Today is the first Sunday of Advent, that season of liturgical Christianity focused on preparation and waiting. It's been my favorite season of the Christian calendar for some time, and for the past two years I've marked it by starting a new volume of this newsletter. If you've been with me from the beginning of this endeavor, I'm grateful for your continued companionship along the way. If you're a new reader, I welcome you and hope you find inspiration and resources for your journey. So here begins the third year of The Human Fire.
The world feels full at the present moment: full of grief and desire, full of death gasps and birth pangs, as if we are in a great transition. But to what? That remains unknown.
It is almost as if the world needs an Advent, a time for all of us to prepare and heal and wait in quiet longing for some new spark of life to be born in us. At least, that's how I feel right now, and what I will be doing this season. I hope you'll join me in your own way.
Oxygen
The British pop sensation Adele possesses one of the most defining voices of this century. (If you don't believe me, just listen and you'll find that's you crying, not me crying...) Her soulful vocals have reached deep into the hearts of millions. And right now I'm listening to her post-divorce, how-do-I-explain-myself-to-my-son, ballad, "Easy On Me." The bittersweet but hopeful lyrics touch on loss and possibility:
I was still a child
Didn't get the chance to
Feel the world around me
I had no time to choose what I chose to do
Asking her son to "go easy on me," her plea is far from an abdication of responsibility but rather a confirmation of it - that she didn't know what she was choosing but now does. As she sings, "There ain't no room for our things to change/When we are both so deeply stuck in our ways." Change begins with one of us, so go easy on yourself and those around you. Take a listen here, and grab the tissues. (You'll feel better, I promise.)
We took to the beach in the days after the election and a death in the family. It was deeply grounding, feeling the cool sand in our toes and the pull of the tide going out in rhythm. The beach was both solid, and shifting.
It confirmed a truth I learned years ago in very different context: the ground that is unstable is also the ground that is stable.
Fuel
When I was a kid, I got the label of being "sensitive," usually accompanied by the modifier "too" in front. While I now understand sensitivity as something to be welcomed, I and others who've gotten that label have often struggled, as a result, to truly express and understand our feelings. Remarking on our sensitivity had the paradoxical effect of teaching us to stuff our feelings.
Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, had a similar experience. The question "how are you feeling?" was, for him, both one never asked by his emotionally-adolescent parents, and one he had no idea how to answer. It was like a trap, until his uncle - a teacher who was, shall we say, sensitively attuned to his students - began to teach him about emotions.
Brackett recounts this story in his book Permission to Feel. In it, he outlines a framework called RULER, which stands for recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions. He's on a mission to teach this kind of emotional intelligence to even the most Spock-like among us, in the belief that working with our feelings is a skill we can all learn.
Could this skill be key to our evolution as a species? Brackett believes so. The anger that so consumes our public discourse might, if we had to capacity to recognize it, be better understood as loss, grief, denial, despair, longing, loneliness, and more. Think of what might happen if all that were the subject of our conversations.
Recently, I drove through smoke so thick it was reminiscent of a blizzard, barely able to see a few feet in front of you. The last time I'd seen smoke like this was on the final flight out of San Francisco in October 2017, when raging wildfires in the Bay area mountains forced the airport to shut down. But I wasn't in California this time. I was fifteen minutes down the highway from my home, surrounded by fumes coming from a nearby state forest.
Massachusetts has been in an extended, significant drought, and all those leaves that sat pretty on their trees through October became dry and ready to burn. This is unusual for us, and to be honest I'm tired of the unusual. It's becoming far too usual for my taste. I can't even use the Solo Stove we bought last year for chilly fall and winter nights on the terrace, as open flames are banned because of the risk they pose.
Welcome to the unusual world we've created, full of change and adaptation. Driving through smoke feels like a proper metaphor for living in these times.
A month ago, I marked the anniversary of my mother's passing. Long-time readers may recall that this newsletter started two years ago as an invitation to join me as I waited for her to die from Alzheimer's, a journey that lasted a full year. With that anniversary, noting the passage of grief, and the tumultuous U.S. election making everyone - winners and losers - depressed, I've had to tend to my own fire.
But fire has a way of clarifying things, of clearing out the accumulated debris we don't need. It's done that for me at least, and I'm hopeful that whatever brokenness you are also experiencing now, it will lead to your own healing in time.
Heat
Henri Nouwen, a priest and Christian spiritual writer, says in his book The Wounded Healer that “experience tells us that we can only love because we are born out of love, that we can only give because our life is a gift, and that we can only make others free because we are set free by One whose heart is greater than ours." He goes further, "When we have found the anchor places for our lives in our own center, we can be free to let others enter into the space created for them and allow them to dance their own dance, sing their own song and speak their own language without fear.”
What are your anchor places right now? Where do you feel the most free, able to stand on the ground that is both stable and unstable?
Whether you celebrate Advent or not, I hope you'll take the opportunity to use these next few weeks between the holidays as a time of preparation. What is it that you wait for? What do you expect? How do those longings shape how you feel and how you plan?
May these days of waiting be filled with hope for you.
Until next week, I'll see you down the path.
Chad