Everything is beautiful and I am so sad. This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief. The light spraying through the lace of the fern is as delicate as the fibers of memory forming their web around the knot in my throat. The breeze makes the birds move from branch to branch as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh of the next stranger. In the very center, under it all, what we have that no one can take away and all that we’ve lost face each other. It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured by a holiness that exists inside everything. I am so sad and everything is beautiful.
Hot air balloons spell out the word “Joy” in the sky; Public domain image.
I was on a Zoom call when quite spontaneously, every single person on the call gave each other a heartfelt complement of what they most notice in each other. It all started with someone expressing a vulnerability, and another person adding encouragement — not only a sense of, “you can do it,” but “you can do it because this is who you are and how we experience you.”
Then somehow, that snowballed in a lovely, spontaneous way. The rest of the call, perhaps the last twenty minutes, became a collective opportunity for all participants to affirm every member. The facilitators couldn’t have planned this if we tried. It just happened, and it felt like joy.
Life is too short, and we’ve gone through too many things over the last few years to let those meaningful affirmations go unnoticed and unvoiced. Let’s share them.
The image above is a tweet from @AlexBanayan, and I really love it. It reads,
“When I interviewed Maya Angelou, she told me to write this sentence on my notepad and to never forget it. ‘Every storm runs out of rain.’ i still think of that line to this day.”
As I reflect on this, I think it can mean a number of things:
— Some storms aren’t worth our energy. — Sometimes, we’ve fought too long in a direction that’s not worth it. We can just walk away.
But I think my favorite is this:
— Sometimes, with time, the clouds clear. The pain is clearer too, or healed, or healing. And love, or possibility, or expansiveness, or growth is what remains.
I was deeply honored by the question but also concerned about dropping it or making ignorant missteps, so I declined. I did smile though, and the Torah scroll was handed over to another person for additional whirling and merriment.
More than a decade ago, I was a Presbyterian seminary student, and I was grateful to visit a Conservative Jewish synagogue with members of my class. We were present for Simchat Torah, a Jewish holiday that marks the end of a cycle of public Torah readings and a new beginning for the next cycle. On this night, the Torah scrolls of the ark are removed, and the community dances with them.
I knew I was going to experience a meaningful interfaith encounter; I had no idea I was going to cut a rug with Torah scrolls. And cut a rug we did!
This celebration was joyous and gleeful, and it lasted for a couple of hours. It was an meaningful experience, and along with my classmates, I was grateful to be welcomed into the community holiday. It was the kind experience you cannot quite anticipate as a guest. You have to be present with it as it unfolds, finding yourself within a moment in the midst of community.
The dancing was meaningful and memorable, but right alongside it, there was an another moment when I suddenly found myself within a community experience I could not have anticipated. The Rabbi invited everyone to come close together, and members of the synagogue unrolled the Torah scroll so that it encircled the people. We were inside the text, in a sense. Then the Rabbi traveled around that circle of text and shared its stories as the larger, unfolding story of the people. He said things like,
“This is when we were created, along with the entire world.”
“This is when we were liberated from slavery in Egypt.”
“This is when we received the law.”
This is when we…
We stood there, peopled.
And I was so drawn to that sense of being gathered together, encircled by story and peopled together by a shared story.
It was the kind experience you cannot quite anticipate as a guest — the kind of experience when you find yourself suddenly peopled too.
A graphic that shares that our thoughts, feelings, and actions are connected
During a recent conference call, my colleague Andrea Thomas said,
“Our thoughts, feelings, and actions are all connected. If one isn’t feeling right or working in the way that we’d like it to, we can change one of them, and the others will shift too.”
This is true, but we rarely think about it. It’s somehow simple and anything but simple at the very same time.
Which of these do we want to shift? Which of these do we need to shift?
I went to see someone perform in a play over weekend (Side note: The Game’s Afoot! is a fun show). It was held in a large room in a church, and there were tables with seating, as opposed to seeing the show in a theatre with seats facing forward. This gave the experience a lovely community feel.
During intermission, there was a raffle, but before one of the theatre leaders chose a person to draw out a winning ticket, he said,
“Does anyone here have a celebration?”
I expected people to mention birthdays, anniversaries, or news of new opportunities.
But one of the women seated at my same table said, “Friendship!” and held up her friend’s hand. Everyone applauded.
I love that she just spontaneously decided to celebrate their friendship — a mundane but very significant celebration. Makes me want to pay attention to these things too.
Yes to daily, mundane, yet highly significant celebrations.
Image Description: A series of black dominos with quite dots; the ones in the back have fallen, and the ones in the front are about to fall. Public domain image.
Many years ago, I worked in a context where everyone worked with their office doors closed. There may be many reasons for this — needing quiet, having a place to focus, or other kinds of needs entirely. That context was filled with lovely, supportive people, but this happened to be a very stressful period of time in our collective history. Some part of me wonders if we all kept our doors closed because stress pheromones were constantly floating through the air in that space.
Anxiety can function like a contagion. We can pick up on the anxious energy of others through body language and yes, even pheromones. We may also be anxious about similar concerns, and someone’s anxiety may evoke our own. That same anxiety in a person or community may also trigger older, stressful storylines from our lives. The anxiety can grow.
Sometimes, we need space alone or in small groups of non-anxious (at the moment) people so we can ground ourselves again and regulate or co-regulate our nervous systems.
In a remarkably anxious period of time, it is okay and helpful to take that space, both for ourselves and for the collective circles of people we love.
Smuggling Grace 