Soul Food

I am greeted by a bright sun this morning after several gray days. The glassy surface of the pond reflects an infancy of green fluttering over it, blowing kisses at the rippling water. On our balcony, lobelia, campanula, and tuberous begonia are out in pots and fuchsia hangs in baskets. It’s a new day for me to welcome life, mine and Frank’s, the life in the park. The ducks and geese will soon surface from their hiding places, including that one determined goose that we see out and about walking on the sidewalk as if it has important business to do, something out of a children’s book. There is always business. Over the primary level of gratitude and amazement, there is the level of maintenance. The shopping, the car repairs, the bill paying. Every day dawns with a new list of things that must be done and I’m fine with that. I don’t expect the universe to wait on me hand and foot. All I yearn for is that a modicum of grace can be agreed upon so that I can go about my day without reading about people in shopping malls being gunned down on their way to pick up a box of laundry soap. But it doesn’t look like I’ll get what I want. The tragic invades the ordinariness of our days and becomes itself ordinary, generating the peculiar circumstances of our time. We know everything as soon as it happens and much of what happens is grotesque, unthinkable. There is no discourse for this. It cannot be processed. Mindless violence day after day. The sense that in our stunned silence, we are digging a deeper and deeper hole for burying the dead. Anything I write seems puerile, better left unsaid.

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

Still, I’m trying to decipher, here in 2023, whether the proportions of dark and light themselves have changed. I would really like to know the answer to that question. Has it always felt as if bursts of fire have intruded suddenly on picnics, parades, a tsunami on the horizon engulfing unsuspecting bathers and fishing boats? Or was it previously the other way around? Were war and famine the normal backdrop against which people experienced intermittent simple pleasures? A field of wildflowers, a healthy baby. What would it be like to sit down to a good meal in Kiev fifteen months after the invasion? Here in the cozy confines of the American middle class, our awareness has been so hallmarked that we continue to be shocked by suffering, despite the evidence of deaths of despair, despite the random killing that can happen any day, anywhere, but especially where guns are valorized.

The spiritual challenge is daunting. We are called to hold the plate of a four year old’s sugary birthday cake in one hand and the endless bloodletting in the other and somehow give them equal weight. Or perhaps to shift our attention back and forth from one to the other like a tennis game, to absorb the reality of good and evil. Always.

You might be one of the gifted ones. One of those rare individuals who can inhale the ocean of delight and the forest of fear in the same breath like a spoonful of cold ice cream and hot fudge from the same sundae. I imagine for some small number of people that level of awareness is native. Certainly, for many people, the focus on transcending duality is central to their spiritual practice. But for me, those elevated moments are rare transient occurrences, visitations from outside ordinary reality. Faced with this limitation, I will have to regroup, find a way to integrate the joy and the horror of being alive in some way that makes sense to me.

Today I plan to think about beauty, generosity, and compassion as foods that nourish my capacity to face suffering in myself and in the world. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, with snacks in between, I seek out the color of magnolia, the sound of saxophone riffs, Frank’s hand in mine. Not despite the recalcitrance of evil, but because of it. I have to be fortified against it. I no longer feel the need to reject pleasure as inappropriate in a world of drone warfare and school shootings. The natural world, art, and love are not frivolous distractions from despair. They are the essential soul food that sustains me in times of struggle and gives me the courage to meet life in all its fire and ice.

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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.