So already, as many of you already know, I have moved my blog from Blogger to Substack. This way, those those who want to receive emails notifying them that I've posted can do so.
Tuesday, July 8, 2025
"And They Lived Happily Ever After": Reflections on a Famous Final Sentence
Saturday, July 5, 2025
As Far (and Near) as the Eye Can Sze
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Revelation, Inspiration . . . & Then . . .
Recently, I've been musing on the connections among revelation, inspiration, and action.
If you'd like to read "Revelation, Inspiration . . . & Then . . .," here's the link--https://joansowhat.substack.com/p/revelation-inspiration-and-then
Thank you for reading, if you do. And feel free to subscribe for free.
Painting by Karin Foreman: “Counting of the Omer” by Karin Foreman: https://karinforeman.com/counting-of-the-omer-sfirat-haomer-%D7%A1%D7%A4%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%9E%D7%A8/counting-of-the-omer/
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Of Horses, Peaches, Pears, and Poems
So already, as many of you already know, I have moved my blog to Substack so that those who want to receive emails letting them know I've posted can do so.
Recently, I've been musing on the kinds of language we need to have in our lives in order to live healthily and happily enough.
If you'd like to read "Of Horses, Peaches, Pears, and Poems," here's the link--https://joansowhat.substack.com/p/of-horses-peaches-pears-and-poems --and thank you.
Tuesday, May 6, 2025
Saying Hello and Good-Bye as So Already Moves On
When I started So Already [on Blogger], I didn’t realize how much I needed a space where I could explore topics and feelings that resonated in the core of me, especially when I wasn’t sure why. Conversation with others often expands and refines my thinking and provides me with insight into the intensity of my feelings. But what I often need even more, especially at first, is to be in conversation with myself. So Already provides the time and space for that. That’s why it says on Blogger, “In So Already, I always get to be me.”*
should you want to subscribe, there will be a subscribe button somewhere within each of my posts, which can be found at this address: https://joansowhat.substack.com. Please know I personally won’t ask you to pay to subscribe, but Substack will no doubt encourage you to pay or pledge.
Sunday, April 27, 2025
The Worlds Beyond Our Windows in Life and Verse
There are photographs of such places and flowers. There are newsletters describing them and encouraging people to visit them. There are radio interviews that promise such places and flowers will inspire "oohs" and "ahs." But poems say and share something different and more about the experience of them. The gift of poetry is that it brings to life such moments and the insights associated with them, even for those of us who are merely reading about them. Happy National Poetry Month, and may the worlds outside of your windows make you feel humbled, connected, profoundly alive, and blessed.
Monday, March 10, 2025
On God Avoidance and Other Activities in the Garden
It's my habit to read a little before I go to sleep, and I wanted to take in some words, but not the kinds of words I'd been taking in during the weeks before. As I climbed into bed wondering, "What words, what words?" I realized I hadn't given God much thought or attention in the last few months.
The 'Hear, O Israel' is a statement of faith, love and commitment to listen to God's voice. And to live that belief means bringing oneness and wholeness into the world. It means bringing people together, bringing unity and peace into the lives we touch. (51)**
. . . is not only the first question: it is also the eternal question. At each moment in our lives, this question is addressed to us: Where are you? Where are you spiritually? Where are you morally? What have you done with life, and what are you doing with it now? Are you proud of your conduct in the garden?"
Tuesday, February 25, 2025
A Read for Our Times: Omo Moses' The White Peril
That Bob Moses* was the first person I saw when I came upon that episode had clinched my decision to watch it: I wanted to hear the voice of the man who wasn't yet Omo's father, whose ideas about supporting groups to self-determine as Americans, to organize, to insist, and to persist are alive and well.
I first met Omo when he was a teenager in an English language arts class I taught at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. In January, as the release date for his book drew near, I marveled at its
timeliness--one day after Donald Trump's inauguration. Since then, Trump
has been confirming that we stand at another moment in our country's
history requiring "we the people" to act for the sake of freedom and justice for all. Members of Omo's family have long known how to do this.
And at the same time, despite its place in American history, the nuclear family of Omo's formative years was also "just a family"--in his case, composed of four children and their two parents who were intent on raising them to thrive and realize their dreams in a world too often structured and inclined to obstruct their paths.
The White Peril captures Omo's experience of navigating the relationship between the public-political and private-familial aspects of his formative years. Presenting his journey from childhood to young adulthood, it offers the beginning chapters of the story of how Omo came to carve out his place in and in relationship to his family's public legacy as it continues in the present moment.**
The extended Moses family in front of a mural featuring Bob and Janet; Omo and his kids are on far left. |
So how does this book hold together, given its many facets? I believe the answer lies in Omo's own writing, so often poetic and dramatic, even when its aim is simply to lay out the contexts that surround particular events and situations that Omo recalls and recounts so vividly. Omo's capacity to create mood, character, and place through the physical details he chooses to share, the diction and imagery he uses to render them, and the metaphors he creates and sometimes repeats makes the world of his youth physically and emotionally immediate.
Take for example, his description of his family's trip from Tanzania to America: the almost staccato presentation of the political/historical context in which it occurred--certainly what Omo learned much later--is followed by his account of the nearly endless trip itself, as experienced by his four-year-old self.
We were torn from the road. From the red dirt**** that stretched to the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, transplanted onto America's glacial concrete.We would learn that our home in Same, like most of the homes of African American expatriates in Tanzania, had been searched by soldiers and police. That it had been reported that blacks from America had arrived by boat with guns and were headed to President Nyerere's village in the build-up to the Pan-African Conference to be held in Dar es Salaam in 1974.We would learn that in 1975 President Jimmy Carter was offering amnesty to the citizens who had refused to fight in the Vietnam War.We would learn that we'd been denied Tanzanian citizenship, that the political climate had shifted, that we couldn't become Tanzania's children.'We're going to visit Bibi,' Mama said.It was 1976. We were six, four, and two, and Malaika was getting ripe in Mama's belly, when the plane left the surface of the earth, its wheels folding into its guts. The engines roared like a pride of lions. We took off down the runway like a tortoise at first, and then a cheetah and then an albatross, wings abruptly rejecting gravity. Taking off felt like the car trips we'd made to the Indian Ocean, five, six, or seven of us in a vehicle yo-yoing on dirt and rocks until we reached the paved road, black and smooth. And then the plane was floating. On our way to forty thousand feet like on our way to the beach, . . .. We treated the plane like the road. Inspected the arms of each chair as if a bush or an anthill, ran up and down the aisle unaware that an umbilical cord had been severed, that we were being delivered to the other side of the planet.We landed in Nairobi and took off again.We landed in Paris and took off again. Remained between the surface of the earth and the sun and the moon for twenty hours.We landed in the South Bronx, unaware that we had reached the shores of hip-hop. (35-36)*****
I spend evenings on Mr. Figgers's porch, just talking about things. I enjoy listening to how his words run a marathon around a point, stuff time with his hopes and provocations. I enjoy time passing, with no apparent destination, along the tenor of his voice. If there are fireflies, I enjoy witnessing the call and response. (201)
Sunday, January 5, 2025
Reading Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These at Christmastime
The day had not yet dawned, and Furlong looked down at the dark, shining river whose surface reflected equal parts of the lighted town. So many things had a way of looking finer, when they were not so close. He could not say which he rathered: the sight of town or its reflection on the water. (60)*******
Photo of the Holiday Card from My Friend Elizabeth |