Tag: contemplative

Conversation & Endorsements

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

“Research is a conversation.”

Students and I discuss that in class. The concept often surprises them. One wrote, “I never thought of research as a conversation, but by this point, it is very clear to me that research is more than just looking stuff up. It’s about finding connections between different sources and ideas by comparing and contrasting them, and creating something of your own.”

Research can also be a deeper conversing, a communing with. In this way, I visited daily for over a year with Brother Lawrence. This kind down-to-earth mystic lived in seventeenth-century Paris as a Discalced Carmelite friar. The Discalced for “without shoes” means he wore sandals as a sign of simplicity and voluntary poverty. While I lived with Brother Lawrence during the scholarly serious and playfully creative act of translation, a true conversation with this humble man developed. I listened to his voice in his French words, first in his spiritual maxims, then in his surviving letters. These and his conversations with his good friend Joseph of Beaufort, who took good notes, are the happy center of Practice of the Presence.

Living with this calm friar and his wise words on contemplation was a deeply satisfying, silent conversation. How life-altering healthy conversations always are. Listening to the friar’s vibrant presence in his book made my own life significantly calmer, even (or especially) in the middle of how-life-happens-to-everyone-including-me.

This book was also a conversation with my kind first readers. I spent hours on the phone with them and hours pouring over their emails, listening, asking for clarification, and revising. Their questions improved the book tremendously. Grateful doesn’t begin to describe how thankful I am for their helpful dialogue.

Then I sent the manuscript out, hopefully asking for endorsements. Twenty-three said, “Yes.” Their input added another layer of conversation to the book. Even as they responded, their words profoundly affected me. Listening to their words also contributed to the manuscript during its last stages before publication. They gave me confidence about my work. They helped me see it anew, often in ways I had not been able to, because I was too close to it.

Many days I walked around in a kind of happy daze: “They read my book. They sent an endorsement.” Interrupting for many moments the Quaker chant or Mary Oliver poem or mantra I was attending to.

Conversation of all kinds is the backbone of my translation. It supported the creation also of this humble friar’s life and work, since he lived his whole life in sandals and a coarse tunic, never trying to publish during his lifetime. We only have his work because of the conversations between him and his friend Joseph of Beaufort, who published Brother Lawrence’s words a year after the friar’s death, when other friends asked for more of his letters, since they found them uplifting to read, and encouraging.

Conversation rewards attention. It’s from con-/com- “with, together,” and versare “turn, bend.” It’s easy to think of conversation mostly as words, but converse also means “move about with, live with, dwell with, keep company with.” Today we’d say, “Hang out.” Translating is a uniquely intimate act of “hanging out” with another human, conversing. Converse also means “turn around, transform,” the way kind friendship, “hanging out” with others, can change us for the better and happier, forever.

Here are the nearly two dozen endorsers and their words for my revolutionary translation of Brother Lawrence and his Practice of the Presence. In print for over three centuries, beloved by kind seekers and thinkers from varied backgrounds – religious, not-religious, and everything in-between and beyond those categories, this spiritual classic is available for pre-order now here.

“Acevedo Butcher’s careful translation recreates the volatile, war-filled, plague-ridden world of seventeenth-century France. She invites us into the monastery kitchen with Brother Lawrence as he cleans the pots and pans amidst literal turmoil outside the monastery doors – a similar situation to what I imagine many of us find ourselves in today! This comprehensive translation of letters, maxims, and last words revolves around the simple practice of the presence, which is simply, and at its most essential, an awareness of the presence of God. Acevedo Butcher beautifully captures what Brother Lawrence continually reminds us: There are no special words, devotions, or actions needed, just simplicity of thought and deed.”

—Father Richard Rohr, OFM, Center for Action and Contemplation

Every skilled translator knows only too well the looming meaning of the French phrase Traduire, c’est trahir—‘To translate is to betray.’ The phrase means that something essential in the original language is left out of the translation. The translator’s art requires two skills at once. She must indwell each language while at the same time listening deeply and waiting patiently. Carmen Acevedo Butcher, both delicate and precise as embroidery, is no traitor. With inspiring, poetic prose she provides us the first complete translation of all Brother Lawrence’s works. And she does this from a unique perspective. As a woman of color, she is sensitive to the need to look beneath the pot-scrubbing Brother Lawrence (he actually detested the work) to see the social constraints that bore upon the man, Nicolas Herman, who, in King Louis XIV’s France, was socially excluded for not being adequately French in quite the right way. Carmen Acevedo Butcher gives a living voice to a person who did not count in his one culture. Out of this place of not-counting, emerges a depth of spiritual wisdom that transcends the ages. Carmen Acevedo Butcher is uniquely positioned to give him a voice in a way no previous translator has. Her translation will be the new standard by which other translations will be measured.

—Martin Laird, OSA, is professor of early Christian studies at Villanova University; author of Into the Silent Land; A Sunlit Absence; and An Ocean of Light (all by Oxford University Press)

“Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s insightful and inclusive translation of Brother Lawrence’s classic, Practice of the Presence, is such a needed balm for our beleaguered souls. Its wisdom reminds us that the maelstrom of this present age is not unique. In this world we will have trouble, i.e., pandemics, environmental disasters, and severely strained social contracts, but they are transitory distractions. Acevedo Butcher’s spiritually attuned translation invites us to host presence, awaken hope, and immerse ourselves in love.”

—Rev. Dr. Barbara A. Holmes, president emerita, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities; core faculty for the Center for Action and Contemplation

“The best translations of spiritual classics are not those that sound familiar but those that strike the ear in a whole new way, because they offer proof that the teachings are still alive and evolving in our own day.  Whether you love the teachings of Brother Lawrence or have never encountered them before, you can trust Carmen Acevedo Butcher to offer you a fresh hearing that is in tune with the lives we are living right now.” 

—Barbara Brown Taylor, author of An Altar in the World

“Imagine Mr. Rogers was a mystic. That will give you a sense of the warm spiritual heart of Brother Lawrence, brought to life for the twenty-first century in this vivid, timely new translation. In our age of distraction and despair, Brother Lawrence’s counsel to practice the presence of Love is not a method or a formula, but the gentle gift from a friend of the God who is our Friend. This is a book to cherish as God’s incessant invitation to draw near.”

—James K.A. Smith, author of You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit 

“To be present to God: this is the ‘method without method’ experimented by a humble Parisian religious of the seventeenth century. This new translation, faithful to the original text, allows us to rediscover a simple spiritual path accessible to all.”
—Denis Sureau, editor, theologian, author of Frère Laurent de la Résurrection: Le cordonnier de Dieu (Artège, 2020)

“What a bold, vibrant, and potent translation of this mystical masterpiece! As she did with the perennial wisdom jewel, Cloud of Unknowing, Carmen Acevedo Butcher once again breaks open the stilted and patriarchal language that encrusts our most life-giving spiritual treasures and makes the Practice of the Presence easy to grasp and impossible to resist. Its author, the humble seventeenth-century sage Brother Lawrence, reminds us that every task, no matter how ordinary, is a fresh opportunity for drawing near to the Friend. And that the more we take refuge in this intimacy, frequently repeating such phrases as ‘My God, I am all yours,’ or ‘God of love, I love you with all my heart,’ or ‘Love, create in me a new heart,’ the more often we find ourselves simply resting in the presence of Love Itself.”

—Mirabai Starr, translator of John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila and Julian of Norwich, author of God of Love and Wild Mercy

“The greatest mystics, like Kabir and Rumi, have a simplicity and electric directness that both takes our breath away and points us to the true north of our essential divine identity and the radiance of the Divine Presence in and as everything. Brother Lawrence is one of these universal visionaries, and reminds us relentlessly, in his soberly ecstatic and humble way, that what we search for with such anxiety and longing is always alive in us, and that the divine presence soaks and invigorates all things at all times. In a time of such devastation and rabid confusion, Brother Lawrence’s testimony is of sublime help, and a source of radical encouragement to all seekers on all paths. In these wonderful, naked, luminous translations he lives afresh inviting us with every word into the reality he knows and embodies so simply and fully. Do not miss this book and give it to everyone you know.”

—Andrew Harvey, author of The Hope and Turn Me to Gold: 108 Translations of Kabir

“To live guided by true presence. To pray as an invitation to embodied authenticity. To orient heart and mind in the direction of kindness. This is the theology of Brother Lawrence brought alive in this beautiful translation of The Practice of Presence by Carmen Acevedo Butcher. Accessible and freshly relevant, the book is a bell of mindfulness to accompany readers in deeper contemplation, making it an important guide to self-understanding, spiritual exploration, and Unity. Pause as you read. Breathe. Practice presence. Allow this profoundly invitational book to settle into your heart.”

—Valerie Brown, JD, MA, PCC, Dharma teacher, Plum Village; faculty, Georgetown University, School of Continuing Studies; author of Hope Leans Forward

“A vibrant, urgent, and earthy translation of a timeless classic.”

—James Martin, SJ, author of Learning to Pray

“In this radiant new translation Carmen Acevedo Butcher puts her acclaimed skills as a translator fully in the service of her listening heart to deliver Brother Lawrence’s timeless teaching on simplicity and presence to a world desperately in need of it. More than a translation, this is a transmission, conveying not only Lawrence’s words, but the spirit of inclusivity and kindness from which he wrote them. It is her faithfulness to the fragrance of his presence that makes her translation so inviting, even as we watch her take a few risks to reach a whole new world of seekers. It was a joy to watch Carmen and Brother Lawrence making such sweet music together.”

—Cynthia Bourgeault, author of The Heart of Centering Prayer, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene

“How to live in the presence of God is of the essence of the Christian mystical tradition. Few mystical texts have presented a practical method for attaining God’s presence as effectively as the collection of letters, conversations, and biographical materials known as The Practice of the Presence of God, stemming from the Carmelite brother, Lawrence of the Resurrection (d. 1691). This gem of the Christian mystical tradition has now been made available in a striking new translation and study by Carmen Acevedo Butcher. It is a book to be treasured by all who are devoted to the inner life.”

—Bernard McGinn, Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor emeritus, Divinity School, University of Chicago

“Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s powerful translation of Brother Lawrence’s Spiritual Maxims, letters, and conversations opens our hearts to experience God through the lens of a humble seventeenth-century friar, one who had very little to say about institutional religion and very much to say about the presence of God in the everyday lives of ordinary people. At a time when institutionalized religion often fails us, this translation reminds us that we are constantly surrounded by the divine presence and that God is accessible to us at any moment of life and far beyond the confines of churches, temples, and synagogues. It is a timely translation that holds enormous possibility for the reformation of a religious faith that desperately needs it.”

—Rob Nash, associate dean for doctoral programs and professor of comparative religion and mission at the McAfee School of Theology of Mercer University, Atlanta, Georgia

“Carmen Acevedo Butcher brings scholarly expertise and abundant love to this fresh rendering of a classic work of Christian literature. Brother Lawrence’s spiritual insights are as timely now as they were when first written centuries ago, making this beautiful translation a much-needed gift to the world today. With its inclusion of helpful historical and biographical context, this edition deserves a place in every personal and public library.”

—Karen Swallow Prior, research professor of English and Christianity & Culture, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary; author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books

“Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century French monk, persists as a powerful force and resource in Christian tradition. His testimony, in letters and conversations, is marked by humility, vulnerability, simplicity, and a focus on love. In this welcome new edition Carmen Acevedo Butcher has made the work of Brother Lawrence freshly available in a most accessible and compelling way. In our world marked by speed, convenience, and hostility, no doubt Brother Lawrence is a persuasive antidote and alternative to a culture of alienation. We may be grateful to Acevedo Butcher for her careful, attentive work in this contemporary offer of ancient trustful wisdom.”

—Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary, author of Money and Possessions

“Presence, not often or easily practiced, is made, once more, available to us. Each of us can practice presence by embodying all that we inhabit. May we come closer to ourselves and to God by a newly found practice of presence. This book is one such tool to inhabit a profound presence.” 

—Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, PhD, author of Body Becoming: A Path to our Liberation 

“Brother Lawrence is not only a great Christian mystic, he’s also charming and accessible—a sage whose wisdom is thoroughly down-to-earth and relevant to today. Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s fresh, richly embodied, and at times surprising translation makes the words of this Carmelite contemplative truly come alive.”
—Carl McColman, author of Eternal Heart and The Big Book of Christian Mysticism

“Carmen Acevedo Butcher listens across the centuries and finds a companion for all of us in a disabled, veteran of war, shoe-mending, soup-making monk. Brother Lawrence’s ‘sacred, ordinary, and necessary’ way of prayer can help all of us to pause, and more importantly, to bring our minds back to love. This translation is a joyful conversation with Brother Lawrence, one in which we can all participate.”

—Kaya Oakes, author of The Defiant Middle

“In these pages, I sat across from a blue-collar saint whose temple is a kitchen. Brother Lawrence has bequeathed to us that rare wisdom that weds the celestial to the terrestrial. He teaches us how to punctuate the ordinary tasks of life with petition, thanksgiving, and the practice of standing in the presence of Jesus, even as he flips omelets for the Almighty. This splendid book, exquisitely written and scintillating with wisdom, will breathe divine life into the sacred ordinary of the Christian.”

—Chad Bird, Scholar in Residence at 1517

“As time goes on, new translations of classic works are desirable. Carmen Acevedo Butcher has provided one for our times. Her work reflects her love of Brother Lawrence and her familiarity with the Practice of the Presence of God. Her comprehensive version is quite extensive and full.”

—Father Salvatore Sciurba, OCD, Discalced Carmelite Friars, Monastery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Washington, DC

“Many have an acquaintance with Brother Lawrence but Carmen Acevedo Butcher helps us to know him far better in this new translation. We not only experience a fresh, contemporary, and accessible translation of The Practice of the Presence of God but we also get a greater understanding of this legendary yet simple man who guides us on a path of contemplation of the greatest love of all.”

—Vincent Bacote, director of the Center for Applied Christian Ethics, and professor of theology, Wheaton College

“Carmen Acevedo Butcher has given us a careful and luminous translation of a spiritual classic. This great book still has the power to bring us into the Presence.”

—Don Brophy, author of One Hundred Great Catholic Books

“This is Presence come alive for a new generation, for our conflicted spirits. Reveals the most durable way of prayer not dependent on words I’ve ever found. Highly recommended!”

—Jon M. Sweeney, author of Nicholas Black Elk and Feed the Wolf

Oddkins

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

“One’s whole life is in the work, in the writing and in the play.”

That’s Donna Haraway, a scientist-cultural activist-professor. In the documentary Story Telling for Earthly Survival by Fabrizio Terranova (58:02), Haraway presents my favorite beyond-colonial, beyond-patriarchal approach to being in the now, on earth, in community. It’s all about being present, embodied, here, now.

Her words also resonate with my translating. My whole life is in it.

It’s like the story of the shucked corn cobs Earcell would bring my family. She’d call about 5:30 of an evening: “Git your pot on, water a-boiling. I’m heading to the field. Be over tirectly.” That corn, with the freshest sugar, grown by our thoughtful generous neighbor, walked over and shared with us, then cooked by my mother, well, no other corn on the cob has ever, and I mean ever, tasted as delicious.

Translating sometimes reminds me of that freshest taste of the gift of just-picked corn.

The snow leopard, called “the ghost of the mountains,” is elusive and beautiful. Evolved to thrive in some of the harshest environments on our planet. Elusive also because its grey, yellow, brown-spotted pelage blends in with its rocky, snowy environment.

A good translator is a little like a snow leopard. If doing the job well, the translator may disappear into the text.

Resting Snow Leopard Credit: Assam, Creative License

A beautiful series of unending acts. Sometimes a translator sits down at a desk and respectfully makes the alchemy happen that slowly turns this text into another one. Other times translating is walking in the marsh or washing dishes or listening to students who’ve faced guns pointed at them merely because their skin is Black. Sometimes translating is resting.

In a world that worships this-or-that, one thing over another, translation is neither and both and something else entirely, all at once. Its essential nature is on the move. “Across and beyond,” trans places, trans times, trans people, it magically carries meaning and beauty and joy between multiple complex points, existing everywhere and nowhere.

Always in complex motion, and outside simplistic categorizing. Translators may be patted on the head and called “clever,” or praised for their “areas of expertise,” but only 44% of books carry their translator’s name on the front cover. That’s from Pamela Paul’s “Stop Pretending All Books Are Written in English” (May 29, 2022, NYT). Thankfully, Jennifer Croft, Jhumpa Lahiri, and many others are pointing out this “unique form of neglect.”

Author, critic, and translator working from Polish, Ukrainian, and Argentine Spanish, Croft asserts, “[I]t’s still considered almost a threat to name anyone other than the author.” Croft’s own Man Booker International Prize-winning translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights doesn’t have Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft on the front cover, and Croft resolved, “I’m not translating any more books without my name on the cover” (Oct. 15, 2021, PW).

You’d also not know that the novelist and translator Jhumpa Lahiri translated Domenico Starnone’s novel Trust, because you don’t see Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri on the front cover. Lahiri argues in Translating Myself and Others: “Translators are often described as being invisible, discreet, self-sacrificing presences. Their names are frequently absent on book covers; their roles are meant to be supportive. . . . Indeed, feminist scholars have argued that the practice of translation corresponds to traditional feminine archetypes in which a woman’s position and identity were subservient to a man’s” (May 12, 2022, TCC).

Lahiri adds that writing and translating are “two aspects of the same activity, two faces of the same coin, or maybe two strokes, that allow me to swim greater distances, and at greater depths” (May 29, 2022, NYT). Isn’t that superlative, I think to myself, another third way to look at the creative process that is writing and translating.

In the lyrical This Little Art translator and author Kate Briggs explores that third way in writing. Her book is fun to read, even if you don’t care about translation one bit, if you just love words and history and joy and walking around in Europe. My favorite books are genre-bursting, like Briggs’ essay, scholarship, novel, poetry, and philosophy all rolled into beautiful words, words you like, words I take in like I eat barbeque potato chips. Happily, simply.

I am blushingly, deeply in love with words. I admit it. When I translate, the sound of the words and their rhythms matter to me as much as their meanings.

As a kind friend and colleague, also a professional editor, pointed out to me recently, I am not likely meant to say, as on the About webpage I remade recently: “Carmen is the author of x-number-of books,” if some are translations. Aren’t translations books?

When my translation of Practice of the Presence is published by Broadleaf Books, I will have worked on, written, revised, translated, been translated by, and put my body, mind, heart, and soul into ten books, not even counting time invested in reissues, new editions, Audible releases, and the like, and even so, I can’t say I’m the author of ten books? Ah, words. Ah, world.

When I think of translating a work from one language and one time period into English and now, I think of how my “whole life” is in that translating, in the writing and in the high-serious play and joy of the countless little acts. I’m looking up innumerable etymologies of words, lovingly finding old dictionaries that offer words in their timely habitats of sentences from that period so I can see how they were used then. I’m also studying history and who knew Paris experienced a Little Ice Age and then floods in the late seventeenth-century.

And I’m letting the words and their meanings “happen” to me by entering into the entire wisdom of the work that translates me, so where past translations of Nicolas Herman see a word like bonté in French and just hear “goodness,” as a binary-system antithesis of “evil,” the Spirit shows me the “kindness” that exists outside a binary view and that is omnipresent in Brother Lawrence’s teaching. Which helps us create all sorts of relationships that Haraway sees as kinships she calls oddkins. These relationships include animals, trees, and yes, relationships human-to-human, with each other.

Noble laureate Olga Tokarczuk in the essay “Ognosia” translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft, calls this “multiorganismicity” (June 6, 2022), at Words Without Borders: “Complexity, multiplicity, diversity, mutual influence, metasymbiosis—these are the new perspectives from which we observe the world.” This essay is a must-read.

Alice Walker dedicates The Color Purple:

“To the Spirit: / Without whose assistance / Neither this book / Nor I / Would have been / Written.”

That dedication speaks to me and my experience of translating. How I best listen to the palpable silence. With my body, mind, heart, and soul alert to the Spirit, who seems a friend, and the Spirit is also my body, mind, heart, and soul, a third way, a fourth way, a fifth way opening. Way opens, meaning kindness.

Translation is how I find my way to more kindness.

Translating is bodyful. A term I take from Christine Caldwell’s Bodyfulness (Shambhala). New days need new terms. New ways of being-awake need new words.

Bodyfulness is her neologism. Caldwell says, “The body isn’t a thing we have but an experience we are” (xxv). She calls bodyfulness “attention during action,” “a purposeful and athletic ability to alter our attentional focus” so that “the amount and type of sensations we work with can be nourishing and deeply informative.”

Body as experience is a complex process of my capillaries, my acetylcholinesterase, my toes, my thinking, the water I drink, my breathing, grief, tears, saying sorry, meaning it and changing, my listening, my joy that we have the right to vote and have our votes counted, my worries for America, my love for others, my love for my self, the tang of coffee, the getting up, the sitting down, the walking, the snowy egrets, and always the dancing.

Caldwell is wise like Haraway. She says, “Humans invent words because we need language to articulate and share our experience with others, yet our words also actively shape how we perceive and move in the world.”

When a friend asked me to write down my translation philosophy recently, I thought, Translation philosophy? because until that moment I translated almost unselfconsciously, but when I sat down to do the task my friend suggested, out came the words embodied mysticism, which after reading Caldwell became bodyful mysticism. I translate because I love words and wisdom and kindness and self-compassion and changing and making community. Because I actually love making space in me for listening to an other, and then sharing their beauty, and it’s a puzzle I respect and it makes me sway and shimmy and spin . . . with myself and others.

Mysticism is not an elite word. Though it’s become rarefied. Treated like champagne when it’s really clean water and oxygen. It merely means my translation listens for mystery and makes room for mystery and respects mystery and honors mystery and opens for the kind Other in others, which cannot be worded, just as the mystic Marguerite Porete’s Loing Près is a Far Nearness happily decentering-Me while embracing me, and I others. This is the Something More healer Ann Bedford Ulanov often mentions, the Source of the Source.

Mysticism is ordinary. It’s a cup of tea, its steam rising. It’s not exclusive. Not housed in institutions. It’s certainly no gatekeeper. It’s a cup of coffee, its steam rising. It’s my breath on a cold day. Your breath. It’s working to make sure everyone can breathe.

Translation is also making oddkins. A portmanteau from Old Norse oddi, “third or additional number,” and Old English cynn, “family,” plus a soupçon of Octavia Butler’s parables, this neologism articulates Haraway’s vision of surprising ways of kin-making. She sees kin as “a wild category” that people “do their best to domesticate” but can’t. Oddkins expresses our need for “unexpected collaborations and combinations,” for “becom[ing]-with each other or not at all.” Making oddkins is “cultivating multispecies justice” among humans, dolphins, ants, corals of the seas and lichens of the land, orchids, bees, you name it.

Living on “Terra” during “disturbing” and “mixed-up” times, Haraway describes our “task” as learning to respond well by inventive kin-making, finding connections with each other, even though as humans we’re all a little “bumptious,” which is a sweet way of saying obnoxious, or as Merriam-Webster‘s puts it: “presumptuously, obtusely, and often noisily self-assertive.” Aren’t we all.

She sees oddkinning as a “practice,” a “response-ability” to make a “thick, ongoing present.” Echoing the wise Georgia Congressman John Lewis, she says, “Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.” She teaches that “staying with the trouble” requires not focusing on an “awful or edenic” past nor an “apocalyptic or salvific” future, but instead on “learning to be truly present.”

“Learning to be truly present” is what Practice of the Presence is about. I spent the quarantine summer of 2020 and beyond in seventeenth-century Paris with Brother Lawrence, translating solidly. This dedication of my time deepened my lifelong walk with this simple practice that heals complexly. When out of the blue on June 9th, someone who read my translation of the Cloud of Unknowing, also a Companion of Julian of Norwich emailed me a gut-wrenching breath prayer: Slowly inhale, I can’t breathe and slowly out, Come, Spirit.

George Floyd’s presence is in Practice of the Presence too. So is Ahmaud Arbery’s and Breonna Taylor’s. As I translated, I began seeing Brother Lawrence, disabled veteran and an unremarkable Carmelite friar then, slipping into his self-repaired sandals, picking up a homemade #LesViesNoiresComptent sign, and marching down the rue de Vaugirard, with a profound limp.

Making oddkins happens where, when, how? Here, now, being present. Haraway translates her vision into a new word. To learn to be present and stay with what Lewis names “trouble,” Haraway renames our present age, seeing the traditional term for our “current geological age,” Anthropocene, as limited, limiting. For our “transformative . . . timeplace” Haraway makes the “simple word” Chthulucene, pronounced, / ˈTHOO luh scene / (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene).

Chthulucene envisions our present moment, with its “vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy,” as the time “to make trouble” by “staying with the trouble . . . [through] learning to be truly present.” Chthulucene is the present moment where we take the third way of sym-poiesis, or making-with all other creatures. Haraway believes, “We become-with each other or not at all.” That’s why she coined Chthulucene by marrying the Greek khthôn/χθών or “earth,” with kainos/καινός or “now . . . thick, ongoing presence.” (Which is very much what the friar’s practicing the presence is: “being present now on earth.”)

Brits keep the initial “k” for χ, but mostly it’s dropped from khthôn/χθών, and the word starts with θ or “th.” A fun word to say, it’s also beautiful. It lands on the tongue like life and love: / ˈTHOO luh scene /. Its sound doesn’t match its looks, which is just the kind of vertigo love makes. Like the word kin, Chthulucene is a “wild category” open to untold healthy possibilities. It’s more inclusive and generates more joy and more opportunities to connect in “unexpected collaborations and combinations,” rather than Anthropocene, which centers man in anthro and excludes other creatures.

We’re all kin and wildly, wonderfully odd. We’re here now, on earth, made of dust, together.

And as my very bones know, translation is a process some may also call, yes, love.

Brown

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

“Look. They’re brown.”

This whisper glides effortlessly across the bituminous tarmac with the lazy downward drift of a paper airplane perfectly creased then released. It sounds astonished, not malicious. Escaping with crystal clarity under the cracked-open glass of a narrow, five-foot-long steel-awning schoolroom window, it reaches the Fiver-like, olive-skinned ears of a skinny eleven-year-old, whose bony shoulders have already begun hunching for other reasons. For one, she’s an introvert who loves books. Hearing this surprisingly feral, disembodied curiosity, they inch an indiscernible fraction more in the direction of the cloudless sky, as she and her family navigate a scorching asphalt parking lot, a patch of melting blackness stranded smackdab in seemingly endless, green, cow-grazing pastures.

With each step, left then right, new sneakers reluctantly leave the sunned and sticky surface with a slight suck-suck sound.

She focuses her gaze resolutely forward, refusing a strong impulse to look left where the long pushed-out window is, but all the same she feels unseen eyes on her and her two sisters.

Her ears burn.

“ÆSˈ ə veɪdʌ.”

“HⱭTˈ pəˈteɪˌtʌ.”

“OƱˈ sʌˈvi doʊ.”

That’s roll call. I wince and pull the corners of my lips up and go along. It’s one reason today I pay attention to how my students’ names are pronounced.

It’s / Ɑˈ səˈveɪ doʊ /, I would say now.

At that point, though, we’re the only Acevedo in the White pages of the phone book. When I check, twelve by then, I don’t need another reason outside my own changing body to make me feel alien and not belonging, but there it is. 

This changing makes me self-conscious because it feels like a threat. My bones warn, You drew the short gender straw. My mind asks how long I’ll evade the consequence by choosing too-big t-shirts that bury tender, growing peaks brushing up against their cotton, simultaneously thrilling and scaring me in a society signaling they will not be mine.

At home in the blue-green foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I grow up eating steaming plates of fried chicken with collard greens and arroz con pollo, not at the same meal. My family and I fork fried liver and onions into mashed potatoes, and spoon black beans with rice and pork. We devour hot fluffy biscuits, we consume fried ripe plantains. We eat salty beef stew, we have spicy chicken fricassee. We enjoy homemade lemon meringue pies, and caramelized flan.

I drink gallons of ice-cold sweet brown tea. I mean Petticoat Junction water towers of it. Also as a kid visiting my dad’s relatives in Miami, I’m granted a grown-up’s breakfast that stars a hot demitasse cup filled to the brim with espresso-shot café con leche, and to the side, toasted Cuban bread for dunking. That is heaven.

Then for lunch we go out with an aunt who always wears bright colors and perfume even to a corner store for some Cuban sandwiches. That simple, underestimated combination of Cuban bread with ham, pork, cheese, pickles, mustard sets a never surpassed standard for sandwich excellence. In between meals, my cousins sneak my brother and me sugary contraband chunks of gritty dark-red guava paste sandwiched between impossibly thick, wonderfully creamy slices of sharply savory orange cheese.

My father and me
My mother and me

With a White mother and a Brown father, I’m born into multiculturalism. At first it means summer trips to Florida from Georgia, a hardworking, taking-nothing-for-granted, overcompensating, flamboyant, brave grandfather who has a thick accent and difficulty with plurals, a different skin tone from those around me, and more, delicious food choices.

It becomes that happy energy I love when my aunts and uncles are all talking at once sitting on the front steps after supper, becoming more animated as the light goes and filling the night air in Little Havana with one “¡Mira!” and “¡Claro que sí!” after another, and smoke curling up from waved cigarettes. It’s being kissed on one cheek, then the other, often, hugged and patted by everybody.

It’s the flickering strangeness of tall votive candles lit and left burning at all hours, with figures on them like a woman looking down, eyes closed, her hands pressed together, dressed in a colorful robe from head to toe, short yellow-orange rays outlining her body. It is also on display on a table in one uncle’s TV room—the biggest, heaviest, loveliest round glass bottle I’ve ever seen, holding a darker-than-tea liquid, and when the sun shines through the window, it looks like amber, but the label on it reads R-U-M.

My skin is not as dark as my Miami cousins’ nor even my father’s Café Bustelo café-con-chocolate tone, since mine has a splash of my mother’s milk and of his mother’s added to it. I’m neither this nor that, but I love my olive hue, write about it in my journals, and feel very Brown looking at those around me.

This mixed-race background, and my gender, are not a fit for the 1970s-1980s South. I look and look for my place. Exclusively run by one end of the Fitzpatrick scale, and by strict commands in Genesis for some to “rule over” me, this world affords me scant space.

But my brave, indefatigably cheerful, hardworking mother faithfully makes PTA phone calls, organizes school fundraisers, bakes endless pound cakes that squeak, cleans up after Halloween school fests, keeps babies in the church nursery, and always makes time to do whatever others ask of her. The community’s respect for her many contributions plus her pigmentation largely protect me.

I thought even then, Others live differently from me—is so fascinating. It makes me feel alive tasting strangely sweet, sandy guava paste for the first time between two smooth slices of tangy cheese. It’s what I think going to school should be like, truly learning, without the torturous spelling tests and other challenges. Multiculturalism experienced as family and self is my first inoculation against society’s suffocating, and inherently violent binary codes.

The main discrimination for me—gender. Two exist then, one strong, one weak. One free, one government-legislated. One virile, one hysterical. I see a future of dishwashing, cooking, and diaper-changing ahead of me. A curtain coming down at the end of a play. Early on I sense that to complain about each unfairness will require constant interruption, incur punishment, and I’ll never get to do the things I want, so I know my place and stay in it, and work like the devil.

This prejudice is mainlined three times a week when my parents take my younger brother and two sisters and me on Wednesday nights and twice on Sundays—with the precision of an addiction—to a Southern Baptist church. Women are not equal with men there. This inequality does not make a person feel like a person.

We’re the only mixed-race family in the pews under that sharply white steeple. My mother and brother look local, she teases the mailman must’ve come through, but the rest of us are decidedly other. Still, my handsome father, who looks a lot like a Cuban Elvis Presley, becomes a glad-handing deacon and gets to stand solemn at the end of pews, one brown hand over the other, both resting where his jacket buttons, waiting straight as a sentry for the gleaming shallow dish, heavy with quarters, to make its way back.

During long church services dark suits stride cleanly up the steps to the pulpit to speak. Often they scream at me with authority. Decreeing women are made inferior by God and are required by divine law to be subservient to their husbands. In Sunday School I’m trained in Evangelical womanhood, which is that the highest, most noble possibility in life is marriage to a man, serving him as my superior; children shall follow, and the woman shall raise them.

As a child, this arrangement puzzles me to no end. If God is loving, how could he make me less-than someone else? Why do just men speak from raised places of power? Why do they shout angrily at me in church, towering over everyone else, while quiet women are always invisibly working, doing things behind-the-scenes that keep the church ticking over?

These questions have never been answered.

My school years are a mess. That likely makes me a kinder teacher.

We move once every two years or so, as my father has difficulty holding a job, and I find it hard to form new friendships that often.

As a student, I always feel wrong, incapable. Reading seems impossible. The words will not stay still. They float in and right back out. Letters switch places, s and c, d and b. Also words like now, no, know. I can’t focus. Standardized reading tests are the worst experience. They make my brain seize and halt. You have to read a passage you have no relationship to, like some jargon-laden textbook excerpt, which wouldn’t intimidate me today, but as a high school student, I’m caught in an undertow. At home we have Reader’s Digest, Guideposts, plus Billy Graham’s Angels on the lid of the toilet tank.

I get in trouble for talking in class. I have several years where I must have been such an annoying student. I try to remember that now, as a teacher. There’s even a black-and-white elementary school photo where I’m turned around talking to someone behind me. In another city a teacher puts me out in the hallway, right beside the classroom door, and the rite of passage is that kids file by on their way to the lunchroom and snicker and point. Even earlier, I’m sitting on a bench waiting for my mother to come pick me up, lucking out since she drove my father to work that day and has the car, and the memory is of soaked underpants and the soggy back of a Singer-sewn dress sticking to the cold metal, making me shiver.

I don’t begin to understand these failures until I’m helping a student who describes his difficulties with reading, which I silently notice resemble my earlier ones, and he says, “I have dyslexia.” I’ve never heard that word before, or if I have, it hasn’t registered. Next I happen on “Words Failed, Then Saved Me” by poet Philip Schulz in the New York Times, describing his late-diagnosed dyslexia, and it resonates. I’m like Ah, I see. I’m well into middle age, too, when I begin to have some compassion for my struggling childhood self.

Today the letters and words rarely switch places, but on occasion they do so gently, without impeding my reading much now. But from kindergarten through college, and beyond to a Ph.D., undiagnosed dyslexia causes me untold grief. I cannot focus and am always anxious. I never sit down to a college test that I’m not holding one hand over my stomach as cramps begin an hour before it and only subside that evening, only to start again with the next test.

Still, I have a deep well of stubbornness, which turns out to be useful. I like books, I just can’t read well. So I read and read and read. One of my favorites is Watership Down. It’s hard going, but life-altering experiences like identifying with the puny rabbit with a sixth sense are what keep me pushing and very gradually allow the act of moving my eyes over printed pages to become one of my greatest joys.

But I remain frustrated for years, watching as friends nail perfect SAT scores and big scholarships to expensive schools. My standardized test scores lag. It’s embarrassing.

My friends have firm plans to go to college. I envy them. Studying is painful, hard, and slow, but I want to go to college too. I’m chopping coleslaw at Granny’s Fried Chicken when my father says to me: “You can’t go to college. I’ve got three more kids after you. I can’t afford it. Don’t ask me again.”

We live in an unincorporated community called Macedonia, near the then equally small town of Canton, Georgia, which doesn’t have a movie cinema. We have well water. It’s soft on hair but bad on teeth. I love our neighbors Hoyt and Earcell, they raise chickens and garden, and let me ramble for hours over their rolling green pastures and woods whenever I am sad or bored or need to flee problems at home, walking miles with only the red-tailed hawks soaring overhead for company. But I itch to see more of the world.

Some teachers help me, and I do the work. Even though I see no progress. What else is there? Behind my father’s back, I apply to colleges, paying for the fees with money from my fast-food job, hoping scholarships will happen that will enable me to go to school; otherwise, I cannot go.

Miraculously they do. I choose the school that offers me the most money. It’s an award-winning liberal arts college offering small class sizes, each not over twenty students, and individual teacher attention for every student. The downside is it’s only two hours from my home in northwest Georgia, but it’s a start, a chance.

Once there, however, I feel awkward. I’m on academic and need-based scholarships and do work-study as a secretary to pay for the expensive books. I type for a professor while many classmates drive new cars. Kind teachers, friends who overlook my oddities, like the semester I wear blue bib overalls solidly, and my doggedness somehow see me through.

My sophomore year brings an unexpected freedom. My Cuban grandfather shoehorns people’s feet into espadrilles and brocades and Oxfords and boots and sneakers and more at a department store, and when he shoehorns enough pumps onto middle-aged women’s callused feet, flashes his mustachioed grin, and charms them into purchases with his enthusiasm, he’s able to buy his long-awaited Oldsmobile Delta 88, and gives me his ten-year-old, faded green Vega. I feel like I am driving a Cadillac. I’m so happy, I don’t care I must turn the AC off to go more than 10 mph up hills, or that it requires me to store quarts of oil in the back and chug in one or more every other time I fill up with gas, or that sometimes it belches heavy white smoke, sometimes black, causing one motorist to shake his fist at me through the fog.

When Ortega (the Vega) dies a few years later, I get a used, dark blue metallic Chevy Chevette hatchback. It looks how a car would if it were mimicking a sneeze, the tiny wheels especially. It, a teaching assistantship, suppers of tuna, canned mixed vegetables, baked potatoes, sometimes Ramen for variation, and not otherwise shopping, for my mother keeps making my dress clothes, carry me through grad school in Athens.