community, reflecting

In the city

Mary Elyn Bahlert

From my windows – kitchen, dining room, living room, I can see the shape of San Francisco, across the Bay from our home in Oakland. We are surrounded by city – by cities – here in the Bay Area. I can drive on city streets from home in North Oakland, due north into Berkeley, where I lived and went to school when I first arrived in the Bay Area.

I love life in the city. I love the variety of human life I see when I am in a city. Here in Oakland, we have people of all shades of human color; and I love it! Sometimes, as I walk along Piedmont Avenue, a restaurant and shopping street only a block from my house, I hear several languages – not only English – as I walk.

This past week, after historic midterm elections, I went for a walk on one of my several regular routes, in the neighborhood. An older woman who was out in the morning walking her dog, stopped as I passed her, to comment on the election day, how she was feeling happy. Sometimes other elders will greet me as I walk along the streets.

We have quiet places here, close to where Jeff and I have made our home for almost twenty years; here in North Oakland, we are hosts to two – two – cemeteries. During Covid, we made new friends in the city when we started each day with a long loop in St. Mary’s Cemetery. Walk another block and beautiful Mountain View Cemetery rises from its gate on Piedmont Avenue high into the hills. From the top of those hills San Francisco, the Bay, and cities south of San Francisco all the way to San Mateo can be seen, on clear days.

When I need to use the freeways now, during the week, I’m aware that I can choose the quieter times of day, times when at least the traffic does not line up, bumper to bumper. And when I drive out of Oakland to have lunch with a friend who lives outside of the Bay Area, I’m frustrated when I have to go through tunnels or slowly make my way along the highway, in traffic.

I’ve lived in quieter places over the years. Even so, I find I prefer to live in the city. I like to see people of all shapes and sizes and hues who walk their dogs in my neighborhood. I like to talk to my neighbors when a group of people in the circle of homes across the street set up their grills and a table full of picnic goodies, just so that we can all be together. I like to greet someone who is familiar to me as I take my walks through the neighborhood. I’m even ok when, as I look up to smile and say hello to another walker as we pass, I am greeted with silence. After all, we all find some sort of comfort in the anonymity that comes along with city life.

Cities can be lonely places, too. Maybe cities can be lonely places because people, even those of us surrounded by others on city streets, because people can be lonely. I’ve spent enough time in my life being lonely to know that may be true.

As comfortable as I am in the teeming streets of cities, I have been able to navigate my way – awkwardly, sometimes – even in foreign places. Somehow, I was able to make my way from the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, to a retreat center in Bingen, Germany. A few kind people made that possible, even the young woman who sat with me in the last row of a bus, talking to me in German as I pieced together a few simple sentences.

And so I am a fan of cities. I love the country side for its beauty, and I see the beauty in cities, also. There’s something sacred to me about the silence that hangs over a city early on Sunday morning, as if the streets, the roads, had been asleep, sleeping in on the weekend – like the people.

San Francisco through the trees, sunset – photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 11/2026

beauty, reflecting

Mornings

Mary Elyn Bahlert

“Each morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.” — Buddha

I love the mornings. I remember a time – when I lived on the South Side of Milwaukee, where summers are short, and sweet – when I would rise early, dress quickly, and go for a morning run in the neighborhood. When I returned home there was just enough time to shower and dress, eat breakfast quickly, and go to work.

These mornings – in the years since COVID hit us like a storm in early 2020 – I have risen early and started the day with Jeff in the living room before we set off for a daily loop in St. Mary’s Cemetery, just in the next block.

Over the past few months, I’ve changed my morning pattern again. I still arise at 6 AM – make myself a cup of coffee, just the way I like it – and sit in the living room on the couch, facing the window. We have a wonderful front window, which looks over our small front yard, the street, with a view of San Francisco just beyond the redwood tree across the way. Before my latest habit, I would stop in my office to pick up my iPad and spend the early minutes of the day – after reading the headlines in the New York Times and doing the crossword puzzle – checking out my social media, scrolling and scrolling.

But I’ve changed my morning pattern again. Now, I still rise early, make myself a cup of coffee with milk, and I sit, cozy, on the afghan thrown over our red couch, looking out the front window into the trees. I watch the light as it slowly – and then quickly – lights up the Bay and our street. Sometimes, Jeff and I chat about the day, or about the happenings of the day before. Today Jeff – who is always out of bed before I wake up – brought me up to date on the outcomes of the mid-term elections we’d been eagerly waiting for.

I love the mornings. I’ve never counted myself a good sleeper – Jeff, like my father, can sleep easily and quickly, and is always asleep before me – and so getting up and facing the new day makes me happy.

The sky over Oakland, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 11/2/2026

community

Worship with the Shakers – August, 2026

Mary Elyn Bahlert

They didn’t shake. Not one little bit. “The Shakers, officially known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, are a millenarian Christian sect founded in 1747 in England that later established communal utopian societies across the United States (wikipedia).”

And so Jeff and I – who were traveling in New England to visit the homes of American poets, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and to see the very site of the very beginning of the Shakers, a religious group that originated in the United States – joined the Shakers in worship in Maine.

The simple worship, which we discovered after climbing the steep stairs in the main hall of the main building – we were not certain whether we had climbed the women’s stairs or the men’s stairs – had already started when we arrived at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine. The large building we entered was quiet, and we made our way up the stairs into the place of worship. Jeff and I found two chairs on the left side of the room, a room where almost 30 people were already gathered. We sat for a few moments, until a woman in the row of seats directly in front of us motioned with her head – a bob, and eyes meaningfully cast across the room – for Jeff to sit with the men, whose chairs sat facing the women’s section, across a space of about 15 feet. Finally, we got the message, and Jeff moved to the men’s section of worship.

We sang several hymns as we gathered there, hymns from a book of songs called: Original Shaker Music. A man who apparently was the leader – at least the leader of that particular worship service – sat in a chair at the front of the room and said a few words. I would call his speaking a sermon, or homily, although I’m not certain that is what his message is called among the Shakers.

After worship, we joined the gathered group of folks – men and women – in a large attached hall, for coffee hour. There, we enjoyed coffee fellowship with conversation, although not with anyone who appeared to be a real life Shaker. A few of the folks who stayed for coffee apparently joined the Shakers in worship every Sunday.

Later, we walked across the road and walked along the carefully laid rows of the summer garden. Everything in sight was beautiful, perfect. There may be as few as three Shakers in the community now. Like all denominations, their days of thriving worship are long behind them. It was Sunday, after all, and there were no workers in the garden.

We went to the car and drove away.

Shaker garden, New Gloucester, Maine, 8/16/2026, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert

beauty, nostalgia

Dreaming of Door County

Mary Elyn Bahlert

From the time I was little, I loved to go to Door County. I was lucky – my Dad (I called him FRB, a nickname that stuck with the whole family) had grown up in Door County – and I had aunts and uncles, favorite aunts and uncles, who still lived in the quiet country places of the Door Peninsula. I think of Door County as “my place” – the place I belong, the place I’m tied to. In these later years, I’ve still made the trip from California, flying to O’Hare Field and driving North into Wisconsin and further North Still, to the strip of land that is held by Green Bay on the West and Lake Michigan on the East. I tell people now that I know the “quiet” places in Door County, which is true; a favorite tourist destination now, many of the once small, quiet towns are hubs of activity all summer long and on autumn weekends.

I promised myself on a lonely drive alone from my little apartment in Green Bay along the Bay side of the peninsula, turning off at the junction of Highway 57 that follows the shoreline of Lake Michigan through Baileys Harbor and north, to connect again with Highway 42 in Sister Bay – “Sisters Bay,” in my father’s telling. It was 1974. I promised myself then, as I drove north toward the Peninsula, that I’d always return to Door County. I have. I’ve lived clear across the country in Northern California since the 1980’s, but I still return, as often as I can.

This week, Jeff and I were to be “lighthouse keepers” at the historic lighthouse – still in operation – along Highway 57, and now part of The Ridges Sanctuary, a ring of paths through the woods along the ancient, ancient shorelines of the Lake, shorelines where Lake Michigan has lapped ashore for all time. We had studied the written history of the lighthouse, in order to be prepared for whatever tourists might still come to the Peninsula in late October. We’d been ready to tell them about the history of the lighthouse, how it has been in use through many years, sometimes as a parsonage for the Lutheran Pastor at the Lutheran Church a few miles to the North.

I’d worshipped in that church more than once with my beloved Auntie Irene and her “Peggy,” Uncle Erdreich. They were old world people, from another time, Uncle Erdreich having grown up in a farmhouse less than a mile from the frame house surrounded by woods that he had built up over the years, putting his expertise as a carpenter to work in his own house. Auntie Irene, too, was from another time, an extraverted Bahlert, like my Dad, in a family that has its share of introverts. I’m one of them.

And so Jeff and I had prepared for the week in the lighthouse. I planned as I do for any trip: I thought daily about what I’d wear, what I’d need for the changing season we were sure to experience, making sure my long underwear was clean and ready to be packed. We prepared as we do for every trip, making plans for getting to the San Francisco airport for our flight to O’Hare Field, talking about our plans to stay overnight with long time friend, Joanne, and for our plans to spend a few nights in Shorewood with Randy and Michael before our return to California, to our home.

As the poet has written: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.” (Robert Burns, “To a Mouse, 1785).

And so I’ve had a week – a week completely clear on my careful calendar – fall to me. I’ll be able to make it to my regular exercise class, and I can enjoy my neighborhood walks in these last days of a beautiful autumn in Northern California. Today was a car day: I had the oil changed and I had a car wash for my snazzy Ford Focus.

But I’ll miss my favorite place, the place I’m attached to, the place where I stand at the graves of the ancestors and talk to them. I’ll miss a week of autumn in the Midwest; the Midwest really knows how to do autumn. I’ll miss seeing so many people I love face to face instead of only hearing their voices over the phone.

And I’ll take in autumn here in the Bay Area, its’ own kind of beauty, the changing light, the slow changing colors of the trees in this place.

Autumn sunset, Oakland, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 10/19/2026

beauty, poetry, reflecting

First reading

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I’ve been a reader for many, many – many – years now, of course. And over the course of those years, I have also been a writer. I learned to write by reading the writing of others, I think. Words, and the sentences that hold words together, come easily to me. That particular gift allowed me to be a preacher, also. I loved reading and studying the scriptures, and over the years, I’d developed my own rhythm, a rhythm that formed the outline of my week for many years.

And I have written poetry since the days I watched my teachers carefully, studying their manners and idiosyncrasies carefully. I was a careful child, and I took that care to my studies. I faithfully memorized the poems of the great American poets in Miss Ross’ English class at Peckham Junior High School. Miss Ross gave me a great gift with her old-fashioned manner of teaching. I remember so little about her; she was an old-fashioned teacher who wore a navy blue, old-fashioned dress that was covered in little white dots, a dress that covered her knees, modestly. Was her name really Betsy Ross? I don’t know, although that’s the name I’ve carried with me all these years. I was sure she had her hair done at a beauty parlor every week. That’s how it looked to me, with my trained eye!

Every week, I studied a poet’s life and poems, and over the course of the semester I put together a book of my own, a three ringed folder with poems carefully written in my own hand, and pictures to visually bring the poems to life. I cut the pictures out of the pages of my mother’s women’s magazines. I wish I had those folders now. Those pages of poems were a treasure in my life.

The poems, the lives of the poets, the world that books and reading opened to me have been a priceless gift to my life.

But the poems that I have written and collected – not carefully, but faithfully – have formed the book that my beloved husband, Jeff, encouraged me to have printed. I am a published poet now! That’s an identity I find I will have to grow into. Like the day Jeff’s first published book appeared at our house, he and I sat down and looked over the small printed volume of my own poetry, Moments (Balboa Press, 2026).

And I have survived my first reading! Carefully planned and executed, I read aloud to a group of other humans selected poems from my collection. The room – the Edwards Room at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, the church where I had retired from as Pastor in 2014 after a 16 year stint (not bad for a Methodist!). There was a gathered group of people, mostly folks I know, a few I did not know. A woman I’d helped with a family matter a few years after my retirement joined the group. The pastor, Sunae, had made sure a flyer had been included in each Sunday’s bulletin.

And so, I am a published poet, and I am a poet who has survived a public reading. I am grateful. A gathering of friends, of beloved folks from many years in my life, colleagues, former parishioners, and even a man I did not know arrived to sit for an hour of poetry reading! So many of my poems, many written on scraps of paper and filed away in a manila file – these many years – were now properly printed and presented for public view. The pastor and a few faithful helpers set out a nice table of simple food for after the reading. A friend brought her dog and generously agreed to handle the selling of the books, of my book, which I signed for the waiting admirers.

And so I expect that a small part of me will have to take on a new – another – identity: published poet. I’m proud that a photo of mine graces the cover. I was delighted to see who showed up to hear me read, some folks I had forgotten would be interested at all.

Now, that day is in the past. I’ve had my collection of poems published – I’m a published poet now – and I’ve had a reading. I’m out there.