An art-poem by Tracy Weil and Drew Myron — made with love for a friend who loves lichen & life.
A friend is sick.
A mother ill.
A funeral today, another tomorrow.
Business lags.
Is this cold or flu or worse?
Where’s my ballot?
I have a litany of worries (don’t we all)? When I tell a friend, she is warm and wise in her response:
The heart stretches and stretches and stretches.
And I think of Maria Popova, the force behind Brain Pickings. Each year she distills one thing she’s learned about living while reading and writing her way through life. This year, she says, the challenge has been “colossal.”
“Depression,” she says, “has lowered its leaden cloudscape over me again and again since I was fifteen, but no other year has lidded life more ominously, as the staggering collective grief we are living through together densified the black fog of private loss.
In such seasons of life, one is pressed against the limits of one’s being, pressed eventually against the understanding — no, more than understanding and less than understanding: the blind elemental fact — that no matter the outer atmosphere of circumstance, one must lift the inner cloudscape by one’s own efforts, or perish under it.”
What did she learn this year? To choose joy — not as sappy platitude, but as intellectual and emotional survival:
“Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. . . . “
Read the whole beautiful, essential passage here.
And so we keep weighing and stretching.
Please, dear reader, keep on choosing.
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
— Jane Hirshfield
from The Weighing