The older I get the more that the word
Bittersweet
strikes me as an apt word to describe the act of living. At first I was going to add the words, “in today’s world” to the previous sentence but as I think about it there have been challenging times throughout history. Though the times we are living in now seem much more challenging than when we were younger, there have been other times here and around the world of difficulty and challenge.
The bittersweet is… an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world. Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know — or will know — loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.
— Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Longing and Sorrow Make Us Whole
I still vividly remember the days when we were reeling from our 4-year-old daughter’s chronic hepatitis diagnosis. The grief I felt was often overwhelming as I watched her paleness, listened to her hiccups which always signaled another flare-up, and wondered whether she would survive the illness. At the same time there were so many transcendent moments of joy spending my days with her, listening to her giggles and watching her eyes widen with wonder. I felt so damn grateful for every single moment with her. And the only word I could use to describe that time of my life was bittersweet.
While I wish had been more graceful in navigating that time in my life I don’t wish that it hadn’t happened. Everything that has happened to me in my life has made me the person I am now.
We have choices in how we respond to this bittersweet life.
Everyone experiences the bitterness of loss and pain. But if we turn toward the beauty of life and turn towards one another we can find the sweetness to counteract the bitter. Sometimes we get overwhelmed and lost in our pain. That’s when loved ones and friends are so important, to hold us in a circle of love until we can find our way to see and experience the sweetness once more.
Leonard Cohen’s song, Hallelujah is one of my favorite songs. I think it speaks to this bittersweet life we live.
I come back, always, to the metaphoric response of the Kabbalah—the mystical branch of Judaism that inspired Leonard Cohen’s broken “Hallelujah.” That, in the beginning, all of creation was a vessel filled with divine light. That it broke apart, and now the shards of holiness are strewn all around us. Sometimes it’s too dark to see them, sometimes we’re too distracted by pain or conflict. But our task is simple—to bend down, dig them out, pick them up. And in so doing, to perceive that light can emerge from darkness, death gives way to rebirth, the soul descends to this riven world for the sake of learning how to ascend. And to realize that we all notice different shards; I might see a lump of coal, but you spot the gold glimmering beneath.
― Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole
Let yourself taste both the bitter and the sweet in your life.
Seek out the shards of holiness, savor the shining darkness, and then create something that weaves the bitterness and the sweetness into a tapestry that expresses your truth.
May you walk in beauty.
Note: I made many many photographs at Noerenberg Gardens Sunday morning. What joy! Here a few of them.
Transience
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