….and I am back! The irony of writing about presence, showing up and saying practice more/suck less two weeks ago; followed by my first week not showing up is not lost on me. Throughout the week I go through this process where I write down thoughts I have, quotes I see, or observations about life and then on Sunday I will sit down, parse through them and write about one or two. This week however it was relatively obvious to me what I should write about and it actually has to do with why I didn’t write last week. Here in Denver last Sunday the weather was about 70º and sunny! I spent a few hours outside playing basketball in the afternoon-working on a tan that has already left me, and then the rest of the day patio hopping and eventually closing down a bar at 9 pm. It was such a good day, but I was too tired to write and found myself falling into bed as soon as I got home.
Fast forward seven days to today (Sunday), it has been snowing for just over 24 hours straight in the city and we have accumulated probably 18 inches of snow, maybe close to two feet. Coming in to this weekend though some meteorologists predicted that we would have anywhere from two and a half feet of snow, up to five feet of snow! Which would be the biggest snowstorm in the Denver area since St. Patrick’s weekend of 2003 when parts of the outlying area got almost six feet of snow! In the span of a week, we went from 70º weather to almost feet of snow.
I think sometimes, in the day to day course of our own lives, we can have seemingly similar swings. I was having a conversation with a friend this week, and they remarked that during the dredges of winter, we forget that it will be warm again. Spring, and then summer will come. Then during the summer, the reverse happens and we forget that it will be winter again. Life, nature, and our experiences have a cyclical quality to them. One of death and rebirth.
The ancient Greeks saw the natural world, and came to a similar conclusion about the resurrective characteristics of the earth. The myths of their gods actually have the corresponding qualities. Lets look briefly at the stories of of Demeter and Penelope. Demeter was the goddess of plant life and the harvest. It was her job to ensure the evergreen presence of all plants. While Penelope was human, wife to Odysseus; the main character of the Odyssey.
In one story Penelope gets abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld, and in response Demeter goes into mourning and refuses to let plant life thrive. As soon as Zeus and the other deities hear about this, they intervene. They come to an agreement where Hades would get Penelope for a period of time each year and then Demeter would get Penelope the rest of the year. During her time in Hades, Demeter would mourn, bringing winter. Upon the return of Penelope however, she would rejoice and bring fruitful seasons for the plants.
What this myth tells us is that humans, were able to take the observable realities of general revelation and conclude a cycle of death and resurrection. Things die in one season, and resurrect, or come to life in the next season. Both seasons are good, they are necessary, and they do not last forever.
So too are our lives evidences of this. From one day to the next we can undergo shifts that see our relation to the experiences of life shift from dread to jubilation, and back again. But more often these seasons are much longer than a day here, a day there. What do we do then? When our winters last a calander year. When our summers bleed into winter.
I think here, we remember. During the winter we take time to remember spring and summer, the smell after a rain, the weekly budding of the flowers on the different corners of the block, the sound of the crackling fire on a late summer evening. It is these memories of the birthing of life, of new life, that really embolden our body to move again. To heal. Healing is unfortunately not a short, or quick process. Instead it is one that takes daily tending to. I have heard it said that taking care of oneself is like taking care of a plant. It is what you do for fifteen minutes a day that matters, not what you do for a couple hours once a week.
Vice verses I find it important to take time to be in remembrance of the winters, even in the fullest seasons of life. To remember the crackling the earth as it is covered in ice, the crispness of the air as we rise out of the cocoons we create from our blankets each night, the absence of the flowers from the corner gardens down the street. One of the hardest things to keep in mind is the reality that while you may be in the fullest season, the coworker might be experiencing winter. The server at your local restaurant might not know where life is coming next. The person in line behind you at the grocery store might feel like they are drowning, slowly, one drip at a time. To remember winter, is to find humility and space for the seasons of those around you. To invite them into live and be gracious if their ability to walk is frozen over.
Planetary rotations, lunar tides, shifting seasons, they all play a part in the life cycle of earth. Life cycles that point to the underlying truth of death and rebirth. Waxing and waning. No matter what you are feeling, the seasons will change.
Last but not least I have decided to change the name of the podcast from The Table, which led to no one being able to find it on Spotify, due to the 17 (this number may be exaggerated) other podcasts named the same thing, to share a name with this newsletter, Monday’s Don’t Suck. Nothing else will change about the podcast, my goal is still to bring people to the table, and to have hard conversations with people while bringing to light the humanity in all of us. This weeks episode was a good conversation with a long family friend, Susan Barber. Susan is an AP Literature teacher from Atlanta and we talk about what it looks like to change as you grow, the limits of tolerance, is there a singular answer to the big metaphysical questions we have in life, and what does it mean to have a freedom to speak.
Thank you for joining this foray into this merriment, love, and sorrow. This view that life holds that ordinary and the unique. The common and the uncommon. Thank you and I’ll see you next Monday.
ℹ️ Read more about Monday’s Don’t Suck here.
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