“We are changing all the time. You become what you love.
You’re always asked to sort of stretch a little bit more. But actually, we’re made for that.
There’s a song that wants to sing itself through us. And we’ve just got to be available. Maybe the song that is to be sung through us is a most beautiful requiem for an irreplaceable planet, or maybe it’s a song of joyous rebirth as we create a new culture that doesn’t destroy its world. But in any case there’s absolutely no excuse for our making our passionate love for our world dependent on what we think of its degree of health. Whether we think it’s going to go on forever. Those are just thoughts anyway.
But this moment we’re alive. So you can just dial up the magic anytime.”
– Joanna Macy in an interview with Krista Tippett (On Being)
I heard today on the radio that Teva Harrison died this past weekend. If you don’t know her work, you can read this piece by Teva in The Walrus, which includes her artwork, on finding four-leaf clovers. Teva was 42 years old when she died. She was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer at the age of 37. In the years in between, she became known for her work documenting her life with cancer, in text and illustrations / cartoons. Here’s another example from The Walrus. She also published a book called In-Between Days, which combines text and illustration into a unique form of non-fiction (reviewed here in The New York Times).
I don’t want Teva to be gone from the world.
I’m thinking of my stepmother, Marg, too, whose photograph sits just above the upper lefthand side of my computer screen. I can look at there anytime and she smiles back. And although she’s been gone almost exactly one year, each time I look at her photo, I experience a fresh, breathtaking disbelief that lasts for no more than a nanosecond — when I don’t believe she’s gone at all. How could she be, when she seems so alive and smiling at me, as if about to speak?
“Rilke invites us to experience what mortality makes possible. Mortality links us with life and all time. Ours is the suffering and ours is the harvest.
– from In Praise of Mortality: Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
Sometimes I think that art is a tiny sacred task that involves carrying fragments of material toward the light. We can’t carry too much at one time. Eternity is too vast for us to understand, but our mortality gives us a window, an entrance. So we pick up a grain of sand and swim with it toward the surface we imagine far above us. This is art. We don’t need to be great to do this work. We don’t need to be visionary. We don’t need to be anything but ourselves.
“This great secret of death, and perhaps its deepest connection with us, is this: in taking from us a being we have love and venerated, death does not wound us, without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves.” – Joanna Macy reading from her translation of Rilke
This moment, we are alive. You are alive and reading these words, as I am alive, writing these words. What song wants to sing itself through us? The task sounds so easy, so joyous — doesn’t it? We just have to make ourselves available. Offhand, here are a few ways I personally dial up the magic: go for a run; talk with a friend; share an experience and share some experience; pet a puppy; meditate; read that book; cry; draw; stretch; be outside; write a story; sit for awhile and think, and breathe.
Hold, love, release. Repeat.
xo, Carrie