Haiku 3
You come to the house
of birdsong wrapped in a sigh,
sleep still in your eyes.
Haiku 4
Soft and small, his hand
fits mine; he builds me new worlds
one brick at a time.
Both of these haikus came out of the slow and quiet moments at home during the pandemic. Those early mornings when my daughter would climb into my bed before sunrise, bleary-eyed but content. The afternoons spent on the floor, watching the creative whir of my son's mind take shape with every carefully-placed LEGO brick.
The blessing of these quiet moments was almost lost on me, caught up in the guilt of having a safe home in which we could tuck ourselves away, a job my husband could depend upon, and the privilege of choice that so many others didn't have. We could choose to stay home, we could choose to opt out of virtual school, we could choose to have our groceries and meals delivered, we could pick and choose our risks.
I wrote early on in the pandemic:
What I find most difficult is feeling like we’re living in two worlds—one dominated by the ordinary, tangible, and familiar, the other by the uncertainty of what’s to come and the grief of what we already know. The challenge, I find, is being present to both, allowing for tension between the two, and not abandoning one for the other.
It can feel as though it ought to be one or the other and that to acknowledge joy in our own lives is to somehow deny the grief in another's.
I remember thinking this on one unusually warm spring day in the early days of the pandemic. We all needed a change of scenery, so we loaded the family up in our minivan and drove to a park with a small pond and high rolling hills--perfect for sledding in the winter and flying kites in the spring. The sky was a clear blue and the sun warmed us from the inside out. While our kids ran down the hill at full speed, hair streaming behind them like the wispy contrails of the passenger plane overhead, I felt a deeply-rooted contentment in the simple goodness of the day.
This contentment was followed closely by an unsettling sense of guilt. Why should I benefit from a global pandemic that left so many people bereft of jobs, loved ones, a sense of safety and security? I don't deserve this.
But that's just it--we don't deserve the good or the bad; we just receive them. And when we compare both our joys and our sorrows to the joys and sorrows of another, we minimize our experiences. We strip them of the creative substance that has the potential to form our character.
And we diminish other peoples' experiences by distilling them to either good or bad, joyful or sorrowful. We do not allow for nuances, for the interplay of joy and sorrow in someone else's life that cannot be discerned at a glance. And when we dismiss them in our own lives, we rob ourselves of an opportunity for growth.
In Lisel Mueller's beautiful poem "Joy" she says:
It happens
when we make bottomless love—
there follows a bottomless sadness
which is not despair
but its nameless opposite.
It has nothing to do with the passing of time.
It’s not about loss. It’s about
two seemingly parallel lines
suddenly coming together
inside us, in some place
that is still wilderness.
We all live in the place where these "two seemingly parallel lines" meet. We receive both the difficult and the sweet. We can thank God for both. We can rejoice with those who rejoice and we mourn with those who mourn. And we can do that even for ourselves. To acknowledge one is not to forsake the other. And so, in the midst of turmoil and grief, I can give thanks for the quiet blessings of a floor strewn with LEGOs and the warmth of a tousled-haired child snuggled up by my side.
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