The Spring issue of Notre Dame Magazine is filled with good things–literally. I’m pleased to say my essay, “Goodness Gracious,” is the lead piece, but it’s far from the only thing you should read in the issue.
The issue is packed with good writing and inspiring perspectives, including a lovely piece by a former student of mine, David Devine, on the beauty to be found in the simple act of taking his daughter to a nearby swing during the pandemic.
You can access the entire issue here.
Three months ago, in the midst of all of the post-election rancor, the editor of Notre Dame Magazine asked me what I would think about writing an essay on Goodness. He was tired of reading so much about the badness in the world, he said. I told him I’d take the project on but had no idea what I’d do with it. He seemed especially pleased at my not-knowing.
Given the times, with death and uncertainty, everywhere, nothing could have been better than spending the holiday period thinking about Goodness. The essay came to me in bits and pieces while I took long walks alone. I knew from the beginning I didn’t want to write some kind of traditional essay, but I didn’t expect the more lyrical piece I ended up creating: a meditation on what Goodness is.
The issue my essay will be in is at the printer’s now and will be mailed out to the magazine’s almost 200,000 subscribers sometime in the next 2-3 weeks. When it goes up online, I’ll post the link here.
Meanwhile, I encourage you to think about where Goodness appears in your own life. It’s a much better lens through which to see the world than the ones you find in most news outlets or social media.
While searching for information for a writing project the other day, I came upon a site that lists the group names for different animals. I took such delight in reading them, I thought I’d share a few of those I found most intriguing:
A gam of albatrosses, a shrewdness of apes, a dissimulation of small birds, a flutter of butterflies, a quiver of cobras, a gulp of cormorants, a consortium of crabs, a waddling of ducks, an aerie of eagles, a cast of falcons, a charm of finches, a skulk of foxes, a troubling of goldfish, an array of hedgehogs, a bloom of jellyfish, a harvest of mice, a blessing of narwhals, a passel of opossums, a romp of otters, a parliament of owls, a maelstrom of salamanders, a fling of sandpipers, a surfeit of skunks, an audience of squid, a hoover of trout, a generation of vipers, a wealth of walruses, a descent of woodpeckers, a cabinet of wrens
from: https://www.theanimalfacts.com/glossary/animal-group-names/
Today would have been my mother’s 99th birthday. A remarkable woman, she raised two children by herself on a bookkeeper’s salary. Once, when she asked her male boss for a much-needed raise, he told her raises were only for men, who had families to support.
I tell other stories about how she was treated by men and the strength she showed in dealing with them in the memoir I’m working on, which includes the days around her death.
Don’t worry, I tell stories about happier times and events too!
(photo by Michael N. McGregor–all rights reserved)
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
Henry David Thoreau Walden
Sentences seem like little bridges crossing a flooded plain. I step onto one and it feels shaky, incomplete. When I come to the end of it, I face anew the expanse of water with nothing laid over it and no materials. So I wait there, lonely and exposed, until something new comes to me.
–from an old journal entry
Two days ago, I was doing a phone consultation with a writer who, among other things, was writing about bees. When I looked up from my notes, what did I see in our yard? A huge swarm of hundreds of…bees. I’ve never seen such a thing. It was strangely beautiful.
As I continued my consultation, the swarm lessened and eventually seemed to be down to a few dozen bees circling like electrons around an overgrown rhododendron. When I got off the phone, I went out to look closer and saw what is in the picture here: an upside down bee cone. It was two feet tall and just as wide at its widest part.
Fortunately, our neighbor used to have beehives and had the right equipment, as well as the desire to have one again. So last night he came and dropped the cone into a garbage bin and took the squirming mass off to put in one of his old bee boxes.
He missed a few, but over the past two days they’ve disappeared, so maybe they’re all together now.
Coincidentally, I’ve been reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in whose works the kind of coincidence in my first paragraph here happens all the time. Maybe more is at work in our world than we know.
Here a picture of the bees’ new home:
