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Adding same label to multiple tasks
I am trying to figure out the quickest way to add a new label to multiple tasks. I'd ideally add the new label to so many tasks across multiple projects that it would be much easier to do this as a simultaneous change, but can't figure out how to do it.
Thanks for your help!
All responses
Hi Blake,
Unfortunately, at this time it's not possible. You can SHIFT click tasks to multi select, but it does not include changing labels, though we do plan to add more feature in the future.
Hi Brendon,
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. Shame it can't be done at the moment - any ideas when it may be possible?
Out of curiosity, is there any way I can export the projects as a template in any way, and then re-upload them with additional labels, (even as a new project and then delete the old one) or can they not be manipulated in that way?
Hello Blake,
Technically, yes, you can use the import/export template option as show in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rl_CLGY_3o
The format these templates are stored for is custom, though, but if you'll see how labels are added there, you could manipulate the TXT file easily :)
Best regards,
Thanks - already seen that video and know how to export/import. Problem is, I can't easily see how this files are editable as text format and if I delimit them into columns, when I add the labels and convert them back into txt, it messes up the format of the file, which means it errors or doesn't recognise the changes. Are you able to provide instructions on how to add labels to the txt file in a way that does not error with the import?
Unfortunately, that's not directly possible. You can copy/paste the labels after each task's name, but if you change the format of how they're stored, it will indeed not work :(
In general, the TXT file will expect one line to be one task so if you would prepare a file with this content:
Task 1 @label
Task 2 @label
It should correctly add 2 tasks, each with the label in it.
Best regards,
+1 for multi-selection to add/change labels
+1. Definitely!!
I registered just to +1 this. You should be able to multiselect and apply ANY of the features eg Priority as well.
Remember the Milk has this and it's a real timesaver, including hot keys eg 1 for P1 etc
+1 Urgently - Would help a lot!
Woooo TD guys, don't let Remember The Milk run you over on this one...
+1 for the suggestion of assigning _any_ function to one or more selected tasks!
Nearly a year since it was mentioned that Todoist hoped to add more "Bulk Change" features. Any updates on this?
I'd really appreciate being able to bulk:
* Remove Date
* Add or Remove Label
* Add, Remove, Change Priority
When will this change be available? It would be very helpful.
Hi todoist team,
Any news on when this may happen? The labels feature is quite buggy (for example, after trying some of the workarounds for bulk uploading tasks, it meant todoist did recognise the labels on my iPhone app, but not online etc). It's my main gripe with the product at the moment.
Many thanks,
Hello Blake,
Unfortunately, we have no news so far, but we'll look into this.
Thanks David.
Hi David,
After a few days since last comms, wondered if that's given enough time to have an update when todoist plan to roll this out and to what extent/functionality?
+1 Pleeeze
+1. Let's make it happen. Thank you.
I too can't quite believe this isn't available with the other bulk options.
It would be excellent, if you could add this feature.
It really should not be that hard. Functionality is already there for single tasks. In this case it should be only a case of walking through a list (with selected tasks), and applying desired action.
+1 Pls as I need it asap
Seems like pretty basic functionality to be able to manage a to do list of 100's of items.
As with not being able to sort labels (even alphabetically), this is a ridiculous usability miss.
This basically makes it incredibly painful to adapt one's workflow once one is embedded in the platform.
Maybe you guys could spend a little less time on shiny new iOS apps, and a little more on basic usability fixes?


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Web 2.0
a second stage in the development of the World Wide Web, involving ways of sharing information such as blogs and wikis
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a second stage in the development of the World Wide Web, involving ways of sharing information such as blogs and wikis
a third stage in the development of the World Wide Web, based on the idea that the Internet understands the pieces of information it stores and is able to make connections between them
a computer system that allows people in different parts of the world to exchange information. You can use the Internet to get information from websites and to send and receive messages by email. The Internet is often simply called the Net
the Web
the Internet and other computer networks that allow people to share information
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a very large collection of documents, pictures, sounds etc stored on computers in many different places and connected through the Internet
relating to the Internet
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Dimmitt Middle School Office
Middle School Yearbooks are on sale now! Yearbooks cost $25 and all order forms and money must be turned in by March 23.
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We welcome you to visit our campus anytime. We do ask that you come by the office first to check in and pick up a visitor's badge before visiting your child's classroom.


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Notre Dame line prepares for physical Stanford
Updated: October 11, 2012, 7:09 PM ETAssociated Press
SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Notre Dame's offensive linemen want to prove something against No. 17 Stanford after being pushed around by the Cardinal the past two seasons.
Stanford (4-1) held the Irish to a total of 101 yards rushing in those two meetings, winning both games by two touchdowns or more. The Fighting Irish (5-0) are ranked No. 7 now, off to their best start in a decade, and are eager to show times have changed.
Left tackle Zack Martin sees the game against the Cardinal as an ...
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southern mn gardeners?
andi_mn(z4MN)April 30, 2012
ok, both karla's (the hosta lady) and veneros are some are some distance from me (veneros closer i think) If you could only go to one of them...which one would you go to? is one a bit less $$ than the other?
i havent been to either one but i just have this NEED to see some pretty hostas Now. i figure if i garden tomorrow and wednesday i will be too sore by thurs or friday to do anything but drive in my car anyway. kinda sucks to be a 66 yr old gardener (and i can't stop digging holes, darn)


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Circle Pad Pro Finally Available for 3DS XL
Posted 17 April 2013 - 08:47 PM
Of course, one wasn't available for it. The original attachment works fine on 3DS but simply can't fit on the larger 3DS XL. The 3DS XL-specific attachment launched in Japan but US players have been unable to get one without importing. Finally, Nintendo has listed the 3DS XL Circle Pad Pro for purchase.
For $20, you can nab an attachment that works with games such as Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, and Resident Evil: Revelations. Orders placed on Shop Nintendo will begin shipping out on the 19th.
Do you think Nintendo will eventually incorporate two Circle Pads into the 3DS's design?
Click here to view the article
#2 Guest_..._*
Posted 17 April 2013 - 09:37 PM
Two circle pads? No probably not and I think it's better they keep it that way. We need one circle pad and one regular one.
Posted 18 April 2013 - 07:24 AM
I dunno, Nintendo kinda failed at using the Cricle Pad Pro with Kid Icarus: Uprising (only really helped for lefties like me... but I got around it otherwise), and third parties aren't even thinking about it. I doubt they'll actually make a 3DS model until they have a real reason to... but then, I think a lot of consumers will throw a fit.
Posted 19 April 2013 - 07:22 AM
The only reason I would ever get one of these would be if I was too lazy and cheap to buy an XL in the first place! The 3DS feels a bit small in my hands so it would make sense there, if only slightly. But adding another piece of plastic onto this already huge sized piece of hardware seems a bit unnecesary.
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Serinah & Jamie's wedding was held at Peregrines of Table Top Mountain. My first impression as I drove to the place was that it was an old tin shed in the middle of nowhere! lol but I couldn't have been more wrong. Not only is Peregrines striking in its uniqueness, but's it's also surrounded by some great Aussie bushland and breathtaking landscapes.
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text: The '90s indie vibe is strong with the Demigs, a rock group that hails from Denton, Texas. This vibe is quite apparent on the tune "Melamine", a clean guitar-driven number off of their forthcoming double LP, the 20-song Welcome to Hard Times. With sonic corollaries that include ones atypical to the indie realm, namely the New Zealand-based "kiwi rock" of groups like the Clean and the 3-Ds, the Demigs have a distinctive sound that's matched by their political savvy. In addition to the issues tackled by "Melamine" specifically (read more on that below), the quartet has also taken a stance against fracking in their native Texas.


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Terry Crews Celebrity Watchlist
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Michael can't fit into an old pair of jeans, so he starts dieting and heads to a gym. He's not fun to be around. Nor is Franklin, who has flunked an astrophysics exam. Daryl: Terry Crews. Salesman: Casey Lee.
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TheChurchLady 46-50, F 15 Answers 8 Aug 17, 2012 in Community
Yes, me too :(
Best Answer
nah, it's whatever.
Best Answer
I felt fine until you put it like that..

Thanks a lot!
Best Answer
This isn't where I would rather be, but I can think of worse things for me to be doing on a Friday night :)
Best Answer
Lets see home alone, again, on a friday, **gets gun**
Best Answer
No actually :D

Firday night is just another day, dosen't really mean anything.
Best Answer
Not really. I just got back from dinner and drinks
Best Answer
thanks!thanks a lot! self esteem out the window!i was doing so good too!lol
Best Answer
Eh, a little considering I am 21 and there is a group of people in my house hanging out right now. But they are playing dnd. x.x Just gotta remember that things will get better.
Best Answer
it ain't Friday night where i am
Best Answer
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Interview and Photos by Melanie Dunea / CPi / My Last Supper
Angela Pinkerton, Pastry Chef at Eleven Madison Park: "My staff, all 15 of them, are my most treasured items. Without them none of this would be possible. They're my little workhorses. They deserve some credit and I thought this was the chance to thank them for that."


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Device Detects Drug Use Via Fingerprints 224
from the giving-it-the-finger-test dept.
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While not necessarily going to jail, you'll at least be going on foot for quite a while in Germany as this will cost you your driver's licence. Yes, even if that joint was a week ago. They won't take the licence because you were under the influence, but because even thinking about taking drugs shows that you are morally unfit for driving. Godwin's law will be invoked in
Land of the Flea, Home of the Slave?
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Good to see historic buildings improved, not torn down
Published: Friday, December 15, 2006 at 3:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 11:00 p.m.
It is heartening at a time when some Tuscaloosa historic buildings are being torn down in the name of revitalization, to see two historic buildings not only being saved, but also improved.
Jack Warner, former Gulf States chair, once again contributed to preserving a piece of West Alabamas history by maintaining the buildings on Gulf States Corp. property along New Watermelon Road for 32 years.
But while it was wonderful they were saved, after development at Gulf States blossomed, people could no longer walk around the structures as they once could. There was no way to get to the building.
The buildings were isolated to the point that they werent useful to the public," as Dan Meissner, spokesman for Gulf States said last spring.
But when Gulf States donated the small buildings to the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society a year ago, permanent homes had to be found for them by the end of this year.
And while they were a lovely distraction when driving down Watermelon Road, the buildings -- a one-room schoolhouse and a bank -- will now be placed in more suitable contexts.
The 176-year-old one-room schoolhouse, a simple white building constructed on the Umbria Plantation in Sawyerville in Hale County, was moved to the park at the Northport Community Center at the intersection of Lurleen Wallace Boulevard and Park Street.
We cant think of a better thing to do with an old schoolhouse than to fill it with school children, and thats what will happen thanks to The Friends of Historic Northport who plan to use the building for educational purposes and tours.
A $25,000 donation from the family of the late Richard Price Holman was added to other donations to rebuild the schoolhouse foundation, yet another example of philanthropic historic preservation we can be proud of.
The old Gainesville Bank, which once printed Confederate money and was in the mid-1800s one of the most influential banks in the state -- will be returning home to its original site in Gainesville, in Sumter County.
And everybody knows theres no place like home.
It is wonderful to see these two buildings returned to more suitable places in West Alabama, and in history, while still looking toward how they may be used and preserved in the future.
At a time when many citizens are donating private money to hire a football coach for Tuscaloosas future, it is satisfying to see others remembering and preserving the importance of the past.
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tomato help please...
i have a couple of questions.. 1st year doing tomatoes and think i am doing something wrong
1) i have (3) tomato plants, spaced around 24" apart.. are they still too close? it may be correct, but looking at this picture it seems congested, but may be normal
2) they've been planted for approx 2 months and they are still green.. they are the heinz, romas, and heirlooms.. the heirlooms are huge, but still green.. should all these be red by now? or will stay green for awhile and redden up here soon?
i appreciate the help.. thanks !!
Yes they are awfully close, especially for using that type of cage. 3' spacing would be better next year. if you could give us the exact name of the varieties you planted it would help. There are several varieties of Heinz and "romas" and heirloom refers to the history of the plant not the variety.
As to turning red, it takes approx. 6-7 weeks from the time the fruit forms for it to ripen and turn red so you still have time to go. Be patient. :)
Dave is rignt on all counts, but I'll add this: There are some heirloom and open pollinated tomatoes that don't get red. There are white ones, yellow ones, orange ones, the so called "purple" and "black" ones, and even some that are green when ripe. If you have a green when ripe, orange, yellow or white, you might be waiting a long time for them to turn red and they'd get over ripe. If you have one of the purple or blacks, you might think they have gone bad, when they haven't.
I'm just sayin'......
Your location would help as well. Tomatoes only ripen between 58 and 85 DEG F. Temperatures outside those turn off the production of the ripening factors. Tomatoes require 1300 to 1400 Growing Degree Days (GDD) to ripen. Depending on the temperatures a given day can be 28 to 60. There is a formula that requires you to know the maximum and minimum temperatures. Any temperature below 50 DEG F does nothing for us.
I plant mine no more than 24" apart, but they never look this bushy....I stake them and also live north so now I have buds..no toms yet...all heirlooms many colours.this year I planted about
30...and gave away the same amount...cheers, martha/zucchini


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RE: Re: [FS32NGModelrail] Beet Wagon Bogies
Expand Messages
- Thanks for the reply Les. I am having a blast talking skips lately, and
we seem to be on the same page for modelling styles. Just gotta find a
digital camera so I can share of my work. I know about the Grease-Em
lube, and agree to it's abilities.
I too will use Kadee's on my stock for the same reasons, though coming
from the smaller scales (Nn3), I don't think that link and pin would be
all that hard to use (he he he).
Chris Mears
Charlottetown, PEI
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By Dan Fenner
Nov 28, 2014
LCC LOST AND FOUND 11/28/14: Small climbing bag containing a pair of shoes and a chalk bag. The bag was found at "Manly Arete" at the Secret Garden boulders at sundown. I believe that this bag belongs to a blonde man named Ryan, possibly driving a Nissan Leaf.
If you lost your shoes and chalk at the Secret Garden boulders on 11/28/14, please message me and describe the bag, the shoes, and the chalk bag.
If anyone knows a blonde, caucasian, ~5'10" boulderer named Ryan ~25-30 years old, please get in contact with me.
Thank you, and happy Holidays!
By Matthew Abbott
Feb 27, 2015
|What are conditions like for bouldering in LCC currently? And what are considered the best winter areas?
By Emerson Takahashi
From: SLC, UT
Nov 26, 2010
Hey, can anyone tell me if you can climb here in the winter, like december/january?
i want to make a ski/climbing trip this winter...
By bheller
From: SL UT
Nov 27, 2010
|You can occasionally climb in LCC in winter, but certainly don't count on it. With that said, Momentum for routes and the SLC Front for bouldering are both awesome gyms!
By jason-T
From: Denver, CO
Aug 12, 2011
|Is there a bouldering guide book to the area?? And what is season for this area? Thanks!
By Emerson Takahashi
From: SLC, UT
Jun 1, 2012
check out:
Utah Bouldering
That book covers climbing in Little Cottonwood, Ogden, Joe's Valley, Ibex and Big Bend.
Season here tends to be March - June and picks up again around September - whenever there's too much snow.
Climbing in the summer is limited since it gets so hot, so you have to drive up to White Pine or find some really good shade.
By Reedrombo
From: Nationwide Dirtbag
Oct 6, 2012
|Yo, left my Petzl chalkbag in the Gate bouldering area. Its tan-ish and has a little guy climbing on it (the little dudes eye is bulging) and its a zip up with a black metolius biner on it. Left it up there Friday Oct 5, 2012, if you gots it and you're generous, hit me up
By Boissal
From: Small Lake, UT
Jul 26, 2013
|Looking pretty good... You might want to borrow a black bible if you can, half of the boulder and problems at WPS are already named.
By bheller
From: SL UT
Nov 18, 2014
I, like so many, find LCC to be a cruel mistress...
Its a love-hate type relationship. With that said, here I offer a haiku:
So many great boulders
And such fickle conditions
Don't count on sending
5 good days a year...that's all we seem to get...its over till spring
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Research Article
Quantitative comparison of Taylor flow simulations based on sharp-interface and diffuse-interface models
Article first published online: 30 APR 2013
DOI: 10.1002/fld.3802
Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids
Volume 73, Issue 4, pages 344–361, 10 October 2013
Additional Information
How to Cite
Aland, S., Boden, S., Hahn, A., Klingbeil, F., Weismann, M. and Weller, S. (2013), Quantitative comparison of Taylor flow simulations based on sharp-interface and diffuse-interface models. Int. J. Numer. Meth. Fluids, 73: 344–361. doi: 10.1002/fld.3802
Publication History
- Issue published online: 4 SEP 2013
- Article first published online: 30 APR 2013
- Manuscript Accepted: 24 MAR 2013
- Manuscript Revised: 6 MAR 2013
- Manuscript Received: 31 OCT 2012
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Mon May 12, 2014
'Fourchestra' Brings Steel Pan Funk to LowerTown
By Kate Lochte
Amidst an eclectic lineup of musicians performing at this weekend's LowerTown Arts & Music Festival is the Asheville, North Carolina jazz fusion ensemble called the Jonathon Scales Fourchestra. Bandleader Scales is a graduate of Appalachian State University. He was the saxophonist before turning to steel pans in 2002. We meet Jonathan Scales and hear the Fourchestra with Kate Lochte.
You can see the entire music schedule for the festival at lowertownamf.com.
Jonathan Scales Fourchestra performs at the LowerTown Arts & Music Festival Friday at 5 p.m. and later for the after party starting at 10:30 p.m. in Maiden Alley Cinema.
Jonathan Scales Fourchestra "Mississippi"
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Friday's Area high school football roundup: Blackhawks beat MVP in OT
WESSINGTON SPRINGS — Woonsocket/Wessington Springs/Sanborn Central pulled off the overtime victory over Mount Vernon/Plankinton 28-22 in Wessington Springs in a high school football game Friday night.
Joe Davis threw a 6-yard touchdown pass to Jacob Fouberg in overtime to lift the Blackhawks.
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What struck me about the Ham kerfuffle is how this arises from the same place that his strict stance on young earth creationism does. At its core, this is not about the science; it is about hermeneutics.
After my post about the LU debate, I had a brief exchange with a commenter who identified himself as Paul. Paul took issue with my calling Ken Ham a biblical literalist—and my saying that this was the reason he could not look at the scientific evidence honestly.
In our subsequent exchange, Paul made the following assertions:
If you interpret Genesis as figurative, that cause problems with what the Bible says elsewhere (example: Romans 5:12 says that death is a result of sin, but if evolution is true then death existed before Adam and Eve existed).
Of course the days in Genesis 1 are 24-hour days. If they weren't, you'd have problems with Exodus 20:11, Exodus 31:17, as well as other verses. So, yes, it is natural to read Genesis 1 as literal 24-hour days.
Like I said, when Ken Ham responded with "I'm a Christian", I think he means that there is no scientific or historical evidence that would contradict the Christian worldview.
What does one part of scripture's relation to another have to do with an analysis of scientific evidence?
The basic theology behind what Paul calls the Christian worldview, and this insistence on young-earth creationism is Premillennial Dispensationalism. It was developed in the late 1800s by John Nelson Darby and it harmonizes the entire Bible into an all-encompassing story of the entire universe. It is a map, a guide for looking at history, judging present crises, and knowing with certainty what will come in the future.
According to this system, the purpose of all creation is God's relationship with humanity, which he carries out according to seven different governing systems or dispensations:
1. Innocence: begins with the literal six-day creation and ends when Adam and Eve screw up
2. Conscience: everyone screws this up and has to be drowned, except for Noah and his family
3. Government: this takes us from Noah to the promise that Abraham will father nations
4. Promise: from Abraham to Moses and the Law
5. Law: this dispensation takes us from Moses to Jesus
6. Grace: the dispensation in which we are living right now
7. Millennial Kingdom: after the Rapture and the seven years of the Great Tribulation
Before the first dispensation is eternity past, in which only God exists, and after the thousand-year rule of the Millennial Kingdom is eternity future, in which human beings exist consciously in heaven or hell.
I remember Sunday school charts in the dank church basement depicting all of existence, past present and future. With some variations—I remember some hot controversies over whether or not Christians would be raptured before the Great Tribulation or suffer through it—this is the basic timeline.
It is a tightly structured harmonization of the entire Bible into a categorical universal history, coupled with the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy—the Bible does not contain one iota of mistaken or false information—at the root of young earth creationists' refusal to look honestly at the scientific evidence. If one tenet falls, the whole system collapses.
Several years ago I blogged here about a group of former Liberty students in town who have left their childhood faith:
The belief system they've been taught all their lives is a theology of one calcified piece, each point taught with the same absolute certainty as every other. They begin to notice oddities in this theological landscape. A stone seems fake, held in place unnaturally—say the doctrine of verbal, plenary biblical inspiration and its subsequent inerrancy; or the prohibition against women in the ministry; or the insistence on a literal, twenty-four-hour, six-day creation six thousand years ago—and they get suspicious, start to kick around.
They kick away a stone—decide, for example, that they cannot believe in a literal talking snake causing all the world's woes any more than they could believe in a literal, historical Pandora. The one stone falls away, and then another falls after it, and with that the collapse begins.
The ground crumbles from beneath them in outward circles like ripples on water. Everything their lives were built on falls away until they are floating, totally unmoored, casting about among the twisting and drifting fragments of their childhood faith, trying to cobble something together that they can live with.
When I was young, I heard more than once in church that if a single scientific or historical claim in Scripture was wrong then none of it could be trusted. It terrified me because even at a young age I recognized inconsistencies and seeming contradictions in the texts.
It came as a great relief years later to realize Biblical literalism is not the only option, the Christian worldview is bigger, and richer, and deeper than that. It is quite possible to be a Christian who engages the scientific community without the spirit of fear.
This post was made possible through the support of a grant from The BioLogos Foundation's Evolution and Christian Faith program. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BioLogos.
Vic Sizemore earned his MFA in fiction from Seattle Pacific University in 2009. His short stories are published or forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou'wester, Silk Road Review, Atticus Review, PANK Magazine Fiction Fix, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Conclave, and elsewhere. Excerpts from his novel The Calling are published in Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Prick of the Spindle, Burrow Press Review, Rock & Sling, and Relief. His fiction has won the New Millennium Writings Award for Fiction, and been nominated for Best American Nonrequired Reading and a Pushcart Prize. You can find Vic at http://vicsizemore.wordpress.com/.
Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.]]>
"Hey Grace," she drawled, as Grace approached her. She had frosty blond hair and friendly blue eyes, and cool running shoes under those purple scrubs, rocking the hip-grandma look. She swung her arm in a wide come-on wave and said, "You're coming too, Mom and Dad."
Later, when Gracie's mother complimented her on how easy she makes her job look, she said, "I've been doing this for forty-five years." She joked and teased in just the right ways to put Grace at ease as she lay back and opened her mouth for the light stretching on its long arm toward her.
After the orthodontist examined her and discussed the braces—and oral surgery—our hip grandma was back with the pricing sheet. She was just as good at this part, had the numbers written neatly, the math done, clear and simple. She said, "You have good insurance. Insurance usually doesn't cover this much."
Gracie's mother and I both said this was great news, good to hear.
Then she added, "And they never will again now, because of Obamacare." As she emphasized the O word, her pretty smile curled into a crisp sneer. Then just as quickly, it was gone and she had moved on to the next line of numbers.
I was not surprised by the political interjection. Nor was I surprised when, describing a new doctor on staff, she said, "We are so blessed to have him." I was on the conservative side of town. On the other side of town, we would have been just as likely to hear a comment from the opposite side of the Affordable Care Act controversy—just as opinionated, and just as inappropriate for the circumstances.
My town has two distinct personalities: one side is die-hard right wing conservative and the other side is just as staunchly on the left. I have watched these two sides do battle in a bumper sticker war. The Darwin fish (an ichthus with feet) popped up to counter the Jesus fish; another ichthus came along with the Jesus fish swallowing the Darwin fish food-chain style. Slogans are volleyed back and forth: equal rights for unborn women, and keep your theology off my biology; God bless America, and God bless the whole world, no exceptions; marriage God's design (a silhouette of a man, a plus sign, and a silhouette of a woman), and the blue and yellow equal sign.
As I teach on one side of town and then the other, I often find myself in the company of conservative Christians who cannot fathom how someone calling herself Christian could be liberal, and hours later in the company of liberals who boggle over how someone claiming to follow Jesus could be conservative. Over the past several years, I have watched these responses turn from wonder to animosity. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, surely you agree that the increasing polarization is troubling.
In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt shares a wealth of research on this issue. He uses the word righteous not with its current connotations of religion and judgmentalism, but from the original "just, upright, virtuous." As ugly as the rhetoric is becoming, it is a fact that many on both sides are doing what they sincerely believe to be upright and virtuous.
Haidt begins with the question, "How can honest and sincere people come to opposite conclusions?" His research maps out the moral foundation of politics, which he places in six basic categories: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, liberty/oppression. What he discovers is that consistently liberals have a three-foundation morality (care, fairness, liberty) while conservatives have a six-foundation morality (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty).
This leads to competing grand narratives. While liberals tell a story of progress toward a more caring and fair society, conservatives tell a story of defending moral foundations against forces that ever work to erode them. These appear to be—and in the realm of politics are—opposing narratives.
The truth is however that both sides make legitimate and correct claims. Our society operates within what Haidt calls a "moral exoskeleton," a set of values that makes a society possible. Liberals rightly claim this moral exoskeleton is imperfect, needs fixing. Conservatives rightly maintain that it will not do to bring the whole thing crashing down. "You can't help the bees by destroying the hive."
Haidt offers a couple of suggestions for reaching a more civil politics, which might or might not work, but does not spend much time on them. His purpose for the book is simply to explain how good people can reach such differing opinions about important issues.
Could it be that the first necessary step is to admit that, whatever side you are on, you can get nowhere without faith that the other side is also "composed of good people who have something important to say"? Is it naive to believe it is possible?
Vic Sizemore earned his MFA in fiction from Seattle Pacific University in 2009. His short stories are published or forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou'wester, Silk Road Review, Atticus Review, PANK Magazine Fiction Fix, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Conclave, and elsewhere. Excerpts from his novel The Calling are published in Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Prick of the Spindle, Burrow Press Review, Rock & Sling, and Relief. His fiction has won the New Millennium Writings Award for Fiction, and been nominated for Best American Nonrequired Reading and a Pushcart Prize. You can find Vic athttp://vicsizemore.wordpress.com/.
Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.]]>
Monks in the Orthodox tradition have long believed that God's love is unchanging, constant, like the light of the sun. We do not need to appease a deity's anger or perform well to turn the light of God's affection and gaze upon us. It's just there, divine mercy blazing away, pouring down all the time.
The problem, these elders say is that our minds—our nouses, or the window to our hearts—have been darkened, like crusty basement windows.
We can be trapped in this basement, and when the illumination starts to seep through, the pure character of God shines through a soiled pane, a clouded filter of our psyches, wounds, fears.
"All the shit that's been put on us?" a new member in our jail group asked as part of our discussion, "Our dad beatin' the shit outta us? The cops, the judges, and all the grimy things we done to others, to our women, to ourselves? Kinda like that?"
I thought it was a good summary of how many Christians' images of God, especially in the West, are still shaped and darkened by guilt and experiences with authority.
I told the guys in red scrubs more of what the monks think about this darkened minds business: although we can do nothing to earn God's love or turn His ever-shining light upon us, what we can do is get to work removing the internal rubble.
That's what they call askesis, ascetic practices. Or praxis. Ceaseless prayer, all-night vigils, renunciation of possessions, silence, confession, service to others—all the hardcore religious stuff for which monks are best known. It's not penance, self-punishment, as I used to assume. It's a way of scrubbing at those windows to our hearts.
"You're talking bout gettin' some Windex on that, then!"
I suggested we experiment with this askesis. Not just talk about it. I asked if any of the guys had ever tried fasting. There was silence. They looked around at each other. One guy from a churchy childhood said he thinks he did that once. Others laughed about how little—and disgusting—the food portions are in jail.
I told them I had no great personal story about fasting, though I'd messed around with it all my Christian life. But, I said, my friend in a distant prison, in solitary confinement, had written telling me how he'd decided to fast.
He'd read in a book I'd mailed him, Mountain of Silence, full of interviews with a holy elder in a monastery in Cyprus, about how the monks are constantly fasting. So he tried it. He wrote how he'd been going three days straight, and after the initial hunger and irritation, he felt more "energized, awake, clean." He saw more things in Scripture and could write longer letters without distraction.
So, I told the guys, I'd be willing to try it for one straight week if they did, too. "All week," I said, "let's pass on breakfast and lunch, eat only dinner, use the time and growling stomachs as internal alarms to pray a little more. And see what happens."
That week, on a Tuesday, I met up with an Orthodox poet for lunch at his house on the Puget Sound. He has spent a lot of time as a pilgrim on Mount Athos, a misty island in Greece swarming with monks in crumbling old hives humming with prayer. He laughed and told me the inmates and I were doing it all wrong.
"So stop it," he smiled, swilled a little single malt, and passed me the salami. "It's just Wednesdays and Fridays. Not all week. And even then, you still eat. Just lay off the meat, brother. Even overdoing asceticism can be its own indulgence."
But the next night I visited one of the men in our jail group in a small holding cell with a bare table. He had tattoos all over his scalp and neck, a young Mexican gang member. "So I been doing that fasting you told us about, right?" he began. "And I had nightmares every night for the first few days."
They were like videotapes, "of all the shit I did those years in prison—you know?" The visitation cell might have been tapped, so he tilted his head and I knew he was referring to the many unspeakable and violent acts he'd felt obligated to perform in order to survive in various prisons. Things he'd told me about on long car rides to probation appointments before he'd gotten arrested this time.
"I'm telling you: three straight nights, when I started fasting, I had nightmares of all that. Like I was seeing it all from the upper corner of my cell, looking down. Like a security camera, you know? Shit I forgot all about; it all came up at night. I'd wake up in sweats, my heart pounding. But I'd feel ok in the morning. And now—I don't know—I feel hella good. I pray more during the day and I got the homies on the tier joining me with a little psalm at nights."
How is it that going without food opens up deep chambers in the mind, heart, spirit? I've read some of the new science about how interconnected the stomach is with the brain, the "gut mind." Maybe monks with their fasting have always known that the stomach is a tangible backdoor to the mind and heart, one we can clear and open. With askesis, spiritual Windex.
The homie started getting visions after the nightmares: how he wanted to use his tattoo design skills to work on art with local kids, and get them gardening. "I wanna get out soon now," he wrote me, "and not waste my life in prison. You know I got so much I can do out there, I just wish I would have done it before."
I told him at our next visit how several months with a good therapist might barely get that kind of darkness from his nightmares to surface in a healing way. And to then discover his own gifts in a new light! And it came about for free, in a county jail cell, when one prisoner in America's sprawling prison system voluntarily took on an ascetic practice. Like fasting.
"I know," he shrugged, never having met a therapist. "Crazy, huh?"
Chris Hoke works with Tierra Nueva in Washington State's Skagit Valley. His first book, WANTED: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders comes out from HarperOne in February 2015. Learn more at chris-hoke.com.
Photo by Max Wolfe, used under a Creative Commons license.
Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.]]>
In the "burpees" the guys often showed me after they were home from prison—in their driveways and garages, always getting my heart thumping in my throat and a sweat in my shirt sooner than I expect—I recognized the Orthodox monks' prostrations I'd learned in the monastery.
The homies in their tight tank tops and huge jeans began upright, then hit fists to their abs, bent down to a full bow, touching knees, then the ground, dropping to pushup position, and back up.
Many guys I know who go off to prison come back home more physically fit, even if spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, they return less alive, burdened with more of the very armor, trauma, rage, secrets, numbness, and sin that monasteries aim to remove.
Not only is there less junk food, an absence of soda, and regimented bedtimes and wakeups in prison; not only is weight-lifting a popular pastime for most men doing hard time; but gang members especially—most of those I pastor—are required among their ranks to constantly train, using burpees as a whole-body workout that fits inside their narrow cells.
They are expected to always be ready for battle.
Monks look at their rigorous practices in a similar way: preparing the instincts of their minds and hearts for spiritual battle in their cells, so that they don't get so easily beat up by all the temptations, demons, thoughts, fears, anxieties, illusions, and torments that assault the human heart daily.
"We need exercises," I read from one monk, "to overcome these maladies." I underlined that part of the book.
I suppose I'd assumed all the bowing and religious physical movements I'd seen performed by monks in movies to be antiquated, pathological expressions of guilt, quivering penance, the anxiety of a slave who knew nothing of love.
But at the monastery I grew interested in these movements—like when I visited my friend's mixed martial arts and boxing gym. I saw him quit drugs, lose weight, and grow in maturity, all while he moved across the mat in bizarre calisthenics with other young men weaning themselves off video games and bong hits.
The gym offered more for him, recently out of jail, than my weekly small group where we'd read the gospels, pray, and share dinner. The gym engaged his body. It demanded more from him than his mind. He left at night with more peace.
This Lenten prayer of Saint Ephraim I was learning in the monastery was more demanding, too. And it gave me a new peace. It strengthened my easily discouraged heart and pushed me to shed the spiritual fat that slows one down. It was the monks' burpee, a whole body spiritual rutina.
So I showed it to the guys at the jail a few months ago. It would be my first monastic contribution to the conversation we'd started the week before about ways to turn their lockdown sentence into a monk-like spiritual retreat and training.
But as we pushed the chairs in our circle back against the wall in the jail's cold, bare multipurpose room, I ended up talking about how much I myself—and so many other people who've never been to a monastery or a jail—need such practices.
Guys in red scrubs stood there as I talked about the wave of my generation pouring into yoga studios, where we can step out of our busy lives into a place set apart, out of a butt-in-chair overly cerebral posture at work, at a computer, and at church, and into a position where our bodies help our spirits open, where they stretch and rise and surrender together.
Learning how to use our time, in our cells or in our bedrooms, I said, requires some ancient practices.
"Like spiritual burpees," I added. "Something to use in your cells during lockdown."
The guys with tattoos on their scalps and necks nodded, smiled at each other, and we began Saint Ephraim's prayer of repentance together.
I'm not sure what the guards thought when they looked through their side of the observation mirror, or through the surveillance camera mounted high in the ceiling corner to watch a chaplain in sneakers and twelve other guys in red—bearded old white guys, Swinomish Natives, fidgety youngsters recently off meth, tattooed Mexican shotcallers in the cell block—all getting on the ground, butts in the air, surrendering, but not to the system. To something unseen.
With all the mixed signals firing between these highly guarded men in the circle with me, I'm not sure what each guy was thinking either. Many hesitated when we bent over, and placed our hands on the painted concrete floor.
But I could feel the group's tension dissolve as our heads touched the cold ground together, absorbed into a new, opened space of humility and mercy.
And a great silence, inside and out.
Chris Hoke works with Tierra Nueva in Washington State's Skagit Valley. His first book, WANTED: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders comes out from HarperOne in February 2015. Learn more at chris-hoke.com. Read part 1 in Chris's "Monasticism in Lockdown America" series for "Good Letters" here.
Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.]]>
After the ferry ride across the chilly waters with seagulls in the air, the drive through the woodsy, misty island on winding roads, away from major cities or even a simple corner store, and finally pulling up to a locked gate where I could push a button and announce myself as a visitor, I realized this was exactly like my visits to the various prisons in my state over the last ten years.
As a chaplain in my local Skagit County Jail, I end up visiting the men who are sentenced and shipped off to distant super-max security facilities. The complexes are guarded, somewhat hidden worlds, without much signage out front. There's usually an obscure road to turn down, and always the little intercom to announce yourself at the gate.
I drove up the hill, past huge, beautiful eight-pointed crosses and old-school icons of Christ, nestled among the mossy timbers and dripping sword ferns, watching me. But unlike how I tighten and tense up, stepping into a prison complex with its sharp surveillance, I felt my insides open; my senses expand inside this monastery's gate.
The monks at this little monastery—all three of them—were expecting me on this day.
After the youngest monk with his small, scraggly beard showed me to my cell, I washed up and approached the church. It had a blue onion dome on top, like in a small Russian village. The heavy door shut me behind me. It was dark and wonderful. Candles. Incense. Icons covering the walls. But it was small, the size of a living room, and had no chairs, no pews on which to sit down.
The books I'd begun to read on Orthodox worship had told me about this. It wasn't just about standing in the presence of God with reverence. The church—and especially the monastery—was a kind of spiritual gym, I'd read, where we are strengthened in mind, body, attention, and heart, to bear the weight of God's love. Where the illness of sin can be dealt with, overcome.
The liturgy talks about receiving Christ's body and life-blood "for the remission of sins." Remission, like what happens to a cancer survivor, with proper treatment and a full, healthy lifestyle.
So I followed along. The two elderly monks moving around up front, by the big icons, kept bowing. So I bowed. I stood. I listened as they chanted on. I shifted my weight when my legs got tired.
But there came a part in their prayerful workout that hit me like an especially good chorus in a new song. The old monk spread his arms, his back to me, and said, "O Lord and Master of my life, Give me not a spirit of idleness, despair, ambition, or empty talk."
And then he tried to kneel.
I later learned that after three decades of such daily bowing, kneeling, and prostrating round the clock, both he and the long-white-bearded abbot had undergone hip replacements.
When I saw his shaky hint at a prostration—I'd read about this too—I took it as an invitation, as a younger man, to sink down and fully kneel myself, alone in the back by the door. I rested my head on the ground. It felt refreshing. To name ambition, despair, and put my head with my palms on the carpet. It felt like something I'd needed for years but it hadn't been prescribed, or I'd forgotten it was available to me.
I wanted to stay there, in this posture that felt more right to me than most of my own wandering prayers.
The monk, however, was back upright now. "But rather," he continued, "a spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love—Give to me your humble servant."
And back down we went.
It went on like this for a few more strikingly vulnerable prayers. Up on feet, down flat on face, and back up.
It reminded me of the prison workouts so many gang members have taught me upon their release.
"Burpees," most inmates call them. Sometimes in their garages, sometimes in the apartment driveways between cars, sometimes in backyards, these guys proudly guide me through the motions that had kept them skinny, strong, and sane the years they were away.
To be continued tomorrow.
Chris Hoke works with Tierra Nueva in Washington State's Skagit Valley. His first book, WANTED: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders comes out from HarperOne in February 2015. Learn more at chris-hoke.com. Read part 1 in Chris's "Monasticism in Lockdown America" series for "Good Letters" here.
Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.]]>
They don't have their wives or girlfriends with them. They all wear the same plain garment—not black robes, but old red scrubs. Their hair often grows scraggly, as they—like monks—don't have many mirrors. They don't care what they look like. The food isn't very flavorful. They're cut off from what used to be their lives, their own hustles and habits.
Their contact with those outside—overpriced collect calls, the occasional letter—is limited. A good number of them spend a great deal of time praying, reading, writing, contemplating their lives on a level deeper than they would have outside these walls. They spend most of the day in small rooms called cells.
The most important and obvious difference, I tell them, is that the monks I've met choose to live this way.
The monks want to know God more fully. And they think such an environment can help. I tell the guys that the monks I've visited—both Catholic and Orthodox—seek in such cloisters to shed their false selves, turning away from their distractions and the illusions society offers. They seek to become bare before God, exposing their truest selves, their hidden need.
They want their hearts to be broken, and filled, and expanded with the love of God.
For thousands of years, I stress, men and women have thought such a stark environment to be helpful for such difficult work. A place set apart from the world to pray.
This is why, after all, I myself go to the jail.
I go as often as I can, at least one afternoon a week, if not more. When I tell the guys I wish I could stay the night, spend a few weeks or months in there with them, they laugh and say they can suggest all sorts of ways they can help me end up in there. We've several times, half-serious, brainstormed some technical infractions that could land me in there, red scrubs and all, with minimal damage to my ability to return as a chaplain one day.
But misdemeanors aside, the men in the circle of chairs often ask why I come at all, when I don't have to. "This is my favorite church," I say. "I've been coming here for years."
That part is no joke.
The mercy of God is what I seek. It is what I love. And so I want to be around it, the way my outdoorsy friends can't stay off the trails or off the Cascade peaks; the way birders' necks crane at the slightest song in the leaves; the way rock addicts stand front row at a concert and feel the raw emotion vibrate through their bones; the way art lovers frequent museums and galleries.
For me, nothing can beat that elusive, invisible rush of heavenly mercy making contact with a crushed heart. I want it to wash through me, repeatedly, to take the normal grime of boredom, ambition, anxiety, and despair off me, over and over again. I want it make me soft once again, soak my calloused edges, freshen my mind—that I might smell of bright, sweet tenderness and mercy when I leave, for a few hours, maybe.
I go to the jail as a volunteer chaplain the way drunks hit a local bar. Some wouldn't mind staying through the night.
Mercy, like music, hums better in certain venues, in certain conditions of heart. Monks, in their chosen walls, are keenly aware of their need for mercy. That is, their sin. And apart from a monastery, I tell the men, the jail is probably the best place to be among people who are also faced with what a mess they really are.
"So if you guys already have such a monastery-like place here, would you want to go ahead and learn some of the ways monks use their time? How to use your cells, in this merciless system, to become students of mercy? Want to learn some of the ways they think and pray, which I'm starting to practice in my own life?"
I've opened with something like this the last several groups I've led. It always surprises me how happy they seem with the whole idea.
I warn them that there're some repetitive, simple prayers and physical postures—lots of bowing, knees and hands and foreheads on the hard ground.
They're in, they tell me.
I guess I'm expecting that they'd ask me to get back to a Bible study as usual. Or just look around awkwardly at this monastic stuff. Or dispute the comparison between an abbey and jail.
But they've been into it. Maybe it's because these men facing criminal charges, trapped in a facility, are no different than the many of us on the outside looking for "spiritual retreats," visiting monasteries in deserts and on coastlines and in rural plains.
In my next few "Good Letters" posts, I will continue this small series exploring the overlap between monastic spirituality and the men I pastor who are inside the growing reality of "lockdown America"—a nation with more people behind bars, per capita, than any other in the world. I will recount specific practices we're trying inside the local jail, as well as a recent visit to an Orthodox monastery with a man just released from solitary confinement.
Till next month.
Chris Hoke works with Tierra Nueva in Washington State's Skagit Valley. His first book, WANTED: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders comes out from HarperOne in February 2015. Learn more at chris-hoke.com.
Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.]]>
I was a serious soccer player in high school, planned to play in college until a senior-year leg injury (not on the field) took me out, so I was ready to watch some soccer no matter who was playing; I didn't know about my family. They caught the excitement. We had not cheered this way for a sports team as a family ever before—even my kids who don't watch sports on television and don't particularly care for soccer.
But what I felt this time around watching the World Cup most strongly is a sense of pride in being American that I haven't felt for a long time. It appears that we are having dealings with the rest of the world on equal and friendly terms. Americans on the field are simply men on the field, just like the ones from Ghana and Portugal and Germany, and every other nation. There is competition, but it is (mostly) friendly, and filled with admiration for a well-played ball no matter who makes the play. (My wife has complained that it is still a world of men, and I can't disagree with that.)
Years ago I read an essay, and can't remember where, that traced our national character through sport. When baseball became our national sport, our culture was agrarian, small town. Long lazy afternoons in the heat of summer, when the crops were growing on their own, spent playing ball in a dusty field. Baseball is a pastoral sport, the essay claimed, studied and cerebral. The rise of football marks a shift from this pastoral ideal to a heroic warrior ideal. A calm evening of balls cracking on bats and glove slaps can no longer compete with the bursts of speed and violence that is smash-mouth football.
What of soccer in all of this? Does it really matter in the United States? When a British commentator said during the Belgium game, "Things are at a standstill in the United States," the bar burst out in laughter. Yet this bar was full with an audience (much younger than my friend and me) raised in soccer leagues.
Writing for Quartz, John McDuling observed that, "while soccer will never unseat baseball as the national pastime, or football as the national sport, it is finally settling into a sustainable place in the country's psyche."
Does our sport really mean anything about our character, or our relationship to the rest of the world? It is nice to think maybe it does, as Galia Press-Barnathan does when he writes, "The World Cup games indeed reflect and symbolize a sense of global fraternity and rejoicing in this popular and beautiful sport, and provide a stage for states to compete with each other and empower themselves by peaceful means."
On the evening of the Portugal game, I stood on the deck enjoying the warm ocean breeze and a garbage truck rumbled up to dump the trash from the previous cottage residents. Two Latino men jumped out in blue coveralls and bounded around the truck. The dirty green garbage bin came up to his shoulders, stuffed to overflowing with white bags.
When one of the men pulled on the bin, an empty milk jug fell out into the road. In smooth, graceful movements, he rainbow kicked the jug and juggled it: one, two, three, four, five times, caught it in his hands and threw it into the truck. When he glanced up at me, I gave him a thumbs-up and he responded with a grin and a nod. The men jumped in the truck and drove on, but in that momentary exchange, a feeling of good will passed between us—it was the World Cup, we both knew, that had created it.
Sports fans in the United States generally get their sense of community by gathering in a stadium with people they don't know for the most part to cheer for kids who are from somewhere else. The World Cup is different at least in that we can have this sense of national pride in our boys who played their hearts out and, as more than one commentator wrote, "left it all out there on the field." It felt good to cheer for our boys.
However, as Laurent Dubois points out, "John Brooks, Jermaine Jones, Timothy Chandler, Fabian Johnson, and Julian Green.… All five are the sons of African-American servicemen and German mothers, and four of them were born in Germany (Green was born in Florida but moved to Germany when he was 2). They grew up in Germany and, crucially, learned to play in the excellent football academies that have made that country the global football power that it is."
The United States is recruiting from its diaspora, which is "part of the massive and unequaled U.S. military presence abroad."
After the Portugal game, my sister laughed and read aloud a comedian's Tweet that the game almost made him want to learn the rules of soccer and find out where Portugal is. This made me think of another bit of humor I saw posted somewhere on social media a few years ago: "War is how the United States teaches its children geography."
Fleeting and insubstantial as it might be, it still felt good to be the United States on the international stage, dealing with other countries big and small, "without," as a man sitting at the bar beside me said, "feeling like we have to have our heels on everyone else's throat."
Vic Sizemore earned his MFA in fiction from Seattle Pacific University in 2009. His short stories are published or forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou'wester, Silk Road Review, Atticus Review, PANK Magazine Fiction Fix, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Conclave, and elsewhere. Excerpts from his novel The Calling are published in Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Prick of the Spindle, Burrow Press Review, Rock & Sling, and Relief. His fiction has won the New Millennium Writings Award for Fiction, and been nominated for Best American Nonrequired Reading and a Pushcart Prize. You can find Vic at http://vicsizemore.wordpress.com/.
Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.]]>
I recognize upon approaching this third score of years that the initial two have been largely peripatetic. The first score's wanderings were undetermined by me, contingent upon my parents' choices—graduate school, better jobs, a new house. Before the age of sixteen, I'd lived in ten different homes. My second score echoed the first for similar reasons, though its upheavals were at least ostensibly of my own choosing—the beginnings and ends of marriages, jobs, graduate schools.
Of all the places I've stopped and started, Mississippi will always be my home, a sort of default way of being as much as a place.
On sleepless nights, I close my eyes and trace the geography of the small town where my family spent the last twenty-five years, where I lived from fifth grade to high school graduation, and to which I have returned countless times, sometimes for months at a stretch. I map the homes along Grand Avenue in Yazoo City on the flat edge of the Delta, bestriding the last loess bluffs drenched with the new-grape smell of kudzu blossoms and the magenta extravagance of azaleas.
There are other sights as intrinsic in memory where my sojourns proved shorter—the wide-lawned Victorians of Hyde Park on the southwesterly fringes of Boston where once I made my home, its yards strewn with rhododendrons and flowering mountain laurel. Or the parched browns of California's San Joaquin Valley, the Sierra foothills visible on smog-free days, where spring begins in February with white and purple bursts from tulip trees and dogwoods.
In a life spent moving from place to place, the predictability of landscapes both new and familiar has been a comfort, a well-worn bead to click against another through every iteration of hunger and praise. One of the many pangs of such constant motion is to leave each place both loving and mourning all you have come to know, and to go forward with five kinds of homesickness equally shared, the scent of new terroir on your skin and your spirit forever dogged by the genius loci endemic to each site.
Now I'm doing something different: going somewhere I mean to stay for good.
If I was chosen, before the world's foundations, to belong to Mississippi, perhaps the edict was also levied that Minnesota—with its lakes, its corn-quilted farmland, its buried, white winters—would also be mine. I use the possessive here because it's the first thought that occurred to me the first time the man who would become my husband drove me down the gravel driveway to the small hobby farm where he was born and raised.
Maybe it was intuition, but as the road bent before me, and slopes of small hills gave onto the ice of a newly frozen lake, a nearly audible voice in me muttered, "Ah, mine. Mine."
I recognized it, as I had always recognized Mississippi. It was, just as Mississippi, as much a way of being, as place. And it was a place, I felt, that somehow knew me back.
And so, with circumstances finally right for the move, we are settling on that lake, just after that bend in the road, at the end of that particular driveway. My daughter will know its beauties and tediums by heart—both the summer raspberries and the late May snowmelt.
In moving there, however, we are leaving what by all objective standards is perhaps the most grand and impressive of any place I've ever lived—the Pacific Northwest. In our last few weeks here, I am trying to visit all the spots I've grown to love.
This morning, I drove my daughter, Ingrid, who turned eight-months-old today, to my old neighborhood of Queen Anne, atop of one of the highest hills in Seattle—a vantage point from which, on a clear day, one can see the Space Needle and the downtown skyline and Mount Rainier, looking more like a Japanese woodcut than an actual mountain. Turning right from that vista, the horizon is crested by the snowcapped Olympics and to the left by the snowcapped Cascades. Below traverse the barges and ferries of Puget Sound and on every side, another bungalow-bedecked hill.
I ordered my favorite coffee from my favorite coffee shop and walked with my daughter snuggled next to me in a carrier to the viewpoint at Kerry Park. I stopped for a good, long time. Ingrid, as is her wont, surveyed the buildings and rolling hills with focused intensity. "So this is Seattle?" she seemed to be thinking. "How interesting."
I found myself hoping, as I watched her, that even though she will likely remember none of this consciously, that the colors would infiltrate her subconscious—the scarlet of Seattle geraniums, the blue of Chinese lilac, the green of massive fir trees, and the glacier-riven white of Rainier. I found myself wishing for her the benediction of this place to carry through the aridity of whatever blank hours await her, and its clean-aired consolation as a talisman against any future loneliness.
I remember in high school underlining many passages of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The one that has come to me again and again through many partings has been this: "What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—it's the too-huge world vaulting us and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."
I don't know if, like her parents, Ingrid will need to wander a good, long time before she learns how to stand still. I consider it more than likely, for better or worse, that she will. But I hope that at night, even if only in dreams, she finds herself tracing the green hills of Seattle sloping down to Puget Sound, watching the ferries come and go, the snow clouds blanketing the rocky horizon.
A former regular contributor to "Good Letters," Kelly Foster Lundquist was the 2012-13 Milton Fellow. She graduated with the first cohort of the Seattle Pacific Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 2007. Her work has appeared in Image. She will soon be moving to Minnesota to teach English at North Hennepin Community College and to live beside the water with her family.
Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.]]>
—Paul Lawrence Dunbar, "Sympathy"
I first read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when I was thirteen. I discovered the book through an interview with Fiona Apple, one of the many female singer-songwriters whose mournful lyrics poured through my boom box speakers while I slogged my way through the kickboxing routine that, according to Seventeen, would slim my hips.
Thirteen was a difficult year; I was overweight, dorky, sarcastic, and sensitive. I spent my Friday nights eating Tombstone pizza and writing Tolkien fan fiction. And it was the last year my parents, whose marriage darkened our house, would live together under the same roof.
And what Angelou's work did in my life, in that year, was phenomenal..
I remember faking sick, as I often did, to stay home and read the book (which was a better education than what my failing middle school had to offer, anyway). It was November, and the piercing headache that had followed me for months only subsided when I was alone, listening to music or reading, away from my parents and the girls who bullied me at school.
"You are too damn smart," they would say when I spoke in class, their hair shiny from gel and glittering butterfly clips, their breasts perky beneath the powder blue uniform shirts that my mother had to buy in men's sizes for me. We had the same route walking home, and I often lingered in my teachers' classrooms at the close of day, hoping that by the time I left there would be enough of a distance between us for me to walk home in peace.
At home, the only true peace was absence: my mother at work, my father asleep. I stayed home when I could and sank into my books. And what I saw in Angelou's world, even though it was so different from mine, was a world that also felt like my own: a young woman whose surroundings sought to diminish her, but who remained distinct, alive, and beautiful.
People praise Angelou for giving voice to the personal lives of African Americans during the blight of Jim Crow. And while her work certainly provides a picture of that era, it is more portrait than documentary, the characters of her family and friends—her grandmother, her daddy, the salvific Bertha Flowers—charged with an intensity that resonated with me deeply, intuitively, despite my being white. Angelou's memoir illumined the inner lives of the people around her, demonstrating that racism and prejudice didn't just deny opportunity, but crushed and twisted people from the inside out.
But the book also showed me that people had incredible power to both change and remain constant, to seek beauty, to find something within themselves and the world that was not only worth loving, but worth loving rightly.
And it is through Mrs. Flowers, the elegant woman who invited Angelou over in the months after her rape and gave her cookies, tea, and poetry, that Angelou's words became the lifeline I caught. I saw what it meant to seek beauty, to welcome others. I wished that I had my own Mrs. Flowers, who would like me for just being Allison Backous.
But I also wished for the ache in my heart, which came from my parents' unhappiness, from our town's poverty, and from my own self-rejection, to be heard. I wished that I could give words to what I felt, and filled notebooks with rhyming poems that contained the words "undulating" and "convalescence" (which I learned from Fiona Apple).
After reading Angelou's memoir, I asked for her poetry for Christmas. And although it was a freer form than I was used to reading, I found in it a way to ward off the nasty girls at school, and the nastier thoughts that kept me up at night, my mother's car mysteriously absent from the driveway. Angelou's poetry held the power of self-assertion, affirmed the size of my hips, and told me that there was courage and strength in me that could not be silenced.
It was that courage that helped me through the next round of difficult years, my parents' divorce, my mother's desperate need and abandonment, her boyfriend's secret terrors. And to this day, that courage helps me carry my history and put it on the page.
When I have talked about the abuse that fills my family life, people have asked how I faced it all. What kept me going? Those are profound questions. I don't have full answers. Does anyone fully understand her life while she's living it?
But I keep flinging my plea upwards, my notebooks overflowing, my heart being slowly uncaged.
Allison Backous Troy lives with her son and husband in Laramie, Wyoming. A teacher and writer with an MFA from Seattle Pacific University, Allison is a former blogger for "Good Letters."
Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.]]>
One picture is a charcoal drawing of a human skull, my memento mori every morning as I sit down to work. The other three are curling snapshots from years ago hanging by a single thumb tack each.
The bottom one is of my boys at a cookout when Evan was not yet three and Asher was so young he could still delight himself to laughter just by running, happily unconcerned about his diaper-full of poop. The boys are in front of a picnic shelter in Kanawha Forest, and they are smudged and smeared face to bare feet with the grime of hard outdoor play. They are both squatting at a dog's metal water bowl, splashing in it with sticks.
The middle photo is of Evan on my sister Alma's lap. They both face the camera, her arms are wrapped around his chest and their faces are side by side—that they are related is clear by their sharp Sizemore chins.
The top photograph was taken by one of my employees at my old café, The Drowsy Poet. All three of the kids are at the sandwich board "helping" me prep for lunch. Asher and Grace are mangling mushrooms with serrated spreaders, and have stopped working to look at the camera. Grace still has a bit of a fat toddler head. At seven-years-old, Evan is slicing cucumber disks with a ten-inch bread knife. He looks down holding his fingers so carefully, his mouth tight in concentration, and his bangs splashed open at his cowlick.
Yesterday evening, Evan, my wife Liz, and I sat at the picnic table in our backyard near the woods. Despite the citronella candle, the mosquitos were thick, but the weather was so perfect we played out there anyway, swatting and waving as we rearranged tiles. Play was tight, jammed into the top right quarter for most of the game, none of us getting much for our words and no one willing to play a long word to break someone else out.
Then, at the end of the game, Evan pulled out a seven-letter word that earned him a quick sixty-two points. Liz and I made our plays, and the very next time, Evan traded out the blank tiles and created yet another seven-letter word, racking up seventy-eight points and soaring to the win.
After my writing time this morning, I ran over to the college to grab a couple of books from my office. I pulled a book off the shelf that I hadn't opened in many years, to look for a passage that a friend's Facebook post had me thinking about. In it I discovered a picture of Evan I didn't even remember we had.
He is probably four years old, and he is in the backyard, unaware that he is being photographed. He holds his shirt up off his belly with his chin and chest, and his pants and underwear are gathered around his ankles as he pees on a tree.
Typical memories wash over me: the boy so fascinated with the world asking endless questions, the boy always ready to dive on me and wrestle, and play a roughhouse game—with his brother Asher, and eventually baby Gracie as well—that he had named "powie."
In the midst of all our preparation for Evan's graduation, and the end of the school year for Asher and Grace, the only thing I can think to do in the face of dire news and scary forecasts is hug my young man when he comes in from school and heads for the refrigerator, and his brother and sister as well.
The boys might find it odd because that's not generally how I greet them after school—Gracie not so much since I hug on her all the time—but not so much that they will ask what's going on.
I am glad, because I would only say something like, "Can't a dad hug his boy?" What I would mean is this: You were out there, and again this time you came back, and that is reason enough.
Vic Sizemore earned his MFA in fiction from Seattle Pacific University in 2009. His short stories are published or forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou'wester, Silk Road Review, Atticus Review, PANK Magazine Fiction Fix, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Conclave, and elsewhere. Excerpts from his novel The Calling are published in Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Prick of the Spindle, Burrow Press Review, Rock & Sling, and Relief. His fiction has won the New Millennium Writings Award for Fiction, and been nominated for Best American Nonrequired Reading and a Pushcart Prize. You can find Vic at http://vicsizemore.wordpress.com/.
Note: This post was originally published on the Image Journal blog Good Letters.]]>


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Add an 80's theme to an upcoming party of event! Use these party tips to help you set up for an 80's theme party, complete with decorations, food ideas and more.
Add a Pink and Gold Color Scheme to Your Party!
Throwing a party? Try using a mix of pink and gold colors to create the color scheme for your party décor. This color combination can be used for birthday parties, bridal parties, baby showers, and much more!