April 25, 2020
My Dear Danny,
Two years ago, I was snuggled into your guest bed with Jerry and Omar, your furry brothers, about to turn off the light and go to sleep when I got word that your birth was nearing. I quickly got dressed and hurried to the dreary maternity waiting room, unrolled my mother’s tea napkin that held my traveling altar: my tiny well-loved doll, the acorn baby Ann gave me and a rose crystal heart … and continued to wait.
I’d spent hours in that waiting room over the previous few days, but the first time I actually heard the soft bells was when they heralded your birth. Within a few minutes after the bells rang, the nurse came out to get me. When I walked into the room where your mother had worked so valiantly in your birthing, you were snugged on your daddy’s bare chest—my firstborn holding his firstborn. Soon it was my turn to cradle you, and my heart broke open as it had years before when I first held my newborn children.
Today you turn two years old. After playing with you two days a week for most of your life, Howard and I haven’t been physically with you for 6 weeks. The COVID-19 pandemic hit, and love asked us all to stay physically apart to keep its spread to a minimum. We’ve had some lovely “visits” electronically. Howard and I have made a few videos for you, read to you through the screen, dropped off little gifts for Easter. We’ve watched you jump off your couch, play with your truck collection, run around the “track” in your home, dig in the sandbox and snuggle with your mom and dad. You’ve grown and learned so many new things since we were last together.
Funny how we can be so far apart physically and yet still feel the strength of our connection and presence with each other.
I’ve been doing a lot of reminiscing over these weeks, looking back at pictures, talking with Howard about some of the fun and cute things you’ve done with us. Remembering the sweep of these last two years with you makes my heart dance.
I’ve also been thinking, yet again, about the world I want for you. In the span of these few weeks, our world has stopped in a way I never imagined was possible. This unasked for spread of one of nature’s viruses has brought separation, illness, death and a massive loss of jobs. The extent of that is reported daily in the newspapers and is felt personally, acutely, by millions. It’s heartbreaking.
Yet, in the midst of that, something else is afoot. The air and water quality have improved worldwide. Nature is healing herself rather quickly. Our deeply unjust, inequitable and broken systems have been stopped in their tracks.
Globally, we have been shaken to the core.
There is speculation about when we can return to “normal.”
I hope the answer to that is never.
Never for you. For your generation all around the world. For your parents’ millennial generation. For us all. My prayer is that we have the courage and vision to push aside the rubble of top-heavy social and economic “welfare” for “human” corporations1 and the debris of greed of money and power by increasingly few individuals who own more than many nations. Once that wreckage has been cleared, together we can build a world where you, Danny, and all of us can thrive. A world that supports all of creation to blossom together.
Danny, I know you LOVE scooping up rubble with your digger, 
dropping it into your dump truck as you focus on important construction work! You can lead the way.
In this time of abrupt slow down, we have a chance to become what was penned so long ago:
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men [and women, girls and boys] are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I know you are more interested in exploring and playing than in all of these words. Your focus is rightly on running, hiding, digging, hugging, reading, exploring… That is the work that you are to do—your two-year-old unfettered expression of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is the responsibility of those of us who are adults now, especially those of us who are older and no longer raising little ones like you. I wrote Big Topics at Midnight because I longed for a more just and awake world for my grown children. Now as you are marking your second birthday on a planet stopped in her tracks, I want to again begin to find words to articulate the world I so long for your generation to grow up in.
Finding words to express that through my blog is my work of the next few months. But today I pause to CELEBRATE YOU, in all your wonderful uniqueness and in gratitude for all you’ve brought my grandmother’s heart. You are surrounded by a wide and powerful community of family and friends. My prayer for you is that you will continue to explore and express all the variety of feelings and senses and thoughts and longings that dance through that miraculous growing body of yours.
It is a wonderful world to explore. Happy Birthday.
May it also be a day of new birth for all of us who were born and live within “the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.”2
I love you, Gammie
- Legally, corporations have many of the same rights as a flesh and blood human person
- From the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer
Ten days ago, a dozen neighbors gathered in our shared courtyard with a drink in hand to toast the twin Tulip Magnolia trees in their full, pale pink glory. COVID 19 was lurking outside our gate—it was the last time we will be physically close together until this period has ended. Today the blossoms are falling. They remained in place much longer than usual, despite a short snowfall and wind—a gift of beauty we all have been grateful for.
beauty of life and our profound global interconnectedness of all of creation into stark view. This has always been true, yet today our thin and fragile illusions of separation, rugged independence and control have come crashing down.
January and February were my months of travel—Boise, ID, Klamath Falls, OR, NYC and Atlanta. I didn’t get to see Alison Saar’s Harriet Tubman statue while I was in Harlem, but hearing about it has sent me to search out photos and descriptions of this remarkable sculpture. Harriet isn’t depicted as running the underground railroad, but rather becoming it. She faces south, following her divine call to return again and again to lead people from slavery to freedom. Her time called for courage—i.e. being afraid and going forward anyway. Ours does too. We aren’t to try to be like Harriet, or anyone else for that matter, but to become more fully ourselves and to do what makes our heart sing as a gift to our global family.
the calls have been keeping touch with family. Howard’s and my heartache at this time of separation from our almost two-year-old grandson, Danny, and his parents has been eased by regularly “hanging out” with him on Google Hangouts. We are exploring having a virtual living room gathering with our family in town sometime this week.