Issue 0

Liminal Space

New Perspective

Andrea Cybyk
My painting, New Perspective, is an invitation to slow down. I hope this work encourages viewers to contemplate the layers of connection that enrich us. Our lives are more vibrant in the space where our paths cross, and communities are formed at these intersections. By joining our diverse backgrounds and talents in meaningful engagement, we may shift our perspectives and collectively examine our priorities. Color is a powerful lens: where colors—where people—converge, something dynamic emerges. A native of Northern Virginia, Andrea Cybyk creates geometric abstract paintings that connect people, places, and relationships through her use of saturated color, repeating lines, and shapes. An engineer turned award-winning artist, Andrea exhibits primarily in the Washington, DC area and curates an exhibit program for a vineyard in Virginia. To view more of her work, visit www.AndreaCybyk.com or on Facebook and Instagram @AndreaCybykArt.

Introduction

The Editors
Dear Reader, We live in disorienting times. The pandemic has exacerbated deeper-rooted problems of systemic violence, inequity, and injustice. Our nation—truly, our world—stands on the cusp of unprecedented change. But history is rife with upheaval and rebirth; we weigh it for instruction and inspiration. In 1840, a group of transcendentalists led by Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau launched The Dial, a journal dedicated to furnishing a “cheerful rational voice amidst the din of mourners and polemics.” From these visionaries—the self-styled “Symposeum”—we take our name. Symposeum is a publication of The Dial project: a twenty-first century creative, collaborative community dedicated to elevating cheerful rationality in public discourse. It draws on its predecessor’s commitment to exploring works of “the Necessary, the Plain, the True, and the Human.” By Necessary, we mean works of critical inquiry. By Plain, we mean works of novel insight into ordinary occurrences. By True, we mean works of empirical investigation. By Human, we mean works of intimate experience. Like an authentic symposium, our quarterly issues will examine single topics through a variety of perspectives. The theme of Issue Zero is liminal space. A state of in-betweenness, liminal space captures the essence of the world today on both macro and micro scales. In the following pages, you’ll find a breadth and depth of related works—from essays to poems to art. In “Lizzie,” a father shares the recent loss of his daughter to the ongoing drug epidemic in the height of coronavirus. In “Leave No Trace,” a hiker recounts her two thousand mile chaplaincy on the Appalachian Trail. In “Arm in Arm,” a teacher reflects on restorative disciplinary models in a virtual learning setting. In “Making a Medium,” a leader at an early stage startup illustrates the future of information as displayed and shared on the internet. As editors, we’ve curated pieces for a broad audience. Acco

Rendering

Meredith Paige | The Human
First, a pop loud as gunfire. Then, burning rubber. Then, margaritas, jalapeño salsa, gossip, chairs scraping far less than six feet apart. I’ve made the mistake of trying to ride my hundred-dollar, salvaged-from-old-parts bike up a pothole-ridden Shelby Avenue. My back tire and tube have fully exploded in front of Cinco de Mayo, a local townie-vibe restaurant that’s happily shirking a few too many COVID guidelines. The obnoxious pop of my tire brings people out of their nearby houses, searching for the source. Guilt floods my throat, but I don’t dare cough. I begin a slow walk to the nearby bike shop, my broken bike in tow. The tube’s come loose, wrapping itself around the gears and skidding the back tire to a halt, splooting right there on the pavement, unmoving. Forcing me to drag it as it bumps along and slows me down. Like dragging roadkill home to roast. ● As long as I get into bed before five a.m., I’ve lied to myself every night, then it’s fine. The infinite scroll and blue light from hours of existing on my phone have been making me nauseous, but like everyone else, I can’t stop, because once I’ve stopped, I’ll be alone, awake, in my silly little brain, in my silly little room, in my silly little house, again, god forbid. Time passes silently and then loud as gunfire. All of a sudden, October. Time froze in March but moves effortlessly through me like water carving limestone. The predictable tides of each day get less and less so. Who cares if the sun is out? Who cares if I have a “job”? Who cares? It’s five a.m., I’ve been up all night, get off my back, I have a life to live! Leave me alone while I sit in my room in the dark, living my life. The same thing over and over. The smallness of our sequestered little bubbles: is this it? The hubris—the guilt, the shameless arrogance—of expecting anything more than mundaneness just because the world out there is on fire. We’re lucky for that mundaneness; we should be kissing the ground for not buckling

padmasana (attempt)

Vibhu Krishna | The Plain
The text scrawled into this piece reads "many things are so uncertain all at once so i imagine lotuses growing like vines all over my field of vision & field of anxiety but padmasana is not coming easily because of the aforementioned quantities of variables so i drew this instead—an anxiety-filled rendition meditation created in one sitting on bristol paper w/my favorite 005 micron pen & my barely-coping roommate's old tupperware lid to trace the circle after reading & re-reading "fieldnotes from the in between" by my very dear friend lisa (drawn somehow all in one sitting) & did you know we have matching cartilage piercings? & aren't the neurotic scratch-like pen marks just a bit harrowing? one of my uglier works!i miss my friends & space but keep hope & art." Then I super-imposed the drawing onto a moon and gave it light and space, thank goodness. Details: micron ink on bristol, digital manipulation, 12"x12"

Theseus's America

Edensky E. Lormeus | The Necessary
The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that questions whether an object that has had all of its pieces replaced remains fundamentally the same object. A king in Greek mythology and founder-hero of Athens, Theseus fought many naval battles. Athenians replaced the rotted oars of his ship over centuries to preserve it as a memorial. Plutarch made the puzzle famous in his Life of Theseus from the late first century. Other philosophers, including Plato, Heraclitus, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke have also investigated the paradox.

Writing Silence

| César Vallejo’s Poetry of Exile

Nissim Lebovits | The Human
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we thought of Zion. There on the poplars we hung up our lyres, for our captors asked us there for songs, our tormentors, for amusement, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” How can we sing a song of the Lord in a strange land? ―Psalm 137 In 1923, a thirty-one year old Peruvian named César Vallejo boarded a passenger ship in Lima and set sail for Paris, France. Within fifty years, he would be widely recognized as one of the most original and important poets to write in the twentieth century. At that moment, though, despite the success of his first two books―The Black Heralds in 1919 and Trilce in 1922―he was in the midst of a profound personal crisis. In the five preceding years, his mother, brother, and sister had died; he had lost a prestigious teaching post after refusing to marry a woman with whom he had been having an affair; and his involvement in leftist politics had led to his unjust incarceration for four months, ending only in a temporary release. Deeply unhappy, and fearful of being reimprisoned, Vallejo departed. ● Now is a time ripe for thoughts of exile. Even before the pandemic, the world’s population of displaced people was at an all-time high of 79 million people. More than 1% of all humans alive today, are either refugees, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. That’s a population larger than all but twenty-three countries—and is expected to quadruple by the year 2050. Yet exile is not a concern common to Americans. We frame our country as a place of refuge—“Give me your tired, your poor, / your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” reads the poem inscribed at the foot of the Statue of Liberty—not from which the persecuted flee. Nor are we confronted by closed doors when we depart. When living abroad we are always expats, never refugees. Especially as travelers, our passports and national wealth have conferred upon us a sense of immunity; borders opened easily for Americans. But

Dilemmas of Duty

Ankita Satpathy | The Necessary
Religious holidays were some of my favorite days growing up. Hindu holidays in the U.S. didn’t result in days off of school, but they were all accompanied by rich traditions. We’d make elaborate chalk drawings outside to welcome good fortune into our home, or play on the swings to celebrate spring’s arrival, and there were always sweets involved. I was raised with religion in the background of my life, but the focus was on culture over strict adherence to scripture. Unlike my classmates who took afternoon classes in Catholicism or spent weekends at Hebrew school, I didn’t worry much about learning “the Word.” However, one Bhagavad Gita quote that I repeatedly heard referenced was: > “You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your action. You have a right to your labor, but not to the fruits of your labor.” The passage goes on to state that people should never assume credit or responsibility for the outcomes of their work, because only their duty is theirs, and the rest is in fate’s hands. As a child, my mother used the quote to put my mind at ease—when I had studied hard for a math test and was worrying about my grade, or when I wondered if I’d made the cut for some team at school. As I’ve grown up and taken on professional, results-focused roles, I’ve often thought back to those moments and wondered if I was breaking some implicit rule by caring about outcomes. We were a Hindu household, but, like many other first-generation Americans, we were an ambitious one, too. Education was always at the center of my life, and eventually, so were the accolades that came with it. My parents spared me the so-called “tiger parenting” that is stereotypically associated with Asian immigrants, but that didn’t mean I didn’t care about results. No amount of parental love and support can spare a child the increasingly competitive experience of growing up in the contemporary American school system, in which, by sixteen, many chil

Seventeenth Grade

Felicia Hanitio | The Human
On a sweltering mid-August afternoon, I dragged three bulging suitcases out of Logan International Airport, hiding a tired but triumphant grin behind my white Temasek Foundation-issued face mask. Five visa appointment cancellations and many soul-searching decisions later, I had finally made it to Boston. In a few days, I would join millions of graduate students worldwide, entering into the ritual of extended adolescence and self-discovery that is graduate education. Earlier this year, as COVID-19 infection rates soared, schools and businesses shut down, and the world moved online, I, like many of my peers, reconsidered my decision to enroll in business school this fall. It wasn’t just about the idea of a “diminished” learning and social experience for the same hefty $200,000 price tag. With a Singaporean passport, I was also on relatively privileged footing to deal with uncertainty around the embassy reopening, visa application timelines, and post-graduation job opportunities. For me, the weightiest consideration was the opportunity cost inherent in spending the next two years in the ivory tower of academia, learning to “make a difference in the world”—the motto of Harvard’s business school—when ample opportunities existed all around to step up, stretch, and lead in a time of global crisis. Yet in the midst of the death of an old “normal,” and the birth of a new reality taking shape, I decided that this would be the opportune time to step back and think critically about the kind of leader I want to be. The timeless existential question posed in “The Summer Day” by the late poet Mary Oliver seemed to urge even closer examination this year: Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? What are the kinds of difference worth fighting for, the answers worth pursuing, and the questions worth asking in times like these? For the next two years, I have the opportunity to examine these lines of i

Arm in Arm

Nate Stauffer | The Necessary
Cody is a pseudonym to protect the student’s privacy. The realization hit me like a rusty, yellow school bus: I have not issued a single demerit. Since March, I have reimagined my pedagogy from the ground up. I rebuilt entire units from scratch, filmed video lessons to help kids learn asynchronously, and spent countless hours debating with colleagues about how to provide support through a laptop screen. In all that time, despite the high stakes and constant stress, I have not issued a single behavioral consequence to my students. At each school I’ve taught in, I learned new protocols for addressing behavioral challenges, from clip charts to family phone calls to individual behavior plans and whole-class rubrics. Though unique in practice, these strategies all nominally shared similar objectives: to maintain high expectations, to promote a safe community, and to ensure consistency in holding kids accountable when they cause harm. Even when I felt at odds with their design, I felt assured by their underlying goals. As the keeper of our classroom culture, the responsibility and authority to punish bad behaviors rested with me. I started teaching sixth grade at my current school in the fall of 2019, seven months before the pandemic hit. At that time, teachers were given a simple system for punishing misbehaviors. Any action that disrupted the flow of class would earn a “demerit," logged into an online tracker that all teachers could access. When a student earned three demerits, they were held for an hour after school to reflect on their actions with our Dean of Students. Every Monday, the program reset so students could start each week with a clean slate. The objective of this three-strike system was clearly defensible: demerits would disincentivize kids from disrupting the learning process or hurting the classroom community. The simplicity of this method ensured that teachers would not waste excessive time in class addressing individual behaviors at the expense o

Leave No Trace

| Carrying Hope, Home, and Freedom from the Appalachian Trail into Everyday Wilderness

Araminta Ray | The Necessary
There is a rugged footpath called the Appalachian Trail running 2,190.9 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. It is a wilderness, a sanctuary, a classroom, and a pilgrimage for those who travel it. The Appalachian Trail becomes deeply woven into one’s being—from transformed physical anatomy due to the stresses of walking, to the resilience and grit that no earthly challenge can steal, to a permanent change in perspective on suffering and nature and contentment therein. My own soul has been irreversibly remodeled by the Appalachian Trail, and for that I am eternally grateful. Envisioned in 1921 by Benton McKaye to function as a wilderness corridor connecting one town to the next, the Appalachian Trail (AT) was completed in 1937 and remains the longest foot-travel-only hiking path in the world. Over its near 2,200 miles, the AT passes through fourteen states, gaining and losing elevation equivalent to sixteen summits of Mount Everest from sea level. While most of the volunteer-maintained trail lies in national forests, national parks, and other such wilderness areas, there are also sections of the trail that travel on roads, through towns, and even in private backyards. More than 2 million people visit the AT every year. Most go for short day hikes; others spend multiple days or weeks on the trail, and approximately four to five thousand attempt to hike the entire length of the trail in one season, called "thru hikers." Most thru hikers walk Northbound, starting in Georgia during the months of March and April, hoping to make it to Mount Katahdin before the snow and ice set in at the beginning of October. A much smaller portion of hikers starts in Maine in June or July to hike Southbound with the fall, finishing at Springer Mountain before the harshness of winter. Still fewer choose alternative routes, most commonly a “flip flop,” which constitutes starting somewhere in the middle of the trail, hiking to one terminus, then returning to

Impressions

Emily Meffert | The Human
I. likely not unlike the bohemian blue Coltrane woke to ages later, this blue cut the blank raw cold. bald stones sloped and peaked. a stout, deciduous fringe rimmed the sky. night-slick grass silvered discretely, breathing or seeming to breathe. a crude, fluid blue. paled like dye, exposed the riotous foxglove and the flushed bleeding-heart. bees lapped the phlox and the purple-pleated oxalis itched, watching. like eyes, someone thought, turning revolutions in the grass. buzzed on fieldwings, ochre-stroked, arrested by the signifying wind, some forebear rode the current up: hissed and whined and shouted violet. their lungs were vast and private. let me flute this hollow bone, they thought. let me split this ivory, what with ten bright fingers and this appetite. II. Except for ours, with its coiled heat and water stains, these homes are razed or newly raised in royals, beiges, pepper-reds and stripes. It’s Tuesday and we’re brazen for the spread. We climb our street in headphones, raising horns. We lurch and honk, bounce and reel, bank the creamsick clouds and bear their light. Bone-deep, the beat is bread. The first disruption thrills like drifting off a curb. Again, we say. Skip the beat but keep its track. Our body will trace it. We’ve made this bass our backbone. We’ve trained our wrist on snare and cymbal. Entranced, our hips and toes admit the stakes. But the sax, loose bull, bucks code. We surge out the gate, bent on wrangling sense from dumb air. That we wobble should inspirit us, who can, in turn, weather thrum and thrust, who, too, have driven chaos into a motif. Daily we shed rituals and props. Finding the essential runs, we’re keeping a fitful tempo and losing everything else. Our neighborhood’s in flux. It flexes us. Daily the hydraulic quartet fells an old frame: bulldozer, earth mover, visionary crane, one that blows and blows and doesn’t stop. III. How was it to live in that year? Well. Everything was tender Everything was c

self-portrait in the new decade

A. Shaikh | The Human
At the hospital, at the grave; in the real story, there are no beloveds. The horoscope reads: what you are longing for is everything curtail your desire into a pinprick of spit. This was April where you dream of dinner parties, blue velvet, & the lungs engorged with sick. To no surprise, you pen a crown of sonnets & fail. The country knows nothing of protection, growing feverish with each headline & punchy tweet. Hysteric, you start online therapy, stock up on sugar & imagine what you’ll tell the children one day. You picture their jawbones and tender noses, cradled in the palm of a partner who kisses you nightly. What was once simple is now a bedtime prayer, leavened into new blood. Tomorrow, tomorrow, words lose meaning said enough times so you don’t ask for news. Ada writes, nothing is ordinary even when it is ordinary. Cutting hair, cooking meals, women and their pixelated hues. You drink in their image, greedy for anything quotidien. At least this is the same, how the body responds to beauty undressed, the soak wet, the heat simmer. The body remains a body, a glitter hungry tremolo. Historic, unprecedented, and yet underneath it all, some terrified joy. Yearning or blessing, your mother hums about life, never enough and too precious to lose. Poet's Note It is no wonder we are living in extraordinary times. This poem, which begins as an abecedarian and then diverges from its form, is a flurry of observation from our current moment. In writing this, I was interested in deconstructing the real and imagined of this decade so far. A self-portrait, this poem is also about the lived memory of the body. What parts of us are we more attuned to in times of siege and crisis? Despite its lingering shadow, this poem is also an ode to gratitude, for the smallness which perseveres in the face of the “historic” and “unprecedented”—a prayer for “some terrified joy.” What we consider sacred now is different from before—“dinner parties, blue ve

The Buffalo Commons

Faith Bottum | The Plain
There’s a spot by my house, maybe ten miles or so north, where the late summer’s sunflowers roll on for acres till the pine-covered hills—the Black Hills of South Dakota—rise to mark a ragged horizon. I drive up there sometimes, just to sit among the slightly drooping flowers, watch the sky, and think of the rest of the distant world—all those people elsewhere, elsewhen. Who they are. What they do. Even while I was little, living in Washington, D.C., and then Manhattan, my parents made a point of hauling me off on trips to South Dakota, exposing me to a rural life: years of horseback riding, old pickups that looked as though they might fall apart if the door were slammed too hard, and hard scrambles up the crumbling rock formations. It prepared me for a life much different than I was used to, and I wasn’t shocked when we moved to the Black Hills full time the winter I was fourteen. It felt like a vacation. The Black Hills are undeniably beautiful. There’s the old granite, among the most ancient in North America. The thick, dark Black Hills spruce and the thinner, yellower Ponderosa Pine. The clear creeks. The wary deer and antelope. The indifferent buffalo. Sunsets as though God were the world’s most sentimental painter, all purple and blue and pink and orange. The land sometimes feels to me like a permanent playground: snowboarding in the winter, summer lakes to cool off in, the deciduous aspen and birch highlighting the fall in the canyons, and the newborn wildlife in the spring. The last census shows (as the new one probably will) that South Dakota’s population has been going up in recent years: increasing by 59,336 people, or 7.86%, from 2000 to 2010. But to drill down into the data is to see that, generally, the increase is only because the cities have been growing—especially in Sioux Falls, the largest city in the state. The old countryside is still declining as the farms and ranches, the rural county seats, continue to empty. This midwestern and western p

National Kite Festival

Adrianna Smith | The Plain
Washington, D.C., 2019 We have made the wrong mistakes. I run into a landscape of kites held by hundreds of invisible hands. From a distance, their flight makes no sound and what’s meant to move keeps still, carries words from me. The crowd finds space for one another, eyes pinned to the sky, empty no longer. Against the obelisk, time appears to hover. Nothing stands for itself alone. Yet we question that peace might waver, that we can’t make room for many more. So strange and fragile these birds without wings. No way to sever what’s seen from the unseen. Poet's Note As someone who has lived in the same city almost her whole life, it’s exhilarating to still discover new things about my home, especially one that carries the expectation of simultaneous transience and gridlock. I was on my regular Saturday afternoon run to the Lincoln Memorial when, on a whim, I decided to go the extra mile down to the mall, knowing the effort of zig-zagging between the crowds would be a workout in and of itself. And then, there it was. Completely unexpected and yet intuitively where it belonged. Hundreds of kites, which from a distance appeared as birds caught mid-flight, a wreath around the Washington monument. When I tried to say how it took my breath away, my friends told me to write about it. So this is what I’m writing towards—harmony, literal and figurative, can feel so natural in the moment that it makes us wonder why we ever thought we couldn’t get along in the first place. We can surprise each other. We can surprise ourselves. And once we see what distant beauty is possible when many of us hold on to a tenuous string we can’t see the end of, then we have a responsibility to guard it. And a responsibility to usher it back. E pluribus unum.

Field Notes From The In-Between

Lisa Muloma | The Plain | Poetry
The spring the coronavirus hit I would sit Next to my window with a cup of green tea Trying to be mindful, self-consciously watching the first Leaves on the six saplings outside of my window Expanding and multiplying by the day As the morning sun leapt over the horizon, Lighting up the field like a fluorescent bulb. When the world began to summarily end, Classes and exams cancelled, the mass migration away from campus, Any “unnecessary gatherings of any size” stopped by the governor, A mandatory six-foot perimeter around every person, Public hugging punishable by misdemeanor A friend walking home in a group reported hearing A voice crying out in the darkness, Issuing from a head poked out of a window somewhere, “How dare you hang out with one another at a time like this?” Email chains and petitions multiplying — “What do we do if we see a flagrant violation Of the Order? Should we call the police?” My first instinct was to lean into it, To call it all Sabbath, to think it romantic Sort of. Buying and selling ceased, political prisoners Released to abate the spread, rent cancelled Deluge of planning emails stilled, Nothing to miss out on, everyone Home. I looked forward to the silence, figured the writer lying dormant Inside of me would rise up. Imagined sitting Next to my window with a cup of green tea Being mindful, personally observing the onset Of Spring, recording it for everybody. But then I spoke to a friend who occupies the hippie Circles in Brooklyn — the bashfully affluent yoga girls Mining the world for meaning — and discovered that they too Were leaning in, diving headlong into the divine White light of quarantine, naming the Universe The real orchestrator of this worldwide moment Of silence, this inevitable Om. And so I didn’t want to be associated with that, Maybe initially for aesthetic reasons, But then Sarah’s grandfather died alone In a hospital bed in New York City. They called him on the phone to say good-bye, Then waited a full day in their

Making a Medium

| Language on the Internet

Lea Boreland | The Plain
The limits of my language are the limits of my world. ―Ludwig Wittgenstein At first, language was only the spoken word: the emittance of noise and its reception, mouths giving tone and annunciation to breath. After thousands of years came writing—a new medium with visual and tactile elements. Language became something tangible and finite. Much later, in the 1400s, the Gutenberg printing press expanded the uses of that medium, giving words more shoes to fill: entertainment and mass communication, for example, rather than just bookkeeping. Finally, in the late twentieth century, a computer scientist named Tim Bernes Lee invented the World Wide Web. Words entered a new, digital medium; once again, the economics and the experience of language changed. Today, the digital user interface (UI) of language online mimics the design tropes we are familiar with from the analog. We squish black letters into small borders on white screens despite the absence of physical constraints on their layout, and despite the fundamental changes to scale and space that computer bytes, uninhibited by gravity, enable. This literalism results in a digital medium that is both inferior and problematic, unable to cope with its own challenges. Our digital content UI has, as of yet, neither replicated nor replaced the tactile romance of its physical counterpart—it remains more enjoyable, for most, to read or write from paper. Our digital content UI also has not grappled with the transformation it has enabled in content production economics. A digital work (a blog post, a tweet) has zero marginal transaction costs; once created, it is nearly free to reproduce. This is why there are no gatekeepers on platforms like Twitter: no one needs to finance the distribution of a tweet in the same way that publishers have historically needed to front book costs. The elimination of these middlemen (publishers, printing houses, newspapers, bookstores, etc.) has led to a vacuum of authority, legitimacy, and cur

Finding Space in the Sky

| How Covid-19 is Grounding More Than Flights

David Sanchez | The Necessary
As the plane touches down, the tires give off a screeching sound, the force of the braking sends loose items rolling, and the pilot welcomes the crowd to its destination. Most passengers feel a sense of excitement, relief, and maybe some lingering nausea. I always feel a bit of melancholy that the flight has come to an end. It means we’re back to Earth, where time resumes its steady march and the to-do list war reboots. If I’m lucky, this is just a layover. Then it’s back up to thirty thousand feet. The sky is a place, I've found, where I can do the type of deep thinking that the daily grind doesn’t allow. It’s where I go to reason through important decisions, consider radical solutions to messy problems, and reflect on life’s biggest questions. I made the call to move across the country for a new job in seat 5F on my way to San Francisco. I wrote my marriage vows in the exit row on a bumpy flight to Chicago. I considered moving back to Wisconsin to run for mayor of my hometown in a middle seat en route to the Dominican Republic. I find clarity in the clouds. A few years ago, while working in a sales role that involved visiting clients around the country, I had a rare opportunity to seriously up my travel game. A friend who worked for a major airline made me his “registered companion,” which basically meant I could fly for free. I would show up to an airport, wait until a flight was undersold or a passenger missed a connection, and take the empty seat. All in all, I took 173 flights that year. San Francisco to New York. Hartford to Dallas. Los Angeles to Seattle and a myriad of other combinations. By my own calculation I spent a full month in the sky. Some of these trips were for work, others for fun, and a few were completely spontaneous: I’d pack a bag, go to the airport, and end up somewhere in the western hemisphere. A couple times I even got first class, though more often I found myself stranded and sleeping in the airport. But usually, I just appeared to

A Faithful Paradox

Reverend Grace Han | The Human
Iam a Christian pastor in the United Methodist denomination. One of the privileges of that vocation is walking with people through the deepest valleys and the highest mountains of their lives. Over fifteen years of ministry, I have learned that between these two points our faith is fully realized. After graduating from seminary, I participated in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE). CPE is a training program to teach pastoral care to clergy, chaplains, and other religious professionals in hospital settings. It has become mandatory training for many Christian denominations because of its unique approach to pastoral care. It emphasizes that the role of clergy in a pastoral care situation isn’t about providing solutions; rather, it is about being present with people in the midst of crisis by simply listening and witnessing. In theological language, CPE trades a ministry of doing for a ministry of being. Reframing pastoral care, this “ministry of presence” taps the healing power of shared physical presence. The idea was explored by Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection in The Practice of the Presence of God, and expanded by theologians and writers like Henri Nouwen, Parker Palmer, and Richard Rohr. A ministry of presence is not a uniquely Christian concept. Jewish Philosopher Martin Buber wrote in 1937 in his seminal book I and Thou that the Hebrew name for God, “Yahweh,” was best translated as “I am present.” When we are present with each other, God is present; a ministry of presence is the ministry of God. In hospital settings, a ministry of presence means attending some of the most horrific, tragic, and difficult moments in life: from the sudden death of a parent to the slow-progressing illness of a spouse, or an accident that paralyzes a child. It is a deeply anxious and indeterminate space. In such liminal zones, we have left one period (sometimes by choice, though often not) but have not yet entered the next. These spaces are filled with uncertainty and may be s

The Race to Resolve COVID-19

| Invisible Steps for Extraordinary Progress

Ariel Helms Thames | The True
As a scientist, it has been amazing to watch the release of paper after paper offering more information about the coronavirus and how to fight it. In just the last year, 198 vaccine candidates, 2,388 clinical trials, and 120,000 peer-reviewed publications emerged in response to COVID-19. To give you an idea of the rapidity with which research is progressing, the entire genome of the virus causing COVID-19 was sequenced within the first two months of the virus being identified. In comparison, the Human Genome Project was a thirteen-year study. By finding the virus’s genetic code, scientists have revealed all the viral machinery that they could target in order to disrupt the virus’s function. Within a month of mapping its genetic code, scientists had uncovered the 3D structure of the physical component of the virus that enables it to invade human cells. Solving this structure equipped scientists with a perfectly detailed picture of what would become the target for a large proportion of future therapeutics. After this, the research field exploded with new advances: massive studies were (and continue to be) carried out to rapidly screen, in a single experiment, huge numbers of possible drug candidates for the virus. Super high throughput methods were used to quickly characterize recovered patients’ antibodies to find one that could be repurposed as a virus-neutralizing drug. Tons of vaccine platforms were quickly redesigned for COVID-19. Innovative diagnostic platforms were reworked within a matter of weeks to detect the virus. From the vantage point of the general public, these proceedings may have felt hasty, especially as the media warped scientific findings with catchy titles or misconstrued descriptions. But from the vantage point of a scientist, it is astonishing to behold. As someone with knowledge of the data beyond the titles, I have watched these technologies unfold over time. In fact, most of the advancements of the COVID-19 pandemic were years, even deca

Diaspora

| The Linguistic Journey

Deya | The Human
Growing up as a Bengali American, the most complicated part of my identity was my relationship to language: I used mostly English while my parents were native Bangla speakers. Though I had loved Bangla as a toddler, it became a source of self-loathing as I grew into adolescence. My parents’ foreign conversations drew snickers in public, and my bilingualism was mocked by my classmates. This linguistic experience also posed numerous logistical challenges. As a third grader, I was asked by my parents to explain dialogue in Hollywood movies. By sixth grade, I was editing my parents’ emails, and by eighth grade I was on the phone for them, disputing a fraudulent credit card bill. As my household responsibilities grew heavier, I came to further resent my native tongue. By the end of high school, I hadn’t accepted my linguistic heritage, but instead hoped that it would disappear if I ignored it. I swapped Ma and Baba for “Mom” and “Dad” when speaking to my parents in front of friends. When community members spoke to me in Bangla, I responded in English. I routinely blasted English music in the car, frantically changing the song when a Bangla classic started playing. But when I started college, I became attuned to a strange gap: the absent sound of Bangla. After so many years inattentive—or even unhappy—in my linguistic environment, the hatred I felt for Bangla turned into curiosity. When my parents asked me to come home to celebrate holidays like Noboborsho, the Bengali new year, I agreed. I willingly sat through cultural programs, trying my best to follow along. When the elders asked me about college, I even responded with a few words of Bangla. Once I returned to campus, though, I would never disclose the details of my trips home. I tried to maintain a distinction between the use of Bangla with my family and the use of English with everyone else. One day in psychology class finally marked a turning point. My professor handed out a quiz called the “privilege self-as

When Makers Make

| Jewelry Science and the Art of Vulnerability

Alexis Cook | The True
The women mentioned in this article are referred to by pseudonyms to protect their privacy. There’s something exciting about pouring molten metal, like it’s part of a science show or an exhibition from another planet. Even after countless times watching my co-founder, Corbin, pour liquid sterling silver into our custom jewelry molds, I still feel mesmerized, beckoning others in the studio to notice the way the bright material spills out. When Corbin and I started Unlocked, our jewelry brand, our goal had nothing to do with jewelry, per se. We wanted to employ and empower women in Nashville transitioning out of homelessness. At best, jewelry was the vehicle for that vision; at worst, an afterthought. In the beginning, we had no idea what we were doing. It took the wonders of YouTube and two years of hard work to learn an advanced form of jewelry manufacturing called lost-wax casting. Since then, to my surprise, we’ve established ourselves as both an e-commerce business and an off-label manufacturer for much larger jewelry brands. More importantly, we’ve been able to partner with nonprofits and businesses to build a holistic program for the women we employ, offering transitional housing, career and life counseling, and financial training. Corbin and I joke that we made the right decision in choosing jewelry, but for all the wrong reasons. Initially, we believed that a jewelry brand would require less startup capital than other business models we were considering. That assumption was proven flagrantly misguided once we decided to invest in the machinery necessary for lost-wax casting. We see now, however, that one of the greatest benefits of jewelry is the powerful meaning it holds for our employees, whom we affectionately call “Makers.” Their daily task of turning raw metal into beautiful products serves as a visual representation of their own transformations. Through intentionality and consistency, our Makers design new lives, grinding away what no longer ser

Lizzie

Mark Murphy | The Human | Essay
My name is Mark. I’m a middle-aged, middle-class father who’s been married for twenty-five years. We rescued a dog and a cat from the humane society that now live with us in our Cincinnati suburban home. What I’m trying to say is that I’m just your average guy, a typical sight in average America. Covid hit me like it did everyone else: business changed, pockets tightened, fears grew, habits adjusted, and bankruptcy felt imminent until it didn’t. March, April, and May were hard months for us. But then came June. June fifth, to be exact. On that day, our family wasn’t lucky to call ourselves like everyone else. My wife and I hadn’t heard from our daughter for a worrying period of time that quickly pushed our emotions from normal to nervous. We eventually tracked down that she was staying at a nearby hotel with friends, but by the time we found out it was too late. In the hours that followed, time somehow stopped and sped up simultaneously. There in the hotel parking lot, with the coroner and flashing blue-red lights, my wife and I tried to process the news a parent prays never to hear. People came and went: some speaking to us, some just watching the scene unfold. I’m not a writer. Until this piece, my daughter’s obituary was the hardest thing I’ve ever written. Her eulogy was a story about how her life changed others; this story, however, is about how her life changed mine. What matters for you to know about that day is that Elizabeth was at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong friends. She died from an accidental drug overdose at just twenty-one years old. The CDC reported more than 67,300 deaths by overdose in 2018. There are always names behind those numbers, something I intellectually knew before but couldn’t fully appreciate until disaster struck us personally. Behind the names, of course, there are families crushed and left behind. I thought I knew pain, but nothing wrung me more than losing my Lizzie. Doctors sometimes tell you to describe you

Multitudes

Emmy Roday | The Plain
Do you ever feel sad when you lose a word? Do you ever try and call it back like calling in the sea? Or a dream. Do you remember waking up in your own bed at the end of a family road trip, knowing someone carried and tucked you in the night before? That is youth, whirred asleep in the car. Beyond, a new day. Now, we write the poem for our future best friend who is already leaving in the earlysun. How long should I stay at the front door waving? I can’t explain the shift of seasonal winds but I do know this: The Arabic root جَوّ creates weather and one more letter جَوّيّ makes weather conditions. Two more accents— a dash below and above— جَوِيَ brings us to the state of being intensely moved by love or grief. How closely we flirt with our extremes, breathing between the multitude of our meanings. And yet, the same origin. And yet, saved alarms remind us of the lives we used to wake for. Remember the space once filled by a lover’s yawning— forgive me, do you mask the people in your dreams? After the longest day of the year, the sun starts shedding itself of minutes. And what did we do in the final suntune? Did we crawl on our hands and knees to pick up cereal off the kitchen floor? Or did we touch? Did we meet in the wind chimes? Blow in through open windows— becoming every person within us. Poet's Note We are all currently living in a quiet aftermath that has no foreseeable deadline. This poem is set in that collective aftermath or as the speaker calls it, “the final suntune.” Now, stuck in that strange betweenness, we struggle to actualize our future and are compelled to look behind us at our past lives. The poem’s first lines were inspired by Jackie Kay’s Old Tongue and ground us in that act of “calling back”— of those lives we had, of those people we loved, of those spaces we shared, of those dreams we slowly lost upon waking. And yet, the calling back won’t change the moment in front of us. Although we write “