Delight Springs

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Ziggy Stardust, meliorist

I'm looking past the sordid and depressing news this morning, to some of the deeper sources of life and light. Listened on our dogwalk to a terrific BBC documentary on the semicentennial of Ziggy Stardust, and read the best thing on page one--clinical psychologist Mary Pipher's essay on "finding light in darkness." 

She writes of the skills she's acquired for having good days in troubled times, and especially in summertime. Yes, there's skill involved in slowing down, setting aside pool and hammock time, acknowledging and appreciating the half-full glass, above all in realizing the value of attentiveness to one's own immediately present experience. "As Thich Nhat Hanh would say: 'Present moment. Beautiful moment.'" 

Pipher ends her essay with a rhetorical question that echoes Keat's negative capability: "Life is so terrible and beautiful at the same time. Do I have the capacity to hold it all in my heart?"

Not all at once, perhaps. Some moments just have to be allowed to occupy the entire stage, for the moment. We must gather enough fully-attended moments to strengthen our hearts for the fights of our lives. Life does feel like a fight, as James said in "Is Life Worth Living?

But it feels beautiful too. That's the feeling the Ziggy show leaves me with. We can't in any given moment fix what's wrong with the world, but we can attend and create and appreciate and enjoy. Fifty years from now, I'm betting, the names of the hard-hearted Supreme Court injustices will be forgotten. Ziggy Stardust will live.

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