We all revolve around the sun
It’s been a few months since I’ve written, not because I haven’t had anything to say, but rather because I’ve had too much to say. Does that ever happen to you? When there’s so much on the tip of your tongue that you can’t help but swallow it back down. It usually comes with the feeling of not wanting to add to the noise, the feeling that the effortful thing is to actually be quiet. Everything I’ve tried to write has come out like a homily and I neither want nor am qualified to sermonize.
Three years ago I sent out a letter, a birthday letter, the day I turned 25. I wrote about how much more frequently my thoughts turned to death, rather than birth. I wrote about how awkward it felt to deliberately turn the attention towards myself, for no other reason than having not died yet. I wrote about how birthdays belong to my mother. In some ways, this still resonates (happy birthday, Mom). [Also, side note: If you’re around this evening, Tuesday, August 11th, at 6p New York time (also my birth time), I'm teaching a yoga class on Zoom. You should come. It’s my birthday gift to you, but if you want to throw a few dollars my way, I’ll be donating it to the Equal Justice Initiative. They’re working to end mass incarceration and the death penalty in the United States.] But in some crucial ways, my thinking has changed. Three years later, I think about birth more (reading and editing this now, I should note here that I am not and have not been pregnant). I think about rebirth and resurrection almost constantly. I think about joy. I am surprisingly, insistently hopeful.
Today I turn 28. There is a pandemic going on. There is an election in three months that I am, true to form, quite cynical about. Nearly every single day I hear of another racist incident that pisses me off to no end. And even as I write this I find myself inexplicably sad, until I remember that I’ve been indoors for the better part of six months and that I’ve only been to the beach once all summer. Yet. There is hope. Not the kind to cling to, not the kind (to borrow a phrase from Lutheran pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber) that tries to blow sunshine up your ass, but the kind that we can sit with in communion. The kind of hope that allows us to wake up in the morning, to get out of bed—the hope that maybe we get to live another day. The kind of hope that allows us to bring children into this world. The kind of hope that is so normal and mundane that we forget how deeply radical it actually is. To love is a choice, and so is to live.
My 28th turn around the sun, in some ways, took a different path than I expected, but then again I still made it around the sun. I’ll celebrate that.
Love always,
Kara