People's Climate March

From Peoples Climate March

Manhattan, New York, NYC

I remember being dismayed at how small and sordid Occupy Wall Street seemed to me, when I first visited. Sarah L and I, who had weathered the Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath together, went down to see Zuccotti Park on the day Gaddafi was killed in Libya. I was high on revolution that day, with the fall of perhaps the most brutal dictator of the Arab Spring (Morsi and Sisi not yet in the picture). There was, I felt confident, a global groundswell rising. Omar Offendum's anthem #Syria rang in my head:

esh-sha3b

yuriid

isqaat an-niDHaam!

The people

united

will never be defeated!

I stood on the corner of Broadway with Sarah L, facing Zuccotti Park in silence, feeling my shoulders droop. A few hundred people standing around in white man dreadlocks and grunge, some bedraggled tents, signs leaning against trees, bits of rubbish on the ground. There was noise, but no energy. Not like Tahrir Square. We looked at each other, shrugged. "There's this great French place around here with amazing crepes," Sarah said, pulling out her smartphone.

Nearly a year later, OWS announced a march to reboot the movement, on May 1, the great socialist holiday of International Workers' Day. I expected the same desultory showing, but I was unemployed and at loose ends; I couldn't job search 24/7, and the exercise would be good for me. Some people from All Souls Unitarian Church and Fourth Universalist Church would be marching with Occupy Faith, so I decided to meet them at the Ghandi statue in Union Square.

Marching with All Souls' Asst Minister Lissa Anne Gundlach and Director of Religious Ed Taryn Strauss was different, immersive. We discussed the issues as we walked, photographed people's signs, and Taryn led us in "This Little Light of Mine." We shouted, "The people / united / will never be defeated," and people cheered us from fourth and fifth floor windows and fire escapes. It was a transformative experience that eventually led me to my job at All Souls, which came to include organizing with Lissa around the People's Climate March.

This was entirely different again because this time it did feel like a movement. I remember first hearing about the march back in May at a screening of Groundswell Rising at All Souls, an anti-fracking documentary. "350.org wants to top the biggest climate protest in history, 85,000 in Copenhagen. We're aiming for 100,000." I thought it was a pretty number but I didn't know how realistic it was.

Then I was attending a free summer concert in Prospect Park: Janelle Monae, the series opener. Young people were going up and down the long line of waiting concert-goers with quarter sheets of paper, encouraging the hipsters, rock fans, families and neighbors to the People's Climate March. "I've already got one. I'll be there," I said, but I wondered if that many people really cared about the climate, even in liberal New York, even so soon after Superstorm Sandy.

After we started talking about it at All Souls, though, I began to have hope that this really did move people. The Unitarian Universalist regional district was organizing homestays for UUs from across the country. There were dozens coming down from Vermont, a couple hundred traveling together by train from California. We were the second largest faith contingent at the march, behind only the Catholics!

From Peoples Climate March

Honoring Margot Adler

New York, NY, USA

I was more deeply moved than I would have expected by the death of Margot Adler: journalist, priestess, lover of vampires, and fellow member of the great family of All Souls Unitarian Church.

I knew Margot Adler’s name and voice long before I ever met her. My father literally sets his watch by All Things Considered, and he always has his favorite reporters: Baxter Black the cowboy poet, Scott Simon, a few others, and Margot Adler. When their voices came on the air, the volume went up and we stopped to listen. I am an NPR junkie myself now, with my own list of favorites -- Soraya Sarhatti-Nelson, Robert Krulwich, Laila Fadl -- but Dad and I still have Margot Adler in common.

So in the fall of 2012, when she was going to preach in the pulpit of All Souls, where I was newly employed, I was ecstatic. When I was proofreading the Order of Service and saw her sermon title, “Why We Love Vampires,” I was enraptured. Even though she had preached at All Souls a few times before, I got there extra early that morning in case she needed anything.

When I walked through the parish house door, there she was, shorter and more stooped than I had pictured for such a giant of journalism, but with a radiant smile you can't see on the radio. The other worship leader wouldn’t arrive for almost an hour, so I walked Margot upstairs and we stood at my desk and chatted, just as if we were old colleagues.

I had loved vampires for at least a dozen years longer than Margot, but of the 260 vampire novels she had read while researching her e-book Vampires Are Us, we had settled on most of the same favorites for mostly the same reasons. I had probably also been pondering why we love vampires longer than she had, but she had come to all my conclusions and taken them a step further.

Eventually, from vampires, we turned quite naturally to witches in popular literature. I have long said that if I were any kind of theist, I would be a Wiccan polytheist, and Margot Adler remains the Wiccan priestess most admired by the practicing pagans of my childhood church. In conversation, I learned that both Margot and I were impressed by the representation of witches in bestselling romance novelist Nora Roberts’ work.

We were interrupted by the arrival of the assistant minister, but I made time to sit and listen to Margot’s sermon in both services. Two years later, chatting with Margot is still one of my best memories of All Souls.

After that, she always had a hug for me when I saw her in church. Through Superstorm Sandy, New York mayoral politics and more, I always stopped to listen when Margot Adler’s familiar voice came on the air.

This past spring, I was walking through Central Park, listening to All Things Considered on my iPod, when Margot came on the air. It was a story about new super skyscrapers on the west side of Central Park that were stealing the sunlight from some of the park’s trees. I almost logged into the church database right there in the park to email her about how I had enjoyed the story and that I couldn’t recall seeing her at church recently.

Now I never will and wish I had.

Prodigal Magnolia

New York, NY, USA

From Finding Magnolia

I'm delighted to have my friend Magnolia back in New York, even for a brief visit. We are, as Anne Shirley would say, "kindred spirits." Between our Unitarian Universalist roots, and our crazy travel histories, we have such similar stories that we understand the parts of each other's lives that are hardest for some of our other friends to really empathize with in the same way.

Not everyone wants to hear the details when you come back from Somewhere. I've been fortunate to have a lot of friends and family who are not only willing but eager to hear all my long, sometimes rambling, often mundane stories about living abroad. What is much harder for many of my friends and family to understand is the emotional underpinnings of this addiction to multiculturalism. Maggie gets that, too.

While I was looking for Maggie, I took a nice stroll through Central Park. I've started using the step counter on my phone again with the hope of walking 5 miles per day (my average is 3.5 at this time). I also got some nice photos of the new set of flowers in bloom this week.

From Finding Magnolia

2 Wilderness Memoirs

Brooklyn, NY, USA

I'm working on two major writing projects right now: a set of novels about wilderness conservation and wolf preservation in Montana, and what finally seems like a successful attempt to write a memoir of my Peace Corps service. One morning, perusing the popular East Village McNally Jackson Bookstore, I found myself in the memoir section. I spotted some phenomenal memoirs I had already read, like human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi's Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope. I walked out with two memoirs I could consider "research" for my current projects: Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors, and Here If You Need Me by Rev. Kate Braestrup.

In Fire Season, Connors leaves the urban jungle of New York City journalism for a short vacation with a friend serving as a lookout in the Gila National Forest, and quickly finds himself with a new career: fire-spotting by summer, bartending by winter. I picked it up because one of my novels takes place mostly in a fictional disused Forest Service cabin like the one Connors spends his summers in (except mine is in Montana), and I thought I could pick up some good atmosphere. I did that. But along the way, I got absorbed into his world, seduced into the idea of a long, golden summer alone on a mountain peak, a man and his typewriter and his mostly-loyal dog.

I live in New York, as Connor did, but I grew up in the countryside. I appreciate the yearning for the open trail, of wilderness and wild as far as the eye can see, as I experienced it backpacking the Appalachian Trail with my Girl Scout troop. Even in the depths of the Central Park Bramble at midsummer, you don't get that. But like Kerouac and the college kid who was supposed to be Connors' once-a-fortnight relief, I don't think I would last. I found myself envying Connors' ability to be completely alone with himself and not lose himself.

From April Flowers

I think Kate Braestrup's world is far more manageable, though it emerged from tragedy instead of ennui. I bought Here If You Need Me because I'd heard her speak on the WNYC program On Being. When her husband, a Maine State Trooper, dies in a car accident, she takes up his dream of becoming a Unitarian Universalist chaplain, eventually becoming the chaplain of the Maine Warden Service. What started as following her husband's dream turns out to be exactly what Kate needed for herself. As she writes about waiting with families, accompanying wardens on their rounds, and locating the occasional body, she learns what it means to be present. Being a chaplain, she finds, is only sometimes about praying together or confronting grief. Sometimes it's just about listening with an open heart. It's not about making sense of the world so much as being in the world and really seeing it, feeling it, appreciating it.

Kate's book is about grief, and I did cry. It's also about finding humor, and I laughed more than I cried. Most of all, it's about living a life of faith that is gentle and nonjudgemental, that opens the heart. When she references scripture, it is to bring the text alive in new and unexpected ways, lending it direct relevance to the simple things in life. She writes in a free associative style that should be confusing, especially after the more traditionally linear narrative of Connor's Fire Season. Instead, Braestrup's Here If You Need Me flows from scene to backstory to scene to theology and back to scene so seamlessly that I had finished the book much faster than I was ready for it to be over.

From Lake in Maine

April Flowers

New York, NY, USA

From April Flowers

As the calendar flipped to April, even I started to hate the New York winter a little. Sure, the snow was still pretty when it occasionally fell, but six months of potatoes and cheese and days too frigidly cold for exercise were leaving their mark. I could feel the inertia, the lethargia, the first tentacles of depression creeping in. I joined a Y, but that was a temporary stop-gap at best. What I really needed were crocuses, followed by snowdrops, daffodils, tulips and forsythia. Some cherry blossoms would be nice.

My first attempt to find crocus was actually on a Sunday afternoon at the end of March. "I've got to get out of here," I told Alice, "and find some crocuses!" She wished me luck with doubt in her voice, but I didn't care. I needed some color. Camera in hand, I headed to the Jackie O reservoir in Central Park, but I saw more fauna than flora.

It was about a week later when I decided the wan sunlight was just about warm enough for lunch in Central Park, and my body was in need of a walk with my meal. That was when I found the first full-blooming crocus.

As the month progressed, the flowers got brighter and more and better.



Until the magnolias bloomed and allergies set in for me in earnest.

From April Flowers

Living Our Values

I had the great good fortune to attend the Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office's 2014 Intergenerational Spring Seminar, organized around the recent passage of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). It was an incredible experience you can read about in the article I wrote for the All Souls Beacon.

On the final morning, there was an opportunity to participate in a poetry slam, which is a fixture of many Unitarian Universalist (UU) youth conferences and events. I was not initially intending to participate, preferring to leave it to the youth. I have written perhaps 3 decent poems in my life, only 2 of them are in English, and I'm not much for performing my work. However, over the course of the seminar, I kept thinking about a poem I had written as a college student and once performed at an open mike at my UU fellowship in Maryland. Eventually, I signed myself up to perform it.

I wrote Wor(l)dpower as an English major's anthem back in 2003, a hymn to the proud history and broad etymology of the language. I saw English as encapsulating literally a whole world of diversity. Over the years, I've come to learn more about the legacy of European colonialism and the complicated nature of American neo-imperialism. As we learned more about UNDRIP and the problems of the Doctrine of Discovery, I began to understand my old poem with new ears. On that last night of the seminar, I was up till 2 a.m., pecking away at my little smartphone screen, refashioning it into the poem I would read that last morning:

WOR(L)DPOWER

I have the language of old white men,
Of ivy-ed dons and lords and kings
Ambitious, adventurous queens,
The psyche – and psychoses! – of an ancient patriarchy
In an unfinished, evolving Mother Tongue;

I speak the rhythms of Angle children
And sing a song of Saxon churls;
Mine the speech of Middle Earth
Twixt Grendel and a variable God;
The spoils of Vikings are mine
And the toils of Britons;

My father is a Norman,
Francois Vikingson,
My mother a Celt
With Germanic mother tongue;
Raised in Oxbridge
On perfect inflection
By Geoffrey
Johnson and
Julian
Milton;

Ours a language of adversity and adversary,
Of dominion and destruction, industry and capital,
The imprisoning web and the interdependent.

Behind my lips: Tragedies. Comedies.
the human experience,
Poetry and romance,
Illusion,
Persuasion,
Coercion,
Denial,
Destruction…
And a long, illustrious history
Of hope and concern,
Of optimism, wisdom;

My pen is poised to change the world,
For where there is progress,
Invention,
Intellect,
Creative determination,
Hopes & fears, losses and loves;
dreams…
There I am,
—There!—
I may speak;

Flawed and unbalanced,
Syncretic, adaptive,
Organic summation of my people’s history,
In thought and deed and family tree,
Prepared to learn and grow
Like dreamers and druids,
Professors and poets,
Warriors, politicians, wand’rers and essayists
Who are the roots and the trunk,
the branches and boughs
Supporting the flowers of culture, of hope, of memory and promise
Into the eternally returning
springtime
of humanity;

Mine is the language of unformed babes,
Still in the dust, in the womb, in the waters

Seven generations and seven more
Whose language dwells in houses
we cannot imagine
can only leave space for—
flexible, respectful—
In the language we’re living into today.

Snowhattan!

New York, NY, USA

From Snowhattan!

While everyone else is complaining, I'm really loving the cold, snow and general winteriness of New York City this year. Sure, there was the day I fell twice within a block of my house on invisible ice, and the day that there were Great Lake-sized slush puddles on every other street corner in Manhattan. There was the day I thought my face would be sliced into ribbons by the sharp sleet on the whipping wind.

But I love it, and I'm completely unrepentant. Take, for example, the day that Maria Hernandez Park glowed golden on my evening commute home:

Or the day the city sparkled above the Jackie Onassis Reservoir in the icy wind of sunset:

And the day the All Souls Memorial Garden turned into a fairy grotto in the heavy snowflakes:

This day, too, of snow and fog in Central Park, was ethereal and beautiful:

From Snowhattan!

My glee hasn't diminished yet for the snow, but my coworkers have told me I'm no longer allowed to wear my snowflake earrings, because they're too effective at invoking further snow!

Cornel West: Whither America?

Unitarian Church of All Souls
Manhattan, NY, USA


We pulled out every chair in the building, and it was still standing-room only!

From Cornel West at All Souls

Joy for the World

Unitarian Church of All Souls
Manhattan, NY, USA

From The Hub: Joy

At the behest and by the hard work of the young adults, All Souls has launched a new worship series, the Hub. Held one Sunday evening a month, it is a more intimate, candlelit service for all ages, with several short homilies instead of one long sermon. The music comes from the newer teal hymnal, with accompaniment by piano, guitar and audience percussion.

While All Souls is known as a more "traditional" or "Protestant-style" Unitarian church, the Hub incorporates what I grew up thinking of as quintessentially Unitarian Universalist "traditions," such as a chalice lighting with a reading, and candles of joy and concern. This service is also primarily lay-led, an important part of Unitarian Universalist tradition for me. I'm excited to have this additional diversity in the worship opportunities at All Souls!

From The Hub: Joy

Each service has a theme, and this month's theme was "Joy."

Christmas at All Souls

Manhattan, New York, USA

This morning, as I left my apartment in Brooklyn to go to the Upper East Side, the streets in both neighborhoods were nearly deserted. With the ground still wet from the wintery mix the night before, I was transported back to the days after Hurricane Sandy; I guess the storm affected me more than I thought.

From All Souls Christmas Dinner

I went in to join some of the young adults and many of my other friends from All Souls Church who don't have family in town to celebrate Christmas with. There was an enormous spread of delicious food, good company, Santa Claus, caroling and plenty of good cheer!

Holiday Brass

Unitarian Church of All Souls
Manhattan, New York, USA

From All Souls Brass Band

For Family Christmas on the Sunday before Christmas Eve, All Souls adds a brass quartet to our musical ensemble. Before each service, we gather on the church steps to sing Christmas carols, then proceed into the church for service.

WIN!!

Harlem, New York, USA

Obama WINS!!

Aftermath

Some images I found of New York City, post-Superstorm Sandy:

Pre-Dawn Blackout at the ConEdison Plant:

Morning Slowly Dawns:

from my kitchen window:

From Superstorm Sandy

86th St N Line:

Battery Tunnel:

East Village:

Pile-Up:

Battery Park, apparently:

Sometimes the Job You Need

Isn't the Job You Were Looking For

Manhattan, New York, USA

When I was in high school, we had an interim minister at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Harford County whom I found to be really inspiring. I'd been interested in comparative religion for most of my life--since long before we became Unitarian Universalists--but initially mostly in order to be able to defend my agnosticism from my evangelical classmates. Sometime during Rev. Kathy's interregnum, I realized I was interested in comparative religion for its own sake, and that eventually (in my 50s or 60s for a "twilight" career) I would like to go to seminary and become a UU minister.

But first, I had some other careers in mind. It was being said over and over that my generation would have 3-5 careers or more--not jobs, but careers--over our lifetimes, and these were gonna be mine: simultaneous translator of Arabic, then special education teacher, then bestselling novelist, then UU minister. Along the way, the plan has changed. I passed over the simultaneous translation, tried out the special ed thing in a few venues to varying degrees of success, and have worked on-again-off-again on the novelist gig. In my unemployment this summer, I've been looking for nonprofit entry level program management positions, preferably with connections to Arabic and/or the Middle East and Islamic world writ large. When the Unitarian Church of All Souls I've been attending for more than a year advertised the position of Membership Coordinator, I applied on a whim--or perhaps something of a sense of desperation!

Garth Brooks says that "some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers." Whether you believe in God or not--I'm perpetually on the fence--I think it's a truth universally acknowledged that from time to time we all look in the wrong place with the best of intentions. I think that nonprofit program management in the Middle East could still be in my future, but there are so many reasons why the job I started last week is the perfect job for me right now.

For one thing, I get to stay in one place. I get to stay in the United States for awhile; globe-trotting is fun, but exhausting, and hard on your social life! Better yet, I get to stay here in New York, where I've established a nice network of new friends, and many of my old friends are less than 4 hours by bus away and happy to come and visit. I'm close enough to my parents, siblings and cousins to spend holidays with family, which hasn't often been the case in the last 15 years. I get a chance to try having a relationship that doesn't start with an expiration date.

Better yet, I get to spend the next several years in nonprofit management, so that when I'm ready to go back to the Middle East in a few years, I'll have more than fluency in Arabic and understanding of local culture. I'll also have the technical skills required to get one of those development jobs I really want.

Best of all, I get to work with an office full of people who share my convictions, who are working to make the world a better, more loving place, and who appreciate my talents. It's been a long time since I felt like the whole office thought of me as a good employee.

Battery Park Memorials

Manhattan, New York City, NY, USA

From Battery Park Lunch

This week my temp agency sent me to work at One Battery Park Plaza, and lunch this week went best with the view from Battery Park.

This flower garden is actually a memorial to the victims of 9/11, as explained by a small plaque at one end of the sidewalk that runs through this wildflower explosion. It's exactly the kind of understated memorial for peaceful contemplation that I can really get behind.

The sunlight was soothing, the flowers beautiful, the boats passing by just what a sailor loves, the butterflies entertaining and the photography soothing. All that, and an income, too! Temping is not a bad way to pay the rent!

From Battery Park Lunch