Despite all the holiday busyness to come, this is typically the most harried time of the season for me. There is so much that I have to do now, at Thanksgiving time, so the magic can unfold as I want it to in December. This year, that includes collecting poems for Advent. Advent means beginning and for us UUs it is a practice of working and waiting for things to be born. And, I admit, for us Collards it has also historically been a commercialized and performative countdown to Christmas. We have a homemade calendar on the wall, 25 little buckets that can be filled with notes, treats, and gifts. Over the years, I’ve put a positive pregnancy test in a bucket, as well as candy, activities, and more recently for my teen daughters, makeup. This year, seeking more meaning and weary of having given myself 25 (x 3 kids) worth of extra holiday jobs, I’m rethinking it.
Since I was a child I have wished that the good things we celebrate, sing about, and lovingly gift each other at Christmastime could actually fill our hearts and last throughout the year. I now know that although it would be convenient to be able to give each other a lifetime love vaccine, one shot that endures forever and never needs a booster, that is not the way vaccines or love work. I believe in and live my life more by the David Foster Wallace kind of love, which he says “involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”
So, the goal has become to gift things that are at the very least enduring. I want to give things to my family that don’t exist to merely satisfy the wants that they themselves create, to paraphrase Antarctic explorer and author Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Trinkets and makeup do not endure so we are turning to poetry (don’t cry for them Argentina, they’ll still get plenty of junk in their stockings). Art, namely poetry, strikes me as something that has the ability to stay in my family’s minds and hearts throughout the year, so I am collecting 25 poems for Advent.
One poem that I’ve chosen is The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry. Here it is:
The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The two most enduring bits for me, and what I hope endures for my kids longer than chocolate or chapstick or eyeliner is “the peace of wild things” and taxing my life with the “forethought of grief.” This is my newsletter about entering the holiday season, but it is also my first newsletter post election. In many ways, this election was easier to metabolize than 2016. Mainly, there were no surprises. In 2016, I had an embarrassingly naive and white perspective: this is not who we are. Since then, I listened and learned and remembered: ah, this is exactly who we are.
This time, we knew it was an extremely close race because, to name a few things, we know the supporters in his cult of personality are fervent, we know people had memory-holed so much about his presidency, we know people are hurting and are wanting a change, any change, and we know that right wing media empire has shaped the worldview of millions of Americans for decades. My hope back in July was that Kamala would give us a dignified fighting chance and I believe she did.
Although I resist many outcomes of his win, like the suffering it has already caused and will continue to cause, I have been comforted since election night that I am strong enough to accept reality. It is an annoying but true spiritual principle that we must accept the things that we cannot change and ALSO we must accept the things that we want to change. It is counterintuitive but acceptance is first. One of my highest callings is to learn from, and in doing so, transform, all that happens to me. In that light, there is never loss, only growth.
And so it is from this steady place that I learn an enduring lesson from the wild things and determine in my bones that I will not tax my life with the forethought of grief. I will continue to feel grateful for the ways I have allowed myself to be wild and thus unprotected. I have seen the mental and spiritual calcification, detachment, and rage that come from living a shielded, closed off life. I am working even harder for public schools not out of some white savior sense of protecting “those” underprivileged kids who have no choice but attend them but because I have skin in the game that is very personal and also because I believe in the million irrefutable arguments that helping kids helps us all.
I am grateful that I am beholden to others because it helps me remember that every time I want to pull up the ladder behind me and “mine” that doing this not only hurts the “other” but hurts me too (for instance, on a very practical level, the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution stands for the fact that states can “enshrine” abortion in their own constitutions all they like but if there is a federal ban, there will be no “individual” protection. You cannot save yourself).
I am grateful for having lived 44 years as an anxious person because I have learned that I suffer twice if I tax my life with the forethought of grief. I will suffer twice if I try to soften future blows by practicing the fear, pain, and heartache that may come. Instead I will live in the good and bad of reality and continue to do the community work I have been doing since at least 2016 with the tens of millions of other people who care about the same things I do. I will pay attention to what is done and not get worn out caring what is said.
The ways I am still wild and unprotected despite all of my privilege help me understand the deep truth of Rebecca Solnit’s words, “Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.” This is what it means to be human. Thank you to poetry for helping me remember.
How are you in this moment? Will you email me your favorite poem? I love you and appreciate you reading what I have to say. May we all work towards birthing the future in which we want to live.
