Excellent — Mo Husseini: We Will Build It Forward

WOW!! YES! Deepest respect, appreciation, and 

gratitude, as always, to Mo Husseini!

— Molly

Photo by Molly

We Will Build It Forward

We will not build it back. Not to what it was. That was never good enough. What it was was a brochure and promise made to some and promised but withheld from others and selectively enforced and celebrated universally and the distance between the brochure and the real heartbreaking lived experience was always the con-man’s tell, was always the bruised and bleeding wound, was always the thing we refused to look at when we pledged allegiance hand on heart with eyes on a flag that flew over slave markets.

So, no. Not back to then. But forward to a better future. Toward the thing we said we were but have never been. Toward the brochure. Toward the lying vision you sold in civics class and that too many were too comfortable to disbelieve, but brave enough still to take seriously, and if that makes us suckers or marks then so be it. We are suckers. We are marks who will persist and build the things we were promised. We will build forward for the people you never built it for.

For the ones who were here before you “discovered” and who were not consulted or included. For the ones who were brought here in chains and were not included. For the ones who built the roads and tilled the fields and laid the railways and built the wealth and who were told that the building was not for them. For the ones who are told every day to go back to a country they have never seen, by people whose own grandparents came here on a boat.

We will build it forward and we will build it right this time, which means building it for everyone, which means admitting it was never, ever, ever for everyone before, which is the part that makes you lose your minds because your myth is load-bearing deception and the myth is a lie and the building has been standing on a cracked foundation since 1619 and you cannot fix the roof until you dig out the skeletons in the basement and bury them with honor and regret.

Every stone you threw we will lay again. Every wall you gutted we will replaster. Every bridge you burned we will build again. Every door you closed we will open again. And the traffic will flow and the rivers will flow and the people will flow and time will flow and we will blot out your names until they fade into the distance of the unloved of history.

We will build forward the schools and the libraries and fill them with the books you banned and the teachers you muzzled and the curricula you bleached and whitewashed to erase the truth of the histories that make you feel shame and discomfort for your part in them.

We will build forward the hospitals and the clinics and the labs and bring back the scientists and the doctors you fired and attacked and the research you killed and the vaccines you politicized and the public health infrastructures you dismantled because drug-addled morons who think the measles builds character told you to.

We will build forward the courts and take back and rewrite the law and clean out the courts like Hercules in the Augean. We will build forward equality under the law without favor or privilege, for every human being, the boring, ordinary, unglamorous Rule of Law that scares you and that you treated like an optional inconvenience instead of the foundations of the nation.

We will build forward the borders. Not as walls or as cages but as doors that welcome in the tired and poor and huddled masses yearning to break free. We will build forward the gateway at the feet of the New Colossus and live up to the truth of the lies you sold.

We will build forward the agencies and the offices and the phone lines and the people who answer them. The VA, and the Social Security office, and the EPA, and CDC, and NOAA, and the FDA, and every dull and vital acronym you gutted because a ketamine-addled sociopath told you they were inefficient and gutted them while spreading memes and glorifying Nazis.

We will build forward the alliances and the treaties and the friendships and the relationships you gutted because your stupid diapered dotard listens to the flattery of dictators and sycophants who pretend he is strong and manipulate his fragile, short-fingered, pyrite-plated, and vulgar ego.

We will build forward the air and the water and the soil and the regulations that weren’t enough but were too burdensome and unnecessary from your perspective. We will build forward rivers that run clean and children who can breathe and we will give you nothing but the reviling you so richly deserve.

We will build forward the right to speak and the right to march and the right to dissent and the right to exist and the right to hold power accountable whether you are Black, or Brown, or Gay, or Trans, or Muslim, or Jewish, or Buddhist, or poor, or just simply inconvenient.

We will build forward the right to vote and the right for that vote to matter and the right to be represented by people who look and think and feel and care like you. We will build forward the right for the person we elected to take office without mobs storming the building because a thin-skinned man in a terrible combover and a shit-filled diaper told them that math was fake news to protect his ego from admitting his loss.

We will build it forward. Nail by nail. Brick by brick. Law by law. Conviction by conviction, and vote by vote, and day by day, and hand in hand.

And yes. It will not be easy and it will not be fast and it will not be clean and we will fuck some shit up and have to fix it and that is called democracy and it is messy and ugly and slow but it is a million times better than the shit we have to live through with you and your vulgarities and it is the only way to build forward and care about the person at the bottom of the pile. To care about your Jesus’ “the least of us.”

And when you say “make America great again” we will say that America has never been great, not fully, not for everyone, not yet, and we will tell you that not as a criticism but as a dare. Not “make America great again” but instead, Make America Great At Last. At long, long last.

Because even your racist, enslaving, hypocritical founders knew. They dared too. The dare they encoded into their foundational words was “more perfect” instead of perfect. Because for all their faults they knew that the project was not finished and will never be finished and that the act of finishing is the work and that work is the nation.

So we will build it forward. The boring way. The ordinary way. The way it works when it works. Clean water from the tap. Mail in the mailbox. Healthcare for all. Bridges that stay up. Ambulances that show up. Teachers who teach truth. Judges who follow the law without favor. The woman who answers the phone and helps a stranger and does it again and again and never trends and never goes viral despite the fact that the Republic rests on her back and the backs of us all. And those backs do not break.

We will build it forward.

Better than it was.

Closer to the promise.

Further from the lie.

Until the lie is so far we can no longer see it from here.

We will build it.

— Mo Husseini

https://husseini.substack.com/

Maurice Sendak: That Was Always the Whole Secret

Tears. This is so moving and something that I resonate so deeply with. Thank you, Maurice Sendak. What a beautiful gift of wisdom, beauty, compassion, and love. 🙏💜 Molly

Photo by Molly

Live Your Life. Live Your Life.

Live Your Life.

In September 2011, an 83-year-old man named Maurice Sendak picked up the phone in his Connecticut home and called Terry Gross at NPR.

He had been on her show many times before. As one of the most beloved children’s book authors in history, he had written and illustrated Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and dozens of other books that became woven into the childhoods of millions.

He had a new book out called Bumble-Ardy. He had created it during the most painful period of his life, while his partner of 50 years, Eugene Glynn, was dying. "I did Bumble-Ardy to save myself," he told Terry. "I did not want to die with him."

What followed was one of the most beautiful interviews ever broadcast. For nineteen minutes, Maurice Sendak talked about getting old, about dying, and about the people he had loved. He spoke of the maple trees outside his studio window that were hundreds of years old and how, in the final stretch of his life, he had finally fallen completely in love with the world.

He cried. Terry cried. Listeners all over the country, driving in their cars or washing dishes, pulled over and cried with them.

He spoke of the tragedy of being 83 and outliving almost everyone he loved most—his parents, his brother Jack, his sister Natalie, his longtime publisher, and most painfully, Eugene. Then he said something that has been quoted ever since: "I’m not unhappy about becoming old. I’m not unhappy about what must be. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more."

He talked about how strange it was to find peace so late in life. He had spent most of his years unhappy, raised by Holocaust survivors who carried a grief they passed down to him. He had spent decades in therapy, once saying he believed in the existence of happy people but had never been one of them.

But near the end, something changed. He told Terry he was now in love with the world. He could look out his window at those beautiful trees and see them for what they were. He called it a blessing to grow old and have time for the things he loved—the books, the music, the quiet moments. "I have nothing now but praise for my life," he said.

At the end of the interview, he shared something with Terry that stayed with everyone who heard it: "You are the only person I have ever dealt with... who brings this out in me. There’s something very unique and special in you, which I so trust."

As they both wept, he added: "Almost certainly, I’ll go before you go, so I won’t have to miss you." Then, before hanging up, he gave her three final pieces of advice: "Live your life. Live your life. Live your life."

Eight months later, on May 8, 2012, Maurice Sendak passed away peacefully in a hospital in Connecticut at the age of 83.

His friend Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, was with him in his final days and brought him a gift: a photograph of Lewis Carroll sitting on a windowsill with his feet hanging outside. It was a perfect goodbye. The man who spent his life drawing children stepping into other worlds was now stepping into his own.

His books remain in nearly every library, and generations of children still join Max on his wild rumpus, always returning home to find their dinner waiting for them—and still hot.

In that final interview, he told Terry he would keep crying for the people he lost all the way to the end. "I’m a happy old man," he said. "But I will cry my way all the way to the grave."

He cried because he loved them. That was the whole secret. That was always the whole secret.

#neverforget #HolocaustHistory #womenshistory #RealHeroes

Copied from Moments from the Past

Cristina Breshears: Inheritance

 Thank you, Cristina Breshears. So powerful,

wise, and true. — Molly

By Cristina Breshears

I didn’t set out to write about inheritance. Not at first. When I began researching and writing Inheriting Our Names years ago, I thought I was writing about silence, about grief, about Spain’s Pact of Forgetting, about what a nation chooses not to say in order to survive itself.

I was interested in memory, in erasure, in the stories that slip beneath the surface and settle there, undisturbed — and how that inheritance impacts future generations. But even then, something else was moving underneath. Because silence and exhausted acceptance, too, is a kind of inheritance. Not just what is passed down in words and deeds, but what is carried forward in the absence of our voices and actions.

These past couple of years, I find myself deep in the lives of my great-grandfathers tracing land deeds and laws, migrations and violences, faith and its distortions. I thought I was writing an American history, or perhaps a reckoning. But here, too, the same question keeps surfacing, quiet and insistent: what do we do with what we’ve been given? Because, inheritance is not only material. It isn’t only names or property or bloodlines. It is also ways of seeing. Ways of justifying. And ways of looking away. It is the story you are handed about who you are and who others are in relation to you.

For a long time, I think I treated inheritance as something fixed. Or perhaps passive. Something simply received. But I’m beginning to see a distinction that feels essential. There is what is bequeathed to us, and there is what we choose to inherit. The first arrives without consent. The second requires participation.

Lately, this question has been surfacing not only in the past as I research the great-grandfathers, but also in the present. In the latest news cycle. In the rhythms of daily life. In the quiet, accumulating (and oftentimes unconscious) decisions we make about what we will accept as normal.

Take today … a proposal emerges for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, mobilized quickly in the name of protecting power after a moment of fear. This, after assurances the ballroom would never cost the public a dime. $400 million dollars. At a time when so many are quietly doing devastating math at their kitchen tables: rent or groceries; prescriptions or gas; one more shift or one more bill deferred.

U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham, Katie Britt, and Eric Schmitt today introduced the White House Safety and Security Act of 2026, which provides taxpayer funding for the construction of the presidential ballroom in the East Wing of the White House. The language is familiar: safety, security, necessity. But it is shocking how today the machinery is moving with startling speed while at the same time, children continue to practice lockdown drills, evacuations, duck and cover.

This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern. One we have slowly and unevenly come to live alongside. In 2026, there have been at least 32 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 14 deaths and 15 injuries nationally. It hardly makes the news anymore.

I wonder, what does it do to a child to practice hiding? What does it do to a parent to practice letting go? I do not think that what we ask our children (and ourselves) to endure and carry disappears. It becomes part of us. It settles in the body and in our nervous system and in what we call normal. It settles. It shapes. It becomes part of how we move through the world.

I find myself thinking not just about policy, or politics, or priorities, but about formation. What does it mean to grow up inside this? What does it do to a child to learn that safety is conditional? That fear is something to be managed rather than prevented? That the world will not change, even when the threat is known and avoidable? What does it do to a child to learn that law actually can be rewritten or rearranged, but not for them?

We tell ourselves kids are resilient. And they are. But resilience is not the same as being unharmed. They are being harmed. We are being harmed.

This is the thread in my work I’ve been unconsciously teasing but didn’t fully see before. What we tolerate does not remain contained to the moment. It carries forward through memory and habit and through what we come to accept. Inheritance is not only what we receive from the past. It is what we allow to pass through us into the future. And this is where the distinction begins to matter. Because if everything that is bequeathed were automatically inherited, nothing would ever change.

But there is, I think, a narrow and necessary space between the two. A space of attention. A moment, sometimes brief, sometimes hard-won where we can ask: is this mine to carry? Does this fit into the fabric of who I am, who I want to be? Is this mine to perpetuate? What will this do, if I pass it on unchanged? What if I reshape this? What if I lay it down?

I don’t mean this in a grand or abstract way. I mean it in the smallest, most ordinary moments. Like in a reaction that feels inherited. Or a belief that has never been examined. In a silence that echoes something older than ourselves. But yes, also in the larger communal patterns: in what we fund with our tax dollars, in what we accommodate, in what we excuse, in what we call inevitable.

I think there could be a daily practice here. We receive. We notice. We discern. We decide. That is, sometimes we hold. Sometimes we reshape. Sometimes, with effort, we set something down. And then, the next day, we do it again. Not perfectly. Not completely. But with increasing awareness. This belongs in the world I want my children to inherit. This does not.

If my writing work is about uncovering what has been carried through silence, through story, and through blood, this moment today feels like something adjacent, but different. It is about our agency within inheritance. About the possibility that we are not only the recipients of history, but its intermediaries. That what passes through us is not predetermined.

What we endure, we become. Not metaphorically. Not eventually. But in real and measurable ways: psychological, cultural, moral. If we ask ourselves to live with preventable fear, we become a society that knows how to accommodate that fear. If we ask ourselves to adapt to harm, we become a society that confuses adaptation with resolution.

But the inverse is also true. If we refuse certain inheritances — if we interrupt them, refuse them, transform them — we can alter what is available to be passed on. We can shape what comes next.

I don’t know that we do this well, as individuals or as a nation (maybe I should just speak for myself). Momentum is powerful. So is fatigue. So is the quiet apathetic seduction of calling something “just the way things are; the way it’s always been.” But I am beginning to believe that the work is not as distant as I’ve imagined. It begins close with what we notice, with what we question, and with what we refuse to normalize. It begins in that space of discernment between what is given to us and what we accept.

I didn’t set out to write about inheritance, but it seems I have been writing about it all along. Not just what we carry from the past, but what we allow to move through us into the future. And maybe that is the alchemical work, after all. Not to choose what we are given, but to choose, again and again, what we will keep, what we will change, and what we will no longer pass on. Because what we do with what we’ve been given becomes what we give. And what we are shaping now will not end with us.

In the words of Czeslaw Milosz:

"Day draws near

another one

do what you can."

(image: A rendering of the new 650-person ballroom in a new 90,000 sq ft building)

Anne Lamott: Gold

I love Anne Lamott. I love the beauty and heart and humility and courage and fierce love that flows through Anne and which she gifts as mirrors for us all. Deepest bow of gratitude and love. 🙏💜 Molly

Photo by Molly

Gold

Half the time when someone announces, “Here’s the thing,” I bristle: Did God stop by their home that morning with a Power Point presentation? Had they contacted Stephen Hawking in a seance?

The other half of the time, I feel a desperate relief that someone is reminding me how appropriate it is that I feel completely discombobulated and hopeless, and yet that there is hope. Yesterday morning I woke to an absolutely unremarkable sky. Not a cloud in sight, gray but with some weak suggestion of brightness to the right where the sun could be sensed. I might have sensed a mere hint of gold, of warmth, but way too subtle for me in my current condition.

As usual in the morning, I turned to Scripture. Rebecca Solnit reminds me, “People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.” And Mary Oliver: "Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.” Jesus (paraphrased): “Don’t be a jerk, and help take care of my sheep.” (cf Jefferson Airplane.)

So here’s the thing: Right now, circumstances have shaken up the snow globe, and for nervous cases such as myself, it is hard to get my bearings. Even before this godawful and illegal war, there were the billionaires cavalierly running and ruining things, a far right Supreme Court, Epstein, etc. not to mention our own mixed-grilled lives— struggling family members, climate change, the slow-mo decline of aging, and then? Ring ring ring: Our beloved old friends getting godawful diagnoses and dying. I ask you: Life just gets so much lifier than I was prepared for.

Some mornings after reading the most recent news of corruption, evil and treason at the highest levels of power, I’m reminded of Joseph Goldstein, the Buddhist writer, who once said, “Another day? Didn’t we just have one yesterday?”

It can be unfathomably weird and hard these days. How do we see a way forward through the swirling white particles of fake snow? How do we not give up and let them ruin and steal everything that is beautiful about America?

Well, here’s the thing: What has always worked before will work again. We stick together. We feed the poor. We take to the streets, loudly and peacefully, like Molly Ivins said, banging pots and pans and shouting, “This must end.” We keep the faith in We the People, in the Constitution, in the basic goodness and courage of people.

I have seen alchemy many, many times in my 72 years here: against all odds, lead transformed to gold. Sober drunks like me are Exhibit A.

My Jesuit friend Tom Weston always tells me, when I am at my most frantic and doomed, “We do what is possible, what is practical, simple and kind.” You all have got the kind part down: We wave to people, we return phone calls and library books, pick up litter, flirt with very old people in the express line even though they have brought coupons. You give some money or food or clothing to the poor, drop dollar bills into paper cups, you show up and listen to people who are hurting, while refraining from offering your incredibly annoying advice.

The game of life is rough, and a lot of people are playing hurt. We listen. We get them water.

The practical part is to help protect the midterms by supporting the integrity and possibly even the existence of the midterms. You give anything you can afford to the ACLU, and to the nonpartisan Election Official Legal Defense Network. If you are struggling with higher food and gas prices because of the illegal Iran war, have a garage sale and donate what you make that day. Doing this will make you happier that you could have imagine possible, what with the appropriate terror and grief so many of us are feeling these days. I promise: You’ll feel as enlivened and hopeful as you did at the last No King’s Rally. If you don’t, I will gladly refund your misery.

The practical/spiritual part, in the loosest meaning of the word “spiritual” is to fill up on nature, on her staggering, showoffy beauty and her schoolmarm lessons: let her blow your mind with awe and the interconnectedness of all things. Remember that root systems share their oxygen, water, and nutrients with trees who may not be doing so well. We are in this together and we are connected. There is still so much magic in the world, let alone those the strange sidelong paths that Reverend Solnit describes. No matter how tempting it is to check out, stop hitting the snooze button. Keep looking up and around: Guess what? The sun did rise yesterday, not blindingly so, but as a plain old ordinary yellow sun, as life and possibility.

So here’s the thing: A golden portent of light means that that’s where the sun will come up. Stay alert, and let your good heart stay open. I know I sound like a broken record, but here’s the thing: I think we’ve got this.

— Anne Lamott

https://annelamott.substack.com/p/gold

It was such a joy to meet Anne Lamott

when she came to Powell's Books in Portland. 

 Which of her books would I recommend? 

Any and all of them. 

💜

Honoring and Celebrating All Women Everywhere on Mother's Day

This is something that I wrote a year ago that 

I am moved to share again. 💜🙏

Photo by Molly

Honoring and Celebrating All  

Women Everywhere 

on Mother's Day

Today I am thinking of Marita, Rubi, Alli, and Arlyne — each loving mothers to our beautiful grandchildren. And I am thinking of other family and many beloved friends near and far and wishing all a beautiful and blessed Mother's Day.

I am also remembering and honoring my mother and grandmothers and ancestors. And I extend my deep caring and love to all the mothers of all the species everywhere and to our Earth Mother.

This day can be one of both celebration and gratitude and love and also one of pain and loss. Throughout most of my adult life, I spent tortured minutes every year standing in the store aisle in front of Mother's Day cards trying not to cry. My experience was one of wading through countless cards that did not mirror my incredibly painful and traumatic experiences with my own mother who — up until the miracle of her partial awakening over the last seven years of her life — was imprisoned in her narcissistic illness. I honor and bless these women for whom this day is a reminder not of mother love, but of mother loss.

There are also the mothers who have endured the unbearable death of a child. I honor and again bless these women and the unfathomable loss that they have experienced. May there be gradual healing over time and may they be held with the deepest compassionate, wise, tender, and loving support over all the years that follow their great loss. (An excellent resource is Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief by Joanne Cacciatore: https://www.amazon.com/Bearing-Unbearable-Love-Heartbreaking-Grief/dp/1614292965.)

Mother's Day, to me, is also a day to honor and celebrate all women everywhere. Many of us birth children and many of us do not. That said, there are countless ways in which women give birth — to beauty, courage, creativity, hope, and inspiration; to healing and unburdening and transforming ancestral and cultural trauma; to activism and generosity and passion and peace; to gratitude and kindness and wisdom and love.

I also acknowledge on this day that there are many women who, for so many different reasons, have not been able to find their way out of the trauma and suffering and legacy burdens that they have absorbed in their lifetimes. May we also hold with compassion and tenderness these women and the suffering that they endure.

Within all women everywhere is the Sacred embodiment of the many gifts of the Divine Feminine. On this Mother's Day may we reach out with heartfelt caring and compassion and love to all women everywhere. All can be honored. All can be blessed.

With love,

💗

Molly

Remembering My Mom and My Children On Mother's Day

 

Brian, Kevin, and Matthew Murray

Today I am remembering my beloved mother 

and my three beautiful sons. 

My heart is filled with 

gratitude and love.

 

💗🙏💗

Molly

John O'Donohue: A Blessing For Beauty

Photos are by Molly

A Blessing For Beauty

May the beauty of your life become more visible to you, that you may glimpse your wild divinity.

May the wonders of the earth call you forth from all your small, secret prisons and set your feet free in the pastures of possibilities.

May the light of dawn anoint your eyes that you may behold what a miracle a day is.

May the liturgy of twilight shelter all your fears and darkness within the circle of ease.

May the angel of memory surprise you in bleak times with new gifts from the harvest of your vanished days.

May you allow no dark hand to quench the candle of hope in your heart.

May you discover a new generosity towards yourself, and encourage yourself to engage your life as a great adventure.

May the outside voices of fear and despair find no echo in you.

May you always trust the urgency and wisdom of your own spirit.

May the shelter and nourishment of all the good you have done, the love you have shown, the suffering you have carried, awaken around you to bless your life a thousand times.

And when love finds the path to your door may you open like the earth to the dawn, and trust your every hidden color towards its nourishment of light.

May you find enough stillness and silence to savor the kiss of God on your soul and delight in the eternity that shaped you, that holds you and calls you.

And may you know that despite confusion, anxiety and emptiness, your name is written in Heaven.

And may you come to see your life as a quiet sacrament of service, which awakens around you a rhythm where doubt gives way to the grace of wonder, where what is awkward and strained can find elegance, and where crippled hope can find wings, and torment enter at last unto the grace of serenity.

May Divine Beauty bless you.

— John O’Donohue

 From Beauty – The Invisible Embrace