May It Be So

In grade school, much was made of the difference between can and may. Can was a hard, metallic, utilitarian word, a verb pertaining to capacity. Later it shared its name with something cold that contained orange Fanta and could be crushed.  If you asked my mother “can I have some chocolate pudding,” she was likely to correct you. You can, it’s right there in the fridge forming a disgusting, leathery layer on top, but you may not until after dinner. May brought up images of flowering crabapple trees, people dancing around a pole for no apparent reason. It was a prim, formal word for asking permission. May implied hierarchy. You could ask but you might not get what you were asking for, what you wanted, because some adult was in charge of dispensing favors. May was about status and you were always at the bottom of the heap.

Photo by Judy Beth Morris on Unsplash

More recently, can became inflated with its own potency. Si, se puede. Yes we can! Barack said. And he was right for a while. May, on the other hand, wandered off its footstool and established itself in the world of spirit as a doorway to prayer. “May all beings be happy, healthy, and at peace,” we say when offering metta in the Buddhist tradition. Now, may is not generally me asking for something for myself, but me expressing the desire for blessing and reprieve for others.  Unless, as today, the left side of my face is kind of numb and feels hot on the inside and I’m looking for a prayerful posture.  May is a lovely expression of benevolence, nurturance and springtime that I find much more comforting than the imploring tone of prayer in western worship with its begging and pleading, ball players crossing themselves and pointing at the sky in the batter’s box. May says happiness, health and peace are out there. May we we know where to look for them and may we sometimes unwittingly stumble upon them.

Prayer then becomes a conflation of can and may. It doesn’t address some agency that is outside of us and more powerful than us. It addresses the deep well of our own wisdom, even as it recognizes fully our ultimate lack of control and that just might be the deepest wisdom of all. It speaks to us in the language of surrender to not knowing. I focus on the first three of the Buddhist Five Remembrances. I understand that as a human it is in my nature to grow old; it is in my nature to experience ill health; it is in my nature to die. I don’t get to decide to stand outside of that paradigm, but I can witness the particular story that is mine to experience with open eyes and an open heart and this is the place (ha-makom, in Hebrew, one of the names of God ) where wisdom extends its helping hand to me. I become aware of the right side of my face which is cool and undisturbed as well as the hypersensitive left side of my face. May we all allow our stories to unfold in the embrace of our loved ones, the belly of nature and the expansive vision of art so that we can get from today to tomorrow unbroken. 

I am working with my friend, the poet and visual artist Rosemary Starace, on an essay entitled “How Art Heals: Meeting the Memory of Wholeness” which will appear on seventysomething on June 30th. It’s of interest that the original title was “How Art Can Heal.” We were hedging our bets, reluctant to step off the cliff and out into the unknown with a statement that might be too grandiose. We were stuck in perhaps, mired in uncertainty. Now I want to say “Art Heals” without any evidence one way or the other, embracing uncertainty and underscoring the power of leaning into may. Just taking a flyer on it. This arises out of my own experience as a writer, but also from my witness to the richness of art-watching available to me here in the Minnesota. After a fifty year nurturing incubation in the Berkshires, I am now back in an urban creative environment where I can listen to a young alto saxophone player climbing and sliding and bending like a gymnast, asking no permission, no “may I.” Coming for us with his joy. And two days later, I can see the Keith Haring show at the Walker, filled with graffiti and political art even as he was dying of AIDS at 31. The courage of it, the generosity of it takes my breath away. It inspires me to say to myself I have the capacity to be in this life, the right side and the left side. Yes I can.  Ken yehi ratzon, may it be so.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In June, seventysomething/Many Voices will be enjoying a far-ranging conversation with visual artist and poet Rosemary Starace about Art, Healing and the Memory of Wholeness. All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.