Seasoning
Spring in the time of war, pandemic, climate catastrophe, and injustice of every stripe presents a daily challenge to our predilection for easy categories, what's good and what's bad. Here in Minnesota where today’s weather features powerful winds blowing hot across the flat, I’m thinking Dorothy, Toto, Auntie Em. But despite threatening skies and that wind that seems to be designed to blow winter out of the park, no tornado develops. At home in New England, before we flew out here, the crabapple and magnolia were whispering their endearments. The emerald of the lawns and meadows was all of a sudden blinding. That’s how impermanence manifests in the northeast. One day hail is drumming on your windshield, the next day you’re eating a double chocolate cone. It was only just winter. Now in the background, warblers have come out singing. Bears, too, lumber around looking for a square meal. Rebirth is the lede. Pervasive, contagious. There is no vaccine that can inoculate me against the giddy joy of springtime. I am a willing victim of its seduction. Can’t get enough of it. But in the fading light of love in the afternoon, night falls with its missile strikes, its ruthless trashing of all difference in the name of a vicious orthodoxy, its reckless exploitation of our one and only home.
We are called, it seems, to become adept at holding paradox and we don’t like it. It’s too much work. Only a widely expanded consciousness can carry opposites, one in each fist, and understand that both are true today and every day. It’s a sleight of hand, pulling the laughing rabbit out of the weeping hat. Life is both beautiful and terrible, everywhere and always. The gift comes to me on rare occasions. Most of the time, I feel like the two year old who’s been asked if she wants apple juice or grape juice. I don’t know! Just tell me what to do. Tell me what I want. Tell me how to love the world and hate what’s become of it. And remind me, please, that every season passes when its time has come. This is true at every level and requires constant awareness. The two year old who doesn’t know what she wants and relies on her mother for sustenance becomes the twenty year old who knows everything and has nothing but disdain for her mother. And the mother who struggled to survive the seemingly endless demands of childrearing becomes the grandmother whose desire for her family is insatiable.
It could be that there’s more than one paradigm for our situation, the play of light and shadow. Instead of trying to hold paradox, the simultaneity of day/night, pleasure/pain, tulips/Putin, it might be more useful to consider impermanence. Everything is passing through like a breeze. Sometimes, it’s more like a sirocco. Nothing remains the same even though we desperately want it to. We resist change with the same ferocious vehemence that we resist paradox, but I’m finding that coming to embrace impermanence has a lighter almost weightless quality. Lugging light and dark around like two heavy grocery bags weighs me down, whereas making friends with impermanence doesn’t ask me to do anything. It doesn’t ask me to hold anything. Instead, it asks me to let it go, let it slip through my fingers. The great irony is that life itself becomes more bearable, maybe even more joyful, when we understand that it’s fundamentally insubstantial. It’s nothing if not a vanishing act. Just here while it’s here, fragile.
This is where the power of families and seasonality comes in. People we know in our cells travel with us around the sun year after year, marking the seasons together when possible, the planting of the raised beds, the aging of the grandparents, the new accomplishments of the young ones. Mother’s Day in Minnesota, one grandson is playing a trumpet solo, the other is demonstrating his skill at jiujitsu by flipping his father onto his back on the newly lush grass, literally overturning the previous generation. Witnessing these changes seasons my days, making everything taste better, saltier, sweeter. The acrid aftertaste of the news will continue to bubble up in my mouth, but I will not spit it out. I will try to swallow it and marvel at the courage and resilience it takes just to graduate from this moment to the next and the next at this fractured time in this aching world.
Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.
Once I stopped seeing things as either/or and instead embrace life as both/and, I got much more comfortable with contradictions. I can be both excited by a situation and frightened. I can love someone and they can also make me crazy. But the biggest for me is this: We are both human and divine. Good and bad. We are, ourselves, living contradictions. Once I was able to accept that in myself, I could finally accept it in others. Which is good - really good. Helps keep expectations in check!
Just what I needed to read today. When I accept the reality of impermanence, my mantra is "we'll see" or "Right now this is how things are."