A NICE OLD PIECE

I wrote this for the National Geographic, for the holy days of 2020 during the dread and isolation of Covid and Trump; edited for length.

Sometimes we let go of things, sometimes things are taken away, and sometimes things break, such as lives, hearts, entire ways of life. Has our world ever felt more broken?

I would dare to ask whether simple cloth coat holiness has gotten lost in the current fever dream, and whether we can be fully immersed in this no matter what nightmare we are going through together. Maybe broken isn’t the end of the world. Maybe broken is a portal.

Let’s start with what we mean by “holy.”

The word derives from whole, uninjured, healthy, complete. I am not always feeling whole these days. Rather, I am often rattled, sad, mad, existentially tired, and crunchy. I would love a nice burning bush about now—but the holy doesn’t come only from the divine, as I understand it. It’s woven through life.

The holy is not a spectacle, the Rockettes on stage at the Taj Mahal backed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It is more often felt in small graces, blessings, mitzvahs, although you do have to be paying attention to catch the momentousness of the moment. That’s the rub. It is around us, above us, below us, and inside us all the time. It’s here, but often I am not.

My path is to make altars around the house: feathers to remind us of flight, weightlessness, grace; something from the beach that has been tossed and churned, brought to beauty by turbulence. They function as cognitive centering devices, taking my mind off the disaster of it all, about which I can do almost nothing today, except to share myself with the poor and suffering. Goofy altars make my heart lighter, and this is the gateway drug to generosity.

Maybe our definition of holy and whole have to change. The early morning is holy. Holy is the warmth of the grocer or grandchild, or a bowl of homegrown tomatoes from the neighbor who once reported you on Nextdoor. I’m whole, -ish, older, slower, with a few dings.

I light candles. Candles remind us how much light remains in the darkness—seriously, it is everywhere if you remind yourself to look around. Warmth, illumination, and in the ho,y days, life anew. The triumph of light over darkness, as in the Persian tradition of Yalda: gathering with loved ones by candlelight and firelight, reading poetry and telling stories—and the inevitable sacrament of overeating special foods—to celebrate the longest night of the year. These are the darkness days, the darkness nights of the soul. Rumi said, “If everything around seems dark, look again…You may be the light.”

It’s hard now, as life so often is. Suffering is part of the beauty of the human drama. (I hate that.) To find what is scared—kindness and the inviolable—amid the loss, restores us.

All of these rituals offer connection with the larger, truer world, with the ancient, with timelessness and the luminous now. They offer benevolent distraction, refocus. They enliven.

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Yes, everything feels ruined some days, in the big picture and at the dining room table. So if broken is what we done got, where do we begin the repairs?

One possible solution is how the ancient Japanese repaired broken pottery with gold along the mended spots. You dishonor things if you won’t admit they are broken. You value them by repairing them. The gold edging adds to the broken things’ beauty. You adorn the cracks so now they really show. (And as Leonard Cohen reminds us, that’s how the light gets in.)

The world is broken. What is the gold?

On the visible level, the gold is appreciation that comes from paying attention with gratitude to what is left: We praise the big things, the gifts of life, love, nature. We are blown away by people’s courage, neighbors protecting neighbors. But don’t forget nice windows, your books, the curated strew of stuff that hooks us into memories and people. I raise my eyes not only to the mountains and stars but to my living room beams, to the view outside the windows. I savor the fresh air when I open them; it’s the breath of the house. Breath! Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe. This is all I need to remember most of the time.

Left to my own devices, I am steeped in dread. But I am not left to my own devices. I have you, and all my moral heroes, who all pretty much say the same thing: keep the faith, love like crazy, take care of each other. Wavy Gravy adds, “Dare to struggle, dare to grin.”

Life wants to keep reminding us of its sacred self, but we have to open our eyes and hearts. Yes, it all looks like hell some days, and how can we possibly restore what the locusts have eaten, but God, what a sunset. And I so appreciate the roof over my head, and maybe most of all, indoor plumbing. There is an exuberant patch of poppies and weeds outside my window. The poppies are lanterns: light over darkness, good over evil. Light your lantern with self-love. Shine.