I am your daughter. You have suckled me throughout my life. There is milk and fruits and honey for me to enjoy. You are larger than the prairie, more rugged than any mountaintops, more forgiving than a quilt of snow. You are expansive like the universe, yet tender and...
Why would 100 prisoners organize a hunger strike in Guantanamo? Did our Congress answer that question adequately before an army of doctors coerced force feeding? Force feeding is not the opposite of hungering for food. Feeding tubes down the mouth are dangerously...
Whatever was Djhokhar Tsarnaev thinking-- accused of setting off homemade bombs on April 15? It’s baffling. Here is a teenager, deeply wounded, isolated from all he knew, and now in police lock-down. I did meet him a few times when he was 16 at the Cambridge high...
Not the Boston marathon. OMG. Not 2 explosions during the marathon. This is worse than a Hitchcock nightmare. Oh Holy God. 4 people dead and countless injured. Here, in my cheerful cocky energetic hometown. And the Marathon, started in 1897 with 18 runners, is...
The Walk Each step a word Each toe a pupil Each pilgrim a sapling Big toes flex, then probe, and grab Groping over earthflesh. Callouses reach blindly for a vista of mountains. Underfoot The arch tenderly curves around a root Prayer is never stagnant Grace...
In Honduras I pick up bits of the culture. I eat an empanada, and the memory is stored on my tongue. I see a boy riding bareback downhill to the bridge, and my calf muscles contract as if trotting along. I'm amazed at the bromeliads growing like spikey lily pads, the...
The terrain going southeast from Chiquimula is a mix of chaparral with valleys of cultivated fields. Guatemalans here dress in western style, with a Butch Cassidy swing. The harvest is good here with melons, watermelons, fruit trees, honey, and ofcourse lots of maize....
My father risked his life several times as a pilot in WW II. I think of him often now that he has left me, left this earth. My father traveled to see the marvels of the world, and loved returning to his home town where he lived for 85 years. My father loved wild...
There’s not much silence in an Alternatives to Violence Workshop. But there’s a lot of soaking in good energy. We do silly games like Mrs. Mumbly Just can’t smile (talk without showing teeth); sly games like taking a slow boat to China; rowdy games like Jailbreak...
Michelle Alexander is a slim tall woman with a powerful voice. Her book, The New Jim Crow, 2011, is convincing and well researched. She shared at Boston University a vision and a plan for a new social movement to turn around pernicious racial policies in the US....