beauty and terror keep going

dispatch 74

hello everyone. Today is a quick little note straight from my brain, so apologies in advance. In this time after the passing of Joanna Macy, I’ve been surrounded by content from her beautiful brain. On a re-release of an episode of For the Wild podcast, paraphrasing Rilke, she says today’s title line “beauty and terror keep going.” I paused. I pressed the skip back button. I listened again.

Because that is just it, isn’t it? People keep dying; there is war and starvation, and breathtaking acts of solidarity. There is art and resistance and crying in a small ball on the ground. The goldenrod is starting to bloom alongside the ongoing miracles of trees and black raspberries, and little kids who say the funniest and most profound things at exactly the perfect moment.

We are here in it all. It’s all connected. You can’t see that sweet, brilliant little human in your life without thinking about children suffering in Palestine, or vice versa. You can’t fill a bowl with berries without thinking about how the air quality is shit from our neighbors to the north burning. It’s all now. It’s all this. It’s all life.

Beauty and terror keep going.

In my own life, my grandmother and my mother are gone. I imagine them repairing their relationship in the afterlife when I see our backyard deer and her spotted fawn. In therapy, I dig back into my childhood and unearth things I have long been too scared to look at. We side-eye each other, each audibly tapping our fingers on the table.

In my kitchen, I am growing a creature in a jar. This creature, who I love, is actually millions or billions of unquantifiable creatures. One day, this creature will help me make bread. When I say I love this creature I’m not saying it lightly, I mean it. We are committed to nourishing each other and I think that’s really beautiful. The only ingredient needed for a relationship.

I want to write again. But I don’t know what to write about. I want to wrangle my bias towards the negative and challenge myself to not lose the beauty in the terror. I fear being pollyannaish and trite. Of having hope, which can sometimes be a dirty word. Hope is not enough, I know, but what is the damn point without it?

This is not an essay, this is word vomit. Maybe that is what I am looking to do here next. This space isn’t the thing I needed in the way that it used to be. It must change shape as I have changed shape.

So, I’m reimagining. Weaving new shapes for my creativity and letting them sit on the dining room table until I know if they are right for me in this moment.

Because beauty and terror keep going. Joanna was right. But the full like from Rilke is perhaps even more beautiful and true:

“Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final”

Just keep going. No feeling is final. Let everything, everything, everything happen to you.

Love and grief,

Lisa