A Blessing for Those Who Choose to Live
Blessed are you
When this dream of yours has died
And it is time to bury it
In a sepulcher of memory
In a shrine of what could have been
In a mausoleum of grief
Or in an unmarked grave
Deep in the forest
Where even your footprints
Will be erased by falling leaves.
Even if you found yourself forced
Into a zodiac wheel of fate,
When a once-shining constellation of hope
Gets lain to rest
May you acknowledge its appointed times,
Each sparkling season of life
And death,
Of potential
And final failure,
As each starry wish
Blinked out
And you were left
With nothing but a handful of ash —
And if you’re lucky,
Stardust still glinting
In the sky.
But walk away.
Journey back to the living.
Do not let yourself become a wraith
Clutching at the gravestone
Of what you wanted.
You must bury the dead
And hope for resurrection and renewal
Just as your own living flesh
Was once the carbon
From a dying star.
Blessings be upon you
Who choose to live,
To rise again
After wearing the veil of grief
For a time,
To feast once more
With friends and loves
Before they too
Are gone forever.
Blessings upon those
Who savor every flavor
In the love feast
Granted daily
Only to the living,
Only to those
Who open their mouths
To receive the holy communion
Of this present world’s delights.
Come,
Take and eat
The bread of life
That feeds you with each morning
That you wake
With breath still in your lungs,
That feeds you
With the hands that made
Each created thing,
From grand artworks
To the humble fork that pierces
The ripened strawberry’s corpulent sweetness
As it bleeds upon your plate,
Which was also made by someone.
May you eat the joy of music,
Of the birdsong and jet contrails
That brocade the skies
With the miracle of flight.
May you taste the curious mysteries
Of what we can never know
And the bitter uncertainties
Of loss
That make new life
That much sweeter.
May you live,
And in your living
May you become a lavish feast
In someone else’s
Holy dream.
Last week my husband, Richard, and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. Well, we celebrated the tenth anniversary of our legal marriage ceremony, which we had to have in California because back then same-sex marriage was not legal in Arizona. Two weeks later we had an enormous storybook wedding at the Episcopal church where I worked and where he sang in the choir and was on the vestry, but that ceremony was purely symbolic, since we had been legally married for two weeks by then.
To mark our ten year anniversary, Richard and I drove back to California and stayed in the same hotel in Coronado Island where we’d stayed when we got married, and which we’ve visited on two prior anniversaries. Each anniversary we’ve spent there, we’ve had a tea ceremony on the beach in honor of the one we had in our hotel room when we first signed our marriage license ten years ago.
What we thought was going to be another of these wonderful anniversaries turned into something else, though. Ten years is a significant milestone, and it forced some introspection. Yes, we still celebrated, and it was beautiful, but our past relationships came back like a specter, haunting each day. Richard realized that his first family had completely dissolved along with his marriage. Due to many complicated factors, none of the original members of my husband’s first marriage family have any contact whatsoever with each other.
To frame this realization in such a stark way as the entire family being “completely dissolved” was shocking to me, even though , of course we already knew this was true. Neither of my husband’s adopted sons speak with each other, and both have cut almost everyone else out of their lives as well — grandparents, aunts, uncles, godparents, relatives back in Zambia — and, sadly, both of us too. And although Richard and his ex wife remained friends for several years after their divorce, even after Richard and I started dating, disagreements and legal disputes festered into acrimony. And so now there is no contact with her, and she has no contact with the boys. No one has any contact with anyone else.
Richard tried desperately to hold his old marriage and family together, even after both he and his wife finally came out as gay. One thing he and I have in common is that we both stayed in our former relationships far too long, even after they became outright abusive and fractured with infidelity. Both of us had been desperate to preserve what we had, even though it was killing us.
I don’t think milestone-induced memories and introspection were the only reason we found ourselves looking back to the past and grieving during what we expected would a celebration. This has been a tremendous year of other milestones, like my fiftieth birthday, and both of us having parents who turned eighty. We’ve also had a few friends die, watched as other friends got divorced, and we found out that both of our estranged sons had children without telling us. All these situations forced us to have a new perspective and drove us to examine our lives.
Our personal challenges, however, are happening in the context of some larger patterns. It seems that nearly everyone is grappling with change lately, and I think a lot of that is because society itself is changing in ways we could never have predicted. We can all feel that we are on the cusp of something monumental.
Stephen Fry recently gave a talk about AI, in which he explained how we can all feel that we are witnessing the confluence of major technological shifts. He said:
“Behind us, unseen on the horizon, huge currents are converging, separate but each feeding and swelling the others to form one unimaginably colossal tsunami. These are the currents of quantum computing, of genomics and gene editing, of bio-augmentation and bionics, of duplex brain-machine interfacing, of robotics, of new materials (graphene, perovskite, carbon nano-tubes, self-healing polymers, many others), and of course, the most swollen current of all — the technologies and processes behind what we call Artificial Intelligence.”
It’s overwhelming, and it can be frightening to think about, full of great promise but also tremendous risk.
And then there are the changes endemic to life now, like a changing political landscape, the constant updates of apps and operating systems, rapid developments in music and the arts, new platforms (like Substack) to figure out and use to their full potential, plus we can all see and feel the effects of climate change and ever-expanding cities…and despite the rise of billionaire tech bros trying to turn back the clock, we are all experiencing the most consistent and ubiquitous force of change: aging.
How many times have we heard, “Life is change?” But I wonder if we have ever been in such a confluence of massively transformative forces before. And as we’ve seen with the big transformations that came before, like the Internet and social media, sometimes these changes actually make our life worse even as they open doors. It feels a bit like we have all unlocked Pandora’s Box, and along with great promise, community, breakthroughs, and advancement, we also get information silos and data manipulation and fake news and highly-orchestrated divisiveness and fraud and cyber bullying and…
With all of this swirling through my mind this week, I could feel myself grappling with the idea of change in all of my Everyday Divina practices. On one walk I noticed a parade of bees celebrating on a fence entirely covered with queen’s wreath vines. As I stood there watching them, asking for whatever wisdom they had to share with me, I realized that it is a completely natural thing to love beauty. Like bees, we evolved to be attracted to beauty, and so it is entirely natural to seek it out.
I thought of birds who build elaborately beautiful installations in the hopes of attracting a mate, or they show glorious plumage for the same reason. I thought of mating rituals throughout the animal kingdom, and the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, who objectively quantified how beauty is endemic to the natural world, and not just a human construct.
And then I thought about the double standards we have on beauty. How many of us have been taught that the pursuit of beauty is frivolous or vain? How much of history has been devoted to ascetic values of poverty and barrenness? What about “form follows function,” or the judgmental idea of calling beautiful art hokey or “just illustration?”
As I continued these walks around my neighborhood, I realized that life and culture often struggle between the diametrically opposed ideas of preservation and development, of the new and old, of history and the future, and how competing ideas of beauty inform these arguments. And I grew to realize that the pallor cast on our anniversary trip by past relationship failures was actually a microcosm of our entire neighborhood.
Richard and I live in West University, a historic district in Tucson adjacent to the University of Arizona. Our entire neighborhood is on the National Register of Historic Places, and our house was one of the original contributing properties to the designation. This means our district has extra laws and very strict regulations aimed at preserving the historic buildings here and appearance of the entire neighborhood.
Being unable to build next to a rapidly growing campus means there is a housing shortage (compounded by the general housing shortage currently happening all over the place), as the University of Arizona takes on record numbers of students. In the past few years, the campus has developed a high-rise skyline of its own, with massive apartment buildings meant for students. But right next to those mountainous buildings, century-old Craftsman bungalows lined the streets like a scene from the Disney Pixar film, Up!
Facing the competing needs of growth, expansion, and preservation is a constant dilemma for cities, but we had great examples of when this dilemma was handled well, and when it wasn’t. A few decades ago Tucson completely razed historic (and mostly Hispanic) barrios to make way for “urban renewal.” It was a catastrophe, and partially what prompted our neighborhood to pursue historic protections for itself.
Similarly, just across the main thoroughfare, another historic neighborhood does not have the same restrictions, and so developers have been free to buy up properties, tear down the historic houses, and then erect generic “mini dorms,” huge houses made specifically for wealthy students. Not only has Tucson permanently lost irreplaceable and historic architecture this way, but these new generic buildings are built cheaply and often become, in effect, frat houses, complete with all the noisy, drunken exploits stereotypically associated with college party life.
So, this unique Tucson history made way for a novel idea, beautifully similar to what happened in Up. The city would only let the developers come in and build another high-rise if they moved the historic houses to available space in the historic neighborhood. This way, we get to have expansion while also preserving the historic architecture, all while keeping it local.
To see these entire houses moved was awe-inspiring. In my walks, I’ve been able to watch as the houses traveled one by one on enormous machines to their new locations on previously empty lots or huge yards where another house might fit. On one block, what was once a single, crumbling old house on a huge piece of land is quickly developing into its own neighborhood-within-a-neighborhood, as four (!!!) of the old houses have made their way onto the large parcel. And this influx of historic value coupled with renewed interest and potential have inspired the owners to fix up the old house. What was en eyesore is quickly becoming something wonderful. In this case, preservation has become exponential, and what was old and falling apart will now become beautiful again, saved from the bulldozer and able to flourish in a completely new context.
This balance between preservation and expansion feels so hopeful in the midst of so much disintegration. This is the opposite of what happened to my husband’s old family. The opposite of what happened in my life when my ex relapsed and went to prison. There is no conflagration, no razing, no stark abandonment, no casting aside for something new — nor is there staunch and toxic resistance to change. ALL of the houses being moved are being preserved in such a way that they will eventually be better off and better preserved than they would have been had they been left in place next to a bunch of skyscrapers on one of the city’s biggest thoroughfares. And thousands of new housing units will rise in their place as their former yards are transformed into a mixed-use high-rise.
This gives me hope and reassurance in the midst of such a rapidly changing world, as city bureaucracies, neighborhood associations, and billionaire investors were able to come together to make a win/win situation. As I recently wrote, I am still learning how to live in the dynamic tension of acceptance of what is and hope for something better. The way our neighborhood and city planners handled this is a masterful way of solving multiple problems at once, bridging preservation and progress by taking what was already there and moving it to a better place, all in a way that retains the authenticity of our neighborhood.
Those houses needed to be moved in order to be preserved, while also making way for something new and essential.
How often is that the case in my life as well? So often I’ve looked at choices as a dichotomy of staying or leaving, changing or staying the same, looking at the past or looking toward the future. But here was a solution playing out on a grand scale right in my own back yard.
How can I retain and even celebrate my history while also moving on to the next wonderful thing life has in store for me? Where do I need to move, or what from my past needs to be moved to make room for something better? And where have I razed something to the ground when really all it needed was a shift or new point of view?
As someone who loves certainty and security, I will probably spend my entire life learning to lean into mystery, nuance, and big-picture thinking — seeing reality with all its complexity and contradictions. Seeing humanity come together to create novel, outside-the-box, elegant solutions that benefit everyone involved gives me hope and reminds me to look for these similar “both/and” paths in my own decision making.
It also allows me to simultaneously hold both the grief of losing the old with the enjoyment of what I have now and the promise of even better things to come. Looking back on what happened during our anniversary trip last week, I now realize that it can be a mix of celebration for what we have built and grief for what we had lost before. We didn’t need to eradicate the past in order to move forward. Instead we could understand and transform our past into something better understood in a different context, the context of our lives now.
Our old wounds and relationships don’t need to haunt our marriage now. Ultimately, while Richard deeply grieved the complete disintegration of his prior family, it also makes him so much more appreciative for our marriage now, and that it is so much healthier. The “old houses” of our past needed to be moved out of the place they had been in our minds — the sense of failure, the sense of loss, the memories of past hurts — and into a new position: a place to the side, no longer shadowing or crowding our marriage, but actually highlighting the goodness we now enjoy.
Plus, like the literal old houses in our neighborhood, which were beautiful for decades and then started crumbling, I am reminded to keep my heart open to the possibility that many other parts of my life are much, much better in a different context. Friends move into and out of proximity. Vocations and values shift. Relationships may die, but pieces of them live on forever, even if the people in those relationships are no longer in my life. But at the end of the day, it’s up to me to choose what to preserve and what to throw away.
If those buildings that got moved had been a generic strip mall instead of beautiful old homes, I doubt anyone would have cared if they were leveled in the name of progress. But like so many things in our lives and in our world, they were worth preserving — and so people literally moved the world to do just that.
What in my life is worth such efforts? A lot, it turns out. And I bet the same is true for you.
A Blessing for Those Who Choose to Live
Blessed are you
When this dream of yours has died
And it is time to bury it
In a sepulcher of memory
In a shrine of what could have been
In a mausoleum of grief
Or in an unmarked grave
Deep in the forest
Where even your footprints
Will be erased by falling leaves.
Even if you found yourself forced
Into a zodiac wheel of fate,
When a once-shining constellation of hope
Gets lain to rest
May you acknowledge its appointed times,
Each sparkling season of life
And death,
Of potential
And final failure,
As each starry wish
Blinked out
And you were left
With nothing but a handful of ash —
And if you’re lucky,
Stardust still glinting
In the sky.
But walk away.
Journey back to the living.
Do not let yourself become a wraith
Clutching at the gravestone
Of what you wanted.
You must bury the dead
And hope for resurrection and renewal
Just as your own living flesh
Was once the carbon
From a dying star.
Blessings be upon you
Who choose to live,
To rise again
After wearing the veil of grief
For a time,
To feast once more
With friends and loves
Before they too
Are gone forever.
Blessings upon those
Who savor every flavor
In the love feast
Granted daily
Only to the living,
Only to those
Who open their mouths
To receive the holy communion
Of this present world’s delights.
Come,
Take and eat
The bread of life
That feeds you with each morning
That you wake
With breath still in your lungs,
That feeds you
With the hands that made
Each created thing,
From grand artworks
To the humble fork that pierces
The ripened strawberry’s corpulent sweetness
As it bleeds upon your plate,
Which was also made by someone.
May you eat the joy of music,
Of the birdsong and jet contrails
That brocade the skies
With the miracle of flight.
May you taste the curious mysteries
Of what we can never know
And the bitter uncertainties
Of loss
That make new life
That much sweeter.
May you live,
And in your living
May you become a lavish feast
In someone else’s
Holy dream.
I love you!
Eric