CoodeIndigo

  On my way You said return to me so here I am skin and bones held together with memories and a little bit of duct tape. I am bringing the worst of me, consider yourself warned— the furrowed brow, the achy back, the slew of judgments, a pocket full of assumptions, the track of negativity that runs laps in my head. I am bringing it all because you said return to me, edits not required, so return I will. And not all of it will be bad. Some of it will be lovely. I will bring a wagon full of nostalgia, a melody that won’t let me go, a million stories that start with the words, “Oh it was beautiful!” I will bring a mended heart, a glass half-full, two lungs, out of breath from dancing too long, and dreams that taste like honey. I will bring my whole messy human self because I know, I just know, deep in my bones, that you are already running to meet me. There are no cuts on this team. You said you’d take it all, so here I come. Me and all my humanity. We are on my way. Poem by Rev. Sara...

Originally published on the Pax Christi International Peace Stories blog, May 8, 2021 On January 6, [2021] many watched in horror as thousands of people stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. in a furious, chaotic, and deeply misguided attempt to nullify the November 2020 election of Joe Biden as president of the United States. The insurrectionists broke windows and furniture, swarmed offices, menaced members of Congress and their staff, stole property and inflicted a sense of terror on those who work in and near the U.S. Capitol. In the aftermath, five people were dead, at least 140 injured, and unknown more were traumatized. The January 6 attack was violent: in attitude, language, action, and result. Rather than stabilizing our democracy it has painfully accelerated social divisions. The United States has a history and culture of nonviolent demonstrations, most of which are peaceful. As the nation’s seat of power, Washington, D.C. is accustomed to protestors, both ...

When I was growing up, a bunch of boys lived in our neighborhood: my brothers Joe and Phillip were part of a pack that included Ricky Ray; Donny and Jimmy Loftus; Timmy Nave (who was the only bilingual one of the group because his parents were deaf and he used ASL); Billy, Joey and Paul Breen (whose fourth brother, John, was too young to join the play); and the star of N. Wilson Boulevard, Kurt Page. For a brief time, Kurt was famous, at least in Nashville and the SEC football world: in the early 1980s,  he was the quarterback for Vanderbilt University  (still holds the record for most yards passed). My Kurt Page scrapbook is around here somewhere. All or some combination of these boys, along with my father, often played basketball and baseball together, and some of them (not our father) played with their Johnny West and Geronimo action figures. (Remind me to tell the story of when I and my Barbie doll were invited to join the activity; it was the scene of my first feminist ou...

This article appeared today in the Health section of the Washington Post. Made me smile remembering how we were allowed to roam around our neighborhood without too much interference. I don't think I ever went too far, maybe a half a mile from home at most, but it probably would have been OK if I'd gone farther. I don't remember being asked about my wanderings -- maybe I was asked where I went, and it was never a big deal. I was just in Brussels for 10 days; on Saturday and Sunday (Aug. 14-15) I wandered around a bit, and decided to try different streets just for the hell of it, just to see where they would go. It made me think about how my father used to do that too, sometimes, when he was driving long distances -- just take another route to see what it would be like. Related: One thing I despise since the rise of the GPS is people's absolute dependence on the little suckers. They can be super helpful, certainly, but there comes a point where it is ridiculous to get ad...

In April 2016, I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Rome. I had been working with Pax Christi International for several months at that point, organizing the Nonviolence and Just Peace conference . We were expecting 85 theologians and peace practitioners from around the world. My previous weeks had been a whirlwind of visa applications, logistics, negotiations on every small details ... And now it was Sunday afternoon, less than 24 hours before our meeting was to begin. Folks were arriving from the United States, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America. One of our participants, Jean Jacques from the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- who had already endured significant obstacles to get a visa to enter Europe -- sent me an email to tell me that his flight had been delayed so he had missed his connection and would miss the entire conference unless he was able to buy a new ticket on a different flight to Rome. So I'm toggling back and forth between Google Translate and email to communicate...

Comfort food, soothing radio voice, bright blue sky and cool breeze. Full of gratitude. 

The biggest fight I had with my father was about the U.S.’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — he, a veteran of the World War II European theater, believed that the bombings had been necessary to protect U.S. soldiers from what he had been told would have been a ghastly invasion of Japan, and I thought (and still believe) the bombings are the worst thing humans have ever done. The fact that 100,000+ people were killed or injured is terrible enough, but tragically the world powers, over the past 75 years, have spent trillions of dollars on weapons of extraordinary destruction, money that could have been spent actually improving living conditions and protecting the earth. But no, it was all wasted. 75 years of waste and fear and distrust.  Today the Washington Post’s Style section has an article about John Hersey who wrote “Hiroshima,” originally for The New Yorker. I’ve never seen a photo of him before: Holy smokes, was he gorgeous. Reminded me of another gorgeous guy who wore fati...