Category: Uncategorized

At Mass yesterday, the priest walked out and soldiered through the prayers despite his stutter. He paused. He took a breath, if need be. But he marched us through the liturgy with an admirable resolve. He was interrupted, right after his respectfully succinct homily, by a woman yelling. This woman was elderly. At a certain…

I am usually under-prepared for July, which means officially slipping past the halfway mark through the year. This year is no different. (Isn’t it still 2020?) Time seems to be running through my fingers this summer. Sometime in May, a friend texted me: “This was the weekend the pandemic ended,” and each weekend seems to vie for…

Were I a poet I would tellyou in pretty four line verse    Of June, and her belongings    Of Sky and Grass    Of hill and dale    And Sun and MoonAll in the bonny month of          June. —Emily Dickinson To me, the first truly warm, sunny mornings of spring-turning-into summer always means pulling a volume of Dickinson’s poetry off the shelf to read outside…

This morning (this was in January), I summoned up every ounce of the misanthropic city-dwelling spirit of Fran Leibowitz energy, as I walked through a film crew at my entrance to the park with my breviary and morning coffee“How many mornings will you be here?” I ask a PA with the most thin of all…

An addendum: I have realized the issue is not that I forget. Which is, of course, not ever entirely I meant, if that means that my memories of events, places, and people will be erased entirely. Although, I have found that it is very easy to forget about everything that happened from March to May—everything…

the first man who ever taught me to hate patriarchy— and yes, it was a man— i may need one like a fish needs a bicycle but cycling is my favorite form of transportation. became disgusted with systems of coercion— of stodgy language designed for laying bare the blood-thirst of a soul’s blatant fantasies of…

This morning, making sandwiches in the crowded comfort of St. Joseph House, I had a strange moment where I wondered: did any of this really happen? My mind knew that many things had happened since St. Patrick’s Day 2020, but my body felt like I was still there—still in last year. And how does my…

One thing that grad school has done away with are the stretches of actual free time. Time that you don’t have to spend working towards a deadline. Time that you can just spend, profligately. We talk about wasting time as a negative. But wasting time is in and of itself kind of an art. And…

— But glories rested in you, and world-shouldering braveries, and words fell through you onto paperas sweetly as soft rain—Glenn Shea, The World is Nothing, a meditation on John Keats There is another side to all this, though: Jesus’ innermost dignity cannot be taken from him. The hidden God remains present within him. Even the man subjected to…

I am happy in unbearable way. when you have to danceand cannot dance hard enough to let allthe peace and contentment bubblinginside you run into the worldhappy in a way earned back after so many years,Put back together with the confidence and joy of being twentythe simplicity of being young—earned back with patience, tears, and…