The day we had sparkly good news

and where we might look for it again.

Hello, readers! I’m Heather Lanier, author of Raising a Rare Girl and Psalms of Unknowing, and this is my occasional newsletter inviting us to lean into what makes us feel more human. Welcome!

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News. It’s a misleading word, because it’s just the letter S tacked onto the word new, as in NEW! Something exciting, fresh, glittery! Beyonce dropping a new track!

The “news” is so often not that sparkly newness. It often feels like the same ol’: Warring factions. Terrible storms. Angry troubled white guy w/ a weapon. It is new, because these are new lives affected, and new lines drawn. But it also feels… not new at all.

You know what felt like new news? As in-sparkly shiny joyful news? June 26, 2015. I still remember the images of the “running of the interns,” bolting from the Supreme Court in their business clothes and sneakers, racing to get the landmark ruling to reporters. Would gay folks be allowed to marry? They held the answer in the hands. It all looks so joyful now, when we know what they carried.

That was shiny news in their hands. But for one full minute, while they sprinted that quarter mile, we didn’t know it. In an age of AI-made “art” and drone-delivered hand soap, I love this image. It reminds me: sometimes it all still comes down to our bodies.

Which was, in some ways, what gay marriage was about. Could an adult in one kind of body marry an adult in a similar kind of body. Could this sensible, loving union be legal in a nation that swears it’s built on freedom (but has a decidedly complicated history with that myth). People in their bodies, in their ties and dresses and sneakers, raced to tell us the answer about how people in other bodies were allowed to be together.

The answer was yes, and the majority of Americans cheered. On this day, the news felt NEW!

Yasss! How much do I love those arm-pumps? Those faces!?

(I mean, look at those arm pumps! Look at those serious committed faces! The speed of their sprinting whipped their lanyards and ties in the air!)

Flash forward to this “new” year…. In the next few days, and weeks, and years, we’re probably about to see some deja-vu images that feel very much not-new, in the drabbest and saddest of ways.

I want to hold out hope that the days of genuine shiny sparkly newness—as in-progress—as in care and love and humanity reaching toward its best beautiful self—are not all behind us. Are still in the future.

But I’m not sure we’ll be finding these pockets of glimmery gorgeous newness in the “news” any time soon. We might have to look for it in our communities. In our schools and libraries and public parks. In our temples and churches and mosques. In the forests. By the seaside. In our homes.

And when we find it, we might need to grab it, and race it without haste toward our hearts, where we can savor it. Let it fuel us. Then spread it to others.

Today, I’m sharing a poem I wrote a few years ago, during the 2016-2020 years. It’s about taking a weeklong news fast. I was on a silent retreat at a monastery. Before I entered the monastery, I sat in my car and listened to the radio and learned that politicians might kill hard-won legislation that helped protect disabled people. I clicked off the radio and resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn’t know what happened for seven whole days.

The monastery was on the Hudson River, and participants didn’t speak, so I had no idea what was going on in the larger world. I watched as long ships glided across the river, and I wondered what news they carried. But I did become more intimately attuned to the “news” of the natural landscape around the monastery. And I became more attuned to the “news” of myself. And these are not worthless news sources to “read.” These matter, too.

When the week was over, I clicked the car radio back on, where I learned that the legislation had been protected.

Below is the poem. May you take some time to read the news of your landscapes and communities and hearts this week. May you find some shiny good news around and within you this week. And if you do, may you report it to the rest of us with the impassioned speed of a tie-and-sneaker-wearing intern.

News Fast (at a Monastery on the Hudson)


What headlines can we write
of the butterfly? 
   
That its black velvet 
invades blossoms in a land colonized 
by air? 

Or of the pines? That
their impossible tallness waves 
for lower taxes?	 	

There is no talk 
of nuclear disarmament
in the meadow. 

Everything here 
wants no more than it is

except a cargo ship, long as a landing strip 
sliding against the river.
  	
It carries minds 
which carry, I surmise, the stream 
of this week’s headlines.

Let me guess.
Countries poking sticks in sand, 
children in adult 

trousers ordering other children 
dead, and a glacier 
going

faster than experts’ worst dreams.
Every morning I offer the sky 
a briefing on this:

peonies balled 
so tightly they look like miniature planets
in pink and white.

We’ve made TVs that depict 
wars clearer than our naked eyes can see
and yet I’ve never glimpsed 
a bud like this, 

so close-fisted
it looks like it could never open
into a softer world.

Hopefully you get the irony of the last line. The peony opens, softens. The tight-fisted world, I think, is capable of doing the same.

You can find this poem in my collection, Psalms of Unknowing. It also appears in Oneing Magazine, with huge thanks to editor,

Mark Longhurst

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