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Into your hands God has pressed one of the sublimest opportunities that ever came into the hands of the women of any race or people. It is yours to create a healthy public sentiment; to demand justice, simple justice, as the right of every race; to brand with everlasting infamy the lawless and brutal cowardice that lynches, burns, and tortures your own countrymen.

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It is eleven o’clock in the evening. The children are in bed. I am sitting on the couch in my living room attempting to read. My eyes have tracked one page three times without connecting. My mind is wandering. Read more →

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I wanted to see Harriet Tubman’s grave.

I wanted to see it enough that I drove from Boston, Massachusetts, to Rochester, New York, about 400 miles, for a speaking gig I ordinarily would have flown to. Tubman is buried in Auburn, New York, close to Rochester. Read more →

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How shall we mend you, sweet Soul?
What shall we use, and how is it
in the first place you’ve come to be torn?
Come sit. Come tell me.
We will find a way to mend you.

I would offer you so much, sweet Soul:
this banana, sliced in rounds of palest
yellow atop hot cereal, or these raisins
scattered through it, if you’d rather.
Would offer cellos in the background singing
melodies Vivaldi heard and wrote
for us to keep. Would hold out to you
everything colored blue or lavender
or light green. All of this I would offer you,
sweet Soul. All of it, or any piece of it,
might mend you.

I would offer you, sweet Soul,
this chair by the window, this sunlight
on the floor and the cat asleep in it.
I would offer you my silence,
my presence, all this love I have,
and my sorrow you’ve become torn.

How shall we mend you, sweet Soul?
With these, I think, gently
we can begin: we will mend you with a rocking
chair, some raisins,
a cat, a field of lavender beginning
now to bloom. We will mend you with songs
remembered entirely the first time
ever they are heard.

We will mend you with pieces of your own
sweet self, sweet Soul — with what you’ve taught
from the very beginning.

From the meditation manual, Instructions in Joy, by Rev. Nancy Shaffer, published by Skinner House in 2002. Available from the CLF library or (617) 948-6150.

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I was standing beside a small mountain waterfall at a Shinto shrine in the mountains outside Nagoya during my first visit to Japan. The Guji, or head priest, of the Tsubaki Grand Shrine had invited me to take part in a Shinto cleansing ritual called misogi. The ritual practice involves stepping into the waterfall and allowing the water to cleanse not only the body but also the spirit.

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