Sunday Collection - sorrow and joy

Remember the old rhyme to recite when you see a magpie?

One for sorrow
Two for joy

There seems to have been a lot of both around this week in what people have been writing.

It’s entirely appropriate to start with Magpie Girl, who writes honestly about searing loss in Dia de Los Muertos, without losing sight of life.

Often joy and sorrow are inseparable from each other.

Christine explores the beauty of broken things, giving us a photograph of a spiral shell, with the observation that of all the chipped spirals she has found, the strength of the spiral is such that they are rarely cracked all the way through.

This immediately made me think of another post I had read: at LadyVivienne, in which she describes the grace and joy of the Wiccan spiral dance in Surrounded and Supported. She shares with us the words chanted during the dance:

Let it begin with each step we take.
Let it begin with each change we make.
Let it begin with each chain we break.
Let it begin everytime we awake.

Milton has written recently about the sorrow he and Ginger are going through in pulling up their roots to move away from their home. In his post Playgrounds and pain, he writes compellingly about learning from children how resistance leads to pain. He describes the amazing risks children take on playground equipment, and quotes the wisdom of his friend:

The little girl fell without fear; she didn’t brace herself as though the ground would hurt, she just let go and landed. “We get injured when we brace ourselves in fear,” Cherry continued. “We have to learn to trust the joy.”

“Learn to trust the joy.” If there was ever a need for an eleventh commandment…

And talking of joy (what a great word - so much more to it than “happiness”), we must of course look at Take Joy itself, where Anita shares the otherworldly view of the hickory tree outside her window in O Glorious Autumn.

And joy, too at Let It Shine, where Anne’s post The Joy of Living picks up on the practicality of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s Buddhist teaching:

It’s about doing things that foster serenity, happiness, and confidence, and avoiding things that provoke anxiety, hopelessness and fear.

Towanda writes in These Hands are Holy of the aftermath of her recent experience of arrest during a peaceful Columbus Day protest. She talks of the continuing pain and numbness in her hands (from being handcuffed too tight):

The pain reminds me of how many have suffered from columbus’ legacy. If this is the price I have to pay to say “yes” to life and love and human decency and dignity and justice, and “no to empire and hatred and death and violence, then so be it.

Our sorrows and joys are often complicated things, so in keeping with the season and with the simplicity of the natural world, here is a beautiful poem by Wendell Berry:

The wind of the fall is here.
It is everywhere. It moves
every leaf of every
tree. It is the only motion
of the river. Green leaves
grow weary of their color.
Now evening too is in the air.
The bright hawks of the day
subside. The owls waken.
Small creatures die because
larger creatures are hungry.
How superior to this
human confusion of greed
and creed, blood and fire.

Have a blessed week everyone, in your sorrows and in your joys.