Merry Monday after Christmas

Dec 29, 2025

Merry you pulled it off, even
If “it” wasn’t exactly what you planned

Merry, we can leave the tree up just a little bit longer

Merry next year, I will slow down and enjoy the holidays more

Merry, I love having so much soft, unstructured time with the kids

Merry wow! Two weeks is a lot of time for the kids to be out of school!

Merry, it’s not 2026 quite yet, quick make a vision board, a resolution, a plan, an intention, a goal, at least find a word for the year.

Merry a moment of gratitude that the extinction of the paper check means that you may not write the number 2026 until late May.

Merry decided to write 2-0-2-6 on the closest piece of paper.

Merry random new beginning as beginnings almost always are not in the plan

Merry whatever this week is: the marrow, the hinge, the gap.

Merry next chapter

Merry new leaf turning and turning, merry knowing that the time is rarely different for having her unknown birthday celebrated.

Merry the marrow, the hinge, the gap, and merry the swaying rope bridge we build to get ourselves across

Merry across, not just a bridge from the end of last year to the beginning of next,
or even a bridge trying to hold onto a future we are only now beginning to dream.

Merry Bridge of Love

A woven rope bridge extends out over a river to the other side. — http://sapiens.org/archaeology/inca-rope-bridge/

Merry, this is definitely not a bridge to some fictional version of yourself that really only serves to prop up a racist capitalist system that suckles off the insecurity it fills you with. Please, my loves and my dear ones, do not build any bridges to the land of self-loathing with its peeling veneer of self-improvement

Merry, the bridge I am talking about is the bridge we are standing on right now. This bridge is swaying, and we can feel the weight of all the other bodies crossing this bridge with us.

Merry marrow, this is a centered place. That which lies deep is often more alive, more necessary than we remember

Merry hinge my loves, as we are here a pin in between years, what if change didn’t happen in a 5-4-3-2-1 kind of way, but in a let’s take a week to lose touch with who we have been and occasionally forget to worry about who we might become.

Merry gap my loves and my dear ones,
May there be space for space for us all this week
May we find capacity for capacity
May we be resolved in unconditional self-love
May we be resolved in unconditional love of our neighbor
may we be forgiven when we ask who that is.
May we be resolved in untameable hope
May we be resolved in lighthearted peace
May we be resolved in such deeply rooted joy
that it shines out ahead of us
Lighting the bridge as we go

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this week at Trader Joe's

Dec 22, 2025

Standing by all things peppermint, I called you by your mother’s name,
even though I knew exactly who you were.
I have not forgotten a single one of you.

And we made the small talk, about your kids- teenagers now.
The math works, but the brain resists.
They will probably stay children in the amber of my memory

Your mom, whose name slipped out, has had a few falls, but is okay
I hope whoever is your priest now, sat by her bed, and held her hand,
and I hope they were delighed to be able to pray with her.

And you remarked on how big the toddler is
and I told you the truth - that I am well, and we smiled and we huggged
and really. Really, it was so good to see you. and I was fine.

And I got the groceries (including the peppermint cookies) loaded into the car
and wrestled a rabid honey badger into a car seat.
and as soon as I started to drive, I shattered

and I sobbed, the kind of big grown-up crying that makes a toddler worry.
Why are you crying, Mama? Why are you sad? It’s complicated baby.
But what does that mean when you are two, almost three?

How do you tell a baby- I am sad because I miss- not just the nice lady we talked to
but I miss her kids, and I miss her mom, and I miss who I used to be
and while most of the time now, it is okay that I am not a priest, it is the

brutal specificity, that I am not their priest, that undid me.
I will not visit the nursing home where an amazing woman
with a soft southern accent and passion for justice heals her old bones.

I will not do the funeral, or celebrate the college acceptance, or the wedding.
It is no longer my job to hold the generations of your family in my heart.
I am someone who used to be your priest.

I am someone who catches up, next to the peppermint candy.
I make small talk
and cry in the car.

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Survival

Dec 15, 2025

As a kid, I used to imagine the world stripped of everything people had ever made. Just like that: everything humans had ever created would disappear. Looking out the car window, I’d watch the houses and fences blur past and picture them vanishing mid-drive. I worried that if this happened while we were driving, we would all be hurtling through the air naked at sixty miles an hour.

Both my parents were born in 1950, which means they were twelve when the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened annihilation. I think it left a kind of secular apocalyptic fatalism in them, and maybe in their whole generation.

My father shared both the glory and the horror of the world with me starting when I was pretty young. He would ask me if I remembered being born, he took me on fantastic adventures. Also, I knew a lot about slavery and the Trail of Tears before I went to kindergarten. The tour guide did not appreicate my questions on our school trip to the Hermaitge1. In second grade, my dad read me The Lord of the Flies as a bedtime story. It’s about shipwrecked kids, you know.

When I pictured everything man-made vanishing, I would wonder how long it would take us to rebuild all that we had constructed as a species. I wondered what would be the order of priority if the human race had to start from scratch. Would we go back and redo the cave paintings and stonehenge? Would someone paint another Mona Lisa? What about the Statue of Liberty? Or would we just get right back to industrialization? Would we have factories before symphonies? Would someone pick themselves up from the dirt and figure out how to build a guitar?

I worried about people on the high floors of tall buildings, people on boats, people in planes. It was a fantasy that indulged my nacent anxiety disorder for sure. I would look around me and wonder, what could I use? These sticks, those rocks. I had no idea how to do anything. I became hyperaware of how deeply dependent I was on the created world. Everything that made my life livable, everything required for my survival, was made by other people.

Maybe I read too much. This was long before any reality TV, which I wouldnt have een allowed to watch even if it had existed. I know the book Hatchet made an impact. If you don’t know it, its about a boy who ends up stranded in the Canadian woods with only, obviously, a hatchet. It was not so much about escaping to the woods to live on your own terms, but being thrust into a world not of your own choosing. I understood the main theme to be that I basically had no chance of survival as the animal I was.

I read plenty of other books too, about children fleeing Korea in So Far from the Bamboo Grove, or running from Nazi soldiers in endless Holocaust stories. It seemed entirely plausible that someday I would have to pack a backpack and run. I’d look around my room and wonder, Is there anything here that could keep me alive? Unless we would need Barbie Dream Kitchens and blue plastic cassette players, the answer was no.

When I got older I started to read the plague stories, the zombie stories. I never saw myself among the gritty ten percent who fight their way into tomorrow. I visited Las Vegas once and could clearly see the hungry desert swallowing the neon city whole. The minute the water turns off the sand will rush in and erase this vanity. he minute the water turns off, the sand will rush in and erase this vanity. In Oregon, it will be the moss, and in Tennessee, the kudzu will wrap up the world.

Kudzu can grow up to a foot a day, and it always wins

Even now, sometimes I’m in a public bathroom and think: If this building collapsed, I could make it for a while. My sweater could be a pillow. The pipes might hold enough water to sustain me for a few days. But to what end? I still don’t know how to build a shelter or how to feed myself in the wild. I have never channeled any of my anxiety into a single useful zombie-apocalypse skill.

If everything human-made ever does vanish, or the zombies do come and somehow I am one of the survivors, I hope I would stay in a place of gentle curiosity and kindness. There are preppers and survivalists—people with gallons of water and cans of food and lots of guns. I have no interest in living inside a bunker, chewing on freeze-dried despair while my neighbors starve. If that’s survival, I don’t want it. I would rather run out of food in a week because I shared it, than survive for a month behind a locked steel door.

In my bunker, I’d want to paint and sing. I’d want to tell stories in the dark. And if I’m honest, getting freaky with my fellow survivors. I’d want a bunker full of pillows and art supplies, and sex toys. And because I can’t actually prove that this isn’t the end of the world, that’s how I’m living already.

And so my loves and my dear ones,
as you look around your life
and wonder
what if this was all you had?
what if this moment was the beginning of the end?
I pray that the life you have built will sustain you
I pray that you have songs in your heart
I pray that you remember some good jokes
I pray that all your days are lived without fear
I pray that you have some paint or at least crayons on hand
and if you can make it,
you are welcome in my bunker.
And even if we don’t make it long
We can make it good.

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Just in case you didnt grow up in middle TN, The Hermaitge is the historic plantation home of Andrew Jackson, 7th president of the US, owner of over 150 slaves who oversaw the Indian Removal Act, forcibly driving the Cherokee from their homes in 1838. Almost 1/3 of them did not survice the 1,000-mile journey to present-day Oklahoma. In 1983 the perky leader of school tours did not want to talk about these things. But I did.

Thanks for the carbs

Dec 01, 2025

Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday for me. I know that’s true for lots of us, but maybe I just get to be part of the “us” in this one. I find myself struggling between a desire to Norman Rockwell the fuck out of this holiday- longing for a full table and food that tastes like comfort, alongside the acknowledgment of its complicated cultural history. When we first came back from New York we shared Thanksgiving dinner with a dear friend and her husband who had a lot of kids and not a lot of time. We made the whole big beautiful meal at their house. Then, a few Thanksgiving later, after my friend had died, Thanksgiving felt even more tender, and we hosted the Thanksgiving dinner at the church. After I lost my relationship with the church, I was aware of how much I was putting on to this one dinner. And still couldn’t seem to help myself. I get caught up in wanting everything to be beautiful and yummy and perfect. That year I may have caused a complete breakdown of a relationship with a metamor because they sprung a number of unplanned for dishes into my cooking schedule at the last minute.

I love planning the meal. I love making a schedule. I love figuring out when things go in the oven. I love figuring out exactly when they need to come out. It’s like a giant strategy game but with carbs. And then I love sitting at the table and watching people I love eat food that I have made. I love feeling competent even if it’s just for a day.

This year I was already feeling a little sad at the big kid being all the way on the East Coast. I worried that he would not find a big full table full of love to sit at. But then all of us here on the West Coast got sick. We weren’t able to do Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, but managed to pull off a reduced version Saturday afternoon. It was just three parents in the toddler at the table. We wanted to spare other people who had not been exposed to our cold yet, just in case. The toddler had been asking extensive questions about “holiday” and we had to repeatedly reassure him that this was the holiday. His enthusiasm over pumpkin pie was 100% worth it.

There is so much I am grateful for. There are also days where gratitude feels incredibly challenging. I can’t remember if we got them as a wedding present, but somehow my husband and I ended up with a lovely package of fill-in-the-blank Curious George thank you notes right after we got married.

Dear ____,
Thank you for the ______.
I really like it.

Love ______

We had a great time filling them out for all of the various wedding presents. I addressed them all stamped them and put them in my car to drop off at the post office. It was only years later when we were selling that car that I found all of those thank you notes for wedding presents smashed into the back of my glove box. I threw them out instead of sending them, and I’m still ashamed of that. Somehow it seems better to be thought of as completely callous and ungrateful, than as overwhelmed and incompetent.

Curious George thank-you notes are pretty close to our cultural narrative of Thanksgiving. Thanks with the motif of racist kidnapping and problematic power dynamics between George and that Man with the Yellow Hat is not the worst metaphor for a holiday that conflates oppression and gratitude.

In a delightful bonus trigger moment on Saturday I had to move my framed seminary diploma and ordination certificates out of a pile in the dining room as various things are getting reorganized and moved around. I’m trying to find gratitude in the midst of shame. But there are days where it feels like the world is papered over with my failures. There are days where it feels like my attempts at being thankful end up shoved in the back of my glove box, do you know what I mean?

But I don’t want to stand so far back in judgment of myself and others that I cannot bend my heart back towards gratitude. I make a donation to NAYA and still eat pie with my family.

It was never our practice in any iterations of my family to go around the table saying what we are thankful for. But I don’t know, it seems like a pretty awesome thing to do. I do not want my thanks to get shoved to the back of my spiritual glovebox.

So my loves and dear ones, what are you grateful for?

Dear Life,
Thank you for the sunshine,
thank you for the rain.

Dear Life,
Thank you for my friends and for my family,
and thank you for the people who are both.

Dear Life,
Thank you for holidays
and all the weird longings that are behind them.

Dear Life,
I know I when I am the most wounded I miss the most miracles.
Thank you for what I keep hoping is a slow and gentle healing.

Dear Life,
Thank you for my life here on Earth.
I really do like it

Kerlin

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