Comfort and Joy
Also grief, acceptance, and love
“My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
In this issue:
What love throws at us
A holiday wish
Some links to comfort, joy, and hopefully a smile or two
Dear Everyone,
All week I have been wondering how I was going to write this newsletter. It was to be the send-off for the year, a holiday hug, a list or two of favorite things to share. Instead, I spent the week writing an obituary.
The subject lived only three years, two months, and 23 days. She was not famous or beautiful in the classic sense. She was no Instagram star. She was great at being herself and reveled in her own skin, her wild Eighties hair, and, often, the stinkiest patch of grass at the dog park. Her name was Rina and she was, as a minor character in Anne Tyler’s novel Saint Maybe put it, “the dog of my heart.” She died suddenly just after midnight on Monday, December 14 after getting us through one of the toughest weeks of our lives.
Then, through the thick of our grief, we received news from my husband’s daughter , news that made all the suffering and surgery she’s recently endured a little easier to bear. When he hung up the phone, he looked at me and said, “It feels so strange to feel joy when I also feel so heartbroken.”
There are any number of wise quotes about how grief and joy coexist, how we are asked to hold not one or the other, but both. I was half tempted to dig up a bunch of them but I’m guessing you don’t need them. I’m guessing that you’ve lived long enough to have experienced first-hand the fallout of giving your heart to another living being. Sometimes it takes all we have to absorb what love throws at us.
Before I abandoned my search for quotes, I did stumble across a proverb that makes sense to me: “Grief shared is halved; joy shared is doubled.” As I wrote Rina’s obituary, my grief did not exactly diminish but instead of a hard cold stone buried in my chest it turned liquid like my tears; it was harder to hold onto. The joy she gave us flowed too. It was confusing. It was cathartic. It’s not over, but today is better than Monday. I am grateful. If you would like to read about Rina, you will find her obituary here or you can click on the photo of her below. It is not my best writing and it runs longer than most obits you will find in the paper. The writer and editor in me knows all this but was overruled by the woman who loved her dog, as she has loved every dog who has changed her life. She hopes you will understand.
Comfort and Joy
This year has been full of pain for so many. I know that some of us in this community have been touched by COVID-19 or some other threat to our lives and livelihoods. We are facing the holidays when many of us will, once again, be far from those we love or frightened for those we love. We are straining forward, trying to stretch out our patience and our health and our hope towards the day when the vaccine is available to all of us and those we love are safe.
Yet, there have also been pockets of unexpected joy. The desire for connection has led to weekly Sunday Zooms with my siblings, mother, and my dad’s wife that temporarily shrink the thousands of miles that separate us. We are all talking more often than we would be if the pandemic had not happened. And I’ve had the great good fortune to be connected on a weekly basis with all of you. I have looked forward to every Friday when I write this newsletter. It makes my day when I hear back from you about the books you are reading or a memory sparked by that week’s topic. Last week’s “Cookbook Edition” brought a bunch of new subscribers into the fold and in 2021 I’m looking forward to sharing books, random thoughts, and ideas that can spark something in each of us.
For the next two weeks, though, Spark will go quiet. We’ll reconvene on January 9, the first Saturday of the year. These next two weeks will be a good time to reflect, recover, and and sit in each moment to savor whatever it offers. I wish you comfort. I wish you joy. Whatever the new year brings, I am glad to be going into it with you.
Before signing off though, here are some links that will take you to offerings of comfort and, possibly, joy or hope or whatever you most need at that moment.
“As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread…Hope is the thing that is left to us in a bad time.”
So begins a letter written by E.B. White (Stuart Little, James and the Giant Peach) to a reader who viewed the future with gloom. It is read by Stephen Fry as part of the Letters Live program which you will definitely be hearing more about in future newsletters.
Comfort Reads
Turns out there are lots of lists out there for books to read when comfort is important. Here are three of them. Are any of your favorites on there? If you’ve got your own list of go-to books for comfort, share them with all of us! I confess, I’ve re-read pretty much every book by Terry Pratchett that I own in the past month and a half. I’m sure there are loftier stories or wiser voices but these were what I reached for every night to read myself to sleep.
Writers Share Their Comfort Reads with The New York Times
OR
Browse the books at our Spark Community Recommendations page for books and pick one out for the new year. It will give you or someone you love something to look forward to and every sale raises money for independent bookstores and will help us raise money to donate to a literacy program selected by the Spark Community. We are making progress very slowly but very surely — currently we’ve raised just under $6. I’m thinking we need $100 or so to make an impact but I’m open to ideas. All the books mentioned here or suggested by the community are listed there. It’s been fun to see the list grow.
Solstice and Joy
On one of the last walks I took with Rina as the sun went down, we wound up standing under this plant (I have no clue what it was). It looked pretty enough from a few feet away but standing under its fronds and looking up transformed them into a living sunset of December colors. If you click on the photo, it will take you to George Winston’s December album and music that always brings joy for me. I hope it does for you too. And then, on Monday, the solstice will mark the turning point. The darkness will slowly fade behind us.
More Joy: “Don’t Hesitate” by Mary Oliver
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
That’s it for now and for 2020. See you in the new year but don’t wait until then if you’d like to get in touch. I love hearing from you and write back as soon as I can. As always, feel free to use the comment section to share your thoughts, your books, and, how you are doing.
Here’s to what’s next for all of us.
Peace, joy, and health,
Betsy
P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…more Mary Oliver
“Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over he gets to ask and I get to tell.”
“Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night” by Mary Oliver from Dog Songs
Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”
Even though we are going quiet in the next two weeks, we will be back with this feature in January. What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.
Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed.
I can’t wait to see what you send!
See you in the New Year.
i'm so sorry about the loss of rina, and what a beautiful, bittersweet ode to life and love.
With deep sympathy from one whose toes were licked. Another heartbreak in a year of heartbreaks, Betsy. I'm glad, too, for those moments of joy.