PC: Author
Happy Thanksgiving, friends! My heart is filled with gratitude to be writing to you once more. I missed this, sitting down and just … writing. “Just” might not be the right word — we all know what it’s like to sit down and draw a blank, or to write week after week with little return on our investment.
The openness I feel sitting here, getting ready to write to you about beauty and winter and gratitude, is a stark contrast to the tunnel of busyness I’ve voluntarily put myself in for some time now as I’ve stepped more fully into the role of business owner.
About busy-ness, Mary Oliver says this:
“Wherever I am the world comes after me
It offers me it’s busyness. It does not believe I do not want it.”
-from “The Old Poets of China”
I sat for meditation for the first time in a long time this morning. In the silence and stillness, the only backdrop being the occasional bird chirp and the hum of my diffuser, my heart had space to well up with joy.
Joy that we so often separate ourselves from in the vacuum of needing to do the next thing, achieve the next thing, and please everyone but ourselves. Joy that we tend to relate to as separate from us, like something to be accessed when we’ve earned it.
No. Joy lives in each of us. Love lives in each of us. Unbounded.
I love this time of year. I sit at my kitchen table in the mornings now, looking at the barren trees, and there’s something so comforting about the death bleakly present in nature. It’s an invitation to slow down, be still, and appreciate where there is still life and where life no longer belongs.
I watch the barren trees, some leaves clinging on for dear life, and I feel seen. The Earth knows this cycle better than anyone. The expansion of dreams and possibilities and the heartbreak of those once-open doors closing forever.
There’s also a nostalgia for me around this time of year. My skin carries the memory of the most warmth during the times of the year when it was coldest. Family hugging, gathering, praying, singing, laughing — all together, every year. This time of year is the biggest callback to my childhood.
I can still see them now - my Granddad gruffly walking in the door, one of those golf caps on with a pointed brim, a windbreaker over his sweater, and perfectly ironed pants. Maybe with a cane in hand, maybe helping my grandmother - who would have been immaculately decked out in Thanksgiving attire1 - up the stairs.
Last week I was driving home. It was chilly and already dark, which this time of year, seems to be the default state.
“Hey, Siri,” I said. “Play Handel’s Messiah.” It took us a few tries to get it right, but Siri got there.
I’m not religious, and every year I go to see the Messiah with my parents and think, this will be the last time. Every year, I listen to it for the first time that year, and I’m 14 again, sandwiched in between my Granddad and my mom at my very first viewing of Handel’s Messiah.
And I know I will never stop going to see Handel’s Messiah. If you’ve never seen the Messiah, it might seem out of touch or overblown.
There’s this thing that happens in really wonderful musical performances. Everyone in the audience is bound up in the same spell of reverence. It’s unforgettable. It’s divine. It’s worth chasing for the rest of your life.
“Listening to music renews the heart precisely for this reason: it plumbs the gravity of sorrow until it finds the point of submerged light and lightness. Listening to music stirs the heavy heart; it alters the gravity. Unconsciously it schools us in a different way to hold sorrow. It frees a space to let in lightness. Unlike anything else in the world, music is neither image nor word and yet it can say and show more than a painting or poem.” - John O’Donohue
O’Donohue talked extensively in his written works about beauty as this illusive, indirectly accessible thing that pointed to the divine nature of all life. I had listened to an interview with him published on the On Being podcast recently, and it hit me that perhaps I don’t love the Messiah because it was a religious work, or even because it’s a nostalgic piece of music for me.
Granddad was a huge musician. He was a big proponent of things like going to see music together or of us playing instruments, but he also made sure we sang together around the piano every Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Just like he did growing up in the Depression. While that had once been all Granddad’s family could do in the evenings, it struck me that he continued to pursue music throughout his lifetime.
Listening to this beautifully orchestrated piece by Handel on my wintery drive home, it occurred to me - for the first time - that Granddad’s love of music was a way of pointing to the divine. To what was greater than us. It was his way of finding beauty in a difficult world.
Maybe I loved the Messiah because it pointed to everything I couldn’t see. The experience of there being something larger, of some kind of divinity not only outside of me, but within me. Within all of us.
As we meet today, friends, there is much sorrow and suffering in the world. More than we may be able to bear. I shared with friends this week that gratitude was a pointing towards what is good, but not in a way of forcing yourself to be happy. Or, as a teacher of mine says, attention is how we access gratitude. Giving a moment or a thing our full attention.
I’m grateful for the dirt on the floors. The countertops that aren’t as clean as I’d like them to be. The inability to do everything. The mum that’s blooming again. A day off. The pile of things that need to go out to the recycle.
I’m grateful for these signs that I’m living so fully. That I’m still here. That we’re still here.
Whether you’re in America or not today, may you find it within your heart to hold the humanity of all beings. May you hold yourself gently. May you hold more than one truth at once. May you find what is ordinary, beautiful. May you turn your soul towards wonder, reverence, and delight.
Let me know how you’re doing in the comments if you feel up to it.
Take good care.
xx
Camille
Thanksgiving attire = sweaters embroidered with turkeys, turkey earrings, etc.
Happy Thanksgiving, Camille. Hope you have a great one!