The Branches Journal Fall 2024: PURPOSE

Weep No More Marissa Thornberry

Discussion of Purpose: September 13th, 2024 Ellen Stedfeld

Contents Front

Going Forth • Susan Black

Inside

Weep No More • Marissa Thornberry

Inside

Discussion of Purpose • Ellen Stedfeld

01

Filler from Flipper • Bethany Schneider

02

The Secretary • Dorothea Nikolaidis

03

Purpose in a Nonfiction World • Will Jelbert

04

Process Stories, Prison Dramas • Ryan Vera

05

Wander • Nick Dane

06

Art as an Act of Love • Peter Maximus

08

Subcreation in Asteroid City • Elizabeth Coletti

10

A Capering Commute • Abigail Burns

11

Follow the Leader • Sara Caporaletti

12

2020: A Year of Thunder • Janusz Kaleta

14

Human Connection in Spite of It All • Alyssa Margarita

15

quietude • Annie McManness

16

The Prophet Moses • Anna Sofia Poloz

17

The End • Rebekah Balick

17

The Necessity of Awe • Maura H. Harrison

18

I Listen to the Winds • Jerry Wayne Hazelwood

20

Be Fruitful • Amnia Lyre

22

The Doubtful One • Christina J. Green

23

Modern Vanity • Mostly Sane

24

There Are No Blessed Mother Statues Here • Karla Pahel

26

The Watering • Rebekah Balick

27

Mosquitoes • Jasmine Su

30

The Ark • Pepper

30

Lupe and Me • Rhonda Melanson

31

Thoughts on My Legacy • Susan Black

32

Lilac • Nick Dane

32

Noticing • Rheza Budiono

33

birth of an individual • Jen Dufau 01

From the Editors When we seek to discover our life’s purpose, we find that the world is a rather difficult place to live.

The idea of our purpose, our telos, as Aristotle coined, comes up against what the world demands and allows of us, giving no easy answers. What are we driven by and why do we continue? How does a thing justify itself? What is the work of our lives? The calling, the vocation? What is the goal of the art we consume and the structures we live within? In briefest response, we believe the way to investigate the intent behind a work and grasp onto purpose is to understand its context, which is what you’ll see explored in this issue.

This theme selection was partly selfish as we sought to determine the purpose of The Branches, and it’s been an honor and joy to see the response to its launch. We encourage you to join our email list on the back cover to stay up to date on upcoming community meetup events, where we chase inspiration and expand the conversations about art, writing, values, and life contained here. In addition, keep an eye out for us on Instagram and Substack, where we’ll be sharing published pieces and more writing from our editorial board. Interested in getting more involved with submissions, distribution, or editing? Reach out to us over email or come to an event. All are welcome, and we invite broad interpretation and varied perspectives.

Elizabeth Coletti Ryan Vera

The Secretary Marissa Thornberry is a mixed media and oil painter known for her serene and contemplative hand paintings that celebrate the inherent dignity and unique beauty of each person.

Ellen Stedfeld, lifelong New Yorker, artist, and Christian, combines poetry and illustration with live experiences, develops stories, and conducts creative experiments.

EllesaurArts.com Bethany Schneider works a regular 9-to-5 and is thankful that faith gives her life purpose, independent of the progress of her career.

Dorothea Nikolaidis writes political theory, poetry, and fiction exploring intersections between Marxism, psychoanalytic theory, and Christian theology.

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Dorothea Nikolaidis As on the Eighth day, when once our Creator had waked again to return to the labor of His making, so now I wake this body in the pains of labor to a making of its own, groaning at the promise of a new creation.

Having made myself spat, shat, and Monitored, I hope I make myself clear, what had me opened for revisions: It was a new office you’d torn in me in the portal you told me not to close, and the window the many see only as through a glass darkly, where you had me under the stare of your screen, and it Pleased me to be there. But I was none-too-pleased being there.

Please read carefully: as that was where I thought I’d make you a redline, and I thought I’d make myself a redline.

And somewhere, between the lines grown lashed out red in the stroke of a pen, well… I hoped I’d be grown by now.

But I am ever your Child, ever your Pupil, ever your Correction.

And when the Lord my Father calls my corpus up, I hope I have the sense to send the Changed Pages Only.

Purpose in a Nonfiction World Will Jelbert

Your ego wants you to be somebody. Your purpose wants you to do something—something that matters to you. Osho wrote, “Personality is bogus, but individuality is substantial.” I prefer “Ego is bogus, but purpose is substantial.”

The way your individuality connects with the world is what inspires your purpose. Ego is driven by fear (of a lack of recognition). Purpose is driven by courage to do what matters (regardless of recognition). In his book Ego Is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday writes that in order to know if you are acting with purpose, you have to ask yourself the following questions: “Does this help me to do what I have set out to do?

Does this allow me to do what I need to do? Am I being selfish or selfless?” Holiday adds, “It is not, ‘Who do I want to be in life?’ but ‘What is it that I want to accomplish in life?’ Setting aside selfish interest, [purpose] asks: What calling does it serve? What principles govern my choices?”

The individuality of your connection to others is what gives you purpose. Purpose connects you to courage, and courage connects you to your truth, renewing the individuality of your connection to others. For example, let’s say that until you connected with others recovering from oxycodone addictions, you were addicted yourself. Now you sense that your purpose is to help rid the world of addiction and depression by raising awareness about their causes and cures. At a family event, you overhear your aunt say, “Those junkies next door need to be locked up for life. They are evil criminals.” Because your purpose of raising awareness about the causes of addiction is strong, your courage is too. You are compelled to speak up for the truth that addiction is a disease and a symptom of a disconnected society, and that addicted people need compassion, not persecution that will make their addiction stronger.

So you say, “You know, I disagree with you on this. What do you think causes addiction, depression, and anxiety? Do you know that they are all linked?” And you then engage in a conversation without succumbing to your ego’s

temptation to exaggerate with words such as “always” and “never” and use insulting metaphors—words that would make your aunt angry, and that she would easily be able to defend herself against. Instead, your courage connects you to the truth: specific facts about addiction that your aunt won’t be able to dispute.

Finally, your connection to both the addicted and to your aunt strengthens and renews both your individuality and your sense of purpose. As I write this, I imagine that my purpose is to write books and articles that connect people.

What’s your purpose? If you can’t articulate it right now, don’t worry. Every new connection with others will renew your individuality and evolve and grow your sense of purpose.

Choose the words and actions you feel the strongest connection with, and your purpose will find you—even if you just meditate or pray to a higher power or the universe for a few seconds a day and ask for guidance. Another path is to try Ikigai: look for overlaps between what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. If there’s something that checks all those boxes, great; if not (let’s be real, that’s most of us) you may have a job that only pays your bills while your purpose is a side hustle that you love, that the world (and it needn’t be the whole world) needs, and that you’re good at (or willing to get better at). It can be a process of trial and error, trying many things until something, one day, clicks. And you’re connected.

Sometimes, I feel like I have no purpose; that’s when I remind myself to follow whatever will connect me well with others, and that may change over time. What doesn’t change is the need for honesty: Purpose can be as simple as telling the truth, contributing a unique piece to the infinite jigsaw puzzle. The purpose of your existence is to be you well. The only way to be you well is to be honest.

Will Jelbert is the author of The Happiness Animal and Word Wise and is currently writing a novel for 2025 publication: 1984 meets Westworld.

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Process Stories, Prison Dramas Ryan Vera

Ten minutes into Greg Kwedar’s newest film, Sing Sing, I had realized this was not your typical prison drama. On the one hand, this was not going to be a film with the religious symbolism of martyrdom or messianic power of Cool Hand Luke or The Shawshank Redemption.

At the same time, this was certainly not going to be a piece of media that bore its soul in the visceral and violent manner of HBO’s OZ, whose writers exposed their characters to Machiavellian drama.

Not only is Sing Sing by far one of the year’s best films—and one that will no doubt be in conversation at next year’s Academy Awards—it is a film that intimately speaks of process and product; of the methods, meaning, and madness behind artistic creation; and of art’s redemptive value for a population oft forgotten by society: the imprisoned. Victorian writer Oscar Wilde’s line “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” speaks to a theme felt profoundly in the film. This is duly ironic because Wilde himself would be sentenced to two years hard labor in prison. Wilde would craft De Profundis while imprisoned and later reflect on his experiences to write “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a poem about the execution of another prisoner. Wilde found meaning in prison through the craft of artistic production; similarly, the prisoners in Sing Sing find that staging plays gives them that allure of “looking at the stars.”

The film focuses on a group of inmates, members of the very real Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program who stage plays for prisoners and the general public. In an early scene, the RTA members have to choose their next play, and one suggests they come up with an original comedy, reluctant to stage another drama that will remind them of their own trials and tribulations. The inmates banter about the artistic process while sitting in a circle. The film repeatedly returns to this motif of the circle, in which these novice actors draft their play and practice their monologues.

The inmates offer suggestions, each more comedic and off-topic than the last: One wants 04

cowboys to be involved; another suggests ancient Egypt as the setting; a fan of A Nightmare on Elm Street proposes adding Freddy Krueger to the mix, because why not?

The group generates idea after idea without stopping and dubs their hodgepodge of a play Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code.

The film centers on the characters of Divine G, played by Coleman Domingo, and Divine Eye, played by Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin himself.

Domingo’s Divine G is seen by the members of the RTA as their leader: a theater veteran, Shakespeare scholar, and playwright. Acting opposite him, Divine Eye is the newcomer, a feared presence in the prison who struggles to articulate his emotions, subject to tendencies of toxic masculinity. Divine Eye sees the warmups in the circle as goofy and corny, and when an actor interrupts his practicing of a monologue, he lets off, akin to Christian Bale freaking out over his method acting process being violated on the set of Terminator Salvation. “Trust the process,” Divine G repeatedly tells him.

Oscar Wilde found meaning in prison through the craft of artistic production; similarly, the prisoners in Sing Sing Sing Sing find that staging plays gives them that allure of “looking at the stars.”

The relationship between the leads remains tense as Divine G provides unwanted mentorship to Divine Eye, who has beat him for the role of Hamlet in their play. Divine G harbors his own struggle with self-hatred and despair as he pursues appeals for a murder he did not commit, and he holds on to the RTA as his only lifeline. Divine G tells Divine Eye to sell his performance by embodying his own dignity, to stop asking for permission to be on stage and instead let the audience be the conduit for his performance. There is an undercurrent of possible violence in this moment before Divine G finally decides to trust the process.

In a text like OZ, circles are associated with the image of prisoners ready to clash. The audience sees two prisoners shadowing each other, ready to kill at any moment. The camera zooms in on their bloodied visage. The prison alarms blaze. A prison lockdown is announced. A prisoner is tackled to the ground by correctional officers. In contrast, Sing Sing has no grand displays of violence and no large-scale prison fights.

Instead, the film uses the circle motif to present the artistic process within a community. The camera follows Divine Eye round and round as he finally nails the iconic monologue in Hamlet and his fellow inmates rush in on him with raucous applause. The circle becomes a place wherein the prisoners vie for meaning and collaborate in the artistic process, allowing them to craft the perfect zombie walk, live through their monologues, and get in better touch with their capacity for craftsmanship and brotherly love.

Sing Sing isn’t a “prison text” like OZ, Cool Hand Luke, or The Shawshank Redemption. There are no grand prison break moments. There are no scathing monologues about the racialized prison industrial complex that Michelle Alexander dubs the New Jim Crow. There are no moments

where the main character is a clear stand-in for Jesus. Instead, Sing Sing operates better as a collection of intimate moments about the creative process, showing a positive vision of masculinity and mentorship. In a moving scene, one of the characters, Dino, calls out the daily violence the prisoners are witness to, the violence that they have been taught to see as nothing more than daily minutiae, the violence that they have been shown to embrace as markers of their masculinity while in prison.

This is the facade they are shedding by being in the RTA and being in the circle. Sing Sing isn’t really interested in “fighting the man.” Instead, it focuses on the intimate, human moments that arise when a spotlight and a conduit to create purpose are given to prisoners as they struggle to find meaning.

The credits at the end of the film reveal most of the actors in the prison troupe are played by alumni of the RTA program. The audience is treated to archival clips of Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code and other RTA productions, giving the performances in the film a meta quality and offering a moment of reflection.

Perhaps it’s these prisoners who are really “looking at the stars.”

Ryan Vera is a writer and educator living in New York City.

Nick Dane is a poet, researcher, and painter from NYC.

Wander Nick Dane

Wander And explore the deep crevasses of earth.

But do not forget, Your soul has creases and folds, Limitless waves of time and thought.

Explore these ripples too.

For within you may discover your pains and strengths.

And live the life that the gods long ago painted upon the fabric of the cosmos.

05

Art as an Act of Love Peter Maximus

The prehistoric work of memorizing epic poetry was a communal effort. The poet learned the poem from another poet, who then learned the poem from another poet, and so on. The poet recited the poem to audiences for festivals, for meditation, for recollection, for praise, and for other aims. In this way, the poet was part of society and provided a service which was the preservation of its culture. In this world, if the poet died, so did an opportunity to learn the verses, and unless such words were written into the heart of a listener, part of the poet’s civilizational history died too. This history did not solely consist of grand and wide-reaching narratives but also personal and lonely lines, carrying the smoldering memory of a deceased good man held in the minds of two or three, if not one.

With the advent of writing systems, literacy, binary mathematics, and the computer, the work of memorizing poetry was automated into the digital storage device and the work of the poet was reduced to producing poetic works and publishing them to a book or uploading it to the storage devices of a publisher. The work of preserving culture and skills in the context of poetry were no longer the work of masters and disciples but instead relegated to editors, critics, and IT professionals. The poet can die, but the creative work has already been rotely and soullessly preserved for purchase and view without need to consider the effects of human death. Computer engineering achieved a cultural marvel (although books did the same at a smaller scale): it separated the poets from their work. No longer does the audience have to share the space of the poet to enjoy her poetry. No longer does the disciple have to learn from his master. No longer is the master beholden to the integrity of his disciples.

Now one can memorize poetry to impress a date or a crowd, but the purpose is not too important, if the skill is even to be considered purposeful at all.

The obsolescence of human memory has arguably made modern humans purposeless. No longer does society need to hire and support the 06

existence of people who turn history into song.

By externalizing cultural preservation to the internet and digital storage, modernity has removed the human layer of culture, namely the social structures that hold the communal memory of such skills and the art from which it came.

Since the spreading of culture today requires minimal human involvement, the communities developing people who sustain the arts have been replaced with communities of creation, consumption, and critique of arts. Creators of the visual and musical arts, with enough selfdiscipline and the internet, can take an autodidactic route toward mastery eschewing the need for masters and mentors. Audiences are replaced by thousands of people spending hours in front of a screen alone. Lively debates and commentary shared in the real company of friends and strangers are made quaint by the scale, activity, and anonymity of comment boards. These institutions do not require the formation of people and communities capable of sustaining the arts in a reality shared with others. Instead, they prioritize the creator’s ability to quickly produce art and amass feedback while minimizing the effort needed for viewers to see art and make commentary. The former builds a human community that can be passed down through time. The latter turns the potential for human community into a banal marketplace running on the vague commodity of attention.

Culture has a dimension of human participation that is losing ground in modernity, namely, the dimension of seeing art as an act of gift-giving.

All skill that goes into an artistic work is a culmination of time, resources, and human dedication, which are transmuted into a tangible artifact of discerned donation. Gifts affirm the dignity of the receiver with an invitation to fully embrace the intent of the giver. Consider one who gifts a book to a friend in hopes that the book is read and not used as a coaster for her afternoon tea. If it is read, the recipient fully participates in the love offered, and if not, such love was accepted but not fully experienced.

This view on cultural works, the act of gifting, has given way to the act of transactional engagement. Art in these cases is produced and presented to the world for an expected response that is solely beneficial to the creator. In this case, art becomes a sociopolitical tool and no longer is given as a gift to the viewer, but as a means to elicit a response that can be utilized by the creator. It cannot exist out of love for another, and it would not exist if it did not have any immediate advantage for the creator. Yes, a community may gather around the reactions of a piece of art and have lively commentary. One can even observe the plethora of human dynamics that arise in those communities. But such a relationship between artist and observer is shallow. There is no means for either to form and humanize the viewer outside of the medium of economic transaction or emotional affirmation.

It is for this reason that modern culture cannot produce the long-standing intergenerational relationships that poetry, craft trades, and religion have for millennia. Something in all these endeavors had to exist for the sake of another, binding a community both geographically and temporally. The poet had to teach the apprentice songs so the memories of souls long forgotten would exist for another generation. The master smith had to teach the apprentice the creation of tools and metal for the sake of their city’s growth and sustenance.

The priest had to teach his apprentice seminarian the art of the care of souls for the love of God and neighbor. In these communities, the works of the artist are not transactional for an immediate benefit but rather acts of charity for whom or what they make their art for. Their art is not here for trade; instead art is given in love for another.

Contemporary culture has made it difficult to answer the question of human purpose because it does not demand more than consumption to partake in culture. All that is asked is that you like what is provided just enough to engage minimally with it. If this is the purpose that culture advocates for art, then no wonder people can graze over a wide array of movies, shows, visuals, books, and media without investing more than money, attention, and reaction into the culture they partake in.

Culture today does not need a comparative investment of human involvement, and because of that culture is cheap and fits a goal of economic efficiency that orients human productivity toward value making.

But humans weren’t made for value. We were made to love and to show that love in acts of gifting. Each piece of art, of music, sculpture, painting, video, literature, and all other forms, is a unification of matter and human experience orienting the material used toward the divine.

In preserving the intention to gift in creating a work of art, art remains participatory, expanding the ways humanity can engage in culture. In this paradigm of gifting, the artist considers how and what is given to the recipient of the work in hope that it is received well. Yet the denigration of art, observed in its transactional engagement in modernity, confines the recipient to a reaction used for a utilitarian end. If culture does not reflect the ur-purpose of humanity to love, then culture becomes dehumanizing and reduces the human person to a functionary of a god or ideology that does not love him but only what he can produce.

Peter Maximus is a Catholic in New York City, like many others.

07

Subcreation in Asteroid City Elizabeth Coletti

In the simplest terms, the work of an artist— their calling or pursuit—is to create their art.

However, artists on the more obsessive and selfperceptive side often find their mission split into two prongs, the second being to chase the essential truth of what it means to be an artist.

They are not content with piecing a world together out of words or discerning a portrait from daubs of paint; much more pertinent for the artist is to understand how the world and the portrait come to be in mechanical, cultural, psychological, collaborative, and practical ways.

You may call them meta; more likely you’ll call them pretentious. One modern filmmaker deserving of both labels is Wes Anderson.

Much has been made of the creative power of authors, but if we are precise, all the books and movies and songs and drawings in our libraries and canons are works of subcreation. Whether fiction or non, they are nested a level down from the true world, crafted by mortal hands in imitation or escapism. Even photographs are mere depictions. The painting of a pipe is not the pipe, to ploddingly translate Magritte.

Terms like “playwright” based on the stem “wright” reveal the satisfying control of active production. Plays are wrought the way metal is wrought, hammered and molded into shape with hard work and clear vision.

I had always been lukewarm on Anderson’s movies with their symmetric cinematography, arch dialogue, precise miniature work, and narratives of male turmoil. But Asteroid City (2023) knocked me out. To tell a lie, the movie is about a small town in the American Midwest called Asteroid City and the awkward cast of characters—a grieving family, military men, teenage brainiacs, schoolchildren, a famous actress, and a band of musical cowboys—who visit to observe an astrological event from within an asteroid crater and find themselves quarantined in the town after [redacted]. But this is not actually what the movie is about, even though these scenes are the only ones in full technicolor (mostly shades of teal and sandstone).

To break free from this construction, you have to come back up to the level of cocreation, where the end product—rather than a creative work—is our lives and our selves. I choose the word cocreation with intention. I’ve endured enough fiction writing workshops to be impressed with the reality that nothing is original. It’s naïve to deny literary inspirations and allusions (conscious and unconscious), just as it’s arrogant to think you have not siphoned off values from mentors, reached taller due to shoulders you stand on, and survived due to systems of production. The only true creation may be restricted to Creation; all else we must call cocreation. Yet, as Asteroid City shows, this does not lessen our agency as authors of our own lives. If anything, it reveals the imperative of intentionality.

Try again: the movie is about the production of a play called Asteroid City and its writer, director, and cast. But even this is false. Once more: the movie depicts the filming of a television documentary about a fake piece of theater, produced with the intent to show how a work goes from the mind of a writer to the stage, from inception to reception. Each of these levels is intriguing; the whole might be considered a curious intellectual exercise. But in terms of what it means, it all comes down to the film’s central metaphor: the play is life, and both have to be created.

What seized me about Asteroid City is how it overlays subcreation and cocreation, drawing correlations and smudging the boundaries between them. Two conclusions on this theme arise. The first is that the metaphor breaks.

Anderson may attempt to convince us that “all that matters is every second of life on stage,” but when the film attempts to equate or substitute life with art (and vice versa), truth begins to refract. The documentary’s narrator appears in the fictional town by mistake and has to admit “I’m not in this” and shuffle off stage.

The dialogue self-contradicts and tricks. When

08

asked what [redacted] symbolizes, someone admits, “I don’t know; we don’t nail it down.”

The actress (Midge Campbell, played by Mercedes Ford, played by Scarlett Johansson) and grieving father (Augie Steenbeck, played by Jones Hall, played by Jason Schwartzman) run lines for a movie Campbell is to appear in (yet another layer: the movie in the play in the documentary in the film), and she tells him, “I mean I think I know now what I realize we are.”

She doesn’t, of course, realize she’s at least three different kinds of fiction.

At the climax, Jones Hall breaks character and opens a concealed door in the side of the crater so he can seek advice from his director Schubert Green, repeating, “I still don’t understand the play” and pleading for an answer to the question, “Am I doing him right?”

H: Do I just keep doing it?

G: Yes. H: Without knowing anything?

G: Yes. H: Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of an answer out there in the cosmic wilderness—Woodrow’s line about the meaning of life?

G: “Maybe there is one!”

H: Right, well that’s my question! I still don’t understand the play.

G: Doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story. You’re doing him right.

for an ideal we don’t quite understand how to enact. This is a challenge and a privilege; as poet I. Buenaventura writes, “I get to create in this life, to recreate my whole being into a home I feel safe in.” We weren’t manifested into existence as characters set on unyielding tracks but as beings with free will, which is what makes life meaningful, what makes any recourse to virtue fruitful, and what makes the beauty of cocreation—the making up of our lives in context—possible.

Like Anderson, I’m still preoccupied with the dual prongs of artistry: to create and to understand how I go about that creation. I must contend with the reality of the living world—the medium we are all working in. Art is a way of engaging with culture and history, a way of making a statement about the world and hoping to influence it. “You are allowed to tell your story, and you must. Silence is not the calling of the artist,” I. Buenaventura emphasizes. To write or paint or proclaim is to have a voice and to have power. We are called to trade in myopic isolation for the kind of participation that allows us to strive together and, as Schubert Green writes, “to try with the few tools I have at my disposal to do my job, which is to make it work.”

His crisis of confidence leads us to the second conclusion: that the play is essential. The play is so important, not for how it helps us understand or artificialize but for how it helps us keep telling the story anyway. Creative works are a model of life. We can’t know if we’re “doing [ourselves] right”; Augie Steenbeck’s attempt at this breaks him out of his world to seek an objective creator, an option we can’t literally mimic. But it highlights the intentionality we are obligated to live up to, or perhaps the intentionality that we cannot escape. (I’m not sure; I don’t nail it down.)

Asteroid City has much else to recommend it (not least that the title is stylized as “Asteroid City” in both italics and quotation marks—a punctuation indicator of the onion-like layers of the story that only editors like myself may appreciate). And perhaps it would be easier to talk about the poignant reflection on life in quarantine, the snide jokes about the military industrial complex, or as one reviewer commented, “possibly the greatest ‘freaky little guy’ in cinema history.” But that’s the type of quirk you could find in any number of Anderson’s other movies. What keeps me coming back to this one is the way it cracks its own heart open, confessing that all the artist wants is to figure out how to make it work and answering, with compassion but little comfort, that all you can do is keep telling the story.

Our selves (i.e., our characters) and life (i.e., the play) do not just happen; they are wrought, and to do it well means expending effort and striving

Elizabeth Coletti is an editor, writer, and museumgoer from North Carolina now living in New York.

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A Capering Commute Abigail Burns

As I walk down the South Bronx sidewalk that hugs a dull green bike lane and a usually bustling but currently tranquil street, I keep my eyes strategically about ten paces ahead of me.

This is so I can avoid stepping on the garbage that flanks either side of the sidewalk. What others find disgusting or annoying makes my morning commute a creative dance. To the left two steps, hop, stride. Each crunched soda can I step over is a direct challenge to execute choreography with grace and poise in my leather work heels.

The crumpled bags of Takis and the D.O.E. milk cartons couple as both litter and landmarks.

Just as a midwestern commuter might drive past a certain mailbox and know it’s five minutes to home, so too the pile of yesterday’s school milk cartons is a landmark: Four more minutes of my commute if I speed up, and my heels clack at a quicker tempo.

I look up and am met with the quiet stillness of the early hour. The morning sun is not yet seen, hidden by the buildings, but its light radiates the whole neighborhood. A dewy, fresh pink glow reminds me to give thanks for another day to walk down these lovable and homely streets.

The six o’clock hour is a special one in this neighborhood. There are generally three kinds of people awake: teachers heading to school with their backpacks or floral tote bags, doctors walking at a fast pace, eager to lay their head down after a long night shift at the nearby hospital, and the homeless who were just released from a shelter earlier that hour.

Though externally there are clear demarcations that distinguish us, one thing, in an ideal world, unites us all: We are all grateful and expectant for the day ahead. The pink sun beckons optimism out of us; in the stillness of the morning, we realize that it was a sincere gift to live and learn from yesterday with all its challenges, and this particular horizon inspires hope that incredible beauty and purpose can and will be found in fidelity to the ostensible mundanity of today.

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I continue to tread my routine course, and I see John at the end of the block, sitting exactly where I expect him at the puckered windowsill of the old and graffitied dental office. Before I reach him, the garbage of this particular stretch of sidewalk gives me the opportunity to perform the finest and most intricate choreography of my commute. Leap over this! Side step over that! Watch out for these! Hold on now, did you consider your balance? Ta-dah! Should I give a bow to the audience of gnats hovering over the rotten fruit I danced over? My lips turn upward at the playful thought.

The pink sun beckons optimism out of us; in the stillness of the morning, we realize that it was a sincere gift to live and learn from yesterday with all its challenges.

I am then quickly and gratefully met by another smile. John speaks like a warm blanket as he calls out, “How you doing, Mama?” Tell me why John’s toothless smile is the most genuine smile I’m privileged to see so regularly. Tell me why the face of the sixty-seven-year-old man with an unkept beard and fresh scratches on his forehead is the most beautiful face I know I will see today.

There is beauty in the routine of our everyday interaction. This morning starts out no differently than our usual chats.

“Good morning John!” I say with a wide smile.

“Are you being good?” he jests.

“I don’t know, I’m trying!”

“God bless you, have a great day.”

“You too, John. God bless!”

But today he adds something unexpected as I turn to walk away.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he says lower and with less inflection than usual.

I whip around as my heart wells up. Quick, how do I convey to John, no, completely convince this man of my deep appreciation and affection?

With furrowed eyebrows and a serious tone, I tell him, “John, never. You are a joy.”

He nods a little, and I want to sit down with him to keep talking, but my commute calls. I get ready to cross the street. Today I choose to wait for the walk signal at the lights because it gives some time to wonder.

I will grant you: In an objective sense, the litter on my commute can be a bother. There is nothing outwardly beautiful about it, and I appreciate only the way it reminds me that I need grace for my own littered and cluttered heart. But this man whom I dearly love claiming to bother me, claiming to be little more than the trash that I avoid on the street? Oh no, I wonder, who or what told him that? I wonder about other things as I wait for the little luminescent walkman. I wonder if John slept on the sidewalk that night. I wonder how he brightens my day more reliably than the pink sun. I wonder if his smile amid all the suffering I know he regularly endures is what taught me to dance on the sidewalks with gratitude and hope.

Abby Burns lives and works in the South Bronx for a nonprofit called Seton Education Partners. By living and working where she does, God in his mercy is always calling Abby to see all of life through His eyes, and she works to communicate this beauty with those around her.

Sara Caporaletti is a multimedia visual artist who explores various autobiographical elements related to Catholic religious traditions and makes connections to the human body form.

Follow the Leader Sara Caporaletti

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2020 A YEAR OF

THUNDER Documenting NYC Street Art in the Wake of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter Movement Janusz Kaleta

Black Lives Matter (left) CK’s Do You Understand Yet?! (top right) MLK (bottom right) COVID-19 Community’s “Today’s News” (opposite)

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Popular art is as old as human existence and plays a critical role in historians’ and researchers’ understanding of particular eras and generations. Seventeen thousand years ago, our ancestors drew on the stone walls of the Lascaux caves in France to memorialize their perceptions and emotions. We mimicked them millennia later in 2020, a year that was far from ordinary. The global health pandemic of COVID19 brought the entire world to a standstill, and after the killing of George Floyd, people of all races took to the streets as part of the Black Lives Matter movement and political unrest surrounding the presidential election. The streets of NYC were closed, but the boarded-up storefronts provided a blank canvas for artists who wanted to use the public space to communicate, self-express, and share their feelings through critical images that could be visible to all. As an alternative to the shuttered museums and art galleries, street artwork proliferated across the city. The year 2020 transformed NYC into a mecca of artistic selfexpression and voices crying for an end to institutional racism, inequality, and centuries of discrimination.

Inspired by this movement, I undertook an ethnographic arts-informed research project to document and interpret NYC street art. I approached preservation of this historically important time and creative activity by recognizing the diversity of the individuals,

groups and communities participating in selfexpression through art in public spaces. In the intersection of visual arts and human science, people actively shape and reshape the worlds they live in through symbolic interactions characterized by complexity, change, and process.

I collected over five hundred photographs of street art in NYC during 2020 (see more at the QR code). I captured everything from scrawling graffiti repeating calls to action to detailed portraits of those often overlooked. While deciphering and documenting these works, I came to articulate creativity as a dynamic selfconstruction influenced by historical events that unfold around and shape the art makers. Artinformed research invites dialogue and provides an opportunity to reexamine societal injustice, racial discrimination, and inequality as it is expressed and envisioned through the multicultural lenses of NYC’s communities.

Unlike the prehistoric works of art carved seventeen thousand years ago in the Lascaux caves, which are protected as a UNESCO heritage site, the popular street arts are not so carefully preserved. My goal was to document the self-expression and cultural moments captured in this street art so that future historians and researchers can understand this time of our history and can give our generation a proper name.

Janusz Kaleta, PhD, received his Masters in Clinical Science from the Western University in London, ON, and PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center. Outside of his clinical practice, Janusz is interested in the intersection of art and science.

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Human Connection in Spite of It All Alyssa Margarita

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.

actually good coffee, my first concert at Madison Square Garden, and my first trip to Europe. I met New York City for the first time, and the fifth time, and the thirtieth time. I began a fulfilling career advocating for asylum seekers. Making friends as an adult is difficult, but I was fortunate enough to find a community where I could be myself. After years of personal and professional struggles, I felt like I had finally made it.

—Charlotte’s Web

Unfortunately, there had to be a catch. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t have it all, and I had to make the difficult decision to walk away from my best friend of ten years—something that I had never foreseen happening in all my life. I was confronted with a devastating reality, that I could give someone all my love, trust, time, and effort for many years, yet they could wake up one day and decide that they no longer wanted to do the same. With enough failed long-term friendships under my belt, I became a perfectionist about all my relationships, doing everything right on the surface, all the while being consumed with distrust. What would be the catalyst for an avalanche of secretly held grievances against me? What information about myself could eventually be weaponized against me? And what was the point in dating if everyone eventually leaves you anyway? Every day brought waves of endless grief, paranoia, and yearning for companionship. In New York, I achieved everything that should have made me happy. I had checked off all the boxes, but I had lost an integral part of myself.

One year ago, I packed up everything I could fit in my 2016 Toyota Corolla and my parents’ 2016 Toyota Highlander and drove 558 miles from North Carolina, the only home I had ever known, to start a new life in New York. As I have complained many times to anyone who will listen: it rained. The entire time. From the time that I loaded my car, through the thirteenhour drive, while unloading, and then for six days afterward, it rained for me. Tropical storm impacts had followed my path up north, and the symbolism of my new beginning could not have been more annoying.

I worked toward this move for three years and two months. The pandemic had been difficult, and I had not come out of it the same person as I was before. I had barely hung on in virtual law school while being shunned by long-time friends over my dating life, and I made a promise to myself: After I made it through law school and the bar exam, I would do everything in my power to start over somewhere new. This promise kept me going for years as I trudged through a bleak academic grind in an institution that sees students as products to be sold to employers. After finally obtaining my law license, I applied to various jobs across the country and accepted a position as an immigration lawyer in Long Island.

As I stood at the entryway of my tiny onebedroom apartment, exhausted and drenched, I had no idea of all the wonderful and precious life experiences I was about to have: beach days at the Hamptons, Japanese BBQ, jazz bars, 14

For me, purpose is human connection in spite of it all. We are meant to give to others, to support each other, and to help each other grow, despite living in an individualistic culture that actively works against deepening our interpersonal relationships. American individualism teaches us to prioritize self-care and protect our inner peace above all else—even at the expense of others’ well-being. The cultural norm is to surround ourselves with people who protect our own personal narratives and reject anyone who has a different perspective that challenges our worldview.

Social media algorithms constantly validate this sentiment. We are bombarded with posts serving as “validation porn,” which remind us that we are never the problem in our interpersonal relationships.1 In the realm of politics, dubious sources in our carefully crafted feed show our side as morally correct and the other side as morally reprehensible. A post you share may single-handedly determine whether you are worth having a conversation with. Even as I write this, I feel the urge to make myself clear where I stand on current political issues to avoid potential social backlash. We do not have the space to learn, make mistakes, or even explain ourselves without being lumped into an ideological box or othered based on our identities. It is no wonder that Americans are feeling lonelier than ever.2 As we spend our days within the comforting confines of our digital echo chambers, we become more averse to navigating interpersonal conflict.3 We avoid it or dismiss it under the excuse that we do not owe each other anything.

However, conflict is a natural part of life, and to cultivate genuine relationships means to confront both our inherent differences with others and our own flaws that make us human.

Relationships that successfully resolve conflict

are stronger, long-lasting, and are even linked to improved long-term health.4 I have learned to see conflict resolution as an opportunity to grow with the other person in a meaningful way, but in a culture that promotes ghosting over honest communication, it is still never easy.

Despite how impossible it sometimes feels to develop new healthy relationships as an adult in my late twenties, I am still wired to seek them out. For most of my life, my primary purpose was to be successful, prove people wrong, and rise above my own perceived lack of intellectual ability.

In reality, I found more fulfillment in giving back to others, as people have done for me. I found gratitude for my family and friends— including those back in North Carolina, who are always there to welcome me home. My real purpose is to defy the values of a culture that is inherently opposed to connection and community, and to simply treat others how I would want to be treated. In an often cold and callous world, all we have is each other.

Alyssa Margarita is a Filipino American lawyer, writer, and habitual overthinker. When she’s not immersed in a book, you can find her rock climbing, running, and watching old movies.

1. As an example, Dr. Nicole LePera (@the_holistic_psychologist) frequently makes posts on her social media accounts that validate her followers and discourage taking accountability for their behavior.

2. Dennis Thompson, “Loneliness is Plaguing Americans in 2024: Poll,” US News & World Report, February 1, 2024.

3. Andrew Reiner, “From Ghosting to Quiet Quitting, We’re Avoiding Conflict. That’s Not Healthy,” NBC News, January 8, 2023.

4. Hayley Clement, “New Research Links Conflict Resolution, Long-Term Health,” UGA Today, October 7, 2020.

quietude : Annie McManness

there’s a poetry of praying with the eyes. i watch, i wait, i fix them on the heavens. long ago i learned there are no words here, in your house. no requirements. only silence, and me kneeling before you in an empty chapel. far away, a siren’s sullen roar worries over the world. here inside, my ears open unto your quiet, expansive stillness, (where you wash over me, where the drop that is me flows within the ocean that is you) anchored in me, poured out by you—my heart’s metronomic song, drifting in. i breathe into your deep, while you whisper (still, small breaths) into the gooseflesh rising on my neck, and i love you, i love you Annie McManness is a student of the transfiguration of suffering—the innermost symptomologies of the soul. Sometimes she studies this in poetry. Mostly, she studies this in people.

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The Prophet Moses Encounters the Divine Darkness, the Ineffable Mystery of God Anna Sofia Poloz Anna Sofia Poloz is an Illinois-based iconographer and artist of Ukrainian and Belarusian descent who explores the depths of the Christian faith in all its beauty and sublime grandeur.

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The End

The Necessity of Awe

Rebekah Balick

Maura H. Harrison

Again, a little miracle appears: And I unspool its brilliance, searching skein for sigh and wonder—source of golden gain— But end up tangling it with wondering tears, With grit and paradox, purling the knot.

Scrutiny tightens with each testing pull And ties up reason—wound and wonderful— Within a tat of buzz and hum and thought.

And still, I analyze. My needle pries Into the heart of each and every knot, Seeking to loosen thread and gleam, but not To lose the gold, the sighs, the sweet reprise.

And then, I see a hundred golden bees— Gilded with awe and pure belief—surrounding the spool, unquestioning. The hive’s astounding purpose rings true and puts my mind at ease.

Rebekah Balick is a writer and artist based in Virginia.

She works in international business while frequently completing commissioned artwork, writing for literary magazines and contests, and working on a novel.

Maura H. Harrison is a writer and artist from Fredericksburg, VA. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of St. Thomas, Houston.

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I Listen to the Winds Jerry Wayne Hazelwood

A nervous glance down the windmill ladder reminded me how far up I had climbed and how hard the black loam soil would be as a landing spot after baking in the hot Texas sun, should I slip and fall those twenty feet down.

Climbing to the top rung on the Aermotor windmill ladder felt like a life-threatening experience on my grandmother’s farm in Itasca, Texas, when I was ten years old in 1953. The windmill was no more than a noisy contraption made of galvanized metal and steel gears.

Magically cool, refreshing water was drawn up from the soil while those swirling fan blades caught the winds, emitting their own unique music that set the tone and spirit for any day.

The kaleidoscopic views from the top of the windmill summoned color and meaning that were otherwise lost to the winds. Even though I’ve struggled with the mysteries of faith, I’ve found that God tends to show up in brief moments and in small ways: a smile, an unexpected touch from a friend, a flash of color from a songbird. Climbing the water tower was one of those too easily forgotten, treasured moments. I carefully peered across the nearby gravel road (now paved) known as Texas Farm to Market 67 with MKT railroad tracks beyond and old U.S. Highway 81 to the east. Here, I was offered views to the horizon that fueled my imagination. This is how I was introduced to the large world, starting with Italy.

The view from my top-of-the-world place focused on a silver silo water tower in the city of Italy, Texas. While only about ten miles to the northeast, I had never been. It was my Uncle Wayne who told me that I was seeing the Italy, Texas, water tower when I asked him about that silver structure as I was looking toward Dallas.

Uncle Wayne was both my spiritual and physical mentor. Even though he was hard-ofhearing, he taught me how to drive his tractor, feed the cows, bait a fish hook, pick cotton. He always had time to visit with neighbors and

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always seemed to be ready to help with any of their needs. I never heard him read the Bible, but he was a living example of faith, and I kept his lessons close on my journey.

My vision from the top of the windmill on the farm near Itasca toward Italy never escaped my memory as I migrated from coast to coast, living in seven different states and Guam, all the while holding on to windmill visions in my mind. “The only thing worse than being blind is having no vision,” said Helen Keller. Prompted by Helen, my mind goes back to the windmill and the cool water it delivered, then wanders off to the magic of how Helen Keller, Stevie Wonder, and Ray Charles could see an eclipse like the recent one as it journeyed across the sky at more than fifteen hundred miles per hour. Helen, Stevie, and Ray could feel the heat from the sun dim and sense moderations in the winds on their skin much like I could feel the undulating vibrations of windmill blades spinning.

Sometimes it feels like Merle Haggard is singing just for those moments with such lyrics as “I can almost hear the stars so bright… Just listenin’ to the wind.”

The trees that grew along the banks of a nearby creek provided the cypress wood for the water tank that sat adjacent to the windmill, ten to fifteen feet off to the side. My Uncle Wayne told me that the water tank was made of cypress wood because of the way it would swell when wet, sealing the joints between each tank board.

Winds kept the windmill pumping water almost constantly; the tank never overflowed, nor was it empty, and underground pipes delivered water to the nearby farmhouse and a more distant cattle barn down the hill.

I can still taste that hard water, cool and flavored with its flakes of shale hidden away in the visible layers of clay and black loam soil. Tin cups hung on a wire near the base of the windmill where anyone could easily grab a drink on a hot day. The windmill caught the breezes blowing by, all the time creating its own

rhythmic music, casting its whirling shadow on the ground as water splashed into the storage tank. The windmill provided all the lullaby needed for a good night’s sleep on the farmhouse porch with its open windows.

Many years later, around 2015, it was water from a plastic water bottle, not pumped by a windmill, that got my attention. The magic that water brings to each day emerged as I saw Matthews Carrey III for the first time; he was standing near the intersection of West Ostend and Wicomico in the Pigtown neighborhood of Baltimore. Matthews held court near this intersection with squeegee in one hand and water bottle in the other, offering his windshield washing service to drivers approaching the intersection.

After my initial use of Matthews’s services, I stopped to introduce myself. He asked, “Are you a priest?” My answer was no, but Matthews wanted to stand there and pray together anyway. We prayed together. Matthews was not homeless; his home was the streets of Pigtown.

He stayed overnight in the house of any area resident who would rent him a room. I often offered to share a meal of Royal Farms chicken and fried potatoes (a favorite of his), and I always felt energized after my time with Matthews and seeing his many customerfriends who would smile and wave as they departed with a clean windshield. Then I moved on, chasing windmills and bigger mysteries. The last time I saw him, he was standing in the distance on West Ostend, waving with water bottle and squeegee in hand and yelling, “I am praying for you, Jerry.”

Cool, refreshing, living water keeps the spirit alive in all beings: water from plastic bottles in Pigtown or drawn up by the Aermotor windmill to treat chickens, guinea hens, cats, dogs, cows, wild birds, foxes, and raccoons to a drink or a cool place to bathe. The seasonal winds keep time for it all across the years.

Whether blowing from the South, most common in the Summer, from the North, most common in the Winter, or from the East when stormy weather is approaching, each wind is a moodchanging experience, each captured by the windmill blades.

No matter what my intentions have been through life or how strong I imagine my faith to be, the seasonal winds return me to questions about God. My spiritual journey continues. Hats off to my grandmother, who spent hours with me in that John Deere green front porch swing.

The swing was near to the windmill; we could feel and hear its music. My grandmother loved humming her favorite gospel songs while sharing stories from the Bible—God ordering a flood to destroy the world He created, Job’s joys and struggles, Jesus walking on water—each loaded with lessons she wanted to bring to my attention. I remained curious. In spite of my struggles with the mysteries of the God who creates the winds, my grandmother was a constant influence through it all. She was content in her faith that He is always near, as near and reliable as the water delivered by the windmill, as near and reliable as she was to me.

Jerry Wayne Hazelwood is an AIA Emeritus who practiced architecture for more than forty years, with a subsequent ten years as staff member with a Habitat for Humanity affiliate.

Now full retirement allows the opportunity to explore creative writing.

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Be Fruitful Amnia Lyre

“You have defects of character.” I remember hearing these words spoken to me many years ago. I was judged. I’m flawed. My existence is a mistake. If you ask people about their aspirations as they grow out of adolescence, most will say they have dreams of finding the perfect spouse, having two-point-five kids (on average), and achieving the quintessential marker of American exceptionalism: becoming a homeowner.

I have always cringed at these aspirations handed to me by my church community, my friends, my family, and the state. Much of the advice given is essentially one march toward the fabled social contract. Is this all there really is, all there ever will be? I’ve often been told that the greatest representation of love and the

greatest legacy you can ever leave behind is children. That the greatest form of love is the “self-gift” of marriage. And that the marital embrace is the highest “form of prayer.” I don’t get it.

I’m asexual. I’m a member of what is called the “ace community.” I can’t feel sexual attraction to anyone, nor have I ever. Some of us occasionally or rarely feel such attraction to others. Romantically, some of us are straight. Some of us are gay. Some of us don’t even fit into the gay-straight binary or the heteronormative sphere.

I have never felt that longing physical attraction often sung about in popular music. Romance?

Sure, especially centered on a larger, profound emotional connection. But I don’t feel sexual desire. For all of my life, I have felt like I don’t belong and like I don’t fit into the design of the world. In the past, when I confided in previous girlfriends and friends about my asexuality, they scoffed at me. They asked how I could say such a thing that was unnatural and went against God’s plan. One friend even said that I would be a good father and if I didn’t have kids, “it would be a crime against humanity.” I have never really responded, never wanting to waste my breath by trying to explain who I really am.

Each of the women I have dated eventually broke up with me, not being able to accept this part of myself I wish I could change and fearing that my being with them was somehow fake.

When you’re religious and you feel that there’s something so inherently wrong with you, you can feel deeply disillusioned, enough to scream out at God, as I often did in my younger years, “I just want to fit in.”

I know that in a world obsessed with the socalled biological imperative—“be fruitful and multiply”—that my brain simply works differently. For example, the Catholic sphere of dating is a delicate dance that people have elaborated to me. Oftentimes these interactions —as I understand—have a sort of “elephant in the room” quality, wherein (a) people are

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obsessed with sexual purity to the point where it becomes an object of fetishization, (b) people are bound to ask about intimacy before marriage, and (c) physical appearance becomes central to the success of marriage, because you couldn’t possibly be happily married to someone if you aren’t sexually attracted to them.

What most people don’t understand is how this differently wired brain colors your entire view of the world, your actions, and how you’re perceived by others.

When I go to a party, I don’t walk across the room to hit on a woman. In fact, I can’t recall a time when I have flirted with a woman upon first meeting her. I have no desire to be on dating apps because the idea of “getting everything” from just a picture seems as complex as I imagine quantum mechanics to be.

On one hand, women have tended to like that I could be their friend without seeing them as an object. I have had women tell me that I’m “not a threat,” which can feel like a positive thing to hear in a world where sexual harassment is an unfortunate common experience for many women. However, others have told me that being asexual means I’m not masculine, which feels demeaning.

I get puzzled when men and women light up around children, and I have deep reservations about becoming a father because of a lack of positive male role models for much of my own life. Not getting that desire to be a father can also be isolating. I know children are indeed a gift, but I just don’t feel called to be a parent.

However, I would like to get married. I’ve dated several women in my life, and people tell me I’m what is considered “straight-passing.” I feel called to such a vocation even though I’m ambivalent about sexual intimacy (some would say this makes me “a sex-neutral asexual”). I can imagine a world wherein I get married and I end up being intimate with my wife, but I can also imagine getting married and finding other forms of closeness.

As you can imagine, none of these are easy things to break to a partner once you feel comfortable enough to confide in them, especially if you want to find a Catholic spouse.

It’s easy to get stuck in a loop of infinite regress

and end up telling yourself you have no worth and would only ever be resented in a relationship. I don’t know who would find me “worthy.” I don’t know how I could navigate these conversations and not have a potential spouse run off. I’ve had people tell me that simply dating a nonreligious woman would solve my problems, but if you truly believe—as I do—that marriage is a sacrament and not simply a social contract between a couple and the state, then you quickly realize that marrying someone who doesn’t share your values may not be ideal. In my faith, the goal of marriage is ultimately to sanctify. A marriage may or may not result in children; the sanctification of spouses is the real goal. But many have told me otherwise.

This differently wired brain colors your entire view of the world, your actions, and how you’re perceived by others.

Members of the LGBTQIA community often struggle with mental health and are prone to higher rates of suicide, and to no one’s surprise, I have spent years telling myself I have no worth, feeling disillusioned about the world and my place in it, and praying about how lonely I am in the deep pain of feeling so not “normal” and wishing I could be.

Our culture is inundated with sexual imagery.

Just one example is the MTV Video Music Award “Song of the Summer” award winner, “Espresso,” in which the subject (i.e., Sabrina Carpenter) becomes an object of sexual desire (e.g., I’m as addictive as caffeine) and absolutely revels in it. In this culture where entering into the marriage-and-children contract becomes the ultimate life goal and the signifier of having achieved “God’s purpose for your life,” where exactly does someone like me fit in?

I don’t think I’ll ever have the answer. Maybe that will be the first question I ask if I get through the pearly gates. I’ve often struggled with what my lasting legacy on this world will be and how I will be remembered, especially if my obituary reads, “He had no children.”

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Eulogies and obituaries feel like they’re trying to summarize the parts of life we should value.

“He owned a three-million-dollar home. He is survived by his wife, four children, and twelve grandchildren.” I imagine any such statements written about me will sound different. I have worked with underprivileged youth for much of my career, young men who were raised in single-parent homes just like me. I want people to value things like mentorship and spiritual fatherhood and brotherhood, and to recognize how my teaching and presence has impacted young men and women for the better. I want to focus my life on how even the smallest moments of one’s life can have the deepest impact. I’ve had kids—now college graduates— tell me they were grateful for how I instilled values such as a desire for the common good and social justice, a desire for virtue, a desire for helping one’s neighbor.

I often tell people that I don’t need to have children because I’ve taught hundreds of children, and that mentorship and attention bears spiritual, not biological, fruit. Last Father’s Day when I was in church, the priest asked young men in the pews to stand up, commending not just biological fathers but spiritual brotherhood, spiritual fatherhood, and holy friendship. I may struggle profoundly with my identity. But my life has value. It has meaning. I sometimes forget about the value of my own dignity until others remind me. I am often in awe of how quickly we can forget we were made in His image and we were made for community, even if that community you create does not involve waking up next to your spouse each morning.

What I can ultimately say is that being asexual has helped me—in my own unique personhood —to try to have radical empathy for the human person and to better form genuine friendships.

There have been many moments in my life when I have felt that people like me have to suffer in silence because of our differences. But this identity of mine, as difficult of a cross as it is, has made me more empathetic to others and more willing to be patient with people. I would want others to show me the same courtesy and to know that I still belong and can be part of a community of people even if I am “othered.” At the very least, we can be there for each other.

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The Doubtful One Christina J. Green

There are those who walk with heads held high, Who seem to know the reasons why.

And then there are the quiet few, Who question all they’re meant to do.

They doubt the path beneath their feet, Unsure of what they’re meant to meet.

They wonder if they’re lost at sea, Or if they’ll ever come to be.

Yet purpose hides in shadowed skies, It’s not just found in certain eyes.

It’s born in doubt, in nights unknown, When hearts feel small, yet seeds are sown.

For those who question, those who fear, Hold something deeper, something clear: The strength to ask, to search, to find, A meaning crafted in their mind.

In every step, uncertain still, They climb the quiet, unseen hill.

And though they stumble, doubt, and stray, They carve their purpose day by day.

So to the doubters, lost in thought, Know purpose isn’t always sought.

It’s built in moments raw and real— In every wound you start to heal.

Amnia Lyre is a New York Catholic living his life with love, even if it looks different from the so-called normal aspirations of the world.

Christina J. Green is a poet and didn’t even know it!

Modern Vanity Mostly Sane

What should I do?

I want to be loved, to belong, but ultimately just to matter. To have my existence noticed in the universe.

I desire to be a parent. I could raise the next generation in my own image. But to what end? My children could wind up being terrible. Maybe they don’t have kids, or their kids don’t have kids, or their kids’ kids are so divergent I couldn’t conceive of them as my progeny. Or maybe they make no impact at all. Futile!

What of my possessions? Silly and trivial, yes; all the more reason to hold onto them. Any meaning they have lies in me and whoever inherits the meaning. If I’m gone they lose all value. What of family heirlooms? Symbols of my family line and values. I want to pass them down. But for how long will they last? How long until they fall apart or are cast aside when they’re no longer wanted? What of my family home, what will become of it? Perhaps it’d be better to burn it all to the ground in one go. That at least would have a sort of finality. Perhaps I could do something important, get a building or street named after me. Then all who pass by would remember my name… until they tear that down too.

Futile!

Perhaps I could become a priest; I’d reach more people that way. But that leaves little tangible behind.

Besides, instead of leading them all to Heaven perhaps I make a wrong turn and lead them to Hell.

Futile!

Perhaps I should become mayor. No, not enough people… governor? More. President? MORE! World hegemon! Yes, that will do it. Able to guide all, the fate of humanity in my hand. But then what? Our planet is still but a speck. What of the rest of the vast universe? Whether my reign is virtuous or sinful, civilization will collapse eventually be it in a hundred, a thousand, even a million years. Surely humanity will go extinct one day whether by our own hand or the cosmos. Even if we don’t, could we hope to traverse and tame the universe? If we did, it’d be five minutes till closing. Futile.

So what is there to hope in? What is it all for? If there is a god, He could create a mountain out of a stone, magnify glory from the most insignificant life and leave the greatest as but dust. But will He? All we can do is find something to hope in.

The author is mostly out of his existential dread phase and hopes his past interior ramblings will assist someone. For now until death he continues to ride the life raft christened Hope.

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There Are No Blessed Mother Statues Here Karla Pahel

“Taj Mahal’s mother was a manager at Jiffy Lube,” my daughter tells me as we wait for an oil change. Tajay is my daughter’s high school friend who everyone calls “Taj Mahal.” His mother died in December. This is how it arrives, in these unexpected places that lift me out of the moment, and I suddenly feel as though I’m in a gondola being rowed down a canal in Venice. It is May: Mother’s Day, First Communions, and the month of Mary.

In the auto shop, I read an Emily Dickinson quote off the tea bag in my cup: “How strange that Nature does not knock and yet does not intrude.” The poet’s words still me. The cranesbill and bearded iris are all blooming, but the Nature that swept me off my feet began at St. Vincent’s.

It was during the First Communion ceremony with the second graders in their sea of white, an orchestra of white gowns and veils, that I noticed there were no statues of Mary the Blessed Mother in the church.

There was an altar for victims who had been murdered in our city of Baltimore and the statue of St. Vincent holding a child. There were stained glass of all the angels and saints, all the stations of the cross, Veronica wiping Christ’s face, and the holy women crying, but no statue of Mary. No Madonna and Child statue. No Our Lady of Fatima in white holding rosary beads with a crown of gold. There wasn’t Our Lady of Grace in her blue cloak with arms stretched out, hands held open. No Mary Undoer of Knots. Our Lady of Guadalupe with all the roses was nowhere to be found, nor Our Lady of Lourdes with her hands folded in prayer. No Mary Queen of Heaven.

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I realized this while frantically searching for a Benadryl, holding my twenty-two-year-old daughter’s hand going from pew to pew. My twenty-two-year-old daughter who wanted to jump from the balcony—who wanted to run onto Interstate 83—who told me she had the urge to kill herself. This urge arrives out of nowhere. It lands unexpectedly, like a storm, even on the Sunday of our parish’s First Communion. Benadryl is the PRN, the medication to take as needed, that helps my daughter in combination with her other medications, her Lithium, Abilify, Zoloft. There are times when she screams that I am starving her to death while she is biting into a pita filled with chicken souvlaki, thyme, sweet paprika, and tzatziki, fresh mint, cucumbers, lemon.

There are times when our cat taps her paw against my daughter’s leg, and she believes an artery has been severed and screams that she is bleeding to death, though there is no blood, no cut, no scrape.

Finally, between the Gloria and the Gospel, we found a Benadryl. A woman in the balcony with us, sitting with her teenage son, took a plastic bag of pills from her purse. Tums, Benadryl, Tylenol, she carries it all, she told me.

The rolling in of the spirit, the great feeling of overwhelming peacefulness and ease swept over me. In the relief that everything was okay, words melted away, as they often do for mothers of children with special needs, as if we are whisked off upward to the top of Guigo’s ladder, the French monk who wrote of experiencing the mystical state of heaven here on earth through steps of his garden ladder. And at the top of Guigo’s ladder, in the ease of heaven, there are no words. No canon Laws. No creeds. Just an overwhelming feeling of Oneness and lightness. That is until she swallowed the pill.

“My hair went into my mouth,” my daughter said, gasping for air. One piece of hair can turn into fields of tumbleweeds rolling around her esophagus; a cat’s paw tapping can turn into a mauling. She has an aura, a power to draw an entire ocean out of a single drop of rain. She takes root cuttings of a thought, an idea, and propagates them into an entire orchard. She tells me her sandals are papaya, not orange.

After communion, a woman came up to me carrying a one-year-old child on her hip and told me, “You’re doing great! I see you! I see you!”

And there it was, a Divine truth.

The way the Divine speaks truth to me is just this, speaking it into the world. I hold my arms outstretched, hands cupped as if to receive communion, practicing how to be open to hearing the Divine truth and how to receive it anywhere.

At this mass, it was the mothers who gave their children their first communion, not the priest.

There were three small girls in white lace gowns and veils, gloves and patent leather shoes. There was one boy in a white suit, with a blue tie. His mother could not be there; she was in Ukraine helping her family. So it was the boy’s small eleven-year-old sister who gave her brother his first communion up on the altar in front of all of us. I had seen hundreds, thousands of statues of Mary, but I had never seen this.

The mother with the Benadryl, the mother with the one-year-old on her hip, the mother who baked the Eucharist with honey from the bees in Kenya, the mother who cut the communion cake in the back of church; Mary the Blessed Mother is not a statue here.

A week after the First Communion, across from the Jiffy Lube where Taj Mahal’s mother was a manager is Sam’s Bagels. While my daughter and I wait for the oil change, we walk across the street. “Do you remember when Jen came over

that Mother’s Day with all the Sam Bagels?” she asks. Jen, my best friend, died two years ago.

My friends who were also mothers who died are suddenly here in my outstretched arms with my hands cupped to receive communion, as if I was receiving them.

It reminds me of Cylburn Arboretum where my daughter and I volunteered and of Rose, the dahlias grower, who told us as she held an empty turtle shell, “They can feel when you touch their shell.” And for a moment, I thought she meant the spirit of the dead turtle could feel my hands on its empty, hollowed-out shell there in that nature center, but rather she was talking of live turtles that can feel through their spines if you touch their shells. I was more concerned with the dead turtles feeling me holding their empty shells than with the live ones. It seemed possible when she said it. When she said what she didn’t say. Perhaps it was Jen and Taj Mahal’s mother, holding us, and the feeling of this. I was not holding the dead turtle shell. My deceased friends were holding me at the Jiffy Lube and Sam’s Bagels. And my daughter was feeling this. The mothers were giving their children communion. And mysteries were revealed to us.

In her dreams, my daughter is eaten by the wolves, and one wolf before it eats her is consumed by fire. Vesta, the fire goddess she speaks of often, is the protector of the fire and the hearth. It was the women who carried the fire back to people in their handbags, my daughter tells me, like the woman in the balcony of St. Vincent’s who had a Benadryl. My daughter is like Anna, the prophetess who recognizes, at times, what others cannot see.

At home in the weeds in the garden, she sees what I can’t, and she tells me, “It’s a dianthus!”

The pink flowers appear barely visible with no one noticing. We can’t believe all that’s come back to us: Jenn, Tajay’s mother, and the dianthus. It’s like Rose said about her permaculture workshop, connecting this world

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and the other, all in sync. There is no separate garden. The herbs are with the vegetables; the basil is next to the tomatoes and the sunflowers.

There is no separate space. They all grow together. Maybe there is no separate space for Jenn and Taj Mahal’s mother and Mary. They are right here in our space with us, waiting for an oil change, ordering a bagel, planting milkweed, sitting in the balcony of church. With my arms outstretched and hands cupped open to receive the miracles, the sacraments of today, an orange tree could easily fit in the palm of my hand, with all of Jen’s bangle bracelets swirling around my wrist.

After that First Communion, everywhere I went I seemed to be with outstretched arms and cupped hands to receive a sacrament out in the world. I’m the same even sitting in the shade of two sweetgum trees in Cylburn Arboretum, past the fountain and garden lion statues high on their pillars with their long wavy beards and the Lady of Baltimore statues, less one’s nose that the rain has taken as though they were sand castles, sand figures. Here, on the edge of where the great lawn meets the start of the forest, where shade plants grow and the ferns are waist high, I fully feel the breeze of May. It is not held back or drained by the sun. The wind, the spirit, is uninterrupted in its giving. How strange that Nature does not knock and yet does not intrude.

Later, with an opera playing from the kitchen radio, my daughter and I carry up the card table from the basement to reintroduce the puzzle table into our living room. The puzzle table is like the edge of the lawn and the beginning of the forest; it’s the bench under the two sweetgum trees for my daughter. It’s where she feels the wind, the spirit, and the connections as she fits together one piece with another.

When the foxtail palm bursts through the conservatory’s glass ceiling in Baltimore, and the dawn redwood at the arboretum is struck by lightning and explodes, I can’t help but feel that the whole world’s an altar. All throughout this month, it is as if my grandmother, who died six years ago, has been riding shotgun with me.

While driving home each day, I can hear her sitting next to me saying, “Look at that Blessed Mother blue sky!”

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The Watering Rebekah Balick

The garden that my father tends Grows because he prays for rain, And if the rain were not to come He’d water it himself again.

Who is my gardener, who my cloud?

And where when thirsting have I sought?

How often have I drank, when parched, From water that my friends have brought?

With grace they bring the watering can To pour themselves upon my head.

Time and time and time again They smile upon my waterbed.

And if rain comes, they smile too, Not because they wouldn't have done The watering if needed to But ’cause they know the rain that comes, Dispelling that pernicious drought, Has quenched me better than they could.

For I was made to drink that rain And grow in soil damp and good.

But clouds so often wander far And leave me parched of drink of life And friends I need, to keep me green In such a soil of toil and strife.

For even when the rain does fall I know it is because they asked; How many of my gardeners Have prayed for rain on my behalf?

Karla Pahel a mother-writer.

She is a caregiver to her twenty-two-year-old autistic daughter. Her writing has appeared in The Baltimore Sun, Delaware Today Magazine, Beach Life, and Image Journal. She leads a writing community in Baltimore called Freewrites and Coffee.

Rebekah Balick is a writer and artist based in Virginia.

She works in international business while frequently completing commissioned artwork, writing for literary magazines and contests, and working on a novel.

Mosquitoes Jasmine Su

“Mosquitoes Gorged Freely on His Blood” Wu Meng of the Jin dynasty was eight years old and served his parents with extreme filiality. The family was poor, and their bed had no mosquito net. Every night in summer many mosquitoes bit him, gorging on his blood. But despite their numbers he did not drive them away, fearing that they would go and bite his parents. This is the extreme of love for parents.

—The Twenty‑Four Exemplars of Filial Piety, dated to the late 1200s

A knock sounded on the door. Wu Meng sprang to action. He pulled out a popsicle from his pocket and stuffed it in a pile of books. Its plastic wrapping made shuffling noises.

Would Mom hear? Sweat dripped from Meng’s forehead. His heart was beating fast but not from the heat, from nervousness. A heat wave had hit Shanghai that summer. In the humble neighborhood where Meng’s family lived, families were rushing to buy mosquito nets and extra fans for their single child. Meng’s mother was no different. There was nothing more important that summer than to protect her baby son from the heat.

Wu Meng swung open the door.

“Meng dear! Why did you close the door?” Mom cried. “And look at you! You are all sweaty. Is one fan not enough? We could’ve bought a second just now at the market.” Buzz… “If you want anything just say, baby...” buzz… “...getting the air conditioning to work…” buzz… buzz...

Buzz... Snap! Meng slapped against his neck. He opened his palm, and there was a bloodied mess that must have been a big, fat mosquito. Meng only then noticed that his palms were wet from holding the popsicle. His heart pounded faster.

Mom’s voice faded in and out of his consciousness.

Earlier that evening, he had slipped a bluepackaged popsicle beneath his baggy shirt at the market—a mission he had planned for weeks before execution. He first saw the popsicle’s advertisement on the back of his math exercise booklet: a cooling blue coating, surrounded by a cloud of mysterious cold mist. Wu Meng had never tasted anything like that before. Mom had prohibited sweets in the household since he was born, and Meng had never desired these things.

That is, not until the heatwave, when the allure of swallowing a flavored ice block began to grip Meng.

That is all about to change today, Meng thought greedily. But his excitement was mingled with painful throbs of guilt. He thought about how far Mom had gone to find sugar substitutes for his meals. When he entered elementary school three years ago, Mom went to inspect the school canteen’s kitchen in person and made sure that no sugar was added to their lunches.

She came back into the room with a plate of watermelon, cut into cubes and deseeded. “Baby dear, for heaven’s sake turn up the fan. I will be getting the air conditioning men to come tomorrow, but if it gets too hot in here, it’s better to come to the living room. Oh, and—” Mom pushed the door wide open as she left “— how many times have I told you? leave the door open.”

Meng glared at the door as Mom left. She had ruined his chance to take a taste of his hidden popsicle. He gave the pile of books another glance. Damn it.

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Room doors in the Wu household were never closed (“It is for your own good and for a better communication in the family.”), so from a young age, Wu Meng had gotten used to his mom poking her head in every fifteen minutes or Grandpa and Grandma taking turns to stroll in, either to complain about each other or to give Meng some extra pocket money. The only occasion when Mom would allow for closed doors was when the air conditioner was on. (“Don’t waste electricity.”) But now that the air conditioner was broken, Wu Meng’s door was left ajar at all hours. His mind raced through backup plans. He scanned the walls of his room, seeking inspiration. Award after award had been framed and hung on the walls. Some of them were merely certificates for participating in school events.

Tung… tung… tung. The ticking sound of the fan turning annoyed him. He stared at the popsicle advert on the back of the math booklet. The popping blue. The icy steam. Would it taste smooth? Or a bit chewy like that time he secretly ate up the ice cubes in his iced tea?

Would the sweetness of it come out the moment he licked it? Or gradually spread like the mist around it? Buzz… Snap! Another mosquito down.

Meng tiptoed to the corner of his room. He bent down, pretending to scratch his legs, and slipped the popsicle once again under his shirt.

He could feel the coldness of it against the itching skin around his waist.

“Meng dear!” Wu Meng jumped. Mom’s voice was so near it sounded like she was at the door.

But Meng turned around, and Mom was only yelling from the kitchen. “Come out for dinner.

Now!” Meng could feel his popsicle sliding downward into his shorts as he dragged his feet to the dining room. His heart was heavier than ever.

He dared not to think what Mom would say if the popsicle just slid out of his pants in the middle of the meal. She would probably cry.

“We thought we’d bring you to see the campus tomorrow. It’ll give you a good sense of what classes at a proper school look like. I heard they’ve finished constructing the indoor stadium for horse-riding classes.” Dad was wearing his signature singlet and staring intently at Meng as he spoke. Meng met his father’s eyes. They were as piercing as usual, as if they could read minds.

“Horse riding…” He muttered. His melting popsicle was wetting his shorts, and thin streams of water dripped down his leg. A euphoric image came to Meng, of him licking a popsicle on a horse, wind in his hair and safe from the scrutinizing gazes of his parents.

“Wu Meng?” Dad said. Meng panicked. Did Dad know what sins he had just imagined?

“Oh God, how are your shorts so wet? Are you still sweating?” Mom said.

Grandma leaned in. “Did he pee in his pants?”

Meng threw a brief excuse at the table of concerned adults and scurried to the bathroom.

Inside, he pulled out the popsicle. Where should he dispose of it? Inside the toilet? No, he wouldn’t be able to flush down the plastic wrapping. The trashcan? Mom would find it when she took out the trash that night. Meng could hear the entire family crowding about the bathroom door. He heard Grandpa murmur, “Ah, could it be the heat? Little boy, he had been in that hot room all day... so many mosquitoes in there.”

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Wu Meng frantically opened all the drawers in the bathroom. Somewhere to hide... somewhere...

He threw the popsicle inside one of the drawers full of towels. Shut it.

That night, Wu Meng couldn’t fall asleep. He stared at the ceiling of Mom’s room. Mom had insisted after the dinner episode that Meng switch rooms with her for the night, since the air conditioner was still working in her room.

Meng replayed what happened earlier over and over in his head. He felt as if he had escaped death very closely. With the entire family asleep, no one was going to open the drawers now. He would just have to find a place to throw it tomorrow. Honn… honn... The sound of the air-conditioner soothed him, somehow. Tung, tung, tung. He could still hear the fan ticking from his room. Tung… tung… honn... buzz...

Mosquitoes. So many mosquitoes. Icy popsicles.

Buzz. Blue and smooth. Buzz. Sweet. Buzz. Cold.

BUZZ. Wu Meng startled from his sleep. He ran a hand over his legs and counted at least five lumps. Pained by the itch, he walked back into his room to wake Mom. The buzzing was loud, and the mosquitoes zoomed excitedly as Meng walked into the dark room. He switched the lights on and was shocked to see the bed covered in a nest of black mosquitoes hovering over Mom. “Ma!” Wu Meng cried, he desperately fanned away the mosquitoes as he shook his mom, but they kept coming back. Buzz… buzz… Wu Meng had never seen so many mosquitoes. “Mama!

Help! Help!” He tugged on his mother.

Finally, she woke. She sat up and scratched her legs, looking quite happy to see him. “Oh, Meng dear, I’ve fed the mosquitoes with my blood.

They are all full, you can sleep in your room again, they won’t drink from your blood anymore, precious one.”

“What?” Meng looked down, fear stricken. His mother’s legs were covered in tiny dots of blood.

“Mama! You are bleeding. You need to stop scratching them, I will bring you medicine.

Stop! Stop scratching. Stop.”

He ran to the bathroom but couldn’t find anything that would help. He took a few towels, and below them, there was a packet of melted popsicle. He grabbed the popsicle as well, but just as he was turning away from the drawer, Mom walked in. Her face was deformed with mosquito bites. Tiny streams of blood slid down her legs. “Meng dear? What is it that you’re holding? You can sleep in your room now. The mosquitoes have been fed, they won’t bite you anymore. My precious little boy.”

“What? No, no. No!” Meng screamed. He woke from his sleep. He was panting, breathless.

Mom’s room was dead and silent. He looked around. Dad was in a heavy sleep beside him.

The ticking of the fan and the humming of the air conditioner continued in the background. He walked dreamily to the bathroom, past his bedroom, where a quick glance inside told him that Mom was sleeping soundly and safely. As if to double check, he opened the drawer and flipped through the towels. There was nothing inside. Meng went back to sleep feeling very sure that Dad had taken it, but no matter how much he worried about what was to come tomorrow when Dad confronted him about it, his eyelids were slowly closing. And soon, Meng was sound asleep again.

Later that night, a crowd of ants gathered around a melted popsicle lying beneath many layers of towels. As they bit through its blue plastic packaging, a gluey, cold liquid came oozing out, drowning many ants in its thick artificial sweetness.

China’s one child policy lasted for thirty-five years, ending in 2016.

Jasmine Su grew up in Taiwan and is currently based in Queens, NY. She’s currently working on two novels.

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The Ark Pepper

Every day is new crisis, so I’m thinking about Genesis and the flood about how the only living things brought up from the waters were in pairs and the only women saved were wives.

I worry I am only worth a womb just a body walking in Nineveh a thing to bed and bear children filling the earth and subduing.

But the olive tree’s on fire and all the doves are slicked in oil.

Those icebergs’ blue bellies melt skyward, and the bears’ ribs count like mine.

We’re end times in concrete and warm winters.

As far as subduing goes I think we’ve overshot too busy pairing species off until extinction set in and in.

Every day I’m new despair, so I’m thinking how we are the flood this go-around and how peacefully unattractive I’ll look when drowned.

Lupe and Me Rhonda Melanson

When I pray, you become dolls nesting inside me— Matryoshka shell after shell of glorious color. A girl could get used to playing with you, in your varied versions of size: games like hide and seek where one of you could be It and find me huddled somewhere, tight as a pea in buried ground waiting to bloom.

Pepper often writes about the multiple existentialisms of religiosity, womanhood, and climate crisis.

Rhonda Melanson has been published in several print and online magazines. She is the author of two chapbooks: Gracenotes (Beret Days Press) and My Name is Mary (Alien Buddha Press).

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Like you, I'll be ready to offer others a red rose cup, the Spanish variety, to let my petals curve lovingly around any sorrow. Bare my breasts, let down my own love, see how painless it is. I can stay latched on to you, forget about the global vineyard so choked in misery.

I can be any manner of saint or intercessor you need, but no, that’s not it, is it? You seek the playing without the masquerade, the faith without the fright. The dolls in staggered order with open throats, confident voices.

You will pick one of me, in no particular order.

Thoughts on My Legacy Susan Black

I never set forth a five- or ten-year plan for my career. I don’t have a bucket list. I don’t make to-do lists either. It’s not that I’ve never had goals, or that I’ve wandered aimlessly through a life devoid of ambition or mileposts or thoughts of the future. My approach has mostly been to do what needs to be done when I see that it needs to be done. To assess what comes to me and move ahead accordingly. To put one foot in front of the other, foolishly or confidently or blindly assuming that each step would lead me to the next, and that all would be well. Thoughts on my “legacy” have been few and far between.

I think I avoided making lists and plans for myself because there was already plenty of assessment and measurement going on. In my growing up and into my adulthood, there was always someone ready to hint at where I stood or to tell me outright—or give me that silent, lingering once-over glance. So much judgment came at me from my family, my schooling, my peer groups, my church, my career.

It was tempting to internalize the standards being applied to me. Doing so might have pleased the judges. But even if such a solution seemed easy, it hurt. I didn’t want to do that to myself, and I decided I would not acquiesce. I would not pin myself down to arbitrary markers of progress, success, achievement—or failure.

understanding. My faith has always told me that my life is a gift. Each of our lives is. But I have come to better appreciate the nature of that gift.

It is to be received with gratitude and then shared, with as much generosity as it has been given; if treated in this way, it will never be depleted.

The true reckoning that will come from sharing my gift of life won’t be seen in objects or totaled up on a balance sheet. It won’t be found in a completed career or a bucket list full of experiences or a piece of paper showing lots of cross-outs. Rather, my legacy will reside in how I affected other people. More and more, I agree with Maya Angelou: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

I’m thinking now of the Celebration of Life event for a close friend who died several years ago.

Throughout, I was emotionally mute and unable to say a word about her. But listening to the eulogies—which were beautiful and loving and simple—I realized that I was hearing my friend’s legacy in those words of reminiscence.

She didn’t need to write her vast and unique legacy. Others did it for her, because of the way she made them feel as she lived her life.

That’s how I want it to be for me.

Instead, I lived my own life, mistakes and all.

Along the way, a mysterious alchemy of experience and time, infused with therapy and spiritual direction, has led me to a graced

Susan Black as an artist, writer and Benedictine Oblate living in Aurora, Oregon.

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Lilac

Noticing

Nick Dane

Rheza Budiono

Nothing can be fixed.

It’s over, any hope for a splendid past, gone.

The past is the past.

Let it remain.

Better yet, bury it.

Unmarked forever.

Hidden under earth.

Among the relics of centuries and ages past.

My history shall be a slumbering corpse.

Till the broken bone dissipates among the soil, and the worms that crawl through it mince the pieces even further.

One thing I love about art is that it helps me notice. It guides my attention in wonderful ways.

Alex Katz’s Upside Down Ada helped me notice the feeling of looking at someone I’m in love with, their face upside down in that charmingly alien perspective, their eyes and lips playing catch with my gaze. Frank O’Hara’s “Having A Coke With You” helped me notice both the utter hopelessness of capturing human experiences in their full fidelity as well as the overwhelming urge to try as we might, perhaps for no other reason than to worship what has happened.

Do not take from this moment sorrow.

For the corpse of history is settled.

Its decomposition has begun.

And interred the hopes and sorrows of the past.

I’ve recently learned about a concept called value capture, by way of C. Thi Nguyen’s essays. Value capture occurs when we can’t measure what we value and instead end up valuing what we can measure. I agree with Nguyen’s point that quantitative metrics (e.g., likes on Twitter) can be dangerously alluring, but most people around me also seem perfectly capable of caring about unquantifiable things, like friends’ feelings and dressing well. In my mind, the more fundamental limitation is that we can only care about what we can notice, and we can only work toward what we can imagine.

Let lilac grow over it.

And disperse her blessing over the May air.

Let the scent herald the hopes of summer love.

And over the years, Let her roots reach deeper, Caressing the broken sorrowful bones of past, Transforming them into lessons, Till one day we recall the blessed flower, Has grown of dirt and sorrow, Perhaps remaining underneath.

Yet we need not think of such things When we lean in and pause to smell The sweet nectar.

Nick Dane is a poet, researcher, and painter from NYC. Rheza Budiono lives in NYC, where he studies cognitive science.

Jen Dufau is a contemporary artist who paints nature scenes filled with symbolism as a way to find meaning and purpose.

Her work is inspired by philosophy, religion, and mythology.

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Art by faraway strangers can help us notice things in our own lives, but there is a limit to what others can notice for us from afar. Frank O’Hara didn’t spend eight hours a day on a laptop, eyes glued to a tiny glowing rectangle. Alex Katz didn’t grow up in a suburb of Jakarta. I want to more actively engage in the art of noticing our particular context, together. There’s this image in my head, of an infinite puzzle laid before us on an equally infinite table. There are large swaths of mostly completed puzzle, continents of coherent images alongside smaller chasms. At first, we focus on trying to fill in those chasms. We search for the missing pieces, pushing aside those that are obviously wrong. This goes on for a while, and we get frustrated. Then someone notices that a few pushed-aside pieces have similar hues of green and pulls them together into a little collection. The person next to them notices this pile and contributes a few pieces. We form patches, and soon, we’ve created our own continent of meaning. The infinite puzzle makes infinitesimally more sense and we keep playing, on and on.

birth of an individual Jen Dufau

This painting is inspired by countless coming-of-age stories. The flowering vine relies on the support of the branch but creates its own path to bloom. It’s a reminder that being independent is rooted in support from those who shape you but ultimately requires you to find your own way.

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Reaching out, growing deep The Branches is a journal of literature and philosophy dedicated to exploring our beliefs, our influences, and our contexts through word and art. Rather than setting an exclusively academic, secular, religious, or artistic category as the target, The Branches is interested in the fluctuating overlap of all of these and seeks to provide a space where we can strive for earnest engagement, curious reflection, open-minded dialogue, and mutual betterment.

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Open to Submissions Spring 2025: GROWTH Deadline March 15