Joanna’s news and updates

New MythBlast: Entering the Mythscape of Pan’s Labyrinth

I have a new MythBlast up with the Joseph Campbell Foundation:

If I could wave a magic wand and invite Joseph Campbell over for dinner tonight, the instant he walked in the door I would sit him down to watch Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). No pleasantries, no chit-chat, no snacks except popcorn and soda, not until he sees the movie. I can already imagine the look on his face when young Ofelia circles down the spiral stone staircase into the realm of the Underground, when the woodland faun first shudders awake, when Ofelia sets out to complete harrowing fairytale tasks to prove her true identity…

To receive the Foundation’s MythBlast newsletters, subscribe to the mailing list at jcf.org/subscribe.

My interview in the Pacifica Post

I had a chance to sit down with my alma mater for an interview about myth, Joseph Campbell, the Mythologium, Skeleton Key Study Guides, and teaching. Basically everything I love to talk about the most. Thank you, Pacifica!

Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide

Front cover of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide

I served as the managing editor for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Skeleton Key Study Guides for books by Joseph Campbell. I was also the lead author on the first title, Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide, with chapter summaries for Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine as well as essay topics, discussion prompts, and creative prompts. We hope to help teachers and students enter into Campbell’s work and build on his ideas. 100% of the proceeds from the book support the work of the Foundation, so buy your copy today!

Interviewing Catherine Svehla, PhD

Here’s the webinar I hosted with the brilliant Catherine Svehla about her Joseph Campbell Foundation book, Myths to Live By: A Skeleton Key Study Guide.

About Joanna

Portrait of Joanna Gardner, a writer, mythologist and magical realist.

Joanna Gardner, PhD is a writer, mythologist, and magical realist whose research focuses on myth, creativity, wonder tales, and goddesses. Joanna serves as adjunct professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program, and as director of marketing and communications for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, where she also contributes to the popular MythBlast essay series. She is the lead author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide and a co-founder of the Fates and Graces, hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers. Joanna’s work appears in a variety of venues, available on the Publications page. You can reach her at joanna at joannagardner dot com.

Haha Learns to Laugh Again

Burnout and Recovery in Laura Lewis-Barr’s “Dumpling”

**Spoiler alert!** At the 2023 Fates and Graces Mythologium, Laura Lewis-Barr shared a presentation about her films, “The Inner Child at Play: Using Fairy Tale Stop Motion Films in Inner Work.” This post analyzes one of those films, “Dumpling.” To avoid spoilers, you can watch the film here before reading.

The woman who used to laugh

Poster for Laura Lewis-Barr’s film, “Dumpling”

Laura Lewis-Barr’s 8-minute film “Dumpling” tells the story of a woman named Haha who has a gift for cooking. At the beginning of the movie, we know two things about Haha: her family calls her Haha because she used to laugh so much, and she loves to cook dumplings.

But when the film begins, Haha isn’t laughing anymore. Instead, she spends her dwindling energy and resources making dumplings for an insatiable throng of visitors. In other words, she uses her creative skills for the nourishment of others, not herself. She wears herself out so others can eat, and she never asks for anything in return. She doesn’t even feed herself. In this state of hunger and exhaustion, Haha is barely surviving in body or soul. She is merely subsisting in a state of burnout.

Haha’s metaphors

The spare quality of the story in “Dumpling” spotlights the psychological metaphors at play. We don’t know much about Haha at the beginning, but we know laughter, cooking, and dumplings are very important to her. Each of these images suggests a deep well of meaning.

Laughing, for example, is a spontaneous, physical release of delight. Haha’s ability to laugh represents her connection with her bodily self, her authentic spontaneity, her innate capacity for joy.

Similarly, cooking is a metaphor for the alchemical art of turning raw, indigestible ingredients into an experience of delicious nourishment. Psychologically, cooking represents the work of turning raw traits and talents into an integrated, balanced personality. This work takes time, care, practice, and patience.

Cooking can also be an art form, a means of creative expression, and Haha’s dumplings are her creative products. They are the physical manifestations of her innate talent and skill, honed by the time she spent practicing her craft. Haha’s dumplings are indeed special: they’re “almost perfect,” the film tells us. But feeding her dumplings to visitors with no reciprocal exchange of energy means Haha has bargained away her creativity, perhaps in the hopes of approval or acceptance.

The first perfect dumpling

Haha in her kitchen making dumplings

One day when Haha is nearly at the end of her resources, she takes the decisive action of locking her door to keep the visitors at bay. She has tended to a personal need at last; she has established a boundary.

Then, hungry and alone in her kitchen-studio, cooking the last of her rice—the last of her energy, her last art supplies—Haha makes the best dumpling of her entire career. The film calls this dumpling “sublime” and “perfect” and sure enough, this is no normal dumpling. First it manages to make sad Haha smile again. Then, of its own volition, the dumpling slides off Haha’s plate and leads her out of her home and into the underworld. In psychological terms, it leads into the depths of Haha’s soul.

A perfect dumpling with a mind of its own? There’s no such thing as a perfect dumpling, any more than there’s such a thing as a perfect person. And this dumpling is alive! Haha’s sublime dumpling draws attention to itself as a metaphor, representing at least three things: the sacredness and vitality of Haha’s creativity, the existence of her innermost soul, and her psychological tendency toward perfectionism. Haha must sense how important this dumpling is, because she follows it without hesitation. Out the door she goes and down into the underworld. Her creativity and soul are running away, and she must chase the dumpling to save them.

Entering the underworld

Haha’s descent to the underworld

So down Haha plunges into the gray, colorness underworld, which is, almost by definition, no fun. I cannot stress this enough: the underworld is no fun. When you enter the underworld, you can count on things getting worse before they get better, and there’s no guarantee that will happen at all.

The image of the underworld is shorthand for the innermost reaches of the psyche where we store everything we can’t deal with right now: fear, anxiety, power, desire, and guilt. We push them so far away from our conscious awareness that we don’t even know about them anymore. An underworld journey is a harrowing way to visit these cast-off parts of the soul, to learn about them, hopefully without judgment, and to choose which to bring to the surface and which to transform into something else. Often it takes misery to force a confrontation with these issues. Suffering is a powerful motivator for change.

But remember the underworld stores more than psychological hang-ups. It also holds, like a bank account, the soul’s gifts and powers that we deny or repress in an attempt to gain approval and acceptance.

Underworld wisdom

What does Haha find on her underworld journey? First, she meets with three Buddhist sages, her inner wisdom-keepers, each of whom tells her a joke. Her innate wisdom is trying to communicate with her. Her impulse toward enlightenment—which is nothing if not a way of light-ening up—is trying to get her to laugh again, but she can’t. Not yet. She’s still too hungry, tired, and sad that her perfect dumpling—her soul, her creativity—is lost.

The first two sages also give her warnings: everyone is hungry in the underworld, and not everyone is a comedian, meaning that not everyone is enlightened. But Haha ignores the warnings of her own intuition.

Sure enough, at the third sage, Haha meets a man.

“Don’t hurt her!” the sage shouts to the man.

“Where’s my dumpling?” Haha demands.

Things get worse before they get better

This man, it turns out, ate Haha’s dumpling!

She ought to be angry with him, or at least tell him how she feels. Instead, she succumbs to his flattery about her cooking abilities and allows him to seduce her into cooking for him. Despite the third sage urgently shaking his head no, Haha sails with the man across a body of water and starts cooking for him. But the man turns out to be the king of the demons. He demands that she cook dumplings for his demon-followers around the clock.

The Demon King (left) and his demon minions

The Demon King harnesses Haha’s energies for himself and his ghouls. Now she is caught on an even more draining hamster wheel, trying to keep up with the insatiable hungers of her personal demons in the underworld. Her conditioned pattern for pleasing others at the expense of herself takes on a manic quality, until at last the day comes when Haha makes another perfect dumpling. This second perfect dumpling, like the first, makes a break for it.

Haha knows she must escape the demon lair to catch this dumpling, so she drugs the demons and runs. In other words, she uses her cunning to outwit the complexes that hold her soul hostage. But the demons wake up and chase her. Psychological patterns do not give up easily.

Returning to life

As Haha sails back across the water, the Demon King drinks it all, stranding her little boat in the muck as the demon mob approaches. Haha jumps out of her boat, backs away from them, then slips and falls flat on her back in the mud with all the flopping fish. She has hit bottom: the lowest, muddiest part of the underworld itself. She has nothing left: no dumpling, no boat, no hope. And that’s when the magic happens: Haha bursts out laughing at herself. Silliness replaces seriousness, levity replaces heaviness. She lightens up, in a moment of muddy grace.

And laughter, it turns out, is contagious. The Demon King can’t help laughing too, which forces him to regurgitate the water he drank, enabling Haha to zip away in her boat back up through an underworld now rich with color. Haha arrives home still laughing, and the story ends with another knock at her door.

Who is on the other side? Maybe the Demon King followed her up. Maybe it’s the visitors who ate her out of house and home. But maybe it’s someone else completely. Maybe someone or something new has arrived, and Haha will be able to relate with this new aspect of her psyche in a conscious, creative, mutually beneficial way.

What Haha learns in the underworld

Haha has been to a metaphorical underworld and back. The beings who populate her underworld are metaphors for the energies of her soul. The thing is, these soul energies are not static. They can change, and we can influence those changes. That’s the name of the game: reclaiming energy from demons such as fear, guilt, anger, perfectionism, and people-pleasing, and assigning that energy to more useful activities, like self-care, creativity, and delight.

Laura Lewis-Barr

Haha’s two perfect dumplings are gifts of the soul that help her recover her soul. One of them leads her into the underworld, where she confronts her own personal demons, and the other leads her out again, with new wisdom and powers. It’s interesting that the second dumpling disappears from the story. Perhaps this indicates that Haha has released her perfectionism and reclaimed her creativity back into herself, away from the external world’s demands. Her burnout is on the mend. She can laugh again and care for herself, which will give her a strong foundation for sharing her gifts with others in a sustainable, reciprocal way.

Ted Lasso and Greek Myth: Your Field Guide to the Deities

In Gabrielle Basha’s MythBlast about Ted Lasso, Gaby wonders why she cries over a show about soccer. It’s an excellent question. I cry too. One reason, I think, has to do with how the series pulls the throne out from under the patriarchy, instead elevating a pantheon of mythic figures from mythology. And not just any pantheon. Ted Lasso’s emotional impact comes from combining the present-day world of English football with ancient patterns from Greek myth.

The Lay of the Mythic Land

Ted Lasso’s script plants clue after clue suggesting we interpret the show a) mythologically, and b) through Greek goggles. For example, one of the players says, seemingly out of nowhere, “Hey, do you like mythology?” In another episode Ted says, “Like the man says, you gotta follow your bliss” – the man clearly being the mythologist Joseph Campbell. And Greece keeps popping up in the dialogue:

~ “You can’t get a table at something called A Taste of Athens?”
~ “Where are we going?” How about Greece?”
~ “Am I really about to eat something called Greek yogurt?”
(ie Greek culture)
~ “And you leaving would be a betrayal on a level usually reserved for Greek mythology?”

Funny how these apparently throw-away lines are framed as questions. It’s as if the writers are saying, “Well? Do you see what we’re doing here?” Yes, writers, we do!

So ok. Ted Lasso and Greek myth, got it. But what divinities are we talking about? Well, the show’s Greek gods and goddesses build on core archetypes like Sovereign, Lover, Warrior, and Magician. In Greek terms, our Sovereign is Hera, queen of the gods. The Lover is Aphrodite, goddess of love. The Warrior is Ares, god of war. And the Magician is Hermes, the divine messenger and guide of souls — the cunning god of communication and change, tricks and transformation. But they all have different names in the Lasso universe.

When the show begins, Hera, who the show calls Rebecca, has taken the radical step of liberating herself from a miserable marriage to philandering Zeus, here named Rupert, who still can’t stop chasing nymphs. But Rebecca, like Hera, remains trapped in her own personal prison of jealousy and revenge.

Meanwhile the goddess of love, Aphrodite, or Keeley in the show, is stuck in compulsive, youth-obsessed sexuality and her failed attempts to achieve fame. The god of war Ares, or Roy, is facing a wasteland of middle age as he keeps on fighting merely to fight, seemingly out of nothing but habit and resignation.

Into this situation bursts Hermes, the trickster-messenger-magician god in the form of Ted himself, who believes wholeheartedly in the magic of everyone he meets even though no one believes in him — or in anything else.

Photo from Ted Lasso, with Ted wearing a suit and tie at a fancy party
Ted Lasso (Hermes the Magician)

Goddesses Will Be Goddesses

One of the main goddesses is Keeley-Aphrodite, the ebulliently sexual influencer who electrifies the locker room whenever she pops in for a quick epiphany.

Like many of her ancestor goddesses, Keeley’s totem is feline: she wears a lion costume (after a long conversation about lion powers), and the ceramic pink cheetah in her office named Trixibelle simultaneously guards and reveals Keeley’s true nature.

Trixibelle and Roy (Ares)

Joyfully raunchy at every opportunity, Keeley-Aphrodite consorts with the pretty boy Jamie Tartt (a beautiful young Adonis who must die to his own ego), until she gets past her own arrested development and finds her soul’s true partner in Roy-Ares. Eventually she even steps into her own Sovereign nature as the CEO of her own company.

But the primary goddess is Rebecca-Hera, the regal but embittered divorcée.

All Hail Queen Rebecca

In Greek myth, Hera is the queen of the gods. But these myths, written at least in part for the training and conditioning of women, portray Hera as a jealous, vengeful, humiliated wife, helpless to do anything about Zeus’s continual dallying with nymphs and mortals.

Similarly, Rebecca’s ex-husband Rupert is a filthy rich socialite who continually dates nymph-like mortals. Evidently immune to consequences, Rupert stands in not only for Zeus but for the whole idea of a single male god who rules over all. And Rebecca says Enough. In the divorce settlement, she receives the football/soccer club, and under her leadership, a new era begins. Just as Hera is the queen of the gods, Rebecca becomes queen of the team.

Photo from Ted Lasso, with Rebecca looking regal in a red dress and gold jewelry
Hera, I mean Rebecca

The first time Ted meets Rebecca, he brings her homemade cookies/biscuits (ambrosia) which he places on her desk (altar). This becomes his daily ritual. Rebecca accepts his offerings reluctantly at first, but soon she requires that divine sustenance delivered to her Olympian office shrine, which sits high above the earthy pitch. Occasionally she shouts down to the field from on high in her booming voice, and sometimes even descends to the locker room in stunning stilettos and a cloud of perfumed glory.

So while Rupert’s time is waning in the universe of the Richmond football club, the future belongs to Rebecca, whose supernatural wealth, beauty, and presence command attention in any room. At a press conference a journalist challenges her, and she cows him with her ruthless logic and a withering glance from her dizzying height. When she shows Nate and Keeley how to be assertive, they gape at her dazzlement in stunned silence. When Rebecca buys drinks for the whole pub and when she takes the karaoke stage, the mere mortals around her can’t help but whoop with joy in the orbit of her bounty.

In one of Ted’s lowest moments, when he has a panic attack in a shadowy alley, who appears at his side as if summoned? Rebecca. The Goddess. She knows when he needs her and she materializes. She holds him as he finds his way back. Her hands anchor him and her voice guides him.

A New Goddess Attitude

In the first minutes of the first episode of Ted Lasso, Rebecca kicks misogyny to the curb in the form of the previous coach. In another episode, Ted says, “If God had wanted games to end in a tie, She would not have invented numbers.” Another time we learn that Rebecca’s assistant Leslie Higgins is named after his mother. This makes him a “feminine junior,” to which Ted responds, “Cool.” Coach Beard reads The Da Vinci Code and coyly comments that he can’t put it down. God characters elevate goddess characters, wholeheartedly and at just the right moments. Goddesses adore all this. Ted Lasso and Greek myth make mortals who sense themselves to be made in the image of goddesses (so to speak) feel like they don’t have to fight just to exist.

Nor do Rebecca and Keeley play out the tired old madonna-whore complex we’ve been suffocating under for centuries. Rebecca and Keeley ace the Bechdel test with extra credit through the radical act of adoring each other. They hang out together, laugh together, help each other. They gracefully receive each other’s honesty, with no offense taken or intended.

Photo from Ted Lasso, with Keeley and Rebecca smiling at each other
Keeley grins at Rebecca

The Changing of the Gods

One one level, the whole team are warriors for the goddess, but individual deities do emerge from the pack of players. Dani Rojas is Eros, the life force who bursts onto the field fueled by pure passion, leaping into the arms of other players, wrapping his legs around them and shouting, “Futbol is life!!!” Jamie Tartt is Adonis, as already mentioned, and Dionysus appears in every bottle of champagne, glass of wine, whiskey highball, and pint of ale.

But one of the most important gods in the show is Ares in the form of Roy — legendary player/warrior, besotted soulmate of Keeley-Aphrodite. At the beginning of the show, Roy’s passion is twisted up in a knot of anger, but he learns to channel that pent up power. Doing battle with his own unhelpful patterns, he first moves past jealousy, then he obeys Keeley (which drives her wild with desire), gives her the space she needs, and sees and honors her success on her own terms, apart from her relationship with him. Eventually he even embraces his arch-enemy Jamie-Adonis. Roy becomes a warrior of the heart.

But how does all this transformation happen? Because a Magician arrives in the form of Ted Lasso, who plays a modern day Hermes.

Guide of Soccer Souls

As this blog has discussed before, Hermes is the messenger of the gods, carrying divine communications between upper realms and lower, and he’s really fast in his magic winged sandals. The talkative god of travel and trickery, he serves as the guide of souls. He occupies the in-between, thresholds of all kinds, the neither-here-nor-there. He’s one of the gymnastikoi, or gods of the gymnasium.

Photo from Ted Lasso, with Ted leaning out of the door of a red bus
Ted in his comfort zone on the threshold of a bus

Ted Lasso, likewise, flies from America to England, really fast and high over the ocean, to take a job as a coach for a sport he knows nothing about. A perpetual traveler, he makes himself at home in England without actually having a home there. He wears conspicuously bright sneakers as he sprints around the pitch ahead of the other players, and as he bounds up into the stands during a game to carry a message to Rebecca. He moves easily between the upper realm of Rebecca’s office, the surface world of the pitch, and the underworld of the locker room, where he even leads an exorcism of old ghosts, sending them back to the underworld where they belong. Funny, talkative, and weirdly charming, Hermes-Ted sees everything that happens, at and below the surface.

Most of all, Ted takes a trickster’s approach to coaching, which is to say, an indirect approach. His first step is to throw a surprise birthday party for the homesick Nigerian player Sam. Then Ted fixes the team’s showers, which had been dribbling like they needed a prostate exam (according to him), thereby restoring virility and strength to the locker room. He leaves gifts of books in the lockers personally chosen for each player. At a clutch moment, he benches his star player. His trickery keeps everyone guessing, always. You never know what he might do next, so you have to stay alert.

The Messenger is the Message

Ted’s full name is Theodore, from the Greek (of course) and it means divine gift. And he does give gifts. Parties, books, biscuits, belief — he distributes treasure of many kinds when the people around him need it most.

In a true Hermes move, Ted fools everyone into thinking he’s an idiot — vapid, ridiculous, empty — but what he’s really empty of is ego. And that’s the kind of emptiness that’s big enough to hold all the other characters in its embrace. That’s how he works his magic of guiding souls toward their best selves.

Ted also take nothing personally. He knows that people aren’t terrible, they just do terrible things. He sees their inner shine before they do. His job is to help them get out of their own way so they can beam at peak wattage. To do that, he stays on the sidelines working his indirect magic.

He focuses the team on winning at life, being their best selves on and off the field. He helps them find their strength, feel supported, support others, and step outside their petty, gnarled little egos. Gradually at first, and often falling right back into ego, they begin to do their joyful work. And it turns out that winning at life helps win at the game which helps win at life.

Ted Lasso also demonstrates how to honor the Goddess. In fact, Ted’s default is to treat pretty much everyone like they’re as sacred as the Goddess. Then they remember that they are sacred. And then they change. The show isn’t even about Ted as much as it is about how everyone else changes in response to him.

The daily offering of ambrosia

When Ted first arrives at the pitch, he crouches down and reverently touches the grass. The pitch is the temple of the sacred game, where devotees experience the divine. They feel wonder, amazement, awe, and all the emotions that accompany trying, failing, winning, losing. Ted Lasso and Greek myth together illustrate that play is sacred, and that the sacred can be playful. If the pitch stands in for the field of life, then the point is to enter the temple and play.

Messing Up Better

Ted’s job title is coach, which is interesting in light of the popularity of personal coaching. It’s like we hunger for our own soul guides. But still, why does Ted Lasso make us cry?

During halftime, when Ted tells the team, “Fellas, we’re broken — we need to change,” he is speaking for himself, for the players, for the team as a whole. He’s also speaking for many, many other men, and speaking to the world on behalf of men. Ted is nothing if not an agent of change, but more than subverting mere toxic masculinity, this show subverts toxic divinity.

Photo from Ted Lasso, where Ted, Coach Beard, and Nate are crossing their fingers
Practicing magic

Ted Lasso and Greek myth conjure a world of post-patriarchal archetypes, in which the characters work through their issues more than they act them out. It’s a femme-friendly, sex-positive, heart-awakened world, and I’m using the word “femme” to mean everything that patriarchy typically reviles. Things like feelings. Friendship. Fashion.

It’s difficult to convey how moving it is to step into a world where the Goddess reigns. In this atmosphere, those of us who have ever been shamed, rejected, or attacked for being or liking anything that the patriarchy condemns feel shock, relief, joy, gratitude. Goddess-starvation is a real condition, and Ted Lasso is nourishment for the famished.

In the world of Ted Lasso, everyone messes up, but apologies come easily and wholeheartedly, and are received easily and wholeheartedly. These characters are more interested in relationships than in their own wounds. And this world isn’t fantasy. It might be fiction, but its miracles do not depend on aliens or technology or wizard powers. This magic is actually available every day, to everyone. The only cost is our illusions and resentments.

Every character’s issues point precisely to their areas of potential. Their strengths just got twisted up and distracted by all the usual ego fears. Take those away, create a safe space, and people flower. They mess up, own up and then they have a better chance of messing up better next time.

Wonder Abounds

So the mythological 1-liner for Ted Lasso is as follows: Hera finally dumps Zeus and then calls Hermes in to help the fractured pantheon restore itself.

Photo from Ted Lasso, where Ted is smiling
Ted’s backpack is pure Hermes – ready for adventure at a moment’s notice

Through the muck and muddle of daily life, Ted Lasso and Greek myth lead us into experiences of awe — a towering goddess, a stunning win, the daring, defiant feeling of belief. Believe is Ted’s watchword, and it’s a very spiritual term. But he’s not talking about believing in nonsense or lies. He’s talking about believing in yourself, believing in others, believing that unlikely things (miracles) can and do happen.

The shock of Ted’s arrival wakes everyone out of a torpor in which they had been acting out very, very old dramas — dramas that lie at the root of cultures that derive from European traditions. If these characters can change, then so can we. If their patterns are not set in stone, then neither are ours. Ted Lasso uses Greek myth to dismantle our psychological and societal prisons.

What’s really wonderful is that we see the main characters lead with one archetype — Sovereign, Lover, Warrior, Magician — and then grow into another. They become more of themselves, more whole, more complete. Rebecca becomes Lover as well as Sovereign. Keeley becomes Sovereign (CEO) as well as Lover. Roy becomes Lover as well as Warrior. What might Ted become in addition to Magician? That’s the big question for Season 3.

One Chosen Change

I can’t believe that we haven’t commemorated our covid-19 deaths — 87,649 as of this moment — eighty-seven thousand six hundred and forty-nine. Where is the country’s mourning? The daily moments of silence for those who died and those who suffer? Our collective resolve to do better and unite for the greater good? 

Covid-19 has changed things for everyone. Those who fall sick suffer physical changes. Families and friends shift into situations of grief and loss. Those who die experience the final, ultimate, no-going-back change. The rest of us change our behavior to prevent more death and sickness. Change, change, change, change. But what does it all mean, if we don’t make meaning out of it?

One way to make it mean something is to choose a change to go with all the unchosen changes. It can be anything that means something to you. Something you wouldn’t have done otherwise. Like planting a seed. Planting a tree. Writing a poem. Taking a day off from social media, maybe once week. Some kind of offering for all the people we’ve lost.

Covid Memorial Day

Since this morning when I began writing this post, the national death count rose to 88,450. Another 801 coffins filled, another 801 families crying, another 801 lives snuffed out. For all these 88,450 reasons (and counting), my household is planning our own covid memorial service.

We think it will be on Friday, May 22. Probably around sunset. We’re not sure yet how it will go, but we will dress up somewhat from our standard quarantine wardrobes. There will be flowers. Candles. Some kind of sacred sound, probably from our singing bowl. Maybe we’ll share our chosen changes with each other. I think we’ll end with a special meal. Maybe then we’ll watch a movie.

It’s a tiny gesture, I know, but it’s something. And a little meaning-making can go a long way. I share all this in case you might find any part of it useful. Mourning is necessary to heal from loss, and when we honor the dead, life becomes more precious. Since we can’t mourn together in person right now, maybe we can help each other share the grief in spirit, each in our own way.

My One Chosen Change

The other day I was thinking about what change I wanted to choose, and I asked my beloved husband Michael how his family observed the Sabbath when he was young. He said they didn’t do any writing that day.

“What, none?” I said. “Not even a list? Or a note to yourself?”

Not even a list, says Michael. Not even a note.

Wow. Could I give up lists for a day? Journaling? What about reading? Could I sacrifice (a word whose roots mean “to make sacred”) my lettered habits in honor of those who died?

Well, they had to give up all reading and writing forever. And for a change to mean something, it’s got to really mean something. So, ok. For all the lives that left us too soon, I will set aside the paper and pens for one day every week.