By Anna Blaedel
Not too long ago, I found myself sitting between beloveds under a moonlit sky, watching a community theater production of Our Town. I had not seen Our Town since playing the part of Mrs. Gibbs while in high school. Time bent, as lines I had not heard for over two decades washed over me, lines I would not have known I could conjure but still knew by heart. Our Town is a story of ordinary life, and the (extra)ordinary experiences of love and loss that mark mortal life. In high school, that play was entangled with my own extraordinary experiences of coming into queerness, my first big love, and my first big heartbreak. Two lines of the play have stuck with me through the years, drenched with longing, reverberating in my heart, sometimes from my lips, particularly when encountering big love, or big heartbreak. “Isn’t the moonlight terrible?” “Isn’t the moonlight wonderful?” So wild and precious, this one life we are living; wonderful, and terrible.
Not long after that, I found myself sitting in the local, independent bookstore that is forever making life more livable, listening to one of my favorite writers, Ross Gay, read from his new, Book of (more) Delights, and riff on life. The two most interesting things about humans, he said, is that we change, and that we die. In the fullness of ever-changing, mortal life there is always delight, and always undelights. Joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another. Everyone is hurt, he said; if you want to find delight, be on the lookout for care. How we care for each other in and through pain and sorrow, Gay proposes, is what makes joy possible. Rather than running from or waging war against sorrow, Gay invites us to open to it, care for it even, to “make sorrow some tea from the lemon balm in the garden.” Because the experience of joy, Gay finds, is not refuge or relief from heartbreak, but “what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreak.” Becoming mutually heartbroken breathes new space for joy. Terrible, and wonderful.
On my way out of the bookstore I bumped against a shelf, knocking a book to the floor. Reaching down, I picked up The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. With delight, I carried it to the register, and then began reading it by the light of the moon on my walk home. Sadness, John Koenig reminds us, is from the Latin satis, conveying fullness. Etymologically, we can trace the kinship between being sad and being sated, experiencing satisfaction. “Not so long ago,” Koenig writes, “to be sad meant you were filled to the brim with some intensity of experience. It wasn’t just a malfunction in the joy machine. It was a state of awareness–setting the focus to infinity and taking it all in, joy and grief all at once..an exuberant upwelling that reminds you how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be.” Sadness is only possible, Koening insists, when “you care about something in this world enough to let it under your skin.” Wonderful, and terrible.
Not so very long before that, I sat down with Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods,” one of the poems that constitutes my ever-becoming scriptural canon. I return to it often, and every year on the 10th of September, which is Mary Oliver’s birthday, and also the birthday of two of the humans–Larry Sonner and my nibling Oliver–who teach me so much about joy efflorescing when we care for and carry each other through. “To live in this world,” the poem begins to conclude, “you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” I am much better at the first two things than the third. I do not know how to live in this world without letting it under my skin, and though it opens me to oceans of sadness, I do not want it otherwise. I do want, however, to become more skillful at letting go, which means surrendering to the fullness of life, which means getting my heart broken, which means trusting heart-full living, because “what is stronger than the human heart,” wonders poet rupi kuar, “which shatters over and over and still lives.” Terrible, and wonderful.
Not so long after that, I listened to a conversation with Andrea Gibson, another poet whose poems brim my canon of scripture. Gibson’s poetry has helped me–helped so many–carry our heartbreak and care for our sorrow. “To be human,” they write, “is to cry each other’s tears.” Only a few years older than I am, Gibson is responding to an incurable cancer recurrence by building a loving relationship with mortality. For many years, they have written honestly about suicidal ideation, and depression, and living without wanting to live, and living while wanting to die. Now, though, they are finding they want very much to live. Their hope is not about continuing to stay alive, but living with an open heart, telling the truth about loving what is mortal and preparing to let go, staying with sorrow and making it tea rather than turning from the heartbreak of it all. “Death itself is the seed that blooms a beautiful life,” they said. Blooming and dying, full of sadness and sated with grief, finding satisfaction in the not-promised possibility of “waking up tomorrow and feeling the feeling of having a wide-open heart.” Wonderful, and terrible.
The night of the last full moon, the moon that marks the threshold between summer and autumn, life’s blooming and shedding, I found myself alone in a graveyard, my wide-open heart holding sadness fuller than the moon. By the new moon, I found my way to the closest state park and pitched my tent under the absent presence of the same moon. Learning to hold what I cannot live without close to my bones, and learning to let it go. Honoring life’s rhythms of filling and emptying. Between the last full moon and now, I learned about suerza, one of the obscure sorrows Koenig describes, from the Spanish suerte, luck, and fuerza, strength. Suerza is the feeling of quiet amazement that we exist at all; a sense of gratitude that we somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds. Tomorrow night I intend to sit under the moon, full again, perhaps with a mug of lemon balm tea from the garden. Drenched with longing. Aware of how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be. Letting the world get under my skin, and learning to let go. Staying with heartbreak. And sorrow. And joy. And pain. And gratitude. And quiet amazement that I, and we, exist at all. Isn’t it all terrible? Isn’t it all wonderful, too?
Anna Blaedel (they/them) is co-director and co-founder at enfleshed, where they tend to the theopoetic intersections of spiritual, academic, and activist engagement. Anna chaplains University of Iowa students, and is a doctoral candidate in Theological and Philosophical Studies at Drew University’s Graduate Division on Religion. Waking before dawn, lingering in poetry, being an aunt, retreating to the woods or their basement woodshop, tending the garden, sharing silence, and feeding people delicious food are some of Anna’s favorite things.