Latest Posts

1500 and counting

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Mother was a prolific letter writer, sending long, hand-written updates on a weekly basis to her children after we moved away from home. I not only acquired her stay-in-touch gene, but I cultivated that desire to share stories, news, and observations using 21st century technology.

It was in August of 2008 that I first put fingers to keyboard in this place. Post number one was a tribute written in memory of a voice I heard way too often in my 20s and 30s. The piece you’re reading now is number 1500.

That’s an average of slightly more than nine per month. The number of words is probably somewhere north of 1.1 million.

Yes, that’s a lot of words.

If it’s any consolation, I don’t know anyone who reads them all. Not even my wife. Candice does, however, hear my opinions live and often provides real-time feedback. As a result, the worst ones never make it to you.*

I began More to Come… (MTC) to document a family vacation and kept on writing. My friend Dolores suggested the name and it stuck.

A post from 2010 tops the “most reader views” over this time period, and it features one of my favorite places on earth. Mohonk Mountain House…A place like no other is one of four pieces I’ve written about this unique spot. Claire — who is the unofficial “official photographer” of MTC — has taken a number of memorable photos at Mohonk. Her evocative picture of this iconic landmark graced the top of the home page for a long time and serves as the lead picture for this essay. Claire also captured a swimmer taking the plunge off the Mohonk high dive, another personal favorite.**

Lake at Mohonk Mountain House by Claire
Taking the plunge off the high board at the lake at Mohonk Mountain House (photo credit: Claire Brown)

More to Come was designed to capture my observations, recollections, and “occasional bursts of radical common sense” on a variety of topics. Here’s a small sampling of the things I’ve observed about our little part of the world since 2008:

  • 2009: Recently, the passage of time and the (incorrect) belief that we can master time has been on my mind. While in high school Andrew wrote an insightful piece on this topic for the St. Albans School literary magazine. I included it as 9:45:00 GMT.
  • 2010: This was the year I finally scratched that Guitar Acquisition Syndrome itch. It wouldn’t be the last. Finding my new Running Dog guitar tells the improbable story of how I came to have a guitar with “Union Forever” inlayed in pearl on the back of the headstock.
  • 2011: I combined my preservation interest with my love of baseball to respond to a really stupid suggestion to tear down Wrigley Field in What’s wrong with sports.
  • 2012: I’ve reported from the Americana festival Merlefest several times, the last being the 25th anniversary year and the final one where festival patriarch Doc Watson performed. He died about a month later. My last post (so far) for Merlefest is Oh Happy Day! — Merlefest 25 wraps up.
California or Bust
Claire and DJB on the “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” tour
Rome view
View of Rome from our window in the Chiaraviglio apartments
  • 2016: I wrote many posts from Rome during my sabbatical, but the most-read piece from that year was My favorite Tom Brown stories, which came from my father’s funeral in May. Daddy’s was an example of a life well lived…much more so than the guy who somehow managed to win the presidential election that year.
At Prospect Hill in 1982
The newlyweds on our honeymoon at Prospect Hill
  • 2018: During the years of the former guy’s administration, July 4th was a good day to think about what it means to be an American, which I did in Freedom.
  • 2019: I announced my retirement from the National Trust and was blown away by the response, which I captured in Kindness.
  • 2020: How do you describe this year of pandemic lockdown, government incompetence, racial unrest, and a democracy-saving election? One of my most-read pieces ever, Places and perspectives, came out of the protests over Confederate statues.
  • 2021: When Candice celebrated a “significant birthday” this year, I asked her family and friends for thoughts on what she meant to them. Tending the heart is a sampling of the outpouring of love and affection.
  • 2022: This newsletter has often been my attempt to capture life’s special moments before they pass into the dustbin of history. Thirty years goes by in the blink of an eye was one such occasion, when the twins turned 30.

Thanks for reading over these years. I hope we have much more to share in whatever time is left.

With hopefully lots more to come…

DJB

*Anyone who literally reads every one of my posts is welcomed to self-identify in the comments.

**See also:

NOTE: For the 1000th post I wrote The top one percent which counts down the ten most popular posts over that span. Claire’s photos from Monument Valley topped the list at that point.

Image of Mohonk Mountain House by Claire Holsey Brown

Don’t believe everything you think

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Common sense is not common. Most people simply have walking around sense.

Anonymous

How do you respond when something appears too good to be true? When a rumor confirms what you already believe, even if the facts seem a bit sketchy? When you hear a good story, even if it seems a bit dubious?

Unfortunately, we too often take the bait. Hook, line, and sinker.

In Beaverland, author Leila Philip introduces us to Scott McGill of the ecological restoration firm Ecotone, Inc. and an individual known as a “beaver whisperer.” McGill is known for surfacing and challenging myths, often by telling his clients, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

It is sage advice no matter the field.

Image by Hans Benn from Pixabay

In his world, McGill fights the myth that these ecosystem engineers negatively impact trout and trout habitat. Other misunderstandings about beavers abound, some of which are pretty fantastic. One that goes back to Aesop’s fables is that beavers, when pursued, remove their testicles — or the highly prized castor sacs — and cleverly throw them at hunters to distract their assailants. Oh my!

Myths in politics and history

The upcoming Jim Jordan Investigative Circus (whose formal name is the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government) is a great time to follow that “don’t believe everything you think (or hear)” advice.

BTW, former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance asked readers to come up with other, more imaginative names, for this subcommittee. Some of the early suggestions included:

  • The Subcommittee to Obstruct Biden, silly. Or simply put: “The SOBs.”
  • Bluster and Obstruction of Justice for Self-Service Subcommittee.

And my favorite:

  • Select Subcommittee on The Pot Calling the Kettle Black.

Politics is one area where way too many people believe things that are totally wrong. Paul Waldman, writing in the Washington Post, listed six such myths about politics, one being the old favorite, “Government should be run like a business.” The problem is that government’s purpose is nothing like that of a business. Government isn’t designed to produce a financial return. It is supposed to help and protect all our citizens. Delivering mail to “far-flung rural addresses” will never make a profit. But we shouldn’t stop doing it.

History is another fertile field in which myths run amuck. In History Myths Exploded: How Some of History’s Biggest Ideas are Wrong, Professors Fee and Webb suggest that much of what the general public knows about the history of the emancipation of the slaves is at best incomplete and at worst wrong. Why? “Although most of us recognize the value of good history,” they explain, “we often find truthful accounts of the past, frankly, less than inspiring.”

What really excites us? A tale well told.

We need new stories … and new clichés

Not all well-told tales are positive. Nesrine Malik has written that there is a malignant thread made of myths that has been running through Anglo-American history.

“These are not myths that animate believers into a shared sense of camaraderie and direction. They are myths that divide and instill a sense of superiority over others.”

Other myths survive because the more complicated truth can make us feel uncomfortable, as considered in No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear). Three from among a number of favorites off Kate Bowler‘s list are:

People SayA More Complicated Truth
Be present.We toggle between the past, present, and future for good reasons.
No regrets.Facing the past is part of facing the future.
Everyone is doing their best.The jury is still out on that.

Compassion with expectations

So what should we do in response to myths, misinformation, and uncomfortable truths? First of all, think responsibly. Think slow, as Daniel Kahneman describes it. Try to understand your biases and motives. Then work to be a good storyteller to help define reality and combat misinformation.

In the end, the response to those stories and myths is on us. And there may be times when we accept an unprovable fact or an incomplete truth for the larger good.

Just categorize these as: “True, if not always factual.”

Robyn Ryle’s recent Substack essay references a Brené Brown podcast in which she raises this question: do you believe that most of the time people are doing the best they can?

Kate Bowler gives her take in the table above.

Different people will have different answers, but Brown’s husband responded that while unsure, “he chooses to believe it because that’s the world he wants to live in. To believe in the good intentions of others is an act of faith.”

Robyn describes a recent trip where she decided to just assume that everyone is doing the best they can. She admits that it felt better and less stressful. “I was doing the best I could in the moment. So was everyone else.”

It’s so easy to pay attention to the ways in which we don’t get along. It’s so easy to assemble a litany of the annoying and the wrong.

Robyn also began to notice “the utter benevolence and cooperation of travel.” A world in which we give everyone the benefit of the doubt is such a better world to live in.

For many of the ordinary interactions of life, I fall in with Brené Brown’s husband. And as Robyn notes, we all mess up, but can always do better. “Believing people are doing the best they can most of the time doesn’t mean you can’t hold them accountable. It doesn’t mean you can’t ask and expect them to do better, especially the people you love. It’s compassion with expectations.”

I like that “compassion with expectations” approach. At the same time, we shouldn’t sugarcoat the actions of those who willfully and maliciously undermine others.

So don’t believe everything you think … unless you decide that believing a myth truly makes the world a better, fairer, more accepting place, and makes you a better person.

Putting our beliefs out for all to see

More to come…

DJB

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The authenticity of Kaia Kater

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Roots music would not exist without Black folks. Without the Black musicians, artists, creators, and storytellers, who give rise to each of these constituent genres we hold so dear.

The Bluegrass Situation

In honor of Black History Month, I am exploring the work of musicians of color who are reclaiming their musical heritage while taking us forward musically and socially. The first in this year’s series (a preview) featured Allison Russell. For the MLK weekend, I featured the work of Ruthie Foster. Today we’ll celebrate the music of Kaia Kater.

The Grenadian Canadian artist Kaia Kater is a talented young musician who brings influences and history from Canada, Grenada, and Appalachia into her music. Being biracial is part of her identity, but it was not until her most recent album, Grenades, that she deeply explored the Grenadian part of her past. Kater grew up between two worlds:

(O)ne her family’s deep ties to the Canadian folk music scene; the other the years she spent soaking up Appalachian music in West Virginia. Her father grew up in Grenada, fleeing to Canada in 1986 as part of a youth speaker program, after the U.S. invasion. 

Kaia Kater began her musical and songwriting career early, releasing her first EP Old Soul in 2013 when she was just out of high school. She then released two additional albums with similar themes and sound, 2015’s Sorrow Bound and 2016’s Nine Pin. The latter album won a Canadian Folk Music Award, a Stingray Rising Star Award, and “sent Kater on an 18-month touring journey from Ireland to Iowa.”

Saint Elizabeth and Rising Down, both from the album Nine Pin, showcase her work from this period.

Rolling Stone described Kater’s music as “plaintive, mesmerizing. … She writes and performs with the skill of a folk-circuit veteran.” You can see that folk-circuit vibe in the instrumental Fine Times at Our House and in her cover of the Frank Ocean song Swim Good.

An NPR review from 2018 speaks to the changes Kater has worked through in producing her most recent album, 2019’s Grenades which came out on Smithsonian Folkways.

During her formative years, the 25-year-old Grenadian-Canadian singer-songwriter worked at reconciling her interest in the banjo and folk festivals run by her mother with her affinity for hip-hop compilations made for her by her father. She visited his side of the family back in Grenada, served as an ambassador for Appalachian old-time music on the behalf of a West Virginia college, and toyed with applying traditional templates to the writing of original material. All the while, Kater’s awareness that she was complicating, even destabilizing, notions of cultural heritage sharpened. “Like many people, I have felt alone and out of place for most of my life, stumbling forward blind and rootless,” she reflects in the liner notes for her new album. “I wrote Grenades to trace the life line from my palm and find my way home.”

This most recent album “weaves between hard-hitting songs that touch on social issues like the Black Lives Matter movement and more personal narratives speaking to life and love in the digital age.” It is a decidedly different direction for the artist. What “started out as a search to discover the roots of her identity became a physical and emotional exploration of history, in particular her paternal ancestry, and has led to bold new heights of imagination and creative expression.” 

NPR had this description of the title track:

She has ways of invoking the past that are more impressionistic but no less affecting. In the dusky soul-jazz title track, her phrasing flits over a woozy, swinging groove. Musically, it’s supper club fare, its silky, sensual sound persuading listeners to let down their guards, but the lyrics imagine her father’s jarring experiences when military force intruded upon his childhood. Here and elsewhere, Kater favors vivid, sensory images and poetic language; she’s meditating on the ways that bodies absorb, carry and transmit memory.

The chorus is especially evocative of the disruption to her father’s young life.

Two seasons invade | Tremor and sway | With hands on grenades | Drive the light from the shade | Like an orange blockade — we always seem to get played | See the men on parade, see the men on parade

The Paste Studio session from 2019 features three songs from Grenades, interspersed with interviews with Kater. Meridian Ground is a beautiful melody that underpins the exploration of her family’s history. In between that song and Canyonland she talks about how the clawhammer banjo attracted her due to the introspective nature of the sound. Canyonland — the second song of the set — is about love and about being imperfect, and “being 25 and not knowing what life is about yet.” In between Canyonland and Everly, she speaks to the work of reclaiming the banjo by individuals who are not white Southerners. The final song of the set, Everly, is described by Kater as “a dialogue between two women.”

Kaia Kater is working on a full-length album for release in 2023. In March and April of this year, she is playing across the U.S. at venues in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and New York. Check out this impressive young artist when she comes to your city.

More to come…

DJB

Image of Kaia Kater by Raez Argulla credit KaiaKater.com

From the bookshelf: January 2023

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Each month my goal is to read five books on a variety of topics and from different genres. Here are the books I read in January 2023. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy.

Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America (2022) by Leila Philip is a fascinating look at the one animal, besides humans, that has an inordinate impact on their environment. Philip, a delightful storyteller who blends history and science in ways that make both interesting, came to her fascination with the weird rodent that scientists dub “ecosystem engineers” when she discovered a group of beavers in a pond near her home. She would visit the pond to observe them as they worked tirelessly to shape their environment; when they disappeared, she was determined to find out more about these creatures. We are all the richer for her exploration.

No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear) (2021) by Kate Bowler explores how to handle the life you’re given instead of something from an unattainable dream. The toxic positivity of the current advice and prosperity industry asks us to ignore our humanness. Bowler makes the direct, honest, and humorous case that this is bunk. Diagnosed with stage-four cancer at age 35, this professor of history at the Duke Divinity School examines in a very accessible way how she’s come to terms with her new reality, its limitations, and the knowledge that, actually, not all things are possible. “Nothing,” she writes, “will exempt me from the pain of being human.”

And Then There Were None (1939), the classic Agatha Christie mystery, is the book that made Christie the best-selling novelist of all time (her books trail only the Bible and Shakespeare in sales). The plot is a delicious puzzle that begins as ten strangers arrive on an island invited by the mysterious U.N. Owen. Each has a dark secret and a crime to hide. One by one they are picked off, with copies of an ominous nursery rhyme hanging in each room suggesting the awful fates of those who are left. There is no one else on the island, so who, exactly, is the murderer? Even if you’ve read it before, And Then There Were None holds up on repeated readings.

The Cruelty is the Point: Why Trump’s America Endures (2022) by journalist Adam Serwer takes the reader back through the unvarnished history that made Donald Trump and today’s cruelty possible while looking ahead at where we may go as a nation. Comprised of fourteen essays originally published in The Atlantic, this is a hard book, almost dark at times, as Serwer repeatedly shows how white Americans have professed a belief in racial equality while pointedly declining to put the necessary laws and policies in place to see it to fruition, what the social scientists call the “principle-implementation gap.” Perhaps most disturbingly for white readers, he demonstrates time after time how cruelty and violence have been the chosen tools for maintaining our place on the top rung of society’s ladder. 

The Card Catalog

The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures (2017) by The Library of Congress features more than 200 images of original catalog cards, first edition book covers, and photographs from the Library’s archives. It begins with the Library of Alexandria’s work to catalog the scrolls of ancient Greece and takes the reader through to the digital age, when the card catalog became obsolete. The book is a love letter to this artifact from an earlier time as well as an “ode to the enduring magic and importance of books.” At a time when libraries and librarians are under attack by the foes of democracy, we should all know the important role they have played, and will continue to play, in educating an informed citizenry. There are books about that. Just look it up!

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: To see the books I read in 2022, click here. Also check out my Ten tips for reading five books a month.

This Weekly Reader features links to recent articles, blog posts, or books that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

Photo of book by Blaz Photo on Unsplash

Observations from … January 2023

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A summary of what was included on More to Come in the month of January 2023. If you receive my monthly email update, you can skip this post.

For many of us, winter can be a difficult time. If that’s the case with you, my hope is that one or more of the January posts on More to Come will brighten your day, help you see a small part of the exceptional in life, and prove a bit of a cure for any winter blues that may be hanging around outside your door.

TOP READER VIEWS

On the next-to-the-last day of the month, this post about our move to the Washington region twenty-five years ago took off and topped the list of monthly reader views. I’ve now lived in Washington longer than in any other community. That started me thinking about the meaning of home, and I turned to my brothers and sisters to begin this exploration.  Even though we were all born in the same town, our answers differ. I include their thoughts, along with mine, in Home is ….

We live remarkable lives, my new year post on January 2nd, was bumped down to second in reader views. In place of annual resolutions, I created eight rules for how I wanted to live my life in 2013. This essay revisits those rules and highlights eight posts from the past year, one for each rule.

A close third was A love letter to readers. I have been deeply touched by the positive feedback from friends and strangers alike who have sent comments or notes, usually through social media or email, concerning something I’ve written in recent weeks. This letter is my way of capturing a sampling of that thoughtful feedback while saying thank you to everyone who takes the time to read. As a bonus, it includes almost 40 books that readers suggested I consider for 2023. It’s a great list!

WORKING FOR FREEDOM AND JUSTICE

MLK Memorial Detail (photo credit: LuAnn Hunt from Pixabay)

January is a time when we celebrate the life and legacy of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I had two posts over the King holiday weekend, the first — Feels like freedom  — being a celebration of the music of Ruthie Foster, who builds on the musical traditions that fueled the Civil Rights movement. A long-time friend and regular reader wrote, “I was so taken by the Ruthie Foster post I listened to it twice through. What a gift to music and society!”

The second post of the King weekend was The enduring nature of America’s original sin, a review of journalist Adam Serwer’s book The Cruelty is the Point: Why Trump’s America Endures. The month we honor the work and legacy of Dr. King is also a good time to remind ourselves that cruelty in American life has been around long before now. It will continue to exist in some form well into the future until our country comes to support the policies that protect those too many of our fellow-citizens hate and fear. This post went up just days before the release of the painful and difficult video that documents Tyre Nichols’s murder at the hands of five, now former, Memphis police officers. I believe it is a time to center black voices in this conversation, and if you haven’t read it already, I encourage you to read former head of the Legal Defense Fund, Sherrilyn Ifill’s essay. Like Serwer’s book, it can be a hard, but difficult read.

Halfway around the world, Ukraine is fighting for democracy. Protecting the pearl of the Black Sea celebrates the recent inclusion of the historic center of Odesa on the UNESCO World Heritage List. I use that post to highlight the work of one of the leading scholars of authoritarianism, Timothy Snyder, on why the world needs Ukrainian victory.

Finally, to get an early start on the celebration of Black History Month, I use the January 28th Saturday Soundtrack to spotlight the music of Allison Russell, an Americana, roots, and jazz-influenced musician who is working to be “The hero of my own story.”

FROM BEAVERS TO MURDER MYSTERIES TO MORE COMPLICATED TRUTHS

I picked up in January right where I left you in December, reading five books each month. I encountered some terrific writers over the last four weeks which, as you might suspect from the subheading, cover a wide-range of topics.

  • The past and future of one weird rodent is a review of Leila Philip’s new book Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America. This is a fascinating look at the one animal, besides humans, that has an inordinate impact on their environment.
  • I made the decision to read one murder mystery a month in 2023, and I began the year with Agatha Christie’s best-known work. In some cases, it is obvious who committed the crime details how I came to jump down the murder mystery rabbit hole, beginning with And Then There Were None.
  • Life is what happens as we’re working towards perfection takes a look at Kate Bowler’s 2021 book No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear). Bowler explores how to handle the life you’re given instead of something from an unattainable dream. Her work is direct, honest, and humorous.
  • If you are of a certain age, you will recall the fascination of flipping through a series of 3 X 5-inch cards looking for just the right book. If you fall into that cohort, I bet you’ll enjoy Bringing a sense of order and clarity in a chaotic world, a love letter to the card catalog as well as an “ode to the enduring magic and importance of books.”

WHATEVER ELSE TICKLED MY FANCY

We moved to what I affectionately call “the old home place” in Murfreesboro when Grandmother Brown came to live with us. She is always my inspiration for the short, to the point adage that speaks of truth, so in her memory I include I love the pithy proverb – Volume 7 ― the latest installment in my ongoing series. Here in the lead-up to the Super Bowl, it is important to remember that truth spoken by long-time Buffalo Bills coach Marv Levy: “No game is a must-win. World War II was a must-win.”

I’ve noticed that we often fail in choosing leaders because we focus on the wrong strengths. Thoughtful and inclusive leadership came out of a family visit to Delaware, where we saw effective leadership in action. Poor leadership selection played out on our televisions in early January in the comical yet very sad process of choosing a new Speaker of the House. The eventual winner seems to have had lifelong ambitions to hold the position but no true principles.

CONCLUSION

Thanks, as always, for reading. As you travel life’s highways, do your best to treat others with kindness, 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. Finally, work hard for justice and democracy because the fight never ends.

More to come…

DJB

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. 

For the December 2022 summary, click here.

Image by Alain Audet from Pixabay

Home is …

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If you live in the South, it is important to be able to answer certain questions. “Where are you from?” is the most important followed closely by, “Who are your people?” Both are really questions about home. Some also want to know, “Are you saved?” Southerners, bless their hearts, have a need to ground themselves in place, history, family, and religion. It is both a blessing and a curse.

When asked, this Southerner says, “Murfreesboro, Tennessee.” Technically I was born in Cookeville and raised in Murfreesboro but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. My people are from Franklin, although again technically mother was born on a farm in Wilson County.

Yet, as of this weekend I’ve lived twenty-five years in the Washington region, longer than in any other community. Is this now home?

The quick response to my own question was an emphatic “no.” But it only took a moment of reflection before I realized that the answer is more complex.

A birthplace or long-time residence usually comes front-of-mind when thinking of home. But what happens when we move, perhaps due to age or health reasons? Are we homeless? Thomas Moore describes home as “an emotional state, a place in the imagination where feelings of security, belonging, placement, family protection, memory, and personal history abide.”

I’m not ready to move entirely to an emotional state, but I clearly need to think more deeply about home.

As a young couple with a growing family, Mom and Dad lived in five different houses in Cookeville. In 1966 we moved to Murfreesboro and in 1969 my parents bought 407 E. Main Street when my grandmother came to live with us. They were in this house for two decades.

My brothers and sisters were all Cookeville-born/Murfreesboro-raised, but our lives took very different paths. To start this exploration, I asked them what comes to mind when they think of home.

DJB (left) with Debbie, Steve, Carol, and Joe (l-r) — December 2015

Steve, an arts administrator in Florida, said simply,

Home is where my wife is.

Debbie, now retired from local government, responded with Murfreesboro — “as I’ve lived here for 56 years” — then added,

Home is a place for family to feel secure. A place to carry on traditions and to pass along family memories to my children and grandchildren. Home is not just a house or city but it’s the people who share it with you.

Home for Joe, the artist blacksmith, is the log house on Cripple Creek, where he and his wife Kerry, who passed away six years ago, lived. Full of memories, joy, tears, heartache, and at times loneliness, this home now “yearns for new purpose as my friends come and share it with me when we seek a deeper relationship with God.”

My home has a new life and I pray it will harbor many more times of joy, laughter, and encouragement, but this home is only temporary till God calls me “Home”.

Carol, the librarian and retired Baptist missionary, has blogged about home. She was raised on East Main and loves that place, but in recent years her view has changed. Each of the more than six countries where she has lived carries a sense of home with accompanying memories. But her “true home is not in this world.”

I’ve become a stranger in a strange land, not only because I’ve moved in and out of countries and cultures, but because any home I have here on this earth is a temporary residence. Just as that house on East Main gave me a taste of “rest,” Christ’s promise of a heavenly home is where I know true rest will be, and that’s home to me. 

407 E. Main Street
Staunton, Virginia

Tied as it is to memory and identity, home is intertwined with the cycle of life. It transcends place and time, inviting different interpretations.

Madeleine L’Engle once wrote that she was still every age she had ever been. Similarly, I am home in places and with people past, present, and future where I feel understood and loved, even with all my faults and foibles.

Home includes 407 E. Main, with its memories across multiple generations: sounds, smells, laughter, crying, loss, discoveries, birth, death. Each Thanksgiving also brings us home to Staunton, where Candice and I began our married life and our family became one. The welcoming embrace of place and friends mixes memories with present joys and sorrows.

In March we’ll celebrate our anniversary, and part of my soul will be at home as we return to the evocative landscape at Mohonk Mountain House. I look at the photographs on the wall here in Silver Spring and realize that these are the choices I’ve made and the people I’ve loved. Yes, this is home as well.

35th anniversary dinner
Celebrating an anniversary at a snowy Mohonk Mountain House

Death is part of any real discussion of home, yet no one really knows what that future will be. The old blues song — Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die — speaks to our fears. To those who count on meeting mom and dad, C.S. Lewis reminds us that there is nothing biblical about the comforting images of “family reunions on the further shore.” L’Engle says we must recognize that we simply do not know. “It is not in the realm of proof. It is in the realm of love.”

For me, death is not the end but just another passage in an ongoing journey. I look forward to being welcomed — warts, imperfections, and all — into a home intertwined in some unknowable way with familiar, sacred, yet perfectly ordinary places. That future home may be here now; in a reality I can’t yet see.

The places we call home are remarkable, challenging, and full of contradiction. Home is where we love, acting out our connections with others. Home is where we set down deep roots. Home stretches across time as a journey. Yes, home is a paradox, but all truth is paradox.

Considering the complexity of all its dimensions, home is in the realm of love. Which seems just right to me.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Family photo wall.

The hero of my own story

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To get an early start on the celebration of Black History Month, I’ll use this Saturday Soundtrack to highlight an Americana, roots, and jazz-influenced musician who is working to be “the hero of my own story.”

Allison Russell — singer, songwriter, poet, and activist — has come through grief, abuse, and despair. “Some of us come, later in life, to find our knees; while others slip young into trauma like a quarry stone gone under, held down by the weight of their own world.” As an abused child she grew into the “brave woman and fierce artist she would become — surviving being one of only two options, and not the most likely.”

Born and raised in Montreal, Russell “imbues her music with the colors of her city — the light, the landscape, the language — but also the trauma that she suffered there.” That music includes both heartbreaking reflection and a powerful reclamation — “asserted from a place of healing, of motherhood, of partnership — and from a new home made in Nashville.” 

In 2022, the Grammy-nominated Russell and Grammy Award-winning Brandi Carlile released a new song together, You’re Not Alone. A version of the song originally appeared on the acclaimed 2019 debut album by Our Native Daughters, a group that features Russell along with MacArthur Fellow Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, and Amythyst Kiah.

Billboard wrote the following about Russell and Carlile’s performance at the 2022 Americana Music Association Awards.

One of the evening’s most orotund, soul-elevating moments was undoubtedly Russell and Carlile teaming for “You’re Not Alone,” supported by a group of ace musicians.

“Our circle is unbroken. Our circle is whole. None above, none below, all of us equal under the listening sky,” Russell said, a joyous summation of the love in the room that evening.

In addition to performing her new song, Russell also received Album of the Year honors at that awards show for Outside Child, which was produced by guitarist Dan Knobler.

Outside Child is an honest, sometimes raw attempt to tell her story and its ongoing evolution. Part of that story is a childhood of abuse.

When I first went to live with my mother and her new husband, my adoptive father, after the foster home in Verdun — it was in a flat above an audiologist’s shop on Rue St. Catherine in Westmount. He worked for the audiologist and we got subsidized rent. It was there that the abuse began. I was 5. Westmount is a wealthy enclave – and though we were very poor — even the food banks were richer there. And there was the Park. I spent as much time as I could in that Park — to get away from him.

The song 4th Day Prayer from that album references Westmount Park and its meaning to her through the trauma and the reclamation.

One for the hate that loops and loops | Two for the poison at the roots | Three for the children breaking through | Four for the day we’re standing in the sun.

Outside Child has been nominated for 18 awards including three Grammy Awards. In the video notes to Nightflyer, Russell writes that she read The Thunder: Perfect Mind for the first time when she was sixteen.

It’s an exhortatory poem discovered among the Gnostic manuscripts in the Nag Hammadi library in the 40’s. It has never left me. I’ve been meditating on the nature of resilience, endurance, and grace more deeply since becoming a mother. I was trying to bridge the divide and embrace shame and my inner divinity equally with this piece…”

To get a longer introduction to Russell’s music today, enjoy this 2022 Tiny Desk Concert, which opens with her “invocation of the ancestors” in Quasheba, followed by live versions of the three songs featured above.

I first discovered Russell through the group Birds of Chicago, which she and her husband formed in 2012. One reviewer noted that “Birds’ shows attract a mix of indy rockers, jam-kids and Americana/roots lovers, mixing moments of hushed attention with wild, rock and soul abandon.” Here the Birds perform 2016’s Real Midnight.

Russell is a much in-demand collaborator on the Americana/roots/alt country scene. We’ll capture that part of her current work with three songs: the first Black Myself with Our Native Daughters, followed by Georgia Rise with Margo Price, Sheryl Crow, and Brittney Spencer at Farm Aid 2022 in Raleigh, NC, and a nice Margo Price interpretation of the Beatles tune Help, where she joins Price along with Adia Victoria, Kam Franklin, and Kyshona Armstrong.

Singer-songwriter Joe Henry describes Russell’s music as,

(A) triumph: a courageous work ––burnished and bright; unspeakably beautiful as she sings the unspeakable.

Above all, it is an act of remarkable generosity: a cathartic, soulful, buoyant and redeeming gift to us all and, one must believe, to herself as well.

Enjoy the gift.

More to come…

DJB

Press photo of Allison Russell credit Marc Baptiste

Protecting the pearl of the Black Sea

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The historic center of Odesa, the Ukranian city known as the pearl of the Black Sea, was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List on Wednesday. This recognition by the United Nations’ cultural agency was taken at a time when the port city remains under threat from Russia’s invasion of the country.

The UN statement says that it is now “the duty of all humanity” to protect it.

In 2006, I had an unforgettable and life-enriching trip when I visited Odesa (also spelled Odessa), Yalta, Sevastopol, the Ukrainian countryside, the painted churches of Romania, Istanbul, and more on a National Trust Tour. The mix of history and present-day world politics was laid before us, in the places we visited and in the analysis provided by Ambassador Jack Matlock, the U.S. government’s representative at the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We climbed the famous “Primorsky Stairs” — better known as the “Potemkin Stairs” (or Odessa Steps) in honor of its significance in cinema history — and walked the streets of the historic city. I made life-long friends among those who joined the tour and came away with a much deeper appreciation for the country’s history and its struggle for independence.

Odesa’s monumental Potemkin Stairs, immortalized in “The Battleship Potemkin,” lead down to the waterfront with its Vorontsov Lighthouse.
A 2006 street scene in Odesa

As my dear friend, INTO Secretary-General Catherine Leonard, wrote upon hearing the outcome of the group’s meeting in Paris, the UNESCO recognition is…

Such uplifting news — and a reminder of the importance of global cooperation. Designation as a World Heritage Site recognises Odesa’s universal value and the duty of all to protect it.

UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay also spoke to the global cooperation that will be necessary to save this cultural landmark in a statement:

As the war continues, this inscription embodies our collective determination to ensure that this city, which has always risen from the heartbreak of the world, is preserved from further destruction.

Earlier this week, distinguished professor Timothy Snyder posted the insightful essay Why the world needs Ukrainian victory in his Substack newsletter. I encourage you to click through and read the entire post.

His list of fifteen reasons begins with one of the most important:

1.  To halt atrocity.  Russia’s occupation is genocidal.  Wherever the Ukrainians recover territory, they save lives, and re-establish the principle that people have a right not to be tortured, deported, and murdered.

Several of Snyder’s reasons leap off the page in their urgency, while others are more subtle, yet nonetheless crucial to the defense of democracy and the rule of law.

3.  To end an era of empire.  This could be the last war fought on the colonial logic that another state and people do not exist.  But this turning point is reached only if Russia loses. …

7.  To remind us that democracy is the better system.  Ukrainians have internalized the idea that they choose their own leaders.  In taking risks to protect their democracy, they remind us that we all must act to protect ours. …

13.  To guarantee food supplies and prevent future starvation.  Ukraine feeds much of the world.  Russia threatens to use that food as a weapon.  As one Russian propagandist put it, “starvation is our only hope.”  …

15.  To affirm the value of freedom.  Even as they have every reason to define freedom as against something — Russian occupation –, Ukrainians remind us that freedom is actually for something, the right to be the people they wish to be, in a future they can help shape.

Snyder ends with a powerful two paragraphs that should be amplified whenever possible. His core message: we have a real chance to turn this century around … if only we help Ukraine win.

I am a historian of political atrocity, and for me personally number 1 — defeating an ongoing genocidal project — would be more than enough reason to want Ukrainian victory.  But every single one of the other fourteen is hugely significant.  Each presents the kind of opportunity that generations of policy planners wish for, but almost never get.  Much has been done, we have not yet seen and seized the moment.

This is a once-in-lifetime conjuncture, not to be wasted.  The Ukrainians have given us a chance to turn this century around, a chance for freedom and security that we could not have achieved by our own efforts, no matter who we happen to be.  All we have to do is help them win.

More to come…

DJB

Image of Odesa’s Opera Theatre building taken by DJB in 2006.

Bringing a sense of order and clarity in a chaotic world

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If you are of a certain age, you will recall the fascination of flipping through a series of 3 X 5-inch cards looking for just the right book to read in the car on a family road trip. Or to help with that term paper due next week. Or simply to find the author who let you know that at least one other person understood what it meant to be a bookish, sometimes lonely pre-teen with nerdy-looking glasses and a cowlick.

The card catalog, wrote celebrated author of The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster, was the “rabbit hole” for generations of children who were searching for their next adventure. Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Proulx remembers the “serendipitous discovery and the thrill of the chase” that came when one flipped through card-after-card in those beautiful oak drawers.

When asked to write an inscription on one of the cards for a library display, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins jotted a poem: “I love card catalogues / but I only wish / my cards were more dog eared!”

The Card Catalog
The Card Catalog

These remembrances are included in The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures (2017) by The Library of Congress. Featuring more than 200 images of original catalog cards, first edition book covers, and photographs from the Library’s archives, the book is a love letter to this artifact from an earlier time as well as an “ode to the enduring magic and importance of books.”

The story begins at the Library of Alexandria. When Alexander the Great founded the greatest library of antiquity and his monument to Greek cultural supremacy, his librarians were faced with the challenge of cataloging the scrolls then in use, scrolls with no title page, table of contents, or index. Alexander’s first librarian, Zenodotus, attempted to organize the collection, affixing a tag to each scroll indicating the author, title, and subject. He then compiled his Pinakes, or Tables of Those Who Were Outstanding in Every Phase of Culture and Their Writings. The cornerstone of library cataloging was laid there beside the Nile.

Over time the story moves through Benjamin Franklin, the founder of America’s first public lending library, and Thomas Jefferson, whose book collection famously came to serve as the basis of the Library of Congress (LOC) collection after the British burned the Capitol — and its fledgling library — in 1812. Jefferson’s system of cataloging his books relied on the earlier work of Sir Francis Bacon, and it was a variant of that catalog that the LOC adopted for the first half of the 19th century. But this 18th century organization scheme wasn’t working, leading many university and city libraries to begin developing systems of their own.

The first librarian of the Smithsonian Institution, Charles Coffin Jewett, stepped into the breech when he proposed a “National Union Catalog” with the Smithsonian as the national library. Jewett was prescient and many of his ideas were ultimately adopted, but he also ruffled feathers, leading to his dismissal. Most of us remember Melvil Dewey, widely recognized as the father of modern librarianship with a classification system that bears his name, as the inventor of the card catalog. Dewey also had a difficult personality which finally caught up to him in 2019, when the council of the American Library Association voted to strip Dewey’s name from its highest award, the Melvil Dewey Medal, citing his history of racism, anti-Semitism and sexual harassment.

The Card Catalog demonstrates that there were a number of cooks in this kitchen, leading the LOC — now at the turn-of-the-century under the direction of Herbert Putnam — to become the nation’s standard-bearer for the classification system we knew throughout the 20th century. This work goes into the detail of how the classification system and cards became standardized, with LOC printing cards for national distribution. When many of us entered libraries anywhere in the U.S. through most of the 1900s, we encountered standardized cards that told volumes in just a few words. This richly illustrated work includes beautiful images not only of rare and well-known books, but of their LOC cards, many with handwritten inscriptions added by those who sought to bring order and clarity to a chaotic world.

This book first came to my attention when my brother Steve sent a link to a 2017 review along with a note to the family.

This story took me back to all those days in libraries…. I spent lots of time at the one in Cookeville where Mom was a one-woman staff for a long time. I would help bind books, glue return card pockets, and watch her type cards for the ubiquitous card catalog. I loved all that. Now I read on my pad and search online, rarely going to an actual library except to find a book old enough to not be available digitally. This article reminded me of how much I’ve lost, and how much I miss Mom.

In the Washington Post review, Michael Lindgren spoke for many who relished this part of the reading experience as he praised the beautifully produced, intelligently written and lavishly illustrated book. “It also sent me into a week-long depression. If you are a book lover of a certain age, it might do the same to you.”

I didn’t go into a depression, but it certainly called up many memories. And I came away agreeing with Constance Grady in Vox that “The Card Catalog makes a persuasive case that cataloging knowledge is fundamental to the acquisition and spread of knowledge.” In some ways it is a basic necessity of civilization.

At a time when libraries and librarians are under attack by the foes of democracy, we should all know the important role they have played, and will continue to play, in educating an informed citizenry. There are books about that. Just look it up!

More to come…

DJB

This Weekly Reader features links to recent articles, blog posts, or books that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

Image of card catalog by Viktor Von from Pixabay

Life is what happens as we’re working towards perfection

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It’s January — that dreaded season when the wellness, diet, and personal improvement industries kick into high gear to convince us that we can be perfected. Yes, we may have slipped over the holidays, but the new year promises that if we only “organize ourselves, heal ourselves, budget ourselves, love ourselves, and eat well enough” we can make ourselves whole.

Oh, and did I mention that pigs can fly?

In America, it isn’t only the secular con men you have to avoid. Many of the successful megachurches are led by proponents of the “prosperity gospel” who suggest that virtue and success go hand-in-hand.

In the midst of all this deceit, we need a reminder that it is much easier to count items — calories, experiences on a bucket list, acquisitions, college degrees, church memberships — than to know what counts.

Here’s a good reminder: No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear) (2021) by Kate Bowler explores how to handle the life you’re given instead of something from an unattainable dream. The toxic positivity of the current advice and prosperity industry — which encourages us to “seize the day, live in the present, work on a bucket list” — asks us to ignore our humanness. Bowler makes the direct, honest, and humorous case that this is bunk.

An associate professor of the history of American Christianity at Duke Divinity School whose personal field of study is the prosperity gospel, Bowler writes that the sustaining myth of the American Dream “rests on a hearty can-do spirit surmounting all obstacles.” But not all problems can be overcome.

Her journey begins in this memoir with the discovery of stage-four colon cancer and her immediate thought that she can’t die, because she’s only thirty-five, has just had a son, and has her dream academic job. Her extended family — where there are a number of Mennonites bringing their propensity for overwork, pacifism, simplicity, “and the foreboding sense that God is very disappointed by naps” — comes to help. There are months-and-months of painful clinical trials, which she later comes to realize puts her and others — who want to live as desperately as she does but are unknowingly added to the control group that isn’t treated — in the position of lab rats. She gets a misdiagnosis and fumes at the impersonal nature of what Natalie Goldberg calls the “cancer-industrial complex.”

While on a visit to the Grand Canyon, she comes upon a small, rural chapel, where she sees walls covered with words.

I miss you every day.

Please let my daughter be the way she was before.

Did you make it to heaven, my love?

Helen, I am weak. But you already knew that.

There are hundreds of slips of paper stuffed into the rafters and seams in the wall written by people undone by life’s tragedies. “People just like me,” Bowler says in a Ted Talk, “who were stumbling around in the debris of dreams they thought they were entitled to and plans they didn’t realize they had made.” Her husband, Toban, comes into the space and together they take in the enormity of the need and hurt.

Finally Toban says, “I used to think we were the only ones.”

“Me too,” she agrees.

Bowler’s honest, courageous, and humorous take on what it means to be human is deeply spiritual without being overtly religious. She is examining in a very accessible way how she’s come to terms with her new reality, its limitations, and the knowledge that, actually, not all things are possible.

“Nothing,” she writes, “will exempt me from the pain of being human.”

“Behind a lot of her work is a prophetic critique of American consumerist culture, of American fantasies and our sense of exceptionalism,” her friend, the retired United Methodist Bishop Will Willimon, told the Washington Post. “She’s a well-formed Christian in the Mennonite tradition who responds to pain and difficulty and challenges differently than others and she’s so successful at communicating that.”

There are wonderful echoes of, and links to, Natalie Goldberg’s story of surviving cancer as told in her powerful memoir-as-meditation Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home as well as Kathryn Schulz‘s tender Lost & Found. Like Goldberg, Bowler ponders how even long-time friends seem to move along emotionally, either because they are busy with their routines, or, as Goldberg suggests, they don’t know (really know) that they will die. Like Schulz, she sees the balance between good and bad that makes up the world, what Schulz describes as “life is and.” Bowler says in her Ted Talk that “I see that the world is jolted by events that are wonderful and terrible, gorgeous and tragic. I can’t reconcile the contradiction, except that I am beginning to believe that these opposites do not cancel each other out.”

Life will break your heart. Life may take everything you have and everything you’ve hoped for. But there is one gratifying truth I believe in: I believe that in the darkness, even there, there will be beauty and there will be love. And every now and then, it will feel more than enough.

At the end of this lyrical memoir, Bowler takes a trip to see the Batalha Monastery in Portugal where the Unfinished Chapels, commissioned by King Duarte in 1434, stand with ornate walls and windows, but no ceiling. The project was abandoned and never finished. Bowler meets an old man on-site who asks her excitedly,

Don’t you see? It’s us! I can’t imagine a more perfect expression of this life. We’re never done, dear. Even when we’re done, we’re never done.”

Bowler muses, “We do too much, never enough, and are done before we’ve even started.”

Then, with truths we need to hear, she ends with the observation, “It’s better this way.”

More to come…

DJB

Photo of the Unfinished Chapel by Antonio Sessa on Unsplash