We sat around the table tonight in the artist's studio, collaging photocopied icons of the Madonna and child onto canvas board, cutting words from magazines, layering images, painting, covering in encaustic wax. The pressing question for me for that two hours was how much gold paint was gaudy, and how much simply got the point [...]
Trail of Death
A candle is lit on my table today... . . . It's fourth grade, and we're learning about "American Indians" in social studies. I have never taken notes before in my life, but this time as the lights are off and the slide show is running, cataloging so many tribes, their housings, their ways of [...]
Paralysis
She's been processing it for days at this point. My coworker, who is Latina, was in a Houston mall a week or so ago when a man stood on a table, yelled white supremacist slurs, and apparently set off fireworks before melting into the crowd and disappearing. She and her small family went running for [...]
Wholesome
We've had a lot of hours in the car lately, and downtime in hotel rooms. Road-tripping between Texas and Michigan has meant plenty of time to catch up, to reflect on life. My kid was just at church camp, the one I grew up going to, where so much of my early Christian formation happened [...]
Road-trip Calamities: A History
Here, for your amusement: a brief history of my calamities. I write to you now from a small-town midwestern Econo Lodge, perhaps the most American of places to be on a patriotic holiday weekend. The sum total of what I know about this town so far is this: car repair places are currently closed till [...]
Pride and hope
We were pressed in tight together in the warm wind and light sporadic rain, rows of sweaty people with no personal space, the occasional brush of skin or the feel of breath as we reached our hands high, grooving to the music and hollering or whistling as the rainbow colored floats passed in the parade, [...]
Mercy for the pain
Sometimes we talk as if changing our views, coming to new understandings, is a cognitive exercise, a battle of aligning our mind with the work of justice. We didn't know things, and now we know things - knowledge at the center. But deconstruction is the stuff of guts. Not like "having the guts to [...]
What I used to think
Last week, he sat quietly in our waiting room, tears silently slipping out of his gentled eyes and down his weathered cheeks. He sat, hands folded and eyes lifted up, his mind deep in memory, or prayer. I wasn't certain which. When the vet came out to talk about the details of a very routine [...]
People talk to me about my body
As I'm getting out of my Jeep in the YMCA parking garage yesterday, I notice a man I don't know walking toward me, looking at me with an unpleasant, even hostile look on his face. I'm alert, a little rattled, and confused because he's looking right at me, but initially I think it has something [...]
Good, good man
He was the first one on Beulah or anywhere in this neighborhood I ever talked to. I came here white-fearful. But I came with a poker face, trying to be far more woke than I felt on the inside, trying to get my body to match what I considered to be my educated deconstructing mind. [...]
