Not Well, But in Touch

By Anna Blaedel

For the last few years, I have kept my Christmas tree lights in a red Panettone tin, gifted by dear friends at the height of the pandemic. There’s a love note still taped to the top, wishing health and happiness in the coming holidays, and year. Neither friend celebrates Christmas–one Jewish, one Muslim–but hoping for health and happiness, and the celebratory sharing of tasty treats has never been confined to any single tradition or religion.

This year, for the first time, my Christmas tree remains undecorated, but for the lights pulled from my Panettone tin. I didn’t intend to keep my tree undecorated this year, but the bare fir branches have felt resonant, right. Ashon Crawley’s words, too, resonate: “Happy holidays to all that celebrate. And remember: to sing about Bethlehem while Palestinians are being brutalized by US tax dollars is to dishonor the life and journey of Jesus. Free Palestine. Always.”

My decorating has been minimal this year: the colored lights I strung on my porch in 2023 brought me enough joy that I never took them down, and I hung a fresh wreath outside my front door. “There’s so much angst and despair radiating all around us,” writes Kelly Hayes. “But if something’s giving you warmth or strength (even just a bit), be sure to uplift that as well. Help others remember that kindness, solidarity, and care are still at work in the world.”

Also decorating my house, I suppose, is the bird poop under the wreath. Within days of placing it on my porch, a brown thrasher was building a nest. I do not love the growing pile of bird poop at the entryway to my home, but I do love the tender intimacy of any and every way we can be part of sheltering each other, these days. I do not know for sure if this is the same bird who built nest after nest in last year’s wreath, throughout winter and spring and into the summer, but I do know this bird found this spot much faster this year.

Every morning I water the tree, and sit next to it reading poetry as light comes into the sky. I’ve been rereading a lot of Nikki Giovanni’s poems, in honor of her life, and recent death. I first found her poetry during Mrs. Campbell’s American Literature class in 11th grade. That class may have saved my life, and certainly sparked my love for poetry, and writing. During that class we each picked a poet, and spent the winter and spring immersing ourselves in their poetry. I fell in love with Nikki Giovanni and her poetry, and still think her love poem to snowflakes is one of the most beautiful ever written:

“once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much and i kissed
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me then
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flower.”

“I hope I die warmed by the life that I tried to live,” Nikki Giovanni wrote. In March of this year, only a few months before her death, she refused to speak at a long scheduled event, an act of Palestinian solidarity.

I set one intention last New Year’s Eve: Live well. In connection. In what matters to our tender collective. With pleasure. And adventure.

So much is so deeply unwell in our world, in our collective life. Bayo Akomolafe writes, “The alternative to being ‘well’ is to be in touch.”

Nikki Giovanni lived and wrote in touch with love, and Blackness, and solidarity, and the miraculousness of this world, and the brutality within it, too.

“i don’t think
i’m allowed
to kill something
because i am
frightened.”

During these holidays and holy days, in the remaining days of 2024, and throughout the days of 2025, my intention, my hope, my prayer, my commitment to practice: may I, may we, live in touch. With each other, and with the sacred lifeforce thrumming through all of life. With tender intimacy. With beauty. With the kindness, solidarity, and care still at work in the world.