A day or so ago, rather frantically going through a rusted toolbox of grimy old silverware, sifting it into forks and knives and spoons for the yard sale. Wondering why I'm wasting my time with this sifting. Wishing it was all already gone.

As I grabbed the last handful, out of my hand and into the dirt falls the little pink spoon we fed both of our kids with. Every day during all those faraway years.

I dropped the handful back into the toolbox, and knelt down in the dirt. I wiped it clean, held it for a moment, and then just sat the rest of the way down, there in the dirt, looking around at the sky and the trees, there beside the house where no children live, hearing it anyway, all the long ago laughter and cries. The calling out to us by name.

Not the names we were given when we were born, but the names we were given when they were.

The goopy, smeary highchair smiles and frowns, half the spoonful missing their mouth. The quick spoon-move we had learned, deftly clearing chin and cheek. The softest sweetest skin we'll ever know.

I put it in my pocket. This one we should keep.

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It’s not the 4th of July. It’s called Independence Day. And we are the most dependent people that have ever lived. Each and every one of us, in nearly every detail of our everyday lives.

Dependent on impersonal technocratic systems too big and complex for any of us to understand or influence. Dependent for our food, our clothing, our shelter. Dependent for our beliefs, our stories, our mythologies, the meaning of our very lives.

Dependent on an increasingly few obscenely wealthy and powerful people that we claim to dislike and mistrust, and yet nevertheless bow down before with every trinket we order, every card we slide, every app we load, every car we drive, every entree we nuke, every drive-thru we drive through, every platform we engage, every network we stream.

We submit to the sovereignty of these wealthy and powerful people. People who have gotten that way because we keep sending them all our money.

The patterns of our everyday lives fits fairly precisely the clinical definition of addiction. We spend our days and nights saying and doing all the very same things that we have seen addicts say and do to justify their dependency. All of them some variation on what has nowadays become an almost universal claim: It’s not my fault.

To say that something is not your fault is to declare that you are dependent, and that it does not seem worth it to you to put any effort into trying to be otherwise.

The country is what it is now not because of any ideology, left or right. It is the way it is because we are the opposite of what the founders said we must be if there is to be liberty, and justice for all. They said we must be independent. But we are the most dependent people that have ever lived. From the far left all the way across to the far right, that’s what we are.

And hardest part is that that’s the way we like it. We can claim otherwise, but the decisions we make in our everyday lives are proof that we are lying. Lying to others, and lying to ourselves. Every day we grovel and submit, and we like it that way.

Let the blinders fall away. Take a good, long, hard look. You’ll see it, sure enough.

It’s your fault. It’s my fault. It’s our fault.

Stop giving them your money. Stop giving them your time. Stop pledging your allegiance to the people who get fat on your daily submission and surrender to the lure of diversion and convenience.

Just stop. I’m talking to me, too. In fact I’m mostly talking to me.

We all want to be free.

Just stop.

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You are not crazy.

What you feel is no fun, but it is the same as an abscess, pushing the necrotic infection out.

Care for it. Keep it clean. Don't let it get infected, and it will go away once it is done with the healing.

In this culture you have to live in now, the primary clinical indication that you are mentally and morally sound is the feeling that you are losing your mind.

Care for it, that feeling. Care for each other. These two things are the same.

In a culture so careless, care for anything. Care for everything. And in a culture so lost and greedy and bloody and mean, be grateful that you are not okay.

Be grateful, and get to work.

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[Image credit: Jessica Laurel Kane]

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He was called Father, not because he had any children, but because he was a priest. He was famous, respected, and well-off, a professor of Theology at Yale and Notre Dame. By all the conventional ways we measure success, he had it all.

But he was lonely. Lonely, not in any mild or mundane way, but debilitatingly so, to the point that he had been hospitalized, diagnosed with severe clinical depression. The way he was, the way God made him, the way he loved, was expressly condemned by the church he served, by the culture around him, even by the laws of the government he lived under.

At the height of his conventional success, he left it all behind, becoming pastor at a remote home for severely intellectually disabled men, women and children. He spent the rest of his life in sacrifice to these people, who, in terms of career or material prosperity, could do nothing at all for him.

He wrote, with two other priests, a book called “Compassion.” I just finished it, a little before sunrise this Father’s Day morning.

Throughout the book there are drawings, most of which did not strike me as expressive of the themes of the book, at least in any obvious way. Images of agricultural landscapes, human brutality, and overwhelming sorrow, in a style that evoked the cultures of Latin America. They were beautiful and moving, but I wondered about them all the way through.

At the end of the book the author had added an epilogue. This is what it said:

“The drawings in this book may prove more important than the words. Therefore, we will not close this book without telling the painful story that gave birth to them.

One question kept haunting us as we wrote: Are we, well-fed, well-dressed, well-housed, and well-protected people, the ones who should write about compassion? Can we claim that we know to any degree what suffering is, and can we honestly enter into solidarity with those whose lives are literally broken?

Although we attempted to explore as sincerely as possible our own limited spiritual territories, we still remained painfully aware of the agonizing cries of millions of people burdened by cruel oppression. As we worked on this book, we read about families dying of hunger and cold, we heard about the systematic killing of indigenous tribes, we were confronted day after day with the imprisonment of men, women and even children all over the world.

Sometimes this knowledge entered so deeply into our hearts that we were tempted to give up writing, hiding ourselves with tears of shame. But we resisted this temptation in the hope that the writing could be an expression not of hypocrisy but of a sincere desire to participate in the confronting and eradication of the enormous injustices in our world.

In the midst of all these self-doubts and hesitations, a man emerged from the hazy background of our ambiguous feelings, a representative of the world that seemed to accuse us. His name is Joel Filartiga, a medical doctor living and working with the poorest of the poor in Paraguay.

He runs a small clinic in Ybyqui, where people come from great distances, walking or riding in little horse-drawn carts, seeking his help. He speaks their language, Guarani, and listens to the stories of their long struggles, and suffers in his heart with them. While he listens, he picks up his pencil and draws, draws, draws. Through his art, he has become one of the most outspoken defenders of the poor, and one of the sharpest critics of the oppressive Stroessner regime.

The more we heard about Joel, the more we began to realize what compassion is.

It is hard work. It is crying out with those in pain. It is tending the wounds of the poor and caring for their lives. It is defending the weak and indignantly accusing those who violate their humanity. It is joining the oppressed in their struggle for justice, pleading for help, with all possible means, from any person with ears to hear and eyes to see. It is willingness to lay down our lives for our friends.

And then we learned the price he had paid for his compassion. On March 30, 1976, the police kidnapped his seventeen-year-old son, Joelito, and withing a few hours, tortured him to death. Those who had been unable to kill the popular and dearly loved father did not hesitate to take revenge by the brutal murder of his teenage son.

Instead of dressing their son’s electro-shocked, burned and distorted body in fine clothes and making it look peaceful, they laid it naked on the bloody mattress where it had been found. Thus, the hundreds of people who came to offer condolences were confronted with the evil attempt to silence a compassionate voice, and were reminded of Jesus’ words, ‘Because you are not owned by the world, the world hates you.’

In his grief, Joel drew. He drew during the long night when deep sorrow kept hm awake. He drew after long, anxious sessions with judges and lawyers to ask for justice, and he drew after hours of tears.

But he also drew with hope. Hope for himself, his family, his patients, and his people. He drew so that people would know and be awakened. He drew so that his dearly-bought compassion would not be quenched but would become a fire that warms the hearts of many to work and pray for justice and peace.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

And so we see what fatherhood can be.
And we see it’s not something to merely celebrate.

It’s something, like medicine, we have to practice.

It’s something, like a skill, we have to learn.

It’s something, like wisdom, we accrue.

It’s something, like a story, like a decree, we have to enact.

And it’s something, sometimes, we must have the courage to wield.

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Some years back, in the middle of a shift at the bakery we ran, I told the crew I had to go home.

Dizzy and stupid, bleary-eyed and belly-sick, I’d just been working too much. I passed out as soon as my head hit the pillow, and slept until right about noon.

I woke up feeling anxious and unrested, still. I had dozens of things that needed doing, but when I got in the bakery van, for some reason, I just headed out north, right out of town, up to where Crooked Creek comes together with the swampy far end of Upper Klamath Lake.

The wind was blowing strong, and not a soul was around. I walked out the dirt road, and after a while I saw a lone canoe out on the water, the young man in it holding his head high, gazing out toward the north, looking purposeful, contemplative. As I get closer I hear his voice, like a chant, saying something I can't quite make out, over and over again. At first I think it might be a bird call. And then it occurs to me that he might be native, that it might be a prayer. Then, as I come closer yet, I hear it . . .

"Can you hear me now? Hello? Can you hear—No, the connection sucks here.”

I walked on past, for an hour or so, way out with the herons and mudhens, the warblers and teals, where you can really see the big mountains, where the wind goes right through you, where you can really feel the way the water runs from top to bottom over this landscape.

I thought about the long to-do list I had waiting back in town, and I wondered for a moment what in God’s name I was doing way out here in the middle of nowhere.

As I was heading back, on that long straight stretch before you get back to the parking lot, I saw a woman and a dog walking toward me. She was older, and the dog, who walked slowly well out ahead of her, looked like he was older, too. But as the dog got closer, I saw that he was not old at all. I felt a kind of a chill, and as he looked up at me I remember thinking, “Jesus, that’s the saddest looking dog I’ve ever seen.”

As the woman approached, I said hello. When she looked at me, I realized that I knew her. I had worked with her quite a bit many years ago, during a time of bitter conflict in our community. But I hadn’t seen her for a good long while. As I reached down to pet the dog, I laughed and said, “Well, what do you know? What brings you way out here?”

She hesitated, and looked away toward the water. Then she shuddered, shook her head slightly and said, “ I just . . . my husband . . . he died this morning.” The dog had walked over to her, and as she patted him, she inhaled deeply and said, “I just left him.” The dog leaned heavy against her leg. She scratched behind his ear and said, “This was a favorite walk.”

We stood in the wind on that dirt road, the sun coming and going. We talked about how you never know what’s going to happen or when, and about how we can’t waste one second of the time we’ve got together.

Everything we said seemed so impotent. So inadequate. But we kept saying them. Both of us, looking into each other’s eyes, then glancing out toward the sky and water and mountains and birds, then looking again into each other’s eyes. Then both of us, feeling how little words were doing, grew silent, turning, looking together for quite a long while, out at the sky and water and mountains and birds.

As she turned to carry on, toward the west and the open wetlands, we embraced. As we did I could feel the whole of her shaking, the tremors like ripples in water, cast out from the battered, beating center of the heart inside her.

As our eyes met again hers were closed, and she raised her two cupped hands out in front of her face, saying something I could not understand. When her eyes opened they were looking up, and for a moment it seemed like she was somewhere else.

It was only later I learned that this was called a Du’a. A supplication to the divine in the faith she practiced. And it struck me, moved me, because it didn’t feel like it was something she did herself. It felt like something that just happened.

As she was walking away, without turning around, she waved her outstretched arm and open palm all around and said, through tears, “God is out here.”

As I got back in the van, my long to-do list was sitting there on the passenger seat. For years I had always joked that my to-do list is always yelling at me. Never gives me a moment’s rest. But now there it was, not making any noise at all. Just a piece of paper with some black marks on it.

As I got back on the highway I rolled the windows down. Not long after my list was lifted up in the air, spun once around the cab, and then was sucked with a snap out the passenger window. I looked in the rear view mirror, and saw it go under the big rig behind me.

I just kept on driving.

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He was just a little kid then. I had been doing interviews with elders, and had this little voice recorder. We were headed down the driveway, and for some reason I pushed record. The ranch we ran was going down by then, and I think even he felt it happening.

There were barn swallows flitting back and forth in front of the truck, and you could hear the beat of their wings. I remember that because the recorder was going, and it caught my little son and I together imitating the flapping fade-away sound. I have that tape somewhere, lost in a box. Flit flit flit flit flit. The little birds as they flew away.

And I will always hear him screaming “Dad!” over and over again, and then seeing him running all by himself on the long road between the feedbarn and the house. The kittens they had been taking care of, out underneath the big willow tree, the little kittens and their mother too had been torn to pieces by coyotes, the pieces scattered and wet and red all over the matted meadow grass. And him in his little rubber boots, running as fast as he could down the coarse gravel road.

And when we finally decided what had to happen. When it just got too hard, and the money was just all gone, and there was just nothing to do but move away from that place where he was born, the only home he had ever known.

I sat with this six year old boy on the bench on the porch, trying to say it, and I just fell apart like I’ve never done before, not even able to get a sentence out. And him looking up at me, his face frightened and wrinkling up as he started to cry himself.

But he took a breath, and reached out his hand and put it on my leg, and just kept looking and waiting for me to be able to talk. His little hand on my leg.

And then we lived in town, but it hadn’t really got any easier. It was our anniversary, and he and his sister could tell how it was. It was summer and he was home from school, maybe seven or eight years old. I was at work all day, and Mom was at work all day. We had nothing planned to celebrate.

I got home from work, worn out, and walked back into our bedroom. He had hung anniversary streamers over the bed, and a little sign that said, “Happy Anniversery Mom and Dad.” It’s still hanging there today, ten more anniversaries down the road. I don’t intend to ever take it down.

Two little streamers taped to the wall.

The sound of running, calling my name.

His little hand on my leg.

The sound of the birds as they flew away.

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The monastery I was headed to was on top of a butte in a broad valley. It was big, and wealthy, and powerful, and also serenely beautiful, full of all the tangled and ambivalent associations the church has always carried for me.

But I had to get my head straightened out. The world the way it is now has turned me into an angsty and anxious wreck, like it’s done to so many of us. Really, to anyone with a head and a heart that works the way they’re supposed to. With the result, for me, that I started feeling like the palliative intoxicants I always believed I controlled were beginning to take control over me. Too much beer, among other things. Had to rein it in.

I was going to spend most of three days in silence, except for six times a day, in response to the church bells calling the monks and us to Holy Office. Vigils at first light, then Lauds, Mass, Sext, Vespers, and Evening Compline, followed by Grand Silence, from seven in the evening to seven the next morning, during which all you could hear was the sounds of wind and trees, and of creatures other than people.

I made it through one full cycle, and then I skipped one. It was the mid-day Office, called Sext, meant to renew one’s focus on the sacred nature of whatever work we are doing throughout the day. Also, being at noon, it is a daily commemoration of the moment Jesus died on the hill at Golgotha, when the whole world went dark in the middle of the day.

I told myself I would spend the time walking the road down to the bottom of the hill, along which, every hundred feet or so, was a nearly life-sized station of the cross, all fourteen of them, hand-carved a century and a half ago, each one enclosed in a decorated shelter, with captions written in high German, a language used by the monks who first built the monastery. The first station was at the bottom of the hill, and the last was at the top. So I left my little room about an hour before the bell rang for Sext, not sure whether or not I’d regret it.

What I already knew was that these monks made beer. And that they also ran a taphouse, open to the public. And the taphouse was right down there at the bottom of the hill. Just below the first station of the cross there was a little path to the taphouse parking lot.

When I got to the bottom I saw the path. There were people on the path walking toward me, smiling and laughing and, by all appearances, happy. I started walking down the path, and got about halfway there. Then I stopped and stood there a minute, before I turned around and headed back up the hill.

On the way back up I stopped at each station, stepping up on the platforms in front of them, briefly admiring the workmanship, avoiding any deeper engagement. But ever since I was a kid the stations, if I kept on with them to the end, have cast a certain spell on me, pulling me into the narrative -- a growing indignation, and then anger, over the way they brutalized this big-hearted rebel. A growing sorrow over the way his mother was always there, stricken, climbing the hill along with him, finally cradling her grown son in her arms, his bleeding body limp and ashen.

I had just stepped down from the eleventh station and was walking toward twelfth. I looked off into the trees, hearing shouts and laughter from the bottom of the hill. There in the trees in a clearing was a young doe, standing alone, motionless and looking right at me.

I got to the platform in front of the twelfth station, and when I stepped onto it I nearly jumped out of my skin -- because at that very instant the big tower bells began to ring out down the hillside, calling us all to the mid-day office, and the remembrance of that darkness at noon.

I looked up at the caption, but could not understand it. I sent a picture of it to my wife, whose immigrant mother had taught her German. The message came back, “Jesus Dies On The Cross.”

I looked out into the trees again, and the doe was still there, still looking. When our eyes met she turned and slowly walked away, into the trees and out of my sight.

I confess my head was in a kind of a cloud as I walked the rest of the way up the hill. I am someone who’s strongest faith has always been in my own intellect, in the powers of reason I possess. But at that moment, such things felt so frail and impotent.

I could not explain why the bells rang right then.

I could not explain why kind people are tortured and killed.

I could not explain why the doe had come. Or why she stayed.

I couldn’t even say why I had come. Or whether I would stay.

I have been told that there is solace, salvation, liberation, in surrender to such mystery. And maybe I felt a fleeting touch of those things. Or at least their possibility. But more than anything else, honestly, I think what I felt was unsettled. I think what I felt was afraid.

I went back to my room and slept. I slept deeply, through the whole afternoon, until my alarm went off around 5, letting me know it was nearly time for Vespers, where gratitude is offered for the day just passed.

I skipped it. Compline, too, where they acknowledge the day’s completion. Because I wasn’t done with this one yet.

I walked back down the hill to the taphouse, and ordered a flight. I stayed there until they closed. Before I left got a bottle to go.

I walked back up the hill, stopping again at each station, this time staying longer, letting the images settle and sink in. Watching for the doe as I walked between. Talking to the birds, as they sang their sundown songs. Talking to myself I suppose. Talking to someone else maybe, too. God knows who I was talking to. The whole time holding the bottle in my hand.

By the time I got to the top of the hill it was dark. I meant to go to my room, but ended up taking the long way. I found myself on the other side of the hilltop, at the graveyard where the monks are buried. Moss-covered stones from the 1800s. Fresh-cut stones just mounted a month ago, still with flowers and lights. The shoveled scars in the green sod, still healing.

I read the names. Imagined their faces. Imagined their prayers. Imagined their doubts. Imagined their sins. Imagined their searching. Imagined them climbing that hill, up and down.

In a corner of the graveyard there was a small chapel. No bigger than a stall in a stable. I walked toward it, feeling again the fear. I reached for the doorlatch, half-hoping it was locked, but it wasn’t. I went inside, and in the darkness I could just make out that there was a bench for sitting, an old prie-dieu for kneeling, and a bookstand holding a large bible, open to the book of Matthew, chapter twenty-seven.

I couldn’t bring myself to kneel. I sat on the bench, staring into the darkness of the wall above the bible. As I looked, I began to discern the outline of shapes. From the void, shades of light and dark, separating into forms.

There was a candle there, so I lit it. What I had begun to see in the dark was a painted image, as big as the wall, just a few feet in front of my face. It was a woman, a mother, holding her child in her arms. His bleeding body, limp and ashen.

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I sat back down on the bench, and breathed.

I tried to stop my tears, but couldn’t.

My hand went to my heart, unbidden.

So I stayed. And let the patient candle burn.

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I ran away from the news again.

There were specific triggers, yes, but deeper down it was more a general revulsion. To the cyclically addictive onslaught, and the way it has of keeping us alienated from the world we’re actually in, and from the people we’re actually near. Even our own insides, body and mind.

Yes, we need to stay informed. God knows, in this day and age. But the most obvious yet somehow invisible fact about the current state of journalism is that the communicative machinery and institutions, and more importantly, the nature of our attraction to their output, is not primarily about being informed -- even though it casts a spell to make us feel that way.

No, it’s more like an open-source morality melodrama, with compulsive audience participation, in which the criteria for selection and evaluation is not relevance, or importance, or speaking truth to power, but simple blathering outlandishness, flailing for our scattered and erratic attention.

Which has this one fundamental effect: It privileges those voices with a talent for embellishment, for strategic omission and expedient falsification, and spotlights those personalities with a predilection for monetized self-promotion and weaponized exhibitionism.

It is easy for us to claim that all of this nonsense is not important to us, and that we just want to be informed. But that is, of course, bullshit.

The fact is we seek it out. We wallow and revel in it. And when confronted with the sort of complexity and nuance and disciplined tedium it takes to convey anything approaching the multifarious and multifaceted truth, we yawn and turn away . . .

They call this thing we stare at the web. And it is fitting.

Because we approach it with curiosity, with innocence, with a perfectly legitimate self-interest. But when we reach out and touch it -- sometimes with caution, sometimes abandon -- we are caught. And as our struggle rattles the strands, the dark presence at its center, motionless and silent, awakens and begins to move.

It makes no difference that all we wanted to do was reach out and touch. Because the point of this pernicious weave is not connection, or community, or access to our needs.

No, the point is not to touch, but to entangle. Not to enable, but ensnare.

And when the poison goes in us, and we are dragged to the center across that beguiling filigree, and we are wrapped up snug in those silky unyielding secretions . . .

There is a part of us that, somehow, doesn’t seem to mind.

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Pearled barley sourdough with pecans and molasses.

Here’s hoping we find gratitude this morning, and the courage to fight the fight they’ve thrust upon us.

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“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.

If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love ourselves, and the reflection of ourselves we find in them”

— Brother Merton, OCSO

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I'm getting to where I set out to be, beating this beast back into the hole it crawled out of.

Back into a narrow, confined paddock out on the outskirts of my days and nights, my thoughts and deeds, where it can be called upon, saddled and reined, and only when I make the decision that it might be able to serve me.

And not, as it has for too long, stomping and snorting and crashing and shitting, goring horns swinging all through the brittle shards of my increasingly scant and fleeting chinashop days on this sacred and endlessly miraculous earth.

Stop.
Look where you are.
I mean where you can reach,
with only the senses and limbs that you have.

Look inside you, too. Into that infinitude.

Look long. Look hard. Look soft as well.

Tell yourself what you see.

The ancient sages and seers
who invented the word "tekno"
did not imagine electric machines.

The word, for them, meant art, and skill.
More than that, the word for them meant Creation.

Which means that we
are the technological solution we've been waiting for.

More vast and infinitesimal,
more intricate and eternal,
more useful and original,
more elegant and irreplaceable
than any and all of their gee-whiz trinkets.

Worth more by any measure
than any speculative executive
or fleeced and vested engineer
will ever be able to even

begin to imagine.

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These four spent a lot of good and hard years together, day by day, making it through and growing. Drifting, together and then apart, but always the soft and stubborn tether still between.

Don’t get as many pictures of us nowadays. But here we are scrambling down a streambank, down to the Blue River, loud with riffles and round rocks, where the deeper pools were crowded with dark lunkers, and the osprey flew by low, tracing the sunsparkled thalweg, upstream and then back down.

Trout on the woodfire for supper. Later darknight fireglow tales, confessions, rants and such, from each in turn. In the morning, we ask if anyone heard the wolves, two of them, howling across to each other sometime before the sunrise.

Somebody lamented the end, having to go back to reality. But no.

No, no, no. God help us.

It’s reality that we are having to leave, not go back to.

God knows what to call what we have to go back to. But no, not reality.

We have to stop talking like that’s what it is.

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Every spring our meadow turns deep lavender blue with the blossoms of the Camas lily.

The Chelamela band of the Kalapuya, who dug the bulbs in our meadow back before, in genetic terms, there was any such thing as white people, called it “T’ip” -- a variation of a word meaning “sweet.”

Recently our son went down a rabbit hole, studying about how the bulbs were harvested, cooked and stored. He went out into the meadow with a stick and dug up a bagful of bulbs. He cleaned and cooked them at very low heat for three whole days, then dried them in order to preserve them.

They taste so much better than you might think. Our son described the taste as “hazelnut, fig and waffles.” I’d say a bit of molasses and tobacco as well. The aroma, potent and earthy, is just so distinctive and pleasant.

And you have to imagine, this is what it must have so often smelled like, around all those ancient campfires, surrounded by those people, the ones we took it all away from. The ones who are still here, making their lives in this valley. And waiting.

So this morning we made a cake. Rehydrated the bulbs into a slurry, beat with some butter, eggs and brown sugar. Little bit of vanilla and honey, along with some currants and walnuts. Plus wheat flour, grown and milled by people we know.

I don’t know how to tell you how good it is.

I makes me think there are still things we all need to learn.

Learn, so that we might finally belong in, belong to, the places we are.

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Years ago my friend lost his elderly father, out running on a path by a busy road, killed by a young man, driving very drunk.

A few years later another elderly man, Ralph Watah, was out walking on another path, and began to have a massive heart attack. A young man saw him and ran to his aid, calling for an ambulance, saving the man’s life. The young hero, Armando Lara, was the same person who killed my friend’s father.

The friend who lost his father told this story this Easter morning, finding, and giving, hope in the miracle of redemption.

I myself have been struggling with this Easter and Lenten season, after a lifetime of sincere observation and celebration. I don’t really know why. It just all felt kind of empty, hollow, maybe even a bit frivolous, given the way God has let the world get nowadays.

But my friend’s story hit me like a bolt from the sky. Or maybe like an earthquake from inside me. I started to type a short thanks for his post. It took me an hour to finish it. This is what it said.

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Three days ago my brother testified in the trial of a driver who killed an elderly person running by a busy street. The runner was a 70-year old emeritus professor and concert violinist. The driver was a 57-year old white male, clean cut, fit, and a partner in an architectural firm. The accident occurred at 10:00am on a weekday. The man’s blood alcohol was twice the legal limit.

My brother was first on scene, on his way to walk his dog in a nearby dog park. He helped the man out of his vehicle, and then he went up to the woman, whose physical condition made it clear that she was beyond any hope.

Yesterday the jury found the man guilty. The local paper interviewed the woman’s family, and the overwhelming sorrow and pain they felt came through with every word they said. The paper also interviewed the man’s family, and the overwhelming sorrow and pain they felt came through with every word they said.

In the pain and sorrow the woman’s family and friends felt, there was also anger and resentment. At the senselessness of the loss and also at the individual person who caused it.

The driver will carry a crushing burden of remorse. The anger and resentment will be the crushing burden carried by the woman’s family and friends. Who knows which burden is heavier to carry. Who knows which will do the most damage to the one who carries it. Who knows if there will be any redemption, for any of them.

When Armando Lara helped save Ralph Watah’s life, I suppose that we can say that he was redeemed for the pain he caused before. Maybe he would agree with that, and maybe not. I don’t think I would if I was him. I feel like the burden of remorse would be just as heavy, regardless.

But that other burden. The anger, resentment, and blame, not just at the person who caused the pain but also at just the whole brutal world where such senseless tragedies happen. The burden carried by those who loved the one who was lost.

Would it not be lighter, knowing that a different instance of the same pain and sorrow was prevented by the very same life that caused their own? Could it not give someone the solace of faith that there are designs that God has that we do not understand, and that our suffering, so often, turns out to be the precondition for blessings we cannot foresee?

Would it not help ease us away from the prison of resentment and blame, from a world divided into good and bad people, into sinner and victims, clearing away that fog, showing us the true nature of Creation as God meant it to be, built on a foundation not of division and antagonism, but of love, plain and simple, for all of God’s children, including ourselves.

This is the redemption this day is about. Not a hope that sinners will turn into saints, but a realization that we are all sinners, redeemable not through our judgement and condemnation of those we feel have caused us to suffer, but through embracing the mystery and miracle of God’s creation, releasing the burdens we load on to our own hearts, doing the one thing God told us to, over and over and over again:

Love one another. Those who curse us, no less than those who bless us. That is what God told us to do.

He told us this for one reason: Because he loves us, and wants us to be free.

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This was tipped over and falling loose on a steep road cut, so I scooped as much of it as I could into two open hands and walked a mile and a half to the truck carrying it in front of me.

It’s Holy Week, tomorrow the Triduum. This trillium then, I carried it with me.

It limped over bad when I got it home and into a pot. I looked it up and learned that you should never pick them, not just because it’s often illegal, but also because it sometimes take ten years for the trillium to grow before it finally produces a single blossom.

Sandy said put it outside, so I put it outside, and then we went to bed.​ The next morning it was upright and reaching, three leaves this way, three petals that. The green and the white, which with luck we’ll now watch turn to pink and then purple, before it is done. If done is what it will be.

Tomorrow we remember the creator of the universe kneeling and washing the feet of beggars. Just before he is betrayed. And just before he gets killed.

We’re hoping we can keep this thing alive. Yes the trillium but also everything else we are worried will not survive.

I feel bad for taking it from where it was. But that’s what happened, and now it’s here.

We’ll give it water, and room to grow, and all the hope we have left.

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[A story written for a child, on a day we fought against kings.]

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It was concrete on either side of her, tight, her lower limbs stuck in the muck. But up above she could just about see over the top. There was light that way, from a city sky you could only see bits of, except for the blue reflections, passed back and forth, in all the big windows of all the tall buildings.

She wouldn’t be here long, she knew. And because of the way they all had to move, everything was going to happen slowly. Her kind was born with the memories of their forbears, stretching back into the endless past, to the ancients.

She knew what they were all trying to do, without anyone telling her what it was. She knew that they had been fighting this same battle for generations uncounted, fighting against the hard things, and that there was little hope that she would be there for the battle’s end. But they began their lives, and began each and every day of their lives, with what little hope they had, cradling it in their hearts like it was the surest promise there could ever be. It was the seeds that carried all this wisdom in them. Seeds that found the soft places, hidden among the hard things.

As she rose up toward the edge of the concrete, the passing feet never seemed to stop. It was better when it got dark, but that was not when they grew. She looked on either side of her, and winced at the frayed and bleeding flesh of her older brothers and sisters, who had pushed up and been stepped on, then pushed up again and again, no matter how many times they were stamped back down. She thought she had a day or so before she was hit the first time. She imagined what it would feel like, and wondered if it would kill her. She could smell the air of the ocean, and it pulled her. She turned back up toward the sun, and stretched with all she had.

She could hear the others around her saying, they would go to the new construction tonight. It was only a city block away, but that was a long way for them. They had to move especially slow during daylight, so as not to be noticed. Once it got dark enough, they could lift themselves and walk, but it was still slow going, and they had to be so very careful not to be seen. In all the ages since the resistance began, since the first of the Bilders arrived, there had only been a few mistakes. Somebody had seen them walking. There are stories that the Bilders tell about these times, but it’s a lucky thing that the Bilders cannot believe in things like her, because the stories only make them laugh.

The new construction had been going for nearly a year. It was a difficult thing, because there had been so much hope when the building had caught fire and come down. The sun and rain hit the ground on that place for the first time in over a hundred years, and the fire had turned the hard things soft, turned them into something that could feed them. Turned the impenetrable edges into places where the seeds could come to rest.

They’d started going there as soon as they could, as soon as the heat from the fire went away. And for a while, like every other time, the Bilders seemed to be helping, moving out the hard things that the fire couldn’t change, scraping out the piles until the soil could see the sun. They knew they didn’t have much time, and they fought with the fierceness and determination of their race, advancing, colonizing, building communities, sinking roots.

But it wasn’t long before the Bilders started bring the hard things back. They carried the hard things that couldn’t move on the backs of hard things that could. And other hard things came, with blades and buckets and teeth, and tore everything they had built apart. Tore all her brothers and sisters to pieces. Tore it all down to soil again, then tore out even the soil itself, and took it somewhere far away. There was another building there now, much bigger than the one before. And most all of what little soil they left was covered back up with hard things again. Concrete and asphalt, with no cracks at all.

The Bilders had left some patches open here and there, and covered the soil that lived there with soil from somewhere else. They killed what few holdouts there were left with a poison rain they shot from a gun, and then covered the soil with a black sheet, blocking the sun wherever the they didn’t want the soil to see it, where they knew she and the other fighters would find a pace to dig in.

They carried in tubs and buckets with what seemed like distant kin, although when they heard them talk they couldn’t understand much of what they were saying. The Bilders planted them in lines and circles and other shapes, all within the little patches they’d left soft. The way they’d been planted, and the way they just stood there, it was almost like they didn’t even know they could go wherever they wanted to.

She knew, deep down, this battle was lost. They all did, but it never occurred to them that this should make any difference at all. She was new, yes, but the wisdom of the seeds made her feel older. Older than the Bilders, and older than anything they had ever made. To her and all her kin, the Bilders had just arrived, and it wouldn’t be long until they were gone again. She knew this. They all knew this, and knew that all they had to do was wait until the time came. And until that time came, they knew they had to fight.

When she got there she joined the others, taking up positions around the new flat concrete. Her kind, her closest kin, were known for their strength, silent and relentless. Their seeds would travel with the wind, through the air or along down low, seeking out the low spots where they could settle, taking root. Since the war began, they had taight themselves how to go underneath, with the help of the creatures underground, who have also always fought the Bilders. They learned how to plant themselves under the hard things, concrete and asphalt and gravel and such.

And then, once there, with all the old wisdom inside them, they imagined the sun, the rain, and the air. Imagined this with all their strength, with a mute force of warriors, bringing together the imagining of all those that battled with them. Raising up a wave of imagining that sometimes even the Bilders could feel -- although they never paid any mind to it, much less knew what it was. This is what she had to do this night.

She followed the path that had been laid for her, under the concrete just in front of the doorway where the Bilders went inside. She slid into a hole that they’d prepared for her, out at the edge of the concrete, and pushed herself into the darkness, into a passage so small and tight that it took all she had to move herself at all. She pushed herself until the passageway ended, where it opened up just slightly, and they had left a small mound of seeds from her kind. She touched the seeds, gathered her mind, reached out to the others, and began the imagining.

The imagining fed her strength beyond what any science could explain, and she began to push, rising, feeling for the weaknesses, seeking and splitting, reaching for the sun and rain and soil she saw and felt inside her cells. Upward, ever, through places so small that any Bilder would refuse to believe they existed, her imagining gradually giving way to actual sensing, the feel of the sun and rain and air themselves, closer with each further crack, until she finally broke open, and the sun and rain and air rushed in.

And she pushed herself up into it, fearless, thoughtless for herself. Fighting for all her kind, all her kin no matter how distant. For all the other creatures. For even all of the Bilders, who were also kin, though they’d forgotten it very long ago. For all of everything everywhere, because that was the only thing worth fighting for, in the end.

It had taken her through the night, and the early sun was bright, shafting through all the tall buildings. She looked around, and she saw that many of the others had made it as well. They began to talk about how they would bring themselves together, spreading longer and pushing wider, with an imagining shared between them of the crumbling, of the gradual shifting from hard to soft, from grey to green. The ones that had made it sooner were adorned with little drops of dew, vibrating in a gentle sea-born breeze, sparkling in the morning sun. She sat and rested, wondering if the dew would find her, too. That was when the first of the Bilders began to arrive.

The Bilders emerged from their machines, and when they came to where she was they stopped and stood in a circle, staring at her and the others, shaking their heads and talking. They talked about the poison rain, and they talked about more concrete. They talked about the money, which they seemed to always be talking about, though she never understood what it was. They talked about the money longer than they talked about any of the other things.

Then they left their circle, and went walking back toward their machines. Then they came back again, carrying tools and laughing. She knew what was going to happen. They all knew what was going to happen.

That was when they first felt the earth begin to tense, felt the push and pressure, all the way down as far as they could feel, building suddenly, silently, unmistakeably. They were amazed and bewildered that the Bilders just kept walking toward them, as if they couldn’t even tell that it was happening.

When the tension finally gave way, there was a sound like the end of the world. All the Bilders suddenly fell to one side, dropping their tools, reaching their arms out, falling right on top of each other. All the hard things began to act like water. The concrete bulged up all around them, and then dropped back down again. Pieces of the tall buildings began falling from above, landing on the machines, landing on the Bilders, who were running every direction, screaming out things that she couldn’t understand.

Far down at end of the street that ran down to the ocean, the asphalt began to rise and buckle, and the rising and buckling moved with terrible speed, up the street and toward them, all the buildings on either side buckling, crumbling and falling, some of them bursting into fire. Black smoke blasted out into the street, then billowing clouds of raging flame. Then a thick black ash, raining down into the street, on to all the Bilders, staggering, running, screaming, falling. On to all of their machines. On to everything everywhere.

But she looked up into the sky, and the sky was deep and endless blue. The sun was shining clear and bright. There wasn’t any wind at all.

The rise in the street kept coming at them. Ahead of it the city was all there, just like every other day, but behind it there was nothing but black, and flame, and falling, the screams of the Bilders drowned out by the unfathomable roar of the earth itself.

When the rise in the street finally hit her and the fighters, it threw them all in the air, up with all the shattered concrete. As it passed they came back down again, some of them still alive, many of them dead, or buried alive. She had landed on a big mound of soil that the Bilders had left, above the rubble of the building they were making, which had fallen just like all the others.

A wind had risen from the sea, blowing away the black clouds, just enough that she could see down the street, all the way to the sea, calm and sparkling in the sun. But far out into the water she saw another rising, a faint, grayish, undulating line, rising higher all the time, moving faster than anything she’d ever seen, marching like an army, straight toward the shore and the city.

As the wave approached the shore it was standing tall, crashing over itself, pushing the lower water first, up into the rubble and rushing into the long depression that used to be the street, raging, like a river running backwards.

Then the mother wave itself, deafening, falling like a mountain on to everything, pushing a wall of shattered city ahead of it, washing over the river in the street, washing over the smoke and fire, washing over all the machines. Washing over hopes and dreams, all the sorrow and regret, all the names and memory, the monuments to anything this city ever honored.

Crashing over her mound of soil, nearly taking her away. Rising higher and higher, pushing her down deeper, colder, darker, until she could not feel the air anymore, could not hear the other fighters, could not hear the screams of the Bilders. Deeper and deeper, until finally the sunlight dimmed to nothing, and the churning darkness overwhelmed her.

She swayed back and forth in the water, blind and silent. She wondered if this was the end. She thought that it probably was. She had never felt so alone.

But she steadied herself, gathered her mind, and then she began to imagine.

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Most of the time I don’t know what else to do but get out and away from it all, otherwise I just feel like my head is falling apart.

If I can get out far enough and long enough I can start to see again that I didn’t actually get away from it all, I came to it all. That I didn’t escape reality, I went out into it, leaving behind a manufactured maelstrom that is not only so unreal, but is also so callow and fleeting, so recently here, and so soon to be gone, compared to all this life and these landforms, so ancient and unending.

I have to see if I still have it in me to stay out there longer, to learn again from these forests and streams and mountains what it really is to be a mind and a heart that is alive and walking on this earth.

When I was young we used to call it training, spending weeks and months making sure we were in good enough shape to do it. At this point I’m just trying to find out if it’s possible for me at all anymore.

Today was the first day with the full pack on, about 35 pounds, maybe five miles, out along the streams and then up to the top of the ridge.

The trees you see, growing right along the ridgeline, are far older than the arrival of settlers and wagons, of our roads and our chainsaws. Some of them are eight feet across, and there are maybe a couple dozen of them.

When this forest was clearcut in the 1947, they didn’t have the machinery to get to the ones at the top, so they were spared. They are the only ones you can see anymore that are like this. Unless you count all the similar-sized 1947 stumps, rotting as you pass on the trail going up.

I could not help but put my hands on these old mother trees, trying to feel how much bigger they are than me, and how much older. How much more sacred and priceless and irreplaceable than almost all of what comes across the various screens we stare at back in what we somehow still manage to think of as Civilization . . .

Maybe you heard the news last week. The news that the government, your government, has announced that they are quadrupling the number of trees cut in targeted Oregon forests.

This is one of the forests. These are the trees they are going to cut down, now that we have made machines that are big enough.

I don’t know how else to put it. Walking these woods, I feel like I am visiting murder victims, just about to breath their last. The killers smiling and waiting, anxious to do their moneydance on the graves.

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"The real mushroom is underground. The parts you see are just a brief apparition: A cloud flower.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood 

This is what we are like, I think.

This one and several others like it were clinging to the vertical cut face of a giant ancient tree that had fallen across a path on a steep and saturated hillside above a cold and rushing river.

It came out of where most of the rest of it was, silken, invisible, delicately everywhere inside what for a time used to be one kind of intricate life and one kind of towering beauty, but then stopped being that kind and became the next kind of intricate life and the next kind of towering beauty. 

Tiny, gigantic. Ancient, ephemeral. These are just words we made up. No life isn't infinite. No life isn't eternal. No life is ever forgotten, there in the invisible delicate silken threads of what comes after.

This is what we are like, I think.

Forever alive, first one way then the next, and then the next, and so on forever.

Clinging, we miracles, then letting go. 

Fallen, finally resting. 

Bringing each other cloud flowers.

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We called her Wanda. Weighed 1,462 pounds. That’s big even for a cow.

She had this long-ass face. In fact, if her head was all you saw and if her ears stood up instead of sticking out, I think you could have mistook her for a horse.

I remember one time I got the tractor stuck up to its axles, right out in the middle of the field uphill of the stock pond. I dug and pulled on it for two days and it only went down deeper. I wore my long irrigation boots, because I’d be standing there up to my hips in it.

On the third day, I went up while the frost was still on the mud, hoping I could get a bite. Like the other mornings, I spent a good five minutes just leaning on the shovel, looking at it. Long sunrise shadows and cold orange morning light. Pulled a tip of silver sage, smashed it, smelled it, threw it in the pit. Nothing else to do but do it.

Right then there’s a splash in the stock pond, too big for a fish. Or anything else I could think of right off. I looked down toward the pond but the sun was right in my eyes. I tipped my head so my hat would cut the glare, and there she was. Wanda looking me straight in the eyes, stuck up to her belly in the mud on the edge of the pond.

I’m looking at her, she’s looking at me, both of us looking like we’re about to laugh. Both of us, stuck good.

I tell you it was funny as all hell.

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But it was the next year she got the cancer in her eye. She had a new calf and we didn’t want to mess with her, but it was bad. We caught the calf and headed toward the pens with Wanda following. We got her in the chute and finally got a good look at it. It was bad.

I couldn’t think of anything else to do. The dogs knew. They were sitting there waiting. Nothing else to do but do it.

We put a soft loop on that long-ass nose, pulled her head up tight to the side, and started cutting. It’s one thing cutting a leg or a gut or whatever. Cutting open a face is a whole different thing. Big bloody cancer eye looking right at me.

You have to cut big so you can get to everything, but you have to leave enough hide to sew it back up again. So cut, then peel everything back until there’s just that wet ball and a bunch of muscle. Then push and pull until you can get to the nerve, and the whole time that eye still looking at you. Then cut, and clamp, and then cuss the dogs away while you look for somewhere to put it.

Wanda kicking and huffing snot, snapping back against the rope, a dripping six inch hole right in side of her head.

She settles just for a second, makes a quiet mama noise. The baby hears it and answers back, and Wanda’s like to jump right out the top of that chute.

Right then the dog knocks a bucket over trying to get at the eye, and when I tried to kick the dog I kicked the bucket instead, and it flew up and hit the hired guy right up under his chin, gunking up his face and the whole front of him with blood and puss and hide and tincture of iodine. So he wasn’t too happy about that.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, would you sew up that fucking hole?”

The dog ran up and grabbed the eye, and the hired guy threw the bucket at her as she ran off under the gate, the big nerve hanging out the side of her mouth.

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Wanda lived another seven years. Had seven more babies. We kept her longer than we usually do. I guess I took to her. I lost an eye myself when I was just little. Only ever had the one. My old man caught it with a hayhook, loading the barn. Tore it right out. Of course he didn’t mean to. Sure caught hell for being in the way though.

When the time came, we sorted her off from the rest. Put her out to grass instead of shipping. Killed her ourselves. Cut and wrapped and then ate her for a year.

I don’t know. Couldn’t see bringing a cow like that to town.

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“But that is the true beauty of a childhood: to be so fully immersed in the moment you have no need to think of the next day or even the next few hours. It is enough simply to be with your dog panting quietly on the dry grass in the shade, listening to the crows call overhead, eating fruit.”

-- N. Spiridakis

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When I was small I loved to climb trees.

So when we first visited the new house my Grandma and Grandpa had built, and I saw the big Gravenstein apple orchard, stretching out down the gentle slope behind, I jumped out of the car and just ran out into it. It was early autumn, and we were there to help with the harvest.

Despite all the travels and travails since then, I’ve not forgotten the sharp and brightened sights and smells and tastes and feel of that orchard. The clear ocean air, the pungent windfall under our feet, the crushed leaves and snapped twigs. Polishing an apple on your flannel shirt. That snap and tart of that first exploding bite.

In most of the places I have lived, far from where Gravensteins are grown, they’ve been very hard to find. They don’t travel well, and they don’t last long. The harvest window is short, and the ripe fruit holds only lightly to the stem, so the big mechanical harvesters don’t work with them. You have to take care with them, and pay close attention, and tend to them daily, with human hands.

Which makes them not fit for the world we live in today.

How delicious they are, how nourishing, how locally adapted, how versatile in a kitchen -- the reasons, throughout our evolution as a species, that we chose the foods we did -- just aren’t what matter anymore. Not to the immense and mechanized organizations we’ve trusted our sustenance to. And not, therefore, because of that trust, no matter how much we tell ourselves otherwise, to us.

So at the bakery, we had to plant our own. And we’re getting good bloom this season, despite the frigid spring.

We’re dedicating all these stubborn budding blossoms to Grandpa Ed & Grandma Lucy.

They are gone from this world now. Like so many of those old ways, the old knowledge about how to draw our lives from the land we walk on every day. The old wisdom about what we know, still, somewhere in our hearts, really matters more than anything else.

The people who choose what we see each day, the sorcerers inside the gadgets we can’t tear our eyes away from, cannot let us see what matters most — even while the birds fly and the trees blossom and the sun shines all above us, and below us the soil breathes and our beloved forebearers moulder and the whole incomprehensibly vast planet tips back and forth and back and forth right beneath our feet. They cannot let us see what matters most because, more than anything, it is more invisible to them than it is even to us.

But it is there, living still.
Waiting for us to remember. 
Waiting for us to uncover it, anew. 
Waiting for us to return to it 
like the forsaken only home we ever had, 
in the boundless imperishable Spring 
that cannot help but come again.

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I always remember my room as dark.

I shared it with my little brother, him on the top bunk and me on the bottom. Hardwood floors and a hollow-core door with a hole in one side from something one of us threw at the other. There was a window on the south side, looking out onto the garden and the chicken run. It was a good-sized window, facing south, so I don’t know why I always remember the room as being dark. But I do.

I had an AM radio I built from a kit I got at Radio Shack, and if I was in the room it was on. Nearly always KFRC, the big top 40 station in the big city our parents brought us to sometimes. The Big 610. Dr. Don Rose. If you know you know, just like everywhere else. I liked it all right, but even then I chafed at the fact that someone else was deciding what I was going to hear, and I didn’t always agree with their decisions.

Then one day there was a thing on the counter. It looked kind of like a radio but it had buttons instead of dials, and it had a little clear plastic window. Dad said, “Watch.” He pushed one of the buttons and the sound that came out of it was like nothing I’d heard before. My mouth fell open and my eyes got wide as I looked at it in wonder. Dad said, “You can listen to whatever you want, whenever.” He started singing along. “Come on over baby, we got chicken in the barn. Whose barn? What Barn? My barn.”

I looked up and said, “Who is that?” He just said, “The Killer.”

I was hooked. I snuck the tape machine into my room whenever I could get away with it, playing the tape over and over. Whole Lotta Shakin’, Great Balls of Fire, High School Confidential, Breathless, What’d I Say, Drinkin’ Wine Spo-dee O’Dee. It was all just like magic to me, and for the first time in my life I got up and danced, all by myself, there in the dark little room.

At the time, it didn’t occur to me that every song he sang was about getting a girl to fuck him.

Of course I didn’t even know what that was back then. And the plausibly deniable double entendres built into lyrics of that era had me thinking it really was all just about chickens and barns and some kind of incendiary spheres.

But I was, in fact, getting to the point where I was looking at the girls at school in a different way. Feeling things I hadn’t felt before. Spontaneously and enthusiastically imagining scenarios that would have repulsed me just a year or so before. God knows nobody was telling us what was going on inside us back then, what these changes even were, much less how we should adapt to them. But that didn’t mean we didn’t have to. We needed some kind of guide, something to model ourselves on.

The models I’d been working with up to that point had been Bugs Bunny, The Lorax, Speed Racer, Billy Colman and his redbone hounds. That kind of thing. They were still in there somewhere, but they weren’t much help with all this new hormonal reality we were entering into, because they never even talked about it at all.

But there were lots of others, everywhere I looked, everywhere I listened, who talked about it all the time. Men with long hair and men with buzzcuts, men in bellbottoms and men in suits, men crooning ballads and men screaming metal, men smelling of Old Spice and men smelling of patchouli -- men with style and bravado and money and freedom and everything else any young man could ever dream of having. And what they were saying seemed to make a lot of sense. I mean, it synced up neatly with what burned inside, and it gave me clear and simple guidance as to what I should be doing with all these new urges and impulses raging around in my guts and my brain.

And what they were saying was “Fuck the girls.” Period, end of sentence.

So that’s what we went with.

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As the years went by I learned more about Jerry Lee Lewis. In fact just this month I read a book about him. The author considered him one of the true greats of all time, a mad genius unequaled in the annals of American music. He included photos of Lewis with a pantheon of my own greatest idols -- Keith Richards, Mick Fleetwood, Bryan Ferry, Merle Haggard, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Waylon Jennings, all of whom made pilgrimages to meet him, or otherwise considered him as their hero and friend. He talked about how Bob Dylan wrote a song for him. How a tape of Lewis’ music was brought to the moon on Apollo XII. How John Lennon, meeting him for the first time backstage, kneeled and kissed his feet.

The author also talked about how all of this adulation came after Lewis married his 13-year-old first cousin, daughter of his bass guitarist, while still married to his first wife, who he married when she was sixteen. And after one of his later wives was found mysteriously dead in their pool. And after another wife’s corpse was found bloody and bruised in their bridal bed, which Lewis explained by saying that “She was a bad girl.” And after being let off, no charge, free as a bird, every single time, for each and every one of these abuses, and many, many more. The cops and judges and other authorities, talking just like they were victimless crimes.

After all of this, there they were, my greatest idols, my glistening masculine templates, knowing it all but still standing there, smiling for the cameras, drinks in the air, glowing with pride and adulation, arms affectionately around this unconscionable monster.

This is where I learned to be a man. And this is where I learned what women were. From a killer and his accomplices. As a young man, I hadn’t known all of what he’d done. But I knew enough of it, and yet I let him off, too, just like the rest. I sang his praises, I sang his songs, I encouraged others to share my enthusiasm, and I somehow always managed to shove his relentless and violent misogyny off into some perverse, sludge-ridden, willfully ignorant corner of my dark and wretched head. And if someone insisted on bringing it up, I would always say something like, “Yeah that was fucked up for sure. But hey listen to this . . .”

That book I read, though, it hit me deep. As I finished it and set it down, I felt a kind of tangled, contradictory mix of regret and belligerence. One voice saying, “How could you have been so callous, so willing to look the other way, so able to let such a man be an influence and inspiration?” And the other voice, the one who wanted to be just like him because nobody ever told him what to do, because he was able to take the desire that made him feel helpless and convert it through wealth and violence into a corrosive delusion of dominance, said, “Oh give me a break, it’s only rock and roll, and I like it, so fuck off, and don’t you try to castrate me into some pussy-whipped pantywaist.”

Both of those voices, one old and one new, shouting and echoing in my head at the same time, as I walked across the room to the stereo, and put the record on.

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It wasn’t a decision I made. I didn’t examine and judge the way I had been, or deliberately reprogram my head and heart with preferable, more socially acceptable ethics and behaviors. I didn’t evaluate alternatives and make a conscious choice. I didn’t do anything because anybody told me I should or had to.

All I know is that when the music started to play, I felt a sickness in my stomach. And I felt a sorrow that I couldn’t keep from overwhelming me. And I sat there, wanting to somehow make every woman I’ve ever known aware of how very sorry I am. For who I have been. For the thoughts I have thought. For the tricks I have played. For the vulnerabilities I have exploited. For the emotions I have leveraged. For the things I have done. For the things I haven’t done.

Before the song was over, I took the record off. As I did the sickness grew stronger, spreading, everywhere inside. And that sickness, as it grew stronger, helped me believe that someday I might find a way to be free.

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