The Unclad Soul

I am fighting pessimism. I do not want to be sour and gloomy and see only all that is wrong in our country and the world. I am trying to not believe we are at the edge of the abyss staring into the darkness. The poet Mary Oliver has written, “My concern for the world is a sorrowful business.” I have that concern as well. I struggle to breathe easier, to lessen the stresses, to find a place beyond the hard realities of this current debacle that is our nation and its defective government. My Facebook friend, Shelley Henderson, shared an astonishing poem from the brilliant Kate Tempest, titled, “Brand New Ancients.” In it, she writes, “In the old days, the myths were the stories we used to explain ourselves But how can we explain the way we hate ourselves? The things we’ve made ourselves into, the way we break ourselves in two, the way we overcomplicate ourselves? We are still permanently trapped somewhere between the heroic and the pitiful.” ...

I asked Ingrid on the way to school the other morning if she could remember when she stopped believing in Santa Clause. She’s 13 now and I miss those days when she would stand by the tree in her Dora pajamas and chatter about Santa coming. She didn’t hesitate to answer my question. She said, “The year Santa never ate the cookies and milk.” Pilar and I were together then and we all lived in the house—Ingrid, her mom Claudia, and Pilar’s mom, Olivia, and Pilar and me. I remember I had set out the cookies and milk after Ingrid was in bed asleep and I always ate them before I went to bed and then would leave a note saying how good they were, signed by Santa. But that night for some reason, maybe I was just too sleepy, I went off to bed and left them there on a little stool by the tree. I don’t remember Ingrid saying much about it at the time. But apparently when she saw the cookies and milk untouched on Christmas morning, all the doubts she’d had about the whole Santa enterprise, fina...