You know it already; the vortex that is year’s end. It’s Christmas. It’s also the winter solstice on December 21-22. You maybe don’t know that December 22 is Gitā Jayanti, or the ‘birthday’ of the Bhagavad Gita, and that December 26 is Annapurna Jayanti, the ‘birthday’ of the Goddess of food and enlightenment, as food gives us the strength to face hard things.
I just know it’s the darkest time of the year.
At least it’s dark if you live in the northern hemisphere. On Thursday, we will have about 7 hours and 14 minutes of daylight here in Minneapolis. The exact amount of daylight changes, of course, depending on where you are on the planet. Barrow Alaska, located just a few hundred miles from the Arctic Polar Circle, goes two months with no sunlight at all. Rjukan, a village near Oslo in Norway, used to go six months without sunlight: not only are they close to the arctic latitudinally, the village is also deep in a mountain valley. They have, however, recently figured out something with heliostat mirrors.
The earth’s axis tilts some 23 degrees throughout the year, toward or away from the sun, giving us seasons. Meaning, I suppose, relativity and perspective.
When it is darkest for us, some one somewhere else is enjoying themselves.
The physical and emotional difficulty of winter, and sunlight standing in for exitential concepts of rebirth, wisdom and hope, are universal and timeless. The holy days, regardless of religion, are direct outcomes of human misery. They are wild expressions of human spirit. The urge to commemorate the passage of time, gathering with friends after a year of ordinary life, mourning, decadence in the face of scarcity, the setting of priorities…it all means something. It has a pang to it.
I have always been indifferent to the holidays. I feel them more as a pang than as a party. This is probably because I rejected Christianity as a kid, and clearly have some spiritual baggage there, but also because I know relativity full well. We may be celebrating nativity scenes, but Bethlehem itself is under siege. The city of Minneapolis continues to bulldoze encampments of the unhoused, where the homeless population rushes national averages and seems to bubble according to wider economic realities. This time of year is wracked with grief for so many people. It’s complicated by financial pressure. And family issues, well. It isn’t easy to go home to the people who screwed you up in the first place. You tend to regress. Resentments are stirred up like embers in a cold fire. For folks like me who have come home, who have reclaimed and re-found family, the bittersweet sense of being prodigal lingers. There are nuances of forgiving and being forgiven. They still hurt.
I always loved Christmas in New York. Mostly because so many of my friends were Jews. I loved the fact that we could eat Chinese food rather than fuss with some kind of turkey. I rarely came home to Minnesota. But I know that what I vaunted as urbanity and chic was a cover for shame. Some wiff of that loneliness and humiliation comes back with holiday smells and nostalgia. Spruce and sorrow, fa la la la la.
I referred to my indifference the other day as spiritual immaturity. I was, of course, talking to students, a role in which it feels okay to use my shortcomings as an example without, hopefully, being sanctimonious. I talked of knowing this about myself and trying really hard to grow up. I can recognize - I mean I can feel - the humane truth under the tinsel and tacky songs. It pangs real chords in me.
G loves Christmas, as does my family; it feels like careful, tender love to not shit on their parade.
I suspect it’s also a poignant opportunity to heal.
It’s so very affective I want to say it’s auspicious, if I can do that without bringing up irritating things like karma and astrology. Something profound might happen if you open your heart.
G and I bundle up - me happy for the auspicious excuse to wear my mink coat - and we wander through Christmas markets. I sip hot cider and he drinks mulled German wine out of a boot shaped mug. We finger crafts: felt and colored glass, wool and straw, wooden toys and beeswax candles. We eat aebleskivers while warming our hands over a bonfire.
Rubbing my hands over the fire, I suggested we go to our favorite Italian market to buy pasta and sauce for dinner, mostly because they make a sipping chocolate over the holidays and I know G loves it.
We will go to the theatre to see Dickens, and I stream Tchaikovsky’s ballet. I bought him a model train. I broke down and bought the nieces gift cards this year. They’re teenagers: I don’t have a clue what they like. I am sure anything I’d choose for them would be received with a frigid “thank you, Auntie.” Just this week I finished my teaching responsibilities for the year, and when I pick G up from work the University campus is quiet.
This is how it truly begins; the moment everything else stops.
Because of the axial tilt, it’s still dark when I do my practice in the morning. I start with socks on because it’s too cold to be barefoot. It’s too cold to be barefoot until my body temperature has gone up. I think I also warm the room a bit with my body heat. It’s a small room.
Just this morning, standing on one leg, I came to understand a part of the Bhagavad Gitā I’d never been able to understand before. It’s in the conversation about re-incarnation. The text says that those who die during the half of the year before the winter solstice will come back, but those who die during the other half of the year don’t, as they have completed their purpose here in life. It seems to me this passage doesn’t mean actual calendar days; it’s a question of the tilt of your soul. Not literal, in other words. My teachers tell me none of it is literal. None of it is literal but it is all deadly serious.
Someone asked, recently, when I would next teach the Bhagavad Gitā. “Not in any foreseeable future,” I said. I used to teach it. Rather: I have taught it in full and in detail twice in my career. Three times, if I count a little afternoon workshop I offered years and years ago that I’m frankly embarrassed to think about now. I drop little references all the time: “be Brave, Arjuna!” or “It is better to do your own work poorly than to do someone else’s well;” or “Yoga is Skill in Action”.
I don’t feel qualified to teach it any longer. I’ve come to realize how serious it is. There are people who spend their entire lives teaching the Gita. The thing is, after all, chanted in Sanskrit. If I can’t chant it, and only know an amateur Sanskrit, why on earth would I claim an ability to teach it? I’ve come to agree with the traditional “unless you’ve been taught by someone who’s been taught by someone,” understanding of teaching qualifications.
More important than who’s your daddy or what’s your authority, I recognize that I’m not spiritually mature enough to understand the Gitā. Let alone transmit it to other people. I mean I understand the principles. I can recite the basic plot line. I am not suggesting that yoga teachers or literature teachers or poetically inclined folks of any kind avoid the Gitā: contemplating the difficult is worth something. But there is a difference between recitation and authority of a text.
Besides, the Gitā is one of those sacred books that has been used as an apologia for genocide, casteism, and Hindu nationalism. It has been celebrated by both Nazis and Gandhi, after all. Henry David Thoreau adored it, but so do a lot of fascists. How am I supposed to teach that?
Sure, all spiritual teachings have the potential to be misused. But I am confused by the fine line between taking hard things too seriously and not taking them seriously enough. I think - and I am still working this out, be patient - we simply do not understand the right use of seriousness.
Conflating consumerism and fairytales for actual human spirit is an example of taking things too literally: seriousness becomes rank cynicism and is cruel. But forgetting that Bethlehem is currently under rubble and there are children down there is simply not literal enough.
There is poetic logic connecting the darkest night to the arrival of spiritual teachings. Because darkness and vulnerability and soul is exhausting, and we’d be prone to think ourselves ascetic and serious and wise, the goddess shows up right then and tells us to eat. Eat up and be charitable, she says.
It makes sense if you believe in the tender and careful work of love.
The spiritual writer Anne Lamott wrote a lovely opinion piece for the Washington Post this week. The sum of it is: the true wisdom of age is humility. The trick of it is (this is me, not her): humility doesn’t mean rolling over. Humility is the best and truest place from which to live. Eat up. Be charitable.
But let me tell it crookedly.
Not only is Annapurna (Anna food + purna abundance, plenty, surfeit) the name of a divine force in the world, it’s also the name of a mountain in Nepal.
Annapurna is the tenth tallest mountain in the world. Her highest summit reaches over 8,000 meters (26,247 feet) above sea level. She also has thirteen peaks over 7,000 meters (22,966 feet) and sixteen more over 6000 meters (19,685).
The massif of the range is 34 miles long, bounded by the Kali Gandaki Gorge, the Marshyangdi River, and the Pokhara Valley. Annapurna is separated from her sister massif Dhaulagiri, the seventh tallest mountain in the world, by the Gandaki River, which way down there below has carved one of the deepest river gorges in the world. Fed by mountain rivers and streams, the plains below are some of the most fertile in the world.
The entire range has limestone at its top ridges, meaning her top was originally the sea bed of a warm ocean.
Rock climbers endearingly call Annapurna the the most dangerous mountain in the world. She may not be as high as some others, but she is statistically more lethal. Annapurna I Main – a 3,000 meter (9,800 feet) wall of sheer rock – is known as one of the most difficult climbs in the world. When I see numbers that big I always have to look at something small, like my shin or a pen, to understand. Understanding is never semantic; understanding is awe. Understanding is feeling. It may be a suck in your belly, a breath tightening, or a hollowness at the front of your face, like a sneeze or tears. There have been 365 Annapurna summit ascents, if you can believe it. This is fewer than any of the other world famous and mountaineer coveted ‘8,000ers’. The climb has a fatality rate of 32 percent. Your odds are better playing Russian roulette.
In June of 1950, Frenchmen Maurice André Raymond Herzog and Louis Larchenal were the first to crest Annapurna. This was the first time any of the world’s 14 “8000ers” had been crested. They managed it on the first try, and without bottled oxygen. Bottled oxygen is apparently standard when you get that high. I wouldn’t know. Herzog and Lachenal first tried Annapurna’s northwest face but found it too rugged. They switched to the avelanche-prone north face. Herzog and Larchenal went the final distance alone, wearing only thin leather boots, while the rest of the expedition watched from below. The expedition’s doctor had to amputate all twenty of Herzog and Larchenal’s toes on the way down. Extreme frostbite, followed by gangrene, had set in. Herzog lost all of his fingers as well.
They were still on their way up, so I don’t know if it’s a fair question, but Lachenal asked Herzog: “do you think it is worth it?” Since they continued, Herzog must have thought that it was.
In the mythology of Annapurna, she is one of the infinite manifestations or avatars of Parvati, the mother goddess, reality. Parvati is, for those of you who don’t know yet, the wife of Śiva, pure consciousness. They lived up in the Himalayas, and to pass the long winter nights they would play dice. One night things got particularly spicy, and Śiva started to bet. And then Śiva started to lose. He first lost his trident (his discernment). Then he lost his snake necklace (his serenity). Eventually he lost everything, even the human skull he used as a begging bowl (his humility and sustenance). Śiva, in a self-loathing rage, went to visit his wise and compassionate friend Viṣṇu. Viṣṇu told him to go back and play again. Viṣṇu promised he would win everything back. As I have heard the story, Śiva had his doubts. But he did what he was told.
And he did: he won everything back. Amazed, Śiva asked Visnu what was up. Viṣṇu confessed that he tilted the dice. Śiva beamed, and asked Pavarti to put her jewels on the table. He said something about her power being an illusion.
Obviously, Pavarti was pissed. She took her jewels and she left. What that means, is, she took all the food and sustenance and nourishment from the world. She took the blues and the greens. She took the sap and the sugar and the salt. People began to die. Forests died. Rivers dried up and plains were wasted and the sea got more and more salty. The divine leeched from the world.
It was her own compassion that brought her around. She went to Varanasi and started distributing food. “Here,” she said, dripping rain from her fingers. “Take,” she said, laying down in the fields. “Eat,” she said, holding a sweet thing to an old man. Śiva realized his arrogant mistake, and he took his begging bowl. He went to her in Varanasi. Then follows a lecture from reality/Pavarti to the soul/Śiva: do not gamble with material life. You’ll lose. And even if your dice tilt, and you realize spiritual truths, you cannot then neglect the world.
I had a dream about this, once. Annapurna was standing, her feet wide, and her voice low and trembly. She pointed to the trident: “that’s mine,” she said, and then pointed at the snake, who licked her ankle. “This is mine too.” she said. And then she knocked her knuckles against the bone of Śiva’s charity bowl. And then she walked away. She just left.
“The game of life is hard,” said Lamott, “and a lot of us are playing hurt.” I think that this is true. But it isn’t really the question.
The question is whether we are willing; whether we think it is worth it.
I think that it is. I think it’s important that we go back and try, even if we’ve been hurt and or feel a little chastened. It is scary to do the heartbreaking, careful work of love in this life, but don’t worry; the axis is tilting. You will win.
But don’t, darling, get haughty and confused. Don’t lose your discernment, your serenity, your boney begging bowl. Remember to eat. Remember the world. Remember that you don’t actually win unless everybody wins with you. In fact you might lose a toe. Still worth it.
I think of Chef Jose Andres, who is able to get a working kitchen on the ground in war zones and disaster areas faster than FEMA. “Here in Gaza,” he recently said, “it’s heartbreaking to realize that beneath this beautiful sky is so much pain and suffering. Loss of life, hungry children, families displaced and torn apart. No light. No water. No medicine…a ceasefire needs to be reached and aid must reach those who need it urgently…innocent civilians must always be protected even in war. No more war, no more terror. Longer tables!”
And I think of Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”, which she read at Biden’s Inauguration:
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true.
That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.
Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.
If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.
Wherever you are, and whatever you do, I hope you find the magic of the next few weeks.
xo,
K