How Helpless

like someone
in a foreign land
with a daypack
of only your own
provincial tongue.

Poems are meant
to speak in metaphor,
but this is your truth,
your horrifying truth.

I know you
only so much.
Even so,
this much I know:

Every atom of oxygen
you would have forgone;
deeply into alien earth
you would have sunk;
a ravage of tears
you did, indeed, weep.

All to keep
her breathing,
all to keep
her here.

(cc) Karen G. Johnston

An Open Letter to Rachel Maddow

I heard the urgency and longing as she started the autobiographical preamble that is unique to her but I am guessing you have heard – in various versions – many times before, prefacing the very same question, posed to you, the very same heart-felt dilemma delivered at your feet.

A vulnerable, “Can you tell me what to do?” A needy, “Will you tell me what to do?” An insistent, “Tell me what to do!” With its whispered underneath, “You are so clever, so articulate, and funny to boot! Please, please, just tell me what to do to save this world, tell me that the world might be saved in my life time.”

I am nowhere near as schooled as you, or brilliant as you; neither do I enjoy the wide acclaim your position in national media affords you. My life has, however, afforded me smaller-pond opportunities to dip into a similar pool of inspiration, of people holding what I say with some regard, that you seem to swim in so gracefully. I, too, have faced dear, confused, despairing people who have done good in their lives, have experienced both joy and pain, who hope for something more just in this broken, unfair world and who are stuck and sad and sometimes outraged, but often, in that moment, are full of urgent longing.

Like she was.

So I kinda felt for you up there on the stage. And I was kinda curious about how you would handle this tender moment. I watched how you held this woman, a good forty feet and many rows of adoring fans between you and her. You listened as she told you that she was marching in the streets long before you were a gleam in your parents’ eyes. She ticked off a litany of ways in which her 80 years had been spent working for social change, strong in voice which buoyed her stature that age had bowed. There, pleading, vulnerable – more vulnerable than I was comfortable witnessing – she implored, “Tell me what to do!”

Whether there was an actual hush in the crowd, I’m not sure, but my somewhat melodramatic mind has built it in. I’m pretty sure those of us there knew you did not have The Answer. Yet some of us rely on your analysis, your gift for “explaining the world” as you call it, so we were ready to hear an answer and we were ready to hear especially your answer.

And with that small, secret magical-thinking child still within us, perhaps we hoped it might be The Answer.

That’s a heavy burden. Even an unfair one, particularly in front of all these people, who are the people of your chosen hometown. I think it comes with the territory of having a public life, the territory of people giving your words more weight than they necessarily give to the words of others.

I am one of the people who, when you asked the room how many people don’t have a television in their home, raised my hand (as you did, which did not go unnoticed or unappreciated). So I am not like my beloved aunt and uncle, who watch you faithfully and nightly. So I have to fess up that I didn’t know that you are famous for your cocktail recipes: I’m that far out of the Rachel Loop. I did sometimes listen to your Big Breakfast radio show when you were still just a local celebrity. I noticed when you went national on AirAmerica and felt a little hometown pride. Then I sort of lost track of you until the past year or two, when you kind of became a left-wing sensation and a local hero.

Mostly I know you through Facebook postings: hand-picked by my FB buds, your insightful, searing commentary that make feel less helpless, less hopeless, in this politically-whacked nation. So I don’t fall under adoring fan or crazed fan or even I-knew-her-before-she-was-famous, not really.

I did know that you were smart. And articulate. And wicked knowledgeable. I didn’t know you got your doctorate in England or that you are writing a real book on a real topic. I did know you have a particularly wry sense of humor that sends wonderful chills up and down my spine. I didn’t know that you were kind and generous, but I was not surprised to find this out. I think I had heard rumors about that. The valley is still a small place and probably always will be.

I did not know, however, that despite your relative youth, you are wise.

I like to think of myself as discerning. So I think of my personal pop culture heroines and heroes as articulate, talented, politically progressive. But wise? I’m more likely to expect that they are the exact opposite: arrogant, self-engrossed, smarmy, aloof. Another thing that seems to come with the territory.

Maybe you aren’t wise. Maybe you are just good at acting wise. I’m guessing you wouldn’t cop to it and that your partner, Susan, might differ in the way that intimate partners know our shadow sides more than others and are less likely to make such grand and unilateral pronouncements. But really, you struck me as wise and I don’t say that about many people.

First, as this elder from our shared community stood before you, you listened to her question. You listened intently. First step of a wise person: listen intently.

Secondly, you knew that the answer was in how you responded, not in what you actually said. Because the fact is, there really isn’t The Answer. As unfair as that feels, it is nonetheless true. If you had indicated otherwise, I think I might have stood up and walked away. And if not walked away, then at least brought much more skepticism and disappointment. Though I’ve not read his work myself, I am awfully good at web surfing for awesome quotes and so I choose here to reference the French Nobel Laureate, Andre Gide, who said (long before Deepak Chopra tried to make it his own), “Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”

You say that you started off as an activist, intent on changing the world. At some point, you turned on some unanticipated dime and ended up explaining the world, instead. Though I do not have the skills or wherewithal to do what you do, I’m thinking that explaining the world is easier than changing it. I’m not saying what you do now is easy. ‘Cause, dear god, you make really complex, important, relevant things accessible. Just easier.

Plus, you’re pretty damn gifted at it and there must be room in the Beloved Community for all of us to live into our gifts.

Lastly, and this is what I hope you hold onto so that you can live long and prosper, what I imagine will be a daily choice you will have to make over and over, because your star is ascending and its arc is wide: you told us there is a limit of what you can give.

You did this right after you explained the seemingly ever-expanding world of Glen Beck and his whole empire and how his influence is not only deep, but wide and vast and dangerous. You told us of the many mechanisms he (and his ilk) use to extend his destructive influence, the crazy amount of hours he works, the subterfuge he employs to spread his message, the pay-per-view presence he has established on the internet after he left Fox.

Not only did you tell us that there is only so much you can do, you did so bravely and with empathy, in the face of our wanting more of you. You did so humbly, even as we did what humans do: “desperately grasp after people, places, and things, as if they can redeem us from our own suffering.”* You did it as we brought our fear of how dark the night is growing, and how we feel you not only explain the world, you illuminate our hopes. Talk about not easy.

You said there is no Rachel Maddow, Incorporated, and there won’t be. You said there is no Rachel merch (though I think you haven’t been on the internet then, cause there is Rachel merch, it just must not be you who is making a buck off it). And even though the Creamery will now have a sandwich named after you, there will be no Maddow internet channel (though there are several of your cocktail how-to recipes online, which is pretty nifty).

You told us that one hour a day on television (and its concomitant activities) was about all you could do. Though I must confess to the slightest shadow of disappointment, I am much more relieved to hear it. I think you are wise for such a choice. You are wise because it isn’t just how much we do, it’s how we do it.

And as if it were a test to see if I was paying attention to what you were saying up there, I want to let you know I heard you say that yes, making a one-hour tv show was enough, but I also seem to remember hearing that you are writing a book of substance on militarism in our country; helping to make a serious documentary what the wound of 9/11 and how our response to that wound has changed us; commuting between two dissonant homes, and sustaining a loving partnership that holds deep meaning for you. Maybe it’s not as flashy as Beck or as empir-i-manical as Rush, but it’s not chopped liver, either.

Not only are you wise for it, we all are better off for it.

Because you don’t have The Answer, even if you have some really good, really scathing, really real answers.

Because we humans don’t have a great track record of treating our prophets very well. Yeah, yeah, I know you aren’t quite yet at the status of prophet, but I think your arc might include it in a pop culture kind of way and that could get ugly on so many levels.

Because it’s not like you are making it up: for it to be done right, for it to be real, for you to do what you can do (rather than some ghost writer or some hired hand), there really is a limit to what you can do. Especially if you want to stay partnered. Or happy. Or just plain sane.

Because when I am swimming in my own small pond of weighted words and empathy, whether it’s when I’m social working or ministering, I will remember that people survive when you hold them and their uncertainty, their longing, their wish for you to be something that you are not while telling them that you have something, but not everything, to meet their needs. There’s always that momentary hush – even if it’s just within my own heart – but then we all breathe, together, and keep on keeping on.

And that’s what I’m wishing for you.

*(Stephen Prothero, God is Not One)

Karen G. Johnston

So Many Lines of Poetry

So many lines of poetry
wander in and out of mind
as I walk s l o w l y, circumnavigating
what my then kiddles-now-nearly-grown
called “the Big Egg.”

Right now, I am a poet who is not a poet.

So I let each line go.
Several repeat silently for beauty
(three times if it is really good).

Mostly, they are gone,
either cast away or floating off,
by the time my right foot
lifts and settles, my left foot
lifts and settles.

Yet this one that you are reading
got caught in the strands of my hair,
like the leafy detritus I often find
after a morning of weeding and pruning.
Hours later, brush in hand,
buck naked before the mirror,
poetry falls to the sink,
carelessly settling
among toothbrush, hair product,
razor & random pen,

a chance for momentary ink
before impermanence
fades us all.

(cc) Karen G. Johnston

Vanishing Alice

These times
I am only what
we are together.

I am not
your daughter’s beloved friend
granddaughter’s mentor
your occasional preacher.

I am
car ride,
driver from one place to the next,
possibility of conversation.

I am
undemanding attention,
delight in the you of you.

And when
I drop you off,
at the place
of your arrival,
I am
no longer.

(cc) Karen G. Johnston

Cosmic Contusions: How Small, How Tender

My latest sermon can be found here.

Quarter-Century Friends

Quarter-century friends
fumble virtually
towards conversation,
towards justice archaic
and utterly urgent.

I feel boastful one minute,
lesser the next.
Humility and determination
make such odd bedfellows.

One a reminder
of my soul,
the other
a manifestation:
each a dire message
that I live a life
not of my own making.


(cc) Karen G. Johnston

The Big Lean

The teacher says, we tend to lean into
the future, into the what’s-next, into
the make-it-happen.

Of which “we” she speaks, I’m not sure.
Wannabe Buddhists? All Americans?
Some Westerners? Upwardly-mobile people
who’ve been turned onto slowing down?

I know it can’t be everyone.
I went to high school with people
still on their glory-days chase.
They lean back, not forward.

Let me be more specific: I lean into the future.
By which I mean to say, I’ve spent my life leaning into it.
I’ve gotten pretty damn good at it:
I make a decent salary.
We have a roof over our heads.
I escaped the alcoholic haze of my childhood.
Some good has come of it.

The teacher says, we lean into the future.
When she says so, it’s clear it’s not the way to be.
Nevertheless, there I am: planning for the worst,
having learned – only later in life, and with great effort –
to hope for the best. All of it: leaning.

Today, however, I sit on buckwheat zafu,
eleven hours among comrades
in the being here, being now.
I notice I have been leaning
into the future and now, I guess,
it’s time to straighten up.

(cc) Karen G. Johnston

Homage on the Occasion of a Church Engulfed in Flames

Hand-me-down hymnals,
colors mismatched,
binding worn nearly bare,
pages yellow, soft. Gone.

Cushions filled with horse hair, straw.
So much more went into them ~
inadvertent blood prick,
graciously efforted sweat,
ancient and renewed tears.
None, not even remnant.
All gone.

Gone, too,
the pulpit,
the piano,
the pews.

Gone, the quilt
called stained glass,
called healing,
called blessed.

I am no lover of Christ.
Yet there are times
I have found myself,
wanting to walk with Jesus.
I have found him here
among you.

I had come
other times,
twice so dire
when divine calling
was too much
for these bones
to bear.

Now, in winter shadow
of single charred edifice,
the Parish House gathers
its motley crew,
some here since dawn,
others not seen in years.

Through distortion
of clear window panes,
the firefighters sentinel,
pacing the smolder
of what was lost.

Shepherd poet preaches,
We’ll keep our perspective.
(And the bell.)
No Haitian rumbling here,
yet the sound
of singing together,
of sighing together,
of seeking together,
is deafening,

making mute
any poem whispering
from this pen,
offered as tribute
to the gift
you are.


(cc) Karen G. Johnston

Like Each Night, Wild and Inescapable

do you not close up
in hopes of opening again?
Do you not open,
in hopes that eventually,
if only temporarily,
you will close?

Life is treacherous,
stinging like the surprising
winter thorn.
It is bitter,
coffee on cold morning lips.
Full of empty promise,
adhering atmosphere
with the weight of its void.

Yet, thorns,
even those hidden
in the yarn of warm mitten,
and soft aging flesh,
avail themselves
to the tweezers' pinch.

And bitter taste at lover’s kiss
is not unexpected, thus
melts into pulsing honey.

Breath breathes
over and over,
dark or light,
day or night,
open and closed.


(cc) Karen G. Johnston

Friends in their Forties

for Tom

Shafts of Indian summer
warm your face,
my neck.

You speak
of your mother,
ever the parent,
even until the very end,
showing all of you
how to pass
with grace.

As we hugged good-bye,
I said with my truest breath,
we have only thirty years.

Only thirty years
to work out
some similar feat.

We should start
figuring out now
how to die.

I meant it.

I mean it still.
And I mean, too,
that maybe
we have
only until
tomorrow.

(cc) Karen G. Johnston

Our Own Potter's Field

Thick scaly bark, these trees are old.
Impossible to know just how old,
since yew boughs hollow as they age.
Three make a canopy of bright berries,
crimson constellations suspended overhead.
As guides, these stars aren’t much use.

All parts of the plant are so poisonous,
save the dark seed within each red star,
that after ingestion, symptoms leading to death ~
staggering gait, muscle tremors, spasms ~
are often missed before terminal collapse.
Horses are most vulnerable, none but birds are safe.

Next to me, the cold bench memorializes
the burial ground this serene hillside might be.
I can’t help but wonder about the dying patients
from the State Lunatic Hospital at Northampton.
No rapid onset: only slow convulsed demise, largely unnoted.

Just a few days ago, I marveled at how the next field over
used to hold an abundance of pumpkins in September,
then late October, a bevy of children learning
the fine art of New England gleaning.
How one year there was a ragged La-Z-Boy ~
some collegiate prank or attempted performance art.
Around here, you can never be sure.
Now the meadow rolls, four shades
of green, one dappled lavender.

Some will not even consider purchase of a house
on the village hill two over from this one.
The collisions of beleaguered spirits too much
for the harmony of hearth and home.

Unsure if this is meditation or lamentation,
I set down novice feet, one after the other.
Heel, ball, toe. H e e l, b a l l, t o e.
Underneath: collapsed dirt has wended its way
from bone to soil, sinew to loam, flesh to earth.
I wonder how to make luminous these toxic rubies:
those just over my head in the sentinel trees,
those deep below my feet in each and every unmarked grave.


(cc) Karen G. Johnston

Peace Pagoda (September 16, 2009)

Brackish water
mottled with lily pads
the color of green beans,
rust, day-old dog shit,
goldenrod.

A cluster shimmies ~
one, then the next, shakes.
This one pulses,
that one acts like a cog:
brief urgent forward,
only to settle back.

The Jesus bugs
are here, as hoped,
skimming water,
barely a ripple
reveals them.

The longer I look,
the more there is
to see.

Frogs I thought
curiously absence
are, in fact, not:
Just my ability
to perceive them
until a half hour
has adjusted me
to the quiet
of this place.

Decay, too, is here:
soothing and ominous.
Pine needles lost
from their mother tree
are now spindly floats
that will eventually sink.

Down is where
I cast my eyes
to find suspended forms
of agile orange
wend their way
in the water.

A single dragonfly
just entered
and exited
the scene.

And always ~
always ~
this wind,
this breath.

(cc) Karen G. Johnston

The Partial Will Come to an End

1 Corinthians 13:10 (NSRV)
for KBW


In grief’s suspension of reality,
disbelief blooms floridly.

Stray sense of right, of wrong
fills the void when breath catches,
when tears well, just before overflow,
when moan is only bitter taste
about to ladder its way out.

Fleeting interval of partial forgetting,
suggests that death is not what it is:
commonplace, ordinary, everyday.

Second only to birth, and barely that.


(cc) Karen G. Johnston

Bread & Roses -- Star Style

Here is the service/sermon that I crafted as part of the Youth Chapel held at the International Affairs Conference on Star Island on Friday, July 24, 2009.

As part of my love of Star Island, I volunteer direct a week-long youth program (60 kids ages 18 months to 18 years!) and get to create a chapel service at the end of our time together.

Deftly Hearing Music (REDUX)

Today I gave a sermon -- recycled, and I'd like to think improved -- from a homily last summer. T

Inbetween Times: Who We Are For Each Other

Here is the link to my latest sermon, which I gave yesterday: http://leamon.org/kj/index.php?itemid=39.

And here is the link to the Reflections by Lynne Marie Wanamaker, who also gave a sermon as a part of the same service:
http://www.mindbodymama.com/2009/06/worship-inbetween-times-who-we-are-for.html

Metal May Well Revert

for Naomi



to its natural state.
Rust, oxidation, salt hastening
its back, back, back to earth.

Bone is less exact.
Fractured, yes, even broken,
it returns: bone to bone,
parts to whole.

It is written
dust to dust.
So it is with bone,
shards turn porous,
devoured by bacteria,
time, our fading memories.

Shattered, however,
it becomes metal
not via its own volition,
but surgical intervention.

Carbon composite,
eventual, actual stardust,
the stuff of which heavens are made:
one moment expanding nebula,
same moment elderly mother’s broken hip
all night on cold linoleum --
she didn’t want to be a bother.

Her stardust does not heal like it once did.
Her mind does not recollect like it used to.
All that iron, zinc, copper, nickel trace:
once loamy soil, then homegrown kale,
then heart, tendon, lung, bone.
None of it, what it used to be.
Until she reverts back
to her natural state,
Alice remains.

Turns out we are all
scatter and combine,
the dust she once was,
is now, ever will be.

The time will come,
when you will grieve,
your tears will make mud,
your fingers smearing
the stuff of her body,
the life of yours,
the whole of the universe
on the wall of our mutual world,
marking our coming,
marking our going.



(cc) Karen G. Johnston

Equilibrium

I believe in the power of equilibrium in nearly all things.

Though my horoscope means blather to me, I find there is something to the Libran symbol of the scale. I see it in my two adopted children, once nearly stolen from each other. Even when I first met them and they were still little – one just two, one nearly four years old – they unknowingly balanced each other. They still do:
• When one is having an foot-stomping meltdown, the other becomes the epitome of perfect progeny.
• Where one feels the need to wash his laundry once per month (at most), the other loads the washer nearly daily with clothes barely worn but somehow in need of sanitizing.

It is not just in my children with which this instinctual, natural, unavoidable tendency manifests. I see it when groups are smarter than the individuals in it. I see it in what we are calling a “recession”, when, in fact, we are coming ‘round right after too long among the irrationally exuberant.

Another example, as certain as Swiss timing: should I stay up until midnight three or four nights in a row, one night to visit with my beloved, another to write a poem, the third to waste on insipid, yet enthralling, computer games, surely a sore throat and clogged sinuses will dog me into an early bed time. The more egregious the late night foray, the more likely a sick day from work will become necessary. The body craves health and demands its due.

The only place I do not see the pull towards equilibrium at work – and this is where my fervent hope and prayer come in, that my vision is limited by my earthy humanity – is peace. Out of defiant resignation, I only see us careening away from her, not arcing back towards what some say is a patient woman, awaiting our begging forgiveness.

I would like to write otherwise. I would like to write something to warm your (and my) heart, give you real sense of hope, give it to myself. But it is out of my purview and sometimes, even out of my imagination. I fear we’ve tipped too far this warming planet. Sad to say, I believe more the reports that say we are already over the edge than the ones that give me tips for reducing my carbon footprint.

Yet, somehow, -- and this is where Mystery enters in – this has not stopped me in my strides for peace. In high school, I began collecting quotes. Phrases, paragraphs, poems, passages which caught my attention. By college, I came across this passage by Elissa Melamed, the origin of which has been lost to me for several decades now:
I don’t know how long we have. We have to do this work because we believe in peace and in building peace. We start with ourselves, our communities: our circles get larger. If the bomb falls tomorrow, there’s something so valid about living this way, that we would live this way anyway.
I suppose that’s the rub, the saving grace, the zen koan. I still ride my bike, with its panniers to carry my groceries. I still buy many of my family’s clothes second hand as an act of recycling that also meets our need for frugality. I still garden organically, buy locally, keep the heat low in the house, write on scratch paper, write to my senators about Gaza, about bailouts, about government-sanctioned torture.

If the world is going to veer wildly towards its own implosion (something long ago depicted in Hindu legend…), a sure tipping out of balance, a ship’s bough rising skyward before certain plunge seaward, somehow I am one of those passengers running against gravity, sometimes racing frantically, sometimes ambling measuredly, in hopes that my little efforts might tip the ship back onto buoyant water, back to balance.

I pray to meet you, and many others, there.


Karen G. Johnston

Role Modeling for New Meditators

Perfect posture.
Lotus position.
Serene countenance.
Motionless hands.

Silence. Stillness. Equanimity.

Not.

Startling to sound.
Distracted and distracting.
Scratching my butt.
Restless feet, hands.
Eyes shut,
then open,
then closed,
then one last peek.

Clumsy. Unfocused. Imperfect.

Sure message:
If I sit here,
you can too.


(cc) Karen G. Johnston

Blood of Christ

With the enthusiasm of a red-corpuscled drunkard
in mystical Irish pub at closing time,
the priest in full vestments
drains the last bit of the blood of Christ.

How unabashed!

Amid prim & proper parishioners
up & down & in unison
as sanctioned by centuries
of utterly correct bishops.


Below polished crucifix,
before entire congregation,
ablution concludes
with unadorned cloth.

Yet, what else to do with the last bit of messianic remnant?

Would it not be worse
to empty it elsewhere,
this liquid lifeline
to the true believers?

Better to whet the gullet
of the white-robed priestman
than dribble down the sides
of any ritualized receptacle,
perhaps made holy by the wine,
but nevertheless, wasted.


(cc) Karen G. Johnston