In Celtic thinking the time between one thing and another is sacred. “Sacred” here is something fluid, organic, changing, but also treacherous, unknowable, and wild. It is dusk and dawn, mid-summer and mid-winter, summer and winter solstices. These are times that are neither one thing nor another. Not really both at once or neither but some other thing: time out of time.
Legacies of War: Memorials and Memories of the American Civil War and the Vietnam War is a public program that encourages individuals to engage with the humanities to discuss war and memory.
On August 20, 2025, White House factotum Steven Miller railed against demonstrators opposing the occupation of Washington, D.C., calling them “stupid white hippies” and saying the regime was going to ignore them. Failing in that resolve, he elaborated, “All these demonstrators you’ve seen out here in recent days, all these elderly white hippies, they’re not part of the city and never have been. And by the way, most of the citizens who live in Washington, D.C., are Black.”
Ah! So that’s why he was crashing out about the protestors: they were white. If they had been Black, out there in the streets, he could have gotten the violence he longed for. But elderly white hippies, “that all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old”? His hands were tied and he hated it.
Construction vehicles make the road to campus a slalom run. The enormous crane sitting on what used to be an athletic field reaches into the low-hanging clouds like Jack’s beanstalk. After yesterday’s thunderstorms, the heatwave has broken.
A gorgeous, washed, clear morning, cool breezes through the window. I heard the thunder yesterday and the rain drumming the roof but I was lying in a darkened room on my acupuncturist’s table so I missed the tornado warning and the sirens.
It is a disjointed memory, attached to impressions. I was fourteen, traveling in France with my family. One day we planned to visit an eighteenth-century country house, I don’t know why. For the architecture, probably. I remember nothing of the tour apart from one detail: sitting on a small table in the entryway was a painted china bowl filled with dried hydrangeas.
I used to host retreats on what is popularly known as “Celtic Spirituality.” I was good at it, largely because I found the whole concept a relief from a particularly patriarchal and oppressive church experience I was caught in. I focused on the seasons and poetry and art and the holiness of the ordinary. We wrote protective prayers and celebrated outdoor Eucharists and memorized Yeats. It was lovely and it felt good and there was a lot of truth and insight in it that I still cherish. But I began to notice a problem.
I have been wrong about almost everything having to do with politics, communal beliefs, and human nature for ten years. I thought at every turn corrective forces, based in values taught in children’s books and elementary school, would mean the demise and disappearance of Donald Trump. I was wrong. Against all my odds he persists, disrupting my status quo, disturbing my sleep, flouting my cherished beliefs. So I went on a search to figure out why.
I’m a reader and a writer. Like so many other readers and writers I love finding connections and themes. Even when I don’t like what I see I still look for meaning. So: today is January 6th, the traditional end of the joyful Christmas season and the anniversary of the upending of our social and political life.
A legend, persisting even now in history books, tells us that when General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown, his band played the British folk ballad, “The World Turned Upside Down.” While this may not have happened—there is no record of it until a century after the event—it endures because it feels so appropriate. The British, with their disciplined, trained, uniformed army, had lost to a ragtag bunch of farmers and craftsmen roaming at will in the woods. From their point of view, that just … wasn’t right.
It was 1972. I was newly married, living in the north but traveling south for Christmas, which was a major festival in my family. Through a series of happy accidents, my husband had escaped any danger of being sent to Vietnam so my spirits were high. Vietnam as a specter over my personal life was behind me. I was everything civilians are accused of being: involved only when personally affected. The war was not behind the Vietnamese, but in a selfish betrayal of passions I had only recently held, I was no longer paying much attention.
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