“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” So said the British writer D.H. Lawrence (who spent some time among us) a century ago, in his provocative and polemical book about our writers, “Studies in Classic American Literature.” Around the same time, the poet William Carlos Williams offered an equally quirky account of American history and literature titled “In the American Grain.” Both are worth considering as we try to figure out who exactly we are. 

A good friend of mine who’s in the middle-of-the-road politically recently asked me if a centrist politician could win the presidency.  My friend lives in Texas, whence comes the saying: “The only thing in the middle of the road is white lines and dead armadillos.” But I take his question seriously; and though I’m not a centrist myself, I wonder about it. 

The theme this week is simple – yet not so simple: All will be well. 

It’s about systemic thinking – how all things rhyme and relate to other things, and how it’s merely a (necessary) convenience to identify “things” in the first place – beginning as infants with our mother’s breast.