High Holy Days

We're slip-sliding offkilter (23.5 degrees to be precise) around this eliptic plane. We are careening PDF (pretty darn fast) around the sun, sometimes veering closer to the rays and sometimes shying away.
And because of the dapper-doffed-hat angle of our planet, we get Demeter and Persephone's yearly push-me pull-you, with the swell of springtime flowers and the burst of heavy harvest, and the long cool rest of the earth.

The waves reach up to moonlight and the stars move over us, hanging changing sheets of constellations across the sky.

We're little monkeys and we like stuff. We're science monkeys and the world is neat-o. So we notice things like the planet hotting or colding, or the lights lining up, and the stars holding still. Also, we like parties. Hence, seasonal festivals!

Also, we are worried little curious monkeys, and the fact that we grow up and die is freaky. So we try and puzzle it out, mapping our wonder and worry across the sky. When it's getting dark and spooky outside, let's remember our dead. When the days are short and cool, let's rest our weapons. When the green things are growing and little creatures hatching, let's celebrate new birth. We map our biological reality onto the planet's movements, matching our transformations onto the transformations of nature.

It seems right-- dignified and balanced-- to mark these passages with festivals, fires, songs, and celebrations. It feeds my soul to be with other people, following tradition, thinking about the seasons and our shared human experiences of birth, change, and death.

My friend Vanessa called me the other day-- we have these enormous, sustaining, rambling, universe-solving conversations, often in stolen moments in the car, just before picking up kids or bringing in the groceries.

We got to talking about how it's a hard month for both of us. Many painful anniversaries clot here, in a nasty emotional cluster just as the days are the most beautiful and the skies most clear.

Vanessa is amazing at bringing people together to mark passages and celebrate transformation-- she leads hundreds of kids on lantern walks, and teens on survival adventures, and adults through grounding and song-- and so much more.

But personal grief can seem indulgent-- marking anniversaries on and on and on-- it embarrasses people. "Don't hang on to it, you need to let it go." As time goes on, people's patience for grief and remembering shrinks. You learn to only share it with the few who will understand. We don't make space for people to hang their crepe for year after year.

As Vanessa and I talked we realized that we could have our own personal liturgical calendar-- our own wheel of the year. Our personal histories overlay the natural sway and return of the seasons, why not mark that?

We can mark our own high holy days, not with numbing and avoidance, but with the same careful celebration we offer with other holidays. There's solemnity and fun, food and tears.

Today is the 4th anniversary of Matt's suicide.

Last year we were on the Big Island. The year before that we were in Scotland. The year before that, Yellowstone.

This year we're in Corona-town. My usual ritual of far flung family travel-- remembering the good old times by making new good times-- doesn't fly right now. And 4 years-- that sounds like a long time. It's not a fresh wound any more. Is it even a thing we should keep marking?

Now it's an older wound, a lodged bullet. Healed over but always twinging with pain and ongoing damage.

I am going to defend today as a high holy day for my family.

On this day, four years ago, our hearts were broken, our hopes were dashed. The things we believed about the world being a good place, a safe place-- that all ended. Everything soft dissolved. Only hard diamond bones were left.

And at the same time, Matt's bitter battle ended. His pain stopped.

We lost our home in Hawaii, but we eventually found new homes in Utah and in Oregon. We left the whole life we knew and found, to our amazement, that other lives were possible across the event horizon.

Today can be a day for us to remember Matt as a person who was alive and loved grassfed steak and Walker's shortbread cookies and slack key guitar and Lonesome Dove and Scottish music and Turner's art and Heaney's poetry and most of all his kids.

We can remember the terrible pain of our own broken hearts, and bless them, and gentle them towards further healing.

And we can honor our own exodus from that moment of catastrophe-- our own journey through the wilderness. We can mark the things that offered us safe passage through the dark desert: singing with dear friends in flower crowns, dancing hula, making new and refinding old friends, adventures across continents, life-changing stories like Tiffany Aching, She-Ra, Miss Sherlock, Juniper etc etc.

I'm going to have patience with myself today, and allow myself to mark this date of transmogrification, the anniversary of our family's entrance into this ongoing crucible.

And I want to extend that grace to all of you, too. To mark and celebrate your own holy days and private festivals.