Dear Bleaders,
Bored? Listless at the grocery story? Pale and beyond yourself? Perhaps you need a holiday.
Do I mean the tanning and nothingness holiday of “vacation”? Sure - but not only that. What I’m talking about is religious and cultural holidays. If they don’t sound appealing—that’s what needs fixing.
Historically, human beings live from holiday to holiday. A few days after one kind of traditional cookie disappears for a year, there’s a new holiday coming and it’s time to bake its traditional foods. And whether or not you get hot for hotcakes, something likely lights your candle. One of the regular features is rereading a poem, or some kind of short beautiful, stirring text.
But today we’ve got some impoverished holidays. It’s not just that we don’t believe in the supernatural stories that may be associated with the holiday. It’s that each holiday used to mean something specific. It’s a loss.
So when a penance and forgiveness holiday comes around, give some thought to the grudges you are holding, and consider apologizing to anyone you may have harmed. If you are in need of assistance with these things, I’d consider doing what so many have done before you. Most common for forgiveness is fasting and washing/bathing. Do the ritual from the religion you grew up with, or one to which you feel a connection.
I wrote The Wonder Paradox to answer some of the persistent questions from the Q & A of my Doubt talks. One thing I discovered was that a lot of people who no longer believe in God or the supernatural still take part in religion—and a lot of them feel guilty about it. Whether it’s as small a matter as showing up to a Christmas party, or attending a church wedding, or as large as taking part in many church doings, or even being the priest. As a historian, it seemed clear to me that unbelievers have also inherited these religious traditions, and their engagement with it is just as valid as is that of a stone-cold believer.
Still, we have to give some real thought to what these holidays mean, and we have to ask ourselves what words we repeat as part of their ritual. If no text in the holiday leaves you carbonated or at least gently stirred, than add a poem. Find one of your favorite poems, or go looking for a spring poem, and make a point of reading it on the holiday.
We’ve got a bunch of holidays coming up in the next two months. There’s Ramadan, Easter, Passover, and Earth Day. These include subholidays and traditions of fasting, feasting on meats, gorging on candy, and eating odd symbolic items, such as bitter herbs dipped in salt water, or chocolate eggs and bunnies. There is not much to say about Earth Day, as it is a young holiday and doesn’t have a ton of traditions. It’s a perfect moment for a poem.
Not that it’s spring yet in NYC which is where I’m at. One day it’s warm, and you’re sprung and springy living sigh to sigh, next day it’s frigid again and your soul goes rigid and you’re wry and dry again.
For that sense of almost being said, almost seen, here’s a classic spring poem by the great Philip Larkin.
The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Maybe in my next post I’ll say a bit about why this poem is such a classic, is so beloved. Here I’ll just say that the strange second line is all potential energy, conjuring the almost spring place we are in now. It’s peculiarity stops us. And what of “Their greenness is a kind of grief.”? The word green has so many meanings and all of them can break our hearts, innocence, growth, watching growth from afar. Knowing that innocence will meet with grief, we grieve.
Any thoughts? Have you got a poem or lines of literature that you think of in spring?
Oh and one last thing. We changed the subtitle of The Wonder Paradox. It was
The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives
which I loved but is a lot to say, with
The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life
which is shorter and somehow more to the point.
Of course a lot of holidays don’t go off the way we want them to and we can get the sads. Just remember there are a lot of people like you and we’re all boiling in the same cauldron, I’m sorry it gets so scorchy but there are so many of us that the water might lose its boil, if you see what I’m saying. It’s an anxious world out there and in here but when I try hard to believe in the inner lives of other people, and follow the circuit of the seasons, I survive. See you next Thursday.
love,
Jennifer