When my children were very young we had a nightly ritual of holding hands in silence before eating.  Then we went around the table taking turns sharing about the bad parts and the good parts of our days.  At some point, during the elementary years, the kids started balking when it came time to hold hands until I started to feel self-conscious about this spiritual moment.  Eventually we let go of the habit and no longer had a moment of gratitude and humility before dinner.

Letting go of grace is one my regrets as a parent.  I wanted my children to have that experience and yet  I didn't hold it up as a value.  Throughout my children’s lives I've asked them to do many things. Sometimes they do them happily and other times they resist.  I know when they resist part of what they are asking me is, “Does this really matter?”  When it came to manners and homework and getting dressed and brushing their teeth and doing their laundry the answer from me alway came back, “Yes, this does matter.  So you are going to do your school work and be polite and wear clean clothes and keep your teeth healthy.”

But when they resisted grace, when they questioned the importance of a spiritual ritual around food, I tacitly answered, “No, this is not important,” when we stopped doing it.

When they were in high school I  reasserted the value of a nightly grace.  When I brought it up, my kids were not just willing, but eager.  So we transformed our dinners  by saying something along these lines:  “God, thank you for the abundance we are about to receive and for all that went into bringing it to our table”.  It’s not fancy, it doesn’t take long, and half the time we only remember to say it when we are part way through the meal.  But it does the trick.  It reminds us all that we are connected to so much else, the interconnected web of all existence and to be grateful for the blessings in our lives.

   As I sat with a group of friends on a warm Fall day in Napa County, someone casually mentioned that they always taste grapes before they buy them.  Of course, I thought to myself, Who doesn’t?It turns out my friend D___ doesn’t. To my surprise, he challenged, “You eat grapes without buying them?!”

    “No, I just taste one,” our friend explained.

    D___ questioned, “Before you paid for it? And with no way to account for how much to pay for it?”

    “I guess so,” she said.

    “I do too,” I said.

    “Really?  Who else?” D___ asked.

    Most of us around that circle taste a single grape before buying a whole bunch.  The consensus of the group reassured me that I wasn’t breaking a social taboo by my sampling.

    “What else?” D__ asked, “Do you ‘taste’ before buying?"

    Nothing. I think to myself, just as our friend S___ says, “Strawberries.”

    I exclaim, “You eat a whole strawberry before buying a basket of them?!”

    She nods, “Same principle as the grape.”

    In my head I think, Oh no, that is stealing.


  In that moment I realize how arbitrary many social norms are and how we aren’t even aware of when and how we learned them.  I’m sure my mom tasted grapes in the store, but didn’t taste strawberries.  That’s why one's okay with me and the other isn't.

    One thing I love about being with people that aren’t just like me is that I get an opportunity to see my own internal biases and assumptions.  Sometimes I don’t know what I really believe until I’m faced with its opposite. This reminds me of a bumper sticker that’s popular around here:  Don’t believe everything you think.

    I still taste a grape before committing to buy a whole bunch, but now I’m aware of  the moral complexity of that act as I do it, turning an ordinary trip to the grocery store into a spiritual practice.

I grew up watching Star Trek.  I’m told I saw the original series when it first aired, but it was watching the reruns, and then the continuation of the series, that deeply shaped who I am.

Star Trek teaches us over and over again that cooperation, respect, and diversity make life better for all beings. We learn that you don’t have to be a human to have humanity.  And that struggling with morally ambiguous questions is a never-ending privilege that come from exploring borders.  Star Trek teaches me that working together we can solve the toughest problems of our time.  Food, energy, tolerance, respect, and justice are all abundantly possible. The future I see in Star Trek is the future that I want-- and the future I’m working for.

I often despair at the futility of that kind of hope. But the alternative is entirely unacceptable.  The alternative leaves my descendents in a Mad Max world:  a society without empathy, resources, and trust, in a world full of fear and scarcity?limitations.

I’ll never know which future we humans will get.  Likely it will be somewhere in the middle.  But I’ll do my part, however small, to bring about the world I’d want to inherit.

In the future, my life is always spacious.  I have all the time to do what I’ve planned. And believe me, I make plans.

Then the future comes and suddenly it looks a lot like the present I had been planning from:  already so full that I never get to most of my to-do list.

Last spring I decided to blog for a year starting on my 50th birthday.  I imagined that I’d have plenty of time to do that once I’d stopped working and became a full-time writer.  And I've missed my first deadline. But, you see, our friend Dan is dying, and I started classes at Berkeley City College, and our daughter Kalin is moving out of the house, and friends are visiting and, and, and…Well, LIFE. There is always life.

Amazing things came from my decision to start writing a novel for my 40th birthday.  It wasn’t an easy or straightforward path to get YELLOW CROCUS into the world.  I missed a lot of self-imposed deadlines.  But I muddled through and now I’m a full time artist—well, except for the rest of my rich and full life :)

So I’m sticking with my decision to blog each week, though I’m starting a week (or is it two?) late. I always want there to be LIFE in the midst of my life.  So I’ll make my plans, deluded that I’ll have all the time in the world in my mythical future, and I’ll muddle through in the reality of now.