enduring great bleakness
dispatch 83
hi friends,
Happy (belated) Solstice and Strawberry Moon! May you find time to soak up all of the light that you can (And for my Southern Hemisphere friends, may the waning dark season treat you gently).
I’m at the start of a full week off of work where I have almost absolutely nothing planned. It’s glorious! I am resisting the urge to plot my every move (or at least like, a few moves) and instead declaring it Play Week. Only things that feel nourishing and fun need apply, which fits perfectly with today’s essay theme. I’ll see you on the other side.
enduring great bleakness
I don’t know exactly when, how, or through whom my recovery community first became enamored with the late Irish poet, author, and philosopher, John O’Donohue; I just know that we collectively did. Affectionately referred to in those spaces as “Johnny O’Donny,” his work felt expansive, hopeful, and grounded in a kind of animist faith that transcended belief system. Bruised as I was by my early run-ins with Catholicism, his inclusion of the Bible in his work felt more comforting than barbed, unapologetically rooted in the body and the landscape that the church had only taught me to distrust.
Like adrienne maree brown, Thích Nhất Hạnh, Mary Oliver, he is the kind of thinker that helps me see the aliveness of the world around me. One that reminds me that I am a small but worthy part of it all.
And for someone coming back to life from substance use, this is a great and priceless creative gift. It’s the kind of sturdy, magical ground you can rebuild a life upon.
Somehow, despite my from-afar admiration over the years, I had never heard Johnny O’Donny speak until this week, when I listened to an old episode of On Being podcast (on youtube here or search your chosen podcast app), one of the last interviews he did before his unexpected death in 2008.
I skipped back to listen to this line at least five times:
“If you can keep some kind of little contour [of beauty] that you can glimpse sideways at now and again, you can endure great bleakness.”
If we find ourselves in a seemingly never-ending stretch of great bleakness that must be endured to be shaped, then what is the role of beauty?
Not beauty-for-sale, not someone else’s idea of it, not beauty that is easy or agreeable or even necessarily universal. The beauty that is because it matters to you. The kind of beauty that is somatic, it stops your breath and makes your chest ache just a little. Beauty that reminds you that you are alive.
And friend, there is so much when I stop to look for it. An embarrassment of riches. The rise and fall of my dog’s chest as he lies in a sunspot. Wind chimes, being woken up by the dawn chorus, the scent of freshly cut grass. The act of bringing food to a neighbor, of seeing someone I know in an unexpected place and stopping for a quick chat. A favorite tree, a favorite rock, a favorite person. New flowers in a chipped old pitcher. Running a thumb over an engraving of my grandmother’s name on one of her silver tea spoons as I wait for the tea to brew. A candle flickering on the altar. That picture of my mother as a mischievous child. A shining blue dragonfly landing on the down of my arm in the sun.
These moments, these tableaus, do not have to be big. There is something precious about their smallness. Maybe our enchantments need to be small and tangible right now. A shining memory with which to adorn our nest, like so many earthbound corvids.
What I love about this quote and about the wisdom of Johnny in general is that he does not say “Proceed towards beauty at all costs”. This is not a hero’s journey, and you will not hold the grail at the end. Instead, it’s a noticing, an intentional engagement with the world around you. To find beauty, you have to be willing to look for it. You have to find it where it hides, and let your sense be open enough that when it finds you first, you do not miss it.
So, as you move on your own path, towards whatever change you are making in your life, your family, your community, the world, you give yourself something to keep moving forward for. You glance, sometimes just for a second, at something worth saving. You fill your periphery with enough enchantment to sustain you, to feed the child in you, the part of you that maybe doesn’t always have the right analysis but has enough down-to-your-toes imagination to shape something more beautiful out of what comes next.
a patchwork of magic: culture recommendations
Things I’ve watched, read, listened to, etc etc etc that brought some power, enchantment, or other big feels into my life.
The Astronomer and the Witch by Dr Ulinka Rublack: This is an academic text that is incredibly engaging and reader-friendly, about the witchcraft case brought against Katharina Kepler and her son’s legal defense of her. It sets the story in deep context of the time and the specific community in which Katharina lived and was fascinating. I wrote about Johannes Kepler and his mother here.
Ripening: Why Women Need Fairytales Now by Sharon Blackie: I love Sharon Blackie’s work and I always choose the audiobook version when she is the one reading it. She has a delightfully soothing voice. On what fairytale archetypes can teach us in midlife in ThEsE tImEs, this one branches a bit beyond her usual focus on Celtic tales and the chapter on Mothers damn near killed me (not a surprise!). I’m always fascinated by how fairytales and myths seem to exist across time and space. For example, the Indigenous Tlingit people of what is now Alaska have a story about a woman who marries a bear, nearly identical to the story native to the people of my mother’s homeland of in what is now Finland. All circumpolar people, but not exactly geographically close, it’s a reminder of the stories that form our deepest and most forgotten connective threads.
Thank you for being here. Here’s your gentle reminder to pause and do something sweet for yourself before you jump to the next thing.
until next time,
Lisa