Love - Transformational, Revolutionary
Making Sense in Senseless Times
“Peacebuilding: Sequence and order uncertain. It circles. It seeds. It tends to deep roots. Suggested approach: Stay humble and know that everything touches everything. It’s a relational thing. - John Paul Lederach
I think it is easy to fall into the kind of thinking that would assume my most important contributions to the betterment of the world and the realization of the highest ideals of a now 250 year old experiment in democracy would be directly and nationally political. And yes, I do believe in the importance of being an engaged citizen, educating myself with factual information and staying aware of the politics of the day. I’ll do my part. And yet, so often my own experience aligns with Tip O’Neill’s quote “all politics are local” and to John Paul Lederach’s description of peace building as the understanding that “everything touches everything” and “it’s a relational thing.”
This week as we marked a significant birthday for the bold, beautiful, flawed experiment (which is us) I had to ponder how to talk about my own complex feelings. I think about my friend Parker J. Palmer’s description of patriotism as the ability to continue to aspire to the ideas of equality, liberty and justice while acknowledging our imperfect/brutal history — and that patriotism can and will call us to be in a lover’s quarrel with current policies and our national state of affairs. Currently, I find myself bewildered and grief stricken as some of our most important steps forward in the past hundred years are under attack or already rolled back. I search myself to know how to even begin to express my concern over a leader and movements within this country that endorse a kind of greed, corruption, self aggrandizement and callousness to suffering I find breathtaking in depth and scope.
I think about the sage wisdom of the original peoples of this country when they based important decisions upon how it would effect seven generations from that moment in time. I think about an interdependence and wisdom that understood the tangible ways in which their communities were living out decisions made seven generations before their time.
All that said, I return to the question of how do I hold what do I not “pledge allegiance to” and still love the world, love my community, love the ideals and ideas that continue to make deep and abiding sense to me —like care and kindness, like interdependent relationship, like hope based in daily loving action?
So perhaps this how we celebrate July 5th, on the day after the fireworks of American Independence Day has given us a moment to pause and reflect upon our national hopes and aspirations for a more perfect union. Let us consider what we love, what preserves and provides, how we are truly interdependent, and how to “pledge allegiance” to all that is beautiful, true — serving us today and for seven generations beyond.
Carrie
Making Sense - or I pledge allegiance
I pledge allegiance to a drop of dew
Wobbling on a broccoli leaf,
To the silver pattern on a zucchini frond
A perfect spiral at the center of a cabbage head.
I bow my head to the licorice smell of fennel filagree,
The taste of rounded peas
The perfect dun of barley hay.
And the tasseled promise of knee-high corn.
I namaste a row of growing beans,
To garlic scapes and turnip greens
To the sweetness of sweet potato vines
To the last red radish and first blueberry.
I lift up my face to the summer sky
The sound of larks
And the feel of dirt
To all that keeps making sense
In senseless times.
By Carrie NewcomerPractice
Take a piece of paper and write at the top the words “I Pledge Allegiance To”. Then list things that come to mind. These can be large concepts like “democracy” or “justice” but then try to think small and list some of the things that you hold dear and true and often encounter in your daily life….a child’s laugh, a wood thrush call…small beautiful things with which you align yourself, would pass to your grandchildren’s grandchildren and beyond.
Question
If you did the practice above, feel free to share one or two of your “allegiances”!
Music Always Music
This is a beautiful song called All To Do With The Moon by my friend Krista Detor. Krista is one of the finest lyricists and musicians I’ve ever met…and her partner, David Weber (the producer and general wizard of my new album) is playing guitar and singing with her in this performance at The Shrewsbury Folk Festival. It’s all to do with those invisible threads - and all to do with the moon.
Things I Loved This Week
John Paul Lederach’s most recent blog and dispatch on Interdependence “Taken Together” where he ponders his experience with communities who continue to consider the Seventh Generation and the wisdom we can learn from those communities.
https://www.johnpaullederach.com/dispatches/taken-together/
Parker J. Palmer’s The Fourth of July, 2026
Your Comments
To the question Is there something in your part of the world that is considered common and that you find wondrous?
We live on a lake and have for 32 years. Everyday it shares something beautiful...the grey heron sitting on the bank, the snowy egrets flying by, the gold it turns at sunset, the kayakers rowing by, the golden leaves surrounding it in fall, the way it freezes over in the winter. It brings joy everyday. - Robin
There is a wondrous mama cottonwood tree in our back yard. She is old and grand. I cannot get my arms half way around her trunk and her reach is tall into the sky. Her roots are deep, looking for the water of the underground river across the road. She is a magnificent creature. Strong in the winds while giving up a few twigs and branches. A place for the birds and squirrel to rest between flights and foraging. And oh…the sounds of her gentle cottonwood whispers. I’ve never loved a tree, but this one has stolen my heart. - Sandi
One Inch Photos
A mamma wren discovered an “ornamental” birdhouse on my porch and decided it was good enough to be a real birdhouse. Four new babies!
Maybe because I've been looking up at fireworks the past couple of days (b/c I refused to let the current WH occupant ruin my delight in fireworks), my 1st thought was "I pledge allegiance to the sky." Its wide expansiveness, its colors (mostly blue but pink, orange, & yellow at sunrise & sunset), its clouds, its signs of storms, its stars & moon at night, the way it provides a place for the birds to fly... All that it evokes & symbolizes, so much of which is beautiful & hopeful & inviting, but at other times scary & worrying. Right now what I'm thinking is that the sky only gives us a rainbow after a storm. So I pledge allegiance to the sky, & I'm trusting that there's a rainbow.
Two steps forward and one step back
Sometimes there is a need to take a positive view even when things seem bleak. I didn’t write this but there is food for thought here:
“If you don’t feel like celebrating America today, I’m not going to argue with you.
I’ve been sitting with that same feeling. Let me just tell you what changed my mind.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, in a hot room in Philadelphia, a handful of men wrote a sentence they did not fully mean.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
They wrote it while some of them owned other human beings. They wrote it before women could vote, before the men who worked their fields could read, before the people whose land they stood on were counted as anything at all. It was a promise made by people who had no idea how to keep it.
And here is the miracle. They wrote it anyway.
They wrote a sentence bigger than themselves. Bigger than their courage, bigger than their character, bigger than the small and frightened parts of them that history remembers alongside the brave ones. They set a standard they knew they were failing, and in doing so they handed every generation after them the same assignment: close the gap. Close the distance between who we say we are and who we actually are. A little more each time. One generation to the next.
Look at the words themselves. Not “a perfect union.” A more perfect union. An admission, right there in the founding, that we started broken, and a vow that we would spend forever getting less so. That’s the whole American story. That’s it.
Frederick Douglass closing the gap. The women at Seneca Falls closing the gap. The soldiers face-down in the mud at Antietam, the marchers with their arms linked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the organizers whose names no one ever wrote down, all of them closing the gap, most of them never living to see the far side of it.
They pushed anyway. They bled for ground they knew they’d never stand on, so that we could. Two hundred and fifty years of two steps forward and one step back, and if you do that math honestly, with your whole heart, it comes out to forward. Slowly. At a cost that should take your breath away. But forward.
I know a lot of us don’t feel like celebrating this year. I understand why. It’s hard to throw a party for a country that feels like it’s being taken from you room by room. It’s hard to wave a flag that other people have started waving at you. A lot of Americans look at this 250th and feel less like guests at a birthday and more like they’re standing on the lawn, watching the house get sold out from under them.
I felt some of that too.
A few weeks ago I watched Barack Obama stand up at the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, and for a moment it felt like I was watching a eulogy. An older, gentler America up on that stage, the kind we used to believe we had, being laid to rest. Springsteen played. Stevie Wonder played. Grown men and women wept in the crowd. And I sat there grieving something I was sure was already gone. I felt the exhaustion of it settle into my bones. I think a lot of us have been carrying that same tired grief, quietly, for a while now.
And then it hit me, and it hit me so hard I had to sit up.
He wasn’t burying anything. He was handing it back.
Standing there with the very thing we had set down in our exhaustion, cradling it, holding it out to us, saying: this was never mine to keep, and it was never yours to lose. It belongs to all of us. And it only dies the day we decide we’re too tired to carry it. He was handing us our own country back. And asking, gently, if we were ready to pick it up again.
That’s the part I need you to hear today. With everything I’ve got, I need you to hear it.
This story belongs to all of us. Not some of us. Not the ones who look a certain way or pray a certain way or landed on these shores in a certain year. All of us. The teacher and the trucker. The kid whose family just got here and the family that’s been here for ten generations. The names carved in monuments and the millions more that never made it into a single book. All of us.
And the harder anyone works to make this country smaller, to hoard it for the few instead of the many, to burn away the history that makes them uncomfortable, to keep only the faces that look like theirs and quietly disappear the rest, the more that should light a fire in the belly of every single one of us.
Because we have seen this move before. Every generation has. And every single time, somebody stood up with a breaking heart and a steady voice and said: no. Not this. Not us. Not while there’s still breath in my body.
They want a history that’s comfortable. We will not let them have it. They want to sit in judgment of who counts as American. They do not get to. Because the most patriotic Americans have never once been the ones dragging her backward into the dark. They have always been the ones with their shoulders against her, pushing her forward, toward the light, toward the promise, the ones who loved this country so much they refused to lie to it.
That’s us. And it is every soul who came before us, standing right behind us today, close enough to feel. Their courage is on loan to us now. And one day, sooner than we think, ours will be on loan to our children.
So today, of all days, do not shy away from celebrating.
Celebrate like your whole heart depends on it. Because it does.
Look east. The sun is coming up on this moment, it always does, it has never once failed to, and the light is going to find every dark corner they tried to hide us in. Not on its own. Never on its own. It rises because people rise with it. So we will rise. We will wipe our faces and get up off the lawn and walk back through the front door of our own house, and we will lock arms, every color, every corner, every last one of us who still believes, and we will march this country forward the way we always have. Not because it’s easy. Because it’s ours.
And a hundred years from now, when our great-grandchildren stand where we’re standing, celebrating a birthday we will never see, I want them to know we didn’t set it down. I want them to know that in the hardest year, when it would have been so easy to grieve and give up, we chose to carry it instead. That we closed the gap a little more, and handed them an America closer to its promise than the one we were given.
That’s the whole job. That’s the whole beautiful, back-breaking, sacred job. To leave them a country worthier of them than the one we inherited.
So happy birthday, America. You are old, and you are flawed, and you are not finished, and God, we are not finished with you.
Pick it back up. It’s ours.
Let’s push.”