what do you call the world?

Always had a tradition of spending New Year’s Day nagging Doug in long, long letters to use his outsized brain to fix the world, or taking twenty-mile walks on the beach, or writing my heart out to Jon about Emily Dickinson being enlightened, or lying splayed in the ferns, looking up through the branches of the ancients. Had me a solitary observance while everyone was quietly holding their heads in their houses, resolving not to ever take part in Amateur Night again, rummaging through the garbage can for their half-full packs of only momentarily-abandoned cigarettes. It gave me a little smirk of pleasure to think of the retribution they were paying for splitting my nervous system with their obnoxious and pointless hallooing the night before.

I’m appalled to report they did it again last night. The dying in the Middle East is so extreme, I just can’t fathom merriment here. I feel guilt wishing anyone a happy anything, as if to wish them happiness under these conditions would be insulting them. Yet it seems I erred. It seems they held their annual hooting match and I am a grinch in her cave, letting my memory land on the moments with people I love like my lungs and bones and eyes.

I remember a telephone conversation with my teacher. He’d made the grievous mistake of asking me how I was. I always tell. I was about out of breath with my intricate accounting of the prevailing awfultude, and it was horrific, when he blithely stated, “Pfeh, relax, it’s a beautiful world.” ***Alert! Alert! Out of character! Alert! Alert!*** Just in the very moment my bewilderment was to arise, lumping up, about to break out of nothingness and onto my face and throat, it was bashed wide open with realization.

No matter what. No matter how ugly they are. No matter how horrific the suffering and violence and death and pitiless greed...

It is a beautiful world.

This is not to say I can wish anybody a happy anything. The horror is a tsunami, crashing around the globe. It must be stopped, and it has only increased, but if you forget what is so, the tsunami will splat you on the rocks and drown you useless dead. It is well to remember. It is well to consider that the part that kills is the part where you are trying to hold it down, where you think your head will explode. Remember what diamonds do with light. They do not explode. They do not think to hold it down. They do not think to nurse it. Look what happens when diamonds are in the light.

Consider, Olympians, that the problem has never been that you feel it too much, but that you have been holding it down, and keeping it up. It really hurts much more than this, and you can completely deal with it, because it truly is a beautiful world.