Tell them.

Last week I complained about a problem. I've been thinking about what the solution might be.

I had never heard of Aaron Swartz until he died, though I used his inventions every day. This happens a lot with famous people – I had never heard of Frank Sinatra until he was dead and suddenly he was all over the radio. Of course, if you're Sinatra, you probably get more attention than you want. But I'm guessing a lot of awesome people, probably Aaron included, don't hear enough “You're awesome, and I'm glad you're doing the things you do, and I want to help if I can.”

I had a friend with a famous father. It struck me as strange that people were so excited about meeting him, because in person he was less interesting than her (possibly because he'd been pursued by too many fans and was sick of meeting people). People just walked up to him and told him how much they admired him and his work, but no one said that to her. I didn't tell her, “You're so fun, and I love your hair, and this spinach you made is really good,” even though I thought it every day.

When people die, we wish we had told them things like that.  And yet it's hard to say it in the course of everyday life.

What praise do we not give, and why?

One reason is the fear other people will think you're weird.  It's true that flattery can come off as creepy. But I think people can usually tell the difference between flattery and honest praise. And accepting weirdness is a good life skill.

Maybe hearing too much praise would make a person conceited after a while. But I think in most cases, it would just make them happier and better at being awesome. I love that as a social worker, I get to give my clients real criticism and real praise, because we're outside the normal realm of social interactions.

And the normal realm does not encourage this kind of thing.  It embraces irony, and geeky subcultures especially prize critique and verbal sparring (see also: Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate).  Which is fine, but that's not all there is to life.

So sometimes there's love and admiration that I don't have an easy outlet for.  It took years of angst before I gave myself permission to be in love with men who were not viable romantic partners. I kept trying to reconcile the love with the impossibility of acting on it. I finally realized I didn't have to act, and I also didn't have to squash the love. It was okay to give up hope and just love them.

With some of them I got to move on from the awkward-non-lover stage to real friendship, and that was great.  And one of them broke up with his girlfriend and married me, and that was pretty great too.

I try to push myself to tell people the things I love about them. It's scary, because there are probably situations where this could go wrong and people would be uncomfortable. But I'd like to move towards a culture where it's not weird.

For well you know that it's a fool
Who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder.
- Paul McCartney

Finding water

On Christmas Eve, one of my relatives had a re-commitment ceremony. She and her boyfriend had gotten legally married last year, but none of their family was present, and they wanted to have a ceremony with us.

We all gathered in the living room, sat silently for a while, and then the couple exchanged vows. (A Quaker wedding has no clergy; the couple give their pledge to each other without a third person mediating.) The two of them stumbled through the old-fashioned vows, but afterwards they began to speak freely about why they were together.

The bride has always been a black sheep in the family. Since childhood, she's had some serious psychiatric and behavioral problems. She spoke about meeting her husband when they were both in a PTSD treatment center. At the time she met him, she had been wearing pajamas for a month and wasn't brushing her teeth. They both had insomnia and would meet at 3 am to drink coffee and talk for hours. She knew that if he loved her when she was at her worst, he was a keeper.

Her husband spoke simply about meeting and loving someone else who understood pain.

It moved me more than some of the carefully-orchestrated weddings I've been to. These are two people who have suffered greatly. I work with many more people like them, people with trauma histories, people to whom life has not been kind. I thought about all the broken people out there, and I was so glad that two of them found each other.

Tonight, I asked the bride's father for some cuttings from his plant collection. He showed me his cacti and succulents, desert plants that grow thorns and tough hides to protect themselves. Inside, they trap precious moisture.

“I took a cutting of this one and left it in an empty pot for a few months,” he told me, holding up a plump green stem. “No water. After three months it was hardly shriveled at all. It was starting to put out roots, getting ready to grab on as soon as it touched soil.” It seemed miraculous that a plant could survive that long on only the moisture from the air.

And I thought of his daughter, thought of my clients at the jail and all the other people who live in a harsh and deadly environment. About the thorns and tough skins they grow to save themselves from the desert.

Recently a client told me his mind was “like a tape recorder,” remembering every kind word he heard from me and other staff so he could play them back to himself. In the scorching environment of jail, he was saving up those droplets of kindness to stay sane.

Even the toughest, the most scarred, the most bitter of people are hiding a thirsty heart. Sometimes their tendrils are reaching out for it, searching for a hospitable place where they can latch on and get some of what they need so much.

Here's to the couple whose improvised wedding moved me so much yesterday. It's hard to form a healthy relationship when you hurt a lot, and I don't know how successful they'll be. But they've found some sweetness and nourishment in each other, and I hope together they can drink their fill.

Reunions

My sister shared this video of one of her second-grade students reuniting with her mother, who's been stationed in Afghanistan for the last year. It's a lovely moment: the moment of realization, then the silence, the rightness of being near each other after too long apart.

It makes me think of the mothers I work with in the jail. A World Apart, Christina Rathbone's excellent book about women in a Massachusetts prison, describes another reunion after two years of separation between mother and son:

“...she ran over and grabbed Patrick, sobbing, almost unable to breathe. Pat burst into tears too, and clung to her. Across the room, her father started to cry, the officer in charge of the visiting room that night started to cry, and one by one the inmates and even their visitors started to cry along with them.”

The male inmates sometimes talk about their children, but not with the same longing the women do.  Many of the mothers describe a physical craving to be near their children, a hunger for the sound of their voices and the smell of their hair.

They worry endlessly about their children's well-being. Have they eaten enough today? Is he doing all right in school?  Will she be mad at me when I come home? How can a toddler understand I didn't leave her on purpose?

They talk about how much they want to keep their children safe from all the terrors of their own childhoods: the sexual abuse, the neglect, the beatings. For some of these women, their relationship with their children is the only non-abusive relationship they've ever had.

The mothers' pain is one side of the coin.  The other side is the children's pain, which I can only imagine.

The United States has the highest imprisonment rate in the world.  That affects not only the people who are locked up, but their families.  Every time we imprison a person, we take away a part of a family.  We should think carefully about whether it's worth it.

What's inside

Some of my favorite patients at the hospital are hard-bitten blue-collar guys on their first psych hospitalization.  They haven't processed their childhoods or their issues or anything - it's all been stored up in there, and when they finally start to talk, it's so raw.

Last week I worked with a man who moved to this country as a child.  As a young man he joined a gang and served prison time for shooting someone.  Now he's middle-aged and the stay-at-home dad of young kids.  More than anything, he wants a paying job.  He kept telling me, "I want to support my kids and my wife. I want to be a good father."

Today I sat with a working-class man whose decades-long depression finally got noticed.  He hasn't told his grandmother he's in the hospital, and that's the part he dreads most: "I just can't stand to do anything that would worry her."  Most people in hospitals get teary when they think of how hard their life has been.  These guys tear up when they talk about the harm they might have caused others.

I once saw an unemployed carpenter calmly discuss his plans for suicide and then break down when he told me how terrible he felt that he'd left his dog with a friend and hadn't provided money to buy dog food.  My ex-gangster showed the most emotion when he talked about his mother, who had flown across the country to see him in the hospital.  He hated to think of the money she had spent on the ticket.  "I want her to move out here so I can support her. I want to repay her for everything she done for me."

If I had gone into some other field, I wouldn't sit around talking with murderers, child abusers, addicts.  And I wouldn't get to be there when someone finally speaks about how much he loves the woman who raised him, or about the pain he doesn't show to anyone.  And every time I think, Holy shit, I can't believe you've been carrying that inside you.

"...the Devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn't have to. That was what some humans found hard to understand. Hell wasn't a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley's opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind."

- Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Two love songs

One of my favorite love songs is the Roches' "Home Away From Home", about two vulnerable people finding each other.

She was twenty-six when she came to the 'burbs
Where the family secrets stop at the curb
I was nine when she moved next door
She had married a Republican, he was for the war

Over at my house, things were sad
Because my folks were always fighting - that made me feel bad
I went to her door with a cookie tin
I said I am your neighbor, would you let me in
She was big, having a baby
She asked me are you hungry and I said maybe
She gave me soup, a piece of toast
She gave me what I needed the most

Thank you for the love you gave
To me as a child
There must have been so much pain
That you never cried
In my home away from home.

Our society stresses romantic love, but sometimes it's the other kinds we need most. Love can be soup, love can be listening, love can be encouragement.

Another song that never fails to swell my heart is Dar Williams' "You're Aging Well".

Why is it that as we grow older and stronger
The road signs point us adrift and make us afraid
Saying, "You never can win,"
"Watch your back," "Where's your husband?"
Oh, I don't like the signs that the signmakers made.

So I'm gonna steal out with my paint and my brushes
I'll change the directions, I'll hit every street
It's the Tinseltown scandal, the Robin Hood vandal
She goes out and steals the King's English
In the morning you wake up and the signs point to you

They say,
"I'm so glad that you finally made it here,"
"You thought nobody cared, but I did, I could tell,"
And "This is your year," and "It always starts here,"
And oh, "You're aging well."

May you have a year of growing older and stronger, a year of love in unexpected places, a year of the signs pointing to you (wherever you are).

Benedicimus te

This year I went to the Christmas carol service at Harvard (college towns! I love 'em!) The church, as usual, was packed enough that latecomers had to sit on the floor. People come mostly to hear the excellent choir and organ, but also for the pleasure of singing through some of the carols. It's the only place I've been that expects you to sight-read Latin on "Adeste Fidelis", though they do give you a choice of German or English on "Silent Night." It's a legit church service with gospel readings and prayers, but I don't have a good sense of how many of us come for a musical more than a religious experience. Sometimes I worry that I ought to find some more secular outlet for my harmony-singing urges, but I've had no luck.

We are now in the midst of family Christmas with twenty or so of Jeff's and my family. It's a solid week of cooking, eating, board games, singing, exchanging gifts, playing music, napping, and walking around the neighborhood. Pretty much my ideal way to spend a week. I know at least three people who wandered into Thomforde gatherings and stayed for days.

At night we light the menorah. My understanding of the Hebrew words we sing is vague at best. I know they feel warm and close. I'm grateful to whatever has preserved my father-in-law and his ancestors, grateful for Jeff singing beside me.

Last night we all went to see Revels, a stage show of traditional Christmas music and dance. Revels is aimed at a more secular crowd, and is generally very good at making folk culture accessible to people who aren't normally part of that scene.

Revels also includes a good bit of participatory singing, which I always approve of. There's no sensory experience that instantly conveys "you're among friends" to me like lots of people singing in harmony. Revels ends with a stately version of the Sussex Mummers' Carol, complete with Ralph Vaughan Williams' soaring descant.

God bless your house, your children too
Your cattle and your store
The Lord increase you day by day
And send you more and more,
And send you more and more.

And I decided it doesn't much matter what the words mean. We don't have cattle, and many of us don't believe in God. It is enough to stand in a warm building surrounded by a thousand other voices, singing a blessing onto each other.

Stumbling

One of my favorite Christmas songs is the Cherry Tree Carol, based on a story from an apocryphal gospel. Joseph and the pregnant Mary are walking through an orchard. She, maybe because of the pregnancy, gets a yen for the cherries and asks him to pick her some. Joseph, none too pleased with the mysterious pregnancy situation, answers,

"Let him pick berries and let him pick cherries
That brought thee now with child."

It's such a typical interaction. Joseph and Mary are both feeling wronged. He's mad because someone knocked up his fiancée, and she's mad because she wants those cherries and can't go clambering around to get them. Plus she's just been insulted.

But because this is a story, a miracle happens and settles the argument. Unborn Jesus takes sides and tells the trees what to do.

Then bowed down the tallest tree
Into sweet Mary's hand.
Then Mary cried, "Oh, see now, Joseph!
I've cherries at command."

Mary is vindicated. Joseph, embarrassed, attempts an apology:

O, then bespoke old Joseph,
"I have done Mary wrong,
Cheer up, cheer up, my dearest dear,
And do not be cast down."

Arguments in real life don't work like this, but we wish they would. I often see this in social work clients (and myself): we act like if we can just prove how wronged we are, someone will take notice and rectify the situation. We would like the universe to announce: "You are right, and he is wrong." And we make up stories where it really does happen.

But in real life, there are no trees that bow down to settle arguments. The other person's hurt is as real as our own. There will not be a divine arbitration, so we have to patch things up as best we can.

And the carol echoes this: after the miracle, life goes on as usual.

So Mary picked one cherry,
As red as any blood,
And Mary and Joseph, they walked on homeward,
All with their heavy load.

I find this the most touching, most human part of a very human carol. We are all carrying heavy loads. We are all stumbling along in the dark, groping towards each other.

Love

There's a lot of grim humor in the nurses' station at a psych hospital. You have to joke, or it would be unbearable. So when a patient comes in and the nurses or social workers say, "Oh, I love him. I hope they assign him to our team," for a while I thought they were being sarcastic.

I eventually realized it wasn't a joke. When the staff say, "I just love him," or "She's such a sweetheart," they mean it. Some patients aren't easy to work with, like the woman who stands at the door of the nurses' station bawling "I wanna get ouuuuutta here! What's wroooong with you people?" As her social worker gets up to go talk to her, there's affection on her face mixed with the exasperation.

If you're a people person, a psych ward is a strangely satisfying place to work. You see a different part of people, rawer and deeper.

A typical episode: One of the older women is having a rough day. She's been sitting at the table in the milieu muttering and shouting all morning. The most veteran counselor there, a burly American Indian man the patients call "Chief", walks to the middle of the room and stands before her. He plants his feet, spreads his arms, and begins to sing.

"You must have been a beautiful baby,
You must have been a wonderful child,"

Activity in the milieu stops. The patients turn to look.

"When you were only starting to go to kindergarten
I bet you drove the little boys wild."

(This is true. She showed us a picture of herself as a young woman, and she was gorgeous.)

"You must've been a beautiful baby,
'Cause baby, look at you now!"

He finishes up, arms flung wide. It works: she cracks a smile.

Love in a war zone

One thing I love about Oxfam (where I work) is the attitude about the people we work with. Too many nonprofits paint poor people as miserable victims, waiting for aid from rich countries. There's that inevitable photo of the crying baby.

Oxfam sent the photographer Rankin to a refugee camp in Congo to get a different kind of picture. He writes:

I expected to be depressed. I had done my homework; the statistics were horrific. I could only imagine what the human face of those statistics would look like. The people I met confounded my expectations. I met fathers, mothers, children... all getting on with life, making it through, even having a laugh and a joke. These people didn't see themselves as victims, despite the bad hand that fate had dealt them. They were human beings, exactly the same as you and me.

View a slideshow of Congolese refugees telling about the people and things they love. Don't get me wrong, these people need help. They need clean water, homes, a way to make a living. Most of all they need an end to the war. But they are people, not numbers.



"I love my guitar. It is my most precious possession. I have had to run from my village three times because of the war. I leave everything behind except my guitar. Even if it's dangerous I always go home and take my guitar before I run. I can forget all of my worries when I'm playing."

Dwelling on grace

I was reading about how meditation can change people's brains. There's some evidence that people who spend lots of time meditating, like Buddhist monks, have brains that actually function differently from those of non-meditating people. Particular parts of the brain grow far more active. I do believe that focusing on something makes it grow bigger in your life - I've seen myself dwell on small problems until they become medium or large problems. But I love the idea that you can actually change how your brain works by practice.

My attempts at meditation have not been very satisfying. I fall asleep, make lists, or get up and do something else. Most Sunday mornings in silent Quaker meeting for worship I start by trying to focus my mind, but I don't last more than a few minutes. The only meditation technique I ever learned was counting breaths until you reach ten and then starting over. I often do this for part of meeting, but I've never experienced anything that made me want to keep doing it. I don't feel refreshed or relaxed.

So today in meeting I tried something different. At Pendle Hill I was introduced to centering prayer, which is focusing on a single holy word and letting all other thoughts go. The method had more or less existed for a long time, but was popularized in the 1970s by Catholic monks who wanted a way to draw in people familiar with Eastern religion. I picked the word "grace".

People talked about grace a lot at Pendle Hill. I remember a woman standing up in meeting and saying with wonder in her voice, "I was thinking about oil spills. And then I thought, what about a grace spill? A spill of grace?" I imagined it flowing and pooling over land and water, coating animal and people like petroleum on seagulls. I think it was the most potent thing I ever heard in meeting. But I realized I didn't have a solid definition of the word.

Christianity defines grace basically as "Gifts from God that we don't deserve." I don't believe in God, but I do see lots of undeserved gifts flowing around, pooling and spilling.

I see grace in my mother-in-law all the time. I try to do chores before she gets to them, but I keep finding some way she's cheerfully done something for me - my laundry hung up, the crumbs I left on the counter wiped up. I tried to talk her out of it, feeling I was accumulating debt to her. But she's not keeping track.

Actually, grace seems a main requirement of parenting. When I see people dealing patiently with their fussy children or surly teenagers, I'm impressed with what they're able to give when they don't seem to be receiving much.

And Jeff's grace pools around me every day. He's steady when I'm fragile, generous when I'm needy, loving when I'm prickly.

I'm not sure if what I was doing in meeting was what the monks had in mind, or if it was reshaping my brain. But I hope that by dwelling on grace, it will come to dwell more in me.

What changes

At the wedding, a friend asked me if I thought being married was going to change my life. I can now answer:

My relationship with Jeff doesn't feel different, except that we have more free time now because we're not planning a wedding. What does feel different is our relationship to society at large.

This whole wedding thing has made me feel embarassingly status quo. I always hated the words "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" because they sounded so smug and teenagerish. "Fiancee" is even worse, as it sounds like an irritating woman who keeps waving the rock on her left hand at people. I quite liked "partner", partly because it made other people say things like "Wait, are you marrying a man or a woman?"

As soon as we got engaged, people who really only knew one of us started addressing party invitations and Christmas cards to both of us. Facebook was suddenly full of ads for teeshirts emblazoned "Future Mrs. Smith" and "Mrs. Williams In Training". The other day we got our first package addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Kaufman. (As far as I can tell, I'm not a Mrs. of any kind.)

On the more pleasant side, we can file our taxes jointly - Jeff is doing it right now, although he spent the first half of the evening filling out the 2007 forms by mistake. I'm on his insurance. We were actually registered as domestic partners for this purpose last fall, but it's cheaper if the federal government recognizes your relationship. If we end up applying to the Peace Corps, we can go together. We can travel together in more conservative countries and not have to stay in separate rooms. Heck, we can even stay in my childhood bedroom without my father forbidding it on the grounds of being "too awkward."

In stepping into this pattern, I keep thinking about the people who can't or don't. The tax breaks they don't get, the insurance coverage, the cards sent to both of them, the congratulations, the soup pots and spatulas.

The most important part is still the part I was worried about the October night I sat Jeff down under a tree and told him I wanted to marry him. I had tried looking at my life without him in it, and I didn't like how it looked. I wanted him to know I was in it for good, and I wanted to know if the same was true of him. I wanted us to be able to plan where we were going to live, how we were going to live, knowing we could each count on the other being there.

Will you forgive me for closing with a little sentiment?

If truth be told,
It was not priest, who made us one,
Nor finger
circled with gold,
Nor soft delights when day is done
and arms enfold.
These bonds are firm,
but in death-storm
They may not hold-
We were welded man and wife
By hammer-strokes of daily life.

Ellen Sophia Bosanquet, 1938

We did it!

My favorite parts:

falling asleep the night before listening to Jeff and assorted friends play contra dance music downstairs. I love falling asleep while other people are still up making music.

Jeff's uncle reciting (most of) Shakespeare's sonnet 116 during the wedding

twenty-some gorgeous chocolate cakes made my Jeff, my sister, and me

biking to Concord in the sunshine the next day

Now we have free time again. So we can do things like:
learn to drive stick!
read books!
figure out if we want to move to Morocco! (Seriously.)

Leavening

I've been thinking about sourdough,
a bubbling, acidic mess of airborne yeast
that we nurture into rich tangy loaves.
Gold prospectors trekked Alaska with bags of sourdough
in their shirts,
keeping the precious leavening alive with the heat of their bodies.

In fall I'll bring home a cup of starter,
and in our new house we'll have sourdough biscuits
and pain au levain.

Last night in your sleep you pulled me closer against you,
and my dreaming brain registered
You
as a baker
Me
a bowl of sourdough
Clasped against your warmth,
Rising

The end of time

When I first read the lyrics to Ewan MacColl's "The First Time", I disliked them.

The first time ever I saw your face
I though the sun rose in your eyes
And the moon & stars were the gifts you gave
To the dark & the empty skies, my love
To the dark and empty skies.

The first time ever I kissed your mouth
I felt the earth move in my hand
Like the trembling heart of a captive bird
That was there at my command, my love
That was there at my command.

The first time ever I lay with you
And felt your heart beat over mine
I thought our joy would fill the earth
And last til the end of time, my love
And last til the end of time.

Knowing nothing of the story behind it, the words turned me off. "Sure, you thought your love would last forever, but of course it won't! Let alone sex. You probably got tired of her, if she didn't get tired of you first."

In college I discovered Peggy Seeger's album Songs of Love and Politics. Along with her own "I Want to Be an Engineer" and many other political songs, the most memorable love song is "The First Time", which Ewan wrote for her during a 1956 transatlantic phone call. They didn't get tired of each other - they were married for many decades. But she also sings the heartbreaking "Thoughts of Time", about being married to a much older man and living with the almost certain knowledge that Ewan would die before her.

These days I have marriage on the brain, and her story takes on more significance for me. The worst thing I can currently imagine is losing Jeff too early, though unless we both go in the same car wreck one of us has to die before the other. So this week when I found Peggy Seeger's most recent album Bring Me Home in the library, I was entranced by the last song. She describes the different people who have been home to her over the years - starting with her parents and brothers, then her life with Ewan, her life alone after his death. But the last verses are about her life with her new partner, Irene. I've never met any of these people, but I was happy all day after learning that! It felt like I had heard good news from a friend.

At Pendle Hill it's the end of term, students are leaving, and people are fond of quoting "The sorrow of your leaving lasts only a moment, because the joy of your being here lasts forever." I'm sure anyone who's lost a spouse will tell you the sorrow in fact lasts more than a moment. But at the same time, the world is a better place because Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl were in it. I hope at the end of our life together Jeff and I can know the same thing.

Love made visible

I'm now living and working at Pendle Hill, the Quaker center where I spent last summer. (Not going to Kazakhstan after all. Ask me if you want.)

One of the things I love about this place is the small objects that show great love put into them over the years. A decade ago when a 225-year-old oak came down, one of the maintenance workers saved some of the wood and made it into things like new seats for the stools in the craft studio. It probably would have been easier to just buy new stools, but I'm sure people were sad about losing the tree and were glad to have it preserved in some way.

The other bit of handiwork I found moving this week was the hotpads in the dining room. They're worn print cotton and corduroy, sewn into rectangles and stitched across with embroidery floss to keep the layers together. And where the fabric is shredding with age, you can see through to some previous layer of the hotpad from a previous generation, the cloth deemed too ragged but re-covered instead of thrown away. The potholders have certainly been around for longer than most of the people here, made and re-made by someone's careful hands.

At the top of the weekly chore chart here are the words Work is love made visible. These small objects made it particularly visible to me this week.

What we carry with us

I've graduated from college and feel oddly homeless. The hardest part is leaving the co-op, knowing I'll never see most of my housemates again. What makes it easier is the feeling that I carry parts of them with me. There's some comfort in drinking from the cup Becky threw on the potter's wheel or wearing the sweater that belonged to Max. The way I spice the dinner came from Sissi; the way I think about art came from Jenny; the way I finger the penny whistle came from Jeff. I can't know what parts of myself the others are carrying to California and Austria and New Hampshire, but I trust that I do go with them.

If we were like the seeds of a dandelion that had grown gold and big and eventually turned white, this weekend was the puff of air that sent us scattering in the wind. I feel dizzy and lost now, but we'll land in new places and fill the field with new flowers.

Valediction

Dear John Donne,

You know how you wrote the poem that's practically the anthem of long-distance relationships? You know, the one about how you're so pure and inter-assurèd of the mind that you care less eyes, lips and hands to miss?

I think it's total rubbish. I bet you missed her like crazy. Unless you and I have absolutely nothing in common.

Julia

Northern spring

Sometimes it's nicer to wait for something a long time and then fall into it all at once instead of getting it before you're ready. In the south spring comes by February, with daffodils and pink daphne all over the place before the snow is even gone in Philadelphia. I like being farther north because the spring is more precious when you have to wait for it.

I feel like I've been watching the buds on the trees for a long time, waiting to see if they'll ever open. It's been cold and grey this week, but on Tuesday there finally came ten minutes of spring with cherry trees and warm winds that made me wish summer would never come.

All-female education 4, Julia 0.

Bryn Mawr has all kinds of curses - if you go up certain stairs or between certain trees you won't graduate, if you kiss someone on the Moon bench you'll break up. (If you kiss someone under Rock Arch you'll supposedly be together forever, which could well be a curse depending on who it is.) Tonight I discovered one they don't tell you about - walking down Senior Row alone realizing that you're likely to never have to worry about either of those later curses.

In my greatest act of cowardice in years, today I didn't talk to him again. I may be a fish, but do I ever want that bicycle.

Loving the invisible

When no one is looking and I want
To kiss
God

I just lift my own hand
To
My
Mouth.

- Hafiz

Today I was introduced to a man who feels like an old friend - Hafiz, a fourteenth-century Persian poet. He presents God as lover and beloved, as friend, as present in everyone around us. I'm so lost in his work I forget that I can't usually manage to believe in his lover. It's so seldom I feel close enough to the brink of believing that I can send anything out to God - but tonight I can, and I'm hankering to reflect some of that light back out into the air. I feel like I'm mailing a letter with no one's address written on the envelope. But it feels good to mail the letter.