Martin Luther King

We’ve officially entered into the season of increasing darkness – not merely politically but because of the planet’s tilt. My teenager, home early from school, slouches at the kitchen table and moans about the gray. I advise her to head out for a run in the rain. She’ll return, pink-cheeked, and far more cheery, her running shoes smeared with greasy mud on their soles.

Post-election, all these words have surfaced again, the same ones Vermonters use over and over – community, persistence, hope – words that are distressingly meaningless without tangible action. How do our footprints mark our paths? For my daughter who will mature to adulthood under a new administration, I’m going to keep advising her to muddy your feet, girl. In my garden, the johnny-ups are yet blooming amongst the weeds.

I’ve been reading Scholastique Mukasonga’s Cockroaches, her memoir of growing up in Rwanda, and that’s all I’m going to write about this slim, powerful book.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

November color

The High Mowing Organic Seeds catalog arrived in our mailbox today, glossy and gorgeous enough to lay on the table and immediately fantasize about that field of peppers. Seeds and agriculture, longing for soil and growth: some of the oldest of humanity’s longings.

I slid a pan of enchiladas in the oven. My older daughter, drawing at the table, lifted her head and told me about the conversation in her French class today. The windows over her shoulders are filled with darkness before dinner, at this time of year. Our conversation unspooled, winding along a thread of history, tangled centuries.

Sometimes I think of my own youth as terribly misspent, all those years in philosophy class, all that writing and reading: all that pondering on faith and love and destiny. What did it all come to? But today, listening to my daughter, my hands on that catalog, I thought of my youth as sown with an infinite complexity of minute seeds. I reminded my daughter of Martin Luther King’s line that The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Small mortals that we are, dwarfed beneath the cosmic arc, our vision of the universe is often myopic and clouded, imperfect at best.

My daughter brushed her hair, wrapped a silky scarf around her neck, zipped up her high heels, and left to babysit the neighbors’ babies. That seed catalog in my hand, I kissed her before she left.

Travellers from the great spaces
when you see a girl
twisting in sumptuous hands
the black vastness of her hair
and when moreover
you see
near a dark baker’s
a horse lying near death
by these signs you will know
that you have come among men.

— Jean Follain (1903-1971)

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Among Humans…