All posts filed under: Monday Musings

Thoughts to start off the work week

Listening

Listening is an act of love

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I’m not always a good listener.  But I know how important it is to listen.  So I felt a little better about my shortcomings when I heard David Isay, the founder of StoryCorps and the person who has said that “listening is an act of love,” confess that other than when interviewing people, he can be a really terrible listener.  He’s impatient. (I can relate).  Listening takes a lot of focus and energy, and all of us have our moments.  In the interview, it was noted that listening is not something that we do all the time. It’s work. It’s a commitment. But we want to make room for listening. And as David Isay said, “It’s something you never regret.” He also told a story that I want to pass along, in honor of Mother Theresa, who was recently named a saint by Pope Francis.  Isay said, “I don’t know if this is an apocryphal story or not, but there’s a story about Dan Rather interviewing Mother Theresa. And he asked her what she said …

We Learn to Walk by Falling Down

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I heard the line “We learn to walk by falling down” recently and was reminded that we can’t do anything unless we’re willing to fail.  In our work, in our lives, in our relationships with others, in everything we do we have to be willing to try, fall down, get back up, learn, and try again. All of us want our work and lives to make a difference.  Being willing to fall down and get up again is part and parcel of making a difference, and I believe that supporting others on this journey as we all “learn to walk” is at the heart of what we’re called to do. Let’s look for ways to learn together. More to come… DJB

Hope is grounded in memory

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Last Saturday marked my 20th anniversary at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. For the past few days, I’ve been thinking about hope in the context of life’s milestones.  Not a greeting card kind of hope or optimism, but “hope that’s kind of gritty…the kind,” as described by songwriter and author Carrie Newcomer, “that gets up every morning and chooses to try to make the world just a little kinder (or better) in your own way.” The thought that “hope is grounded in memory” has influenced the work of  another writer I admire, Rebecca Solnit. In a recent interview, she notes that “We think of hope as looking forward, but…(if) you study history deeply, you realize that, to quote Patti Smith, ‘people have the power’….(P)eople have often taken on things that seemed hopeless — freeing the slaves, getting women the vote — and achieved those things.”  Knowing history gives me hope. To be fair, hope is hard.  Cynicism – where I have gone on occasion – is easy. But in thinking about 20 years of …

Beach Reading

Think before you speak. Read before you think

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Author Fran Lebowitz once wrote, “Think before you speak.  Read before you think.” I’ve been thinking about reading recently, because I will be out of the office as I complete the final two weeks of my sabbatical and link that with some personal days off. I have the opinion that summer reading lists should be light, but that may simply be an excuse to read another baseball book.  Since this time is tied to my sabbatical, I’m going a bit more serious this August and I thought I’d share a few of the books which will be on night stand. (Regular readers can expect “mini reviews” in the coming weeks.) Bending the Future:  50 Ideas for the Next 50 Years of Historic Preservation in the United States (Edited by Max Page and Marla R. Miller) – This brand new work from the University of Massachusetts Press contains a wonderful introductory essay and then 50 short contributions from practitioners, academicians, journalists, community activists and more. I’m looking forward to digging into this work as one more …

Kefa Cafe

Gratitude turns what we have into enough

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Among the institutions in our community of Silver Spring, few are beloved as much as a small coffee shop run by two sisters who left Ethiopia in the 1980s to escape violence and political upheaval.  Lene and Abeba Tsegaye – with the help of their brother – established Kefa Café in 1996.  In a recent Washington Post article celebrating the reopening of the shop after a fire, Lena said the two sisters, “…wanted their independent coffee shop to be a place where people talked to each other, not just another cafe where people buried their noses in laptops.” There is no WiFi at Kefa, named for the southwestern Ethiopia province where, the 9th-century legend goes, a goat herder named Kaldi saw his animals become so energized after eating coffee beans they couldn’t sleep.  “There is a history about coffee,” Abeba said. “It’s not just about getting caffeinated. People make big decisions around coffee.” The title comes from a sign they recently posted in their window, in celebration of their 20th anniversary in Silver Spring.  I …

The Age of Wonder

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During high school graduation ceremonies for Andrew, one of the speakers built her remarks around a relatively new work at the time that captured the love of knowledge and learning. Five years later, I finally  picked up Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder (first published in 2008).  Sometimes it takes a while, but I try never to pass up a good book recommendation. And I’m so glad I did.  The Age of Wonder is a terrific work which looks at the growth of science in the Romantic Age.  Holmes tackles this broad topic with a blend of history, biography, art, science, and philosophy. In 500 pages that seem to fly by, the reader follows the intertwined stories of such historical luminaries as astronomer William Herschel and his sister Caroline, botanist Joseph Banks, chemist Humphry Davy, and writers such as Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats. The book rightly received stellar reviews from the start, which I cannot top.  “Flat-out fascinating,” “groundbreaking,” and “superlative” are just a few of the descriptions applied to this …

Cheerfulness revisited

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I was thinking (again) about cheerfulness recently while putting together a long to-do list — which is how I feel prepared, if not always cheerful. Garrison Keillor — the soon-to-be-retired host of A Prairie Home Companion — has written that, “Cheerfulness is a choice, like choosing what color socks to wear, the black or the red. Happiness is something that occurs, or it doesn’t, and don’t hold your breath. Joy is a theological idea, pretty rare among us mortals and what many people refer to as “joy” is what I would call ‘bragging.’…Euphoria is a drug.”  Keillor suggests that cheerfulness is a…“habit you assume in the morning and hang on to as best you can for the rest of the day….that spiritual awareness that Buddhism holds up as enlightenment, in which one does not covet more than one’s small lot, one is free of animosity, and one lives in the immediate present, day by day, without dread of what might befall.” That sounds about right to me.  And while I’ve written this as a reminder …

A Good Measure of a Life

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Last week I was fortunate to join the most remarkable retirement celebration I’ve ever attended.  Paul Herman, the Head of the Lower School at St. Albans here in Washington (where my son is an alum), was celebrated for 44 years of service.  There are many wonderful things I can share about Paul, but I’ll stick to one example.  Each day he stands outside the school and greets every student by name, gives them a firm handshake, looks them in the eye, and offers up an encouraging word (or a reminder to tuck in a shirt tail).  If he doesn’t remember a name after the first week, he pays the student a dollar.  Suffice it to say he rarely has to pay.  Candice and I hadn’t seen Mr. Herman in at least four years, but as we were next in the receiving line he looked up and said, “Great, here come the Browns” and gave us a warm greeting.  He has an amazing gift to make people feel included and welcome. The center nave of Washington …

Men Explain Things

Letting experience be larger than knowledge

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I just completed reading a thoughtful collection of essays by the writer Rebecca Solnit.  Titled after the first in the collection and her best-known essay – Men Explain Things to Me – these nine pieces written between 2008 and 2014 explore multiple topics including the gender wars and male privilege, the use of violence as a way of silencing speech, abuse of power, a new twist on marriage equality, and more.  Through them all, Solnit pushes the reader to consider perspectives that are likely to be outside their  comfort zone. A colleague forwarded the link to the Men Explain Things to Me essay several weeks ago after I referenced Solnit’s book Wanderlust: A History of Walking. (Also highly recommended.) The essay begins with the comic scene of a man explaining Solnit’s most recent book to her – even though he never read anything more than the New York Times book review of her work. But as noted on Solnit’s website, she ends this essay “on a serious note— because the ultimate problem is the silencing …