Whew. It’s been, as is often the case, a heavy few weeks in the news. I’ve experienced the unsettling dissonance of reading about children killed in a hospital explosion in Gaza and then returning to work on my laptop at a sunlit kitchen table, dog at my feet. During the ordinary routines of my day I am also lamenting distant suffering.
Of course, it’s never just far-off suffering that we carry throughout our days. We’re all marked by personal and private sorrows of every shape and size. Some days these sadnesses seem small: pebbles at the bottom of a cerulean lake. Other days they are boulders sitting on our chests.
This week I remembered a passage I love from the poet Christian Wiman:
“Sorrow is so woven through us, so much a part of our souls, or at least any understanding of our souls that we are able to attain, that every experience is dyed with its color. This is why, even in moments of joy, part of that joy is the seams of ore that are our sorrow. They burn darkly and beautifully in the midst of joy, and they make joy the complete experience that it is. But they still burn.”
This acknowledgement that all of our experiences, even our joys, are dyed with the color of sadness, is a relief to me. It breaks down the childish binary between happy and sad, grateful and grieving. It reminds me of the brief poem “Separation” by W.S. Merwin:
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
Likewise, everything we do is stitched with some level of loss.
In the Orthodox Church, Lent—the forty days of fasting and repentance leading up to Christ’s resurrection on Easter morning—is known as the season of “bright sadness.” I love this term. Bright sadness, or bright sorrow, seems to me like an apt description of so much of our human experience.
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