Typically, Good Friday is for me a day of languishing. It’s a day where the whole ceaseless striving pain of the universe criss-crosses through the worn flesh of a human person bleeding in our memories. Christ’s passion, compassion. It is an inglorious liberation, the orthodoxy finally releasing the mystic into union with God, as Joseph Campbell would put it. The moth leaps into the candle flame. “My Father and I are one.” This year it is not.

This year, it feels to me more like a Greek Orthodox Easter. The world is quieted, hushed from its haste. Golden flower graces burst above green mercy in their easily overlooked yet not necessarily noticed splendor. We are in a global moment of one-pointedness, our anxieties as society are converging. Fortunately, it is not a pandemic of great devastation; more so a sliding a little bit downhill traversing along the scree. We are not lost here in this tumult, which is mostly produced by a media scrounging to upkeep its capital by maintaining your obsessions. Most of this hubbub is not necessary to panic over. Life goes on, the rains come, the fragrant flowers rise though they will fall. Look outside: the birds are warbling, going from place to place with ease. Inordinarily, I have seen western blue birds, red-shouldered hawks, greater varieties of hummingbirds, the ducks are happier, more relaxed. The sky is cleaner. It is an intimate planet.

I am happy today, for the world is calmer than it was a year ago, both the world at large and my world. A year ago, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday marked the opening of a door to a new world in my life beaming, glittering with hope, however subtle. I made new close friends overnight, I took a philosophy class for once and loved it, I went to therapy and she (my therapist) helped me see the periphery, I went to Colorado and journeyed away from Californian idealism. From the deep space of my longterm isolation within, I have entered a greater space without. The ripe pain of sequestration and uncertainty will crumble away, I assure you. Even as a lettuce plant will bolt up in apparent strength as it bitters and soon dies, the restless tide of our cultural obsessions cannot last much longer. And what we fear is not our fate. Our greatest fear is not death but that we might be given the gift we dream of, which is the access to what is right before us. What a funny thing we mistake the miracle of our hopes being realizable for a terror. For instance, we can actually do a lot, and are doing a lot, to effectively mitigate COVID; for thousands of years, most governments would have just let us all die. The world will not end; the world that seems to be ours will end, and it will lead to far happier changes than we expect. Hope is possible, realizable, actual. There can be good things that happen in this world and we need not reject them out of an absence of a fight-or-flight that we think is necessary for survival. The predator-prey relations are devolving, the love is spreading, the ocean breathes, the moon is bright, the sun is shining, the rain has come.


April 10, 2020
San Luis Obispo