Tenderness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 21 of 145 · 20 per page

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Later generations of Israelites would try to eradicate such cult places as idolatrous and tear down the local matzeboth , but in this early story, these pagan symbols nourished Jacob’s vision of Yahweh, and Bethel became one of their own sacred “centers.” The story shows how impossible it is to seek a single, consistent message in the Bible, since a directive in one book is likely to be countermanded in another. The editors did not eradicate potentially embarrassing early teachings that clashed with later doctrines. Later Jews would be shocked to imagine God becoming manifest in a human being, but J described Yahweh appearing to Abraham in the guise of a traveler at Mamre, near Hebron. 31 Standing in the entrance of his tent during the hottest part of the afternoon, Abraham had seen three men approaching. Strangers were dangerous people, because they were not bound by the local vendetta, but Abraham ran out to meet them, bowed before them as if they were kings or gods, brought them into his camp, and gave them an elaborate meal. Without any great fanfare, it transpires in the course of the ensuing conversation that one of these visitors was Abraham’s god. The act of compassion had led to a divine encounter. Abraham’s previous encounters with Yahweh had been somewhat disturbing and peremptory, but at Mamre Yahweh ate with Abraham as a friend—the first intimacy with the divine that humans had enjoyed since the expulsion from Eden. J and E were not writing edifying morality tales, however. The characters of Genesis have moments of vision and insight, but they are also presented as flawed human beings who have to contend with a perplexing God. This is particularly evident when Yahweh commands Abraham to take his only remaining son, Isaac, to a mountain in the land of Moriyya and sacrifice him there. 32 Hitherto Abraham had not hesitated to question Yahweh’s arrangements, but this time he obeyed without voicing a single objection. Perhaps he was too shocked to speak. The God he had served so long had turned out to be a heartless slayer of children, who was also cynically breaking his promise to make him the father of a great nation. At the last moment, of course, Isaac is reprieved, God renews his promise, and Abraham sacrifices a ram in Isaac’s stead. This disturbing story has traditionally been related to the Jerusalem temple, which was said to have been built on Mount Moriyya. Yahweh was, therefore, making it clear that his cult must not include human sacrifice. But E’s painful story goes further. Moriyya means “Seeing,” and the Hebrew verb ra’o (“to see”) sounds insistently through the Abraham stories.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I asked where he lived and his smile disappeared. “Months ago,” he said, “I lose my home. Typhoon Billie.” The storm had completely wiped away the Japanese islands of Honshu and Kyushu, along with two thousand houses. “Mine,” Fujimoto said, “was one of houses.” “I’m very sorry,” I said. He nodded, looked at the water. He’d started over, he said. As the Japanese do. The one thing he hadn’t been able to replace, unfortunately, was his bicycle. In the 1960s bicycles were exorbitantly expensive in Japan. Kitami now joined us. I noticed that Fujimoto got up right away and walked off. I mentioned to Kitami that Fujimoto had learned his English from GIs, and Kitami said with pride that he’d learned his English all by himself, from a record. I congratulated him, and said I hoped one day to be as fluent in Japanese as he was in English. Then I mentioned that I was getting married soon. I told him a bit about Penny, and he congratulated me and wished me luck. “When is wedding?” he asked. “September,” I said. “Ah,” he said, “I will be in America one month after, when Mr. Onitsuka and I attend Olympics in Mexico City. We might visit Los Angeles.” He invited me to fly down, have dinner with them. I said I’d be delighted. The next day I returned to the United States, and one of the first things I did after landing was put fifty dollars in an envelope and airmail it to Fujimoto. On the card I wrote: “For a new bicycle, my friend.” Weeks later an envelope arrived from Fujimoto. My fifty dollars, folded inside a note explaining that he’d asked his superiors if he could keep the money, and they’d said no. There was a PS: “If you send my house, I can keep.” So I did. And thus another life-altering partnership was born. ON SEPTEMBER 13, 1968, Penny and I exchanged our vows before two hundred people at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in downtown Portland, at the same altar where Penny’s parents had been married. It was one year, nearly to the day, after Miss Parks had first walked into my classroom. She was again in the front row, of a sort, only this time I was standing beside her. And she was now Mrs. Knight. Before us stood her uncle, an Episcopal priest from Pasadena, who performed the service. Penny was shaking so much, she couldn’t raise her chin to look him, or me, in the eye. I wasn’t shaking, because I’d cheated. In my breast pocket I had two miniature airplane bottles of whiskey, stashed from my recent trip to Japan. I nipped one just before, and one just after, the ceremony.

• From Educated (2018)

  Mother smeared the salve over Dad’s upper body twice a day. I don’t remember what other treatments they used, and I don’t know enough about the energy work to give an account. I know they went through seventeen gallons of salve in the first two weeks, and that Mother was ordering gauze in bulk. Tyler flew in from Purdue. He took over for Mother, changing the bandages on Dad’s fingers every morning, scraping away the layers of skin and muscle that had necrotized during the night. It didn’t hurt. The nerves were dead. “I scraped off so many layers,” Tyler told me, “I was sure that one morning I’d hit bone.” Dad’s fingers began to bow, bending unnaturally backward at the joint. This was because the tendons had begun to shrivel and contract. Tyler tried to curl Dad’s fingers, to elongate the tendons and prevent the deformity from becoming permanent, but Dad couldn’t bear the pain. I came back to Buck’s Peak when I was sure the strep was gone. I sat by Dad’s bed, dripping teaspoons of water into his mouth with a medical dropper and feeding him pureed vegetables as if he were a toddler. He rarely spoke. The pain made it difficult for him to focus; he could hardly get through a sentence before his mind surrendered to it. Mother offered to buy him pharmaceuticals, the strongest analgesics she could get her hands on, but he declined them. This was the Lord’s pain, he said, and he would feel every part of it. While I was away, I had scoured every video store within a hundred miles until I’d found the complete box set of The Honeymooners . I held it up for Dad. He blinked to acknowledge he’d seen it. I asked if he wanted to watch an episode. He blinked again. I pushed the first tape into the VCR and sat beside him, searching his warped face, listening to his soft whimpers, while on the screen Alice Kramden outfoxed her husband again and again. * It is possible that my timeline is off here by one or two days. According to some who were there, although my father was horribly burned, he did not seem in any real danger until the third day, when the scabbing began, making it difficult to breathe. Dehydration compounded the situation. In this account, it was then that they feared for his life, and that is when my sister called me, only I misunderstood and assumed that the explosion had happened the day before. [image "Chapter 26 Waiting for the Moving Water" file=Image00028.jpg] Dad didn’t leave his bed for two months unless one of my brothers was carrying him. He peed in a bottle, and the enemas continued. Even after it became clear that he would live, we had no idea what kind of life it would be.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I’d never before said good-bye to a true partner, and it felt massively different. Imagine that, I thought. The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye. FOR ONCE, MY former contact at Onitsuka was still my contact. Kitami was still there. He hadn’t been replaced. He hadn’t been reassigned. On the contrary, his role with the company was more secure, judging by his demeanor. He seemed easier, more self-assured. He welcomed me like one of the family, said he was delighted with Blue Ribbon’s performance, and with our East Coast office, which was thriving under Johnson. “Now let us work on how we can capture the U.S. market,” he said. “I like the sound of that,” I said. In my briefcase I was carrying new shoe designs from both Bowerman and Johnson, including one they’d teamed up on, a shoe we were calling the Boston. It had an innovative full-length midsole cushion. Kitami put the designs on the wall and studied them closely. He held his chin in one hand. He liked them, he said. “Like very very much,” he said, slapping me on the back. We met many times over the course of the next several weeks, and each time I sensed from Kitami an almost brotherly vibe. One afternoon he mentioned that his Export Department was having its annual picnic in a few days. “You come!” he said. “Me?” I said. “Yes, yes,” he said, “you are honorary member of Export Department.” The picnic was on Awaji, a tiny island off Kobe. We took a small boat to get there, and when we arrived we saw long tables set up along the beach, each one covered with platters of seafood and bowls of noodles and rice. Beside the tables were tubs filled with cold bottles of soda and beer. Everyone was wearing bathing suits and sunglasses and laughing. People I’d only known in a reserved, corporate setting were being silly and carefree. Late in the day there were competitions. Team-building exercises like potato sack relays and foot races along the surf. I showed off my speed, and everyone bowed to me as I crossed the finish line first. Everyone agreed that Skinny Gaijin was very fast. I was picking up the language, slowly. I knew the Japanese word for shoe: gutzu. I knew the Japanese word for revenue: shunyu. I knew how to ask the time, and directions, and I learned a phrase I used often: Watakushi domo no kaisha ni tsuite no joh hou des. Here is some information about my company. Toward the end of the picnic I sat on the sand and looked out across the Pacific Ocean. I was living two separate lives, both wonderful, both merging. Back home I was part of a team, me and Woodell and Johnson—and now Penny. Here in Japan I was part of a team, me and Kitami and all the good people of Onitsuka. By

• From Educated (2018)

  We trapped mice to feed it, but sometimes it didn’t eat them, and we couldn’t clear away the carcasses. The smell of death was strong and foul, a punch to the gut. The owl grew restless. When it began to refuse food, we opened the back door and let it escape. It wasn’t fully healed, but Dad said its chances were better with the mountain than with us. It didn’t belong. It couldn’t be taught to belong. —I WANTED TO TELL SOMEONE I’d failed the exam, but something stopped me from calling Tyler. It might have been shame. Or it might have been that Tyler was preparing to be a father. He’d met his wife, Stefanie, at Purdue, and they’d married quickly. She didn’t know anything about our family. To me, it felt as though he preferred his new life—his new family—to his old one. I called home. Dad answered. Mother was delivering a baby, which she was doing more and more now the migraines had stopped. “When will Mother be home?” I said. “Don’t know,” said Dad. “Might as well ask the Lord as me, as He’s the one deciding.” He chuckled, then asked, “How’s school?” Dad and I hadn’t spoken since he’d screamed at me about the VCR. I could tell he was trying to be supportive, but I didn’t think I could admit to him that I was failing. I wanted to tell him it was going well. So easy, I imagined myself saying. “Not great,” I said instead. “I had no idea it would be this hard.” The line was silent, and I imagined Dad’s stern face hardening. I waited for the jab I imagined he was preparing, but instead a quiet voice said, “It’ll be okay, honey.” “It won’t,” I said. “There will be no scholarship. I’m not even going to pass.” My voice was shaky now. “If there’s no scholarship, there’s no scholarship,” he said. “Maybe I can help with the money. We’ll figure it out. Just be happy, okay?” “Okay,” I said. “Come on home if you need.” I hung up, not sure what I’d just heard. I knew it wouldn’t last, that the next time we spoke everything would be different, the tenderness of this moment forgotten, the endless struggle between us again in the foreground. But tonight he wanted to help. And that was something. —IN MARCH, THERE WAS ANOTHER exam in Western Civ. This time I made flash cards. I spent hours memorizing odd spellings, many of them French (France, I now understood, was a part of Europe). Jacques-Louis David and François Boucher: I couldn’t say them but I could spell them. My lecture notes were nonsensical, so I asked Vanessa if I could look at hers. She looked at me skeptically, and for a moment I wondered if she’d noticed me cheating off her exam. She said she wouldn’t give me her notes but that we could study together, so after class I followed her to her dorm room.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Or are you excited, caught up in eager anticipation of something new? Whatever the feeling, there’s no need to push it aside. Pleasant or not, let the feeling in. Accept it as part of what it means to be you at this moment. Meet the feeling with curiosity and openness. Explore it. Note how this feeling registers in your body and how those bodily feelings change—subtly—from one moment to the next. Whether your current experience is pleasant or unpleasant, just witness and accept it. Whether events in your life are presenting you with good or bad fortune these days, just witness and accept those events. See them as part of the inevitable ups and downs that all people experience, no matter what part of this earth they call home. And just as surely as all people face good and bad fortune, and experience pleasant and unpleasant emotions, all people—all the world over—yearn to feel good, safe, peaceful, and healthy. Alongside this awareness of suffering’s inevitability and the fundamental sameness of all people, you can choose to wish yourself well. You deserve this kindness as much as anyone. Now, put your intention for this particular practice session, whatever it is, into words. This will shine a light on the path you choose and help you get back on it when your mind inevitably strays. Begin by lightly calling to mind your own good qualities. If it helps, briefly visualize an event that exemplifies one of those good qualities. No need to launch an exhaustive hunt for the “best” good quality or the “best” exemplifying event. Just lightly accept whatever good quality or instance of it that comes to mind. No need to judge or rate it. Simply let it remind you of what’s good in you, what touches your heart about yourself. Then, gently offer the classic wishes of loving-kindness to yourself, choosing phrasings of these classic sentiments that best speak to your heart. May I feel safe and protected. May I feel happy and peaceful. May I feel healthy and strong. May I live with ease. See yourself as being a dear friend to yourself. It may help to first conjure up the feelings of warmth and tenderness you might feel toward a small child, or a kitten, as innocent as these small creatures can be. Experience how your face softens or your heart expands in their presence. Now imagine directing these same feelings of warmth and tenderness toward yourself. May I feel safe. May I feel happy. May I feel healthy. May I live with ease. Between each phrase, pause for just a moment and drop your awareness down to your body, to your heart in particular. Note and accept whatever sensations arise there.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  They darkened further. Driving back to the house one afternoon I passed a huddle of walkers staring at a rabbit crouched in the grassy verge on the other side of the road. They were upset. Their shoulders were hunched in concern. I pulled in a little further up the road and waited. I did not want to talk to them, but their concern pulled at me. They knew the rabbit was sick and wanted to do something, but no one knew what that could be, and no one was brave enough to get near it. For minutes on end they stared at it, unable to intervene, unwilling to leave. Then they walked on. When they were gone I got out of the car and went up to the little lump of fur. It was a small rabbit. Its muscles were wasted, its head covered in tumours, its eyes swollen and blistered. It was matted with mud. It could not see. ‘Oh rabbit,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Leaning down I hardened my heart and put it out of its misery. The rabbit had myxomatosis. It arrived in Britain in 1952 and in two years the virus – originally from South America, but already introduced by humans to Australia and Europe – killed ninety-five per cent of the British rabbit population. Tens of millions of rain-soaked corpses littered the roads and fields, and their disappearance had huge effects on the countryside: rabbit-grazed grasslands grew thick with scrub and predator populations crashed. Rabbits have recovered since, though never to the numbers that we once thought normal. And while the virus is less virulent now, outbreaks still occur.

• From Educated (2018)

  She laughed, closing her eyes and throwing back her head in a way that nearly broke my heart, she looked so much like my mother. I stayed with Angie until the funeral. In the days before the service, my mother’s siblings began to gather at their childhood home. They were my aunts and uncles, but some of them I hadn’t seen since I was a child. My uncle Daryl, who I barely knew, suggested that his brothers and sisters should spend an afternoon together at a favorite restaurant in Lava Hot Springs. My mother refused to come. She would not go without my father, and he would have nothing to do with Angie. It was a bright May afternoon when we all piled into a large van and set off on the hour-long drive. I was uncomfortably aware that I had taken my mother’s place, going with her siblings and her remaining parent on an outing to remember her mother, a grandmother I had not known well. I soon realized that my not knowing her was wonderful for her children, who were bursting with remembrances and loved answering questions about her. With every story my grandmother came into sharper focus, but the woman taking shape from their collective memories was nothing like the woman I remembered. It was then I realized how cruelly I had judged her, how my perception of her had been distorted, because I’d been looking at her through my father’s harsh lens. During the drive back, my aunt Debbie invited me to visit her in Utah. My uncle Daryl echoed her. “We’d love to have you in Arizona,” he said. In the space of a day, I had reclaimed a family—not mine, hers. The funeral was the next day. I stood in a corner and watched my siblings trickle in. There were Tyler and Stefanie. They had decided to homeschool their seven children, and from what I’d seen, the children were being educated to a very high standard. Luke came in next, with a brood so numerous I lost count. He saw me and crossed the room, and we made small talk for several minutes, neither of us acknowledging that we hadn’t seen each other in half a decade, neither of us alluding to why. Do you believe what Dad says about me? I wanted to ask. Do you believe I’m dangerous? But I didn’t. Luke worked for my parents, and without an education, he needed that job to support his family. Forcing him to take a side would only end in heartache. Richard, who was finishing a PhD in chemistry, had come down from Oregon with Kami and their children.

• From Educated (2018)

  nerves were dead. “I scraped off so many layers,” Tyler told me, “I was sure that one morning I’d hit bone.” Dad’s fingers began to bow, bending unnaturally backward at the joint. This was because the tendons had begun to shrivel and contract. Tyler tried to curl Dad’s fingers, to elongate the tendons and prevent the deformity from becoming permanent, but Dad couldn’t bear the pain. I came back to Buck’s Peak when I was sure the strep was gone. I sat by Dad’s bed, dripping teaspoons of water into his mouth with a medical dropper and feeding him pureed vegetables as if he were a toddler. He rarely spoke. The pain made it difficult for him to focus; he could hardly get through a sentence before his mind surrendered to it. Mother offered to buy him pharmaceuticals, the strongest analgesics she could get her hands on, but he declined them. This was the Lord’s pain, he said, and he would feel every part of it. While I was away, I had scoured every video store within a hundred miles until I’d found the complete box set of The Honeymooners. I held it up for Dad. He blinked to acknowledge he’d seen it. I asked if he wanted to watch an episode. He blinked again. I pushed the first tape into the VCR and sat beside him, searching his warped face, listening to his soft whimpers, while on the screen Alice Kramden outfoxed her husband again and again. * It is possible that my timeline is off here by one or two days. According to some who were there, although my father was horribly burned, he did not seem in any real danger until the third day, when the scabbing began, making it difficult to breathe. Dehydration compounded the situation. In this account, it was then that they feared for his life, and that is when my sister called me, only I misunderstood and assumed that the explosion had happened the day before.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘For the goshawk,’ wrote White, ‘the necessity was a long walk on the fist; as it always was.’ But he walked as if the walking itself were the secret, not his attention to the feelings of his hawk. Even in the aftermath of my father’s death my tattered heart knew that the secret to taming hawks was to take things slowly. To move from darkness to light, from enclosed rooms into the open air, to stand at a distance, first, and then grow closer, over many days, to this alien world of raucous voices and swinging arms, of bright plastic buggies and roaring mopeds. Day by day, foot by foot, mouthful by mouthful, my hawk would come to see that these things were not a threat, and would look upon them with equanimity. But it was continuous murder for Gos. White walked because that was what the books said he should do, and so that was what he did, taking Gos outside even on the day he arrived. Forty-eight hours later he was walked to the Wheelers’ farmhouse to meet ‘all the family, barking dogs and all’, and the next day they were out on the road meeting cars and cyclists. ‘He bates repeatedly on these trips,’ White noted in his day-book. On it went. He took Gos with him to the pub, took him fishing for carp, took him to Banbury in a motor car. ‘He had to learn to stand that bustle,’ wrote White, ‘as we all have to do, however little we visit it.’ And he did. Just as the despairing soul will finally comprehend its helplessness in the face of continuing horror and bear it because there is no alternative, so with Gos. He had no alternative. There was no softness in his taming. He had to learn to bear things through being frightened all the time, just as White had learned there was no escape in his own education. Down the small roads and grassy rides and across fields damp with standing hay, White walked himself into the landscape. Whole days went past on foot, the novice austringer sinking gratefully into the rhythm and weather of the land. Walking home in the evening along the high-hedged Buckinghamshire lanes he watched ‘the red moon perceptibly rising’, which he ‘had seen to sink as a yellow one at dawn’. At night the world became magical by virtue of its emptiness, and the Ridings a place of mists and stars and solitude. This was his patient excursion into the fields and back into the past.

• From Educated (2018)

  he usually wasn’t—he would play the part of the ruffian, a hardened “Whatcha gonna do about it?” expression disguising his face. But after, when it was just the two of us, the mask lowered, the bravado peeled off like a breastplate, and he was my brother. It was his smile I loved best. His upper canines had never grown in, and the string of holistic dentists my parents had taken him to as a child had failed to notice until it was too late. By the time he was twenty-three, and he got himself to an oral surgeon, they had rotated sideways inside his gums and were ejecting themselves through the tissue under his nose. The surgeon who removed them told Shawn to preserve his baby teeth for as long as possible, then when they rotted out, he’d be given posts. But they never rotted out. They stayed, stubborn relics of a misplaced childhood, reminding anyone who witnessed his pointless, endless, feckless belligerence, that this man was once a boy. * — IT WAS A HAZY summer evening, a month before I turned fifteen. The sun had dipped below Buck’s Peak but the sky still held a few hours of light. Shawn and I were in the corral. After breaking Bud that spring, Shawn had taken up horses in a serious way. All summer he’d been buying horses, Thoroughbreds and Paso Finos, most of them unbroken because he could pick them up cheap. We were still working with Bud. We’d taken him on a dozen rides through the open pasture, but he was inexperienced, skittish, unpredictable. That evening, Shawn saddled a new horse, a copper-coated mare, for the first time. She was ready for a short ride, Shawn said, so we mounted, him on the mare, me on Bud. We made it about half a mile up the mountain, moving deliberately so as not to frighten the horses, winding our way through the wheat fields. Then I did something foolish. I got too close to the mare. She didn’t like having the gelding behind her, and with no warning she leapt forward, thrusting her weight onto her front legs, and with her hind legs kicked Bud full in the chest. Bud went berserk. I’d been tying a knot in my reins to make them more secure and didn’t have a firm hold. Bud gave a tremendous jolt, then began to buck,

• From Educated (2018)

  parents, but I understood instinctively what was at stake. As long as we had never asked, it was possible to believe that they would help. To tell them was to risk the unthinkable: it was to risk learning that they already knew. Audrey did not wait, not even a day. The next morning she showed my email to Mother. I cannot imagine the details of that conversation, but I know that for Audrey it must have been a tremendous relief, laying my words before our mother, finally able to say, I’m not crazy. It happened to Tara, too. For all of that day, Mother pondered it. Then she decided she had to hear the words from me. It was late afternoon in Idaho, nearly midnight in England, when my mother, unsure how to place an international call, found me online. The words on the screen were small, confined to a tiny text box in the corner of the browser, but somehow they seemed to swallow the room. She told me she had read my letter. I braced myself for her rage. It is painful to face reality, she wrote. To realize there was something ugly, and I refused to see it. *2 I had to read those lines a number of times before I understood them. Before I realized that she was not angry, not blaming me, or trying to convince me I had only imagined. She believed me. Don’t blame yourself, I told her. Your mind was never the same after the accident. Maybe, she said. But sometimes I think we choose our illnesses, because they benefit us in some way. I asked Mother why she’d never stopped Shawn from hurting me. Shawn always said you picked the fights, and I guess I wanted to believe that, because it was easier. Because you were strong and rational, and anyone could see that Shawn was not. That didn’t make sense. If I had seemed rational, why had Mother believed Shawn when he’d told her I was picking fights? That I needed to be subdued, disciplined. I’m a mother, she said. Mothers protect. And Shawn was so damaged. I wanted to say that she was also my mother but I didn’t. I don’t think Dad will believe any of this, I typed.

• From Educated (2018)

  chest; for the pain we gave him lobelia, blue vervain and skullcap. This was another of Mother’s recipes. I’d taken it after I’d fallen from the scrap bin, to dull the throbbing in my leg while I waited for the gash to close, but as near as I could tell it had no effect. I believed hospital drugs were an abomination to God, but if I’d had morphine that night, I’d have given it to Luke. The pain robbed him of breath. He lay propped up in his bed, beads of sweat falling from his forehead onto his chest, holding his breath until he turned red, then purple, as if depriving his brain of oxygen was the only way he could make it through the next minute. When the pain in his lungs overtook the pain of the burn, he would release the air in a great, gasping cry—a cry of relief for his lungs, of agony for his leg. I tended him alone the second night so Mother could rest. I slept lightly, waking at the first sounds of fussing, at the slightest shifting of weight, so I could fetch the ice and tinctures before Luke became fully conscious and the pain gripped him. On the third night, Mother tended him and I stood in the doorway, listening to his gasps, watching Mother watch him, her face hollow, her eyes swollen with worry and exhaustion. When I slept, I dreamed. I dreamed about the fire I hadn’t seen. I dreamed it was me lying in that bed, my body wrapped in loose bandages, mummified. Mother knelt on the floor beside me, pressing my plastered hand the way she pressed Luke’s, dabbing my forehead, praying. Luke didn’t go to church that Sunday, or the Sunday after that, or the one after that. Dad told us to tell people Luke was sick. He said there’d be trouble if the Government found out about Luke’s leg, that the Feds would take us kids away. That they would put Luke in a hospital, where his leg would get infected and he would die. About three weeks after the fire, Mother announced that the skin around the edges of the burn had begun to grow back, and that she had hope for even the worst patches. By then Luke was sitting up, and a week later, when the first cold spell hit, he could stand for a minute or two on crutches. Before long, he was thumping around the house, thin as a string bean, swallowing buckets of food to regain the weight he’d lost. By then, the twine was a family fable. “A man ought to have a real belt,” Dad said at breakfast on the day Luke was well enough to return to the junkyard, handing him a leather

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘For the goshawk,’ wrote White, ‘the necessity was a long walk on the fist; as it always was.’ But he walked as if the walking itself were the secret, not his attention to the feelings of his hawk. Even in the aftermath of my father’s death my tattered heart knew that the secret to taming hawks was to take things slowly. To move from darkness to light, from enclosed rooms into the open air, to stand at a distance, first, and then grow closer, over many days, to this alien world of raucous voices and swinging arms, of bright plastic buggies and roaring mopeds. Day by day, foot by foot, mouthful by mouthful, my hawk would come to see that these things were not a threat, and would look upon them with equanimity. But it was continuous murder for Gos. White walked because that was what the books said he should do, and so that was what he did, taking Gos outside even on the day he arrived. Forty-eight hours later he was walked to the Wheelers’ farmhouse to meet ‘all the family, barking dogs and all’, and the next day they were out on the road meeting cars and cyclists. ‘He bates repeatedly on these trips,’ White noted in his day-book. On it went. He took Gos with him to the pub, took him fishing for carp, took him to Banbury in a motor car. ‘He had to learn to stand that bustle,’ wrote White, ‘as we all have to do, however little we visit it.’ And he did. Just as the despairing soul will finally comprehend its helplessness in the face of continuing horror and bear it because there is no alternative, so with Gos. He had no alternative. There was no softness in his taming. He had to learn to bear things through being frightened all the time, just as White had learned there was no escape in his own education. Down the small roads and grassy rides and across fields damp with standing hay, White walked himself into the landscape. Whole days went past on foot, the novice austringer sinking gratefully into the rhythm and weather of the land. Walking home in the evening along the high-hedged Buckinghamshire lanes he watched ‘the red moon perceptibly rising’, which he ‘had seen to sink as a yellow one at dawn’. At night the world became magical by virtue of its emptiness, and the Ridings a place of mists and stars and solitude. This was his patient excursion into the fields and back into the past.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Jesus was inaugurated into his public ministry by his baptism in the fast-flowing river Jordan, which connects the Old and New Covenant. The traditional spot, a few miles from Jericho, is still visited by thousands of Christian pilgrims from all parts of the world at the Easter season, who repeat the spectacle of the multitudinous baptisms of John, when the people came "from Jerusalem and all Judaea and all the region round about the Jordan" to confess their sins and to receive his water-baptism of repentance. The ruins of Jacob’s well still mark the spot where Jesus sat down weary of travel, but not of his work of mercy and opened to the poor woman of Samaria the well of the water of life and instructed her in the true spiritual worship of God; and the surrounding landscape, Mount Gerizim, and Mount Ebal, the town of Shechem, the grain-fields whitening to the harvest, all illustrate and confirm the narrative in the fourth chapter of John; while the fossil remnant of the Samaritans at Nablous (the modern Shechem) still perpetuates the memory of the paschal sacrifice according to the Mosaic prescription, and their traditional hatred of the Jews.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The ideas of the civilized peoples of the ancient world had traveled down the trade routes and had been avidly discussed among the Arabs. Their own local lore had it that they themselves were descended from Ishmael, Abraham’s eldest son, 6 and many believed that their high god Allah, whose name simply meant “God,” was identical with the god of the Jews and Christians. But the Arabs had no concept of an exclusive revelation or of their own special election. The Quran was to them simply the latest in the unfolding revelation of Allah to the descendants of Abraham, a “reminder” of what everybody knew already. 7 Indeed, in one remarkable passage of what would become the written Quran, Allah made it clear that he made no distinction between the revelations of any of the prophets. 8 The bedrock message of the Quran was not a new abstruse doctrine, such as had riven Byzantium, but simply a “reminder” of what constituted a just society that challenged the structural violence emerging in Mecca: that it was wrong to build a private fortune but good to share your wealth with the poor and vulnerable, who must be treated with equity and respect. The Muslims formed an ummah, a “community” that provided an alternative to the greed and systemic injustice of Meccan capitalism. Eventually the religion of Muhammad’s followers would be called islam, because it demanded that individuals “surrender” their whole being to Allah; a muslim was simply a man or woman who had made that surrender. At first, though, the new faith was called tazakka, which can be roughly translated as “refinement.” 9 Instead of hoarding their wealth and ignoring the plight of the poor, Muslims were exhorted to take responsibility for one another and feed the destitute, even when they were hungry themselves. 10 They traded the irascibility of jahiliyyah for the traditional Arab virtue of hilm —forbearance, patience, and mercy. 11 By caring for the vulnerable, freeing slaves, and performing small acts of kindness on a daily, even hourly basis, they believed that they would gradually acquire a responsible, compassionate spirit and purge themselves of selfishness.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  26 55; pl. עָפות‎ Is 31°; of birds Dt 4”, specif. of swallow (in sim.) Pr 26° (|| 72); of seraph Is 6° (cf. Po'l.) ; “ riding (רכב)‎ on cherub 2822" = 18; roll (in vision) Ze 517; arrow 91°; of swift army 18119 (under fig. of bird, sq. 032) Hb 1° (sim. of vulture); fig. of ships (like cloud, or doves) Is60%; ינְבִּיהוּ עוף‎ WIA Ib 5’ make high to fly, i.e. make their flight high, soar aloft (sim. of irresistible tandenca): b. hover (protectingly) Is 31° (birds, sim. of %; on sense 61. Dt 32”). 2. fly away, to a dis- || 772 PTS (יצ‎ ; = vanish, of locusts Na 1 (fig.); כָּנְשָר יָעוּף הַשָמָיִם‎ Pr 23°” (Qr) sim. of riches (v. Toy); of wicked Jb 20% (B13); end of life, in gen. עפ‎ v התעוף--."ספ‎ Pr 23°* Kt, do thine eyes fly (ight) upon it? הַתָעִיף)‎ Hiph. Qr dost thou cause thine eyes to fly,@tc.?) is difficult, and line perhaps not original (v. Toy). Pol. 1. fly about, to and fro; Impf. 3 ms. ְעוּפֶף‎ ot birds Gn” (P); seraphim Is 6; Pe. מָעוּפּף‎ PY Slying fiery serpent Is 14” 30°. 2. cause to fly to and fro, brandish, Inf. estr. sf. בְּעוּפְפִי‎ ‘210 Ez 32” when I brandish my sword before them. | 1110001. Jmpf. 3 ms. ABIYN AV בְּבוּרֶם‎ Hog" like a bird their glory shall fly away. Hiph. Jmpf. 2 ms. Qr, v. Qal ad fin. n-m. °°" coll. flying creatures,‏ ., עוף fowl, insects ;—’y abs. Gn 17+, cstr. + ;‏ fowl, birds, Gn 40% (KE), 78 (J), 1°”‏ .1— fowl of the‏ ע' השמים (P), 1 K 53+; esp. (38 t.)‏ sky, Gn, 21? (J), 174? (P), Hohe ro” +;‏ carrion birds 181728 21% 7 11;‏ ae‏ ְּבְלוּב NOD‏ ע' 165 THY Ts‏ 50% ץ ע' הָרִים fowl of wing Gn 1”‏ ע' 432 redundantly‏ ה (for food); for food also Ly 7° (P),‏ ”78 ץצ (P),‏ (both H), ef. Lv r1¥*° (H, clean and‏ ”20 17% (הָע' הַטָהוּר unclean); for offering Gn 8% (J;‏ Lyi" (P). 2. winged insects (clean and‏ ya yyw Ly 11% )11(‏ ההלְךּ unclean) YIIN-PY‏ ש' Dt 14, so prob. yn alone v™; “Yn‏ שי "yn‏ Ly 11% (A).‏ אשרדלו ps Ya‏ T .ג ג [עפעף]‎ 5% 7 eyelid (NH 20. ; from fluttering %) ge) du. 0801. (v. infr.) and sf. עפָעפי‎ Jb 16" ץ‎ 132%, JBYEY Pr 4” 6% ete. ;-- eyelids, usu. nearly = eyes (6 t. || Dy, as weeping, עפעפינר‎ Jeg”; closed in sleep y 132° Pr 64, ef. of צַלְמָוֶת‎ Jb 16%; looking Pr 4” ef. ינש‎ (of %, testing men); used seductively by wanton women Pr 6”; raised, in arrogance עוף (‘superciliousness’) 40"; fig. an ByEy Jb3° eyelids of dawn, break a dawn, 40? (sim.). fil. עוף]‎ | yy | vb. be dark ;—only Qal /mpf. 2 ms. mayn Jb 11” (though) ₪ be dark, but rd. prob. ִּעְפָה‎ subst., v. infr.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  5; דל || ;88% ע' וגו‎ 126" 2 3%; MINI’ Is 00 "ד ז לוו‎ y, 11,°3¥33 ;—God does not forget hem yg 2a (Kt) כל‎ but has compassion on them Is 49”, saves 34’, delivers 35°, and bestows various favours 68" 140%, the ‘king also judges 727" ; and delivers 72". 4. hum- ble, lowly, Zc 9° (victorious king); opp. לְצִים‎ Pr 3% (Kt); opp. 0°83 16 (Kt); עינים.קקס עם עני‎ רמות‎ yy 18%=2 8 22%. Py n.m. affliction, poverty ;—’y Ex3'+; 29 Dt 16°+, WY עוני ,107% ש‎ 28 16” ) but 20. עכיי‎ ; >Qr עוני‎ ( ; sf. "DY Gn 3x24, WV 164, ae ;—1. affliction, Ib a6 ak 44s 83 1071 19° Lax? 3°; ארץ ע'‎ Gn 41 (E); יָמִי ע'‎ Th 30% Lax’; כור ע'‎ Is 48"; ע'‎ an Tb 36°; אסְירִי ע'‎ y107"; בָּנִי ע/‎ Pr 31°; ‘y ראה‎ Gn 31” (E), Ex 3 ial (J), Dt 267 2K es Ne 9° Jb 10” yo" 285 31° 119’ Lat 3', ins. also before "OY 1S 9° ₪ Th We Dr Kit Bu HPS; ‘ya ראה‎ Gn 20% (J), 1 ₪ 11 25 16” (v. supr.); שמע ע'‎ Gn 16" (J); העלה מע'‎ Ex 3%(J); עני‎ ond Dt 16°. 2. poverty, בְּעָנְיִי הכינותי זהב‎ 1 Ch 22%. 1 ] תעבית‎ [ n.£. humiliation, by fasting (cf. / Pi.Hithp.; NH’n= fasting), sf. YWHEz 9°. vb. sing (Ar. césing, chant, ss‏ ענה ו singing, chanting, etc.; Syr. wiX sing respon-‏ hymn, refrain; poss. As. enti,‏ -ב-ם 1-22[ sively,‏ resound )7( ; Egypt. anni is loan-word 00. to‏ Bondi®) ;—Qal Pf. 3 ms. 11 consec. Je 51";‏ Ex 15”;‏ ותע] Impf. 3 ms. 739° Je 25°; 3 fs.‏ "21 גוא Imv. VY‏ ;.660 18 ₪ ד fpl. APIVAL‏ 3 Ex 32***;—-sing, utter‏ ענת "Inf, estr.‏ ץ tunefully, Ex 15 (E) and Miriam sang to (5)‏ them ; of uttering shout (17%), as in vintage‏ על" :51 Je25°(subj.; 47s pers.), in attack‏ ל.6 Ex 32™8(E);‏ קול ענות M23‏ (חַלוּשָה) pers.);‏ "ך4 דש rei vel pers. laudat. Nu 21” (JE; well);‏ the women‏ 187 8 ז 708+ ;37 Ezr‏ ,)2 || 5( ;29° ”21 יעני במחלות לאר ; sang, and said‏ (cf. || v2).—Is 14”‏ ”'119 ש ace. rei laudat.‏ V. .עון‎ Pi. intens.: עברכ .על‎ Is 27° sing sweetly of it; Inf.M3v קול:‎ Ex 3 21* (E) the sound of distinct singing; cf. niay? ץ‎ n-pr.m. 11011168 :—1. Gn 36° (read‏ | עְנָה Wis Di) vit: -18.20.25.25.29 __ =I Ch y*3- tay,‏ החגי 0 ‘hn‏ (‘nephew’ of 1) Gn 36°"=1 Ch 1. ones‏ .2 A(i)va(v) (cf. n-prm. jy, Safa, Hal" ***).‏ Pw.‏ .: .+ ענוק | יצ Kt‏ ענו (Vv of fouls; Ko" 2® ep, Am jes turn‏ ענז 777 ’¥(9) abs. Ex 19° +; py aside, whence [fr. movements] ; 112 goat, cf. As. enzu; Syr. Ji, estr. six; also JuUxX; [41+ goat-herd ; Ph. Palm. ty; NH (rare (

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  He had to feel what homosexual people feel when they are rejected; what people of color feel when they are demeaned; what people with physical challenges feel when they are ignored; what any human being who has ever been abused feels like to the core of their being. The death of Jesus, therefore, was not required by God to stave off divine retribution against a fatally flawed humanity that deserves eternal punishment, but an act of self-sacrifice and love so profound that it brought enough Good Medicine in the world to heal the broken hoop of the nation for every person on earth.11 The fourth vision quest restored the most essential aspect of creation: kinship. Racism destroys kinship. Sexism destroys kinship. Classism destroys kinship. Homophobia destroys kinship. When human beings exile other human beings from the circle of life, they are breaking the hoop of the human nation, tearing apart what God has created. The sin of humanity is not a lifetime stain inherited from mythic ancestors who disobeyed a rule, but a daily choice made by all of us in the here and now, in living relationships that embody our kinship. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, European Christians had a choice. They could have acknowledged kinship. They could have resisted the temptation of racism that pretended that one kind of human being is better than another. They could have worked with Native nations to establish a new community, one that would have shared resources and helped each to grow. Perhaps part of this exchange could have offered European women a more respected place in their own society. The liberation of the human spirit among American women could have occurred centuries ago. The fact that these choices were not made illustrates why the sacrifice of the Native Messiah is so profound. The message of his vision quest, the reason he chose his good day to die, and the point of his becoming a Two-Spirit embodiment of all people is so we might see more clearly the choice before us. He came and died not for our sins, but for our sight. He came that we might have his vision. Native American women are still standing beside the cross of history. They are still bravely facing the suffering of humanity. They are living witnesses to the death caused by exile, rejection and abuse. By their presence they are calling racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, and homophobia into account. They are insisting that no one can be left out of the family of human beings. Their spirit is the spirit of life. They are the life bearers of the People. Jesus, as the Native Messiah, the Christ, is their sacred sister. Christ is who they are. Christ, the Two-Spirit Messiah, who is neither male nor female but both in one person, is the living vision of equality before God that is the birthright of every human being.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  I will never claim to know the experience of anxiety that is all too real for those living with marginalized identities and/or residing in sometimes unsafe communities. I have heard many precious client stories that reveal how harrowing and heartbreaking it is to walk into a bathroom and not know whether someone will be there waiting to hurt you. To stay behind on a school trip because your citizenship status does not let you travel outside of the country (and, worse yet, to never get to return to your homeland for fear that you will not get to come back to your present country of residence). To feel like you have to hide your identity at Thanksgiving dinner because your family will make fun of you for loving who you love. While I hold tremendous empathy and a sense of humble openness to continue to learn, I will never truly know what these experiences are like. I do know, though, that it breaks my heart if you are reading this and you know this anxiety all too well because you have lived or are continuing to live through these pains. It never should have been this way. I ache knowing that you ache. Anxiety looks different for each of us, depending on the storied life that each of us has led. We all have different paths that have brought us here to this page. Even as you read this, you may find that you’ve been comparing your anxieties to those of others. Perhaps you have been guilting yourself for feeling anxious when others “have it so much worse.” You minimize your pain, feeling that it pales in light of what someone else has gone through. Or maybe you have been validating your own experience while belittling another’s, saying, “It’s not that bad.” Perhaps you scoff, saying, “Some people are such babies.” Yet I will say this: Pain is pain. Anxiety is anxiety. No matter the symptom—the physical sensations, the ruminative distress, feeling like a victim in your own body—anxiety is universally and undeniably uncomfortable. It can bring us all to our knees, no matter what set it off. It can have a grip on us that is unshakable. When this happens, our acknowledgment of that pain is sometimes our best course of action. Shaming ourselves that we “shouldn’t” feel anxiety often only amplifies distress. And while these circumstances are often beyond our control, we get to choose how we show up in the aftermath. Whether a situation is self-created or the result of life unexpectedly handing us a juicy peach through the thorns, we get to decide how we respond to our challenges and choose whether to take a bite or not. Anxiety is the purgatory in between that tells you you’re just not ready, though. It tells you that you’ll make a fool of yourself. It says that it won’t be worth it. It whispers in your ear that people will judge you.