All posts by Kingsview & Co posts from Michael A. King and guests

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; and owner, Cascadia Publishing House LLC
human finitude

Seeing with an Injured Eye

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Amid age-long arguments of philosophers, brain experts, and more about the extent to which we see the world as it is, by faith I commit to the reality of a world external to my perceptions. But slamming a bike lock into my eye also underscored for me that we see that world only in part, as if, to echo the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, through a mirror dimly.

By the day after the injury, my eye hurt and qualified nicely as a “black eye” even as nothing otherwise seemed amiss. That morning my wife Joan and I headed out on what seemed a routine jaunt to work together from the road. Until mid-afternoon at the Minneapolis airport. At the same time as we were temporarily trapped by ripple effects of a delayed flight, I suddenly realized that no, sun glare couldn’t account for the frequent flashes on my right no matter where I was, even in the restroom.

Suddenly it hit me: injured eye. I Googled: symptoms like mine could be no big deal–or could signal retinal tear and “medical emergency.” Should we risk breaking airport security and maybe lose another flight while hoping to figure out where in Minneapolis to try to get immediate care? It was getting late. A supportive Joan who works regularly with the Montana health care system phoned Kalispell, our ultimate destination, and got me an appointment for early next morning.

When at last we got on the plane, it seemed I was literally glimpsing the image shouted out by the man born blind after Jesus healed his sight (John 9): I saw people as trees walking. Floaters dangled over my vision and bright flashes radiated into them whenever I blinked.

Next morning the care was, thank God, superb, as was the news: I had experienced not a retinal tear but a vitreous detachment, which afflicts perhaps half of us over 60 when the vitreous at the back of the eye detaches from retina. There can be complications and follow-up is important, but treatment is often tincture of time.

That proved true for me, as several ophthalmology visits confirmed. Day by day the floaters and flashes faded. What startled me was this: the eye has mostly not repaired itself; this is not how the symptoms resolve. Rather, the brain learns to filter out the floaters and flashes.  I sense this when I’m particularly tired, in certain light conditions, or if I make a deliberate effort to focus on the symptoms. Then again I can sometimes see the floaters snaking across my vision or a flash firing.

This power of the brain to decide what I will and won’t see is quite striking. It has taught me that in fact I don’t reliably see what’s in front of me. Rather, I see what my brain’s endless synaptic communications across 100 billion neurons send into my conscious awareness.

It also turns out that all of us have a blind spot. A small part of our eye is blind at the point where optic nerve connects with brain. Our brain fills in the missing information.

If a brain can so effectively detour my and our consciousness around actual physical realities, then how much more must it make choices about what I will and won’t see as the endless welter of environmental, cultural, economic, and political stimuli flood in. And how regularly must my perspectives be based on simply not seeing even the countless floaters and flashes of life that do exist despite my being oblivious to them.

I wonder if the fact that we see only with injured or partly blind eyes is worth pondering as a few billion of us seem to be concluding that my job is mostly to proclaim and yours is mostly to submit to my amazingly perfect visions.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which publishes many of his Kingsview & Co posts.

inspiration

Two High-Fives! Say Yay!

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Sometimes it takes someone who is two (“and a half,”  she stresses), to lead the way.

For some 40 years, starting in our twenties weeks after arrival of first daughter, our family has spent some summer retreat time in Maine. There we learned at least temporarily to give up TV,  to read and read, to talk and talk, to walk the beach from sunrise to sunset and into moonrise. We savored the clear cool days we called “Maine days,” ocean so frigid you were brave to dip toes in, nights requiring at least sweatshirts. Sometimes we’d start a fire.

Now no fire for ages. Fewer sweatshirt times. And ever more days of people swarming not only up to water’s edge but way in, the rare head of the hardy soul now become almost too many for lifeguards to count.

Then this year: forecasters had warned the jetstream would sweep tropical air up the East Coast for weeks. They were too right. Clouds that looked like they started in the Caribbean (as they often had) in humid air to match scudded on winds blowing atypically from the southeast. But oh! In Maine there would be Maine days.

With just the right twist of breeze and sunshine there was an occasional Maine minute or hour. But days? No. Especially not nights. Historically Maine summer nights have often fallen into 50s, even 40s. So air conditioners are rare. This year fans blowing gales across sweating bodies were no match for nights often stuck in humid 70s.

Possibly we were experiencing effects of dramatic shifts becoming evident in Maine as the Gulf of Maine warms 99 percent faster than the global ocean and Maine’s summers are now trending two months longer than in 1982 (around when we started our Maine pilgrimages).

Meanwhile the usual sweltering news blew in from everywhere, not least Washington, D.C.

In the middle of wondering how we cope with and find hope as jet streams, ocean streams, and sociopolitical  streams send distress signals, we were monitoring our granddaughter at the beach as she sent that body aged precisely 2.5 years down to the waves but not quite in. She flirted. She flirted some more. Finally: toe touched wave.

She raced back, hand high. “High Five, PawPaw! High Five, Grandma!” She liked our responses.

Back to the waves. Inches deeper. Race back. High Five. High Five. TWO High Fives!

Again. A whole foot or two in. Back. More High Fives and Two  High Fives than the world has ever known.

“Now say Yay, PawPaw! Say Yay, Grandma! Say yay again. And again say yay. And again. Again!” Then with a stern cut-it-out wave of both hands across chest: “No more Yay.” Start over.

The day and the news still sweltered.  Yet hope had breezed in.

After Maine, Joan went back to consulting with organizations striving to provide behavioral health care amid economic, political, and cultural heat waves. Often resources for health-care versions of air conditioners are inadequate. Now what?

Joan tells the story of a young woman, 2.5 years old, who teaches us how to say High Five and Two High Fives and Yay. Together she and the organizations look for the path. And often enough, toward the end of the day as spirits sag and hope flags, someone will point out that this is going well, that holds promise. Someone else initiates a call-and-response High Five! And Yay! Things perk up.

Sometimes even our ability to draw nurture from Scripture seems compromised as every study or sermon or text going this direction is challenged from another direction. But one Scripture seems right now to shout out its treasures as, to paraphrase Isaiah 11:6, amid the warring animals and people “a little child shall lead them” in offering the yays and high fives.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column written in consultation with Joan K. King

inspiration

Off to See the Wizard

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Enroute to an annual extended family gathering in rural New York and to glimpse a quest for the wizard though we didn’t yet know it, we listened to a nationally broadcast funeral service. We digested an update from friends confronting the prospect that one of them might be gone in the coming year. As we left the warmth of the reunion, we wondered whether next time the circle would be unbroken.

After those hours with portents of death mixed with hints of new life, we headed home. Knowing what vulnerable souls need, Joan said, “Now: I want you to be ready to stop if we see an ice cream place.”

Okay. So we turn the corner in small-town New York. There it is: an ice cream place of nearly legendary size and style. It looks like the prototype for any of the best ice cream stands in the world.

We stop. We use the restrooms. We order our ice cream. I ask for small. It comes with one medium-sized scoop. Just right. Our server interrupts herself as she’s handing it over: “Oh, you ordered small. That’s another scoop.” Off she goes to return with the small: a tower of ice cream on a sugar cone.

I take it to the table. I eat fast. Ice cream starts melting and running. Disaster looms. I go back to ask if I might also have a cup and spoon.

I return to the table. The woman at the next table with her partner laughs and says, “Oh, I should have done that!” We chat  as we savor our cones, trading this and that detail of where we’re headed.

Joan and I settle back into our own conversation while admiring a deep red-maroon tricycle motorcycle parked not too far from their table. Eventually they get up. Now we see that they’re in motorcycle garb. Plenty of leather in jackets and leggings.

We’re surprised. I think we would be on the old side for motorcycling. They, based on skin and hair and wrinkles even more leathery and white and plentiful than ours, appear to be a decade or two older.

She chuckles at our surprise. “We have to live this life while we have it,” she assures us. “We’re in our late 70s. This life’s all we have. Or at least if there’s more we don’t know what it is.”

He hadn’t had much to say up to that point. Now he comes past our table to throw some trash in the basket. He gives us what seems a sly, cheerful look. In an accent that sounds vaguely British we hear “We’re off to see the wizard.”

Back to the cycle he goes. They putter around doing whatever it is you do to get ready to start the engine and head off. We watch with admiration, awe, and maybe a hint of envy. We’re old enough that we’re paying attention to models of aging. We like this model. We tell each other to learn from it.

Abruptly she pulls away from the cycle while he tugs at this and that. She heads back to our table. She leans in. In a near-whisper she reports, “He’s starting to experience Alzheimer’s. We’re out on the motorcycle today for the first time in a long time. He’s been afraid to ride. He’s been afraid he’s forgetting how to do it.

“I told him the only way we’ll keep riding is if we keep doing it. So I ordered him, ‘We’re getting on that motorcycle, and if you won’t do it then you’ll have to ride in back and be my b–ch.'”

Back she goes while he keeps working at remembering what does what and how to start the motor. He thinks the battery’s dead but, she points out, the lights are on.

We feel caught between rooting them on and not wanting to intrude on what seems a sacred and private moment. Eventually we go back to the restroom again to give them space and hope when we get back they’ll be edging out and we can give them a thumbs-up.

They’re gone. We feel pangs as we think how much lies ahead for them. How happy we are that they have managed to pull back onto the highway. What a privilege it has been to glimpse, there with the magic of ice cream, these two modeling for us how to navigate portents of death and still head off to see the wizard.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review

Creation care, Grief and loss

The Dog and More Too Soon Gone

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    As national flames flare over babies torn from immigrant parents, how public figures are treated in restaurants, some Christians viewing a president as God’s new Cyrus of Persia while others see a swamp turned into a septic field,  death arrives. A beloved dog in our extended family dies. He has exuberantly pursued some creature into too small a space.

Shock and grief for many, young and old, is intense. Such a minor loss compared to the national furies over tariffs, taxes, environmental regulations, Supreme Court nominees, and so much more. Is the grief proportionate to the event? Multiple reasons for thinking so flood in.

We humans are built for the local. We connect with the day-to-day realities, relationships built not only of large things but also such small wonders as feet feeling a dog’s body under the blankets; coffee made just right not only for its own sake but as a ritual of love; the infant’s first latching of eyes, then grinning, then vocalizing enroute to first words; the monarch flitting around Joan’s flower garden so little yet laced with the milkweed on which the monarch lays eggs; fireflies so thick in tree fringes you need no backlit Kindle to read by their light.

We feel the depths of loss through the ripping of ordinary patterns and habits; the absence of the bark which made hens scurry up their run into shelter; the emptiness under the covers; the inability to share with my mom the hot dogs she was still thrilling to in her last weeks.

We feel the loss through remembering that once there was milkweed all over and butterflies in their millions; now herbicides kill the milkweed (and apparently decimate honeybees) and this year only that one monarch, not the clusters once routine, has appeared. We feel the sorrow as habitat destruction, light pollution, and pesticides threaten the fireflies whose lanterns guided many of us through childhoods in pre-development nights so dark we couldn’t see hands in front of faces until our eyes adjusted to the glimmers from fireflies and the now often-lost Milky Way.

When children are taken from parents, I’m horrified. Yet my path to the horror and the conviction that no country can morally do this starts with those local loves. My awareness of what a tear we make in the fabric of God’s universe when we separate children from parents, monarchs and fireflies and honeybees from their food and wellbeing, people from sustenance and respect and dignity, comes precisely from this: experiencing how attuned dogs and people are to each other; how beautiful the details of a nature in balance are; how intricate is the dance of eye contact, brain development, sound, touch, and layers of being and relating so deep awe and mystery mingle.

If we lose the ability to be tender with dogs, to have their deaths break our hearts, to share coffee and nurture each other from conception to birth through life to the fading years when hot dogs still offer bliss, to feel loss as monarchs dwindle along with the times we can read by the light of endless fireflies or see the Milky Way, then I suspect we’ll truly have entered our culture’s death throes.

So there is much more to love than a dog and much more to grieve than his loss. But he is one more reminder of why on finishing creation God, throbbing with pride and love and delight, saw that it was good (Gen. 1). And having death take him fills me with all the more passion to care about the things that matter before death takes us all.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column. 
Creation, Creation care, Sustainability

Chainsaw, Riding Mower, and Planet Earth

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During maybe the latest spring since we moved to our current home in 1993, I worked on my chainsaw then riding mower. I learned about expertise and limits. I wondered about connections with Planet Earth as some U.S. regions turned too cool while up where cold belonged it was too warm. I needed the chainsaw for trees that had fallen in high-wind, springtime “winter” storms. I needed the mower in case grass ever grew again.

As a boy I ruined many an item by taking it apart. I also learned that if you really attend to nuts and bolts and springs and doohickeys amid modest theoretical grasp of what does what, you can sometimes get an “I fixed it!” high.

So: The chainsaw engine won’t turn. I take spark plug out. Engine turns. Plug back in—freeze. Finally I get it: frozen by accumulated unburned oil from gas-oil mix. I drip in raw gas. Pull/flush, pull/flush. Thaw. Back together. Roar! Smoke! Fix-it high. Dead. Gas spurts out the bottom. What?!

Apart again. After 30 years, rotted gas line. Take even more things apart to attach new line. At last: Roar! Smoke!

Fizzle. What! Apart. Broken electrical wire. Solder. Back together. No roar. No smoke. Gas out the bottom. What!

Apart. Ensuring the gas line is permanently connected requires disassembling the (I think) carburetor. Now so many pieces I don’t remember what a chain saw looks like. Gas line attached. Where do those choke pieces go? Memories of where they belong have faded as badly as my 1981 Greek training.

You can tell my dear spouse wonders about priorities but with remarkable maturity forbears judgment. She knows her husband hates to let go of old things, especially now he’s becoming one, and how excited he’ll be if he fixes this old thing.

Another half day goes into turning 50-some pieces back into a chain saw. Roar! Smoke! Run out. Cut cut cut limbs. Huge I-fixed-it high.

Time to get the mower ready. Battery down. Charge. Engine turns. But won’t start. Confident after proving chain-saw expertise, I jump the battery. Roar! Smoke! Silence. Nothing nothing nothing. I’ve fried the electrical system. I will be the customer fix-it shops love: I’ll take it to my friend who fixes just about anything and plead, “Could you fix this thing I ‘fixed’?”

Pride shattered, I think about the strange weather that drew me into these triumphs and tribulations. I ponder how borderline my expertise is, how much I rely on trial and error and vague understandings of how things work. I think of some eight billion of us humans bringing this approach to an entire planet.

This makes me more alarmed about the relentless clues something is wrong Planet Earth appears to be giving us, amid word that the jetstream and Gulf Stream may be turning erratic. Yet countless ones of us whose expertise is no greater than mine with chainsaws or mowers are sure we know what’s happening.

Experts as good at their analyses as my shop friend is at his do confirm danger signals. They tell us that lifestyles like mine, in which even as I try to live lightly on the earth I use chainsaws and mowers and contribute to what is likely the environmental crime of western lawns, feed the vicious cycles. No matter where I’ve traveled this month, the yard-loving and world-destroying engines seem to be buzzing and roaring and whining like never before, as a too-wet spring yields to sizzling summer and we belch yet more poisoning fumes.  Whether or not we believe God gave us dominion over the earth (Gen. 1), we likely have the power to demolish it as our home.

My chainsaw-fixing self hopes people who disagree will accept this before we’re all dead. But then my mower-breaking self says hold on. Have some humility: none of us can fully grasp what’s happening or what to do. Take seriously the possibility that together we all figure this out or together we die. Maybe we can start by learning how to help our lawns be more often heaven and less frequently hell for wildlife.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published the first version of this post.

Anabaptist-Mennonite, Mennonite poet, Poetry, Writing

A Writing Place, by Phyllis Miller Swartz

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I had been writing about place—the places of my childhood and the places in a historical fiction book—so when I read the invitation to the Poetics of Place writing retreat, I signed up.

Come to Jacob’s Creek, the invitation had said, in the beautiful Laurel Highlands. The conveners stressed that scheduled activities, according to the brochure, would be offered in the spirit of Ecclesiastes 4:6: “Better is one hand full of quietness than two hands full of toil and striving after the wind.”

But I came with some trepidation. I was a new writer, after all, and I would join a group that included authors of books published by Cascadia, often through its DreamSeeker Books imprint.

Come to relax, a post-registration e-mail told me, and bring ten photocopies of a piece of your work for critique.

Those two sentences, I thought, didn’t fit.

But they did, I found.

One evening we stood on a porch under the rain and heard the words from a poem by Mary Szybist savoring the world’s taste and acknowledging that in exchange for such gifts the poet “did nothing, not even wonder.”

The Poetics of Place conference became for me a call to wonder, to pay attention. There’s something holy about loving the place where you are, someone at the retreat said one evening, and something especially holy about loving a place others don’t love. So notice the signs of life that emerge from the decay of a place.  What are you witness to in the place you live?

Photograph by participant Joseph Gascho.

And I learned to pay attention, close attention, to words. In workshops with people who wrote—a pastor, a musician, a doctor, an editor, a professor, a retired volunteer—I saw how to notice what words are actually saying, as opposed to what was meant. I learned to hear the rhythm of words and to examine each word to find its reason to exist. And I found that to lay my work open for others to see and question and offer impressions and suggestions, is to ask for a gift.

At the retreat we, who loved words, immersed ourselves in them. We plucked words from our ordinary lives and set them on paper so we could see them more clearly. We mediated on God’s call to record words, tracing the biblical commands to write through the Old Testament narratives and the prophets, through the gospels and the epistles, and into Revelation. Even at meals, we played with words in our talk.

When I drove into the Laurelville Mennonite Church Center on the first day of the retreat, I parked my car and sat for a moment, feeling too timid to walk inside, to spend the weekend writing with people I didn’t know and who had written more than I had. But I left the retreat three days later, richer and glad I had come.

—Phyllis Miller Swartz taught school for over 30 years, from HeadStart to middle school, high school, college, and more after “graduating with the hippies from Antioch College.” She is author of Yoder School, a memoir to be released through the DreamSeeker Books imprint of Cascadia Publishing House as the inaugural title in the new DreamSeeker Memoir Series. Jeff Gundy, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Becca J. R. Lachman, and Anita Hooley Yoder developed the Poetics of Place retreat. They in turn invited participation of Michael A. King and Cascadia Publishing House/DreamSeeker Books, publisher of many of the retreat participants, including Swartz.

justice, suicide

As the Loneliness Surges: Beyond Lewis and Clark Maps

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There is a sculpture of Sacagawea, Lewis, and Clark on a bluff above the Missouri River in Great Falls, Montana. As they point west, one gazing through a telescope, they seem to dream beyond the setting sun.

They believe they’ll find a mirror of the eastern lands with which they’re familiar, proposes Tod Bolsinger in Canoeing the Mountains (InterVarsity Press, 2015). Drawing analogies pertinent to Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory as his subtitle summarizes (the type of territory I pondered in my “Hope as Church Unravels” series and a 2017 Eastern Mennonite Seminary Commencement address on “Weaving the New”), Bolsinger portrays them as expecting modest mountains. From gentle crests they’ll glide down a western-style Mississippi to the Pacific. This will delight Thomas Jefferson, who wants them to explore the Missouri River in search of a direct waterway “across this continent for the purposes of commerce.”

Instead of gliding, their expedition crashed into the staggering realities of Rocky Mountains. As Bolsinger puts it, they would have to

go off the map and into uncharted territory. They would have to change plans, give up expectations, even reframe their entire mission. . . . There were no experts, no maps, no “best practices” and no sure guides. . . .

Nevertheless, despite no direct waterway, reach the Pacific they ultimately did. The country burst across now-mapped wilderness.

Except people with their own maps already lived there. When the expedition arrived in 1805 in what is now Missoula, Montana, hospitable Salish Native Americans cared for the weary explorers. For decades after the Salish sought constructive relationships with the hordes to follow.

In Missoula, the Salish had a campground. That’s where the University of Montana now sits. Behind Grizzly Stadium rises a mountain marked with a huge initial M. Beside it flows the Clark Fork River, with downtown Missoula on the other side.

Though rebuilt since the first 1870s version, a few blocks downstream Higgins Bridge still connects the sides. On the university side is a plaque that tells of 1891. Amid promises broken then, before, and later, the U.S. government said it was time: The Salish must move to the Flathead Reservation.

The Clark Fork River viewed from Higgins Bridge

Today you can stand on the bank and watch cars whiz past where an age-10 Mary Ann Pierre Topseh Coombs and her Salish people, wearing their best ceremonial clothes, left home across Higgins Bridge while the white folk watched. There, “Women’s History Matters” reports,  “Mary Ann recalled that ‘everyone was in tears, even the men,’ and said the procession was like ‘a funeral march.’”

I learned about Mary Ann while my wife Joan, who consults with behavioral healthcare providers, was connecting with Salish and other Native American healthcare leaders in the Flathead Reservation. They wrestle with how to offer care—a 2018 version of the hospitality their people once provided Lewis and Clark—amid effects of yesterday’s traumas and today’s realities. They navigate the tragedies and triumphs detailed  in a moving New York Times Magazine story on the Arlee Warriors and how “on Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation, basketball is about much more than winning.”

As by the Clark Fork I imagined Mary Ann’s crossing, I felt haunted by the Lewis and Clark saga. Their courage is evident. So is the fact that in charting their world on top of Native American charts they imposed tragedy in which most of us participate, myself included as I love the land, likely first loved by Unami Native Americans, on which my home is built.

Does the shredding of familiar maps invite us to move beyond them, as Bolsinger urges, but to shift sources of inspiration? Bolsinger hints at this when he highlights contributions to the Lewis and Clark expedition of Sacagawea, a Soshone Native American who joined the expedition with her French Canadian husband. Yet this remains a footnote to the larger affirmations of Lewis-and-Clark mapmaking.

What if when we encountered Lewis-and-Clark-like leadership we imagined the alternate maps—maybe like last-shall-be-first maps Jesus describes—lurking in such paths not taken as collaborating with instead of exploiting the hospitality of Mary Ann’s people?

As loneliness surges with the breakdown of both conservatism and liberalism in Western cultures, what if the inheritors of that forced march across the Higgins Bridge are blazing their own trail through not only their historical traumas but also the unraveling of the culture that took over their people? Is that what we see when suicide clusters force its young to “learn to ‘survive their past and their present’”? When the Arlee Warriors release a video on Facebook dedicating their basketball tournament to all who have lost a loved one to suicide?

When the Warriors win and, amid celebrations, Bear, a Salish grandfather who had long ago been beaten for speaking his native language goes on?

“We’re not supposed to be here,” he said, his face turning momentarily dark, his immense hands clenching. Then his hands released, and a great smile worked its way across his face. “We’re still here,” he said.

He walked inside, where mothers danced around the laughing boys, shoving them playfully down to the court. The world is never so hopeful as when the old honor the young.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published the first version of this post.

 

Awe and wonder, grace, hope, Mennonite poet, Poetry

Be Not Afraid and other Poems, by Julie Cadwallader Staub

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Be Not Afraid

I am converted and every day:

when the clouds dream
a new dream
and fill the air
with snow

when the pines and hemlocks
lift their needles
and welcome
what sun there is

when the creek,
hard frozen,
listens as the fox
trots along its side.

This world of enchantment
waits for you
like the milkweed
standing in this snowy field

its pod open wide
like angel wings outstretched
ready to catch
the rising wind.

Moth

When Jesus said, “Suffer the little ones to come unto me”

I know he included this inch-long moth
marooned on the bike path
gray wings delicately trimmed in white
a neon orange head
an iridescent blue body.

When I put my fingers down in front of it,
it climbs right into my hand,
happily, I think,

and when I crouch at the edge of the path
to let it go
there is a young apple tree growing there,
sensitive and wood ferns,
buttercups,
a spray of little white asters

for such is the kingdom of heaven.

Slow by Slow

“Secret work has been done in us of which we’ve had no inkling.” —John O’Donohue

It’s like yeast, they say
or a mustard seed

but I submit
it is also like carpenter ants

the way they work, hidden,
unbidden, unnoticed,

deep within the foundation, the walls,
the very structure of the house

so that one day
light filters through
where a thick wall stood

one day
you see a patch of open sky
where the hardest ceiling had been

one day a door
stands ajar that has been
locked for a lifetime.

Slow by slow
grace finds a way.

Slow by slow
still the gift comes.

—Julie Cadwallader Staub’s poems have been published in various journals, featured on “The Writer’s Almanac,” and included in such anthologies as Poetry of Presence (Grayson Books) and Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry (Green Writers Press). Her poem “Milk” won Hunger Mountain Review’s 2015 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Her first collection of poems, Face to Face, was published by Cascadia Publishing House in 2010, and her second collection, Wing Over Wing, will be published by Paraclete Press in 2019 and will include all three poems posted here.

Peace, Polarization, Politics

The Sand Fight

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One cousin was already at the beach. When the other topped the dune and they spied one another, both galloped across sand and their different ages, three and nearly five, arms outstretched.

It was a thrill to watch, this pure delight.

Then they met. She yanked off his hat. He hurled sand in her face. They probably both meant more to tease than assault. Yet in seconds they were tussling, mutually enraged. Grownups ran to separate them. Screams of anger and pain burst forth.

Sorrow flowing. Delight drowning. So lovely. So quickly so nasty. Just those few moments, yet within them lurked the human condition writ large. We thrill to companionship. And constantly we scan: Is our share of love, voice, justice, place in the community safe?

As the beach fight raged, it pointed mostly to the usual work of growing up. But it also became a microcosm of the nuclear furies world leaders threaten, the claims to “blood and soil” with which some assault those they believe to be stealing it, the growing inability of adults, including the most powerful one in the world, to do better than yank hats, throw sand, egg on violences of mind, spirit, and body.

It still hurts to remember the sand fight. Not because the combatants were terrible; they were acting their age. After grownups reinforced the norms of civilized behavior, they didn’t forswear battle but could often be spied whispering under a blanket, sharing books, even cuddling. What hurts is how quickly the joy fizzled, a cloud spreading over that sun-drenched beach precisely as beauty raced toward fulfillment.

What hurts is that the image of missing each other precisely when on the cusp of finding each other seems to capture our current national and planetary condition. There is so much to be awed by, so much wonder crying out for attention, so much human yearning to embrace the other and challenges of the day before the planet shuts us down. Yet the thermometers measuring our hate and Earth itself show global temperatures soaring as we yank hats and throw sand. This is why in the August 14, 2017, issue of The New Yorker, Robin Wright asks, “Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?” This is why the January 17, 2018, New York Times analysis of the 2017 U.S. tax cut is headlined, “Sharper State Divide in Congress Seen as ‘New Civil War.’”

Extrapolating from children is dangerous. But I wonder what might have happened if adults had egged on instead of pacifying the cousins. And I find myself asking what adult intervention looks like when the grownups themselves regress to childhood. How far does the hate spread? How many casualties are suffered? What finally enables combatants to recapture their vision of delight long enough once more to pursue it?

When Adam and Eve lost their way in Eden, God warned of trouble ahead and that an angel with a flaming sword would bar their return. But next, Genesis reports, they “made love,” setting in motion the births of Cain and then Abel. No return to Eden here as soon they rolled in the sand and Abel was dead. Still, the ending of Genesis 4 reports, Adam and Eve made love again, Seth was born, Seth had son Enosh, and “At that time people began to call on the name of the Lord.”

Now we fumble toward the next chapters in our and (we pray) God’s story. I wonder if it’s precisely when we honor a story larger than our own—which is what adults intervening in the sand fight called for—that we grow back up and into delight.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which first published this post.

Fiction

Home, by Heidi Hackman

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The day was cold but flashed with light. The Olympian Rings hung in the sky as usual, bands of glowing iridescent dust and ice. Persephone knelt and tugged at the base of a thick stem. Golden-white blossoms sprang loose, ready to be gathered. Their nectar would be made into ambrosia and help gods boost their powers, according to Demeter.

A grassy rustle hooked Persephone’s attention, and she spun to her feet, dropping the flowers. A young man stood there, falsely innocent. Brown skin, a mane of long braids. His fingers hooked around a blood-red sash tied around his waist, and a vest of glittering gold mesh exposed the ink sprawling across his arms.

“Hades.” Her voice was wary.

“I’m not scared of your mother.”

Persephone glowered. “You should be. I need to give her these flowers. Go away.”

Hades pulled something from his pocket, a winking silver-white Stone. He tossed it into the air, and it morphed into a white cloak. Its fabric shifted to shades of green and brown as he flipped the hood up, blending into the forest. “Better?”

Persephone sighed and began picking up her flowers. This was dangerous. “She’ll banish you before anything happens to me.”

“I noticed that about her. That she doesn’t let anything happen to you.” Hades threw back his hood and shimmered back into visibility.

“There’s more to the world of Olympus than this forest.”
Persephone raised her eyebrows in a knowing expression. “Like the Underworld?”

Hades held her gaze steadily. “It’s not far. I can show you around.”
Persephone felt her heart rate pick up. Wild, foolish hope. She covered it up with a weak smile. “I wouldn’t belong there.” She didn’t even belong to herself.

“You don’t owe this place anything. It’s your birthplace, not your home.” Hades whistled. A pure black horse, dressed in riding gear, ambled to his side. “Demeter can take care of herself. When are you going to do the same?”

Persephone’s thoughts felt loud yet silent. This was her chance. She grinned at him. Hades stretched out his hand. Persephone paused, trying to read the flowing script on his forearm, and accepted it. He mounted gracefully and helped her clamber up. Persephone clung on as they galloped, Hades’ hands guiding the reins.

The forest grew deeper and darker as they drew further away from Demeter, forcing the horse to trot even with the light. Finally the horse snorted to a stop, stomping its feet. Persephone tensed.
“Relax. She just wants a break.” Hades slid off, leaving Persephone to clutch the saddle horn, and stroked the horse’s neck, talking quietly.
Persephone dropped to the mud-soft ground on the opposite side. The faintest of light revealed a white ring around the horse’s eye, but it was still a brilliant black. “What’s her name?”

“Poetry In Motion. Poetry for short.”

“Poetry,” Persephone echoed warmly, rubbing the horse’s neck. This was the steed leading her to freedom. “Thank you, Poetry.”

“You’re welcome,” Hades muttered. He pointed straight ahead, at the faintest glimmer of liquid light. “That’s the River Styx. The Underworld’s at the bottom of the river. We need light.”

Persephone reached into her pocket and opened her hand slowly. Her green Stone morphed into a torch, ready to light at a mere thought from her. It flared to life then shrank and faded.
“What’s wrong with your torch?”

Persephone felt her chest clutch. She owed him some honesty, since he had risked her mother’s wrath to help her. “I haven’t had ambrosia for a month.”

Hades’ face was hidden in shadow. Persephone busied herself, winding a strip of cloth around the torch and borrowing his flint to spark natural flames into being. “Let’s go.” She fought the tremble from her voice. Hades didn’t react, just mounted, grasped her hand, and carefully nudged Poetry forward.

“So. Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“With me, you always have a choice.”

Persephone gazed at him through the darkness. “My mother limited my amount of ambrosia. She didn’t want me to become too strong. She is the goddess of spring, I have the power of fire . . . . You understand.”

Hades turned his head toward her. Firelight bounced around in his eyes like sound in an echo chamber. A thousand shades of amber and warm brown sparkled, only a little lighter than her own eyes. “You’re lucky to have her. Demeter is strong.”

“Strength doesn’t fear strength,” Persephone growled. “It disagrees and even clashes, but always respects.”

“Is your running away an act of fear, then?”

“An act of anger.”

“Are you sure?” Hades’ expression was flat.

Persephone glared at his shoulders. “I hate her! I accidentally burned down her garden, and she struck me. Hit me across the face. What kind of woman does that to a child!”

Hades’ features were pale, stricken. One blurred glimpse of his face was enough. Persephone stared away, thoughts swirling. He would judge her, pity her. Maybe she should ignore him and pretend nothing happened. Maybe she should just leave.

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry, Persephone.”
She drew deeper into his embrace. The words stuck in her throat at first, heavy as stones. “I just want to be free,” she whispered.
“And I want to be your friend.”

You already are.

Persephone swam through the Styx toward the surface. A regally tall figure was approaching the entrance to the Underworld.
Demeter.

Persephone’s head burst into the air just as the thought occurred. Round blue eyes met lidded brown eyes. Two years of lost history passed between them in a shiver of time. Persephone brandished the torch. It burst into flame, shining green with magical energy, and Demeter fled.

Wide-eyed. The clumsiness of desperation. A trapped and frightened animal.

Persephone closed her eyes, trying to steady herself before she could start to sway. She expected triumph. But she had just scared off a weak woman. Where was the triumph in that?
Had her mother even recognized her?

Enough. Persephone ducked back underwater. This was her life now. Brimming with ambrosia, hardened with muscle, confident in her power of fire.

Hades was waiting for her in the glass sphere protecting the Underworld from flooding, colored green and blue by the light shining through the water. His eyes glowed with pride. For her. The bridge had finally burned. Persephone felt her feet practically take flight. She kissed him eagerly, her hair messy between them. “Sorry.”
Hades only replied with an affectionate shake of his head.

Her mother would never leave her, deep down. But she was home.

—Heidi Hackman is a student at Christopher Dock Mennonite Academy, Lansdale, Pennsylvania. As part of an internship assignment, she shadowed Cascadia Publishing House activities, which included this fresh take on the story of Persephone, Hades, and Demeter as a Kingsview & Co guest blog post.