulling apart at the seams.

These Corno di Toro pepper seeds were labeled from 2000, the year I graduated from college. 

Comfort for a midlife crisis moment to see aah, those seeds are full of life, it's never too late.

Praying that our eyes and hearts will be open to noticing glimpses of resurrection. What are the little seeds of love that you need to plant this season? Feel free to comment about that.  (I keep getting kind of funny comments on this blog that I think are computer-generated links to game sites. I would love to get real thoughts from folks that are actually reading and joining me in this conversation).

Vultures and Unmarked Graves


I wrote this short essay for Good Letters, the blog of Image Journal:

https://imagejournal.org/2019/02/13/vultures/

* A week ago I wrote a different introductory paragraph here.  I've decided to change it to this instead:

My husband wants you to know that he didn't say he got "pooped" on. He said another word, a word I chose not to write in my piece for Good Letters and a word I decided to edit out of this blog post, primarily because I want my kids to not get mixed messages from me about what language we use and what language we don't use.  I've been working on a much longer piece on when, or why, or if we should use the words that we call curse words and I'm not done and I'm not sharing it right now, but that little paragraph has helped me get a little clarity. I experimented with cursing a lot in that earlier version of this paragraph, then I felt uneasy and took that unease as a cue to go back and change it.  An interesting fact about vulture droppings is that they have antiseptic qualities.  The vultures can eat a diseased animal but after it is digested there is no sign of disease in their droppings.  They also let their runny poop flow all over their legs to clean off any residue from standing in rotting flesh.  What it would be like if even the most vile things that we have experienced could be transformed so that even the most vile things to flow from us could have healing properties not destructive? What if our output was less toxic than our input?  Is that what the Holy Spirit can do for us and all the yuck we take in?

Another thing I wanted to add is a little poem my grandaddy, a dairy farmer, used to say:

When I looked up into the sky,
A bird dropped whitewash in my eye
Oh me oh me oh my oh my
How glad I am that cows don't fly


Here are some of the vultures, the tombstone, a piece of deer vertebrae and the dogs chewing it:









Also, click here to hear a recording of Rayna Gellert singing the song Sister Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, by Samuel Francis Smith.  I searched the verse on the side of the tombstone to find the song and full lyrics:


1. Sister, thou wast mild and lovely,
Gentle as the summer breeze;
Pleasant as the air of evening
When it floats among the trees.
2. Dearest sister, thou hast left us!
Here thy loss we deeply feel;
But 'tis God that hath berelf us,
He can all our sorrows heal.
3. Yet again we hope to meet thee,
When this mortal life is fled;
Then, in heav'n, with joy to greet thee,
Where no farewell tear is shed.
I also found it recorded to the more popular tune of "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing," but I much prefer this old-timy way of singing it.

And to end on a more cheerful note.  Look what the dog found today, the day after Valentine's Day.  If anyone lost their balloon near highway 22 I found it.

As always, thank you for reading. Walk in love.

Mississippi Stories




So, if you have been following this blog longer than a week you will be surprised that I am posting again. I usually average about three or four posts a year.  But it's January and I am inspired and excited and it’s too cold for me to be distracted with outdoor things so you are getting more writing, yay! 
Last summer the editors at the Christian Century asked me if I would like to visit the new Civil Rights Museum in Mississippi and write about it for their magazine.  I jumped at the opportunity. They even helped pay for the trip!  I also used money from my Louisville Institute grant and tacked this trip on to a visit to the Federation for Southern Farmer’s Cooperative in Epes, Alabama, where I was born (…I'll have to write more on that later).  I brought my fifteen-year-old son while my husband and daughters stayed home to tend the chickens and dogs. I asked my brother and his dog Stripes to come up from New Orleans and meet up with us in Jackson. (For the record, I paid the extra fee for the dog to stay in our room, he's a very sweet and well-behaved dog)

On our way home my son and I took a detour to drive up Mt Cheaha to watch the sunset from the highest peak in Alabama. After wading through such emotionally intense waters in the museums, I wanted to be intentional about pausing and
soaking in natural beauty.

Then I wrote and rewrote and asked for an extension and stressed and agonized and dealt with sciatica and plantar fasciitis.  (I include this because I'm convinced that many of us carry psychological trauma from racism in our bodies.  Ross Gay wrote one of my favorite essays in Some Thoughts on Mercy, maybe I just needed to stretch and wear better shoes, maybe it was a combination) I wondered how to write a review that was honest and balanced and something that might make people think and be challenged and be encouraged and I finally finished.  I was pretty surprised to hear that it ended up on the cover of their January 16 print edition and is available to read here

 In the spring I had written a piece for Sojourners about the new Equal Justice Initiative Legacy Museum and Memorial in Alabama.  In that case, I asked the editors directly.  This invitation from the Century was the first piece that I didn’t pitch to anyone. It was so cool to be “on assignment.”  Two museum pieces in a row doesn’t exactly make me a museum reviewer but if museums could be “my beat” I’d be so thrilled.

The staff at the Mississippi museums were all super helpful and gracious.  I hope that in my writing I was able to convey the very valuable work of the two Mississippi Museums, while also conveying the very unfinished work of healing from racism in our nation, in the south and in our hearts, minds and bodies.   

The weekend we came to Jackson, there was a large Gun Show happening at the Jackson Trade Mart not far from the Museum and across the street from where we were staying.  This truck was among many that flowed in and out of the parking lot as I spent my day inside the museum.  I wish they knew, I wish they were listening to the stories in those museums. My brother was walking his dog at night near the hotel and a man who was there for the gun show told my brother to be careful, not to walk this neighborhood at night.  "He thinks I'm white," my brother told me later, "he thinks I'm on his team, that I would agree with him and be afraid."

As I mentioned in the Mississippi piece, we ate dinner at a very good soul food restaurant where I met a civil Rights Veteran named Ineva Mae Pittman.   She graciously allowed me to record and share our conversation recorded on September 1,2018 at Bully’s Restaurant.  You may listen to it here: 

I had to pause because she gave me her phone number.  I'm still learning how to edit sound so you can listen to part two of the conversation here.  I included here what I took out of my piece, a conversation about my confusion that a current member of the Klan is also a current member of the museums.  Since it was based on hearsay, I can understand why the editors didn't want to include it.  I kept her response "That is the Mississippi way of life" and called Mrs Pittman later (in a conversation that is not recorded) to get her permission to change it to fit the finished piece: 

I also spoke with Greta Brown Bully, who runs the restaurant with her husband.  We talked about racism, confederate flags, mass incarceration, education. I also told her that when I saw the name "Bully" I said I really didn't want to go because I felt like my spirit had been bullied too much in the museum and I didn't want to be in a place called Bully's!  My experience at Bully's was full of joy and sincere welcome, the opposite bullying. You can listen to that conversation here:  
Earlier in our conversation, (before I asked if I could record) Greta told me to watch a 2012 film called Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story. It's about a restaurant owner named Booker Wright who spoke honestly about racism in Mississippi in the mid 1960's. His interview aired on NBC documentary called Mississippi a Self Portrait.  Mr. Wright's honesty cost him his business and his life. He was shunned by the black community for speaking up, his restaurant was firebombed, he was pistol-whipped by a police officer and ultimately murdered- all for admitting that when he smiles at his white customers, he is giving them what they want, not his true self. The story also focuses on the journalist who interviewed Booker Wright and his regrets over the consequences of airing the interview.

Greta told me she wasn’t afraid for me to record our conversation. We can count this as progress. Yet that memory of Booker Wright and the real consequences of speaking honestly were at the forefront of her consciousness.  You can watch a short preview of the film here:

While I was recording these conversations my son had wandered off to take pictures.  It got dark, quickly, and I was nervous.  He didn't know the neighborhood and nobody knew him and he is walking around with a big camera around his neck.  Of course, I was scared.  It's a different kind of scared that I feel when I see large trucks with Confederate flags, but it's still fear.  Greta hopped in her car and drove one direction and my brother and I drove the other direction.  When she returned my son to me I hugged her and said, "Now we are family."



I feel sick every time I hear Jamaal Kashoggi’s name mentioned in the news. I feel sick when people say his "death"- as if it happened by accident, not his "torture and murder." I'm sick that our president and his cronies consider Saudi Arabia a close friend.  I imagine them taking notes, asking just how they too could succeed at successfully dismembering and silencing the press, their enemies, one finger at a time.  I wonder if this trip to Saudi Arabia was seized as a learning opportunity, just as the framers of South African Apartheid traveled the American South to learn best practices in repression. (Yes, they sure did, look it up).

This may seem like a random aside.  Why bring up the killing of a Saudi journalist in a Turkish Embassy if you are writing about racialized violence and fear in the South?  We can't stay in our lanes here.  We need to be attentive to the insidious ways of injustice at all levels including at our border and across the world.

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute just rescinded the Fred Shuttlesworth Award which was to be presented to Angela Davis this February.  Davis is a Birmingham native and a strong voice for human rights, including the Palestinian people.  In 2001, my sister and I traveled to Durban, South Africa to attend the NGO Forum of the UN World Conference Against Racism and we heard Angela Davis speak.  She has spent her life working and speaking up for human rights.  She is being accused of anti-semitism even though she has been quite clear, among many other activists including many Jewish activists, that justice for Palestine is part of a larger human rights conversation. Here is a video with her response to these events.

There is a calculated risk that comes with speaking up. But the alternative- silence, a smile and a nod, another generation of hatefulness- we can’t bear.  All the fire inside would surely destroy us and our families faster than any external attempts at violence.

So, I write. I look out my window at cardinals at the bird feeder.  I thank God for my cold fingers. And I pray.  Thanks for the work that you are doing, wherever you are, to spread love at all costs, it matters. And thanks for reading, listening, and speaking up.

New Year's Ham Biscuits



New Year’s Ham Biscuits

Happy New Year everyone!  I want to share 4 things (Of course, I’d love for you to read all of it but I wanted to provide this handy table of contents so you can skip forward to what you would like to read.):

1) an update on writing that I have had published in recent months. 
2) The back story for my recipe for ham biscuits along with tips for making black-eyed peas and better biscuits.
3) my Ham Biscuit recipe.  
4) A recipe for Refrigerator Dill Pickles (I promised I would do this on my last post in August and even though cucumbers aren't in season, I want to keep my word and start thinking about good things to plant and make when the weather warms up)


1)Writing Update: 

Last Fall I wrote a piece for a beautiful little magazine called Crop Stories, Issue 6: Hogs.  Each issue focuses on a different Southern crop and explores the complicated overlap of race, geography, economics, and history in the cultivation and use of that crop.  With recipes from top-notch southern chefs and writing by or about folks that are practicing agriculture as a way to restore communities and the land, it is a very satisfying magazine to hold in the hand and share with friends and family. You can order single copies or back issues here or support it monthly through Patreon. My piece is called Hog’s Head and it’s all about my parents’ brief foray into hog farming as an interracial couple in rural Alabama as well as my decision to root my family in the rural south near folks who know how to process meat. I also explore both the generational trauma and blessings that can be passed through meat processing.  I know there are many good reasons not to eat pork or any meat at all. I make a case for smalltime farming and “humane slaughter.”
I had two poems published in Micah Bournes and Chris Cambell’s new Anthology Fight Evil With Poetry.  You can order the book online and find out more about the project here In December I put in a pre-order of 20 books and they are all sold! (not a NY Times bestseller, but exciting for me!) I’ll be ordering more soon to sell locally or to friends so message me if you want a signed copy.  It has been a fun way to connect with friends across the country by sending out the books.

Finally, In the Winter 2018 issue of Communities Magazine included a piece that I wrote last year called about that clothesline. It is a response to an article I wrote a few years ago called  "Putting our Lives on the Line" which is in their new collection of books The Wisdom of Communities: Volume 4 Sustainability in Community. You can purchase the complete set or a single book here 

2) The Ham Biscuit Backstory:
On New Year’s Day, I fixed black-eyed peas and greens for dinner.  My dad would always do this when I was growing up and I’m happy to carry on the tradition.  It was such a joy to go out back and pick a mixture of collards, turnip and mustard greens that I’ve got growing in the yard. I talked on the phone with my parents on New Year’s Day and dad said that for the first time in his life he burned the beans.  I texted him a photo of my simmering pot.  Not exactly the same as sitting at the same table, but still there was a feeling of connection across the many miles that separate us.  The tradition of eating black-eyed peas and greens on New Year’s began with enslaved Africans and was embraced by white southern culture after the Civil War.  The peas, which swell as they cook are said to represent prosperity and the greens look like money, so they represent wealth.  I found many explanations of why we do it on New Years Day, one was that the emancipation proclamation went into effect on New Year’s Day.  It still doesn’t explain why those particular foods carried significance on New Year’s Day but my guess is that the associations of special qualities in the foods are rooted in West African folklore.
                  
                I still feel conflicted about buying factory farmed meat, but I still do it, especially when it is on sale or for big celebrations.  When I do, I try and use the entire piece, boiling bones to make broth and using up leftovers in creative ways. I used the ham bone from our Christmas ham to season the black-eyed peas  (I also threw in a whole dry chili pepper, some leftover cooked rice, salt, pepper, and thyme.  Always add the salt last after the beans are nice and tender) Cornbread is the classic accompaniment for black-eyed peas and greens.  They say the golden bread represents gold. Our grocery store was out of cornmeal when I went shopping.   You know you live in the south when cornmeal is out of stock.  So, I decided on buttermilk biscuits.  I chopped up the last bits of the leftover ham and folded it into my biscuit dough.  When I texted dad a picture of the biscuits he asked for a recipe.  I figured it might be nice to share it with all of you.  If your biscuits usually end up heavy, try these tips for a lighter biscuit.  Since I stirred ham into my biscuits so they are both heavy and light. Maybe I’ll start a new tradition: The ham biscuits, both heavy and light represent the hope that the heavy challenges of the new year be balanced with a lightness in your spirit.

Grammy's old tin can biscuit cutter sitting on one of her quilts
 The keys to a great biscuit are
  • cold butter-  this allows those lovely pockets to form, butter that’s too soft will be absorbed into the flower and the biscuits won’t rise as well.
  • very little handling of the dough- too much kneading adds too much gluten and makes is tough
  • not too much flour, too much flour makes your biscuits dense
  • a very sharp cutting tool.*



It's a piece of an old can, it's a biscuit cutter, its a fried egg shaper
*If you cut your biscuits with something dull it pinches the edges down the edges and decreases the loft.  A clean sharp edge allows the biscuits to get a full lift when they rise.  We inherited a biscuit cutter from Michael’s Grammy.  She died before we got married but I hear she was strong and feisty and she knew how to make things like hand-stitched quilts from old bits of cloth and hot fresh biscuits. She fashioned her best biscuit cutter out of a tiny an old tin can. It makes little biscuits about the size of a golf ball.  I like bigger biscuits, so I’ve started using a cutter that Michael made out of a regular sized can. I’m not sure what tool he used to cut the can but it does the trick.  (Incidentally, he made it so that you can fry eggs that fit perfectly on an English Muffin or your homemade biscuit.  Just butter it on the inside and set it on your pan and crack the egg inside the mold. Voila! a multi-use kitchen tool made from an old can!)


3)Recipe for Ham Biscuits 
Here they are before they are baked



(vegetarian option: leave out the ham or stir in shredded cheese instead of ham)

1 1/3 C unbleached white flour
1/3 C Whole Wheat Flour (you can use all white for a fluffier biscuit, but I don’t recommend all wheat because it will be too dense)
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ t salt
6 Tablespoons of cold butter (or 3 butter, 3 shortening or lard)
¾ Cup of Buttermilk (To make buttermilk just add a Tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice to the measured. milk)
1-2 cups of chopped up leftover cooked ham

Preheat oven to 425
Whisk together the dry ingredients in a large bowl.  Cut in the butter into the dry ingredients with a pastry blender or two knives until there are no large clumps.  Pour in the buttermilk and stir until it is just blended, don’t over mix.  Fold in the ham.


On a surface that is lightly covered in flour knead the dough very gently, only use your fingertips (principles for bread dough DO NOT apply to biscuit dough)  Press the dough gently into a 1” thickness.  Cut your biscuits with a sharp tool, gather up scraps and flatten out and cut again. Place on an ungreased baking sheet with a little space between them.  Bake until the tops are light golden brown, about 18-20 minutes.  

4) Refrigerator Dill Pickles 

from my dogeared copy of Brilliant Food Tips and Cooking Tricks by David Joachim
This is the basic recipe I follow except I use whole peppercorns instead of or in addition to coriander seeds (depending on what's on hand) and I also slice up a white onion and add a few rings to the jars and a few whole peeled garlic when packing the pickles.

End of Summer Epistle

Homemade refrigerator dill pickles, from our first summer in Georgia.  I'll put the recipe in my next post. 


My kids started school at the beginning of this month so it feels like summer is over, even though it’s only the middle of August. Temperatures are still in the 90’s, but I feel autumn coming to northeast Georgia as the leaves on the blueberry bushes turn red, and the first yellowing leaves are falling from the pecan tree.  It feels good to be getting up and out of the house at the same time every cool morning and to fall asleep earlier at night.  I’m starting to get myself into a better writing rhythm which also feels good. It's time for picking lots of tomatoes and making dill pickles. The problem with not writing in a while is that I don't know where to begin or what all to include.  I can't cover all the events of the past few months, but I hope you'll get yourself a cup of tea and read this like it's a long letter,  hand-scrawled on legal paper and mailed to you in a nicely stamped envelope.    
Back in November of 2017, I found out that I was selected as one of 25 recipients of a Pastoral Study Project Grant from the Louisville Institute.  I know many of my friends are scrambling to get their applications in by the September 1 deadline so I thought I would share a little bit about what this Louisville Grant has meant for me thus far as a way of offering some encouragement.  Last summer, as my husband and I were deciding to transition out of living and working full-time Jubilee Partners, we still wanted to stay rooted in Georgia and with Jubilee as our faith community and I still wanted to stay connected as a monthly worship leader.  The Louisville Institute offers this grant to ordained and lay Christian leaders. The timing of the grant felt like the affirmation I needed to take a step into an uncharted path. 
 In February, I got to spend a few days at the Louisville Seminary in Kentucky and meet the other recipients as we offered feedback and support to one another in our projects. I woke up my first morning there feeling like “this is just right where I need to be right now.”  A friend of mine had just sent me a link to the Porter's Gate album Work Songs. I was already familiar with that album because another friend had already shared it with me a few months earlier.  But it was good to be reminded of that collection and I played the song Establish the Work of our Hands. This is what it feels like to really have a vocation, I thought to myself.  To be led by a sense of calling and gathered with other people of faith who share a similar passion to create and ask hard questions. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found myself in a small focus group with Isaac Wardell the founder of the Porter's Gate whose music had just been filling me up that very morning and whose album Lamentations by Bifrost Arts had already worked its way into our worship community. It's tiny moments like this that affirm in me a sense that the Holy Spirit moves in our lives.  And if our ears are open to it we can sense the Spirit moving even in a morning playlist.
The few days in Louisville continued to feel like an unfolding gift of connections and inspiration with Christian leaders from across North America.  I fear that someone might feel left out, so please go ahead and look at all 25 projects – everything from a theology of attachment parenting to researching how church leaders handle (or mishandle) sex abuse, to exploring how mending quilts can be a metaphor for mending institutions.  Murphy Davis from the Open Door community is writing about her lifetime of solidarity with the poor as she journeyed through cancer treatment as a Georgia Medicaid recipient and Dayna Olson-Getty is writing about the unique grief of bearing and grieving a child that she knew would not survive.  Starlette Thomas has a specific call to build up an undivided church that embraces a "raceless gospel" and is doing a close study of Clarence Jordan and Koinonia Farm. Britney Winn Lee is compiling a litany of prayers for congregations that are hungry for words of faith and justice in these troubling times. I met Dan Smith who is working to remember the enslaved members of his congregation in Boston and tell the often-overlooked legacy of slavery in New England while looking into what reparations would mean for his church.  If you are thinking about applying or are in the process I pray that it will be a blessed experience for you.  ( I spent three years thinking about it before I applied)  Also, if you find yourself wondering, "Where are the Christians who care about intersections of justice, art, spirituality, ecology, economic sustainability, grief, racism, sexuality, and healing?" Well, the Louisville Institute seems to be a good incubator for amplifying the voices of such folk and I'm really thankful to be among them.
And what's my project about?  Basically, I am trying to write my own story of race, healing, community, finding my way home and my connection with land overlaid with the larger narrative of racism, agriculture, war and migration in the American South.  I had thought I would call my book Paint: A Memoir in Color and its Application but now I’m thinking about calling it  Raisin’ a Little Heaven: the Sacred Work of Parenting, Activism, Gardening and Growing Community in the Rural South. What do you think?  (I’d love a few title suggestions or feedback in the comments.  I’m in conversation with a few different presses about my book proposal so a little feedback from potential readers would be super helpful.)
In April I used grant funds to attend the Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids and I got to reconnect with and meet so many lovely writers.  Again, please forgive me if I don't mention you by name. I think I accomplished in four days what a years' worth of emails could have done.  It is so good to meet writers and editors face to face.  I shared in an earlier post that a highlight of that trip was the spontaneous poetry reading at the Grand Rapids airport.  I am so thankful that I could spend a few magical moments with the recently departed, fiercely brilliant, Anya Silver.  Please read her NY Times obituary and her gorgeous poems.  




I also had the pleasure of connecting with Patrice Gopo. We met through reading one another's work online, but its so nice to meet people face to face.  Her beautiful new collection of essays All The Colors We Will See just released this month.   Here is my interview with her for Bearings the online journal of Collegeville Institute. It was interesting during the back and forth with the editor that Patrice asked that her lower-case “black” not be changed to upper-case “Black.”  It was a theme she touches on in her book of very thoughtful and timely essays about identity and belonging. 
I also met some editors at Sojourners Magazine.  I asked, “Do you have anyone covering the opening events at the  EJI Museum and Memorial in Montgomery?”  I had made plans to use some grant funds to travel to the opening and attend the Peace and Justice Summit and thought it would be amazing to write about my experience for the magazine that I grew up reading as a child in Washington, DC. They accepted my offer and it felt like a real honor to visit that space with a commission to share with readers who may not be able to get there in person.  Here’s a link to the article, you’ll need to be a Sojourners subscriber to read the whole thing. 
When I attended a workshop a few years ago with Vincent Harding he asked us to introduce ourselves by stating our full names and our place of birth and then our mother's full name and place of birth and finally our maternal grandmother's full name and place of birth.  Only after naming the women and places that formed us could we comment or bring our thoughts into the conversation.  He said that our maternal grandmothers play a special role in encouraging us to follow our dreams.  I ache to sit at Grandma Flossie's kitchen table and share this copy of the magazine with her. "I am so proud of thee and thy accomplishments," she would say in her old Quaker way. Oh, Grief, it's so sneaky, the way it just crept into this paragraph.
Here I am with my maternal grandma Florence "Flossie" Edgerton Rockwell
My Sojourners article really only scratches the surface of all that those few days held for me and my two older children who came with me.  The heaviness of the subject matter of lynching and systematic terror was offset by the sense of celebration and convening of so many influential people: EJI's founder Bryan Stevenson, Partners in Health Founder Paul Farmer, the Rev. William Barber, Children's Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, Senator Cory Booker, Jacqueline Woodson, Common, Britney Packnett, Elizabeth Alexander, Ava Duvernay, Sweet Honey in the Rock, The Roots, Britney Ford from the Alabama Shakes, Kirk Franklin, Stevie Wonder and the list goes on! It was like drinking from an overflowing fountain of talent, beauty and courage.  My kids didn’t know who all of these folks were but I’m so glad that they got to hear their voices and see their faces.  Perhaps one of the most moving moments was to be in a packed auditorium and being invited to shout out the names the people that came before us whose memories we wish to honor and at the end of that gathering to stand and sing Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.  That is the anthem that I will always stand to sing. This NPR piece reflects on the staying power of this song.
I have more plans to keep traveling to and reflecting on other points of personal and national interest in the South, including nurturing the land and stories in my own backyard (more on that later). The next trip will be to The Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Epes Alabama, where I was born, and then to the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, MS.  I'm also interested in joining with other people in the county where I live in Georgia to get a historical marker for a farmer named Lent Shaw who was falsely accused and lynched within earshot of his terrified family.  His great-grandson recently came to Colbert, Georgia looking for answers.  A Historical Marker for Mr. Shaw would be a healthy step in working toward healing these wounds. Eventually, Madison County can join the more than 800 other counties across the country in claiming a steel column from the EJI Memorial for Peace and Justice in remembrance of the African-American people lynched between 1877-1950.  The steel column for Madison County bears these names:
George Herbert 7/11/1907
___ Oglesby 9/6/1910
___ Brooks 9/6/1910
Cliff Bolton 9/6/1910
Lint Shaw 4/28/1936
There is a column for every county in which an African American person was lynched.
This is the one for the county that I call home.

I  have not yet been able to uncover any information about the other four people listed here, and I'm eager to learn their stories.   I encourage you to contact EJI to find out what you can do to remember lynching victims in your own communities.


Well, if you've read this far, thank you.  And please do comment about possible book titles or anything else that triggers a response.

[I just edited out an earlier version of this post in which I asked folks to share the same info that Vincent Harding asked us to share in our retreat.  There is a difference between being in a circle of people in a room and being on the web. I think that level of sharing is best done in person]

Made for a Time Like This- Pop Up Poetry in Grand Rapids Airport

I didn't know it at the time, but I began practicing for my debut airport poetry reading in my bathrobe during the two weeks leading up to my trip to Michigan for the Festival of Faith and Writing.  One Sunday morning I turned on the radio while I shuffled through the kitchen, making coffee, putting away clean dishes, preparing breakfast.  I still listen to the actual radio at particular times for particular shows.  On Being comes on at 7am, so I am most familiar with the second halves of that show. I caught the tail end of Naomi Shihab Nye's interview with Krista Tippet and was inspired by her practice of waking her teenage son by reading poetry aloud.  That seemed like a gentler practice than yelling and shaking my children awake.  I thought I would give it a try.

So, that Monday I opened the bedroom doors, stood in the hall and began to read to an audience of four sleeping figures. In the ensuing weeks, the words of Mary Oliver, Jean Toomer, Nikki Giovanni, Killian McDonnell, Ogden Nash, Anne Sexton, Denis Levertov, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman and Joy Harjo (to name a few) would pull my children out of dreaming and into the light of each new day. (And when that didn't work I would revert to my old ways, pull off their covers and shout TIME TO GET OUT OF BED!)     

In that empty hall of our old Georgia farmhouse, I read as if I was on stage, a homegrown habit that had been passed on to me by my mother and grandmothers. My mother read aloud to my siblings and me with such powerful expression and she learned it from her mother who cultivated the habit of reading aloud with her four children in their Ohio farmhouse.  My mother tells me that tedious chores like ironing and butter churning were softened by the promise of a book that one of the siblings would be tasked to read aloud.  They would take turns passing the hours by passing the book and the iron. Readings and recitations were also expected from my father's mother who would sometime plan living room programs for which grandchildren like me were expected to prepare and perform.  My nana sat like a queen in her chair as I refined my elocution skills before her watchful and encouraging eyes.


So, it was not without some sense of inner preparation and natural inclination that the idea of putting on a spontaneous poetry reading in the middle of a snowed-in airport moved rapidly from idea to reality.  I came to Grand Rapids for the first time to attend a gathering of people who still have faith in the power of reading and writing.  Filled with inspiration and encouragement I was ready to hurry home to start writing again.  I overheard a few people talking writer-talk and guessed that they were festival attendees but I thought- "I'll be on the plane soon, no need to keep chatting it up with new folks." A blanket of snow and steady freezing rain made all my fellow festival goers captives among an airport full of weary and frustrated travelers.  Every announcement pushed us further toward despair as our scheduled flights moved from one to three to nine hours delayed and even to complete cancellation.  On my flight to Michigan, I told the woman beside me that I was going to a writing festival and she gave me an amused and puzzled look and asked if it would be outside - the word "festival" perhaps conjuring a sense of word-shaped balloons and stilt walking poets dancing in a mosh pit of words.  "It's a writer's conference," I told her, "But, I do hope it will be fun."  And there were parts of it that were fun- meeting new people, reconnecting with old friends, listening to inspiring talks and readings, meeting editors face to face- accomplishing more in 4 days than a years worth of e-mails could have done.  But there were also parts that were disappointing- program designs that rarely accessed or invited the collective wisdom in the room, shop talk about the business end of writing that made me strain my ears to hear how "faith" fit into any of it.

The gate for my return flight to Atlanta was A-4 (HONESTLY no joke! more on this later) and I was about to pull into myself and settle into my seat by the cold white view of our grounded plane, when my friend Britney, who I met four years ago at a workshop at the Collegeville Institute, called out my name.  Before long I was shaking hands, getting business cards, and talking shop with fellow stranded travelers as if the airport were the last event of the festival.  "Someone should host a reading," someone said. I had just met at least two people who were brave enough to introduce themselves as poets, surely they would join me.  Inspired by Kwame Alexander's talk about saying yes, I jumped up and said, "Yes!  Let's do it!"

Word spread quickly through the Twitterverse as the idea of a pop-up poetry reading became reality. We picked a time, 1:30 pm.  We picked a gate, A-6.  We, well some of us, got some lunch and beer. And then we started making our selections.

What should I read to a group of people from children to old folks?  Hmm, the poem I'm working on about pinatas and lynchings nope, the one about Andersonville prison and starlings, nah, the one about horse racing and starvation, man maybe I need to lighten up on the poetry front, don't I have anything that isn't about death? There's is a reason my poems are mostly sad, because we live in a world of total depravity.  One of my favorite poems of late has been Micah Bournes' Made for A Time Like This .   I pull my children out of peaceful slumber and send them to school and out into this wounded world with hope and terror in my chest.  At the same time, I want to improve my ability to cultivate joy in my heart and the people around me, even while carrying the weight of past and current events. 

Finally, I remembered this little poem I wrote when I was 8 months pregnant and waddled to the corner store to buy dish soap during a blizzard during the winter of endless snow in Philadelphia.  I offered to open the show with it. Nathan Irons Roberts of The Salt Collective offered to be the announcer.  He stood in the middle of the terminal and announced that we would be starting our scheduled poetry reading.  Then I took the floor and read my snowy poem for a snowy day:

Pilgrimage to the Corner Store or Winter Ode to Joy 

Gleaming bottle on the shelf-
a remedy to heal myself.
Ultra concentrated Joy
One yellow lemon scented squirt
is all I need to banish dirt
or rather dried and crusting grits
milky pools and bacon bits

I clutch and pay and leave the store
to face the snow outside the door.

The two block walk feels like a mile
At myself, I have to smile
Huddled, waddling
through knee deep snow
that has not ceased to fall and blow
to frost my glasses, freeze my nose,
                as steadily I trudge toward  home
On my snowy path, I plod
and utter silent thanks to God
who knows and grants his children’s wishes
I now have soap to wash the dishes.


 Anya Silver jumped up after me and followed it with an ode to her washing machine. And we were off.  Each poet jumping up and building on the other.  Poems on domesticity led to poems on loss and migration, love, grief, dead and distant parents.  I also found and read my other poem that isn't too heavy- Father's Day Manicures.

And we were all so shiny in that terminal, all smiles, laughter and clapping hands.  I watched a passing traveler pull out his earbuds and stand still. We all had nowhere to go.  He had time to listen.

Thus, the Grand Rapids Pop Up Poetry Collective featuring Aline Mello, Jennifer Fueston, Seana Scottt, Josina Guess, Anya Silver, Cameron Lawrence and Britney Winn Lee made history as the only scheduled and on-time event in the Gerald Ford International Airport that day.


Soon questions showed up on twitter, did we read Naomi Shihab Nye's poem Gate A-4.  No, we didn't read that poem. We all read our own original poems from books and phones and computer screens.  We were seasoned and green. My friend Britney Win Lee read the only poem she had written in a very long time and got an invitation from an editor in the crowd to submit a proposal to turn it into children's book!  (She can remember to thank the Grand Rapids Pop Up Poetry Collective.You're welcome.)

What started as a daily practice of breaking morning silence with poetry became a daring public experiment in community building.  Though Naomi Shihab Nye's poem was not read aloud, it was embodied. Maybe we were made fore a time like this.  A collection of stranded writers gave an offering of joy to that cold and frustrating day.  In the closing words of Gate A-4:
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

Burning the Milk and Making it Into Yogurt Anyway


I like making yogurt.  It is not too complicated:
Heat the milk. (to just below boiling)
Cool the milk (to warm enough that you can touch it)
Add a little plain yogurt. (one Tablespoon per quart)
Pour the cultured milk into jars.
Put the lidded jars in a pot filled with hot tap water and keep it warm by wrapping the lidded pot in a fleece jacket.
Walk away.
Come back the next day, or at the end of the day if you started in the morning and you have yogurt.

When I was a child my mom had a plug-in yogurt maker that came with a special thermometer and plug-in machine that could incubate four 8 ounce ceramic jars at a time.  When I was in college I learned that I could make yogurt by the gallon without the help of a yogurt machine or thermometer. My friend Nacim, whose mom is from Iran, taught her that you just need to hold your finger in the milk and count to seven. If you can keep it there without pulling it out than it is cool enough.

When my family was on WIC and got more gallons of milk than we could ever consume, yogurt making helped to preserve the milk and our digestive tracks.  When we lived in an intentional community with an abundance of raw milk I made yogurt for our household and for the family that lived next door, but I was never the yogurt maker for the whole community.  Now that we are back to living on our own and buying our own groceries I still love to make yogurt because it is much less expensive than store-bought and it only contains milk and an older version of itself. It seems like yogurt making holds a modern parable of community building and personal transformation: a little bit of starter makes the fresh milk hold together into a more solidified superfood.

The only thing that is complicated about making yogurt is heating the milk.  The milk needs to be stirred, not constantly, but enough to prevent scorching.  I have made gallons of yogurt and only burned the milk a few times.  If burnt milk is any indicator of how distracted I'm feeling, in the past month, I have had to scrape a thick black crust of burned milk off of the bottom of the pot not once, but twice.  Both times I made the same mistake.  I turned on the heat and walked into the next room to sit at my computer.  Both times I lost track of time by sometimes writing my own words but more likely reading someone else's writing or advice about writing and then the smell of charred dairy pulled me back to reality.  (I also realize that our back burner runs a little hot.  Maybe the stove's to blame)

We all know not to cry over spilled milk but what is one to do with a pot of burned milk?  My advice: don't stir the bottom and do make the most of it.  Last time I let the milk cool in the pot and it was very difficult to wash it later.  By very difficult I mean that it sat on the counter for days.  I kept adding hot soapy water and letting it soak.  Finally, I begged Michael to use his extra elbow grease to get it clean. This time, I quickly poured the milk into another pot and then submerged the burnt pot in water right away.


As I was scraping up my mistake with the spatula, I was struck by the beauty of freshly burnt milk.  It looked like reptilian skin or the barnacled surface of a tidewater pool brimming with algae and salty life.  It looked like woodsy fungus, or bubbling tarpits, or the surface of cooling lava or the crazy crackly surface of pot pulled from a Raku firing.  It reminded me of those photos in kids' magazines that ask you to guess what you see.  So I snapped this shot:

Then I scraped the pot clean while it was still soft and pliable.

For several weeks now, I've found myself humming the refrain to the song You Make Beautiful Things. I first heard this song during a Resurrection Sunday service 2 years ago.  In our community, we have an outdoor sunrise service for Easter that starts with people filling the cross wrapped in chicken wire with freshly picked flowers. On that particular Sunday, there was rain in the forecast so we stayed inside and had the service with a bare cross at the center. Toward the end of the service, my friend Jess sang this song while we all transformed a symbol of torture and death into something bursting with beauty and life.

I didn't make a beautiful thing from the burnt milk, but I noticed beauty in it.  Can we see beauty in the burnt people and places in our lives?

It would be nice to think that burning the milk was my only problem.  I keep making mistakes, stupid, preventable mistakes that I have made before.  My mouth keeps moving faster than my brain or slower than my heart.  I hurt the ones I love the most with things said and unsaid, actions taken and passively avoided.  I'll need to keep cleaning up the messes from those mistakes and the quicker the better.  There is nothing beautiful in hurting others or ourselves, but I'm beginning to see that grace is what can happen when we see beauty even in our wounds.

Our society is going to keep seeming like its broken and divided beyond repair, our wounds too deep, our memories too raw, the damage too hideous.  We have messes of history, of mistakes we have inherited, we inhabit crumbling structures built on lies and exploitation. We will spend our lives working to scrape off layers of neglect and exploitation of the earth and one another.

We will keep mixing the old with the new and making the most of it.  The flavor of my most recent batch of yogurt has a slightly charred reminder of my mistake, but its ok. Honey and fruit make it more than tolerable. It is good, even though it's not perfect.  The next batch will be better. If I can accept that good yogurt can still come from burnt milk, then maybe there's grace enough for me and the people I know who are all a little burnt around the edges.   




A few Book Reviews

I wrote a few book reviews in recent months. My kids couldn't believe that I was so excited to get invited to write book reports. But, they do think its kind of cool and weird to see my name in the magazines on the coffee table.

Below are links to the reviews as well as a little background story.
 
1.) I met Camille Dungy when she did a poetry reading at an AME church in Athens, GA.  I loved how she honored that sacred space with her own words and by reading the words of other poets that had shaped her.  It was spring break and so my children were out of school and my parents, sister, and young niece were in town.  They wouldn't have chosen to spend a sunny spring afternoon at a poetry reading but they all came and enjoyed it.  When she was finished I asked her to sign my copies of a powerful anthology that she edited called Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and a collection of her own poems called What to Eat, What to Drink and What to Leave for Poison.

Even though I assured them that the books were for our whole family, my children wanted her signature too.  So, they stood in line and asked her to sign their faces.  Camille Dungy and I had a little "mom to mom" moment where she was not going to sign my kids in sharpie unless I directly requested it.  I looked at my kids and shook my head, "OK kids, she can she just sign your hands instead of your face." So she signed their hands.  They immediately pressed their hands to their faces so that the reverse image of her signature showed up on their heads.  Let's just say Camille Dungy left a lasting impression on all of us and she didn't forget us either!.

When I saw that she had a new collection of essays Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History I knew I had to read it.  Last spring I was preparing to attend a writing retreat called Revision, Spirituality and the Writer's Life and we were asked to choose a book that we thought of as influential in our own book projects.  The problem was that her book was not going to be released until after my retreat but I knew it was the book I needed.  So I emailed her and asked her if I could buy it early for my retreat.  She said yes, and  I got a signed copy with the command "Thrive!"  Her book is definitely providing the wisdom and inspiration for me to write the book I need to write.

Here is my review called The Vocation of Being a Stranger of Camille Dungy's Guidebook to Relative Strangers that I wrote for the Jan 31, 2018 issue of The Christian Century

2. Englewood Review of Books named Jesmyn Ward's Sing Unburied Sing the best novel of 2017.  It is a heart-wrenching gem of book, that has gotten all kinds of other accolades. If you haven't read it please, please do. It was an honor to review it.  The full review is only available in print in the Advent 2017 edition of the Englewood Review of Books but you can read a piece of it here.


3.  I also offered to review a book by Daniel Coleman called Presence and Process: a Path Toward Transformative Faith an Inclusive Community, without really realizing what it was about.  The title made me think it would be about the transformational process of staying present when you are in a community with divergent viewpoints.  It was actually about how the rise of Buddhist practice in the West has led to and influenced deeper Christian contemplative practice.  It was interesting. The author went to Earlham School of Religion which is just down the road from Earlham College where I studied.  You can read the full review online here at the Englewood Review of Books 


About that clothesline…


 In January 2014, Communities Magazine published an article I wrote called “Putting Our Lives on the Line”.  I wrote about the joys and challenges of line drying laundry for my family of six in the intentional community where I lived.  I felt good about the piece and shared it with friends and family. I was amazed when the editor wrote me to say that a writer for the Scientific American blog cited my article in a piece about environmentally sustainable practices.  I just got word yesterday that it will be included in a new book, Sustainability in Community: Resources and Stories about Creating Eco Resilience in Intentional Community. (Yay, another step toward becoming a bonafide legit writer!)  This book is one of a four-volume series on intentional communities. But here’s the catch, the addendum to my piece: In December 2017 I moved half a mile away from the intentional community where I lived when I wrote the piece, and I own a dryer now (but I hardly ever use it.)
                My love affair with line drying may have started to wane when I visited a friend on a rainy day in 2015 and brought a load of wet laundry with me.  She’s a college professor, poet, and mom who was happy to share her dryer with me.  I popped my clothes in to dry and realized as we drank coffee and talked, that I wanted more choices than my current life offered. When I got home that night I wrote in my journal, “So is a basket of warm and fluffy clothes going to be the lure that finally pulls me out of intentional community?”
                Then my mother-in-love moved to town in 2016.  She watched me scrambling from one incomplete project to the next.  She watched my children as I jumped from meeting to meeting. And she watched me haul baskets of laundry in and out of my house. “Crumb (that’s as close as she gets to cursing), Josina, when do you ever find time to write?” I told her that I wrote on the occasional mornings when I would wake up naturally at 4 or 5 or sometimes at night when the kids are in bed.  She is a classical violinist who knows from experience that raw talent can be refined through discipline and routine.  She asked me how many hours a week I spent hanging and folding laundry. I guessed at least three.  “Here’s what I’d like to do for you,” she said, “I’ll do your laundry but only if you use that extra time to write.”
                So, she did my laundry, for a year, and I found my life falling a little more into balance.  I also felt like the biggest hypocrite, imposter-fake-earthy-mama in the world.  Here I was playing the role of the happy communitarian who – wait for it- actually, wore clothes that went through a dryer! It was like the year in junior high school where I tried to be a complete vegetarian, even tried to talk my friends into it, but, when I got home from school, I heated up a hamburger and ate it alone in my bedroom.  I was eating my words, slowly and privately, unable to publicly admit to the internal conflict I felt between my ideals and my practices. I felt a growing strain in my relationships within my community because I knew that I could not rely on my mother-in-law’s generosity forever.  I would have to choose to accept line drying for the rest of my life or move.
I also felt this amazing outpouring of grace.  Every day that I dropped off laundry I felt like we were doing important redemptive work.  Historically, when a woman of color appears with a full laundry basket at the door of an older white woman the clothes are washed, dried, ironed and folded by the brown hands. I appeared with baskets of unsorted dirty clothes and she returned them to my doorstep oftentimes better then I left them.  Missing buttons were sowed back, rips were mended and there would be little yellow sticky notes of apology for not being able to get out a stain. I didn’t use a full three hours each week, but I started to prioritize writing time and produce work that felt tighter and stronger than when I was writing haphazardly. I felt a little embarrassed and completely undeserving of my own personal Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (Beatrix Potter’s laundry-doing hedgehog). Almost every week I would say, “You don’t have to do this for us, really I can manage.”  And she would assure me that she didn’t have that much to do with her day and that it made her happy.

It made her happy.  As the years rolled by (and as I fought multiple rounds of super lice on my kids' heads- we’ll save that for another story) I began to resent that I did not have the option of a clothes dryer.  I realized that I felt happier knowing that I have choices. I realized that if I had to choose between 2 uninterrupted hours of writing or 2 hours of winter line drying, I would choose chilly fingers on a keyboard over chilly fingers gripping clothespins. I wanted my children to remember and see me happy with my choices.

I’m not going to be able to trace every thread that lead to my family’s decision to move, but one of the factors was, indeed, my desire for the choice to use a clothes dryer- a choice that our community had decided, long before we moved there, would not be an option.  There is this tragic scene in the movie Ray in which his little brother drowns while his mom was at the clothesline. Ray Charles’ heroin addiction was an attempt to bury that haunting memory. I think constantly about women who had and have very little choices in their lives and the tragic consequences that can emerge when women and children are drowning in poverty.  Hanging line after line in the Georgia sunshine I felt this enormous tension between the pleasure and privilege I had to slow down and hang my clothes on a line and the desire for time to join my voice with others in the ongoing fight for justice and equality. It doesn’t have to be either or, but for me and my family to thrive, I knew that we needed something as simple as how we did our laundry to feel like a complete and voluntary choice.
We bought our dryer on a rainy day in December, one week after we moved into the old farmhouse where we live now.  My husband and I went to the used appliance shop in the next town over and picked out a simple model for $125. It has been over a month, and I have used the dryer about four times.  We have a drying rack in the kitchen and a clothesline out back which we use on a regular basis.  I still love that time of birdsong, breeze, and sunshine. I don’t regret any of what I wrote or practiced over the past six and a half years. I moved only half a mile away because I still value and I am very connected to the community that helped to form me and my family. We still want to be good stewards of our resources. But I needed to be happy, free of resentment, and joyful in our choices. We are still intentional about nurturing healthy relationships to the earth and the people around us, and, sometimes, that means we choose to use a clothes dryer.


So, if you’ve read this far, I’m curious- 

When have you had to eat your words- have you written or proclaimed something that needs an addendum?  

Have the things that were important to you four years ago changed? 

How do you live with the gap between righteous ideals and flawed practice? 

Have you ever tried to hide your choices from the people you love when your values and practices diverge?

Have you ever chosen to distance yourself from a community so that you can strengthen those relationships and live more authentically?  

And of course, how do you dry your laundry and why?  

On loving a Chicken named Chili





I’d like to interrupt this steady stream of depressing news (Vegas, North Korea, 45, Puerto Rico, violence, you know the rest) to introduce to you a little red hen named Chili.  Her left foot is crooked.  She doesn’t lay predictably.  She poops on our front porch and eats the cat food. I wouldn’t recommend to anyone that they have a chicken that thinks she’s a cat (thankfully our cats don’t poop on the porch).  But since this silly little porch chicken came into my life I’ve had something to laugh about and laughter feels a lot better than the alternative right now.

 On Tuesday night my husband sent a group text to a few friends and family: Chilli chicken in da house.  After taking the picture Michael promptly put her into her pen in the front yard. 
 
That little white swirl on the cushion is lint, not poop, but why, you may ask, is there a chicken on the couch in the first place?  How did we get to this point? 
We’ve been living for the past six years in an intentional community that keeps chickens for eggs and meat.  We have about 75 of them and they live far from the houses on a field with movable fencing. Similar to this one pictured here: Image result for joel salatin mobile chicken coop

Following the farming practice made popular by Joel Salatin the chickens aerate and fertilize the soil where the cows had grazed.  Though they live a happy life of pecking and scratching in the ground by day and roosting in their stylish mobile chicken coop by night, chickens never meant much to me until Chili showed up at our house.

It was the morning after the total solar eclipse (We had 99.67% here but drove to SC to see 100% - but that’s another story).  Some of our friends who had come down from Philadelphia for the big event woke up to a loud clucking on the porch. “So does that chicken always sleep on your porch?” Angela asked as I filled her cup with black coffee.
 
“What chicken?” I wondered aloud.  Maybe the bird’s little internal homing mechanism got interrupted by the partial darkness the day before, maybe she wanted in on the party with the Guesses, maybe God sent her as a feathered messenger from above bringing me good tidings of great joy but for whatever reason she found in our porch a home and we decided we’d keep her.

Her head was bloody on top. We get the phrase “hen-pecked” from that practice of chickens ganging up on weaker chickens.  Like I said before her foot is crooked so she doesn’t fit in.  There was no way that I was going to put her back in the pen with the sharp-beaked flock.  We pulled over an old bottomless cage that we once used for tending rabbits and made it her new place to sleep in the front yard. The kids started calling her Chili, perhaps for the ruddiness of her feathers, perhaps because it rhymes with silly.


Chili is a people chicken. She runs up to greet us as we come and go from the house.  She stares at us through the door and pecks at the glass begging to be let in.  We don’t let her, and we curse when she poops on the welcome mat.  She doesn’t mind being held. When I sit on the rocking chair on the front porch I scoop her up onto my lap and smooth her silky feathers.  She doesn’t flap and squawk.  She lays an egg now and then in an abandoned terrarium, and when she does our daughters rush to bring it, still warm, into the house. She likes to be talked to.  Every morning we have a little chat- I do most of the talking.

One afternoon, about a week after Chili started roosting with us, a friend saw the chicken on the porch and thought she was doing me a favor by plopping her back in with all the other chickens.  I tried to hide my consternation when she told me, but I think I was visibly disturbed.  I’ve gone all these years without a chicken in my life, but the idea of losing Chili made me ache as I ran toward the fence and scanned my eyes across a sea of anonymous birds. Here was the test- did I really know her at all?  Did she really know me?  I stepped into the pen and looked at each bird. I knew she wasn’t one of the white or speckled ones but there were dozens of reddish brown hens.  

“Chili, hey Chili chicken,” I called out to the feathery ones but I was met with empty birdie-eyed stares and absent-minded clucks. “Hey Chili girl, c’mon now.” Then a little chicken sidled up to my leg and gave a little, “Brr-bruck?”  She pointed her crooked foot toward mine and I scooped her up into my arms.  All those Bible stories about shepherd and sheep rang true as I was assured that we actually do know one another by name- this bird and me.


A few years back I went to year Alice Walker speak at the Morton Theater in Athens, GA.  At the time I was a bit bemused that this writing legend, speaking to a packed auditorium (the most diverse crowd I’ve been in since moving down south), who could have spoken to us about anything in the world chose to share her delight in raising backyard chickens.  It had something to do with love.  She wanted us to realize that peace is a practice as fragile and miraculous as a fresh laid egg and that if a heart can feel the tragedy in cracking an egg with a half formed chick we can feel the tragedy of greater losses.

I wish it were that easy, that peace on earth were as simple as each creature knowing and being known by name. That our hearts would stay fragile and open and willing to keep breaking.  But even Nazis and Klansman can be kind parents, farmers and pet owners.  Loving the ones close to us doesn’t always lead to love of the ones far away, the ones we think of as others, the ones we kill with drone strikes, the ones whose blood we have not seen. But still I cling to the hope that tenderness to any living thing might soften us to one another.

I know a man who arrived in the US as a refugee from Congo. Before war pushed him and his family from their land, he lived with cows.  While he was staying at Jubilee he accurately predicted the birth of a calf based on his lifetime of nearness to the life rhythms of cows.  He lives in a city now, works in a chicken plant where white gangly birds who never see the light of day are hacked and chopped into convenience food. We saw him a few weeks ago and he confided to a friend of mine that when he has trouble sleeping he turns on his smart phone and looks at a photo of a cow.  It helps him to feel at home.

I’m sorry, I wanted to write something to help us all laugh a little bit and now I feel like crying again.  I want you to know that I’m a hypocrite too.  I still eat factory farmed meat.  I’ve witnessed and plucked but still have not directly killed my own food.  In his book The Witness of Combines Kent Meyers has this beautiful chapter called “Chickens” about how quickly our affection toward chickens can be transformed as they become chicken, but how even the process of butchering –when done with care- can feel sacramental.

 I can hear Chili clucking now in the yard. I have a feeling that even if I become a woman who butchers her own supper, Chili – my first chicken love- will grow to a ripe old age


Since this little Chili bird came my daughter, Seraphina, who is usually the last one out of bed, has been waking up early to let her out, give her grain, talk to her.  My son wants to kill her on account of the poop on the porch.  Our porch is actually cleaner than usual because of all the sweeping and spraying and the shoes are stacked up neatly because no one wants poop in their shoes.


On a day when the sky turned dark a silly little bird came to our home for solace.  She brought us extra work and joy. Her head is healed now and my heart, my ever breaking heart, is happier for her arrival.

I rest me in the thought



I’ve been distraught of late.   I know better.  I know God is more powerful than people.  Yet I've been floundering, not really praying, not really feeling blessedly assured. I've been crying for the ones who can’t go home, for the ones who are suffering and may suffer more as a result of the bad choices of greedy, fearful and misinformed people.

I offered to watch a friend’s baby this morning as much for my own sanity as for her ability to attend English class.  The baby and I went to visit Grandma Coffee.  Coffee is 97 years old.  In worship last Sunday she stood up and told a story that she’s told many times before, a story that never gets old:

She and her husband had just arrived in Korea as missionaries at the end of the Korean War.  There was  a building that she recognized as a church except all the windows were blown out and there were piles of rubble.  Yet she could hear voices coming from that ravished space .  Voices singing in Korean a song she knew well in English. “And though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.”  So she knew God was already there and thus begun her two decades in Korea with the theme song of her life becoming “This is My Father’s World.”

She held this little baby during part of Sunday worship, this baby whose mommy made it safely to the US and for the misfortune of being a survivor of a crime and the courage of reporting it can now stay in this country out of the shadows. We hope.  

This baby and I came to Coffee’s this morning because I thought she would like to hold the baby again.   I also  thought, surely, in the presence of these very young and very old souls I would find some solace.

I told Coffee that I am angry, sad and scared.  Then she spoke my deeper thoughts that I’ve been trying to conceal. “And you find yourself thinking, ‘Lord strike him down.’ But you know that isn’t going to work at this point because there must be others that think and feel like him.  And so you pray.”

Every morning she has been reading, or rather asking someone to read to her from John Baillie’s daily devotional.  She had already read it this morning before I came, but asked me if I’d like to read it aloud. “ Can you read while holding a baby? I can’t see the words anymore.” The baby had fallen into a deep and settled rest upon my chest.  Her warm breath steadying and deepening my own tight and anxious breaths.  “Yes, I can read with a baby in my arms. I have years of practice.”

So I read and prayed and those tears sprang a leak down my cheeks.  “Help me, O Lord God, not to let my thoughts today be wholly occupied by the world’s passing show.”

And it helped.  From the outside someone might have mistaken me for the helper- holding the baby, visiting my elderly neighbor.  But I was the neediest, the hungriest, the most consoled. 


lament for an Inaugural poet



Image result for on the pulse of morning

In my short 38 years, I have only attended one inauguration and for one reason, to hear a poem.  I grew up in Washington, DC. In the years my family lived there, between 1980 and 1996 we went downtown for protests more often than for celebrations. In January 1993, mom and I bundled up and caught the Metro downtown for Bill Clinton’s inauguration.  I remember standing in the throng of people and watching his motorcade pass.  His window was rolled up for security but I could see a waving white hand behind the black tinted glass.  I had not come for a glimpse of a hand behind glass, I had come to hear the voice of Maya Angelou reading her new poem, “On the Pulse of Morning.”   The year before, I had read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings for my eighth grade English class. I knew it would be a gift to the nation and to me personally to hear Maya Angelou read on the National Mall.  Her poem, her voice vibrating through the loud speakers across a sea of people standing quietly, peacefully, breathing steamy winter breath together instilled a sense of hopefulness, a sense that I belonged.  My hope was not in the new president but in the fact that Maya’s truth-telling words were welcome, her voice was invited.  I was coming of age into a belief that my voice would be welcome too, that we were becoming a nation that was growing toward its lofty ideals. I took her words to heart, my fourteen year-old self heeded her words as a commission:

Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.


There have only been four inaugural poets in our nation’s history.  Robert Frost, invited by John F Kennedy was the first.  There was a long silent spell followed by Maya Angelou who was invited by Bill Clinton in 1993.  President Obama is the only US president who invited two inaugural poets, Elizabeth Alexander in 2009 and Richard Blanco in 2013. In only four people there is a rich representation of African American, Latino, White, gay, female and male,  people who chose words as tools for inner and societal transformation.   

For the past five years, I have lived in rural Georgia and been have been challenged to love my neighbors while maintaining a voice that is often quite distinct.  I do not want to just fit in or for my kids to accept many of the cultural norms as "normal," yet I want to actually love and know people without fear. I attended an all day sporting event with my son a few years back. He and I read an O magazine together as we waited for his turn to compete.  One of the feature articles was a list of questions to encourage personal reflection and growth. He then read the questions aloud to his teammates. Most of them humored him with their responses.  Except when he got to this question, “Have you tried poetry?”  One child seemed obviously annoyed that my son was focusing more on Oprah than his sport and replied derisively, “Poetry is for hippies and vegetarians!” His mother, the coach, cast her son a silencing glance but did not raise her voice in defense of poetry, hippies or vegetarians. I think this boy may have hoped to insult us with these labels. We just laughed.  I turned to him and said, “Poetry is for you, too.” 

As many writers have already pointed out, there will be no poetry read at today’s inauguration. Poets, at their best, are truth tellers, and truth did not receive an invitation. But tomorrow when the streets are flooded with dissent, the truth will be made clear.  Poetry and truth telling and courage will continue with our without presidential invitation.

 In 2014, I heard Richard Blanco read in Atlanta. As the son of an immigrant, he spoke about what it meant to be invited to read at a US presidential inauguration. He quoted his Cuban born mother who said to him, “You know m’ijo, it’s not where you are born that matters, it’s where you choose to die. That’s your country.”  

What is my country? Death keeps coming quickly and uninvited in this country. What a privilege it would be, what a beautiful nation we could become if untimely death were not thrust upon people- from unborn babies, to death row inmates and to victims drone strikes, state sanctioned police and vigilante killings and shooting rampages from legal assault rifles. These early deaths are not their choice. (I know some may chafe that I mention babies here. I am in no way advocating that Roe V Wade be overturned. I am advocating a culture of life from cradle to grave, a culture so loving, so free of rape and abuse, so affirming of life that it would make abortion rare and obsolete, never illegal).

Before Richard Blanco read, he was introduced by a beautiful rising star in the poetry world named Jericho Brown.  As I heard him read, I thought, “Yes! Him! His voice! Our nation needs to listen to him. Perhaps Jericho Brown will be the next inaugural poet.” His poems cut to the quick.  In December his poem “Riddle” appeared in the Georgia Review. It starts with the unrecognizable body of Emmet Till, the refusal to hear a mother cry and continues

We do not know the history
Of ourselves in this nation. We
Do not know the history of our
Selves on this planet because
We do not have to know
What we believe we own.

It ends with the line, What? What on Earth are we?

Many appropriate poems have emerged in recent months, but this it the one I am re-reading today. 
I’ve also got Maya’s words burrowed deep in the folds of my memory.  As the old song goes “I won’t let the devil steal my joy.” Though my heart is heavy with lament today, he who shall not be named is not the author of my hope. And so I will heed the final lines of the poem I heard 24 years ago today and face this day and the days ahead with a hope that will not be taken by this regime change.

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, into
Your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.

Father's Day Manicures

Here is poem in two parts that I wrote based on my dad's recent visit to our home.  He is such an amazing grandfather and continues to challenge, love and encourage me.  I love the strength of my father's hands and that he always taught me, "The pen is swifter than the sword." I am so very thankful.
.



His
 
After sawing logs on the couch,
your Daddy wakes and says he’ll bake
 a sweet potato pie.

You look at his thick rhinoceros horn nails,
and say, “Daddy, please wait.”
Then you start to clip those jagged saws
and say, “How could you let them go
for so long?”

You gather the clippings
 in your skirt and your son tells you
 that you are acting
 like his mom. But your dad
is no longer acting
like your son who would have
 balled his sharp nails into a fist
 if you tried.

Daddy says, “I can’t
remember anyone ever
clipping my nails.”





Hers

 He considers the small
 bottle of purple  metallic polish
 and says, “Yes, I will
 paint your nails,
but I have never painted
a person’s nails before.”

She says that’s okay
and spreads the sum of her years
 on a flattened macaroni box
 to protect the table where you sat
 as a child and now stand at a distance

 to watch your father bent over
 and concentrating with bifocals off.
 The top of his head gleams,
the bald spot that was a golden coin
 has grown into a mirror.

 And this little curly haired girl,
 your daughter, is you
though he never said, “yes”
when you asked.    

you want to bottle this moment
 to take a picture of those thick 
tree trunk fingers holding her red bud twigs.
She sighs her patient I’m a big girl sigh
as he takes his time and colors outside the lines.

 

mom's lentils



Happy Mother's Day to my mom, who taught me how to make something sweet from humble lentils.

You just left a stressful business meeting and you have an hour and a half to make lunch for fifty people. 

Don’t panic.

Look in the industrial sized community fridge for leftovers and find enough to feed eight maybe ten people. 

Breathe.  You can do this.

Remember there are always lentils, those quick cooking gems of simplicity.

Put four pounds in a big pot, rinse well and cover with plenty of water, drop in four bay leaves and turn on the heat.  Go for the mondo rice cooker and measure fourteen cups of rice.  Rinse well cover with enough water and remember to plug it in and turn it on.  Look at the clock- you’ve got time.  Pull out hummous and baba ghanoush from the fridge and defrost a few bags of pita bread.  Discover that someone else in the community sliced five gallons of sweet potatoes into fries and sing a sweet hallelujah.  This lunch will be more than OK. 

Realize you are not alone.   Earlier that morning your jaw dropped in the meeting when it was casually announced that there would be ten extra people at lunch.  Mercy was shown and a volunteer was made available to help you with a task that is usually done by one person. She sets cups and pitchers of water on the tables. She puts away all of the clean dishes and washes all of the ones you will dirty.  She slices the bag of mini peppers you found in the fridge.  She slices them thinly, as you instructed, so that everyone can get some.  She smiles when you say you are making sweet and sour lentils.  Her mom had visited a few weeks earlier and complemented you when you made the dish, “Your lentils are good. Whenever I make lentils they taste like dirt. Yours do not taste like dirt.”  You can’t expect much more from a complement for a pot of lentils.

You spread the fries in a single layer on three large baking sheets and drizzle a little oil on them and stir then spread them back flat and pop them in the oven.

Your husband sits near the kitchen with another man eating cheese and crackers and talks about a maintenance project. You know that they both work plenty, but they are not working now.  You sweetly tell your hubby how much it bugs you to see him having a snack right there, right now. He smiles and offers you some cheese and crackers. The other man offers to help.  You decline both and get out four large onions.

Another coworker walks into the kitchen and asks to use two stove burners to heat up lunch for the Congolese family that will be arriving soon.  She will serve them lunch in the small house that will be their home for the next two months but doesn’t want to dirty up their freshly cleaned kitchen.  They will get a dish made with meat which we usually don’t serve during the week. The lentils simmer and soften on the back burner and there is room for her pots.  You feel like Brother Lawrence, so close to God in the clamor of the kitchen, and do not begrudge your sisters need for space there. 

You try to suppress your insecurity about making lunch for the ten guests that are on their way.  They work for a local refugee resettlement agency and most of them are themselves refugees or the children of people from Somalia, Vietnam, Bhutan, Sudan.  They left behind the hell of war but carried with them food traditions that taste like heaven.  You peel and dice the onions for your mom’s sweet and sour lentils recipe from the More with Less Cookbook and try not to feel inadequate.  No chili peppers, ginger, lemongrass or mélange of spices. Just boil the lentils with bay leaves and enough water to be sure they don’t burn.  When they are soft, add equal parts apple cider vinegar and apple (or pineapple) juice.  The recipe calls for an equal part of sugar but it is fine with less.  A pinch of ground cloves.  Salt.  Stir in sautéed onions.  Don’t forget salt. Simmer until bubbly and serve over rice.  Usually throw in some minced garlic but there is no pre-chopped garlic in the fridge and the clock is ticking too fast to squash and mince enough garlic to taste a difference.

Resign yourself to the fact that it is only food.  There will be enough for everyone to eat and no one will go hungry.  Fifteen minutes before you are supposed to be done you hear a shout from across the dining room, “They brought food!”  Your heart sinks and rises at this announcement. You didn’t need to make so much.  Why didn’t anyone tell you they were bringing food? Why didn’t you remember that they brought food the last time they visited?

Realize that your pride is wounded; no one will want your bubbly pot of plain old “don’t taste like dirt” lentils. 

Suddenly you are tasked with warming up food for an international potluck.  You slice pork dumplings in half so that people at the end of the line will get a taste. You pour chickpea and tomato stew out of the turmeric stained plastic container into a pot to warm on a burner that is now free.  Fragrant rice pilaf goes into a pan to warm in the oven.  Your dear helper washes all of the Tupperware so that it can be returned.  You find serving utensils for Vietnamese noodles, plug in a crockpot of chick pea spinach and potato soup.  The only white guy among the visitors hands you a plastic bag with tortilla chips, a box of Cheezits, and a half filled container of white icing.  You give a puzzled look first to the icing and then to the bearer of the bag. “They said we should bring food so I just cleaned out my desk.”  You set the icing aside on the counter.

The guests begin introducing themselves and talking to the community about refugee resettlement work while you try to quietly fry the onions in a cast iron skillet.  They crackle and pop and refuse to quiet down.  So you put a lid on them and turn down the heat while you clean up onion peels and wipe down the counters.  You pull the sweet potato fries out of the oven.  Set out a stack of plates.  You notice a burning smell.  The onions! You lift the lid and loud crackly steam escapes from the pan.  The onions have formed a crisp oily carmelized black layer on the bottom and are white and translucent on top.  You put the lid back on and remind yourself that you are not going to panic.

You want to be invisible so you slip out the back door and set the hot pan on the cool damp ground. You bend over the iron skillet and stir until the onions are evenly brown.  Wind blows the oniony smoke and you imagine yourself connected through that smoke to the women all over the world, cooking outside and making do with what they’ve got.  You head back to the kitchen and pour the onions into the bubbling pot of lentils. Another angel appears to help you get the rice out of the rice cooker and to fit all the simmering pots onto the serving table.

The food is blessed and people line up to eat. When it is time to fix your own plate you eagerly grab for all the colors and flavors that have appeared, as if by magic, to this impromptu feast.  Your giant pot of lentils stares at you like a jilted lover but you don’t even give it a glance.

As you bring your empty plate to the sink a Somali woman pulls you aside and asks, “Did you make the lentils?”

“Yes?” You answer hesitantly.

“We loved them!  How did you do it?”

You tell her the simple recipe and her friend has now piped in, “Oh they were so good, that’s how I am going to do lentils now!”  You hug them, your heart swells and you say, “It’s my mom’s recipe.”
Your mom who does not like to cook.  Your mom who always leaves the cooking to your dad.  Your mom who marvels at the things you cook as if they came from another planet and says, “She didn’t learn it from me.”  Your mom who has an insatiable sweet tooth and likes white sheet cake with thick colorful icing.  Your mom who thinks the best way to eat lettuce fresh from the garden is with a little sugar sprinkled on it. Your mom taught you how to make sweet and sour lentils.  Lentils that do not taste like dirt, lentils that taste good even to people who were raised with flavor. It must be the sugar. You receive their complement as a gift and return to them your mom’s recipe.
Sweet and Sour Lentils (slightly modified with abundant thanks to the More With Less Cookbook which kept me well fed through my childhood and beyond)
Rinse a one pound bag of brown lentils and put in a pot with enough water (you want them to soften and not be too soupy but definitely not too dry- err on the side of too much water).  Drop in one bay leaf and bring to a boil then simmer for 20 minutes.
When the lentils are soft add:
½ cup of apple or pineapple juice
½ cup of apple cider vinegar
¼- ½  cup of brown sugar (you can also use white sugar plus a tablespoon of molasses or sourghum or only sourghum)
¼ t of ground cloves
2 cloves of minced garlic
Sautee a large onion  (better yet, slightly burn and carme
lize them in a cast iron pan) stir in and simmer until bubbly
Salt to taste (add the salt when it is done because salt can slow the cooking of legumes)
Serve over rice with sides of sweet potatoes and greens.  Also goes well with an international potluck.

Marriage poem after almost thirteen years

Thirteen years ago my frog prince and I paraded out of the church hand in hand as husband and wife. 

Here's a little poem to celebrate:
children sleeping
dishes drying
laundry folding
summer planning
my family
          your family
                    our family
pin points on the map
we can not please or be with them all
our words begin to hurt
voices rising
time to brush clenched teeth
sheets rustling
children whimpering
I say they peed
You say they’re fine
talking in circles we get no closer
upstairs the girls are wide legged frogs
dreaming soundly on wet lily pads
you carry them down and peel off the wet
then slide on the dry gowns
and lay them on our bed
I strip urine soaked sheets
breathe in a kiss of
damp hair on sweaty foreheads
we stake a claim
to either side of
these sleeping proofs of love made
washing machine fills and agitates
I ask if I can warm
my cold feet on you
and you say yes
 as always
our feet touch
I say
I love you
because
I do

This path towards becoming a writer

Last January Helena called and asked if my son could spend a week in Canada with their family in the summer.  Helena had allowed me to write the story of their son Adam who had died in a farming accident. It was the first piece I ever published (outside of newsletters).  Our families have stayed in touch through letters, phone calls and prayers.  We wondered over the phone on how we could get our family to Minnesota so that they could meet us there and bring our son back to Canada.  I started to plan a road trip from Georgia to Minnesota.....if only I could find a way to buy only one plane ticket for him and get a free plane ticket home from Minnesota.... and something for me to do for a week....

In February there was a small blurb in Conspire magazine about an all expenses paid writing workshop led by Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove called "Writing to Change the World" in, you guessed it, Minnesota.  Well, I thought, I want to learn more from Jonathan and I want my writing to change the world and I want my son to spend a week in Canada and this could get me to Minnesota.  So, I applied.

In April I was accepted!  The Collegeville Institute is a gem of a place that has nurtured writers like Kathleen Norris, Parker Palmer, Laura Winner, Krista Tippet and now little old me.

We spent May and June planning the road trip: camping at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, visiting friends and  family reunion in Chicago, staying with my husband's extended family in Minnesota, planning for my mom and dad to care for our daughters in Ohio and for Michael to drive back to Georgia.  We got our son a passport and signed and notarized a letter for our friends to drive him across the border.

In mid-July we took the trip which is another story in and of itself.

All that planning so that for one week in August I could sit with 12 other writers and say, yes, I want to keep paying attention and listening and adding my voice to the conversation.  I want to be a writer.

What brought me here?  I wanted a way to get to Minnesota so that my son could go to Canada for a week.

My son and daughters and husband all had wonderful times scattered across the continent in Manitoba, Ohio and Georgia respectively.  For one week they managed just fine without me doing their laundry, cooking or telling them what to do.

That week may not have changed the world but it changed me.  It might only be an hour or two a week, but I have resolved to keep writing.  I want to write to figure out what I think and hope that might help others along too.  I want to write even if I don't have all the answers.

It connected me to a wonderful little community of people that want to write too and they have invited me to share in their conversations.

Many of our workshop folks have written or write for Red Letter Christians. Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove, Paige Cordial Brtiney Winn Lee, Joshua Hearne, and DL Mayfield have all written really beautiful and though provoking things in that blog to help us along in following Jesus. Here are my posts on the long term psychological impact of police misconduct and the humbling work of parenting.


Danielle Mayfield (who I admire immensely and I can't wait to read her new book) invited me to write in her blog about "The Book That Changed My Life"  Since I wrote this essay I've thought of many others like Beyond the Rat Race by Art Gish, Left To Tell by Imacculee Iligabiza, With Our Own Eyes by Don Mosley 12 Marks of a New Monasticism by Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin,  Celtic Daily Prayer the list goes on... Maybe I'll write about them another day.

Because of my community's work with refugees from Sudan I got to attend a preview of the film the Good Lie this summer and I wrote a review about it. Danielle encouraged me to offer it to Christ and Pop Culture and here it is.

Lydia Wylie Kellerman started a blog called Radical Discipleship and invited me to write for that.  I have gone back and forth about what I think regarding gay marriage and the church.  Meeting Lydia really pushed me over the fence. When I met her I instantly valued her voice and saw her as a fellow mom and sister in Christ.  Then I realized that she is married to a woman and is part of an affirming Christian community.  That friendship  has pushed me over the fence.  This is what I wrote about going to a revival and hearing a pastor preach against gay people and Christians that love and welcome them.  Walter Wink was a genius and I appreciate his liberating read of the Bible.

So, there it is.  I schemed a way to get a free plane ticket home from Minnesota so that my son could go to Canada. In the process I've decided to go ahead and keep writing and see where it leads me next!