July 13, 2011 by Michael

From Migrations of the Heart

I’m reading Marita Golden’s autobiography, Migrations of the Heart. Her story is compelling and thoughtful and beautifully written. Can I use beautifully? It’s hard at times and yet still somehow beautiful. Her writing is striking and full and lively.

In this passage, she’s writing about a very powerful loss. Her first pregnancy ended with what her doctor called a spontaneous abortion. Ms. Golden is “taking me to school” in her writing. I’m learning. I’m listening. As she’s talked about her experiences in this autobiography of loving Femi, a Nigerian, and moving into his culture after having lived for years in the US, I’m learning, through her, of what it took for her to adjust. New expectations, new rules, spoken and unspoken. I’m learning of how manhood and womanhood was seen and expressed in her life. I’m learning about being a husband.

At home I recuperated, confined by the doctor, Femi and my own desire to bed. Almost immediately I began to write furiously, with the fervor of a long-awaited eruption. I filled page after page with an outpouring the loss of my child released. The writing affirmed me, anointed me with a sense of purpose. Most of all, it slowly began to dissipate the sense of failure that squatted, a mannerless intruder, inside my spirit. The writing redeemed my talent for creation and, as the days passed, made me whole once again.

In the evenings Bisi came to visit, and for several days under her hand I received a postpartum “native treatment.” Filling the tub with warm water and an assortment of leaves, grasses and herbs, her hands pressed and gently kneaded my stomach in a downward motion. “This will bring out the poisons,” she explained. The water was the color of strong tea and the steam rising from it made me drowsy. Drying me with a towel, she warned, “Tell uncle to let you rest. Let your body heal. Tell him to be patient.”

“I will,” I assured her, “I will.”

Mourning the loss of his child, his son, Femi inhabited the house with me but was dazed with grief. As I ate dinner from a tray in bed one evening, he said, “We lost a man.”

“No, Femi, we lost a child.”

“We lost my son,” he insisted. “And we must find out why this happened. What went wrong, so that it won’t happen again. Next time you will not drive; the roads alone could cause a miscarriage.”

“Femi, the doctor told me that sometimes a weak or defective fetus will spontaneously abort. That perhaps if the child had gone nine months, it may not have been a healthy baby anyway.”

In response he quieted me with a wave of his hand. “We will be more careful next time.”

July 13, 2011 by Michael

Interview with Rabbi Zoe Klein & Book Giveaway

I am happy to bring you the next author interview with Rabbi Zoe Klein. Rabbi Klein’s novel, Drawing in the Dust, tells the story of an archaeologist who risks her reputation to excavate beneath the home of an Arab couple to make a miraculous discovery. I’d like to give away a copy of the novel, so look into that at the bottom of the interview. Rabbi Klein inspires me. As a spiritual leader and writer, she gives powerful answers to how she thinks about what she does, how she wobbles all her plates. Enjoy…

MW: When did you first know you would be both a writer and a rabbi?

RZK: Hi Michael! Thank you for bringing these questions to me, it is an honor to participate in this interview! Long before I ever could imagine that a little girl like myself could grow up and become a Rabbi, I knew I loved to write. I wrote stories all the time. I remember writing stories on those beige thin sheets of paper on which the lines were two inches apart, filling in scenes with chubby crayoned letters. I even remember one of my first stories, about a magical species called the Giringos, half giraffe and half flamingo.

I remember a powerful moment, the first time I told my father I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. He is an artist and I remember standing beside his dawing board while he worked and saying I wanted to be a writer. He said, “That’s great. But you cannot call yourself a writer until you finish a book. Even if it is never published, even if no one reads it, once you finish a book you will be a writer, but until then you are not.” It sounds like a strong thing to say, but it was a valuable lesson. For my father, it was very important that I learn the value of taking a creative idea to its completion. Lots of people have wonderful novels in their souls, but very few put in the tedious effort to realize it. When I finished my first novel in college, an as-yet unpublished story called “The Goat Keeper”, it was such a proud moment to hand it to him and to become a writer!

It wasn’t until I was in my Junior year in college that I truly understood that the path to the rabbinate was even a possibility for me. I had always thought that it was something only men could do. Even though there were female rabbis around, I hadn’t met any. However, I always loved religion, studying faiths and myths and cultures. The kinds of conversations and debates I had with people with strong faith identities in many ways mirrored the conversations I’d hear between my parents and their artist friends. The artists would always talk about such things as mortality, man’s fragility, the futility of monument, shattering dogmas, the supremacy of blank space…it was art they were discussing, but it filtered into my mind as theology, and I loved it.

In many ways I think of myself as a rabbi with the heart of a novelist, rather than the other way around. I started as a writer and then expanded my material from the confines of pen and ink to people and community. As a congregational rabbi, I have the opportunity to help craft the story of a community of families, engage in their sacred and profound moments, adding our chapters to an ever-unfolding scripture of a people.

MW: I realize both roles relate to one another, if I’m reading your interview in Drawing in the Dust correctly. But does writing serve your role as a spiritual leader? If so, how?

RZK: Sometimes I think my rabbinate is almost like fieldwork for writing, and my writing is soulwork for the rabbinate. Writing is interesting in that it is done in physical solitude, and yet it is never lonely for me. I am full up with characters, with vivid dreams and scenes, demons to wrestle, I’m haunted and vexed and also ecstatic and weeping. In contradiction to that, in the rabbinate there is no solitude, you are continually working with people. It is a very social position, and yet for me there is loneliness there. There is a lot of what the mystics call “tzim-tzum,” a kind of spiritual contraction one does to make room for others. You retract yourself enough to allow space for other’s voices. You become an expert active listener. When I write though, that part of me that contracts in order to give center stage to others’ stories and needs, suddenly unfurls its great wings and jets about wildly.

The short answer to your question is that I think my writing allows me to be a whole person as a spiritual leader. Without it, I think I’d be fragments of a mosaic, chipped with no clear design. I think when you take the time regularly, whether through writing or meditation or running or whatever, to reflect on your decisions and desires, face your darkness, and emerge with a burning but joyful heart, you can better take others by the hand and lead them through a courageous process of reflection and growth.

MW: Talk about your experience as a person of faith—indeed a leader—writing biblical fiction for a broad audience. Were you concerned that you wouldn’t be received well, that you might misrepresent yourself, or that your story might be misperceived?

RZK: While I was perhaps concerned about the story being misperceived or not received well, it was not a deterrent for me. I was encouraged by a great editor Al Silverman to forget while I wrote that I was a rabbi, a mother, a wife, and just write from a place of uniqueness, without titles, and I’ve always tried to do that. I am a person of faith. I believe that stories which are filled with metaphor and myth are a form of prayer. I never feel far from God when I write, in fact I feel close, even if I’m writing a scene that is sexual or violent or both. It is a process of exploration into human nature, into fantasy, into longing and fear, and it is not too different than the best kind of worship experience, where you are completely honest and raw, repentant, mournful, terrified, awe-filled, trembling with humility, romanced and swept up in all your smallness into the impossible arms of the infinite. There is no doubt that it is scary to write for a broad audience, and that no matter how much you try to hide your truths under layers and layers of plot and characterization you always end up realizing that despite your efforts you ended up publishing your very private diary, but it is also freeing to realize that the things that you say are the honest voicing of your humanness, what a relief to not be a spiritual leader hiding behind a façade, with word locked into routine platitudes! How refreshing to be real, to have a faith that wrestles, breathes, challenges and confounds!

MW: How has your congregation responded to your writing life?

RZK: My congregation has been celebratory and wonderful. I am fortunate to share this journey with them! We have many writers, thinkers, professors and experts-in-their-field in our community, people who love and appreciate art and don’t shy away from its darker sides…

MW: When I connected with you about this interview, I mentioned my gratitude for the seen and unseen work behind this novel. I’m glad you’ve labored in all the ways you have to give us this work. What don’t people know about what it takes to write a good story for publication? Will you give us a sense of some of what it took for you?

RZK: Ah, that’s a good question. I don’t think people understand the sheer mass of hours that it takes. People don’t realize that once the book is finished and you feel completely beaten and your hair is grayer and thinner because of the process, and your eyes are dim from staring into the computer, and every time you blink you see bright blue squares, and your wrecked with fatigue after months of not sleeping, once you’ve gotten that far, you have to STILL muster the strength to face rejection after rejection after rejection…years of rejection and pitching your story, and trying even after years have gone by and you’ve already become passionate about a NEW idea retaining the freshness about the book that no one seems to want…and then after you finally find an agent and an editor, realizing that there are two of three or four more Everests to climb with revisions, revisions that keep tearing out your heart and then sewing it back in. Every time I’d get to a new mountain where it would be so easy to just drop the whole thing, I would think to myself, “This is a filter, and only the most determined get through.” And I was determined to be determined enough! I think people understand how steep the climb is from conception to publication, but I don’t think people know how long it is, how much stamina is involved.

I also tend to like to write stories that have a lot of different characters and layers of interpretation, and it is hard to keep track of all of those little pieces over the course of 600 hundred pages, which was how long DRAWING IN THE DUST originally was. When I was editting it at one point I realized that if one added up the years and scenes carefully for one of the very peripheral characters and tried to figure out her age, she would have to be something like 130 years old. Keeping track of all these strands of lives is hard!

MW: I’m pretty sure you have many things to do. I could be wrong. I’m probably not. How do you serve both these areas in your life well? And how do you do anything else?!

RZK: Sometimes I feel like one of those cirque-d’soleil contortionists with the spinning plates on top of sticks, except that while they make it look so graceful and beautiful, all the plates spinning perfectly, my plates are often pretty wobbly! And some of them crash. If I were to label my plates, there would be the Writing Plate, the Rabbi Plate, the Children Plate, the Husband Plate, Friend Plate, and of course lots more. I think while I’ve made time to keep the Writing Plate spinning by devoting Mondays, my one day off, to writing, and the Rabbi plate I devote much time to, and the Children Plate keeps spinning even though it’s hectic, I admit the Husband Plate often wobbles and falls (luckily it’s a sturdy, rebounding plate!), and I haven’t been able to devote much time to the Friends Plate (I have friends, we just don’t see each other at all, I haven’t been able to nourish that part of my life)…there are a lot of sacrifices! As I’ve gotten older, I am trying to redistribute my energy, focusing more on my family and building relationships, and trying to approach work with less frenetic energy and more joy and appreciation. Everything is not always in balance as people like to believe! But up until now I think I’ve lived my life is a giant rush, and I really want to learn to slow down and appreciate BEING instead of eating up every hour with DOING.

MW: I read Eugene Peterson who is a pastor and writer, and he encourages clergy to read fiction. He says that artists have become his allies and have taken a place next to theologians and scholars in his formation as a pastor and as an artist. You talk about the power of fiction in your provided interview. How does fiction nurture a person in general and a religious leader in particular?

RZK: That is beautiful. I think that fiction unlocks people’s hearts in a particular way that nothing else can. You take fiction under the covers with you, give it the heat of your breath, and like the genie in the lamp it has an enchantment. Somehow entering the world of fiction, our vault of tears is more easily unlocked, particular drama reflects universal understanding. There is an intimacy in fiction, partly because of the intimacy it took to create it. In terms of a religious person, I think that today we tend to sterilize the idea of a person of faith, turn that person into a kind of sexless judge. Piety is purity. But dancing with God is an intimacy, it’s a cosmic affair, filled with subordination and abuses, mastery and humility, and of course love. I once wrote a new definition for love — Reverence for Mystery. I think fiction nurtures a person in general and a religious person in particular because there are very high truths that can only be expressed in metaphor. God, for example, can only be expressed in metaphor, as shepherd or teacher or lover or parent or guide. I believe Fiction, ironically, is Ultimate Truth’s master key.

MW: What are you reading these days, by the way?

RZK: To be honest, I’m reading a lot of Science Fiction! I just printed out the top 100 Science Fiction books, and right now I’m reading Ender’s Game. It’s just a field I had never read before, and I am surprised at how much I’m loving it! Before this new kick though, I read Cynthia Ozick’s novels, The Shawl, The Putterman Papers and Heir to The Glimmering World, and my goodness, her language was like cashmere, so rich and sumptous.

MW: You’ve talked about God as the Reader of All Life—language that I love. What are you working on, preparing, and “offering skyward”?

RZK: I just finished a novel called Origin of Color which will be released in summer of 2012; it is going through its editing process now. I went to Swaziland and Tanzania to research for it when I was on sabbatical this past December. The book is about an American couple that accidently falls into the middle of a crime ring of witchdoctors and politicians in East Africa who sell albino body parts to be made into potions. I met with East Africans with alibinism and families whose children with albinism had been butchered. I wove these experiences into this novel. It was an emotional novel to write, it is a thriller, and it even scared me as I was creating it. I’d be writing in the middle of the night and leaping up to make sure the doors were locked…jumping if I thought the curtain moved! The “offering skyward” part of it is that it is also a contemplation about perception. I am very excited about it.

I am also leaving in two weeks to go back to Africa, to Ghana, with the American Jewish World Service. I will be in Winneba, Ghana with American Jewish World Service’s Young Rabbis’ Delegation. The Young Rabbis’ Delegation brings together a group of rabbis from all over the country to experience first-hand the power of grassroots development and explore issues of social justice and global responsibility from the perspective of Jewish texts and tradition. The group is working at Challenging Heights, an AJWS-supported NGO devoted to providing education to former child slaves and resources to families whose children are at risk for slavery and human trafficking.

MW: How can readers stay in touch with you and support your work?

RZK: On my website www.zoeklein.com, or by emailing me at zoe@zoeklein.com. Thank you so much for inviting me to participate on your website. Abundant blessings to you and to all of your readers!

As for the book giveaway, if you know of a clergy person who would benefit from reading this novel, post a comment, a sentence or two, about why they would. Do so by Friday, midnight, CST. I’ll choose a winner randomly and you can give a copy to your clergy person.

July 11, 2011 by Michael

From One Father To His Son

This letter is a part of the collection of letters in Letters From Black America edited by Pamela Newkirk. I’ve posted one other letter on the blog. If these stories-in-the-form-of-letters, or the idea of them is interesting to you, take a look at the book. I think you’ll find a narrative of the African American experience as well as delightful examples of language about family, love, and a host of other aspects of Black life.

My dear Son Rudolph,

I am in receipt of your letter and have read it carefully. I know that in many respects I must appear a stranger father and rather disinterested, but that is not the case. There is more of the Indian stoicism in me than the Negro loquacity. When I am deeply moved I am least demonstrative. You were exactly about my age when you made your choice. I have not tried to dominate your selection in any way. I have taken the girl only on what your mother has said. She intimated the probability of this last year, and seemed satisfied. I therefore made myself satisfied. I hope your choice will be all you desire and as you have expressed it, she may prove as noble a wife as your mother is. I suppose really that I should have interested myself in Isabel when she was here last. But to tell the truth, it did not occur to me. Just tell her for me that she must take me as she finds me. Make herself at home whenever she comes around me and do not look for any gushing over as it is not my way. Let her know that I will take her to my bosom just as warmly as either of you boys and would do as much for her as for any of you.

All I ask is that you boys will not neglect your mother, for, hale and active as I appear, my time is fast approaching and I feel that my [illegible] is not far off…

Wishing you the best,

Your loving father

July 10, 2011 by Michael

Bicycles, Washers, Sermons & Flat Tires

My wife told me not to ride my bicycle to church. I listened. I didn’t ride all the way to church. I rode to the Green Line. I would ride the bike home from church, not to church, giving her her wish.

Well, I got to the Green Line; it was my first time taking the el with my bike. I had seen other people do it. I still can’t find the courage to rack my bike on a bus, but I could do the el. So I got to the station. The security woman pointed to the door next to the turnstile. I walked through, got on an escalator, and lifted toward the platform. When I got to the platform, my rear wheel wasn’t moving. I thought I was crazy. I got off the bike three minutes prior. But it wasn’t moving. The wheel was off the frame. I pretended to know what I was doing when I removed my backpack and examined the wheel. I saw the problem, but I knew I couldn’t fix it. After admitting my own small failure under my breath, I tried anyway.

I sweat when I think too hard, especially when it’s 80 degrees outside. So I knelt down, salty water running and dripping into my face hairs, and worked at the wheel, trying to pull it back to the frame. I could see that it looked like the front wheel, the one that releases from the spinning thing I have no name for. Quick release? Is that it? My hands smudged with oil. I pulled my water bottle from my back pack. I checked to see if a train was coming. I was frustrated. My white polo dotted with black spots from the dirt that splashed when I tried to wash my hands. I had nothing to wipe them on. I couldn’t preach at church in a dirty shirt and dirty khakis. So I waved to no one, fanning the air and feeling sticky.

The train came. I got on it, taking the bike rather than following my first mind to leave it for the vultures. I sat down and pulled my cell phone out of the clip. I thought of three guys: Alan, Daniel, and Roland. I didn’t have Daniel’s number. He doesn’t want me to call him if things like this happen. I texted Alan and Roland. Roland still hasn’t responded. If I didn’t know he loved me, I’d be hurt. But Alan. God bless the man. Alan texted. I asked if he would be in church. He said he would and asked if I needed him to preach. If you know Alan, this is funny. I pressed a short message, explaining the situation. He promised to bring his tools and to see if he could help.

He texted me when I got to the California stop. I’m here. Are you? he asked. I was irritated. I had been walking from the el station. I was hot. I texted back: not yet. He wrote again that he’d be in his car, in AC, waiting. I wasn’t sure if Alan was joking because he jokes or if he was saying that he would wait and not go into the church. The church is 15 degrees hotter than outside in the summer. So, I called him and asked if he’d come to me. It was a good idea according to Alan. He came, picked me up, and took me to the church.

He would fix it, he said. And he did. The culprit was a missing washer. A tiny little thing. I was glad because it meant that Alan wouldn’t have to do the stuff he does to his motorcycle. I was irritated because a tiny thing could cause such trouble.

After church several kind people offered rides. I mentioned this little example of grace and help at the end of my sermon. I told the people who approached me that my bike was repaired, that Alan was a star and a gift. Ellen was among the people who came to me. But Ellen, bless her, was a bit more pointed. She asked me if I was going to tell my wife what happened. I hadn’t planned to up to that moment. I told Ellen I would decide on the ride home. Ellen said something like if I made it home. Something about there being other incidents with the bike. I smiled. She wasn’t prophesying, she said.

Ellen was the first person I thought of when I was cycling down North Avenue, near Larabee, on my way to LSD. The rear tire, the same tire I had blustered over, was flat. I tried to laugh, but I was too hot. So there I was, walking my bike again for the second time today. I didn’t bring my air pump. Who does that every time they ride? No, I prayed for some kind soul to pull to the side and sing about how they saw me and thought to help. Didn’t happen. Instead, I saw a hardware store.

They sold air pumps. I bought one and used their air-conditioned shop to pump my tire. It wasn’t working. Some kind older fellow pointed that out, as if I needed him to. The guys working at the shop were nice, as helpful as they could be. One of them said there was a repair shop up Wells, about three blocks down. He called. They were open til six. I steered the bike out of the hardware store and down Wells.

I was close to exhaustion. It took an hour for the repair. I went to Chipotle where I could eat in air.

It took longer than I wanted to make my way home. It’s been two years, yes, two years, since I’ve ridden to and from my office. Thirteen miles feels longer two years later. But today was the start of the bicycling season for me. It started with these events. Hopefully I won’t go through these again. Alan will learn to hate me and ignore my calls like Roland. Or, worse, he’ll change his number and not give it to me like Daniel.

When I came home and after I spent a day in the shower, I told my wife all about my little adventure. She was gracious. Didn’t even look at me with the “What did I tell you” face. She was glad I made it home. Even if I had to stop and rest along the way because I didn’t mentally prepare for a 2.5 hours long journey. I did listen to my wife this morning. I didn’t do everything she wanted me to. I am pretty sure, though, that I’ll remember today when she says I shouldn’t ride my bike. And I’ll probably do what she says. We’ll see. I can be committed to my viewpoint. But I will definitely be printing a list of all the bike shops on my route. I will drop the air pump in my bag so that it goes with me when the helmet goes. And I’ll laugh at myself if this happens again, hoping that you or that Alan or that some kind person will help me right before I throw my bicycle into Lake Michigan.

July 9, 2011 by Michael

If You Could Ask…

I’m preparing for a conversation. An extremely important one. As part of it, I’m thinking through a few questions that I want to ask. I’m feeling a hundred feelings at once. I’m excited, nervous, and, surprisingly, clear. I have a sense of what I want to know, even while what I want evades me. I’m probably a bit giddy. And sober too. I get to query a person who I’ve been listening to, learning from, and appreciating in a rare conversation that I will likely call nothing but a gift.

If you could ask one person who you really respected and admired a handful of questions, who would it be and what would you ask? Uh, Winston, no comments from you and you know why.

July 8, 2011 by Michael

Open During Under Construction

This is a perfect image for how fathering often feels. I saw it this morning on my way to Target to pick up diapers and milk. I missed the detail that the boy was down to four diapers. His grandmother was in route. I should have gone to the store yesterday, but yesterday had its own long list of things to do for me.

I have this expectation to be a certain kind of a father. I want my son to see me when I’m good, when I’m finished, when the construction that is my spiritual life is complete. And yet that isn’t real. What’s real is that I’m open while I’m wrecked, while I’m worked over, while I’m dusty, while I’m, at worst, even uninhabitable. But that’s what he has, a dad with brokenness. A dad with edges that are far too sharp. A dad who may well have a beautiful plan in front of him. A dad who may one day be a strong, sturdy this or that but who, these days, is a project, a work in progress, a mess on its way to something else.

July 6, 2011 by Michael

Morrison on Writing & The Interior Life

To follow is a passage from Toni Morrison’s “The Site of Memory” in her book of selected nonfiction, What Moves At The Margin.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic. I suppose I could dispense with the last four if I were not so deadly serious about fidelity to the milieu out of which I write and in which my ancestors actually lived. Infidelity to that milieu–the absence of the interior life, the deliberate excising of it from the records that the slaves themselves told–is precisely the problem in the discourse that proceeded without us. How I gain access to that interior life is what drives me and is the part of this talk which both distinguishes my fiction from autobiographical strategies and which also embraces certain autobiographical strategies. It’s a kind of literary archaeology: on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the image–on the remains–in addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of a truth. By “image,” of course, I don’t mean “symbol”; I simply mean “picture” and the feelings that accompany the picture.

July 6, 2011 by Michael

Things I Learned Road Tripping

We’ve been on a few road trips with my son: Charlotte, NC, Little Rock, AR and Phenix City, Alabama. We drove to Estes Park, CO last week for two of my denomination’s meetings. We traveled as a family–me, my wife, Dawn, and my son, Bryce. I learned a few things.

Pack as carefully as possible. And even then your kid will have more bags than you. We took one huge suitcase for all the days we were away–for me, my wife, and my son’s clothing. Bryce still had a diaper bag, a shopping bag, a tote bag that usually finds a home in our bathroom, a few things in his mother’s purse, and stuff in my book bag.
There’s no time to sleep. When you’re driving, you have to stay awake, right? Well, actually this point is about my son. He’s pretty established on a routine for sleep, has been for longer than he wasn’t as a newbie. But time zones disrupt sleeping rituals, especially when the zone you’re in is behind the one you’re used to. That plus the schedule we kept while away demolished the routine the boy knew.
Small people can’t do much at 15 months. My son has many talents. He plays the guitar with a shovel. He sings songs that only he can understand. He picks up his spoon and leaves most of his food in the bowl. He does a lot. But we could do very little at the YMCA where these meetings were held. He couldn’t ride a horse or climb a mountain. He hardly stayed still while my wife created a craft. As much as I wanted to, doing things as a family was almost as difficult there as doing them here because he’s small.
My son’s an extrovert. Bryce has been greeting people for months now. He even waves at people in church, like I do, but with bigger smiles. We’re trying to figure how this works since me and Dawn are introverts. As we got out of an elevator at the hotel, one woman we didn’t know said, “Oh, he makes his parents speak to everybody.” She was partially right and half way wrong at the same time. I told her, “He learns how to say hello from his parents.”
Toys help. My wife has gotten good at the toy thing. I don’t think of toys. They’re small, take up space, and usually don’t fit well into my one-bag rule. But she had bags on the rear floor with toys, toys in his car seat, and toys hanging from the handrails above his head. She also had that dogged pacifier that we’ve spent the last few days working back out of Bryce’s system.
Expect surprises. One surprise was how my son tripped and fell up the sidewalk. He thought he could run straight when the walkway slanted upward. As I pulled him up, he was screaming, dressed with a bruise on the tip of his nose. Another was how many more bags we would bring back thanks to the generosity and love of Bryce’s aunt. She added to our crowded trunk a huge truck in a box and a shopping bag almost as big as our luggage.

Would you add anything from a road trip you’ve taken?

July 4, 2011 by Michael

Frederick Douglass On The Meaning of July 4

This is an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’s speech in Rochester, 1852. It is a long speech, full of a remarkable orator’s skill and precision. Douglass’s experience and passion fueled and boasted much of the abolition movement. His voice is keen when I think about the nation’s journey toward continued freedom and how we include or don’t include people in liberty. I wonder if you can think of people who might wail, as Douglass says, toward the bottom, while we celebrate:

Friends and citizens, I need not enter further into the causes which led to this anniversary. Many of you understand them better than I do. You could instruct me in regard to them. That is a branch of knowledge in which you feel, perhaps, a much deeper interest than your speaker. The causes which led to the separation of the colonies from the British crown have never lacked for a tongue. They have all been taught in your common schools, narrated at your firesides, unfolded from your pulpits, and thundered from your legislative halls, and are as familiar to you as household words. They form the staple of your national poetry and eloquence.

I remember, also, that, as a people, Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a national trait–perhaps a national weakness. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans and can be had cheap! will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering Americans if I say I think the American side of any question may be safely left in American hands.

I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than mine!

My business, if I have any here-to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and His cause is the ever-living now.

Trust no future, however pleasant,

Let the dead past bury its dead;

Act, act in the living present,

Heart within, and God overhead.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence.

…Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!”

July 3, 2011 by Michael

Fathers Know Best, Interview #1

To follow is my interview with Mark Washington. Mark is my brother, and though he isn’t the first father I knew (our dad is), I thought it’d be fun to have him be my first interviewee on the blog. He’s a man of few words. Just like our father. My sense is that Mark’s interview will be the most succinct. Mark’s two daugthers, Laila and London, two out of three of my nieces, are pictured to the left.

FF: Describe your family.

MW: My family are comedians, they always keep me laughing.

FF: How has fatherhood changed you?

MW: Fatherhood has changed me where I’m more giving then I was. It has also taught me that it’s not all about me anymore. My children come first before my needs and wants.

FF: Have you made any mistakes as a dad? If you’re not a liar, name one and talk about what it meant to you.

MW: One of the biggest mistakes that I have made was to start taking Laila to the beauty shop at the age of four. Now she expects it every two weeks. LOL. No, but really sometimes I don’t choose my words carefully and, sooner or later, I hear them echoed around the house.

FF: What’s the most helpful advice you heard when you were becoming a father or as you’ve been a father?

MW: The best advice I’ve heard is to enjoy the younger years with them because when they become teenagers, I will start to feel the gap.

FF: How do you attend to your relationship with your children’s mother? It’s changed over time. How so?

MW: Well, we hear each other out, and then we discuss what logic will work. With any relationship it’s all about communication.

FF: What surprises are there along the way for parents? What do you wish you were told to expect?

MW: I can’t really think of one, but my children never cease to amaze me. I mean just when you thought you heard or seen it all, here’s another surprise. And part two of that question is, how expensive they can be. I mean I’ve been told that, but no one ever stressed it! LOL.

FF: What is one recent memory you made with your child?

MW: Last night I was playing shouting music off You Tube and the little one (London) came and got Laila and I. She said “I’m about to shout,” and we all started shouting while holding hands. It was too funny!

I appreciate Mark for his answers. Since this is the beginning of a series–we’ll have a couple interviews per month on the blog–I invite you to participate. If you are a father and would like to be interviewed, or if you know one who would, leave a comment with your email address.

July 2, 2011 by Michael

Five Questions For Writers

Jane Friedman is a gift for writers. Her blog, There Are No Rules (which you can visit by clicking here) is full of resources, tips, summaries, and posts about writing, editing, publishing, marketing, and promotions.

In a recent post at Writer Unboxed, Jane offers writers five questions to ask when we wonder whether we have talent. There are different questions, better questions, according to Jane. Here is an excerpt with question 4:

4. What do you do after you fail?

Everyone fails. That’s not the important part. What’s important is what you do next. Are you learning? Are you growing? Is your experience making your heart bigger? Or is it shrinking you down, making you small? Beware of cynicism and bitterness, because if these emotions stick around too long, they will poison your efforts.

If you’re a writer or you know someone who is, pass these thoughts on. If you’re interested to read more, see the full post here.

Michael Washington

Reflections on the Spiritual Life

Month / July 2011