We Will Not Go Back

March for Eric Garner

Staten Island, New York, USA

You may have heard various accounts of the march and rally organized by Rev. Al Sharpton and the family of Eric Garner. When the Racial Justice Initiative at All Souls decided to march, I went, too.

It wasn't that long ago that I was teaching in Canarsie, Brooklyn. All of my students were black, Latino, Caribbean Islanders, and other minority identities. Many lived in Brownsville, East New York, Canarsie, Flatbush and other designated high crime neighborhoods where police presence was strong and stop-and-frisk was a fact of life. Any one of my boys could have been Ramarley Graham. Many lived in low-income housing where armed NYPD are authorized to walk the halls of high rise buildings seeking out infractions. We didn't talk about it, but I knew that, statistically speaking, most of them had been stopped-and-frisked multiple times. They all distrusted the police.

Even at school, all students were subjected to full-body scanning each morning as they entered the building, and school safety officers in the hallways who are employees of the NYPD. Even excelling, well-behaved students were not exempt from these indignities. I know how insulted and degraded I feel taking my shoes and belt off for screening at the airport. As a white woman speaking in an educated register, I know that I will never be profiled and chosen for "random" additional inspections, even with 20 pages of Arabic in my passport. I could only imagine what it felt like for my students to know that they were subject to this treatment every day, in school and on the streets, regardless of their academic, athletic or other achievements.

For this and for so many other indignities to the inherent worth and dignity of people of color in this country, I marched. I listened to this group and that chant, bearing witness to their anger and needs. We carried signs from SEIU 1199, the health workers union of which Eric Garner's mother is a member and organizer.

Kelly was interviewed on camera about why a white person would march for black lives. In part she said that, as a school social worker, these are her children who are being stopped-and-frisked, profiled and harmed. She acquitted herself with exceeding grace, and made the cut for the evening news.

At the end of the march, there was a rally hosted by Rev. Al Sharpton and the extended family of Eric Garner. I was very impressed that every speaker began by thanking the NYPD for the graciousness with which they greeted and shepherded this march, and for the important service they do for our city. And then they all called for reform of the bad apples in the service, and for legal action against officers who take a life like Eric Garner's. Every member of Eric Garner's family spoke, and they all encouraged us to make our voices heard, but urged us to do so without violence. We also heard from city officials, religious leaders, the Nation of Islam, and my hero/girl-crush Debbie Almontaser of the Arab American Association of New York.

It was a powerful day. A beautiful day for a march, a powerful crowd to march with, an important message to tell.

And we all got our picture in the Village Voice online and on Facebook.

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.

Van Cortland Hike

Bronx, New York, USA

From Van Cortland Park Hike

One of the things I love best about New York City is the abundance of public parks and green spaces, a wealth that is growing in quantity and quality as I live here. For the third summer in a row, it is my intention to see some parks this year that I haven't visited.

It's also my goal to do some Saturday hiking this year, to get in slightly better shape, but more for the renewal of a little time in green and nature. While I love New York, I'm not actually a city person by nature.

So when I saw that the Friends of Van Cortland Park was doing a highlights hike of the park on my day off, I jumped at the chance. Van Cortland is a huge park up in the Bronx with lots of more or less untouched woods, cross country and bridle trails, cricket and soccer fields, and some historic buildings.

There's a couple of golf courses with a swamp in between that I'd love to come back and spend more time exploring the edges of.

All in all, it was a nice little hike in the big city.

From Van Cortland Park Hike

Beacon Mountain

Beacon, NY, USA

From Beacon Mountain

Wow. Am I ever sore! At the top of the first switchback, David said, "Is everyone okay? Does anyone think they're not going to make it?" I almost raised my hand and said I'd meet them back in town after. Call it pride, chutzpah or the "stoic Maryah act," I couldn't bring myself to raise my hand. And I would have regretted it.

The views were spectacular, the clouds perfectly fluffy and just the right amount, the company delightful, and we stopped often to drink it all in.


After we had rested a bit at the top, we hiked across to that fire tower, which looks pretty far away in this photo, but was a pleasant walk, mostly fairly flat. It was worth it for the misty view of the New York City skyline over sixty miles away.

From Beacon Mountain

New Goal
I started using the step counter on my phone again on the first. My commute plus lunch averages out to about 3.5 miles of walking all told (home to subway, subway to subway, subway to work). My new fitness goal is to walk 5 miles a day, even on Fridays and Saturdays when I'm not working. Today I gave my average a good head start with 14.1 miles, doorstep to doorstep (by which I mean the apartment doorstep in my third floor walkup!)

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

No Swimming at the Beach!

Arverne by the Sea, Queens, NYC, NY

From No Swimming at the Beach!

When Hannah proposed a day at the beach for Memorial Day, I jumped at the chance. I love the water, the sun, the waves.... We took the A Train out to the Rockaways to our usual beach spot in Arverne.

This is our third summer going to this same spot on the beach: the summer before Hurricane Sandy, and now two summers since. It gets busier and busier each time we go, first with surfers and now with sunbathers, too. Next time probably we'll head farther up the island.

It's also the first time we've been yelled at for going in the water. The reason I love the Rockaways is because they have real waves for jumping and body-surfing and just general interest. I wasn't intending to really swim today, just get wet and jump some waves for a bit. No sooner were we hip-deep than the park police started blowing her whistle. "There's no swimming here," she says. "There's no lifeguard."

"What about the surfers?" They go out farther, and closer to the rocky jetties, with surfboards heavy enough to do some real damage in a collison with someone's head.

"That's different. There's no swimming."

One more reason to go farther up the beach next time!

From No Swimming at the Beach!

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

Accidentally Vegetarian

Brooklyn, NY, USA

Five days last week, I ate an entirely vegetarian diet. It wasn't planned, by me or anyone else. It just happened that, when I opened my refrigerator or visited the grocery store, none of the carnivorous options appealed to me. Spring is in the air, even a hint of summer, and what I wanted were veggies. Just veggies and rice crackers and cheeses. (Vegan, my friends, will never be the lifestyle for me! Not even, apparently, by accident.)

I'm not philosophically oriented to vegetarianism, but it's been a year for me of compelling arguments to partial vegetarianism. It started to really stick in my mind after Elly's Goucher reunion picnic last spring. Sean said something in the course of conversation about being vegetarian once or twice a week because it's better for the environment. It stuck with me as something I could really do, an opportunity to improve my footprint without giving up the deliciousness of beef entirely. Every so often, I would say to myself, "Oo, today I ate vegetarian!" and then go back over my day and realize I'd had beef stew or a ham sandwich for lunch. "Next week," I would tell msyelf.

I was hesitant for primarily two misconceptions. First, I associate vegetarianism with tofu and soy, to which I am allergic, and which has some pretty negative environmental, health and economic impacts as well. On the occasions when I've accompanied vegetarian friends to a vegetarian restuarant, I've found it almost impossible to find something (other than leafy greens, which I really dislike) that I could eat. It got worse when I cut 90% of gluten out of my diet. Second, I had some concerns that I could feel full on a vegetarian diet. Protein is the thing that makes us feel satisfied, and no matter the stuffed feeling of lots of vegetarian mass in the stomach, I was sure I would still feel hungry.

At the Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office's Intergenerational Spring Seminar, one day's meal was entirely vegan. I found their argument compelling. UU-UNO Director Bruce Knotts explained that an enormous contributor to global warming is our meat-centered Western diet. It wasn't the idea but the execution that disappointed me, and reinforced those preconceptions I mention. All I could eat that day were gluten-free veggie wraps at lunch and leftover gluten-free veggie wraps for dinner, because everything else had soy: faux-chicken, tofu, seitan. Even the rice and beans had added soy sauce, for reasons I simply can't fathom.

What finally did it for me last week was a tactic I developed in my first summer in New York City, up in the Bronx. It was a revelation to me the day I realized that if I don't like leafy greens, I don't have to put them in my salad. Instead, I head to the grocery story for fresh veggies in as many colors as I can find, each color representing a different essential nutrient, and chop them up in a big bowl. An apple, carrots, tricolor peppers, a purple onion, brussel sprouts, a pear.... In this bowl, you'll also see garlic-and-herb feta cheese. I make a huge bowl of it, and scoop it into single-serving tupperware for lunch each day.

This summer's twist is that I've passed on the dressing. In the Arab style, I dice a pair of lemons and mix them in. It keeps the apple and pear from browning, and gives it just enough flavor to make dressing superfluous.

Now, I feel like I really can do as Sean suggests and be vegetarian once or twice a week.

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!

Neighborhood Beautification

Brooklyn, NY, USA

Yesterday, I was trying to fathom why there was a legion of Bobcats in my street digging up chunks of sidewalk.

From Beautification

This morning, when I looked out my window, not only were they at it again, but it became clear why. Between these trees going in, and the bike racks appearing all over the neighborhood in the last couple months, you can see the City hard at work here in East Williamsburg.

I'm a little conflicted about this. I know that trees and bikes are good for the environment, that providing these amenities may bring people, like hipsters, to the neighborhood who sign petitions about sustainability and outdoor spaces. All of those are good things. On the other hand, it's one more sign of gentrification in my neighborhood that the city is now paying for all these things, and while the fact that I live here is probably also evidence of gentrification, it wasn't so obvious when I first moved in.

From Beautification

When I first walked this neighborhood, I felt like the only non-Spanish-speaking resident in a neighborhood of young immigrant families with small children. Even at the Chinese owned and operated Chinese restaurant down the street, they speak better Spanish than English. It's part of the charm of New York City for me. And while progress is inevitable and in this case, at least, bears some desirable fruit, it leaves me surprisingly ambivalent.

Also, impressed. It's noon, and they've already completed one whole side of the street!

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