Hope
I am experiencing despair and joy entwined. I'm getting married in a little over a month (surprise). Because my partner and I have many people we love, in many places, we're celebrating with a train of events that begins in late June and ends early next year with stops in California, New York (details to come!), and India.
I thought it wouldn't matter. I had thought getting engaged wouldn't matter. It turns out it does, for no reason I can pinpoint. We sink deeper into each other and to this home we are building together, this relationship we want to last a lifetime (for one of us at least).
The last bars of with-holding fell somewhere along the way. In the first episode of Mrs. Maisel, Amy Sherman Palladino's follow up to Gilmore Girls, she sneaks away to the bathroom in the early morning so her husband will never see her without a full face of make-up.
What horror Midge would feel in my babbling song about flossing and the grotesquerie of teeth. It was not a cute moment performed to my partner. It was a quirk indulged only for myself to which he happened to be present. My mind no longer spends energy crafting the shape of my existence for him. I simply trust that whatever shape I make will nestle next to his.
And so it has been a time of joy with a real quality of surprise to it. I keep awakening to the sweetness of reality around me.
And also. And also.
I keep awakening to horror.
Tara Brach, the meditation teacher has a phrase she uses as a mantra in her practice. And this too. And this too.
When I can remember it is, which is not always, it offers me a light to carry, though it does not take me out of darkness. I aspire to the wholeness of the phrase. And this too. To be the (and Ilona, I feel I have taken this phrase from you somehow) the both and.
I was listening to Krista Tippett while doing the dishes and she was talking about a question that she asks her interviewees.
What is making you despair, and what is giving you hope?
She then talks about the kind of hope she means. In her words, not optimism, but a "muscular hope" that looks at the world as it really is.
This is not a blogpost of what that kind of hope looks like, for me. I wish it was. I don't know. But this is where I am, standing here in 2025 and holding my and this too. To be exquisitely happy and filled with horror.