May Day Renewal
RE-POSTING LAST YEAR’S MAY DAY POST with two updates at the end:
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May Day is the day the Celts celebrated renewal with sacred coupling. It was an acknowledgement that the near-death and starvations of winter were behind them.
It is bizarre, at last after a decade of suffering, to be so contented in the midst of so much horror. Others may be experiencing a pandemic, but I am oddly in paradise — in comfort and plenty with beloved children, my extended family safe in careful quarantine. None of us troubled by money woes, each of us able to be generous in our worlds.
We Americans are on a path we do not recognize. It may end in suffocating illness, it may end in machine gun fire. It may end in the strange, untrustworthy renewal of a Biden presidency. It may end in a new home in Canada. But many of us are, like me, watching from a privileged lens removed, from the comfort of plenty.
Ten years ago almost to the day, I left a beloved husband and a troubled marriage. I naively believed that, like every other challenge of my life, I would rise to the occasion. No matter how impossible the task, or how long the journey, success had always been in endless supply.
Instead, I failed at everything set before me for years on end — most especially I failed my children. In this journey of failure I lost my health, my fortune, and nearly all my friends. With very few exceptions people whom I thought were ride-or-die forever companions had no need for a suffering human. They were used to a bright, chirpy blondie who endlessly sparked contracts of fun work and large parties. An actual living, wracked-with-pain creature making inexplicable choices was too much for them. At this stage I was preyed upon by vultures.
The only thing I had left was my house and my children. We adopted a dog fighting rescue who was, like us, entirely PTSD. He did not require much love. We didn’t have any extra to give. We could give him a plate of food twice a day and a safe place to sleep. It was all we had; it was all any of us needed. And, handhold by handhold, through the grace of God, healing came.
We got groceries from Catholic Charities. We often went without electricity, and, sometimes, without running water. Our clothes, when we could afford them, came from the thrift store. Our yard was overgrown, our cars were clunkers, our neighbors hated us for our downward mobility.
But, one foot in front of the other, we survived.
And now, a decade later, we thrive.
Even our wounded rescue pup knows to expect love, these days. Perhaps we do, too. I’m still unsure.
I am running two vigorous businesses, counting productivity in dozens hired and multi-millions raised. The boys are doing well in school. My house is neat as a pin and lovely in all respects. We have done this on our own with help from no other living creature in the universe.
While the nation reels in Coronavirus, I can give away over half my income to help those in need.
The gift of our long sojourn of failure and near-death and abandonment and pennilessness was this: if my life and work does not serve a higher purpose — and no, I don’t mean the non-profit industrial complex bullshit vision of “giving back” that is a salve to many of our middle class consciences — if it doesn’t serve a truly higher purpose of lifting others up every single day, in every single interaction, then I have not learned the lesson of those dark years, then I am still living in darkness and penury and ego.
As Naomi Shahib says:
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
This May Day I acknowledge my re-birth; I give thanks where it is due — to the endless, relentless CRUEL call to life of the universe.
Pricked by life’s insistence on re-birth, I say to you — the unknowable future is upon us, my friends. We have much to do. Let’s get busy.
UPDATES:
(1) this above perspective lead me to build a large company that paid folks working from home quite well during Coronavirus. I knew what it was to work twelve hours just to make $100. It was a great ride, even though we are just winding down now as our nation starts to emerge from the pandemic;
(2) our dog-fighting rescue ended up being too feral — he tried to kill other dogs too many times and didn’t work out. It is impossible to imagine our grief and amazement that a creature we loved into civilization and knew for four years as loving, dear and educable was also a killer. There is a lesson for me here in aspects of my own feral nature and who I choose to love and my capacity for recognizing/tolerating danger, but I am too distraught to learn them at the moment.
