I’ve been in mourning this week about the Packers’ loss to the Seahawks. I’ll get over that. Maybe not by Super Bowl Sunday, but someday. What I’m not over, and never will be, is the loss of Deborah Howell, my fiercest editor-foe-fan-believer. She died five years ago in New Zealand, when she popped out of(…)
“The poor have an incredible amount to teach us about patience and thankfulness and an openness to life. We’re not poor so we’ve never had to wait. But that’s what the poor have grown up with – having to wait and having to share, because nobody can have it all.”
We witnessed our first death today. Only like everything else in Sudan, not even that was definite… I could not be so passive in the face of death or hunger or political maldistribution. But I’ve never been bombed or shot at or burned out of my home, either.
I am now convinced that hell is not the firepit of religious lore. Hell is the complete loss of privacy, dignity and self-determination.. It is bathing with a dirty cup of water in the street, defecating in an open field as people walk by, having no curtain to draw while you make love, displaying your sickness and sores to the world in the hope someone will make them better…
If my pen is shaking, it is fitting. Twice today, people have told Jean and me we are brave. Right now, I feel anything but. I feel shaken and scared and like having a good cry. Or a cold beer. Either would do. (Although a beer right now would certainly lead to a cry.)
The folks from the American Refugee Committee are wonderful, the kind of people with the inner peace necessary to tackle such a mission. And while they know that about themselves, they seem to harbor no disdain or even impatience for others who blind themselves to world pain and who refuse to be moved out of their own self-absorption.
The men bury Adara Hailu’s daughter just after sunrise Monday, Feb. 25. The gritty wind still carries a hint of night coolness, offering a few hours of reprieve from the searing punishment of the desert sun.
In my second official act of 2015, I committed to committing some words to this space, which has sat waiting for some months now, nagging me to write … I’m not sure what. But as editors know, and writers often forget, the simple act of writing is usually what it takes to figure out what to write.
I’ve read studies that claim a direct connection between the movement involved in writing and the part of the brain that writes. I know I think differently – with more clarity, mindfulness and memory – with a pen in my hand and paper to hold my scribbles. And I have anxious memories of sitting at my keyboard in the newsroom, facing deadline with a crowded mind and blank computer screen, and finally just letting my fingers go – “Mary had a little lamb.” “The quick brown fox jumped over some kind of fence.” “This is a story about…” – until those restless fingers found a rhythm that cornered my mind and the letters gave shape to precise words that formed meaningful sentences that became the path through my thicket of notes and quotes and factoids to reveal a true story.