The snow started falling in Seattle on Monday evening, just as the shortest day of the year came to an end. I took a little video that wound up having a bit of “Christmas in Jail” in the background (more on this later), but the song in my head at that moment was “I Believe in Father Christmas” by Greg Lake and Peter Sinfield. “They said there’d be snow at Christmas,” Lake sang in the 1970s. But in 2020, the snow fell on the solstice instead, and somehow that seemed more fitting in a year when we’ve learned how closely we are connected, to each other and to the Earth.
I looked to the sky with excited eyes ...
Holiday music is a deeply personal matter. Most of us have seasonal songs we cherish and others we’d be fine with never hearing or singing again, as well as songs that have gained shades of complexity as our lives unfold and our spiritual views evolve. I still enjoy singing Angels We Have Heard on High, Oh Little Town of Bethlehem, and other tunes that evoke happy memories of times spent caroling with my childhood church choir, even as I’ve come to love a wider palette of music that reflects the many ways people celebrate light coming amid the deepest darkness.
In that spirit, the rest of this week’s post is the Surely Joy 2020 holiday jukebox, with a selection of songs that may not immediately come to mind when you consider the sounds of the season. It’s accompanied by a longer playlist on Spotify, including many songs nominated by my friends when I solicited suggestions on Facebook this week. Enjoy and be well, and I’ll see you here next week with some final thoughts on what I’ve learned in 2020.
“We are in the valley of the shadow of death. It is really dark. We know the sun is going to come up over a mountain at the other side of the valley, but it can’t rise fast enough.” — Science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr., discussing the state of the pandemic on “The Daily” from The New York Times
“In North Dakota, you’ll see the most beautiful sunrises. Today is the most beautiful sunrise.” — Fargo physician Dr. Rishi Seth to reporter Jack Healy, last Monday just before he received one of the first COVID-19 vaccinations given in the United States
Mark well this middle week of the darkest December, for we will never forget it. For all their multitude of sins, big pharma and big government have come to the rescue, and men and women of science and medicine are now rolling up their sleeves to accept the best-ever holiday gift—a vaccine that has arrived just in time to help them gird for the many months of battle still ahead.
How fitting, too, that this historic event is taking place at the solstice, when we have mere hours of daylight in much of the Northern Hemisphere. The valley of death is still all around us, in relentlessly grim pandemic statistics and in months of Congressional dithering amid job and housing insecurity and long lines at the food banks. But the vaccines are arriving, more slowly than promised but much faster than we expected. Truth is finally dawning for many who’d prefer fiction, and the long nights will soon get a little shorter, minute by minute.
Bless the anonymous angels of encouragement
Given the events of this week, it feels like the world is leaning into the light as never before, actively choosing hope and repair over despair. Hope is a choice we’ll need to keep making over and over this long winter. Yet we need the darkness, too, as a time of rest and reflection. Even as we anticipate the return of what we knew as normal, we can use these winter months to consider what we want to save from this long pandemic year.
I want to hold onto the knowledge that even in a year I earned very little income, I found ways to share what I have—my time and talent, mostly, but even some treasure–because my government and my family and my friends have been generous to me. Amid this year of unparalleled loss and inept leadership, there has also been also widespread recognition that “all of us need all of us to make it,” in the words of the Rev. Theresa Soto.
Together, we have an opportunity to start remaking our world. We can end the pandemic through science, we can encourage reason as a road to happiness, and we can adopt mutual care and concern as the ground on which we stand.
Here are links to The Daily’s interviews with Donald G. McNeil Jr. (Dec. 14) and healthcare professionals receiving the first vaccines (Dec. 15). Deep gratitude to the essential workers who have labored overtime all year, and for whom much hard work remains. May you stay well.
Thank you for reading Surely Joy. You can find the first Pandemic Postcards and my earlier writings here. If you’d like to get future posts via email, look for the link on the right side of this page (or maybe below this post, if you’re on a mobile device). I write for a living, so if you enjoy my work, feel free to hit the tip jar.
Item 1: The Minimalists have a new documentary on Netflix. Actually, you need to wait until Jan. 1 to watch it, but the trailer is out now.
Item 2: Netflix likes minimalism. The streaming service already showcased the work of Marie Kondo, whose tidying-up tips made her a star.
I’ll get back to those thoughts. First, though, welcome to Surely Joy’s new home! I had to make a quick move this week. Here’s how that happened:
Not my license plate, but I love it.
Last Saturday morning, I woke up and realized that my latest post hadn’t gone out to email subscribers. I’ve been blogging in various places since 2003, always favoring the simplest possible platforms, and my low-tech approach has served me well. Lately, though, I’d been frustrated with some typographical glitches in Google Blogspot—so when the email feed failed my readers and me last week, I decided to build a new website. “What the heck,” I thought. “I don’t have anything better to do today.”
So that’s what I did, and here we are. I’ve thought about moving all my Surely Joy content—or at least the first 37 pandemic postcards—over here, and I may eventually get around to that. But what I really want to talk about today is that word: content.
Content, noun. Stuff that people produce and buy to fill the insatiable demands of our consumerist culture. All the stuff clogging our online feeds and our homes.
Content, adjective. A state of being satisfied. I am enough. I have enough. You are enough. You have enough.
I think The Minimalists, Josh and Ryan, are basically good guys with genuinely helpful advice on paring down the possessions you already have. They refuse to sell ads on their website and their podcast, and that’s admirable. But they sure do sell themselves and their philosophy.
More power to them, but can you truly have a simple life with millions of followers, bestselling books, speaking tours (when those were a thing), and two Netflix documentaries? And if a key principle of minimalism is buying less stuff, why not release the documentary before the holiday shopping season rather than on New Year’s Day, to give people plenty of time to practice the idea of “enough” before adopting minimalism as a 2021 resolution?
As for Ms. Kondo, I haven’t read any of her books and I didn’t watch her Netflix series, but I know she’s all about sparking joy—a word I obviously cherish. So I will admit to having been a little bit appalled when I heard last year that she’d launched her own line of … stuff. I just took my first-ever peek at her website and, amid the gift guides, I see she is also offering a 10-lesson, 75-minute course in mastering her method. Just $39.99.
I get it. Everyone needs to make and spend some money in our world. But know this: You have everything you need to live a simpler life. You don’t need any more content to be content. You don’t need a guru, a method, or a teacher. And you don’t need this blog, though I am grateful you’ve spent a few minutes reading this, and that you’ve found Surely Joy in this new space.
We’ll meet again here next week. In the meantime, be content—the adjective, not the noun.
Eight miles west of Highway 101, I had a decision to make: Continue straight to La Push on Washington 110 or turn right to Mora. I had a reservation at the Mora Campground near Rialto Beach, but check-in was many hours off, so I thought I’d spend the morning at Second Beach near La Push. As I neared the intersection, I saw the choice had been made for me: The temporary road sign flashed “QUILEUTE RESERVATION CLOSED.” Good for them, I thought.
Forest sprite, Hoh Rain Forest, Washington
As the pandemic took hold last spring, tribal governments up and down Washington’s coast closed their lands to visitors. When summer came and the spread of the virus slowed, many adjacent areas in Olympic National Park opened to stir-crazy Americans seeking outdoor relief from isolation. I saw license plates from all over at Rialto Beach and cars parked a half-mile down Mora Road. But just across the Quileute River, its eponymous tribal nation remained off-limits to outsiders, as did the Makah reservation at the northwestern tip of the contiguous United States and the Quinault Indian Nation in southwestern Washington.
I applaud tribal nations for doing whatever they can to keep the coronavirus at bay, especially given the long history of indigenous people dying from diseases brought by outsiders and the high COVID-19 toll some Indian nations are facing in 2020. The closures are a reminder that the 574 tribal nations in the United States are sovereign and have the right to self-determination as well as the right to receive benefits from the federal government.
At least most of them do. Here in Seattle, we live on the unceded land of the Duwamish people. Our city was named for Duwamish Chief Si’ahl, who famously said, “The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know: all things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.”
The Duwamish are a federally recognized tribe under the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott, but they are not currently on the list of federally acknowledged tribes. According to the Duwamish website, in 1978, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs basically amended the treaty by adding seven new rules with which the Duwamish must comply to receive land, benefits, and services. The case has been under review by the Interior Department’s Board of Indian Appeals for more than five years.
Meanwhile, despite being in the heart of one of the wealthiest areas in the United States, many Duwamish people cannot access health services, nor can the tribe profit from tourism and gaming, as so many others do. (Seattle is surrounded by high-end resorts run by the Snoqualmie, Puyallup, Suquamish, and other neighboring tribes.) Even if the Duwamish prevail, I’m not sure how likely I’d be to hit a future casino. But along with more than 10,500 other people—half of whom have signed up in 2020—I’ve decided it’s time to pay a small, symbolic amount of rent to the Duwamish people in recognition of the centuries they’ve spent caring for the land where I live today.
In last Sunday’s online service, my minister Rev. Beth Chronister advocated for Real Rent Duwamish, and she also acknowledged that our physical building is on Duwamish land. I am part of a faith tradition that is grappling like never before with our nation’s history of settler colonialism and enslavement. But Rev. Beth cautioned us against absolving ourselves with what theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” We can pay token rent and say a land acknowledgment and call it good, or we can go deeper, into real relationship and covenant with each other.
I can think of two ways beyond church that I will try to do this. Early in my freelance writing career, I authored two guidebooks that explored the Oregon Trail and the Lewis and Clark Trail. I know I tried my best—given my body of knowledge in the 1990s—to offer a nuanced view of how the United States expanded westward, yet I am sure I fell fall short. As I get future opportunities to write about history, I will do better.
Second, I recommit to living as lightly as I can. I retain a small footprint by American standards, dwelling in 400 square feet, yet like Henry David Thoreau, I need to leave my cabin now and then. I usually go on foot, but I have a car, and I occasionally use it to visit nature that’s not within walking distance. A paradox, I know. So when I go into the woods and walk beside the waters, I want to be as mindful as I can of what I find there. “We rarely care for that we cannot name,” says British writer Robert Macfarlane, who has worked with artist Jackie Morris and musicians to re-animate lost words from the natural world, just as many Americans seek to authentically connect with indigenous wisdom.
This is not wisdom from the past. Its practitioners are here now, seeking the right to harvest salmon and protect their water from oil spills. As best I can as a 21st century urban creature of comfort, I want to know plants by their names and birds by their songs. I want to invoke spirits and spells and “sing the things I see,” perhaps gaining a tiny fraction of the knowledge possessed by the people who have lived here for millennia and who still live here today. I honor their wisdom and would be grateful for a small measure of it, if I am worthy. Spirit of life, let me be worthy of these gifts, and let us share them widely.
