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Willie Mays, R.I.P.

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Willie Mays, the best baseball player to ever grace the game, died on Tuesday, June 17, at the age of 93.

Mays has always been my childhood hero and favorite baseball player. He could hit for average and power, steal bases, catch every ball that came his way in centerfield, and throw like no one else. He loved playing baseball and he played with the childhood joy that was forever captured in his immortal nickname: The “Say Hey Kid.” The actress Tallulah Bankhead said, “There have been only two geniuses in the world—Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.”

Mays and Shakespeare

You see, I wasn’t alone in that hero worship. Not by a long shot.

Isn’t Willie Mays wonderful?

People—famous people—seemed to know their place in the pecking order when it came to Willie Mays.

  • Woody Allen, in the movie Manhattan, said Willie Mays was one of the things that made life worth living, right after Groucho Marx but before “those incredible apples and pears by Cezanne.” I don’t know that I’d put Groucho before Willie.
  • “If he could cook,” his first (and most beloved manager) Leo Durocher said, “I’d marry him.”
  • Sportswriter Bob Stevens penned a classic line after Mays hit a game-winning triple in the eighth inning of the 1959 All-Star Game, which went, “Harvey Kuenn gave it honest pursuit, but the only center fielder in baseball who could have caught it hit it.”  
  • “Isn’t Willie Mays wonderful?” the first lady of American theater, Ethel Barrymore, asked.

Carl Hubbell, the “Meal Ticket” pitcher of the 1930s who famously struck out Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and three others consecutively in the 1934 All-Star Game, was at the Polo Grounds with New York Cubans owner Alex Pompez in 1950 to scout an 18-year-old Willie Mays. Hubbell watches amazing defensive plays throughout the day, sees Mays hit a home run with a bat that moves through the strike zone faster than any of the greats he played with, and is convinced.  Years later, after Mays became a Giant, Hubbell would . . .

“. . . relive that day in the Polo Grounds when the Giants truly discovered the talent, the power, and the voice of Willie Mays. ‘Gentlemen,’ he’d say regally, ‘that was the day I saw the best goddamn baseball player I have ever seen in my life.’”

Everyone has a story

With Willie at ATT Park
With my childhood hero, Willie Mays – the Say Hey Kid – outside Giants Park in 2014

Like so many others, I’ve written about my love affair with Mays, beginning in 2010 with Willie Mays and America’s oldest professional ballpark.

The time Mays spent in the Negro Leagues and the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Birmingham’s historic Rickwood Field, America’s oldest professional baseball park, are themes in this post. The Alabama native got his start with the Birmingham Black Barons in 1948 and, as fate would have it, his death came the same week baseball came back to Rickwood Field.

Three other fan letters include:

Once I even had Mays lead off what became a very popular MTC post on retirement: Bashing into joy. I chose Willie as the lead on that subject because it was said of Mays that the only thing he could not do on a baseball diamond was stay young forever.

Willie, you see, played too long after his skills had declined and the joy was harder to find. Those last years were not kind.

We’re all the young Willie Mays early in life, believing we can chase down fly balls forever. Yet when one has to make a decision to let go of a place in the world there can be a big difference between understanding what’s necessary intellectually and owning that choice through emotional acceptance.

I’ve owned the fact that I’m getting older and that I’m now retired. I’m not quite ready, however, to see all my childhood heroes move on.

Joe Posnanski seems to understand that feeling.

“The sky seems a little less bright today. The music sounds just a bit bluer. The stars feel farther away.

Willie Mays is gone.

He stopped playing baseball more than 50 years ago, and yet you can see him, even if you never actually saw him. He’s chasing a fly ball, and he will never get there in time. Sayers was effortless. Orr was effortless. Griffey was effortless. But Mays? He runs like he’s racing after a missed bus. He exerts every muscle, each limb seems to have a mind of its own, and he moves with such speed and abandon that his baseball cap holds on for dear life until it cannot hold on and goes flying off his head like a rodeo cowboy getting bucked off a bull.“

I never got to see Mays play live, but I watched him every chance I could get (which wasn’t enough in those days) on television.

“But, of course, it was never just about playing baseball. The 660 home runs and 1,326 extra base hits and 339 stolen bases and 12 Gold Gloves tell a fine story. But none of those numbers are records. None of those are singular in baseball history. None of those get to the heart of Willie Mays.

No, at the heart is something indescribable.

At the heart is joy. That’s what Willie Mays radiated, even on those off days when he wasn’t feeling especially joyful. Watch him turn his back and take off after Vic Wertz’s fly ball in ’54. Think of the time he sprinted after Rocky Nelson’s shot and, having run out of time, simply snagged the ball out of the air barehanded.

‘Did you see that?’ he squeaked at Durocher when he got back to the dugout.

‘No, Willie,’ Durocher said straight-faced. ‘Can you go out there and do it again?’“

It is hard to believe that Willie Mays is gone.

“Only, of course, he isn’t gone. Willie Mays will never be gone.“

Thanks for all the incredible memories. And for the joy. Rest in peace, Say Hey.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photos: The Catch, Willie Mays; statue outside Oracle Park

Memory is life’s way of talking to the future

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We can learn a great deal by listening to our children and our elders. The child in this particular case was my daughter, who had been pressing me to read a book that was unlike anything she had ever encountered, even loaning me her copy. The elders are the trees and forests that have been here long before we arrived and will survive long after humans end their time on this planet.

The Overstory: A Novel (2018) by Richard Powers is a work that—like all brilliant pieces of fiction—tells us more about reality than we often care to see. This majestic fable is actually an interlocking collection of nine human stories that, in the end, center trees as the main characters. It takes time to understand how these stories might be connected, but Powers begins to drop hints in the very first pages: we should be listening to the trees to truly understand connection. The Overstory changed the way I will see the world. One simply cannot ask more of a piece of literature.

With exceptional wordsmithing and storytelling skills, Powers lets us see that “there is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.”

To call The Overstory a work about activism and resistance doesn’t do it justice. Yes, activism and resistance against clearcutting logging practices in old growth forests is key to understanding the deeper truths Powers mines throughout this book. But as the Pulitzer Prize citation for fiction put it, this is “An ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them.”

Powers writes powerful prose, much of which comes from one of the book’s key characters, Dr. Patricia Westerford, a plant ecologist who was shamed out of the academy by conventional-thinking and threatened academicians only to have her work vindicated by later scientists. Early in The Overstory, her father—an agricultural extension agent in Ohio who takes his young daughter on his visits to the region’s farms—teaches her that most humans are “plant-blind.” He calls it “Adam’s curse. We only see things that look like us.”

The book Westerford eventually writes is entitled The Silent Forest, and it begins with this paragraph:

“You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes . . .”

Dr. Westerford “closely resembles, and is probably based upon, the scientist who first researched the way trees communicate, Dr. Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia.”

The fictional Dr. Westerford’s “immersion in her work is almost literal: She sees herself as part of the forest ecosystem.” And that vision leads her to observe that,

“No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible.”

The Overstory also builds upon the real-life work of Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. * “Forests are not first and foremost lumber factories and warehouses for raw material, and only secondarily complex habitats for thousands of species, which is the way modern forestry treats them,” Wohlleben writes. “Completely the opposite, in fact.” But in a fictional tale, Powers can take this understanding and expand it in ways that one dare not do in a non-fiction context.

Since this book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019, much has been written about it. The Earth Island Journal has an insightful review that summarizes the core plot as pivoting . . .

“. . . on five characters for whom the moniker ‘tree hugger’ would be an understatement. Their youthful endeavor to protect an old-growth forest from a clearcutting operation changes their lives irrevocably. But we also read about the quasi-spiritual journey of a reclusive coding genius, and the less-obviously relevant story of a married couple—workers in the legal profession by day, amateur actors by night—whose significance plays out (mostly symbolically) only at the end.“

Those eight all come into contact with Westerford’s book and are shaped by it. Near the end of this heart-wrenching, thrilling, poetic, and majestic work, we find that Westerford has written a sequel to her influential first book, where she reiterates the point that “This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”

Powers has Westerford, now an old woman, giving a lecture at a Silicon Valley conference of scientists, futurists, engineers, artists, writers, and venture capitalists being gathered under the unlikely title of “Home Repair: Countering a Warming World.” She is unsure of the reception she will receive, but accepts the invitation so she can tell those in attendance that,

“Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes. To solve the future, we must save the past. My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

Trees are miraculous. Much of what we make from them comes nowhere close.

The resolution—after 500 pages—is somewhat hopeful without being unrealistically optimistic. Powers zooms out to the timeline of a tree and lets the reader consider our individual and collective next steps.

Barbara Kingsolver, writing in The New York Times Book Review, may have summarized this book most succinctly. It is, simply, “A gigantic fable of genuine truths.” 

More to come . . .

DJB

*In addition to my essay on Wohlleben, also see MTC reviews of the work of Merlin Sheldrake; David George Haskell (here), (here), and (here); and Leah Rampy.

Image: Forest floor at Muir Woods National Monument by DJB

Checking off the big 5-0 (state, that is)

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If I began a task, I like to complete it. I generally finish any book I start, even those that are less than compelling. When I told myself I wanted to learn how to play the piano again at age 40, I stayed with it until I could perform in a recital . . . before my fellow students, who were of the age 7-12 variety.

That same push to finish what I start is how I ended up in South Lake Tahoe, Nevada this past weekend.

Nevada has an interesting history, becoming the 36th state on October 31, 1864, after telegraphing its constitution to the Congress days before the November 8 presidential election.

“Statehood was rushed to help ensure three electoral votes for Abraham Lincoln’s reelection and add to the Republican congressional majorities. Nevada became the second of two states added during the Civil War (the first being West Virginia).“

Now 160 years later, I crossed the line from California into Nevada to make it the final stop on my bucket list quest to visit all 50 states. After traveling to Alaska last year, I’ve been itching to join the All Fifty Club.

DJB crossing the line to enter my 50th state
In Nevada, overlooking Lake Tahoe

To complete this longtime journey, Candice, Claire, and I left Alameda on Saturday morning for the drive to Lake Tahoe. It was exciting to take in more of the beauty and grandeur of this amazing country.

Scene in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, near the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Photo by Carol Highsmith.

Of course, Nevada wasn’t always a part of the United States.

“Prior to European contact, Native Americans of the Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe tribes inhabited the land comprising the modern state. The first Europeans to explore the region originated from Spain. They gave the region the name of Nevada (snowy) due to the snow which covered the mountains at winter.”

Present-day Nevada became Mexican territory in 1821 and was acquired by the US in 1848 following the Mexican-American War. The discovery of gold and the outbreak of the Civil War changed the state’s history.

Lodge at Nevada’s Edgewood Resort, where we stayed on our recent visit. Photo by Carol Highsmith.

Some tasks take longer than others and some—like this—are much more pleasurable than the average to-do list item. It took me almost 70 trips around the sun to reach this goal. The bucket list quest began, unofficially, in 1955 when I arrived in Tennessee. By high school I’d visited most of the Southern states plus Indiana and Illinois. My adventure picked up as I began attending National Trust conferences (the first was 1976 in Philadelphia), and it went into overdrive when I began to work for the Trust in 1996 and traveled all across America.

Displaying my 50th state certificate in Nevada, with Candice and Claire
And for Father’s Day, the family gave me the All 50 Club T-Shirt!

It was appropriate that Claire was with me when I reached this milestone. I’ve been to more states with my daughter than with any other member of the family, primarily because the two of us drove on a cross-country tour in 2014 (another bucket-list item for me) in a little less than three weeks. We pulled into our destination after visiting 13 states.

On a Father’s Day hike with Claire in Nevada
Not All Who Wander Tour 2014
Our 2014 “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” Tour map
Twine Ball and Claire
Claire at the World’s Biggest Ball of Twine! Is this a great country or what!?!
Claire and DJB at Glacier
At Glacier National Park
Wallace, Idaho and the Smokehouse Saloon
With Claire in Wallace, Idaho
Claire and DJB with Map
Claire and DJB admire her dorm room map with highlights of our 2014 cross-country trip

The trip to Nevada was not just about the joy of travel, but it also signaled that my bucket list—an inventory of things to do before you die (or “kick the bucket”)—was very much alive and well. The key is to have a list with things that you really want to accomplish and would love to do. 

Credit: Daniel Byram from Pixabay

I was in my late 30s when I put together my first bucket list. I say first because they are, by nature, a work in progress. Some begin with very personal items that you are giving yourself permission to pursue, such as learning to play the piano again. Some morph into lists of ways to help others and make a difference. Expectations and situations will change. 

Visiting MLB ballparks is another personal bucket list goal. I have seven left. Among my acquaintances are individuals who have visited every presidential home, every congressional district in the U.S., presidential gravesites, (Washington is full of lobbyists), and state capitols. But I don’t focus only on fun or travel. Building a career around work that made an impact was important, as was retiring early enough to enjoy the next third of life. In that stage I’ve added the goal of reading five books a month for the rest of my life. One bucket list project that I completed during the pandemic year was to write one thank you note each week for a year to 52 people who shaped my life.

Bucket lists are optimistic, by nature. I like the idea of turning from cynicism to optimism. Cynicism is easy, while hope is risky and hard. A bucket list says, “I’m going to be out in the world, I’m going to make a difference, and I’m going to love what I’m doing.” A bucket list should include things you can do in an afternoon and things that will take the rest of your life.

A friend recently asked how many countries I’d visited. That total is now nearing 20, and by the end of next year Candice and I should be able to add about a dozen more. I’ve now added visiting 40 foreign countries by the time I reach 80 to my bucket list. Even with this most recent milestone, my bags are still packed!

Duffle bag
On the road

With that in mind, let’s enjoy Johnny Cash’s classic tribute to life on the road: I’ve Been Everywhere.

More to come . . .

DJB

View of Lake Tahoe from the Nevada side. Photo from the Carol Highsmith Collection, Library of Congress.

Using government to help ordinary people

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We are living in the midst of one of our all-too-common experiments to see if the idea of America as a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”—in the famous words of Abraham Lincoln—can long endure.

Last Monday I wrote about the difficulty of living with the former guy. Today I want to talk about the current guy. *

However much it may surprise his detractors, President Joe Biden has worked hard to reclaim the promise of democracy.

“The American equation,” writes Lewis Lapham, “rests on the habit of holding our fellow citizens in thoughtful regard not because they are exceptional (or famous, or beautiful, or rich) but simply because they are our fellow citizens.” 

“If the American system of government at present seems so patently at odds with its constitutional hopes and purposes, it is not because the practice of democracy no longer serves the interests of the presiding oligarchy (which it never did), but because the promise of democracy no longer inspires or exalts the citizenry lucky enough to have been born under its star. It isn’t so much that liberty stands at bay but, rather, that it has fallen into disuse, regarded as insufficient by both its enemies and its nominal friends. What is the use of free expression to people so frightened of the future that they prefer the comforts of the authoritative lie?”

As Lapham suggests, large numbers of billionaires and other oligarchs are not looking for democracy. Based on where they direct their political donations, it seems clear that what is wanted is someone who will lower their already low tax rate, cut business regulations, and fight for the rights of owners over those of workers. Someone who will, like another rising authoritarian 90 years ago, promise to crush labor unions and protect the interest of his donors. 

They are seeking government by the few for the few.

President Biden’s work to reclaim our democracy is not recognized often enough by a media enthralled by horse-race reporting and performance politics. But that fact doesn’t make the president’s efforts to return to a government that works for ordinary people, instead of the nation’s wealthiest citizens, any less important and, yes, revolutionary.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson began a recent letter on the president’s efforts by noting the release of “another blockbuster jobs report.” The country added 272,000 jobs in May, far higher than the 180,000 jobs economists predicted. Wages are also up. Over the past year, average hourly earnings have grown 4.1%, higher than the rate of inflation, which was 3.4% over the same period. 

The 15.6 million jobs created during the three years of the Biden administration are eight times as many jobs as were created in the 16 years of the last 3 Republican Presidencies, combined. Since 1989 and the end of the Cold War, the US has seen 51 million new jobs created, 49 million of which have been created under Democratic Presidents. That’s 96%. Just 2 million jobs—or 4%—have been created under Republicans.

While the news media generally doesn’t cover this news, Richardson goes into detail to explain how Biden’s incredible streak of economic growth happened.

The Biden administration has quite deliberately overturned the supply-side economics that came into ascendancy in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan took office . . . Adherents of that ideology rejected the idea that the government should invest in the “demand side” of the economy—workers and other ordinary Americans—to develop the economy, as it had done since 1933. 

Instead, they maintained that the best way to nurture the economy was to support the “supply side”: those at the top. Cutting business regulations and slashing taxes would create prosperity, they said, by concentrating wealth in the hands of individuals who would invest in the economy more efficiently than they could if the government interfered in their choices.

But supply-side economics never worked. It did, however, “move money out of the hands of ordinary Americans into the hands of the very wealthy.” Between 1981 and 2021, more than $50 trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

In the last few weeks we’ve seen repeated confirmation of the success of the Biden Presidency:

  • “Inflation is down;
  • food prices are down;
  • crime and murder rates are way down;
  • gas prices are down;
  • we’ve had the strongest economic recovery of any advanced economy in the world;
  • the best job market since the 1960s;
  • the deficit is trillions less;
  • the Dow has broken 40,000 and all three indices continue to hover in record territory;
  • domestic oil, gas and renewable production continue to be at all time highs leaving America more energy independent; and
  • consumer sentiment surged last month.”

“The Wall Street Journal called the American economy the ‘envy of the world,’ and the Economist just wrote about the unprecedented start up boom America is experiencing right now. Biden’s big three investment bills have dramatically accelerated the energy transition necessary to combat climate change and will be creating opportunities and jobs for our workers for decades to come.

By being focused on helping ordinary people, the US now has the lowest uninsured rate in its history. Signups for the Affordable Care Act coverage this past year were at the highest levels ever. The Biden Administration also erased more than $130 billion in student debt that had piled up due to past policies that favored loan and finance corporations over everyday people.

Another under-reported item is about how Joe Biden broke OPEC. “Domestic oil production set records in 2023, and we are setting records with renewable energy production too.”

MSNBC host Chris Hayes noted that

“The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, has had massive influence over American politics for six decades. President Biden’s ‘incredible’ oil market trading has broken this influence.

Some analysts believe that the current radicalization of the GOP is intimately linked to its repeated failure to handle the challenges of the post-Cold War era and its inability to govern in a time of rapid change. 

Richardson is a student of Republican Party history. In order to keep a system in place that works for the few, today’s Republicans have “worked to make it extraordinarily difficult for Congress to pass laws making the government do anything, even when the vast majority of Americans wanted it to.” That helped them shift law-making power to the courts. And since the Reagan administration, Republicans have been packing our courts with “appointees who adhered to their small-government principles” at the expense of the people. 

Joe Biden has been a good, even transformational president, who I believe has more than earned a second term. His administration has stood up against multiple challenges. Most important, under Joe Biden we are a government of the people, not of the wealthy few.

“’What joins the Americans one to another,’ Lapham writes, is ‘their complicity in a shared work of the imagination.  My love of country follows from my love of its freedoms, not from my pride in its fleets or its armies or its gross national product. Construed as a means and not an end, the Constitution stands as the premise for a narrative rather than a plan for an invasion or a monument. The narrative was always plural—not one story but many stories.”

More to come . . .

DJB

*See my disclaimer for politics-related posts.

U.S. Capitol and steel workers photos from Pixabay.

From the bookshelf: May 2024

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Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics from different genres. Here are the books I read in May 2024. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on MORE TO COME. Enjoy.

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection (2024) by Charles Duhigg is the best-selling author’s most recent deep dive into ways we can navigate the basics of life. Similar to his exploration of habits, Duhigg blends timely research and top-level storytelling chops to help us understand how to connect with others. Whenever we speak, Duhigg asserts, we’re actually participating in one of three conversations: practical, emotional, and social. In this insightful and very practical book, Duhigg makes the case that we have to understand what kind of conversation we’re having before we can connect.

Earth & Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos (2024) by Leah Rampy comes from an “intersection of spirituality, ecology and story.” In helping us understand why our souls ache for a deeper connection with the earth, Rampy invites us to think, contemplate, live, and act differently. She travels to edges—where sea, land, and sky meet—because these thin places are sacred. There “the division between heaven and earth, past and present, living and dead can blur, and a sense of oneness permeates time and place.” These liminal places are where we can choose our stories for the future, stories that will last long beyond our lifetimes. In this latest edition of my author interviews on MORE TO COME, Leah answers my questions about her work.

The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers (2024) by Samuel Burr is a delightful tale of a group of extraordinary minds gathered together by Miss Pippa Allsbrook: polymath, a professional enthusiast of crossword puzzles, creator of The Sunday Times puzzles using the pseudonym Squire to conceal her gender, and—most importantly—Chief Cruciverbalist, Founder and President of The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers. She is one of thirteen members of the Fellowship who live together in her historic family estate in the English countryside. In this uplifting debut novel, the cast of characters moves through the many puzzles put before them, ultimately addressing the puzzle each of us faces to belong, to find our own missing pieces, to discover who we really are. 

My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future (2024) by Alice Randall is memoir, history lesson, and manifesto by the first Black woman to cowrite a number one country hit. Like the author, this is a story that upsets the stereotypes about Country Music. Randall’s life goal is to make certain that everyone recognizes and remembers the First Family of Black Country Music: “DeFord Bailey, the father; Lil Hardin, the mother; Ray Charles, their genius child; Charley Pride, DeFord’s side child; and Herb Jeffries, Lil’s stepson.” This engaging and enriching book—along with a companion album featuring young Black female artists playing the Alice Randall songbook—is an important step along that path.

No Man is an Island (1955) by Thomas Merton reflects on the vital nature of community and the commandment to love our neighbor. In a series of sixteen essays with titles such as “Love Can Be Kept Only by Being Given Away,” “Sentences on Hope,” “Mercy,” and “The Inward Solitude,” the twentieth century American monastic and writer looks at the life of the spirit and makes the case that “by integrating us in the real order established by God,” this life puts us “in the fullest possible contact with reality—not as we imagine it, but as it really is.”

What’s on the nightstand for June (subject to change at the whims of the reader):

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: Click to see the books I read in April of 2024 and to see the books I read in 2023. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

Photo by Syd Wachs on Unsplash

Draw from a well of common goodness

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How do we make sense of senseless times?

In a lifetime of traveling across every state in this nation, I have seen both the fragility and the strength of America. Its perplexity and wonder. Its wretchedness and innate goodness. We are complex and contradictory humans, living in the midst of unbelievable natural splendor that we habitually despoil.

If one follows politics, it would also be easy to conclude that the land of the free has lost its mind to support a wannabe dictator.

Just eighty years after we joined our WWII Allies to strike a debilitating blow against fascism on June 6th, 1944, one of our political parties is preparing to nominate a man for president who has made disparaging remarks about those who died in war serving their country while speaking in glowing terms about authoritarian strongmen around the globe.

Last Thursday was the commemoration of D-Day. World leaders and more than two dozen U.S. veterans gathered above Omaha Beach at the Normandy American Cemetery, “where the remains of 9,388 Americans, many of whom were killed on D-Day, are buried.” In his speech, President Biden reminded us that “Hitler and those with him thought democracies were weak, that the future belonged to dictators.”

“’The men who fought here became heroes not because they were the strongest or toughest or were fiercest—although they were,’ Biden said, ‘but because they . . . knew, beyond any doubt, there are things that are worth fighting and dying for. 

Freedom is worth it. Democracy is worth it. America is worth it. The world is worth it—then, now, and always.’”

A few weeks after that successful invasion, U.S. troops were given a pamphlet that reminded them of the stakes.

“Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, ‘is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state. The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.’”

Sadly, one of our political parties appears ready to completely give up on government by the people.

A former president and the presumed 2024 nominee of the Republican Party—who has promised government by the few and for the few—is a convicted felon. Thirty-four times over. A jury of his peers found that he falsified records to cover up a hush money payment to a sex worker in order to change the results of the 2016 election. The news media, for the most part, refuses to say the obvious out loud.

He’s also surrounded himself with individuals who subvert the rule of law for personal gain. Trump’s campaign chairman, deputy campaign manager, personal lawyer, chief strategist, National Security Adviser, Trade Advisor, Foreign Policy Adviser, campaign fixer, and company CFO are also convicted felons.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley noted, “With Lincoln, they had a team of rivals. With Trump, you have a team of felons.”

In addition, his business was found guilty of fraud and a jury held him liable for sexual abuse—rape, in other words—in a civil trial. And perhaps the worst charges against him as a former president—inciting a riot to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election and stealing state secrets—are bogged down as judges and justices forget their oath of office and follow his bidding while Congressional Republicans create fake scandals to divert our attention.

Former Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles captured the essence of this latter playbook in 2013.

Five years ago, the Post described the “remarkable universe of criminality” surrounding the former president. It has become even worse. And yet some think his reelection is imminent. The Republicans seem intent on backing Donald Trump no matter what he says or does and no matter how much of the American public disagrees with its policies.

I subscribe to the “Do more, worry less and go win this election” mindset, but I can see how the prospect of a Trump return can lead to despair.

Heartbreak and rage have been “manipulated by unscrupulous persons in power . . . creating scapegoats, demonizing and pitting communities and families against one another, eroding our ability to see how we are still and truly deeply connected.”

Poet and songwriter Carrie Newcomer asks, “How do we live in these times?” She wrestles to find “the most effective and true to my soul ways to respond.”

“I must continue to find courage, comfort and grounding in the things that make sense, things like love, beauty, wonder, daily gratitude and awe, the natural world, our default inclination to be decent and kind to those we encounter. I must continue to lean into joy, for the goodness of life for the gift it is—joy being different than happiness and at its heart is its own kind of resistance to despair and the politics of rage. All I know to do is to live as well as I can, with as much love as I know how to give, speak truth even when it’s uncomfortable but be as kind as possible.”

Those endeavors to divide us and make us feel powerless, she writes, are just “a kind of politics” and not the true shape of reality.

“The truth is—we are great with love and we are so very powerful . . . Let us keep grounding ourselves in what makes sense in senseless times. Let us remember to lean into beauty and pull up the water from a well of common goodness, let us be brave and true, always reaching just a little further than we thought possible.”

Rebecca Solnit has written that joy is a way to support the work which hope demands.

“Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.”

There’s work to do. Leaning into joy supports the demands that hope makes of us. Drawing water from a well of common goodness provides the nourishment needed to press forward on this important task.

More to come . . .

DJB

See my disclaimer for politics-related posts.

Image by ddzphoto from Pixabay

Blackbird

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In late March, American singer and songwriter Beyoncé released Cowboy Carter, the second in a planned trilogy of albums. Also known as Act II: Cowboy Carter, the album was conceived as a journey through a reinvention of Americana, spotlighting the overlooked contributions of Black pioneers to American musical and cultural history.

I recently reviewed Alice Randall’s Black Country, which is another piece in reclaiming the Black influence in country music. In a 2021 interview with Harper’s Bizarre, Beyoncé explained the important influence of country music and the Black cowboy on her life and music.

I grew up going to the Houston rodeo every year. It was this amazing diverse and multicultural experience where there was something for every member of the family, including great performances, Houston-style fried Snickers, and fried turkey legs. One of my inspirations came from the overlooked history of the American Black cowboy. Many of them were originally called cowhands, who experienced great discrimination and were often forced to work with the worst, most temperamental horses. They took their talents and formed the Soul Circuit. Through time, these Black rodeos showcased incredible performers and helped us reclaim our place in western history and culture.

The second song on Cowboy Carter is a cover of the Beatles’ tune Blackbird, which she renames Blackbiird in homage to Act II. Her cover features additional harmony and/or lead vocals from four Black country singers: Reyna Roberts, Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer and Tiera Kennedy. She also “used the master recording of the original guitar-and-foot-tapping backing part McCartney recorded for the Beatles’ White Album as the backing track for her new version.” It is a fabulous interpretation of a wonderful song, bringing the tune and its backstory to a whole new audience.

Places are important in telling our stories as a people. One of the important places that the National Trust for Historic Preservation has worked to save through the years is Little Rock Central High School. The Little Rock Central High School first made headlines when it opened in 1927 as the largest high school in the country, and then again thirty years later as the focal point of America’s school desegregation controversy. In 2017, Trust’s President and CEO Stephanie Meeks spoke to that history when the organization celebrated the saving of what was once an endangered place.

“In 1957, the school was the scene of forced school desegregation that gained international attention. Nine African American students—“the Little Rock Nine”— were denied entrance to the school by one thousand angry protestors in defiance of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordering integration of public schools. The first test of the federal government’s public school integration policy, the events at the Little Rock Central High School had lasting implications on civil rights and education in our country.“

By 1996, however, the school was suffering severe deterioration—peeling paint, crumbling plaster, leaking plumbing, broken windows, termites, leaking roof and outer walls—requiring $6.5 million in repairs. The school district did not have the money for repairs and the Trust named the building to that year’s list of the 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.

“The listing helped to generate support and funding for extensive internal and external renovations,” noted Meeks. “On November 6, 1998, Congress established the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. The National Historic Site is administered in partnership with the National Park Service, Little Rock Public Schools, the City of Little Rock, and others.“

The place is important to the story because it was there that those nine young students stood up to bigotry and hate. And the repercussions were widespread, affecting life and people in so many different ways and places.

Paul McCartney wrote Blackbird to honor members of the Little Rock Nine. At a 2016 concert in Little Rock, McCartney introduced the song by telling the audience,

“Way back in the Sixties, there was a lot of trouble going on over civil rights, particularly in Little Rock. We would notice this on the news back in England, so it’s a really important place for us, because to me, this is where civil rights started. We would see what was going on and sympathize with the people going through those troubles, and it made me want to write a song that, if it ever got back to the people going through those troubles, it might just help them a little bit, and that’s this next one.”

Blackbird is a song that has had many famous (and not-so-famous) covers over the years. Beyond the recent Beyoncé offering, here are a few additional personal favorite versions of the classic.

Bob Weir and Rob Wasserman recorded the song in 1989 for The Long Island Sound—a 6 CD box set from the Jerry Garcia Band and Bob Weir & Rob Wasserman, released in 2013.

Joan Baez celebrated her 75th birthday in 2016 with a who’s who at the Beacon Theatre. “This delicate and heartwarming rendition of Blackbird was one of many classics Joan sang with friends,” this time in a duo with David Crosby.

Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan sang a simple yet beautiful version in I Am Sam. The soundtrack to the 2001 film is made up entirely of cover versions of songs by the Beatles, although it was originally intended to consist of the group’s original recordings.

Jazz great Sarah Vaughan released her cover on 1981’s Songs of The Beatles, with “interesting” (he puts in quotes) ’80s jazz interludes interspersed throughout the verses.

And singing alone, with just her guitar, Joy Oladokun does—in my estimation—one of the most beautiful and heartfelt covers of the tune.

We’ll end with the man himself, singing his song live in concert—in spite of the bad rhythmic clapping of the crowd—as only he can.

“You were only waiting for this moment to arise | You were only waiting for this moment to be free” remains a message for our time.

More to come . . .

DJB

Image of Little Rock Central High School by National Park Service.

How we communicate and connect

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It can be a humbling experience to catalog all the ways one screws up conversations. If you’re like me there are too many to easily recall. I’ve written about a few, as when I talked over a friend to “help her” explain something that I thought might be difficult to articulate. Or the times I haven’t responded well to feedback.

Most of us have had conversations that we found bewildering at best and terrifying at worst. Perhaps a performance review that didn’t go the way we envisioned. Or a discussion with a sibling or spouse that suddenly turned into a confrontation. I have had times after a conversation where I was sure we had agreed to one approach, only to find my conversation partner heading off in a totally different direction.

Conversation and connection are at the heart of living together as humans. “To communicate with someone, we must connect with them.” But we consistently make a mess of this basic task. “The single biggest problem with communication,” said the playwright George Bernard Shaw, “is the illusion it has taken place.”

Misunderstandings and miscommunication seem to be a way of life. Yet there are some people who appear to have a superpower. They really hear what others say, and they are the people others want to listen to.

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection (2024) by Charles Duhigg is the best-selling author’s most recent deep dive into ways we can navigate the basics of life. Similar to his exploration of habits, Duhigg blends timely research and top-level storytelling chops to help us understand how to connect with others. Whenever we speak, Duhigg asserts, we’re actually participating in one of three conversations: practical (What’s this really about?), emotional (How do we feel?), and social (Who are we?). In this insightful and very practical book, Duhigg makes the case that we have to understand what kind of conversation we’re having before we can connect.

The stories he uses to describe these various types of conversation are compelling and (for the most part) relatable. We go inside a jury room to learn how one juror “leads a starkly divided room to consensus.” Duhigg has us accompany a surgeon as he tries, and fails, “to convince yet another cancer patient to opt for the less risky course of treatment.” The story of a young CIA officer recruiting a reluctant foreign agent is instructive, if not quite relatable for the average reader.

Duhigg looks at some of today’s most difficult conversations—around race, vaccines, and polarized politics—to help us understand ways to make better connections. Early in the book he notes that during the most meaningful conversations, the best communicators focus on creating a learning conversation. They do this by paying attention to what kind of conversation is occurring, sharing goals to determine what others are seeking, asking about feelings, and exploring if identities are important in the discussion. He then suggests,

The most effective communicators pause before they speak and ask themselves: Why am I opening my mouth?

That’s when I realized I really needed to read this book.

Unsplash

Duhigg’s writing doesn’t just consist of insightful stories and deep research. For each section he begins with an overview and then ends with a guide to using these ideas. He’ll restate the rules (and puts them in easy-to-follow graphics) and suggest ways to implement them. Want others to go first? The easiest way is by asking open-ended questions, which are easy to find if you focus on:

  • Asking about someone’s beliefs or values (“How’d you decide to become a teacher?”)
  • Asking someone to make a judgment (“Are you glad you went to law school?”)
  • Asking about someone’s experiences (“What was it like to visit Europe?”)

Connecting with others is vitally important in a world where we are tempted to stick with our tribe, vilify those who don’t look or think like us, and spend way too much time in conversation with our screens as opposed to humans. Charles Duhigg has written an important and helpful book for those seeking to make better connections.

More to come . . .

DJB

The Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed.

Photo by Etienne Boulanger on Unsplash

Discerning a path in a future beyond our knowing

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In our time of converging crises it may seem that the end of the world is near. But that perspective misses one important element. “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop,” social thinker and writer Dougald Hine reminds us. “(W)e live within stories whose ending lies beyond the horizons of our lifetimes.”

Some of our most astute scientists, philosophers, storytellers, and mystics are seeking to reweave our connections between soul and earth in ways that look beyond our brief lifespans. They are encouraging conversations that are “far deeper and more profound than that of saving our lifestyle.”

Earth & Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos (2024) by Leah Rampy comes from an “intersection of spirituality, ecology and story.” In helping us understand why our souls ache for a deeper connection with the earth, Rampy invites us to think, contemplate, live, and act differently. She travels to edges—where sea, land, and sky meet—because these thin places are sacred. There “the division between heaven and earth, past and present, living and dead can blur, and a sense of oneness permeates time and place.” These liminal places are where we can choose our stories for the future, stories that will last long beyond our lifetimes. They can be a place of “great turning, a return to our truest selves and a transformation of our relationship with the Earth.”

In this latest edition of my author interviews on More to Come, Leah graciously agreed to answer my questions about her work.

DJB: Leah, you moved from wanting to educate people about climate change to focusing on something far deeper. What did you discover about the real conversations we must have?

LR: Facts are important. We need to understand the twin threats of biodiversity loss and climate change. But facts alone do not move us from long-established habits and comfortable lifestyles, nor do they point the way to engaging heart and soul to collaborate in creating a world of mutual wellbeing. Having frayed connections to our relatives in the natural world, we are desperately lonely, and we don’t even understand why. The void we feel often drives us toward consumption and other addictions as we try to numb the pain.

We need practices to encompass both the inward journey to the essence of our true self and the outward journey toward ever-richer connections to the living world. Of course, these are not really two separate journeys; in understanding our soul purpose, we see more clearly how we are inextricably woven into the sacred web of Earth, the cosmos, the Holy. In weaving connections to all life, we deepen our soul’s capacity to bear witness, hold grief, discover beauty, delight in awe and wonder, and act with courage and compassion.

I wrote Earth and Soul to ignite a conversation about living fully alive and deeply connected in these edge times, discerning a path toward mutual thriving in a future beyond our knowing.

The writer Suzanne Simard said, “the forest is a single organism wired for wisdom.” How does that perspective change the way that we relate to nature?

Leah Rampy

When teacher, author and long-time activist Joanna Macy spoke at a Bioneers Conference, she offered four simple and profound sentences that continue to resonate deeply within me: “It’s all alive. It’s all connected. It’s all intelligent. It’s all relatives.” If we could live into the truth of those statements, our relationship to the living world would change dramatically.

Suzanne Simard along with other scientists and writers like Merlin Sheldrake have brought to us a new understanding of the vast web of relationships and the breadth of interactions that are happening within and because of forests. I love the stories of trees because they illustrate so much wisdom. Robin Wall Kimmerer in her amazing book, Braiding Sweetgrass, called our attention to our role as the younger brothers and sisters of the wise beings who have been on Earth far longer than humans. Author Enrique Salmon speaks of Indigenous knowledge as kincentric ecology. In much of our dominant western culture, we have forgotten our relationship to the more-than-human ones, making it too easy to see anything non-human as “other.” And when we other the living world, it’s a short step to using kith and kin for our wants without regard for their life and liveliness. What an opportunity for us, to become kin-centric instead of ego-centric!

Throughout the book you reference “the dark night of the soul.” What is it about darkness and grief—individual and collective—that has the potential to provide a pathway forward?

If we are not grieving the loss of people, homeland, species, and ecosystems, we are not paying attention. Paying attention is a spiritual practice—open, present, and available to Spirit’s movement in, among, and around every being and within which all are held. When we face fully what is happening, we feel a deep and abiding grief. It’s not that we choose the path to grief, it’s that we choose not to look away or distract ourselves from its presence. We allow our hearts to break open to hold it and more—more grief, joy, sorrow, wonder. We embrace life in its entirety.

However, sometimes on our journey, we come to an impasse. We have no idea where to go, how to move from where we are. Anything we’ve done before no longer works. Solace cannot be found in friends, activities, or religion. We may feel abandoned by the Sacred. This is the dark night of the soul. In this space, our plans, efforts, and energies are of no use. There is nothing for it but to cease struggling and allow ourselves to be found. Then we may be given a direction, a bit of wisdom heretofore unknown to us, that frees us from the total darkness.

We tend to seek solutions to problems when what we really face are predicaments that have no solutions but demand responses. You suggest we not “overdrive our headlights.” How can that simple phrase help us navigate the journey we find ourselves on today?

Discerning what is ours to do in these edge times may not reveal our destination or even the purpose of the journey to which we are called. As we set forth, seeing just a bit of the road ahead, we might begin to anticipate what lies beyond. The reminder not to overdrive our headlights keeps our attention on ongoing discernment, holding an attentive and open receptivity to small nudges that invite us to cocreate with Earth and Spirit, perhaps in surprising ways.

What other books would you suggest to learn more about the connection between earth and soul?

So many good books. The Great Conversation by Belden Lane and Earth’s Wild Music by Kathleen Dean Moore speak to loss and finding beauty and comfort in the world around us. Joanna Macy is a seasoned guide to how we live in edge times. I like Active Hope but anything she writes is infused with deep elder wisdom. I think everyone needs to read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass to explore more about kinship with plants and break some cultural paradigms through stories and gentle guidance.

Stephen Harrod Buhner’s Earth Grief and of course anything by Francis Weller are companions for eco-grief. For a look at how we moved so far from recognizing interwoven connections, I really appreciate The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh. If you’re interested in the wisdom of Celtic spirituality, John Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul is excellent.

Thank you, Leah.

Thanks for the invitation.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by kazuend on Unsplash

Observations from . . . May 2024

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A summary of the May posts from the MORE TO COME newsletter.

The poet Mary Oliver had rather straightforward instructions for life: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Simple, but also difficult to follow.

I sleepwalk through much of life, caught up in my own head and little problems. The writer Kathryn Schulz knows there is both a wonder and fragility to life, but instead of feeling small and powerless she takes the side of amazement.

“I cannot look closely for any length of time at even so simple a thing as a pond and do otherwise…what serves us best, in the face of inexorable loss, is not our grief or our acquiescence but our attention. For now, at least, the world is ours to notice and to change, and that seems sufficient.“

The MORE TO COME newsletter pushes me to not only pay attention and be astonished but to tell others about it. So let’s see what caught my eye this past month.

TOP READER VIEWS

Our sponsorship poster for Arcadia’s “Sponsor a Quote” fundraiser (credit: Leah Rampy)

During May, Candice and I helped support the rehabilitation of Staunton, Virginia’s historic New Theater into a community cultural center by sponsoring a quote about creativity on the theatre marquee. We chose my favorite Mary Oliver quote. The story I wrote about this project—Celebrating the creators—was far-and-away this month’s top in reader views.

OTHER READER FAVORITES

Three other posts attracted special attention from MTC readers.

  • The May 20th print edition of The New York Times included a photograph of Congressman Jamie Raskin I took at Takoma Park’s 2022 July 4th parade. You can read When The New York Times came calling to discover how my image was chosen for what is often called our “newspaper of record.” It may not surprise you to find I have mixed feelings about the Times.
  • In Exploring places that matter, I highlighted six upcoming tours over the next eighteen months where I’ll be serving as the educational expert for National Trust Tours. Consider joining us on one or more of these fascinating explorations around the world.
  • Dreams interrupted; dreams denied introduced readers to a powerful exhibit at the United States Institute of Peace, reminding us of the price Ukrainians pay daily in their fight for freedom.

FROM THE BOOKSHELF

I found much to ponder in all the books I read this month.

  • Alice Randall, the first Black woman to cowrite a number one country hit, wants us to recognize and remember the Black roots of Country Music. Remembering the first family of Black Country Music is my look—complete with music videos—at her recent work My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future.
  • The hard, but necessary work of living together with others is a review of the “memoir-manifesto” To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul by Tracy K. Smith, the former Poet Laureate of the United States. Her powerful, poetic language reminds us that America is, at its heart, a soul-making enterprise.
  • Solving life’s puzzles featured a lovely debut novel—The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers. Life isn’t always straightforward, but nothing worth solving ever is.

SATURDAY SOUNDTRACK

In addition to Randall’s exploration of Black Country Music, I had two other music-themed posts as part of my ongoing Soundtrack series.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS

Memorial Day, cataract surgery, and more were on my mind in May.

  • The third and final installment of “The Cataract Trilogy” can be found in Return to normalcy.
  • Pentecost thoughts from Pauli Murray on pain, suffering, and restoration made their way to MTC in Reconciliation.

FEATURED COMMENTS

I’m highlighting a few comments from readers this month in the hope that you’ll want to check out the stories that struck a chord with these commentators.

  • In response to the post on Black Country Music, a friend and author wrote on LinkedIn: “You have me reading and listening to so many new things! Thanks!” Of course, Alan did once encourage me to read about eels, so broadening perspective is part of our relationship.
  • John Swenson wins my kindness award with his comment on the month’s most-read post: “Mr. Brown: You have paid attention. You have been astonished. You have told about it. What more could Staunton ask of you? Thank you!” Wow!
  • After reading about the Unissued Diplomas exhibit, Nick, a friend and former colleague from Oak Park, was moved to write: “Very powerful stories David and stark reminders of the horrors of war.”

CONCLUSION

Thanks, as always, for reading. Your support and feedback mean more than I can ever express.

As you travel life’s highways be open to love, thirst for wonder, undertake some mindful walking every day, recognize the incredible privilege that most of us have, and think about how to put that privilege to use for good. Women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, immigrants, and others can feel especially vulnerable . . . because they are. Work hard for justice and democracy as the fight never ends.

Bash into some joy along the way.

And finally, try to be nice. Always be kind.

More to come . . .

DJB

For the April 2024 summary, click here.

You can follow MORE TO COME by going to the small “Follow” box that is on the right-hand column of the site (on the desktop version) or at the bottom right on your mobile device. It is great to hear from readers, and if you like them feel free to share these posts on your own social media platforms.

Photo of Mary Oliver’s quote on the Arcadia marquee by Pam Wagner.