Hello, Blog!  What use is having a space like this if I’m not going to think out loud in it? The friend to whom I write emails almost daily will vouch for the fact that I’m not without opinions and reactions concerning current events, poetry doings, and general philosophy. Yesterday, alerted by another poet friend, I found myself quoted on someone else’s blog from this blog!  I was flattered. It felt like being a little bit famous.

I am prompted to philosophy today by the sudden death last week of a poet* highly regarded in the poetry circles with whom I connect. As I lamented in my poem “Obituary”—So she is dead before we even thought/that she was sick…

In emails, Facebook posts, and forum conversations, she is universally praised for both her poetry and her personality.  Her recently published poetry collection remains as a legacy we can all turn to in admiring remembrance. But her beautiful present—and presence—has been ripped from the earth. Me?  Well, I can no longer be considered “too young” to suddenly die.

All my life, I have been adamantly future-facing.  This is a good thing in that it compels me to be always considering what I will do next, rather than dwelling on what I’ve done already.  Hopes and ambitions seem to motivate me a great deal more than achievements and rewards.

This way of approaching life becomes especially vivid to me while I’m reading the work of dozens of living poets in books, literary magazines, and online. In their bios, they list their publications, awards, degrees, and nominations for prestigious prizes.  These lists tend to remind me of the many credits I have not accumulated, while obliterating from my mind the many credits I have.

I wrote a poem about that called “Poet Envy.”  It begins, Remember, darling, you are no one else.  And it ends, …There’s ever only one of you. My perpetual discomfort seems to lie in not knowing when enough is enough, or perhaps when I am enough.

I wrap it all up in my poem “Old Lady With No Complaints”—My bit in time seems infinitely small/its prizes insufficient after all.

So, what IS the prize I seek?  What is the thing I’ve been chasing after for seventy-five years?

Oh, that’s easy:  Love.

I don’t mean romantic love (but surely that) or family love (definitely that) or the love of an audience (obviously that).  I want even more.  I want the biggest, deepest, most unconditional, eternal, delightful love a human being can experience.

Can you imagine what my idea of “God” looks like?

*Susan de Sola [Rodstein], author of Frozen Charlotte from Able Muse Press.

Somehow I discern a living intelligence in their eyes–possibly in the same way I imagine conversation with my cat.  Behind their neutral but pleasant expressions, I sense the histories and stories these dolls were created to represent.  And I love them.

I’m talking about four American Girl dolls who occupy a corner of my study.  They are Addy, whose story involves escaping from slavery; Kaya, a Nez Perce girl whose story takes place only a generation prior to the first contact with white people; Marisol, a modern girl of Mexican heritage living in Chicago; and BJ, the first of my little family of dolls, who has my (formerly) red hair and, I presume, my huge affection for having and acquiring sisters.

I grew up with two sisters, one older and one younger.  Belonging to a military family during my first thirteen years, I knew my sisters as my only everywhere friends, and they still are.  Oh, we had our share of quarrels, I’m sure.  But nothing fatal to the bonds of love and affection and mutual encouragement we share to this day.  I was, however, the only sister with a passion for dolls.  My younger sister could be persuaded to cooperate in doll play, with real dolls or celebrity paper dolls or dolls cut out of the Montgomery Ward catalog.  But I was the one who cherished them, from my very first baby doll to the Madame Alexander fashion doll who is with me still.

No wonder, when Hallmark was engaged to create auxiliary products for the American Girl brand for which I was a writer, I was smitten by the idea of obtaining an American Girl doll of my own.  Who’s to say no?  Thus came BJ into my life—named with my initials.  Eventually, I owned seven dolls, representing the historic American Girl stories of Molly, Josefina, Addy, and Kaya, plus Marisol, BJ, and a pretty blonde who filled out the representation of my real sisters.  Three dolls were eventually adopted out to other little girls.  Now the four remain, along with their respective wardrobes and storybooks.  Their sweet, inviting faces beam at me every day.

I’ve long since stopped accumulating accessories for this quartet.  If you’re familiar with the American Girl brand, you know it provides infinite opportunities to spend money. Sometimes I peek at the catalogs, but firmly resist.  I’m at the stage of life where deaccessioning is the necessary decision. I have enough. Every now and then, perhaps with the change of seasons, I drag out the trunks and boxes from under a bed. I sit on the floor with the dolls, the dresses, the hairbrushes, the shoes…and play.  The girls seem grateful every time for the refreshed outfits.

When I was a Sunday school girl, we learned a little song that goes like this:

Jesus loves the little children,

all the children of the world:

red and yellow, black and white,

they are precious in his sight.

Jesus loves the little children of the world.

I like to think that my girls remind me every day that all the children of the earth are precious, no matter how old they are.  Each one has a story.  We are a family.

On a one-to-ten scale of tragic circumstances, Bill and I rack up a big fat Zero. For this, we are grateful daily and hourly. However, stuff happens, even to us–more specifically, to Bill, who is now recovering from successful surgery to repair the rotator cuff and nearby locations in his right shoulder. His arm is immobilized in a sling. He has to sleep upright. Discomfort and pain are involved.

Aside from ordinary procedures like colonoscopies (see “Colonoscopy: A Love Poem” in my book Windshift) both of us are innocent of serious medical interventions. Therefore, this challenge serves not only as a dose of reality, but also as a means of improving our interpersonal communications in a way that thirteen years of being a couple has not equaled. Let me speak mostly of myself.

I have a problem with listening. This problem has three aspects: 1) I don’t always hear what is being said, especially when spoken to from another room or in the midst of air-conditioning whoosh or any other form of interference; 2) I do not wait to hear the entire statement, whether by jumping to conclusions or making assumptions or impatiently tuning out; and 3) I fail to understand what is being said, or misinterpret, or otherwise screw up the message without asking for clarification or explanation. Do you as a spouse or relative or friend relate to any of these issues? This problem of mine precedes present conditions. It warrants intentional practice and correction.

Meanwhile, I’m learning a little about what it means to be a caregiver. Bill prefers to handle his own needs as much as possible. Even in normal times, he doesn’t welcome hasty advice or intervention, even well-meant. In the current situation, can he sometimes seem testy when I seem officious? Well, maybe a bit.

Some requirements of care are physically demanding—in this case involving lots and lots of ice, and lots and lots of stairs. Keeping schedules straight, dosages recorded, and doctor’s orders punctiliously observed requires attention to detail that one person on this team (that would be me) lacks the gene for. Bill is practicing acceptance and endurance.

For the time being, we are living in a bubble more restrictive in some ways than the bubble of covid isolation in which we’ve spent the past eighteen months. That unwelcome rehearsal makes the next few weeks of healing and rehabilitation seem more manageable. Time has slowed down even more, days of the week matter even less. I can only imagine what life must be like for those who live in a permanent bubble of caregiving (and disability) that has no end in view.

Six weeks (acute) and six months (ongoing) of healing and therapy will bring Bill back to his active self, his woodshop projects, and his keyboard skills. He’ll be as focused in his recovery as he is in everything else he does. Goals. Plans. Actions. Rinse and repeat. I’ll try to minimize any tendency to hover and fuss. Perhaps Bill could learn how to enjoy it more. We’ll work out the balance as we go.

We’ve missed going to the island in Canada these two years. Friends there have visited the cottage and sent us pictures. All is well, even without us. This time next year, we’ll hope to be at Blackwater Lake again. However, at home, just as in our little wilderness to the north, we’ll experience the healing we need, body and soul, through gifts of love and friendship and learning how to be better people together.

This is no surprise to the other members of my household, because I mention the idea from time to time. So far, I’ve been outvoted two-to-one, one voter being Bob the Cat. I admit there’s nothing practical about welcoming a dog into our family. A dog requires attention far in excess of a cat, including daily walks (and poop scooping), obedience training (for the other members of the family), and baths (the kind no self-respecting cat would stand for.)

But when did practicality ever finally determine my desires or decisions on other matters? In fact, my heart usually leads. I’ve been lucky in love and other significant experiences on my life’s journey. Wouldn’t a dog add another layer of love to the whole picture? Well, with props to The Pet Project, the Humane Society, and all the dedicated professionals and volunteers who provide life-giving aid to animals, I have to limit my contribution for now to cash. (That helps, right?)

One reason a dog doesn’t fit in right now is travel. In previous years, Bob the Cat has been complacent during the two-day drive to the camp in Canada. Perhaps somewhere in her little cat brain is the memory of those few weeks when she gets to be an outdoor cat, sleeping under the stars (or at least under the porch) and chasing after little things that crawl and scamper (outside the house.) At the cottage, Bob gets along with the occasional visiting dog—except that one time. You were pretty high up in that tree, weren’t you, Bob? We were worried. But our hero risked his life bringing you down. We still think you deserve your space of peace and quiet on the island as much as we do. No more dogs.

This year, we are being happy with summer in Kansas City, while missing our Canada retreat because of border restrictions on account of covid-19. We’re watching the flowers flourish, anticipating a small crop of tomatoes, savoring fresh garden herbs in our food. The front porch affords the entertainment of people passing by (lots of them with dogs!)

As I write this, rebounding from the dire headlines of the day, I remind myself that, in other years, during these same calendar weeks at the island, I’d be oblivious to it all, and all of it would go on entirely beyond my worries. In the scope of the universe, I am rather less than a housecat. Even so, I can concentrate on bringing a little comfort and good humor to my immediate neighbors, just like you, Bob.

Here’s a remembrance of a feline role model from my past, on the art of growing old and letting go.

VERONICA

She sat in her favorite spots where the sun was warm.
She liked her refreshments punctual and routine.
She carried an air of dignity and decorum
and kept herself impeccably groomed and clean.
Her voice was often querulous with impatience,
but she could win my attention with a soulful look,
her dark-wide pupils riveting and intense
across a table or over the top of a book.
She could be playful sometimes, and make me smile,
yet soon became bored with teasing or too much noise.
A graceful somnolence settled her aging style,
and she held the indefinite days in equipoise
clear to the quiet close. Requiescat.
I’d like to let go as indifferently as that.

A glorious ash tree grows on the streetside in front of our house.  We anticipate the mournful day when, perhaps, the ash borers discover it.  For now, however, its lovely shape and dancing leaves bring us great pleasure.

The other day we noticed that the ground around the base of the ash tree was littered with small branches, all about the same size and length: finger width, twelve inches long.  Most had no foliage attached.  Alas!  We thought.  The borers are doing their business.  But there were no other signs of distress in or on the tree.  What could be happening?

Some days later, from my perch on the porch, I observed a busy-ness in the upper branches.  Soon I spotted a squirrel scampering up the tree with, it appeared, a small branch in its grasp (in its teeth, I suppose). Then the squirrel dropped the branch, which tickled its way down, down through the tree.

Hmmm.  I wondered.  Perhaps this squirrel is a bad builder.  Could that fall of branches at the base of the tree have been a squirrel architectural fail?  Did a nest under construction simply fall apart?

Surrounded by three walnut trees, our home is pretty much squirrel nirvana.  Nuts abound.  We seem to have a resident family of five or six squirrels who defend their turf against hungry hordes.  That ash tree would be a fine haven for a nest if the squirrel could get it together.  I watch the branches quivering as the squirrel scampers about, chomping off branches and perhaps securing them in a suitable fork.  Clearly a more skillful squirrel had better luck in the maple tree.

These observations and concerns help take the sting out of being denied access to our cottage retreat in Canada this summer because of covid.  The garden has bloomed lushly (but not in this order) with cone flowers and black-eyed susans, hibiscus and salvia, rose o’ Sharon and roses—in fact, a succession of colorful blossoms from early spring until now, and on into fall as the asters and chrysanthemums flourish.  We might even harvest a couple of tomatoes.

We got our vaccinations early on. We’ve ventured recently into social reconnections, such as in-person church and dinner at a restaurant.  However, Missouri has soared to dubious recognition as a covid hotspot due to vaccination resistance. We are being careful, wearing masks in public and avoiding crowds.  We feel grateful daily for the privileges we enjoy.

On the subject of trees, here’s a poem I wrote recently after watching—from our marvelous front porch—a gigantic tree being cut down, owing to its dangerous habit of dropping large branches on cars, roofs, and (potentially) passers-by.  Sad to see it go though.

THE PREDATOR

All day Thursday we sat on the porch in the rain

watching the white oak be taken. A monster crane

stretched out its neck and extended a dangling claw

that clenched on each branch and severed it with a saw.

It was inhuman, though clearly a human below

angled its reach. Like a predator, clever and slow,

the animal ate at the tree until nothing, nothing was left

but a hole in the sky of its plaything strangely bereft.

The work of a lifetime fell, was felled to the ground.

When dusk darkened the drizzle that lasted all day,

having folded itself over its six fat wheels,

the great satisfied beast rumbled away.

When we bought the piano, we were thinking of fun. Bill plunking out the notes of the countless tunes he carries around in his head. Barb reclaiming the skills of her nine or so years as a piano student in her youth. Perhaps a social gathering with a guest virtuoso, or simply a bunch of friends singing together with the boost of liberal libations.

With the exception of “Bill plunking,” none of the above has actually occurred. The beautiful piano suffers from loneliness, which the tuner advises us is detrimental to its well-being.

What happened? Well, like everything, it’s complicated. In my case, it has something to do, I’m afraid, with my mother. This is psychological territory I’m loathe to explore, let alone try to explain in writing.

The truth is, now in my 70s, when I sit down at the piano I’m immediately ten or eleven years old again. It is five o’clock in the morning, no matter what time I happen to be playing. My mother is upstairs in her bed, listening to every wrong note, every lame repetition. Her hopes hanging up there in the darkness overshadow my lonely hour at the keyboard just as they always did. “Practicing” the piano, I realize, is not the same as playing the piano for fun. In my youth, I never played the piano for fun.

With the new piano, I signed up for a few lessons with a recommended teacher. She seemed pleased to have an adult student who liked classical music. I’d already mastered (at least at one time) the basics of the keyboard. I was enthusiastic. The teacher launched me into some helpful practice techniques. I bought some books of music I played in my early years. Then I went off on my own. But how many times could I play the Moonlight Sonata or Für Elise before I felt stuck? When would I be able to launch myself into spontaneous renditions of popular tunes? I enjoyed sight-reading from the stack of hymnals I owned, bringing to mind times as the accompanist for youth group and the good feelings of a lifetime of worship. When would I start having fun?

Enthusiasm flagged. Skills remained rudimentary. The piano fell mostly silent. Frankly, it was embarrassing to play so little and so badly. Whenever I sat down at the piano, I somehow felt my mother’s disappointment looming over my shoulder.

I have no memory of family fun around the piano–mother and father and daughters (three) singing together, popular tunes or church music. I never heard my mother play the piano for pleasure, although I believe she did play. Is that what she did during that lacuna in time when the children are in school—that time when, as far as I was concerned, my mother didn’t exist?

My mother was extremely proud of the accomplishments of her daughters, in academia and in music, too. She made sure we had the best teachers. She enforced the discipline of practice: one hour before school for the two older girls, half-hour for the youngest. Before school: hence my lifelong propensity to wake up at 5 am. This was good for learning skills, but hardly a recipe for fun. Then there were the recitals: the looming threat against which all practice was aimed.

I’m beginning to understand the difficulty of picking up the piano again this far down the road.

Recently, my older sister reminded me of the hilarious energy with which we used to play Schubert’s Marche Militaire, a peppy duet. I threw down a challenge. She accepted. Thus, with a deadline of the 4th of July, I’m practicing for the Duet Redux. I’ve found that having a goal has boosted my application to practice. It’s beginning to feel like fun. A little. It’s frustrating, with fingers tangling and mysterious notes occupying perches on the clef I don’t even recognize. I’ve scribbled a lot of notes on the score. I try to practice every day. But as the little motto stuck on my refrigerator quips: Always Make New Mistakes. I always do.

Perhaps this goal-setting, this not taking things too seriously, this aiming for fun with my sister(s) will help me bring the piano to life. Meanwhile, Schubert and my mother may be rolling over in their…well, you know.

Here’s a poem published in The Lyric in 1982. Clearly I’ve been engaged with the conundrum of the piano for a long time.

The Metronome

How she complains against the metronome
let loose to discipline her clever hands.
It changes, she insists, when accents roam
awkwardly from the measure it demands,
while she, hurrying over the notes she knows,
or gingerly laggard at the tricky part,
asserts her independence as she goes
after the heedless rhythms of her heart.
This tension teaches how my will may go
stubborn and reckless while the beat is clear,
halting or quick, precipitate or slow,
despite instruction clicking in my ear,
until at last my little tune is done
and time unmeasured makes all tempos one.

We’re beginning to venture out: masked, tentative, nervous.   Did there used to be this many cars coming at me from all directions?  Are all the people in this coffee shop safely breathing?  Do I still prefer ZOOM church over attendance in a nearly empty sanctuary? Are some of these people in the grocery store refusing vaccination?

From the perspective of his 80th birthday, revered columnist George Will reminds me: “To be 80 years old in this republic is to have lived through almost exactly one-third of its life. And to have seen so many ephemeral excitements come and go that one knows how few events are memorable beyond their day. (Try to remember the things that had you in a lather during, say, the George H.W. Bush administration.)”*

I’m only a few years behind George in the accumulation of perspective.  These days I feel greatly unburdened to glance at political headlines and move on immediately to the comics and my favorite advice columns and the crossword puzzles. Probably not in my lifetime will the world end in either fire or ice.  I’ve had about fifty years so far, and may have perhaps twenty more, to do my bit for peace, justice, and love.  Life’s a journey, all right, but there’s no “there” to aim for.

What I can live for is simply NOW.  It’s an “eternal now,” as my favorite theologian Paul Tillich affirms.  Time, whether described by physicists, cosmologists, or theologians, is a context for human life as mysterious as what some of us call God.  What’ll it be today?

Here’s a pair of poems that bookend my life so far, the first from my 30s (I think) and the second from my 70s.  Same person.  Same path.  Some progress?

CLIMBING

I have begun to narrow down desire.

As though tracing a river to its source

I climb, charting the change higher and higher

from placid meander to the turbulent course

where it began.  I have loved much, not well,

collecting worlds to carry on my back.

What shall I leave?  The spirits that compel

this climb demand a spare and steady pack.

Leave beauty, wonder.  They are everywhere.

Leave hope, and drink from the relentless stream.

Leave knowledge, learn trust in the nimble air

until, suspended by a slender dream,

you seek only to climb, and not to know

where you came from, where you have to go.

OLD LADY WITH NO COMPLAINTS**

The outward qualities already met:

the white hair, glasses, wrinkles, overweight,

the random names I’m likely to forget,

the words for things (like icebox) out of date.

The comfy sweats retirees get to wear?

I live in those, with sneakers on my feet.

Do I look puzzled, with a distant stare

as though I needed help to cross the street?

I might be lost, but only lost in thought.

The road not taken troubles me no more.

Amused, I sift the clutter life has brought

and shut the past behind me door by door.

My bit in time seems infinitely small,

its prizes insufficient after all.

In breaking news, the almost 20-year-old stove we bought with the house bit the dust yesterday.  This sets up unimagined consequences and complications.  Even the resident fix-it wizard has to acknowledge that this puppy is beyond repair.  We might learn what we never quite learned during quarantine:  ordering in is helpful.  But now we can add eating out.

*Link to George Will

**This poem won recognition in the 2020 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. It is included in my poetry collection The Beekeeper and other love poems. Ironically, while prizes may be insufficient, they are still delightful to get.

I’ve been nurturing the prejudice that the so-called Enlightenment is responsible for the mess of today’s American “democracy.” The truth is, we’ve never followed through.

The Enlightenment I’m referring to is the economic, intellectual, and social movement that emerged in Western Europe in the early 18^th century. Scientific investigation, industrial and technological developments, and laws governing the interactions of workers and owners began adding up to what we’ve come to view as modernization.  During that time, Religion lost its power to illuminate humanity’s Ultimate Concerns (let’s say) as Reason stepped in. A few names associated with the Enlightenment include Descartes, Newton, Spinoza, Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Voltaire.

The American experiment, as some call it, was launched in the late 18^th century on the coattails of men who subscribed to Enlightenment ideas. On fire with the opportunity to establish something new in human history, they prosecuted a shooting war for independence and a war of words for the re-creation of democracy from an ancient model. As a consequence, laden with its ideals and its flaws, we’ve rolled with the fruit of Enlightenment down these two hundred years. Or rather, lumped along with it.

In the light of my short lifespan, it appears to me that Enlightenment philosophy has come to mean something less than its lofty and humane ideals. In brief, the principle of self-determination has come to mean “do-as-I-please individualism.” Liberty is perverted to “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.” Compassion is denigrated as “socialism.” Science is set in opposition to Faith, and faith has taken a literalist spin in defense of God (who didn’t need defending) and dug in its dogmatic heels. All this adds up to endless divisions among people supposedly devoted to the common cause of democracy–that is, to the value of each and every voice.

The Enlightenment may have set the human mind free from superstition and the fear of natural forces.  The Enlightenment may have opened minds to the doubts and questions that energize science.  The Enlightenment may have broken the bondage of hereditary tyranny in Western Europe.  What The Enlightenment did not do was bring about liberty and justice FOR ALL in America. After two hundred years, we’re still struggling with how to do that.

Where we have most failed, in my opinion, is in public education.  We’ve edited our own history down to a mythology.  We’ve utterly devalued the calling of teachers.  We’ve let the infrastructure of schools from the nursery to the university decay and crumble.  We’ve lowered the expectation of learning from critical thinking to picking right answers.

No one has time in this complicated world to learn all the answers.  But everyone has the capacity to ask creative questions. Everyone deserves a door to opportunity. We must teach those two fundamental languages: words and mathematics.  We must encourage curiosity over success.  We must support the many paths to life-sustaining work for all kinds of minds, all kinds of abilities.  We must determine to pay for all this out of our national abundance, dreamed in the hearts and built on the backs of people “yearning to breathe free.”  Wealth hoarded at the top is worse than taxation without representation.

Time for some real enlightenment. Liberty and Justice and Education for all.

Almost 30 million Americans have contracted Covid-19. More than 540,000 have died. Yet still, a substantial number of folks doubt those numbers. They doubt that mask mandates, lockdowns, and school closings are necessary. They doubt that vaccines should be imposed on them, because they have a right…to their doubts.

Apparently, no one they care about has died.  No one close to them is suffering from mysterious lingering symptoms.  No one should be concerned that variants of the virus are causing surges in illness and death around the globe. Apparently, no one they don’t personally know matters. They believe they have a right to think and do as they choose.

I lean toward the feeling of a recent online correspondent:  I’m glad I’m old.  That is, I don’t have to look too far into the future and face up to the consequences of other people’s doubts and rights.

When I was a girl, I saw pictures in, say, LIFE Magazine, of children confined—perhaps for life?—in large steel tubes with only their heads exposed.  These machines were called “iron lungs.” They enabled people afflicted with polio to breathe.  Perhaps today’s version is a respirator: less bulky, but no less restrictive.

When I was a girl, scientists perfected a vaccine for polio. We lined up in school to take a sugar cube soaked with a pinkish liquid on our tongues. As far as I know, all children still receive this vaccine. Polio doesn’t happen to American children anymore, because, well, a vaccine. Similarly, smallpox, measles, whooping cough, and a handful of other diseases no longer kill, disable, and disfigure children. Will those folks claiming their right to avoid vaccination for Covid-19 extend their doubts and rights to these other immunizations as well?

Covid-19 and its variants will not go away. Many of us still welcome our annual “flu shot” which helps mitigate the possibility of serious illness from whatever variant of the “ordinary flu” happens to come along that year. The protection isn’t perfect. Mother Nature is clever at creating new attacks on human life. I’m not required to get that flu shot by the government; but organizations I volunteer with insist on it—not necessarily for my protection, but surely for the protection of those I help and serve.  Doesn’t this seem like common sense, common decency, common human compassion?  Whatever happened to those values in today’s America?

I’ve always claimed to believe in Human Rights. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and others more specific, are enshrined in the US Constitution with its Bill of Rights. Now it seems that “my” rights and “their” rights clash daily in the headlines, sometimes with violence, and sometimes via legislation or judicial decisions.  Do human beings really have rights?  Possibly not.

All ancient wisdom texts contain a variation on this saying: Do not do to someone else what you would not want them to do to you.

Now…imagine. (Human beings are the only animals, as far as we know, who have the power to imagine.)

Imagine that you personally know every victim, every refugee, every criminal, every corpse.

What are your rights?

I’m giving up religion for Lent. There. I’ve said it. The next forty days or so, I can devote my theological study hours to something comprehensible, like Bitcoin or The United States Constitution or Virus Data. Just kidding. Sort of.

Religion has been among the most disappointing of human interventions for understanding the mystery of life. Nothing human can be perfect, I know, but surely we could have prevented ourselves from spoiling, almost without exception, the enlightened discoveries of certain historic individuals, like Buddha and Abraham and Ahkenaten and Zoroaster and Jesus and Muhammad and Akbar. Their respective insights concerning the Ineffable were brilliant and beautiful. The religions that grew up after them? Not so much.

It doesn’t help that I’ve been reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste. Her descriptions of how the legacies of certain beliefs around the world have perpetrated inhuman suffering make my stomach churn, even though it isn’t news to me. I also launched into a “cover the whole book in one year” reading schedule of the Bible, a personal refresher course, only to find myself, this month, in bloody Leviticus. Obviously, any sacred text requires interpretation. But it’s hard to read these ancient Hebrew scriptures knowing that certain “believers” today describe this entire book as word-for-word, straight from the mouth of God orders for life. If this scripture was what Jesus grew up learning, I wonder how he ever managed to proclaim “God is love.”

As a girl, I lived in a Buddhist country, a Muslim country, and a Roman Catholic country. As a docent in a major art museum, I’ve delved into the iconography of religious traditions from China and Ancient Egypt and India. As a practicing Protestant Christian since childhood, I’ve worshiped and studied in several denominations, from Dutch Reformed to Southern Methodist to Presbyterian (PCUSA sect). And I’ve attempted to practice, from time to time, forms of spirituality in the Roman Catholic tradition. I’m only in my 75th year of age, so perhaps there’s still time for me to discover the final answer.

But for Lent this year, I think I’ll let go of religion. I’m going to try to grab on with clarity to the free-form faith that God, by some name or other, or no name at all, has a love for creation—the earth and everyone and everything on it—an absolute love available for humanity to participate in. For that, we just need some humility, some gratitude, some wonder, some mercy and generosity towards every other being, animate or inanimate, as evoked in Robin Wall Kimmer’s love-filled book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.

I’m not doing religion, at least for now. But I’m not giving up on Jesus, whose forever presence as Christ in the world originally and truly revealed to humanity the message of compassion over judgment, servanthood over power, love over death. That’s a message I’m not giving up.