Blog o’ Gnosis

One of the most profound spiritual experiences I ever had was during a guided meditation led by Andrew Harvey. I was taking a class from him on my way to earning a doctorate, and the instruction he gave us was quite simple but changed completely my orientation to Spirit.

Basically, we went on an inner journey through a specific landscape, and then got to a place where we came face to face with our image of the Divine. Being asked the question, “What does the Divine look like to you?” threw me into complete confusion. I had a whole Rolodex of images of God/dess, beginning with the Christian God of my youth, and extending into all the Deities I had encountered and worked with over many years. I literally imagined rifling through the card file, trying on each image in succession. Brigid? No. Jesus? No. Lugh? No. Yemaya? No. Snowy-bearded God guy? No.

This was getting interesting. None of the faces I knew of deity fit when I tried to imagine that fire at the center of my heart, which felt like my connection to Spirit. So what was it, that connection? What was I connecting to? When I focused on the sensation, gradually a wholly unexpected image drifted to the surface of my mind. It was a golden, shining being, androgynous, more light than substance, and shifting so that I could see all those other images in it, but none could encompass it. Compared to this Presence, my whole Rolodex was like a closet of used clothing.

Somehow I had managed to reach forty years of age while avidly studying, learning, and teaching others about spirituality, without being asked or asking myself that simple question. How was that possible? What other tremendous insights was I overlooking, by not taking the time to ask seemingly obvious questions? I had no explanation for this bizarre oversight in my spiritual education, but that experience taught me the importance of starting at the core and proceeding outward, rather than beginning on the outside with a story or image and bringing it in.

I have had the pleasure recently of lingering with a book that asks these seemingly obvious questions in a probing yet open-handed way. Like Catching Water in a Net: Human Attempts to Describe the Divine, by Val Webb, is a very readable, thoughtful consideration of why and how we name our experience of Spirit. Webb, a theologian, scientist, and Religious Studies lecturer in Australia, digs deep into Sufi, Buddhist, Hindu, Mesopotamian, Hebrew, Aboriginal, and Christian texts and images to illustrate some of the ways humans have answered those big questions over time.

Webb’s writing style is very clear and straightforward. She weaves together history, scripture, philosophy, and theology in a way that does not favor the academic or the  poetic, but rather draws both to the table. I recommend this book highly to anyone who would like to delve more deeply into their own conceptions of Spirit, and those like me who have always been curious about the genesis of certain religious ideas and assumptions, but were looking for the right book on the subject to come along. This is the book.

It was a perfect day. The breeze was steady, bringing up whitecaps on the water, and the sun shone through it revealing all the shades of color in the sea. Breakers of pale glass-green gave way to aqua where the water deepened, interspersed with the heaving browns of kelp beds. The tendrils lifted and swayed in the surf, playing with the eye by sometimes appearing as weaving fronds, sometimes as the bobbing heads of seals lazing in the sun-warmed water.

After a long drive up the coast and lunch in Timber Cove, we got back into the car and headed home. I felt sated and relaxed, happy, at ease. Thinking of a perfect day tossed up like a jewel from the sea, I said, “Life is good.”

He said, “And it’s going to get better now,” with a finality that made me turn my head. I felt all the levels at which I needed to believe that was true. A parade of responses floated across my mind’s eye: denial jokes, teasing banter, changes of subject. I let them all go by, and finally said, “I have that on tape,” as though daring him to take back those words.

Without glancing from the road, and in a quiet, deep voice, he simply replied, “Good.”

This is my Lammas harvest. Old stories are wiped clean from the slate like prayers sent off into the ether, while the answers to our dream questions slowly emerge, taking shape in the flesh, on the page, bursting through the soil of night and into the waking world.

Amazingly, those items on my to-do lists keep getting crossed off. It takes me longer to get things done than I think it ought to, and I tend to get impatient with myself. In times like these, two things come in very handy. One is keeping those completed lists on my desk for a few extra days, so I can remind myself of how much I have actually accomplished. The other is to remember what it was like working for other people.

When I did administrative work, it was nearly impossible to complete any major task because there were constant distractions, both from my employers and from other employees. The same to-do list that I nearly completed this week in my own office would have taken me twice or three times as long to get through, if I were still working for someone else.

Still, the writing suffers. Every task that I can possibly think of comes before I sit down to write. I know that eventually I will just have to knuckle under and do it, but meanwhile I did manage to do one writing-related task. I found all the blog posts I have written here about Reclaiming, and created a page which lists them all.

I have amassed quite a collection of Reclaiming posts, as it turns out, and it was kind of fun to sort them all out and add commentary to each one. The beauty of writing, of course, is being able to control the narrative of any given event. In this task I was also able to dictate the meta-narrative, which is even more thrilling.

So while this isn’t an earth-shattering post by any means, at least it will serve to alert friends and foes of Reclaiming that there is now, over on the sidebar just below the blogroll, a helpful index of all my supportive, and not-so-supportive, comments from the past few years. That should be worth at least an afternoon of procrastination for anyone working in an office or, Goddess forbid, on writing projects of your own.

I remember one summer day when I was about 12 years old, walking home from the closest store to our house. It was a two mile walk along the hot, dusty ridge trail that wound like a ribbon of young pines and dry grasses between the north and south lanes of Skyline Boulevard in Oakland.

I didn’t have enough money to buy something that would really quench my thirst, so I was sweaty and miserable before I’d even left the parking lot. I would have given anything not to walk two more miles in the blistering heat. I forgot why the trip had seemed like a good idea in the first place.

All I wanted was a fast-forward button. I fantasized about reaching out my index finger and pushing a simple button which would magically skip me forward to my cool room again without having to take another step. How lovely that would be, to already be back home, and to avoid all the suffering of the next forty minutes.

But since I was being honest with myself, I had to admit that I wouldn’t stop there. I would proceed to fast-forward through the next two years of my life until high school—well, okay, through all the years of my life before I could leave home and move out on my own. Because surely sometime in my future there would be a time when I was not miserable—and here I was not just talking about the heat—when I would feel happy, loved, and in the right place.

This scene neatly sums up the lesson which has defined my entire adult life: resisting the urge to flee. Or rather, living with that urge, sometimes giving in and sometimes holding firm.

Both resisting and giving in have served me well. I stayed in a difficult marriage for many years, to give my children the most stable home life possible. When it was obviously time to leave, I had the strength to go and not return.

Neither staying nor going ever prevent the heart from breaking. All we can hope to influence is in what place and under what conditions the heart breaks open, because it will: unavoidably, regularly, and without concern for whatever else we might wish to be doing.

Anybody who hopes to live somehow without feeling heartbreak should not choose writing as a profession. The best writing comes tinged with loss, with the page edges torn and tattered from the gale force winds whipping through the writer’s open heart. On the other hand, it is nearly impossible to write while coping with a huge loss.

I should be more specific. It is not impossible for me to write now that my father is dead. What is difficult is writing publicly while feeling those gale force winds. The urge to fast-forward, to gloss over my actual experience and move into the abstract, is tempting. There are many things I could write now in this way, with a reasonable effort. They might even be worth reading.

But the part of me that is by now familiar many times over with the withering trail knows otherwise. Going slowly when things are the most difficult—that is the key. Staying loyal to the unfinished thoughts, resisting the urge to sum up, fingering gently the ragged edges of the heart. This is where I am. It is almost beyond my ability to tolerate. Almost. Thank goodness for practice.

…this may be the year when people aside from my kids get really tired of me saying “I told you so” all the time. Case in point: this blog post detailing how Toyota is worried about being perceived as an old people’s car. They have replaced Sly and the Family Stone in their ads with a band I’ve never heard of, which must mean they’ll attract that youthful demographic, right? You know, the youth who have no student loan debt, pristine credit, and jobs which pay them enough to afford a new car. Right.

I am also reading with interest the nervous reports from the Left about Barack Obama flip-flopping on the FISA bill, public election financing, and other issues. This is being written about ad nauseum in blogs the world over, so I won’t waste too much time on it. Just to be clear, I’ve got no problem with Obama being a centrist Democrat. I just had a problem with the people who insisted (and still insist) that he’s not. Now that he has been revealed as a mere mortal with an affinity for power, I hope people vote for him anyway.

That’s it for me this week. I wish I had something more interesting to post, but I guess I’m on bereavement leave for a while. I am wrung out, and not only from the extreme heat and terrible air quality around here. Hopefully I can get back to my weekly blogging schedule before too long.

On a positive note, even amidst the surreality of my father’s death I have come up with a couple potentially amusing future blog topics. Yesterday, for instance, I met a friend at the excellent Green Apple Books in SF. As I browsed through the voluminous used book bins out front, I realized that there is a whole list of rules to be generated on how to quickly weed out promising bargain books from immediate rejects. The first rule on the list: anything with “idiom” in the title is automatically thrown out. Even though it’s probably the cheapest book in there. (92¢!)

I live in one of the few places in Sonoma County where there is a shred of freshness in the air today. The wind is blowing fierce, the sky is like a milky soup with streaks of rust from all the fires burning, but at least here the smoke mingles with a layer of fog sitting just off the coast, and it is possible to see small patches of almost-blue in the sky, to the west. They are faint as phantoms, and if you focus hard they disappear, but even the hint of a clear sky helps restore sanity.

A few days ago I joined a California disasters email group, where it is possible to get hourly updates on all fires and other critical conditions in the state as they unfold. The traffic is so heavy on the list that I opted for the digest version; even then I have been getting two or three email digests per day. I scanned the messages once but couldn’t bring myself to read them. I was safe; the fires were striking other places; that was all I really needed to know right then.

I spoke with a good friend in Willits today, who said that the air was so thick with smoke it was impossible to even take a walk without feeling sick. He was in Santa Cruz over the weekend, and standing on a bluff looking south toward Big Sur he could see the enormous black thunderheads come in off the ocean, striking dry lightning across the landscape. And from every lightning strike there soon rose a column of smoke. Literally hundreds of fires were set this way over the weekend, some of which are being left to burn as firefighters concentrate on the most threatening ones first.

I went to Oakland this Saturday, the morning that my father collapsed at the pool and died. As I sat with my sister and my mother, who was still in shock, I noticed the air getting hazier outside. I had to do something, in between calling people, reminding ourselves of other people to call, waiting for the coroner’s report, and answering calls from those who had heard the news.

So I checked my email on his computer, the new one I helped him buy and that he never fully mastered. He was frustrated by the tremor in his hands; no matter how I adjusted the keyboard sensitivity he always ended up pressing the wrong keys and his letters to friends ended up looking like a scrabble game.

I had been planning to spend time with him this coming weekend, maybe all of Monday morning, helping with his latest email woes and teaching him again how to use his scanner. Instead I cleaned up his desktop, deleted all his junk email, and started sending notices to his friends and colleagues. I re-set the keyboard to how I like it, and then, unable to begin writing his obituary, I started reading about all the fires.

My mom and I went outside for a while, I forget why, and the air had gotten palpably thicker. I was on the verge of pointing it out to her, but then thought the better of it. There are some moments of personal crisis which are made transcendent by knowledge of simultaneous collective “disturbances in the Force.” This would not be one of them. For her, at 74 losing her mate of almost 50 years, a reminder that the hills were a blazing inferno would be in no way comforting.

So I kept the news to myself as I read the laundry lists of fires, each identified by acronym, with details of how many acres were affected, what percentage was contained, and which neighborhoods were being evacuated. I wrapped myself in quilts of town names, roads closed, and evacuation centers opened. I tried reading other things, but somehow the short, declarative statements of the fire reports were all I could absorb.

For years I tried to get my father to write about his life, but he always resisted. Maybe I was really talking to myself all those years, because now when I try to remember the stories he told me, I find that I can only think of the ones I wrote down. I wrote about one memorable lunch here, and our most recent lunch here. It turns out that was the last time I ever saw him alive. We spoke on the phone twice after that, but were due for another visit which now will never happen—at least, not on this side of the veil.

There are tragedies, and then there are tragedies. My father died on the Summer Solstice. He was 81 years old, had led a full life, and left swiftly while surrounded by friends, doing what he loved. If there must be a sacrifice at the sun’s zenith, let it be this. I will miss him terribly—I do already—but I can’t begrudge him a quick death before his growing infirmities robbed him of joy.

The sky now at sunset is tinged red all around. There is no escape from the smoke, and the black thunderclouds are riding across the Valley, slowly advancing on the tinder-dry Sierras. We are being hit hard this fire season, even those of us not in the path of the flames. Tomorrow I will view my father’s body. Monday I will speak at his memorial. In between, there are countless tasks and trials. The wind outside is cold and damp, acrid, and stings the eyes. It also carries the faint whisper of freedom.

A couple years ago, I wrote about how singing and especially songwriting was one of my personal indicator species—those activities which, by their presence in my daily routine, mean that I am functioning at my fullest. By their absence, I can measure the level of stress that I am under. When they return, it is like I have just noticed that the sun is out and am able to take a full, deep breath.

Now that I have my own place, it is dawning on me that perhaps there are other soul-health indicators that I have been unaware of all this time. I have never had a garden of my own, to design and plant and care for just the way I want. For the past couple years there has been too much going on to do more than punt in the garden here: plant a few things, see if the deer eat them, water them when I remember, and hope they survive.

I made a few good choices: an apple and fig tree which thrive in the coastal climate, a bay tree (laurel nobilis) which gently demarcates the front yard from the side yard and gives me pungent leaves for cooking. Somehow those got watered enough, and with deer netting around them they are growing well into their second year.

Other choices weren’t so wise, and I won’t bother to list them. But this year I was determined to get started on the project I have always wanted to create: an herb garden. Specifically, I wanted to grow the herbs that I use in my work with dreams: mugwort, valerian, skullcap, lavender, hops, verbena, angelica, rose, sage, rosemary, and a few others. I figured if I started small, with one or two plants of each, chances were that I could keep up with maintenance and harvesting, and eventually make dream pillows with homegrown herbs.

It turns out that even starting small is a lot of work! Finding good medicinal herb plants is not easy, for one thing. Then planting them in neglected beds meant that I had to attend to the woody stragglers planted in years previous that were barely hanging on. I kept at it, weeding and sheet mulching and hooking everything up to a drip. In some cases, that meant ripping out and re-creating an entire bed taken over by spearmint, or doing a morning’s excavation of the old drip system, parts of which were blocked and parts which were leaking like a sieve.

By early this month I had everything in the ground and hooked up to the drip. There are still a few mysteries, like what is eating my marigolds (deer and insect resistant!) to the ground, and what that strange color on one of the roses is. But there have also been wonderful finds, like a pitcher sage that survived three years with no care whatsoever, and two types of honeysuckle that hid from the deer and are bouncing right back to grow over a trellis.

In one bed there was a French lavender that I feared the worst for, but pruned back and watered anyway. I checked on it two weeks ago, and it was full and bushy and loaded with stalks of unripened flowers. So over the full moon this week I have been doing my first Summer Solstice harvest of lavender, as well as rosemary. My dining room table is piled high with fragrant herbs soon to be hung upside-down in bunches in my shed, along with a tray of Spanish moss harvested from a cypress tree near the beach.

Being an herbalist has been a lifelong dream of mine, and I had thought it was brought on by all the young adult fiction I read as a girl, where there was a wise old woman living in a cottage somewhere who had healing plants growing all around her. It turns out that it has been part of my nighttime dreaming too, for just as long. Digging in the ground these past few weeks I started remembering many dreams I have had through the years of finding the woman with the herb garden and listening to her stories.

In a sense, this whole full moon has been a waking dream for me, where I rise in the morning and step outside into a long-forgotten dream that is now being tended, and watered, and bearing its first harvest. I pick my herbs and carry them inside, notice what plants are growing well and which need more care, and give them all a drink before the heat of the day.

When I go back inside to sit at my desk, the garden outside keeps growing. I feel buoyed by the life in the ground, the fragrant herbs scenting my fingers and clothes, the color reflected back to me through my windows. It is a good feeling—a great feeling—new, yet vaguely familiar.

I find myself sifting through other people’s dreams now, searching for the dried-up survivors of ancient dreams which keep appearing and refuse to die, calling out for water, waiting to bloom again. The tenacity of the soul, and the speed with which it can recover from years of neglect: these are the gifts of my first dream harvest.

It is amazing, the human capacity to make do and get by, when really we would prefer an entirely different set of circumstances. Perhaps this adaptive trait is what has made us such a successful species—but I didn’t start this post to talk about evolutionary biology. Heavens no!

No, I am excited to spread the word about a major new development in the increasingly adrift world of media outlets. Newspapers across the nation are tanking, newsrooms at every major network are having their budgets slashed, and even the internet has not been able to pick up the slack in terms of investigative journalism—with notable exceptions, of course.

Yesterday, however, I found out via Jeff Jarvis that a new, independent, investigative journalism enterprise has started up, ProPublica. From their “Who We Are” blurb:

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that will produce investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work will focus exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We will do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them…

We have created an independent newsroom, located in Manhattan and led by some of the nation’s most distinguished editors, and staffed at levels unprecedented for a non-profit organization. Indeed, we believe, this is the largest, best-led and best-funded investigative journalism operation in the United States.

Yay! This just makes me incredibly happy. They have created six categories for the stories they produce: Business & Money; Justice & Law; Energy & Environment; Government & Politics; Media & Technology; and National Security. You can subscribe to RSS feeds for any or all of these categories, or just browse their main page to see the stories posted since they started, in late April.

I could go on about how blog-based software (which is what they’re using) is revolutionizing both collaborative publishing and website development in general, but that would bore even me. And I will leave it to others to say hopeful things about how this will hasten the return of the democratic process to our suffering nation. Instead, I’m going to head over there right now and start reading.

Yesterday afternoon I was preparing for my first class on Children in Contemporary Paganism, to be held online that evening through Cherry Hill Seminary, by reading some of the articles assigned to my students. The first piece was a lovely essay by my old friend Mary Klein, and as I read it I remembered the time I met her (now teenage) son Robbie. Mary and Dave had come to one of our first May Day parties, and Robbie had all the enthusiasm of an almost-toddler eager to walk, but not yet able to walk alone. I have never seen a child take so many trips across a lawn and back, gripping tightly to the fingers of one or the other of his hunched-over parents. Mary and Dave were patient and good-humored, in spite of having aching backs by the end of the afternoon.

I read four articles in all, written by friends of mine and published in the Reclaiming Quarterly over the past decade. They reminded me of earlier articles that I had published about Pagan parenting, back when the Quarterly was the humble Reclaiming Newsletter. And because my mind loves nothing better than a juicy tangent, I decided I must then and there dig up my old back-issues and see if I could find those articles.

Hours later, the class was about to begin, I had a desk full of stapled copies of some old pieces, and my scanner was busy making a final PDF of a long-forgotten poem I’d written about my daughter’s birth. I was not as prepared for the class as I had hoped to be, but taking the winding trip through my closets to unearth the box and sift through old newsletters had done me a world of good.

When I first got involved with Reclaiming, in the mid-80s, I read every newsletter I could get my hands on. I craved the backstory on all these people I had just met, and wanted to understand both the personal and the political dimensions behind every topic.

In the pages of the newsletter there were arguments about how much to charge for classes (Cerridwen Fallingstar against just about everyone else, as I recall), humor pieces from the fictional housecleaner Hannah Clancy, rants from Rose Dance and Moher Downing, poetry by Francesca Dubie (before she became DeGrandis), and hilarious send-ups of favorite liturgy, like the one at right. I inhaled it all. These were my people, my new tribe, and I loved hearing about their conflicts just as much as their inspirations. It made them all the more human to me, and therefore more authentic, which allowed me to both trust them and not put them (or the tradition) on a pedestal.

As the Newsletter morphed into the Quarterly, I gradually lost interest in its content. It became more of a platform for a particular subset of our thoughts and ideals, and seemed to lose its earlier focus of intense, engaged discussion. This is not in any way a criticism of the dedicated people who kept the quarterly in print throughout that time. Having worked on the newsletter for many years myself, I know how much hard work is involved, and how difficult it is to keep up that kind of commitment over the long term.

The change was due to a number of factors, not the least of which was the decentralization of Reclaiming and its growth both nationally and internationally. With the rising popularity of blogging over the last five years or so, many of us loosely (or not so loosely) connected to Reclaiming have developed our own forums for thinking about, and talking about, the topics of the day. It has been thrilling to re-connect with old friends like Robin Weaver, Kevin Roddy, Pandora, and Sharon Jackson through the blogosphere, even as I become acquainted with many newer people through their own blogs.

Now, it appears that the Reclaiming website will be supporting this constellation of conversations, by listing prominently all the blogs hosted by Reclaiming-affiliated folks. I look forward to this major change, and not because I think it will drive more traffic to my blog. If anything, the Reclaiming site will see increased traffic from all our blogs being linked to it.

As an old-timer, and somewhat tangential to the extended Reclaiming community, I will love having easier access to what people are saying in other regions. But as a newcomer to the clan, I would love it even more. The backstory! The drama! The differences! Ultimately, our blogs are testimony to how people can disagree and yet maintain common connections. I would be the last person to characterize Reclaiming as a utopian social experiment that succeeded, but it has somehow supported a culture of inquisitiveness and a great many people who are skilled at expressing themselves verbally and in writing. That is something any tradition should be proud of, and enthusiastically share with the world.

One of my early memories is of being six years old, getting ready to go to school early one morning. My mother had turned on our small black and white TV, and on it I saw a long, solemn procession moving slowly down a street, with many people bearing a raised casket in the middle of the crowd (or was it a long hearse?). The sight filled me with an intense grief that I didn’t understand, and I had to start wailing and running around the house. My mother was startled and tried to shush me, and my father herded me out the door to school with my sister, without another word about it.

Years later I was able to piece back together the scene, and realized that it was Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral ceremony I had seen on television that morning. My parents, never big Kennedy fans, had not been paying attention to the broadcast at all, but it affected me deeply. The scene came up again in a major recurring dream I had when I was nine, and to some extent has remained with me throughout my life.

I believe what I was feeling was collective grief, the sense shared by so many that a great hope had been lost. It is impossible to view our current election season—or any presidential race, for that matter—without hearing that cultural overtone ring loudly again when things heat up. As they are doing now, with or without help from the upcoming anniversary of RFK’s assassination on June 5, 1968????????.

My first civic post was in second grade, when I was elected secretary of our class council. I thought secretary was a modest position to start with, but my true ambition was to be President of the United States. Not the first woman president, just president. By fifth grade I had rethought that career plan, and decided it would be nice to be on the Newbery Award Committee instead, as I would get to read all the best children’s fiction each year.

In ninth grade, my last year of junior high, I ran for president of the student body. Twice. To this day, I do not know what possessed me to run again the second semester after having been defeated the first. All I can come up with is that I genuinely thought I would do a great job, and felt that I was a better candidate than the others. I don’t remember any adult trying to dissuade me from running, but I remember all too well the hurt that came from defeat. My sole consolation was that, according to the vice principal, I had picked up 200 more votes the second time around.

The first time I ran, my chief opponent was my friend and classmate Jacques Hébert. Everyone loved Jacques. He came from a well-respected African American family, he was tall, good-looking, athletic, smart, and kind. Of course Jacques won, and I didn’t really begrudge him the loss. The second time around I lost to another of the most popular boys in school, but he didn’t have nearly the character or intelligence of Jacques. That one hurt.

All this came back to me this morning, as I puzzled over the dream I had just before waking. In the dream, I see Barack Obama drinking coffee in a café. I greet him, he is an old friend on the lecture/writing/traveling circuit, like several people I know. He looks absolutely exhausted, so I invite him over to my house for dinner and a rest before moving on to his next gig. He accepts gladly.

We drive over in my car, and when he comes into the kitchen I introduce him to my two daughters who are seated at the counter. I tell them, “Say hello to Barack Obama,” and then it occurs to me that this will be a huge deal for them, because they might be meeting the next president of the United States. But to me there is no glamour, he’s just an old friend.

This dream was surprising to me, mostly because I have not been a big Obama supporter. I never trusted his rhetoric about a “new type of politics.” It has always seemed to me that anyone with the ambition to be President must have an astute grasp of politics in general, and “new” or “old” is just a marketing term. His health care proposal, compared to that of Edwards and Clinton, was disappointing, and combined with his inexperience and conciliatory stance toward the right wing of Congress, I feared that the net effect of an Obama presidency would be a profound disillusionment among his ardent followers.

That to me has been the most worrisome aspect of his candidacy: the inevitable popping of the hope bubble, and the damage it will do to the young people who are now engaged in our political system because of his campaign of hope and change. I fundamentally do not want to see another generation become as apathetic and cynical about the process of democracy as my generation has been. And too, I don’t think I can bear to go through more years of political disappointment myself, either.

Yet my dream felt like an admission that he would in fact be the Democratic nominee, something that until today I had not really come to terms with. Obama’s anointing by the Kennedy clan is just another unsettling tone added to the cacaphony of hopes, dreams, fears, and projections already swirling around the country. That cultural harmonic of hope betrayed is ringing loud and clear, and I dread the coming months.

I am not one of those Clinton supporters who would vote for McCain—Gods forbid he ever enters the White House again except by invitation to tea. At least if I do vote for Obama, as seems inevitable at the moment, my dream reminds me that it will be a strategic choice, not a romantic one.

And the fact that Obama looks a lot like my old friend Jacques—I will just try to put that out of my mind. Of course the qualified woman loses to the cute guy in the class. I was really hoping that dynamic would change before my daughters were of voting age, but it looks like we will have to wait another several years before a woman has a chance to just be elected president.