The power of humility

I've dug up an old post in honor of the holiday, mostly for the beauty of the above photograph by Tony Fischer.

January 21, 2013

Tonight my husband, Peter, and I are planning to celebrate the birthday of MLK, Jr. and the second inauguration of Barack Obama by going to see Lincoln. We saw it for the first time before Christmas, but I want to see it again now after having finally read Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals. I've heard some critics fault the movie for its narrow focus and the conspicuous gaps it leaves in the "small" story it tells: that of the legislative struggles that culminated in the passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery from the soon-to-be re-United States. But I think the narrow focus and the gaps are two of the movie's great strengths (just behind a beautiful, bone-graven performance by Daniel Day-Lewis). Unusually for Steven Spielberg (but characteristically for Tony Kushner), this is storytelling with some "negative capability," with an appreciation for (even a relish in) the many mysteries, uncertainties, and doubts that surround the tightest of narratives (whether historical or fictional). Lincoln is a suggestive movie instead of being a (falsely) exhaustive one - whatever its distortions or oversimplifications, it whetted my desire to know more. Kearns Goodwin gave me seven-hundred-fifty-four (fascinating, comical, heart-wrenching) pages' worth of more, and my curiosity is not yet sated. But I am excited to go back and see the film again, now that I have come to know the man a little better.

Also to love him better. Lincoln was no saint, and therein lay his great virtue. What emerges most strongly in Kearns Goodwin's portrayal is Lincoln's profound appreciation for his own limitations and the genius with which he turned those limitations to his personal advantage and to the preservation of the country. He was a faithful student of human frailty in general, but just as faithful a student of the weaknesses and deficits that were peculiar to him. Of course, he also knew his own strengths.

I don't know MLK's complex, embedded story nearly as well as I should (haven't even seen Selma yet) but what little I do know suggests the same paradox, of a very fine dust. Who wants to walk behind (or beside) a leader who hasn't got feet of clay? Not I.

Forza!
Gretchen

Calling all angels

There's something I've been meaning to do for a couple of months now, since I realized how much it means to me at this juncture (yup, still here! hanging out at the crossroads!) to let other people know what they've meant to me, and it's become more pressing as I've been forced to admit how unlikely it is that I'll have time even to track them all down, let alone to tell each of them individually how grateful I am (and why) that they touched my life.I can't be persuaded to get on facebook, though I'm grateful to those who have used it to help me reconnect. (Thanks, Margie! Thanks, Ted!) Instead I want to create a page organized by time and place and simply list names (as well as I can remember them). People still google themselves, yes? Maybe they'll find themselves there, or people who make a link between us can let them know they're there. (Many I've lost touch with, while to some I am a near or total stranger - Pete Rose was a case in point, but now we're good buds.)

I don't know whether I'll get to it, or how comprehensive I'll manage to make it if I do, but I can at least state my intention - that might give me a push to make good on it! 

In the same spirit, I've started to do something that feels uncomfortable for its flavor of self-promotion, but that I hope might spread more than my dark and silly musings rippling into the world: dropping my card around town (something I never got into the habit of when I really should have, when I had a business and not just a blog to my name). I don't plan to scatter them willy-nilly but to leave them where some tiny connection has already been made, especially where someone has shown me a gratuitous kindness. If you were led here by a strip of cardstock with the site address and tiny photos of some glorious canines, I want to say, Hey! You've got light in you. Thanks for throwing some my way.

Tonight I left a card with the waitress at Bernie's Southern Bistro, she of the great, kind smile; she who happily substituted whiskey for rum in my mojito (just a half dose, as I need to be careful mixing my drugs these days). Bernie's! Such good food! Amazing prices at happy hour, and – most rarely – a place where they play great music just below the level of human conversation. Go with people you actually like talking to - you can use your inside voice there.

Kindnesses in abundance today. Wish I could have slipped a card into the hand of the man who told me, as I passed in my ocean blue coat, "That color looks good on you, young lady." Forgive the color-tinged generalization, but in my experience no one delivers compliments more gracefully than a black gentleman of a certain age and decorous style, delivers them so they arrive at their intended destination and land lightly. I did thank him with all the grace I could return.

Forza!
Gretchen

Vegas?! What the hell are you doing in Vegas?

I've been buying (and even writing!) a lot of cards lately, and I ran across one a few months ago that perfectly captured the sentiment of this moment: "I don't have a bucket list, but my fuck it list gets longer every day." Well, I scratched  a major item off my "fuck it" list today.

I've written in an early post here about my early, impassioned, and enduring admiration for "the Hit King," Pete Rose. It has survived his many public sins;  indeed, his decades-long exile and vilification serve for me as powerful evidence of the inhuman streak of Puritanism that persists in American culture and helps make our public dialogue much more brittle and bitter than it would be if we tolerated mess better, if we were less devoted to principle and more to spirit, or simply to people and other flawed creatures. (Hmm, any more recent examples come to mind? Lord, what a depressing election. The only bright spot is that they've legalized marijuana in Oregon, which should at least make the vitriol and idiocy of our politics slightly more tolerable.) I defy anyone to persuade me that, however flagrantly Pete Rose transgressed against the letter of baseball's laws and through arrogance and bull-headedness dug himself almost to China, he ever damaged the spirit of the game. I defy anyone to show me another player living or dead who embodies more fully the joys of playing itself. C'mon, who's out there who wants to argue this with me? Bring it on!

My main contention re: Rose is that his virtues are all tangled up with his faults in a way that many find hard or impossible to accept, but it's true of all of us to one degree or another, and the degree is probably linked most closely to whether we are living small or large.

Pete Rose continues to live large and to work as diligently as ever. He ought to be hustling on a field somewhere, channeling all his happy hungry animal energy into the nurturance of younger players. Instead you can find him signing autographs and chatting up fans at a memorabilia shop just off the Strip, four and a half hours a day, five or six days a week, most weeks of the year. That's where this pilgrim found him today.

Forza!

Gretchen

My mother's daughter

Sadly, it seems that I'm only interested in front page news these days if it relates to me. (Even Ebola's sway over my imagination owes a lot to the fact that my father works in Nigeria. That country has done a better job than this one in managing the couple of cases it has seen, but try telling that to the oncology nurse after you've given her an affirmative answer to the question: "Have you been in contact in the last twenty-one days with someone traveling from West Africa?" Even after I assured her that Dad is indecently well and currently biking across South Africa, she was justifiably spooked. These are scary times.)

As little as I've been keeping up on current events, the NY Times remains my browser home page, and this morning they posted an invitation for breast cancer stories. Here's the one I told. Most of it will be familiar (even the language in some places) from earlier posts, but it did let me articulate a little more clearly than I have before the uncanny but comforting sense of walking the path that my mom cleared:

I was born on my mother's twentieth birthday, and even at those times when we were at loggerheads and didn't understand each other very well, I always had a curious sense of living in parallel with her, looping my life with hers. When she was just shy of thirty-five (and I of fifteen), she was diagnosed with locally advanced melanoma. Only by a near miracle (comprised of an expert surgeon, two brutal years of chemo, and her own iron will) did she survive to relish ten cancer-free, adventure-filled years, following my geophysicist father all over the country and eventually overseas.

They were living with my little brother on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, when Mom's right breast swelled one day to twice its normal size; what appeared at first glance to be a tropical infection proved instead to be the most deadly and fearsome of breast cancers, inflammatory. Again, she had expert care and her own great heart to carry her further than we had reason at the time of her diagnosis to hope that they could, but rogue cells eventually found their way to her spine and brain, and treatment savaged her immune system. Three years after her diagnosis, a necrotizing staph infection took root in her jaw and gave us ten days to celebrate her life and spirit in her presence. We've been celebrating her in her absence for all the seventeen years since, living in her honor, with a vengeance.

For sixteen of those years, I waited for the other shoe to drop, and last December it finally did, when I found a lump in my own right breast. Dense tissue rendered it almost invisible on a mammogram, but it emerged clearly on a sonogram. A needle biopsy returned a life-altering verdict: triple-negative invasive ductal carcinoma.

Five weeks later, I learned that I carried a BRCA1 mutation, and three days after that I had a double-mastectomy. My sister tested clear: she and my niece are at no higher risk of having their epithelial cells rebel than anyone in the general population. Through five months of chemo, I drew closer to my mother every day. There were things I finally understood when she no longer had the benefit of my empathy; I felt partnered and protected at moments that could otherwise have been unbearably lonely.

An oophorectomy marked the end of my treatment in August. My husband and I celebrated by spending the last two weeks of September snorkeling and hiking on the Big Island of Hawaii. A week after our return and a week before I was due to return to my work as a dog trainer, stroke-like visual symptoms sent me to the emergency room. A CAT scan soon revealed a 1-inch metastasis in my brain.

I am three weeks out of surgery. It went as well as it possibly could have, and still my straw is but a stub. I've been told I may have six good months, and I mean to spend them recklessly, like the gift they are.

Forza!
Gretchen

P.S. Yo, Ry-dog! Check out the colon-appositive pairs! (And no, for the rest of you, I'm not talking about anything to do with the lower intestine.) Those are in your honor, my friend, even if I haven't finished drafting the essay I'm supposed to be working on... Did I mention I'm still recovering from brain surgery? Why are you rolling your eyes?

Faraway, so close

I hope it's okay if I get a little less careful here, put up fragments where I'd like to complete my thoughts.There's just so much I still want to say. Most urgently right now, I want to give tribute to my teachers. Alive and gone, they are palpably present, the scaffolding holding me together.

There's really only one place to start, with my mom, Cashie Kieckhefer. If you didn't know her personally, her name won't ring any bells, but if you did, it will sound a note both clear and resonant. She was mighty in will but untouched by ambition; she cared nothing for status or power as they're commonly understood but impressed her spirit on every encounter. She knew her own measure exactly and rarely wasted breath or effort. Her reach was literal, defined by her long arms and strong voice. (You always knew where she was at a party, as her volume rose about a decibel per drink.) Anyone who felt her embrace felt her influence.

She loved. That was all. But she loved truly, and that was everything. The German word Schadenfreude has passed into common usage because it describes such a common feeling: the joy we take in others' failures and suffering. The joy we might take in their joys remains so rare that few of us have a name for it, but the Buddhists call it mudita. They recognize it as one of four sublime attitudes we can cultivate toward the world and all those who struggle alongside us. Mom got it as a pretty direct inheritance from her mom, our Gramma, Margaret Parkhill.

When we have the great fortune to be at the receiving end of mudita, we experience it as a borrowed buoyancy, lifting us out of our smallness. The success that might have isolated us in self-admiration is no longer ours alone; the precious moment whose shadow we try to grasp lights a smile in the face of another. Radiant sympathy gives our joys currency, movement, life. We are tempted always toward miserliness, but under a generous touch our own hands may open.

Of course, the center of the world rarely shows up in pictures, but here's a rare sighting. Mom and Gramma are rightmost. San Diego airport, 1980, waiting for the plane that will take us away from our sun-kissed coast to Pittsburgh, PA.

And a semi-random playlist for the small hours of a Tuesday:

1. "The Sisters" from Dubliners by James Joyce, read by Frank McCourt.

2. "We Will Rebuild with Smooth Stones," Balmorhea

3. "Lost Stars," Adam Levine (embarrassing, but whatchyou gonna do? )

4. "Louise," Bonnie Raitt version

5. "Love Came Here," Lhasa de Sela

6. "Wake Me Up," Aloe Blacc

7. "Lay Me Down," The Frames

"Green," Lee Baby Sims

9. "Confutatis" from Mozart's Requiem as sung by Las Rubias del Norte

10. "Jigsaw," Amelia

Forza!
Gretchen

A rejoinder

From Camus (I'm reading Robert Zaretsky's fine new biography):

"The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it."

Forza!
Gretchen

Goodbye to glamour!

Full of inner beauty, no doubt.

Well, the fun and easy bit (all relative here) will be drawing to a close nine days sooner than originally anticipated: my surgery has been moved from January fifteenth to the sixth, one week from today. The hypothetical is about to get painfully real. A few needle pokes and claustrophobia-inducing scans aside, I've so far had to endure little in the way of physical insults; apart from a bad cold a couple of weeks ago, I've been the picture of health (to anyone without the technological means to look deep). As you know, I've been very much in a partying frame of mind, and well able to sustain a face that others call brave. But I've only had to smile down the horror of my diagnosis in the abstract. I really can't say how bravely I'll face what's to come.

The more immediate surgery date is a very good thing in the larger analysis, and it's owing entirely to my surgeon's consideration for my well-being and peace of mind. The scheduler, Cynthia, had failed to note when she put me down for the fifteenth that Dr. Lee would be leaving for a conference on the sixteenth and would therefore be unable to follow through with my post-operative care. That made him and me both uneasy, as did the prospect of pushing the surgery further out. When he and Cynthia conferred again, the only earlier date they could find where his availability and that of the OR overlapped was the sixth. Cynthia called to tell me, and if I hadn't thought to ask whether I'd still be coming in first thing in the morning, I might not have learned that Dr. Lee had given up his day off for me. I'll be his only patient.

It will surprise no one who knows my husband that I am a sucker for kindness, all the more when it's allied with competence and wit. I think Pete forgives me for being a little smitten with the man who will cut away my underappreciated assets.

Will I still be punning when he's done? What will become of my own wit, competence, or capacity for kindness when my breasts and hair and final pretensions to youthful imperishability are gone? Will they abandon me completely when I'm ugly, exhausted, and fighting despair? I was at least half joking when I told my Grandma Di the other day that I was stocking up as much capital (in charm and graciousness) as I could manage now, knowing how little I'll soon have to offer. But she took me at my word. "Yes, you're going to be an unlovable specimen for the next while," she told me. "And we're going to love you all the same."

I believe her on both counts. If you're going to be lucky in anything (in the sense of your rewards far outrunning your merits), best to be lucky in love.

Forza!
Gretchen

Chapter 13. In which it is clinically demonstrated that I have a big head.

There comes a point at which accumulated bad luck begins to look like something else altogether. When Mom was diagnosed with melanoma at the beautifully ripe age of thirty-five, the news ripped the floor out from under the reality my family had theretofore inhabited and taught us at a blow how flimsy every personal metaphysics can be.

We didn't dare lay any new boards during the three years of brutal treatment and two years of held breath that Mom needed before her doctors declared her officially in remission, and the structure we built thereafter always had a little of the quality of a dream, or of the impassioned ramblings of a drunk college friend who's just discovered quantum physics: "Dude. Put your hand on this table - or no! better idea - I want you to hit this table as hard as you can. Come on, hit it! Fine, I'll do it. Ahh! Shit, that was too hard. But it feels solid, right? Total illusion, dude. It's mostly space, with maybe a sprinkling of dust. That's it. That's all we are, substancewise. My hand throbbing right now? That's about energy."

Ten years after the melanoma came the inflammatory breast cancer. When I was writing recently about receiving the news of Mom's second diagnosis, I remembered what a friend of mine says about the old expression that some long-neglected activity is "just like riding a bike." She doesn't find this reassuring. "Yeah, I remember riding a bike. It's sweaty and awkward, and it makes your crotch hurt like fuck."

My family has ridden this tandem beast before, and yes, with my own recent diagnosis of a triple-negative carcinoma (more on that designation later), there's a strong feeling for us all of déja fucked. (For maybe the last time ever, I beg pardon for my French.) We're not just indulging a communal sense of self-pity, as it turns out. We may have some scientific justification for our suspicion that we are substantially less favored (genetically speaking) than your average family of bears. Three aggressive cancers diagnosed in two premenopausal women at one degree of separation amount to a strong indication that our shared matter might have come unzipped somewhere. Thus last Monday found me in a basement examining room with a tape measure around my head.

That sounds medieval, or possibly Victorian - back to the days of phrenology! - but the geneticist wanted to see whether I might carry a "PTEN" mutation, one of the few currently known to create a strong vulnerability to untrammeled cell growth, also to big crania. Despite the doctor's discovery that I've got enough brow to make a neanderthal's heart go pitter-pat (58.3 cm!), he doesn't guess this is the problem. The PTEN mutation usually announces its presence in clusters of thyroid cancers and autism. He's more immediately concerned that I may carry the "Angelina Jolie" mutation, a misspelling in the BRCA gene that works (when it works) to correct replication errors in our DNA. The two algorithms currently available to guesstimate risk from patient data (clinical presentation and family history) returned a 10% and a 26% probability that I carry one of the two known forms of the mutation. From our consultation I went directly to see a phlebotomist (can't resist all this juicy language), and two vials of my blood (tucked adorably into a small foam cushion) winged their way that day by express mail to a California lab.

Results are expected just in time for New Year's, and we're waiting to proceed with surgery and the rest until they arrive, because they'll help determine how much of me will remain to me. If the BRCA test is negative, I may lose only the one boob. If it's positive or equivocal, I'll likely undergo a double-mastectomy now and an oophorectomy (removal of my ovaries) later - the risk of a new cancer would otherwise be high.

As you've probably gathered, the two weeks since my diagnosis have not been filled with comforting proviso, qualification, or reprieve. The blows have come in a staggered (and staggering) series:

Tuesday a diagnosis of invasive ductal carcinoma;

Wednesday night the news that the tumor cells display poor differentiation (paradoxically, they are highly diverse) and "brisk mitotic activity" (they are replicating quickly), signaling a high-grade, aggressive growth;

Friday afternoon my new surgical oncologist's judgment that chemo (which I dread far more than surgery) will almost certainly be on my menu of treatment "modalities", also his detection of a suspiciously swollen lymph node near the tumor;

Monday morning the confirmation that the cancer is "triple-negative," meaning that it is not fed by the hormones (estrogen and progesterone) or protein (HER2) that feed most breast cancers and that it is consequently invulnerable to certain of the most effective modern therapies (e.g. Tamoxifen); also Monday a confrontation with the real possibility that I may carry a genetic defect whose detection would have serious potential implications for the future health of my sister, brother, uncle, great-aunt, and all of their offspring;

Thursday the judgment by my new medical oncologist (echoing that of my surgeon) that my tumor may well be larger than suggested by ultrasound and that a PET scan is therefore warranted to check for possible metastasis before we proceed with surgery.

I go in to meet that terrifying prospect this afternoon. Sunday I'll have an MRI of both breasts as a similar precaution.

There is an upside. I am a member of Kaiser Permanente and wildly grateful for this, for reasons I will expand upon in another (effusive) post. But you might have noticed from my litany of bad news how very quickly everyone has mobilized, and how few bureaucratic or scheduling roadblocks I've had to stumble over in pursuit of a more or less definitive diagnosis and a "solid, fluid plan." Beyond this, I am absurdly well-networked, owing to that crappy luck referenced above - Mom's medical oncologist, Dr. Robert Carlson, is now the CEO of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, and he has most generously offered his informal guidance as well as the names of two Portland oncologists he could recommend highly; one is now on my team and consults with the other. I do not feel that I could be in better or more compassionate hands.

Also, I am learning a lot. My inner biologist manqué has awakened from a long sleep, and my doctors welcome my active participation in the dialogue around my best course of treatment.

And then there is you. If you are reading this, there's a good chance that you're a card-carrying member of my personal League of Extraordinary Gentlepeople. Please forgive me if you have written to me and not yet heard back. You will. But you should know in the meantime that I owe you most of my wherewithal and pretty much all of my courage in these hard days. I'd have a much stronger case against Fortune if she hadn't brought me you.

Forza!
Gretchen

The tonsils of the wolf

A month ago I found a lump in my right breast, maybe an inch large and highly distinct, off on the "distal" side toward my armpit. (These are good occasions for searching out the intersections of science and poetry - "distal" is lovely and deserves a wider acquaintance.) I have been waiting for this almost as for an inevitability. My mom was ten years younger than I am now when she was diagnosed with melanoma. Thanks to a skilled surgeon and a brutal but effective regimen of chemo, she made a near-miraculous escape and thoroughly enjoyed an eleven-year reprieve before one of her breasts swelled suddenly to twice its ordinary size. Days later, she received a diagnosis of inflammatory breast cancer - very rare and very aggressive. She was forty-five then, forty-eight when she died.

Thus, for our family, cancer took on an aspect of the ordinary horrifying, one of life's givens, and that has included for me an assumption that I would one day get my own diagnosis. A rite of passage, though through what and to what none could say. I think my sister, Megan, shares this irrational persuasion (irrational because the cancer that killed Mom has no established genetic basis), but it's strengthened in me by the weird coincidence of a shared birthday. I was born twenty years to the day after Mom, and my superstitious sense of symmetry suggests that I have four years left before my time is up.

I should have expected but did not expect that I would feel so close to Mom when I went in to Kaiser's "imaging" center two weeks ago for a mammogram and sonogram. As it was for Mom, the mammogram was for me all but useless - Megan and I share a matrilineal legacy of low blood pressure and unusually dense breast tissue - but the sonogram confirmed the presence of a tumor. I returned to the center last week for a core needle biopsy and expect results tomorrow that may or may not be conclusive.

The good news is that there's a strong probability - maybe nine to one - that the tumor is benign. The bad news is that it is likely of a type that will require "excision," not just of the tumor itself but also of a wide margin of healthy tissue. "Phyllodes" tumors have a pretty Greek name that refers to a leaf-like pattern of growth at the cellular level. When benign, they may rapidly grow until they distort the breast or even create open lesions on the skin. When malignant, they do not resemble most other forms of breast cancer but are classified as sarcomas, and they may metastasize outside the breast. Both types present a high risk of recurrence if any stray cells are left behind, and definitive distinctions between them are difficult or in some instances impossible to make. (The tumors have three classifications: benign, malignant, and borderline.)

The last and most hopeful possibility is that it's a late-blooming fibroadenoma, which is lacking in both poetry and danger. But that tends to be a young woman's no big problem, and I am no longer a young woman.

So it looks like I may lose at least part of my right boob, and I am having a harder time with that prospect than I could have guessed, given that I've been complaining for thirty years about being overburdened. Yesterday I was flying very low to the ground, not in a grateful or celebratory "Live, dammit!" frame of mind like I've been intent on preserving. A Chargers win could really have come in handy, but nothing doing there.

What could I do but stop running and look my wolf in the teeth? Pen in hand, natch.

Poems in honor of my breasts

I.

I wear a thin woolen sweater in a shade of royal purple
Against my skin
It clings and I revel in the fulsomeness I have from my mother
As she had it from her mother before her.
The question mark drawn from breast to waist
Makes an empty invitation -
Its terminus has been closed for years,
The chamber collapsed, the altar smashed.
Still -
The gesture remains fertile.
Generous,
Covetous eyes
Complete the riddle.

II.

They've never known from perky.
Droopy and friendly as basset puppies,
With plump bodies and soft noses
Warm with fever.
I put them away for polite company -
They're too much!
And too much neglected.
But I loose them for love, for play.

Forza!
Gretchen

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

Rainer Maria Rilke's wrote that beautiful line in his Sonnet to Orpheus II, 29 (as translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy).

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Rilke reminds us to speak even when we've lost faith that we'll be heard. He reminds us that we all possess the poet's alchemical power to transform bitterness and suffering into song. That power, however, is hard won, and by its nature entirely personal. It cannot be coerced from without.

Among the many things to be thankful for in this (all-too-brief) hiatus between election seasons, we can count a temporary respite from Republican "rape gaffes." Whatever Todd Akin may continue to believe (and to whisper in Paul Ryan's ear) about the superpowers of the female anatomy, we won't have to hear it repeated for a while.

In a strange way, though, I'm thankful for the gaffes themselves. Not only because they helped turn at least a couple of senatorial races (and quite possibly the presidential race) in the direction I favored but also because they dimly illumined some real, stubborn differences that go beyond the specific issue of abortion to our perceptions of moral agency itself, of what it means to choose.

I confess that I wasn't especially shocked by Richard Mourdock's reflection that "even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, it is something that God intended to happen."

I deplore the thought, but I'm glad Mourdock spoke it aloud, and I think he spoke in better faith than do some of the people who held him at arm's length until Election Day. For those of any religion who truly believe that "it's all part of God's plan," there are no codicils or exceptions to that belief. It needs must include rape, murder, and torture. (Dostoevsky dissected this spiritual difficulty brilliantly and heartbreakingly through his creation Ivan Karamazov and his story of the Grand Inquisitor.)

We may choose to leave the work of meaning up to God (or His elected representatives), in which case we cannot complain. Even in the absence of belief, we may decide (as Buddhists do) that our core spiritual work is about acceptance, about drinking down what is bitter and turning ourselves to wine. But who should presume to force that draught down our throats and call it anything but violence?

One of my heroes of spiritual alchemy is the Italian-Jewish writer Primo Levi. He was just beginning his (first) career as a chemist when the Nazis invaded Poland, and he later became - very briefly and by his own confession ineptly - a fighter for the Italian resistance before being captured, imprisoned, and eventually deported to Auschwitz. His account of his time there - Se Questo È Un Uomo (If This Is a Man) - remains the most indelible tale of endurance I have ever read, heroic (as many have observed) for its antiheroism. The worst of the crimes that Levi lays at the Nazis' feet is the deliberate, systematic destruction of their captives' dignity and decency; he can only communicate the horror of that crime by describing his own degradation into a creature of mere appetite. The strength he needed to write of such evil in a plain, clear voice is unfathomable to me - and I send up an empty prayer that it will remain so.

But in order to appreciate the magnitude of Levi's alchemical gifts (and in order to understand how difficult it has been for many to admit the possibility that he did not fall but leapt down a stairwell to his death in 1987), you need to read The Periodic Table. What you will find there is radiance. Wit. Love. Celebration. The song of a man who turned darkness to a bell tower and allowed what battered him to become his strength. He took on that great spiritual work, and his possible suicide does not to my mind diminish the humble miracle he performed in realizing it.

Irreverence itself supplies the steadiest source of light and calalytic heat in Levi's writing, as it did in his work as a chemist. Here he comments on the scientifically elegant solution he found to the problem of making lipstick more lasting: "The fact that alloxan, destined to embellish ladies' lips, would come from the excrement of chickens or pythons was a thought which didn't trouble me for a moment. The trade of a chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz) teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever."

God absconded from Levi's world, but he kept his faith in carbon and nitrogen, the stuff of life. For a very long while, it was enough.

Men in Tight Pants Who Positively Kick Ass: Quentin Jammer, Brendan Ayanbadejo & Chris Kluwe

The man.​

We're about halfway into the football season, and my mind is therefore (un)naturally occupied by the San Diego Chargers, who have all but perfected the art of breaking their fans' hearts. Case in point: they recently made history by becoming the first NFL team ever to lead a game by 24 points at the half then lose it by double digits. They took a chance to own the AFC West and strangled the breath out of it over 30 excruciating minutes of playing time. "Implosion" could be the Chargers' middle name.

As if this weren't bummer enough, it completely eclipsed a magical moment that had been more than ten years in the making: Quentin Jammer scoring the first touchdown of his career on an interception of Peyton Manning. A blown play sent the ball sailing right into Jammer's arms, and even though his face was obscured by his helmet, you couldn't mistake his giddiness as he skipped neatly around a tackler and kept on going until he was gone. I could swear he paused at the fifteen-yard line, as if to say, "Really?" or maybe just to savor the moment. I could almost swear the last Bronco paused with him: "You go, man. You've earned it." But I'm sentimental on the subject of Quentin Jammer.

Jammer got drafted by the Chargers as the fifth overall pick back in 2002. He's now in his eleventh year in the league, playing a highly physical version of a highly physical position, cornerback. I first admired him for his stoicism and his quietly fierce commitment to doing his job right by his own lights. These qualities were thrown into high relief when Antonio Cromartie joined the Bolts in 2006 and soon came to personify everything Jammer wasn't: acrobatic flash & self-loving swagger. In his years with the Chargers, Cromartie made about as many spectacular interceptions as he fathered children (soon to be twelve by nine mothers). Jammer just kept making tackles and breaking plays while raising three boys with his wife, Alicia. He mentored Cro and later defended him when teammates grew impatient with the younger man's lust for the hero's cape. (Now with the Jets, Cromartie is finally stealing an occasional taste of life as a wide receiver.)

Last season, Q wasn't so steady. He drifted out of coverage, becoming an easier target for opposing quarterbacks than he'd been in years. His timing was off and his hands were sloppy. Refs noticed. Every broken pass seemed to draw a yellow flag. Jammer looked overamped one minute and lost the next, suddenly not a man you could count on.

Maybe not in the short run. But a few months ago Jammer sat down with Kevin Acee, a reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune, and laid it out just the way he's been doing forever: the no-apologies, hard-tackling truth. He told Acee where the fog had rolled in from. His marriage had come apart, and so had he. He'd spent months dazed by sadness, convinced that his failures as a husband and father made him a failure as a man and human being. But he learned otherwise. As Acee tells it,

"He first tried to hide his depression from his mother and younger brother, to whom Jammer has been a father of sorts. He did have a close friend, Ian Kennedy, who would not let Jammer push him away. And when Jammer informed his family of his troubles, they responded only with support.

'The thing I’ll take away from that is you don’t go through that alone,' Jammer said. 'Talk to somebody. Somebody may snap you out of it ... I learned people really care about me and love me for me.'

He said there was no magical moment that got him up from the floor.

'Just time,' Jammer said. 'You go out and you heal. You heal the best way you know how. You see all the people that support you and love you. You find out they all care about you. It gradually happened. I just got a little bit more happy, a little bit more happy. It just got a little better every day.'"

It's hard enough from the sidelines of our Ram Tough culture to speak plainly and without bitterness of pain, of need. It's a lot harder when you're on the field, playing out our communal fantasies of strength. Q spoke to Acee just weeks after a stadium full of people had celebrated the sadly abbreviated life of Junior Seau, who committed suicide in May - he'd seen how a man can get crushed by the mythologies he shoulders.

We women are hardly immune, especially when we get to thinking that the world will grind to a slow halt without our cheerful encouragement. ("I'm good." "It's all good." "Hangin' in.") In my own periodic struggles with depression, I've found it very hard to reach out, and vanity has been part of the reason: I want to think of myself as someone other people turn to for comfort and support.

That said, the public display of vulnerability doesn't usually entail an existential crisis for women the way it so often does for men. "Manly" is a brand of sprung steel trap, and you can hear the jaws snap shut a hundred times a day.

Sometimes you can step past; sometimes you need a sledgehammer to bust your way to safe ground. Brendan Ayanbadejo, a linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens, has been speaking out against homophobia for years, and he recently added his strong, clear voice to the campaign to preserve a newborn Maryland law that enshrines the right of gays and lesbians to marry. This exercise of a free mind and a compassionate heart (Ayanbadejo "happens" to be straight) inspired a state delegate, Emmett C. Burns Jr., to write to the owner of the Ravens, "requesting that you take the necessary actions... to inhibit such expressions from your employee and that he be ordered to cease and desist such injurious actions."

Enter Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe - with sledgehammer - in a letter to Burns published on Deadspin:

"[W]hy do you hate freedom? Why do you hate the fact that other people want a chance to live their lives and be happy, even though they may believe in something different than you, or act different than you? How does gay marriage, in any way shape or form, affect your life? If gay marriage becomes legal, are you worried that all of a sudden you'll start thinking about penis? "Oh shit. Gay marriage just passed. Gotta get me some of that hot dong action!" Will all of your friends suddenly turn gay and refuse to come to your Sunday Ticket grill-outs? (Unlikely, since gay people enjoy watching football too.)"

A week later, Burns relented:

"Upon reflection, [Ayanbadejo] has his First Amendment rights. And I have my First Amendment rights. … Each of us has the right to speak our opinions. The football player and I have a right to speak our minds."

Very generous of you, Mr. Burns.

Love & Truth 1, "Manly" trap 0.

Forza!
Gretchen

Update: Bless their mighty hearts, voters in Maryland, Maine, and maybe Washington (still counting, but looking good!) have come out in support of marriage equality. Score!

Cromartie makes good. Photo by Adam Bouska.​

Two Positively Kick Ass Spiritual Guides: Pema Chödrön & Louis CK

​Go buy a concert ticket. Go buy a video. Give this man your money - it's for a good cause.

I think these two might have been separated at birth. Granted, the physical resemblance isn't all that striking, beyond the strong noses and sparse reddish hair. You're probably right to be skeptical about their spiritual affinity, too, given that Pema Chödrön is a Buddhist nun and Louis CK a magnificently crass comedian. But Pema and Louis have been getting on amazingly well at the little party in my mind. They've also been giving me some of the same invaluable advice... in very different words.

​Photo by Robin Holland. Click through to the book at the top of my Pema stack.

​​Pema Chödrön = spiritual guide. Not a big stretch. James Atlas recently had a great op-ed in the NY Times about the exploding popularity of Buddhism among Americans who've become disenchanted with formal religion (or never got enchanted in the first place). He has a word for people like us, "people with a stack of Pema Chödrön books beside their beds": he calls us Newddhists, and goes on to confess that he's one himself. You can tease when you're family.

So why are so many of us turning to Pema for support both at ordinary moments and at times of great need? If she's become an emblem, if she's risen to the double-edged status of cliché, it's not because she's feeding people pablum. Look back into those eyes. Can you hold that gaze? Remember, you're only dealing with a photo here. If you dare to ask this woman what she thinks about how you're conducting your life, you'd best be prepared to do more than rearrange your deck chairs.

"There is compassion and there is idiot compassion; there is patience and there is idiot patience; there is generosity and there is idiot generosity. For example, trying to smooth everything out to avoid confrontation, to not rock the boat, is not what's meant by compassion or patience. That's what is meant by control."

- Pema Chödrön

How does Pema kick my ass?

• By telling me things that I don't want to hear, at the moment when I need to hear them.​
• ​By telling me things that I'm starved to hear, before I know I need to hear them.
  
• By laughing at me, you, herself, all of us.​
• By relishing what's difficult.​
• By encouraging me to make a mess, and to embrace the mess I'm already in.​
• By leading the way to humility. Again and again and again.
• Did I mention the laughter thing? It's important.​

Chödrön's resemblance to Louis CK came clearly into focus for me when I read her observation that the impulse toward self-improvement is "a subtle aggression against who we really are." I love that. It's impossible. Pema has got to know that I would never read her books if I didn't want to improve myself somehow, if I weren't seeking to be a little less stupid and destructive, a little more patient and generous. But now she tells me to cut it out. What do I do with that? How am I supposed to be fully accepting and hopeful of change?

Louis lives the paradox.​ In his concert at the New Beacon, he repeatedly says, "I want to be a better person." And I believe him. But every time he says it, he goes on to demonstrate how feeble this desire is, how it gets continually swamped by fiercer hungers (for sex, ice cream, revenge, etc.).

How does Louis kick my ass?​

• ​By reveling in the comedy of limitation. He insists on telling us in excruciating detail all the ways that he fails to be a good guy, a sexy guy, a smart guy, a loving guy.
• By "leaning into" his discomfort and shame and thereby redeeming them.​
• By transforming arrows into flowers. For $5 a download.​
• By staying tender.​
• By smiling - adorably - when he's just said the very worst thing in the history of human speech.​
• By being a big-bellied bodhisattva, a saggy sideline warrior - except that he now somehow finds himself an honest-to-god hero to all of us who dream of taking creative and economic possession of our work. That's transformation for you.
  

I follow these two because they'd really rather I didn't, because they'd both be happiest seeing me find my own way. (Well, my imaginary friends who look and sound like them would be very happy indeed.)

Forza!​
Gretchen

Just a human being...​